"Yes! And other boats are still going north. Your soldiers must pick
up the hurt and run for it."
There were not many living wounded in this sudden quiet. A spear has
scant mercy. And the lifeboat had not come.... Mijok was holding out
his shield on both arms; he had tossed his stick aside. "Put them on
this. I can carry six--seven." When the shield could hold no more he
lifted it, his face contorted and changed. "Paul--I told myself I was
back in the old life, when we always killed them if we could. But the
new laws--oh, Paul, _the laws_----"
"War perverts all laws. But the laws are true. It is--climbing a
mountain, Mijok: we slip, fall back, try again. Nothing good in war,
only necessity, choice of evils. Now make the best speed you can,
friend--don't wait for us." Mijok ran with his vast strides, holding
the shield out in front so that the motion of his body would not
jounce it.
Pakriaa would not move till the last of the survivors had stumbled
past her. They were disciplined. Already some of the soft bowmen had
taken out arrows of the whining, glittering type that sometimes
frightened off the omasha. They were ready. Paul tried to count, gave
it up. Less than three hundred. The archers had not suffered much.
Paul said, "Your leg is hurt, Abro Pakriaa. I'll carry you."
She was indifferent. "I thank you." He slung his rifle and caught her
up, naked and slippery with blood and acrid-smelling paint. Her weight
was less than forty pounds. Her head lolled back; she whispered to the
sky, "No one should call me Abro. I am Pakriaa the child, weak as a
male, a fool. I could have followed. I could have brought her to the
ground. I let her go. I am a red worm. I blame you for it, Paul-Mason.
You and your friends. All of you--except Sears, who is a god with a
window on another world."
"Hush! The world Sears shows you in the microscope is this world,
Pakriaa. He tells you so himself. And I tell you there'll be a new
way----"
She was not listening. Still he saw no threat of brown wings, and no
lifeboat. But time was a deception; dawn on Lucifer was abrupt on
cloudless mornings. The battle which had seemed long as heart-break
had been a skirmish, a brush of advance parties lasting perhaps ten
minutes from his first shot to the retreat. Pakriaa's head twitched
from side to side; her eyes were dry. "I have betrayed Ismar,
Creator-and-Destroyer-Who-Speaks-Thunder-in-the-Rains----"
"Pakriaa----"
"My people are to burn me in the pit for the kaksmas with lamp oil. I
will order it. I would have been Queen of the World." Making no effort
to escape from his arms, she burst into rage at him; a rage pitiable,
not dangerous: "Why have you come, you sky people, you speakers of new
words? We had our life, no need of you. We were brave--you weaken us
with words, with words. Your friendship is the green-flower weed that
kills the self. You make children of us. You break our beautiful image
of the god and tell us she never lived. You say that now?" She slashed
her fingers down her side, drawing blood.
Firing? Firing at the camp?
She clung to him, wailing: "And now you carry me. I cannot even hate
you. You steal our strength. The priests were right--the
priests----Ismar, help me! _Ismar!_"
Paul forced himself into a run. It was firing, rapid and sharp,
pistols and rifles. The ammunition would melt fast at that rate. He
could hear yelling. Catching up with the running soldiers, leaving
them behind, he could see Mijok, far ahead, swerve to the left.
And the lifeboat was in action.
It curved grandly from near the surface of the lake, which was dim
with smoke. It circled over jungle, descended in another swoop at the
canoes. Red bodies tumbled overside; the silver nose tilted as if in
disdain; the jet spoke for one second, blasting the near canoes into
nothing, sending up the further ones in yellow fire, driving the
lifeboat into its seeming-careless leap. But there was still firing
from the gray stone fortress, a human tangle on the beach before it, a
high long screaming.
Forward detachments of the lake fleet must have passed in the dark.
Paul ran on, only his arms remembering Pakriaa. She slipped down,
grabbed a spear as her soldiers caught up with her, and ran straight
for the beach.
That part of the agony was almost done. No more boats were coming
in--Ed Spearman's sky weapon had seen to that. There were more canoes,
many more, but they were holding off, grouping clumsily at a distance.
Paul waited for the lifeboat to slip over him and waved to the south.
Spearman altered the course of the glide, dropping after one more
group of panicked boats but heading south. A longer burst of the jet,
and Spearman's weapon lifted, straightened, shot out of sight across
the meadow.
Paul could picture the big man's intent and mirthless grin, the cold
gray eye alert on the fuel gauge. And when this fuel was gone--no
more. It might stand for a while, somewhere, a decaying artifact....
Those left alive on the beach were bringing in casualties. The boats
were still withdrawing. Christopher Wright was in the fortress with
the wounded, his narrow face tight in the misery of a doctor who can
do almost nothing. "Doc--how many have we lost here?"
"You! I had almost--Oh, Mijok, what've you got there...? Paul, they
jumped us at first-light. No time even to remind Ed to go after
you----"
"No, he did right. More needed here. We've stalled the land army, but
they'll come on. They have to." In the sky the brown dots had appeared
at last, pouring from their foul rock ledges in the hills. All of them
were flying south. "Pakriaa, look! Lantis has two wars now."
She stood naked and stiff, watching, her underlip thrust out, despair
giving way to a glare of satisfaction at the far-off wings, the beasts
who ate everything, feared nothing. The southwestern sky was heavy
with them. Paul had been right; he sickened at his own cleverness.
"How many, Doc?"
"Forty or worse. This defense on the beach was by Kamisiaa's people
and our giant girls--who can shoot." Paul saw the golden-furred girl
Lisson smile uneasily at him; there was a sober stare from brown
Tejron. The other two giant women, old Karison and young Elron, seemed
more deeply disturbed, Elron studying her rifle as if it were a living
thing. Wright said, "With Abro Brodaa's help I made the others stay in
the woods where you posted 'em. Surok ran over from the right flank--I
had him run back and tell Sears and the rest to sit tight....
Pakriaa"--Wright strode out to her--"let me bind that up--you're
bleeding." She permitted it....
The boats were clustering a quarter mile away. Paul fumbled for his
field glasses; they were lost. Little Abroshin Nisana, whom he had
ordered to remain at the fortress, spoke beside him, slowly and
carefully because her English was not good: "Commander, Abro Samiraa
is return. The plan--good. She crossed the stream, catch them in
blackness. A few escape. We lose twenty. One was Abro Duriaa--I am not
know how she is killed." She scuffed her little seven-toed foot in the
dust; there was nothing alien in her smile. "Those who return
Tocwright is send west." She was puzzled, not disapproving. "Why are
we most strong in the west? The Vestoians follow lake shore."
He said, not quite honestly, "Their straightest approach to Abro
Pakriaa's village--your village--is in the west. Were there
prisoners?"
"Abro Samiraa is not like to take prisoners. We took not any on the
beach. Wrong?"
He smothered a sigh of exhaustion. "It may not matter." With Mijok,
the stout giantess Tejron was moving among the wounded. Paul noticed a
heap of torn cloth, all that remained of Earth-made shorts and jackets
and overalls, ripped for bandages. Wright's idea, no doubt, and good:
the pygmies' pounded-bark fabric was a poor second best. _After the
war we can go naked--fair enough...._ He saw a pygmy woman shrink from
Tejron's approach; she might be from one of the northern villages, her
stoicism unequal to accepting the touch of the huge beings she would
always have regarded as wild animals. Paul knelt, hoping to reassure
her, as Tejron eased a bandage around a pierced abdomen. There would
be internal bleeding. "You are from the north?"
She looked hurt that he did not know her face. "I am of Abro Brodaa's
village." Then in spite of her shrinking her question was directed at
Tejron: "Abro Brodaa has say to us--we are all one flesh.
That--that----"
Tejron was able to say, "That is true." And while Paul searched for
other words that might affirm, comfort, explain, the soldier died.
The only omasha now visible were soaring stragglers. The swarm would
have found the army of Lantis--which must and would continue to
advance. There was a limit to the gorging of the bat-winged beasts;
they too could die on the spears. Meantime the lifeboat was gone, the
boats were landing, in a moment of darkly sweet quiet which was the
eye of the storm.
Paul checked the giant girl Lisson from firing at the landing party.
"Save ammunition." He indicated a tall blue-flowered shrub a hundred
yards out in the meadow. "We wait at the edge of the woods until they
pass that bush, then charge them. If they break us down here, everyone
is to fight west, away from the lake--_west_. Now run down the line,
pass on these two orders." Lisson sped away, her golden fur bright and
unstained. "Doc--get the wounded together, have the other women and
Mijok take them west, beyond Sears' group, well back in the woods. Try
to find out where Abara's got to with the olifants but send a runner
back (if there's time)--don't come back yourself. And keep Mijok with
you. I don't want him to do any more fighting if we can help it--it's
tearing him up inside."
"I----" Wright checked himself, nodded, hurried back into the
fortress.
"Pakriaa, Abro Kamisiaa, get your soldiers at the edge of the woods."
They vanished. The meadow was empty of life; the many open eyes on the
beach would not see what was to come. Wright's party left the
enclosure, Mijok carrying the shield. Wright could not look back nor
wave, for his own arms were full, his head bent in some consoling
speech. Paul was striding for the woods when Pakriaa met him and
murmured in contempt, "We hide too, Commander?"
He answered out of a moment of black indifference. (_Probably we all
die and everything I have done is a mistake._) "Pakriaa, they may
break easier if they don't see us till we charge." She shrugged,
following him into the obscurity, pointedly ignoring Nisana, who came
to his other side, perhaps still hating the little captain for her
independence of yesterday, when Paul was chosen commander of this
grotesque army.
The Vestoians from the boats were rising out of the grass and coming
forward. Steadily now, with no more apparent haste than the first
breakers leading a destroying wave. It was possible to think with
amazing leisure of the high meadows and wooded roads of New Hampshire.
Paul's brother had always been a little too fat and fond of ice cream.
There was a bookstore in Brattleboro. And the waves of the South China
Sea were moving mountains with snowcaps of foam as they came in on
Lingayen. Why, there was a war there once, more than a hundred years
ago, when the Republic of Oceania was hardly even a thought. Yes: they
called it a Second World War....
The Vestoians passed the blue shrub. The breaker was red, with a foam
of white-tipped spears.
Paul was swept into the open, not only by the howling drive of his own
pygmy army, but by the machine within, relentless again, briefly free
from the compromise of thought. He was firing with precision in the
scant time available before the white-painted bodies crashed into the
unpainted and churned up a froth of battle.
He had time to wonder why Nisana was here with him a few yards back of
the hand-to-hand frenzy. She was not afraid; her spear was balanced. A
break in the line of fighters let through a Vestoian soldier, dark
mouth squared in a yell. Nisana's spear widened the mouth to a death
mask and withdrew. Paul stepped into the breach and sent a few shots
toward a trio of green-capped leaders. Something slapped and gouged at
his chest--_nothing serious_. But his own fighters to the left of him
were going down, outnumbered. He shouted at a brief gleam of Pakriaa's
face, "West! Fight _west!_"
Golden Lisson was running back from her errand, her rifle waving, her
lips straining in wild laughter. She passed him, trying to bring her
rifle into use as she ran; it did not fire. A Vestoian was forcing
Nisana away from Paul and beating down her spear. "Why, damn you!" The
Vestoian face dissolved in pulp and strangeness under his rifle butt,
and Paul reeled back, believing for an unbounded second that ghosts
from a place only a few light-years away had swirled across this
stinking battlefield to shriek at him: "_Yes! Your people always
fought that way--the ape picked up a stone...._" But Nisana was alive;
Nisana was unhurt and alive. He could look up again and see the girl
Lisson also using her rifle as a flail.
She was between him and the beach. Three pygmies had caught the butt,
and now she swung them absurdly high; she had almost shaken them off
when a spear pierced her arm and hung there. The rifle dropped. She
was down, under the leaping spears and red bodies. She did not even
cry out again; the golden fur was reddened and defiled. Paul beat his
way toward her, scarcely seeing what his swinging rifle hit, knowing
it was too late, forgetting his own order to drive west. Aware too of
another tawny shape flashing toward him.
Surok, who had loved Lisson, who would have been her playmate in the
next Red-Moon-before-the Rains. Paul tried to stop him--but if any
sound came out of his own throat it would have been lost against
Surok's mindless crying. The giant tore into the press around Lisson's
body and fell almost at once, crushing a few as he rolled....
"_West!_ Stay behind my rifle, Nisana---"
It had become a methodical insanity like Mijok's, a cutting of red hay
that spouted blood. He noticed blood on his right hand too--nothing:
front sights of the rifle gouging him. The Vestoians in this direction
were thinning out and giving way. He caught up with a white-splashed
back and bandaged thigh--Pakriaa, ploughing her way west. Abro Samiraa
drove across his path in the wrong direction, chasing an isolated
group of three; squat and heavy-faced, she looked happy and more than
life-size in the moment of her death, as she took a spear thrust over
her heart and lay down with the enemy to grin at the sky and cease
hating.
A rifle barked ahead of him. That could only be Sears Oliphant: Wright
would surely follow orders and keep Mijok and the giant women with him
to protect the wounded.... Abro Brodaa was fighting through to aid
Pakriaa, not yelling, not excited, keeping somehow an air of dreamy
contemplation, as if the arms driving her spear and dagger were not
quite hers. Nisana cried out, "They are not following! They go
back----"
It was true. Partly true. Here in this patch of bloody meadow there
was not much left to fight. The defenders had functioned like a single
organism, forming a new semicircular line. Behind it was a quiet,
where Pakriaa was gasping, pounding her foot into a body that felt
nothing.
And this dear monster, this fat naked grotesque, panting and smeared
with red--this must be Sears Oliphant, late of John Hopkins
University. The monster smiled in a black beard. "Few got by, oh my,
yes. Tamisraa's girls fixed 'em--had to club m' rifle--dirty cave
man--no fear, Paul--_no fear!_ Muscle man with an empty head. They
had--couple bowmen with 'em--no harm done." No harm? Was he unaware of
the broken arrow shaft below his ribs, deeply bedded, with dark blood
oozing around the wood? "They quit, Paul?"
"They haven't quit." He looked south, seeing why they wouldn't quit.
"Tamisraa got a bad one--throat." Sears coughed painfully. "I sent her
to Doc--he's just back of those trees. And my pets, Paul, my olifants,
why, they're standing fast, boy. With Abara, bless him--'bout half
mile north. You can't beat 'em. We must figure some way to ferry 'em
over to the island--must--they're people, those olifants----"
"You go to Doc yourself, Jocko, and fast. That----"
"Oh, that, that. Mere prac'l dem'stration nobody loves fat man----"
The Vestoians would not quit because of what was coming half a mile
away in the south under a cloud of brown wings, coming fast. The horde
would be ignoring the omasha, striking them aside, spearing them when
there was time, granting them the necessary toll for passage, and
coming fast. Oh, they would be less than six thousand now--somewhat
less. Meanwhile the remnant from the boats was waiting, regrouping,
drawing breath, readying itself for the climax of massacre, maybe
deliberately postponing it until Lantis of Vestoia, Queen of the
World, could arrive to enjoy it. Paul tried again to count his people
in the sturdy half circle. Black Elis was striding among them, a
great stick in each hand, rumbling comfort and encouragement, and none
of them shrank away from him.
It looked like less than seven hundred. A hundred lost at the knoll;
forty, Wright said, in the first skirmish at the camp; twenty in
Samiraa's night expedition. Perhaps three hundred in this last wave of
the battle. And Samiraa herself; Duriaa; Tamisraa wounded, Pakriaa
insane with grief; Lisson and Surok dead. Lame Kamisiaa--Paul could
not find her. Abro Brodaa--still calm, unhurt, competent. Very
well--seven hundred against somewhat less than six thousand of the
land army, somewhat less than four thousand from the boats.
_How I dreamed!_ There would be no southward drive to the island. The
omasha alone made it an absurdity. He had been idiotic to imagine it.
Pakriaa broke her spear across her knee. She walked out into the
meadow toward the advancing swarm. She looked back stupidly at Paul's
shout, and Nisana ran to her, crying out in the old language. Pakriaa,
with no change of expression, lunged at the captain, striking
flat-handed across her face, forcing her back until Paul reached them
to interfere and Sears caught Pakriaa's wrist, mumbling, "Come
now--come with me, princess."
"I am no princess."
"I call you so," Sears said clearly, and speaking with sternness for
possibly the first time in his life. "Now come with me."
Paul stammered, "Have Doc get that damned arrow out of you. Then he's
to start north with the wounded--at once."
"North." Sears nodded.
"There are no gods," said Pakriaa.
"Yes, north. We'll catch up with you."
"I thought of you as a god."
"Think of me as a friend who loves you. It is better." She went with
him, stumbling as Paul had never seen her do, and when the leaves
closed behind them it seemed to Paul that there was surely the cloud
of another world. She might have been a small girl going for a walk in
the woods with her grandfather....
There was no lifeboat above that rolling swarm. Ed Spearman must
have----_No time to think about it_.
But he had to, a little. Spearman was forced down by lack of fuel and
killed. Or forced down, isolated somewhere, miles away. Or he had kept
good watch of the fuel gauge until there was just enough for another
trip to the island and had gone--right, reasonable, what he ought to
have done, what Paul would have ordered him to do if he could have....
Paul turned to Brodaa. "Your sister Kamisiaa--I don't see her----"
"My lame sister is dead." Her eyes were shrewd, counting. "We have
more than seven hundred. Two hundred of them bowmen."
"Bring them all to the woods. Spread the bowmen at the edge: they will
meet the first charge with arrows, nothing else, and then join our
retreat. Send a hundred spearwomen to guard and help Tocwright's
group: they will go straight north. Send another hundred through the
villages to save what they can--the children, the old--and take them
west and north to join the others. All the rest will stay with you and
me and Elis to fight in the rear--delay and confuse--fighting retreat,
Brodaa. I see nothing else."
"Nothing else," she said evenly. "As you say...."
Elis was with him, waiting under the trees, and Nisana, who said, "No
gods? There must be other gods. Not Ismar...."
Elis watched the meadow over the crouching bowmen. "Within you,
Captain. The god within you made you save the life of my friend. I saw
that. I even think I begin to understand. But that might be vanity."
6
A sorry day moved into evening, and when evening became an approach to
moonless dark, this day of retreat was in Paul's mind a passage of
distorted images, true or false.
True that he was now limping through forest stillness between Nisana
and a skinny ghost who was Christopher Wright and Wright carried
Pakriaa, who moaned at times like a child with a nightmare, and up
ahead were five white drifting mountains, one of them ridden by a man
who was silent in pain, Sears Oliphant. It might or might not be true
that at some time during the day Paul had thrashed on the ground with
a broken head in front of some squalling danger until black arms swept
him up away from--whatever it was.
Tejron and the two other giant women Karison and Elron, and Mijok,
still lived. Elis was walking behind Paul, unhurt; therefore the mind
of Elis would still be probing at the borderland of known and unknown,
searching and incorruptible. All true. Apparently true that the gash
in Paul's side had stiffened, his right leg was knotting itself in
some unimportant distress, and his bandaged forehead no longer
throbbed.
The first contact with the Vestoian land army had been a swift
skirmish and ordered withdrawal. Abro Brodaa's archers had crumpled
the first enemy charge. After that the Vestoians had crashed into the
woods with no caution, driven by the horror of brown wings that still
pursued them. Paul had had a final glimpse of the green headdress of
Lantis, Queen of the World; his two shots before the rifle jammed had
not touched her. Once, under cover of the trees, the Vestoians had
paused to reorganize, giving Paul's retreating force a little time
and distance and the help of forest obscurity.
The spearwomen sent ahead to clear the villages had poured through
Pakriaa's settlement and Brodaa's, rounding up old people, children,
and the chattering pack of male witches, sending them west to join
Wright's group of wounded--if they could find it. But at the third
village upstream--it had been Abro Samiraa's--there was delay. Perhaps
the people had refused to go where there were giants. Paul's rear
guard had halted south of the village to protect the evacuation; here
the Vestoians caught up with them.
They had fought it out for two hours in the misery of bush and brier
and purple vine outside the village ditch, while the jungle world
steamed in the growth of mid-morning. Paul's horizon had narrowed to
the knot of fighters who stayed with him--Nisana, Brodaa, Elis, an
unknown black-skirted soldier who fell at his feet with a bleeding
mouth. Somewhere in that hell he had lost his rifle. It was Brodaa
(this must be true, for it was Elis who told him of it)--Brodaa who
had guided them out of the trap, regrouped the remnant of the rear
guard north of Samiraa's village while the Vestoians paused to set
that village afire and rejoice over its dying.
Paul could remember that regrouping: black Elis had set him on his
feet, supporting him till he could walk. There were many twittering,
mad-eyed bowmen among the survivors. Brodaa had sent runners to give
the other three villages a final warning; she herself decided against
trying to reach them with this fragment of an army numbering less than
three hundred. The only way to save anything at all was to flee north,
join Wright's group, hope that the remaining villages would delay the
conquerors and that at least some of their non-combatants could
scatter before Lantis, Queen of the World, took them for slaves, meat,
and sacrifice.
The rest of the day had been a running, a harsh drive into country
unknown even to Elis. There had been, for Paul and Elis at least, a
breath of second wind when they found the tracks of the olifants. They
had caught up with Wright's refugees in the early afternoon, but there
could be no pause, even though it was quiet here at the edge of
forest and western meadow and the sound of screaming in the villages
was an hour behind them....
Paul noticed that he was naked except for ammunition belt and an empty
holster. Perhaps his present clarity of mind was the true madness, the
earlier fog of pain and anger the mind's more natural climate. But one
might as well reason and take stock. He remembered the map. Was it
saved? No matter: a copy had been flown to the island with Dorothy and
the baby.
_I have a woman who loves me; I have a daughter. I have my life._
On his left, just visible in twilight beyond a meadow turning
brilliant with blue fireflies, there were the low western hills, the
hills rotten with the burrows of kaksmas, and they were nearer, much
nearer than he had ever seen them except from the lifeboat. (_But Ed
Spearman went there; he walked in the hills alone and found iron ore,
and now he is----Never mind where he is. If the charlesite was giving
out he did right to fly to the island and abandon us. What else could
he do?_) Well, it was right too that the hills should be nearer: the
edge of the forest slanted northwest, narrowing the meadow. And this
far north the hills were smaller, more broken up. Yet it would not do
to approach them closely: even the least of the hills (so pygmy and
giant tradition said) could be the dwelling place of day-blind ratlike
killers numerous enough to destroy this entire party and still be
hungry. The retreat must struggle north until the hills were well
behind, shut away by level jungle--where the kaksmas still might come,
to be sure, but only to the distance of half a night's journey from
their burrows. "Doc--can you estimate what distance we've made since
we caught up with you?"
"Maybe twenty miles," the old man said. "In more time than _Argo_ once
needed to travel twenty million miles. What is man?"
"Man? A mathematical absurdity.... Aren't you tired? I could carry
Pakriaa a while."
"No, I'm not tired, son. I like to have her...."
Rifles--in the beginning there had been only five, and one shotgun.
The shotgun had been taken to the island. Dorothy and Ann had their
pistols there, too. Paul's rifle was lost. Lisson's had been lost when
she died. That should leave three. Wright had one slung at his back.
Peering up ahead, Paul saw another in the red-brown hand of the young
giantess Elron. Sears must have lost his. So two at least remained.
And one automatic--Wright's. "Those two new recruits Mijok
brought----I'm in a fog--I only just remembered----"
"Lost," said Wright, staring ahead. "The boy didn't understand. He ran
into the mess on the beach like a horse running into a fire. That was
before you got back from the south. The other had more sense. Saw the
pygmies spilling out of the boats and ran for the woods. Naturally we
didn't try to hold him. Perhaps he's reached his home territory. I
hope so."
Behind him Elis spoke softly: "It was not very far, Doc. When we reach
the island and start the new settlement----"
"Oh, Elis----"
"When that has been done I'll come back and find him, give him the
words--him and many others. I promise you that. Let me believe it."
"Believe it, Elis. But the boy Danik is dead. He was bright, curious.
He should have lived 150 years."
"We overtake mystery," Elis said, "and leave it behind."
"Men have never overtaken the mystery of untimely death."
"There is chaos," said Elis. "Chance. Mystery is great jungle around a
small clearing. I accept that. We make a wider clearing."
Paul felt Nisana's finger hook over his. Pakriaa groaned, perhaps in
sleep. The darkness had blotted away the hills; even the small shape
of Nisana was growing too dim. Elis said, "You're limping, Paul.
Abroshin Nisana is tired. There are still three of the animals without
riders. You and Doc----"
"Yes," Wright said. "We might make better time." Nisana trilled an
order to Abara, who rode the colossal bulk of Mister Johnson at the
head of the line. The animals halted without sound. "We must go on all
night, Paul--right? What became of your--prisoner?"
"My----" the mental clarity must be a fraud, Paul thought, if new
memories could flash into it so abruptly. At some time--it must have
been after Elis had carried him clear of the nightmare at Samiraa's
village--he had stumbled on a Vestoian soldier unconscious from a head
wound and loss of blood but not dead. He had still been carrying her
when they caught up with Wright. With this, the memory of that reunion
became whole--the wordless suffering on the shield that Mijok carried,
the improvised stretchers, the bewilderment and exhaustion in the red
faces, the very smell of defeat--with this also a picture of the
horribly fat witch from Pakriaa's village carried on a litter by two
spearwomen, and one other witch, a lank skeleton with white and purple
lines emphasizing the prominence of his ribs, striding beside his
colleague and shooting glances of wrath from left to right and back.
Someone had gently taken the unconscious soldier. "She's safe, Doc.
Tejron took her--still has her, I'm sure."
"Good." Wright added with a harshness canceling humor: "Now if only
friend Lantis will initial a copy of the Geneva Convention...." He was
fumbling in the twilight before one of the white beasts, uncertain
what to do.
The old cow olifant Susie, carrying Sears, fretted at the delay,
sampling the air and rumbling. Paul petted her trunk to soothe her;
Sears' voice came down to him: "Paul? Take this, will you?" He was
reaching down the case that held his microscope, safe somehow out of
the inferno of the day. "My grip's not too good, got nothing to tie it
to--bare's a baby's bottom, like you. We look like the last days of a
Turkish bath, hey?"
"How d'you feel?" Nisana tore shreds from what remained of her purple
skirt; she looped them about the case, fastened it to Paul's
ammunition belt.
"Feel good," Sears said. Each word was a thick struggle for normal
speech. "Arrowhead came off; Chris got it out. Manicure scissors for
forceps; you may slice me cross-ways and call me ham and eggs if it
ain't so. Right, Chris? You there?"
"I'm here, Jocko," Wright said, and under his breath to Paul: "Medical
kit lost. I don't think the spleen is injured, but----" Aloud he said,
"Of course, with your gut what I needed was a hook and line. Paul, how
do you make one of these ten-foot roller coasters kneel down?"
"Let me--that's Miss Ponsonby--she knows me." At Paul's order, tons of
gentleness knelt on the earth; Paul held Pakriaa while Wright
struggled into the hollow between hump and head, and Pakriaa was
either asleep or not caring.... "Abro Brodaa?"
"Here, Commander."
"Form your people in three lines with linked hands. The giant women
Karison and Elron, and Elis, will guide them at the head, because
their night vision is better than yours and mine. Mijok and Tejron
will walk beside us. We must travel all night. I think the Vestoians
will not."
"They will not," the princess Brodaa said. He wished he could see
truly what was happening in her little face. "They will not because
they have no giants or Charins to help them." It carried no hint of
the obsequious.
"Thank you, Abro Brodaa. Wait here a moment." He patted Millie's
trunk--she was a young beast, nervous but fond of him--and made her
kneel. "Help Nisana climb up to me.... Abro Brodaa--the people of your
village----"
"Most of them lost." It might have been the oncoming night itself
speaking temperately. "These remaining are a few from all the
villages. I think they will follow me. And I will go with you...."
In the rest of the night--a silence and a drifting, on the surge and
thrust of the great animal under him--it was possible to reach a kind
of sleep, knowing his body would not relax enough to fall or to weaken
his hold on Nisana, who trusted him. She was deeply asleep in the
first part of the night, occasionally snoring, a comic noise like a
puppy's whine. All day she had never been out of his sight; she had
fought like a hellcat, but singlemindedly, saving her strength to deal
with those who threatened him.
It would have been possible to abandon these people; at one time, Paul
remembered, he had almost favored it himself, and Ed Spearman had very
nearly hinted that it might be better to join forces with the tyranny
in the south.... Life seemed cheap to Pakriaa's tribe--others' life.
Devil-worshipping cannibals, capable of every cruelty, committed for
thousands of years to all the superstitions that ever crippled
intelligence. You had to look beyond that, said Christopher Wright the
theorist, the doctor, the anthropologist, the impractical daydreamer.
_Anyway I saved a Vestoian--if she lives. One balanced against how
many that I destroyed...? No answer.... Unless you can see a world
where the ways of destruction become obsolete under a government of
laws. With the devils of human nature--the vanities, the greeds, the
follies and needless resentments, the fear of self-knowledge, dread of
the unfamiliar, the power lust of the morally blind, the passion for
easy solutions, scapegoats, panaceas--how do you see such a world...?
You say, Christopher Wright, that no one is expendable. I believe you.
But--when I must choose between the life of myself or my friends and
the life of the one whom the stream of history has tossed against me
as my enemy----_
_When I do that, I only discover once more that I am caught in the
same net with the rest of my kind and cannot escape until all of them
escape--escape into a region of living where men do not set traps for
each other and the blind do not lead._
_Therefore----_
"Are you awake, Nisana?" Her even breathing quickened. It seemed to
Paul that there was faint color in his glimpses of sky; he remembered
the silver moon that had appeared over the jungle with first-light so
long ago--yesterday morning. The passage of the red moon around
Lucifer was swift: tonight it would be rising two hours before
first-light and would be something broader than the gory scimitar he
had seen from the knoll.
"I am awake."
"I think the red moon has come back."
"Yes." She pointed over his shoulder; he glimpsed it through a gap in
the leaves. "A good moon. Begins the Moon of Little Rains. The small
rains make no harm, make the ground sweet. Is better than the moon
past--that we call the Moon of Beginnings." She moved restlessly
against him. "This country--all forest? How long have I sleep?"
"Most of the night. We're past the open land."
She whispered, "No one has ever come here. We have think always there
are bad--what word?--tev--tevils in the north."
"Tomorrow--rather, today--we turn west and then south on the other
side of the hills, to the island."
"Ah, the island.... I cannot see this island."
"You'll like it, Nisana. You'll be happy there."
"Happy?" And he remembered that the old pygmy language had no word for
happiness.