Part Two

The Year One

1

"This island is Eden." Sears Oliphant spoke drowsily. Toy bat wings flickered from the woods crowning the hillside, hovered over a pond: _illuama_. In a scant year of Lucifer time (seventeen months of the calendar of Earth) native names had become natural, mostly Mijok's names.

Two red-moon changes ago, in the final jading month of the rains, the pygmy word "kaksma" had been only a symbol. Now it woke the image of a village desolate, bones scraped and scarred. The mind's eye winced in pity--a sentry careless, a bridge left in place after dark; thousands of ratty bodies rustling down from the wet hills, over open ground, swimming swollen streams, finding the bridge before oil on the rain water in the ditch could be ignited. Small bodies, not swift, leaping or humping along like furry worms, sniffing, squeaking, their stabbing teeth dark with the blood of any flesh that moved. The northernmost of the villages allied with Pakriaa's had already returned to jungle.

But here, ten miles offshore from the coastal range, no kaksmas lived; Sears and Paul, in two days of study on this second visit, had established that. No wide wings lurked in the sky. The hilly island had no large meadows where omasha could hunt. Three giants had been flown to the island a month ago--the girl Arek, her mother Muson, and old Rak. They said it was a place of calm. Their soft talk could be heard up the slope, where a log building was growing. Paul stretched, lean and comfortable, on the grass, glad to be alone for a while with this least demanding of his friends.

Sears was fatter, but hardened, a round block of man, with a coarse black beard, kindness of brown eyes unaltered. Christopher Wright, waiting at the "fortress" by Lake Argo and no doubt frantic for word of this exploration, had let his beard grow too, sandy gray. Spearman and Paul had stayed clean-shaven, with soap made from fat and wood ashes. "The others must come here, Paul. I suppose Chris won't consent till Pakriaa agrees--damn, you'd think she could see it. She knows her enemies fear the ocean as she does. Lantis' two-by-four army would never chase after us in their lake boats."

"Wait a minute, Jocko. Lantis is no two-by-four proposition."

"Damn pint-size Napoleon with four teats and a grass skirt."

"Lookee: that settlement south of Lake Argo is thirty miles long. Equivalent of two hundred villages, to Pakriaa's six. Say twenty thousand warriors who got their pride hurt a year ago when the crash of _Argo_ swamped their fleet and scared the pants off 'em. They'll have replaced the fleet. They'll come overland too. Lantis, Queen of the World."

"If they do"--Sears' heavy voice had the tremor that he himself hated--"the firearms should be at least one ace in the hole."

"Ye--es. Ed's pistol helped in our one bad scrape with Pakriaa herself. But it was his smashing the idol that stalled 'em, not the gun."

"Poor little Abro Pakriaa!" Sears spoke with tenderness. "If ever a lady was pulled seven ways from Sunday! Wants our way of life, doesn't want it. Wants to grasp Chris' ethics, doesn't want to. Afraid of Ed's strength and aggressiveness, admires 'em too, oh my, yes. Tries to believe the god Ismar died or never lived--but can't, quite."

"And can't understand why our women are gentle--Dorothy anyway----"

"Nan's toughening up is conscious effort, Paul. Superficial. She's made herself hunt, shoot well, act hard, because her brain tells her she should. If we could only find something to restring her violin! I think she's given up hope of it: nothing I've found so far has been any good. She doesn't see that Dorothy does more for us by remaining the person she always was.... You know, when I go alone to Pak's village, I just set. Even the witches have got used to me, not that they wouldn't gut me if they could."

"Jocko"--Paul looked away--"you told me once you were scared all the time. When you go there alone--or when you tame the olifants for that matter--are you sort of grasping the nettle? And does it work?"

"Don't ask me, friend. Because I don't exactly know. I was never a brave man." Brown eyes misted in what was partly laughter. "Oy, the witches! There's the big enemy in the battle for Pakriaa's mind. Chris may claim they aren't real witch doctors, just advisers, low-grade magicians. I'm not so sure. Priests of Ismar, and when Ed clobbered the idol Pakriaa did consider having 'em all burned alive. Point is, she didn't do it. They gnaw away in the dark at all we try to teach her. That proposed bonfire, by the way, is gossip passed on to me in confidence by Abara."

"There's a dear little man."

"Ain't he though?" Smiling into late sky, Paul envisaged the wizened red midget riding the white monsters that Sears had tamed and insisted on naming olifants-with-an-f. A painting might grow out of that, he thought, squat coppery lump astride of massive white--it might, if the desire to paint should ever wake again and be as strong as it once was on _Argo_, when his mind's eye could remember Earth without distortion. Abara, popeyed and potbellied, a favorite in Pakriaa's harem, had been commissioned by her as a student and go-between at the lakeside camp; Sears had not only adopted him as an olifant trainer, but suspected him of furtively possessing a sense of humor. "Well--the giants. Lantis will always have thought of them as wild animals----"

"Sears"--Paul rolled over and pressed his face in the grass--"can we ask or even permit the giants to tangle in a pygmy war?"

"Ah.... It's tormenting Chris too, ever since Lantis sent that ultimatum." He snarled in his beard, "Thirty fat meat slaves every two months! There's politics for you. Dirtiest way she could answer Pak's challenge to personal combat, and the automatic refusal makes an excuse to come and clean up. Sounds like home.... Mijok wants to help fight--says he does."

"It's still our responsibility." Paul sat up. His eyes kept returning to the towering courage of the trees. Brave as any cathedral spire, scarcely one was free from the clutch of the purple-leaf vine. "As for moving here to the island, Pak sees it, but the idea's too new. You just don't pull up stakes, venture on the Big Water, crossing forbidden kaksma country."

Sears chewed a grass blade. "Anyway we've got to bring Dorothy and the baby here, and Ann. Dorothy won't fuss, will she, son?"

"Since there _is_ Helen--no, she won't. I still dream sometimes, as I did during her first pregnancy. Things, shapes, trying to pull her away--or she's where I can't find her, can't push through the leaves."

"She told me. It's something else that's made you blue lately."

"No."

Sears watched him. "Yes.... Want to start back tomorrow?"

"Might as well. We've learned all we need."

"Mm.... Second thoughts about the daddy of Dorothy's second----"

"No no. We settled that. She's proud to be carrying it."

"Good genetics could be damn bad psychology."

"No, Jocko. Don't think that. She's close to me as ever."

Sears waited and spoke softly: "New York late on a rainy night, a few car lights moving, street-lamp reflections like golden fish----"

"Orange paintbrush in New Hampshire meadows----We'd better stop."

"We better. I want boat whistles--floating city coming out of the fog. Call it a slow-healing wound.... And look across the channel."

Paul saw it presently: a cliff formation in the coastal range made a brow, nose, and chin. Below this, rounded rock could be a shoulder straining in heroic effort; then, tumbled reality of mountain-fancy must supply whatever held the figure in bondage. "Yes. He looks west. Past us, at the sun."

"Why, no, Paul. I think he looks west of the sun...."

A red-furred girl wandered down from the woods. "I got tired." Arek had lived twenty-two years; she was seven feet tall, not yet adolescent but near it. In the next Red-Moon-before-the-Rains, ten months away, she might take adult part in the frenzy of love if her body demanded it: if not, she would go apart with the other children, whose play also became innocently erotic at that time, and help care for the youngest. Sears grinned as she sat down with them. "Tired or lazy?"

"Both. You Charins are never lazy enough." The name Charin, Paul thought, was almost natural now, a pygmy word for "halfway," intended by Pakriaa merely to convey that Wright and his breed were halfway in size between her people and the giants, but Wright took sardonic satisfaction in it as a generic name. "Work and loafing are both good. Why can Ed Spearman never sit still in the sun? Or maybe I like to talk too much."

"Never," Sears chuckled. "Well--his best pleasure is in action. Maybe it's the technician in him--he must always be doing something."

"Like always waking, never sleeping." She sprawled in comfort; her broad hands plucked grass, scattered it over the furry softness of her four breasts. "Green rain.... I want to stay on this island. Will they come?"

"We hope so. Mijok will as soon as Doc does."

She sighed. "Mijok is a beautiful male. I think I'll take him for my first when I'm ready.... And soon the pretty boat will be no more good. It's sad we can't make another. Tell me again about Captain Jensen. He was as tall as me? He had hair on his head, red like my fur. He spoke----"

"Like storm wind," said Paul, supplying the wanted note in a favorite fairy tale, remembering a brother on Earth who was--perhaps--not dead.

"Hear the ocean," Arek whispered. Paul could hardly separate the sound from the mutter of the pond's outlet. This ridge of high ground ended short of the island's northern limit. A white beach, where the lifeboat was shaded from late sun, faced the mainland. West of the beach a red stone cliff ran to the tip of the island, shouldering away the sea. Wind out of the west allowed no soil to gather on it. Now and then a rainbow flashed and died above the rock, when a wave of uncommon grandeur spent itself in a tower of foam. "Hear what it says? 'I--will--try--aga-a-ain....' Why must the others wait to come here?"

"Pakriaa's people are not ready."

"Oh, Sears!" Arek laughed unhappily and sat up. "I think of how my mother taught me the three terrors. She took me to the hills, beat two stones before a burrow till one blundered out maddened, afraid of nothing but the light. She crushed it, made me smell it. I was sick; then we fled. I think of how she flung an _asonis_ carcass into meadow grass, so the omasha came. She wounded one with a stone, made me watch while the others tore it apart. Later still, when I could run fast--ah, through night to a village of the Red Bald----"

"Please, dear--pygmies. That's a name they accept."

"I'm sorry, Sears.... Yes, we hid in the dark, waited until a sentry moved--careless.... It was wrong. You've shown us how such things are wrong. And memory's someone talking behind you, out of the big dark."

"The laws we've agreed on----"

"I do honor them," she said gently. "The law against murder was my first writing lesson. But--what if Pakriaa's tribe--"

"They're slower," Sears said in distress, and the distress would be as much a message to Arek as any words. There was no hiding the heart from these people: green eyes and black ears missed no smallest nuance.

"When will they know they must not dig pits, with poisoned stakes--"

"But Pakriaa's tribe don't do that now. Do they?"

Arek admitted: "I suppose not. But the six other villages----"

"Five, dear. The kaksmas. And only two months ago, Arek."

She stared at Paul with shock. "I _had_ almost forgotten. But they do still hate us. The day before you flew us here, Paul, I met Pakriaa and two of her soldiers in the woods. I gave them the good-day greeting. Oh, if one of you had been there she would have answered it.... Wouldn't the island be better without them? Some of _you_ don't like them. Even Dorothy only tries to like them. Since the baby was born, Paul, she--shrinks when they come to the fortress. They don't know it, but I do."

Dimly, Paul had known it, known also that it was a thing Dorothy would consciously reject. "Time, Arek. You'll live a hundred and fifty years or better--more than three pygmy lifetimes. You'll see them change."

Speaking almost like a Charin, Arek said, "They'd better."

They strolled up the hill; the other giants' labor had ceased. The building was a sturdy oblong, intended as storehouse and temporary communal dwelling for them all, including (Wright hoped) some of Pakriaa's people. Rafters were not yet in place. For that, Rak needed the strength of another like himself: chubby Muson tired easily. Someday a road would climb from the beach, traversing the ridge which was the backbone of the northern half of the island. Here, where spring water filled the pond and rushed on down to carve a small harbor below the beach, would be Jensen City, and the three races of Lucifer would learn to live there in good will and pleasure under a government of laws. So Wright said--peering at photographs, teasing his gray beard, tapping thin fingers on the map drawn on the paper of Earth, on the new maps of whitebark. Paul could see it too--sometimes; glimpse the houses, gardens, open places. South of the pond, a wheat field, for on Lucifer the wheat of Earth grew to four feet and bore richly. Near the field, perhaps the house for Dorothy and himself, with no doorway lower than ten feet.

At other times he could see only defeat--the arrogance and blind drive of genus _Charin_, species _Semisapiens_ beating against the indifference of nature, the resentment of other life. He could see his people destroyed, by accident or anger, the giant friends adrift with only hints of the new life and spoiled for the old. Then he would stop trying to foresee and would make his mind's ear listen to Wright insisting: "_Give protoplasm a chance. Patience is the well-spring._..."

The walls were eleven feet in height. Rak and Muson rested on the coolness of bare ground within; Rak pointed at the top of the walls where rafters would rest. "Slow," he said, "and good." Rak could not be sure how old he was. When Mijok had first persuaded him to the camp ten months ago, Rak had won his English with the grave precision of a mason selecting fieldstone. His language had none of the flexibility and scope that Mijok and others had achieved, but it served him. After absorbing basic arithmetic, Rak had deliberated on the problem of his age--squatting at the gate of the stone fortress by Lake Argo, spreading out rows of colored pebbles to indicate years, rainy seasons, episodes of hunting or fear or passion too keen to forget. At last he had come up with the figure of 130 years. "But," he said, "there are two times. In here"--he patted an ancient scar on his belly--"and there." He pointed at the red crescent moon.

"I'll cook supper," Arek said. Muson bubbled and shadowboxed with her daughter. Muson would laugh at anything--the flutter of a leaf, a breath of breeze on her red-brown fur. Paul followed to help Arek trim the carcass of an asonis killed the night before. Hornless, short-legged, fat, the bovine animal was abundant on the island; its one enemy here was what Arek called _usran_, a catlike carnivore the size of a lynx, which could tackle only the young asonis or feeble stragglers. Rak hunted in the old way. Bow, club, spear, even rifle, had been explained to him, but the stalk, the single rush and leap, the grasp of a muzzle and backward jerk that snapped the neck before the prey could even struggle--these were Rak's way still. In the old life, Rak's age would have led him eventually to a few dim years with a band of women, who would have fed him until he chose to wander into deep jungle, preventing any from following. When far away, he would have sat in the shadows to wait--for starvation or the black marsh reptiles or a great mainland cat, _uskaran_, which never attacked a giant in the prime of strength. Rak would have taken no harm from the young men in this weakness: his own territory would have been inviolate, and he would have joined the women, in a taciturn farewell to life, only when teeth and arms had failed. ("We're gentle people," Mijok said, puzzled at it himself. "In the Red-Moon-before-the-Rains we only play at fighting. It's not like what we see the other creatures do at that time. How could one 'possess' a woman? Do I possess the wind because I like to run against the touch of it...?")

The meat hung from a makeshift tripod; Arek jumped back, startled, as a furry thing scampered down. It was like a kinkajou except for the hump on the back (a true hindbrain in the spine: Sears had long ago verified that guess of Wright's). "Little rascal," Paul said. "Let's tame it."

"What?" Arek was bewildered. "Do what?"

"Do these live on the mainland?"

"I never saw one till I came here. Too small to eat. Tame it?"

"Watch." Paul tossed a bit of meat. The visitor's chatter changed to a whistling whine; it elongated itself, grabbed, sat back on stubby hind legs to eat in clever paws; it washed itself with a squirrel's pertness. Arek chuckled, examining the idea, and went on with her work; she had become a hypercritical cook, under Dorothy's guidance. "Jocko, biologist, stand by: I propose to name an animile. Genus _Kink_, species _quasikinkajou_." Genus Kink did not retreat at Sears' quiet approach, but wriggled a black nose.

Rak asked in solemn curiosity, "For what is it good?"

"To make us laugh," Paul said, "so long as we're kind to it."

"Ah?" Rak moved his fingers to aid the patient mill of his mind.

"Dance-Nose," said Muson, who already understood. She shook all over. "Come, Funny-Nose." It would not--yet, but Muson could be patient too.

Sears whispered in his beard, "Less homesick?"

"Yes...."

After the meal Arek wanted Paul to come out on the cliffs. Though there seemed no danger from the omasha, she carried a long stick and Paul took his pistol. The slope leveled out to the bare rock of the headland; the ocean voice was the humming of a thousand giants. The way was easy, with no crevasses, no peril while the wind was mild. Arek had often been out here alone. Yesterday Paul had seen her standing for an hour, watching the west where unbroken water met a sun-reddened horizon. In her earlier years there might have been dim mention of the sea by her almost wordless people, but no true knowledge: the mainland coast was steaming vine-choked jungle, or tidal marsh, and shut away by the kaksma hills. Paul wondered what member of his race could stand for an hour in contemplation like a thinking tree, not shifting a foot nor raising an arm...?

"Paul, why did you leave Earth?" Arek patted the rock beside her.

Below the troubled water laughed, endlessly defeated and returning. Cloud fantasies gathered below a lucid green, and the wind was a friend. "I have doubted sometimes whether we ought to have done so."

"That wasn't my meaning. We love you. Didn't you know? But I've wondered what sent you away from such a place. Ann says it was beautiful."

"A--drive of restlessness. We took boundaries as a challenge. I used to think that a great virtue. Now I call it neither good nor evil."

"I think it is good."

"Everywhere, we carry good _and_ evil."

"What you do here is good. You teach us. You do kind things."

"We can be bad. But for Doc Wright and his dreams that Ed Spearman finds so impractical, we'd have done you harm." Helpless at her innocence, Paul saw she did not believe him. "On Earth, we fought each other. We hunted for lies to make ourselves feel big. We created great institutions built on vanity--tickling lies: imperialism, communism--most of the isms you find so puzzling when we talk of Earth history. The anger of Charins rarely focused itself on the actual causes of unhappiness or injustice. Instead we hunted for scapegoats, easy solutions. We wouldn't study ourselves. Always we itched for something external to take the blame for our own follies and crimes."

"I don't understand."

"As if you stumbled on a root, Arek, and then banged your fist on the tree that grew it, to blame it for your own clumsiness."

"But Paul--only a very small child would act like that."

"Darling, let's watch the sunset." She felt his pain, touched his knee, and was silent until he said, "A poor naughty child...."

"There was a thing Ed Spearman said to me--what I wanted to talk to you about. I've never gone to Pakriaa's village. You know, even Mijok won't go there except with one of you. I asked Ed if Pakriaa still kept that stockade for drugging and fattening prisoners--in spite of her agreeing to the laws. He said yes, she did. I said it was not right. I said we made a law against slavery too. He said, 'Forget it, baby--one thing at a time.' I am not a baby. How can the laws govern us unless all obey them?"

"Ed--meant no harm, Arek. He only meant it does take time. The pygmies have more to unlearn. You--started clean. And--well--with the army of Lantis likely to come back at any time--we can't afford--"

Yet it seemed natural that this giant child, who had herself done murder in the old days, should answer his troubled evasions not only with reproach but with command: "If the laws are to govern us they must be respected by everyone. I wish I had gone to that village and torn down the stockade with my hands."

"And they would have killed you with a hundred spears and Pakriaa's people would hate us forever, learning nothing but more hatred."

Arek cried a little, rubbing at the unfamiliar wetness. "Maybe I begin to see, how difficult.... The sun's going." But they sat quietly in the warm and undemanding wind until the first sapphire glint of fireflies dotted the slope where Jensen City might one day shine. Arek stood, reaching down an affectionate hand.

2

Paul glanced down at sunrise-tinted snow on the highest peak of the coastal range, thirteen thousand feet above the sea. Prairie spread for thirty miles east of its base; then came a region of forest and small lakes fed by the outlet of Lake Argo, which was the core of the empire of Lantis, Queen of the World.

Pakriaa's information on Lantis was a murky blend of truth and fantasy. Lantis claimed birth from Ismar-Creator-and-Destroyer. Pakriaa had different theories. Originally ruler of a single village, Lantis consolidated by conquest. Instead of annihilating defeated villages she took their populations captive, sorting out three categories: potential followers, slave laborers, and meat. Many in the first class became fanatically converted; those in the second provided a year or so of work before dying of whippings and other abuse; captives of the third class were forced to eat the green-flowered weed that numbed the brain and were bled out at the right stage of fatness. In fifteen years one riverside village had swollen to a city of sixty thousand, fed by expeditions far to the east, and Lantis named her city Vestoia--Country of Freedom and Joy. "Got anything new in the 'scope?"

Sears groaned: "There _are_ more boats above the falls."

The boats, they knew, were broad canoes roofed like sampans against the omasha, but with no sail. "Not moving, are they?"

"No--anchored maybe." Sears mopped his round face.

Without the telescope, Paul could see brownness on the water of Lake Argo's southern end, near the spot where the outlet tumbled over a high falls to a smaller lake. It meant that hundreds more must have been portaged past the falls from Vestoia during his two days on the island....

The fifty red-green flowing miles became a pain of delay. Sears too would be aching for the gray square of their "fortress" to claim the eye in the north, touched by early sunlight, a brave structure twelve feet high, fifty square, built of split stone by the labor of giant friends. Outside it ran a moat twenty feet wide, ten deep, with a drawbridge of logs, bark matting, grass-fiber ropes, the bottom flooded with lake water. There was room within for living quarters, a supply of smoked meat, dried vegetables.

Lantis understood scaling ladders, Pakriaa said. Lantis had patience for a siege. There was no defense, Pakriaa said, in these measures. The only defense was to attack, to retreat, and attack again. It had always been so in the old wars. It was still so with this Lantis and her Big-Village-Vestoia, this bastard begotten of a red worm and Inkar, goddess of kaksmas. It would always be so--at least, until.... Paul remembered Dorothy, cherishing Helen at her brown breast, asking neutrally, "Until what, Abro Pakriaa?"

Pakriaa had studied the giants' walls with contempt. "Until I shame this worm spawn Lantis into meeting me alone. She must respect custom. Her first answer is a--what word?--rejection, because she has fear. I have sent a second challenge. She will meet me, or her own people will condemn her. I will pin her belly to the ground. Her government will be mine." There had been no mistaking it: for the first time in the year since the idol of Ismar fell and was not restored, Pakriaa was making vast decisions wholly her own, with only perfunctory interest in what the Charins might think. In her wrath against the mighty soldier ruler in the south there was natural grief at the outrages of past years, but something else too. Her red face glaring southward said: _She has what I desire; she is doing what I would do_. Pakriaa had finished her answer quietly: "It is _I_ who will be Queen of the World."

Three days ago. It could have been a mistake to leave the camp at all. Now--a streak of sunshine on gray at the end of familiar meadow. With fuel for only a few more flights, Paul knew he had never made a better landing. The drawbridge was down. Dorothy ran to meet him. Sears was shouting, "Chris! It's perfect--no kaksmas--everything Paul said it was--"

Paul stammered, "You look like a million dollars."

"Dollars. What're those?"

"I forget. What's news?"

"Your funny mouth is tickling my ear."

"That isn't news, Dope. Helen--"

"Full of the best gurgles. Come and see." He thought: _How do I tell her of the boats, the thirty-mile hive of savage hatreds_--but Sears was already talking of it. Wright had no smile for Paul, only a warm gray-eyed stare and pressure of the hand. Paul asked, "Where's Ed? Mijok and the boys?"

Ann looked up from cutting a square of hide. She had not come to meet them. Ann's way nowadays; one's mind insisted: _It doesn't mean anything_. "Ed's hunting. Should have been back last night."

Dorothy added: "Mijok's off missionarying, with Elis and Surok. They took Blondie--Lisson, I mean: moral support."

Wright was hag-ridden. "Sears, if it were only Pakriaa's tribe--but--not fuel enough to fly all the giants over. We cannot abandon _them_."

"Then let's get the women there and the rest of us go overland."

Ann said, "I'm going overland."

Wright muttered, "Damn it, Nancy--"

Sears patted her shoulder and ignored her speech as she ignored the touch. "Chris, I've labored, myself, over that damn knotty little brain of Pakriaa's. She can't see things our way. We need a hundred years."

The conference lengthened into the morning. Sometimes it seemed to Paul that his teacher's stubbornness degenerated into the obsession of a man who won't leave a blazing house until the rugs are saved. Wright longed for the island, which he had seen only in photographs. There had always been some compelling reason why he must stay by the fortress, if only to hoe voracious weeds out of the gardens. Yet to Wright it was unthinkable that the island community should start without the pygmies: he returned to it with haggard insistence. "I know--I can't actually like Pakriaa--she's got a mind like a greased eel; but we've made a beginning. They speak our tongue--well. A people intelligent as they are--"

Paul thought: _It's not Lucifer that's aged him--it's us. We are not big enough_. Aloud he suggested: "Doc, can't we make a start without them and just keep the door open? Bring them in when we're stronger ourselves?"

"Oh, son, if we desert Pak now, she's finished. Over-confidence. Lantis will go over her like a tide. We might just turn that tide. If not, we _must_ be ready to help her escape with--whatever's left.... Well, at least we agree on this: Helen and the women must go to the island, at once."

"Tomorrow." Dorothy choked. "If the boats haven't started yet--"

"All right, dear. Tomorrow. And one man should go with them."

"You," Paul said. "You."

Wright said inexorably, "No." His stare groped at Sears Oliphant.

Sears was nakedly desperate. "Chris, I beg of you--you must not ask me to go away from this battle." He was sweating, white. "I am--in a sense--a religious man. The--Armageddon within, your own phrase--please understand without my saying any more. Don't ask me to go."

"Ed won't go.... Paul?"

_Leave him, with Sears' inner torments and Ed's arrogance?_ "No, Doc."

Ann Bryan said, "I'm staying for the show."

Dorothy lowered her cheek to the brown fuzz of Helen's head; the baby's absurd square of palm found Paul's finger. Helen was almost eight months old--Lucifer months. The new life in Dorothy had been conceived in the last month of the rains. Dorothy said, "I'm going, Nancy, with Helen. As a valuable brood mare, I can't afford heroism. Neither can you."

The giant women crossed the bridge; they had lingered outside, knowing the Charins needed to talk alone. Ann said, "I've heard the argument. I'm not pregnant yet. I've learned to shoot damn' well."

Wright asked, "Will you abide by a vote when Ed gets back?"

Ann pushed her fingers into black hair, cut short as a man's. "I suppose I must.... If no men get to the island, how do two women and a girl child increase and multiply, or shouldn't I ask?"

Wright mumbled inadequately, "We'll reach the island."

Ann said, "Then you already see it as a retreat?"

Wright was silent. He tried to smile with confidence at the giant women and children, who were sober with reflected unhappiness--all but nine-year-old Dunin, who trotted to Paul and hugged him with her large arms and announced: "I learned six words while you were gone. Hi, listen! 'Brain': that's here and here. 'Me-di-tation': that happens in the brain when it's quiet. Mm-mm.... 'Breast': that's these. And 'breath': that's ooph, like that. 'Breeze': that's a breath with nobody blowing it.... I forgotten six."

Dorothy murmured. "Tem--tem--"

Dunin hopped up and down. "'Tempest!' Big _big_ breeze--"

"That's perfect," said Paul. "Perfect...."

Before the five-month rainy season had made travel on the sodden, gasping ground too miserable, Mijok had explored a half circle of territory forty miles in radius east of the hills, for others who might be willing to learn new ways. It was slow work, often discouraging. He had located two bands of free-wandering women and children--twenty in all--and stirred their curiosity and friendliness. But he had been able to recruit only three other males. There was Rak. Blackfurred Elis and tawny Surok were in vigorous middle years, hard to convince but quick to learn once the barrier was down.

Kamon was accepted leader of the women. White with age, gaunt, flat-breasted, stooped but quick on her feet, Kamon rarely smiled, but her good nature was profound. "Ann," she said, "you ought to go. We--if we cannot fight off these southern pygmies, we can escape. But you? One of us would have to carry you. And as Mashana Dorothy says, your womb is needed." (Mashana--sweetheart, mother, hunting companion, friend.)

Wright said, "You, Dorothy, Helen, and the giant children."

That brought murmuring. Kamon checked it: "Only four children still need milk. You, Samis, your breasts are big: you will go." Kamon turned with gentle deference to one authority she felt to be stronger than her own under the laws: "Doc?" Paul found it comfortable, no longer even amusing, that Wright should be known to the giants by his inevitable nickname. The pygmies disliked the short sound, and initial _D_ always bothered them. To them he was Tocwright, or more often Tocwright-Who-Plays-with Gray-Fur-at-His-Throat.

"Yes, Kamon. Samis too. Paul, how many trips will that take?"

"Three--leaving fuel for about three more of the same length."

Wright nodded. "Ed has a notion of using the lifeboat for a weapon. Hedgehop, scare 'em to hell. But with fuel so low--"

There was shadow at the drawbridge. Ed Spearman flung aside the carcass he had brought. Ann's white face was still, though she clung to him briefly when he kissed her. It had occurred to Paul that Ann's image of love would not be given reality anywhere in the galaxies: she wished moments to be eternities and a human self to be a mirror of desire. _But Dorothy and I--somehow we've learned to let each other live...._ "More news," Spearman said. "I stopped at the village. A spy of Pakriaa's came home last night--must be a sharp article: did the sixty-odd miles up the lake shore in nothing flat, with facts and figures."

"Lantis is moving." Wright dropped his hands to his bony knees.

"No, Doc, but will in a day or so." Spearman sat down, holding Ann's fingers till she pulled them away. He nodded to Sears and Paul. "Good trip?" He had grown even more rugged in a year of Lucifer. He wore only shorts and Earth-made shoes; months of handling a heavy bow had made his upper arms almost as thick as the narrow part of Mijok's forearm. His face had deepened its lines; he had never smiled easily.

"Very good," Sears said. "The island is--" He was silent.

Spearman grunted. "You're sold too? Well, here's the news. One: you remember Pakriaa's second challenge, sent by two warriors, correct and formal--trust Pak for that. One of those messengers is returning. The spy ran on ahead--with part of the body of the other ambassador." He studied the sickened faces. "Two: the spy says Lantis plans to send four thousand on the lake boats, another six thousand overland. Pakriaa--who is in a state of mind I don't know how to describe, not jitters exactly--Pakriaa thinks we may feel the lake-boat drums tomorrow. She doesn't know what they are, by the way--invention of Lantis, I guess. From her description they must be drums, maybe hollow logs mounted on boats. She heard them last year in the war we interrupted. You feel them before you hear them, she says: she thinks it was a lake devil consulting with the Queen of the World. Three: the spy wasn't sure, but thinks Lantis has already sent six hundred east of the lake to make a big circle, come down on the settlement from the northeast."

"Smart," Paul said. "To drive us into the kaksma hills?"

"The kaksma hills." Spearman's gray eyes squinted in a sort of laughter. "They're not so bad. The critters may be all they say, after dark, but--I'd better own up: I've gone that way on my last three solo trips. Safe enough in daylight, when they're half blind. I killed a few today."

Sears asked quickly, "Bring back specimens?"

Spearman teased the fat man with waiting and chuckled and nodded at the asonis carcass. "Tied to one of the hoofs. Don't look so worried, Doc--I waded plenty of streams on the way back." He rose with heavy grace and strolled out on the bridge. "Come a minute, some of you." Paul joined him; Wright stayed as he was; Sears was examining the kaksma's gray, thick-tailed body, holding back its pinkish lip. Paul caught a repellent glimpse of the jutting upper canines; the molars were shearing tools like a cat's. He saw the spade claws of the forefeet. The jet eyes were like a mole's. "Look," Spearman said, "the hills. Notice that hogback at the southern end--it's five miles long. Riddled with burrows. They must live on small game on the meadow below and hunt the other side of the hills too, where it's jungle." His fingers dug at Paul's shoulder. He spoke loudly enough to be heard by all: "Listen: the earth at the burrows is red ocher. Understand? Hematite."

Wright let out his breath sharply. "So--"

"Yeah. Just a five-mile mountain of iron ore. Merely what I've been looking for ever since we crashed. For a start. From iron to steel to--ah.... And just when we've _got_ it--God! with organized pygmy labor--" He strode back into the fortress, glancing obliquely at the silent giant women. "The pygmies do understand work, you know. Well, never mind it now. Of course we must get the baby and the women to your island right away. As a temporary refuge, we must use it." He watched Wright with unqualified sadness. "Apart from that, you know what I think of your Island of Lotos-Eaters--"

"That's not just, Ed."

"Adelphi then. Well, the women and Helen--"

"And the giant children, with Samis to nurse the youngest."

Spearman asked evenly, "Paul, how's the charlesite?"

"After the trips Doc mentioned, enough for three more."

Ann's keen ears caught a far-off sound. "Mijok's coming back."

The music grew slowly manifest: Mijok, in an Earth song more than two hundred years old. Long-flowing chanteys and slower spirituals suited him. He had teased Ann to teach him all she knew, even after she lost interest. Swift melodies and rapid syllables were beyond him--the depth of his tone rendered them grotesque. More than a mile away, he was wallowing in "Shenandoah"--Mijok, to whom the ocean was only a word and a river steamboat the cloudiest of legends. Other voices, true on pitch, followed his solo:

"_Away--we're bound away...._"

Paul asked, "How many, Nan?"

Ann shut her eyes. "Four, besides Mijok and--yes, Lisson's singing. At least two new recruits. Ah--they can sing before they talk." She hurried into that thatched house-within-a-house which was her comer of privacy on Lucifer. The giant women were smiling, though Kamon's eyes followed Ann with trouble and pity. They hummed in three-part counterpoint. Their voices had the range of a Charin baritone; Paul missed Muson, who could approach the tenor. Sears' bass moved in, a well-behaved trombone teasing a crowd of bassoons. Dorothy's alto added a warm thread of sound....

The tall children and women poured out over the bridge when Mijok and his companions were still distant. Musical thunder in the woods pulsed along the ground. Spearman smiled indulgently. "Just like a bunch of kids."

"Yes," Wright said. "The pygmies are more serious. They have wars."

Sears stopped humming and mumbled, "Don't, Chris...."

Mijok brought in his triumph, beaming and warm. "And my smallest woman?" Dorothy placed the naked morsel that was Helen in his waiting hands. Mijok was bemused. "How can anything be so small?"

Dorothy claimed: "Seven pounds at birth--that ain't hay, Mijok."

"Growing too," Elis said. The golden-furred girl Lisson tickled Helen's chest with the tip of a forefinger, and Mijok introduced the newcomers. One was timid. "Just a boy," Mijok explained. "Knows some words already, though. Danik?"

The giant boy whispered, "Good day." The other was older, black like Elis, trying to display stern indifference, but Surok eased him into relaxation with a few words in the old language.

For Mijok, speech had still the brilliance of newness but was wholly flexible; he reveled in colloquialisms, acquired mainly from Sears and Dorothy. "While the boys and I were out having a hell of a time, what's with local industries? The island, gentlemen?"

"Good," Sears said. "Better than I dared dream."

"And those tough babies in the south--anything new?"

Sears winced. "That part ain't good."

Mijok fondled the fat man's arm with a hand mild as silk. "Now, Jock, now. We'll give 'em hell, that's what we'll do. Hey, Paul?"

3

Abara trotted between Sears and Paul in the forest aisle, a silent ugly man with popeyes, bulging underlip, jutting ears; thirty inches tall. He was twenty-six. His potbellied softness had the beginning sag of middle age. There was politics, Paul guessed, in his presence at the camp--it was not because the queen had tired of him that he was temporarily detached from the harem. His body was agile for all its pokiness, his mind even more nimble; his English, when he stooped to use it, was good. After the noon meal Abara had appeared, crossing the drawbridge like a wisp of red smoke, ignoring the giants, reminding Sears obliquely that it was three days since he had visited the clearing near the camp, where the white olifants had learned to come.

Sears' love for the great leaf eaters had deepened with familiarity. He had easily persuaded the others to guarantee their permanent protection in the laws. He had taught the pygmies to call them olifants, a shrewd stroke, conveying to the Neolithic mind that the animals were of Sears' totem. Even during the long ordeal of the rains he had gone alone for whole days and nights, following olifant trails, sitting in patience where a broad-leaf tree they enjoyed was abundant. Deep forest was no place for a man who moved slowly and shrank from discomfort and danger, yet Sears held to this undertaking as stubbornly as Wright to his dreams of a community of good will under a government of laws. And before all except Paul and Wright, Sears was able to preserve a manner like the face of Lake Argo on a still morning. That calm gave him, in the eyes of the pygmies, more puzzling divinity than they found in the others. Abara worshiped from behind a mask of cynical blankness. Pakriaa seemed almost to love him openly. She was not arrogant with him; when he spoke she listened. She assigned soldiers to collect the insects, fish, small animals he wanted for study; she brought him gifts--an earthenware vessel with ritual painting, odd flowers, ornaments of wood and bone and clay. She liked to sit by him when he was at the microscope and peek, mystified, into the country of the lens.

Sears had let the olifants grow used to him. He talked to them. He learned they like to be rubbed above the tip of the trunk and on the vast flat tops of their heads--for this luxury they would kneel, rumbling and sighing. Eventually he dared climb into the natural saddle between hump and skull: they allowed it. They were never excited nor in a hurry. The kaksmas they probably avoided by keen scent and flight in times of danger; they kept clear of the omasha by going into open ground only at night.

The clearing was silent except for muted trilling of illuama. The ground was trodden; purple-leaf vines hung dead and brown, ripped out by trunks and tusks. Sears said that once, with no notion of conveying the idea, he had tugged peevishly at a vine under the nose of his favorite cow. "So, she came and fetched it loose--tired of watching me act like a damn fool."

Abara said, "I will whistle, me...." Two came, spectrally calm. "Susie!" Sears called. "Been a good girl, hey?" The old cow let down her many tons to have her head scratched. Another arrived on fog-silent feet; then two bulls together, munching leaves. The five were placid, enjoying the hot stillness and Sears' purring talk. The largest bull stood ten feet at the shoulder, Paul estimated, as Abara's two-feet-six approached him, seized a lowered ear, and climbed up. Abara piped: "We walk now, Mister Johnson."

Mister Johnson's pale eyes noted Paul's bulging jacket; the boneless finger of his trunk groped suggestively till Paul produced a melon-like fruit. "Hoo-hee!" Abara crowed. "We thank you." They vanished in the shadows.

"Susie, want to dig some vines?" But Sears halted in the act of climbing her neck. Spearman had joined them, with a good hunter's quiet.

"You really have something there." Spearman was cordial and flushed. "Pygmies still make the best wine. Ours is no damn good, yet."

"Meant to ask how the last turned out."

"Needs ripening, like everything else."

"In fact," said Paul, "you're slightly plastered."

"But slightly." Ed grinned. "How if I climb on one of those?"

Sears was doubtful. "Have to get acquainted first. Mister Smith over there--he shook me off the first time. Not rough--just wasn't ready."

"They pull vines at command? You can steer 'em?"

"Sure. If they like you. Knee pressure."

"Abara's good?"

"They prefer him to me. Arek is better still. I miss her."

"Mijok rides, doesn't he?"

"Mijok and Elis. Surok's a bit skittish. I guess Pak thinks it's undignified--or else the damned witches disapprove."

"Hm.... We have, maybe, three days before Lantis hits us--"

"Lantis--I'd succeeded in forgetting her for three minutes." Sears drooped his head against the column of Mister Smith's foreleg; eyes closed, he cursed without humor. He dredged up almost forgotten words from the old years of Earth, from bars, docks, dissecting rooms, at least four major religions. He cursed Lantis root and branch, ancestry and posterity, heart, body, and brain. Regaining a trace of mirth, he outlined a program of correction that would have kept hell under forced draft for a thousand years. Still with closed eyes, he asked, "What's the point, Ed? What's the damned point?"

"How many of these critters have you tamed?"

"Five. There's another smelling around, not ready yet."

"And five riders--you ride 'em, don't you, Paul?" Paul nodded.

Abara and Mister Johnson returned in silence, under the trees behind Spearman, who was unaware of them. Sears said, "Paul's good. Good balance."

"So you have a rider for each mount.... Well, I talked it over with Doc--he says it's your department. What if a bunch of those animals, with armed riders--"

"No," said Sears. "Quite impractical."

"Why?"

"Well.... They won't go in the open--omasha."

"They will at night, you told me."

"They are not fighters."

"If they go where you order 'em--"

Sears said, "No. If Paul and I and the two strongest giants were trying that, what's left? You, Doc, Surok, and the giant women."

Spearman snapped: "Then use only three--Abara, Mijok, Elis."

"Mijok will fight beside Chris. You know that. So will I."

Spearman turned away, noticing Abara and Mister Johnson for the first time and ignoring them. Popeyes watched him from a mountain of white flesh. "All right. Oh, I almost forgot: Doc wants you back at the camp for another conference. It has just occurred to him that since we're about to be wiped off the planet we ought to have a military commander. For the look of the thing, you reckon? You know, I dreamed of space travel from the time I was five. Never imagined I'd do it with a Sunday school. Don't hurry of course. Just come when it damn well suits you."

Paul caught up with him on the trail. "Look, Ed--"

"I'll recite it for you: mustn't lose my temper. We mustn't divide; mustn't quarrel; Doc's word is holy at all times--"

"No one says that."

Spearman wasn't listening. "Goddamn it, why do you think I've gone away alone so often? To explore, sure, to find things we need. By God I've found 'em too, haven't I? Also to get away from the Sunday school. Beating my brains out to win a little advance--you people can't see--"

"What do _you_ think we should do? I mean right now--Lantis."

Spearman fretted in silence, striding as if speed and heavy steps could ease his distress. "Why, we ought to have gone to live at Pakriaa's village a year ago, after the reconciliation, while they were still dizzy from the fall of the idol. You remember--Pak was almost humble. Ready for big changes. We could have done anything with her--then. Eliminated the witches. Taught and trained the best of her followers. We'd have ironworking now. We'd have a competent army. Why, we could take the initiative, drive south, break up anything Lantis may have while she's on the march. Yeah--a year ago. Sure--Mijok wouldn't approach the village, so _we_ mustn't move there. Every day is an opportunity thrown away, wasted."

"You think we should have abandoned the giants?"

"What've they _got_?" Spearman cried. "Don't even understand work--throw things around at a great rate, and then somebody sees a new bug or has a funny idea or starts singing. Or asks Doc to explain a point in philosophy. Or they decide to just sit and look at nothing for two hours. Fight? Mijok talks a good fight. You couldn't make 'em fight with a kick in the rear."

"Never tried it."

Spearman smiled miserably. "One doesn't, with a critter eight feet tall.... All right, they're people. They're intelligent. If we had all the time in the world and nothing threatening I'd like to study 'em myself. But look at the numbers. Three on the island. Six grown women here. Twelve flutterbrained children. Elis, Surok, Mijok, and the two tenderfeet they brought in today. Is that an army? As for right now--Hell, I've given up making suggestions." He tensed and stopped short. Paul glanced behind; Sears and Abara were catching up. "Thought I heard something."

"What?"

"Drums.... Guess I imagined it.... Lantis must have a terrific organization. Bound to, Paul, in a community of sixty thousand. Hadn't you thought of that at all? Communications, laws, disciplined army, a forest agriculture at least as good as Pakriaa's. Why, from something Pak said, I think they even have a monetary system--anyway something more elaborate than the barter that's good enough for Pak's little cluster of villages. Stone Age--but that's partly an accident of ecology, isn't it? I mean, they have to avoid the hills and open ground--wouldn't be easy to get a start in metalworking when you have to stay in the woods. I believe they're a people under strong internal pressure toward the next stage of civilization. With labor, organization, a few modern ideas, there would be ways to clean the kaksmas out of the hills. Then metals. We know the omasha breed on rock ledges wherever the kaksmas can't climb. They could be exterminated too. There's a whole world for the taking. Doc is right that the new culture has to be a blend of ours and theirs. Oh, the giants too, maybe, sometime. But it won't be done by piddling around with the kind of pretty idealism that never worked even on Earth."

Paul groped for the unspoken thing. "You'd have us join forces with Lantis?"

Spearman halted to stare at him. There was a flush of blood around his eyes, the visible pain of frustration that never gave him rest. He waited till Sears and Abara had come up. "I'm a minority. I haven't suggested a damned thing." He was silent until they reached the camp.

Abro Pakriaa was there, with seven of her soldiers. All seven wore purple skirts, insignia of leadership--"captains" was the nearest word. With makeshift pigments and brittle whitebark, Paul had recently painted such a group. The effort was for Pakriaa; she had been gravely delighted with it, seeing how prominent in it were her own vivid blue skirt and taller stature. To Paul's eyes the colors had sworn horribly, and he had been glad when the princess carried the daub away, balanced joyfully on her bald head.

Pak's seven captains made it a visit of state. Wright was soberly intent, and Ann stood by him, regally silent; play-acting for Pakriaa's benefit, but Ann sardonically enjoyed the pose. Pakriaa had gradually accepted the fact of Tocwright's leadership, but her view of the status of Charin women remained addled by contradictions; the idea of social and mental equality between the sexes eluded her completely. Dorothy sat watchful at the opening of the "home" room--Helen would be sleeping inside; Dorothy's fists were pushed into her cheeks, dark eyes upturned to Pakriaa's explanatory monologue. Abara effaced himself. Mijok loomed with folded arms on Wright's other side. The rest of the giants kept to the background.

"Abro Samiraa, Abro Kamisiaa, Abro Brodaa--" Pakriaa was naming the heads of the five northern villages. A loose alliance, but those villages had fought powerfully against Lantis a year ago and each could provide a hundred and fifty first-line soldiers and fifty of the skittish male bowmen. "They are with me, my sisters," Pakriaa said, with sad gravity and not much of her natural swagger. "The wormseed Lantis has broken custom--her own people must spit on her. For the death of my messenger I spit on her heart and loins, I spit on her footprints."

The arithmetic was simple, Paul thought. A scant twelve hundred fighters against a three-sided attack from over ten thousand. Four Charin men with rifles, automatics, scanty ammunition, heavy bows. A handful of giants who knew nothing of war but theory and whose basic nature would revolt at the reality. Spitting wouldn't help. He forced himself to attend to what Wright was saying: "There must be one commander."

"I give no orders to Abro Samiraa and her sisters, my equals."

"Would you and she and the others accept direction from one of us?"

Pakriaa murmured, "I have never seen you fight."

Spearman laughed. Wright said, "You will, Abro Pakriaa. If you will accept one of us as commander, the army can strike as one soldier. There would be less confusion. And Lantis will not expect it."

That brought shrewdness to the little red face. "But you can do nothing hiding behind this pile of stones."

"A temporary shelter while we shoot. You know our fire sticks. This building commands the upper part of the lake and this end of the meadow. We will not be trapped here. There will be no siege. If it is necessary to retreat, we'll know the right moment to do it."

The oldest captain, Nisana, a wiry, quiet woman, said, "Abro Kamisiaa herself spoke of a thing like this."

Pakriaa murmured absently, "Did I give you leave to speak?" But she was not angry; she was considering it. "This is better, Tocwright, what you say now. I will send, learn if my sisters agree. But who will be the leader?"

"That should be decided now," Wright said, and Paul thought: _Here it comes, Ed--you get what you want at last._ And he remembered that obscure thing which might not have been in Spearman's mind at all: _desertion_--the thing was a dirty word, and the mind would not speak it. But Wright was staring at him--at him, not at Spearman. "There's only one of us," Wright said, "who ought to lead, in this trouble. That is _my_ feeling, Abro Pakriaa, but I alone cannot decide it. All of us here should vote on it."

Pakriaa understood the nature of a vote. Under her iron monarchy, minor village matters were often decided by that method if her own attitude happened to be neutral. Once made, and approved by herself, a pygmy vote was binding as magic. Her gaze touched the giants with a sour smile. She was visibly counting; then she was studying Paul with new curiosity.

Of the giants, only the two new recruits were not in evidence. Paul glimpsed the red-furred boy peering from the doorway of Mijok's private room; Surok went in to soothe him. Pakriaa said, "I will consent. After the vote I will inform my sisters as quickly as I can."

Wright's fingers were frozen in his gray beard. "Then I ask that Paul Mason take command, his orders to be followed without question."

Paul could not speak. _How did this happen? How can I...._ He heard Ann, imitating the formality of Wright's words, but with an undertone of passionate protest: "I ask for the leadership of Edmund Spearman."

Spearman frowned at her, flushed, proud, perhaps amazed. He said doubtfully, "Other nominations...? Voice vote?"

"Voice vote, as you wish," Wright said.

"M-make it voice vote," Dorothy whispered, and her face was begging: _Is it too much? Can you stand it? Is it what I ought to do..._?

"Satisfactory," Spearman said. Paul nodded helplessly.

Dorothy said, "Paul Mason."

Wright glanced at Pakriaa. When Spearman was nominated she had abandoned her patronizing air; she said with enthusiasm, "Spearman."

Mijok's voice rumbled in the depths: "Paul Mason."

The voting went quickly after that. Abara slipped into shadow and shook his head before Wright could call his name. Sears voted for Paul with a wry attempt at a grin. Surok hesitated; his tawny face smiled at Paul with apology and he said, "Spearman." Golden Lisson voted the same way. The other giant women and Elis voted for Paul. The children were quiet, not needing to be told that this was grown-up business. When one of the smallest boys started to hum, little Dunin squatted behind him and covered his mouth.

All the pygmy captains but one had followed Pakriaa's lead, after a pantomime of meditation, probably for the record. Now, with a vote of 10-10, this one captain was full of trouble. She understood that she would be the last to vote and must break the tie. This was Nisana, taciturn, with the white scar of a wound that had destroyed her lower left breast and run jaggedly down her side; Paul had seen her often but knew little of her. She was studying the candidates with a manifestly honest, tormenting effort to decide, and she avoided Pakriaa's astounded glare. The green eyes fixed themselves at last on one candidate with a blinding innocence.

"Paul Mason."

Pakriaa started as if slapped, but recovered quickly. She said, "Tocwright, is Abara not to vote?"

Abara shuffled a step backward, two steps forward. It brought him nearer the bulk of Sears Oliphant. His bulging eyes tried to escape Wright's look, and Pakriaa's; his ugly lips wobbled. He squeaked: "Paul Mason."

"Twelve-ten," Wright said. "Abro Pakriaa, I am grateful--"

Pakriaa ignored him. She was saying with acid sweetness, "Abroshin Nisana, perhaps you wish to remain here?"

It seemed to Paul that a mechanical force within him was taking over, unsought, at a moment of greatest need. "That would be excellent, Abro Pakriaa. If I am commander, I need one of you here: I am glad to select Abroshin Nisana."

The princess faced him. Her eyelids flickered--usually a sign of pygmy amusement more revealing than laughter, but one never knew, exactly. The machine labored, weighing dangers and advantages. A direct order now might win over Pakriaa or lose her completely and all the twelve hundred. She understood and admired aggressiveness; she was also a bundle of touchy personal pride. And--the slim spear in her hand could strike like a cobra. Paul said, "Abro Pakriaa, you will tell the other leaders our decision, and if they agree, have them come here at once." There was a gray-white shadow at his left. The balance, swinging delicately, was visible in Pakriaa's almost sleepy eyes. He thought: _One thing quicker than a pygmy's arm--a giant's_. At least he would not be pierced with white-stone, while Mijok stood there.

Pakriaa's arm swung--the harmless right arm, a harmless beckoning gesture to six of her captains, who followed her out of the fortress, leaving Abroshin Nisana staring at the ground and very much alone.

Spearman came alive. He spoke plainly, cheerfully: "Paul, count on me for anything. Do whatever I can." His voice had full sincerity. If his eyes were a little too steady, too candid--never mind it. It was a pleasure to take his hand, thank him, turn to immediate needs.

"Two lifeboat trips right away, Ed, in what's left of daylight. Ann, Samis, and the four smallest giant children on the first. All the carpentry and garden tools. Third trip in the morning." Wright's sudden relaxation was praise....

Ann left, with no more protest than a backward look. But at the last moment she ran back to kiss Wright on the mouth....

And when Ed was returning from the second flight, which had carried Dunin and four other giant children to the island--when it was night and the red eye of the lifeboat was slipping down from above the hills, then the drums began.

4

Paul heard the drums from within the room that was his and Dorothy's--merely a section of the thatched lean-to inside the fortress wall, but Dorothy had given it the reality of a living place. There were no chairs: one sat on a rug which was a cured uskaran pelt, a gift from Abro Brodaa, whose people had hunted down the tigerish beast after it raided her village. The bed was only a clumsy framework with an asonis hide stretched across it. But the shelter had become dear with use, and Dorothy had hung a few of Paul's paintings on the walls--a portrait of Mijok, one of Christopher Wright which had caught something of the old man's brooding alertness. The red jungle flowers were too cloyingly rich to be kept here, but Dorothy had found a blue meadow shrub, and a white bloom that hid in shady ground and recalled the scent of jonquils....

It was too dark to see her plainly; Paul knew her eyes were open on him. Barely audible against his shoulder, she said, "I thought I'd be insatiable. I only want to be near and not think." Nevertheless thought goaded her. "Ten thousand--ten thousand--What can you _do_?"

All he could say was rehearsed, mechanical, and she had heard it before. "Frontal attack first, because the pygmies couldn't be led into anything else. But I shall turn it into an ordered retreat--to the island. Drive south, skirt the southern end of the hills, then straight for the coast. We'll be at the island in--oh, soon--"

"But the range--the coastal mountains opposite the island--you can't cross them--they rise so sheer--"

"Remember the river that flows almost due west from these little hills? It comes to the sea north of the range. We'll make rafts to get down that, I think. There aren't any falls. At the coast we'll contrive something--dugouts with outriggers. I've already shown old Rak how to make one; he may be working on it now."

Dorothy pressed a hand over his mouth. She stammered, "Make this moment last." But even during the fine sharp agony there were words: "I shall keep--a bonfire on that beach--night and day...." and when his hand was slack in her hair and she seemed to be hardly breathing, Paul heard the drums.

They were far off and everywhere. Only the remembering brain insisted they were on the lake. They were not sound at all, at first. A pressure pain in the back of the skull, a rasping of nerve endings. Nothing but drums. Hollow logs with a hide membrane, rubbed and pounded by tiny painted savages. "You must go tonight after all." Dorothy could not speak. He put Helen in her fumbling arms; he hurried out to the open space, saw the eye of the lifeboat returning. The drums took on a rhythm, a throbbing in 5/8 time, rapid, venomous. But far away. Still not quite sound--_Ah_-ah-ah-ah-ah, _ah_-ah-ah-ah-ah--growing no nearer, no louder, but gaining in vicious urgency, relentless as a waterfall, a runaway machine. _Ah_-ah-ah-ah-ah....

Paul hoped that Wright and Sears might be sleeping. It would be an hour yet before Pakriaa could return with the other leaders, if indeed she ever did. Elis and Abara were on sentry duty. The three giant children still at the camp--would they be sleepless, keyed up to vivid fantasies of the island, like Charin children before a great journey?

Kamon sat alone by the gate. A small figure drooped at the other end of the enclosure. Since there was no immediate task for her, Paul had told Abroshin Nisana to rest, but he knew her little bald head turned to follow him. "Kamon--I'm going to have the third flight made tonight. There would be room for you too in the boat. Will you go?"

Black lips and ancient white face smiled up at him. "If you wish."

"I do. Stay close to Dorothy. That will leave four of you giant women here. I wish they could all go. Tejron's sober and wise--she'll keep them together. You're more needed on the island. Don't let Dorothy be much alone."

The old woman mused: "This Charin love is a strange thing. It isn't our natures for two persons to come so close. But I see something good in it, I think...." Paul struggled to hear her over the almost subsonic yammer of the drums. _Ah_-ah-ah-ah-ah--it seemed not to trouble Kamon much, though she would be hearing it even more plainly. "I will stay with her, Paul," she said, and watched the long glide as Spearman brought the boat in.

On the drawbridge Spearman cocked his head at the drums. "That's it." He read Paul's thought: "The rest tonight, huh? Better, I'd think."

"Yes. Get something to eat, why don't you? Kamon is going too."

Spearman nodded, unsurprised. "Not hungry.... Wonder how long they keep it up...."

Wright came from his room with sleepless eyes. "Till they attack, probably. All night, maybe all tomorrow. To soften us up. Damn them...."

Somehow Paul was walking to the boat, carrying the baby for Dorothy. He climbed in with her, adjusted the straps. Helen waked and was fretful till she found the breast "You bore her alone--without any--"

"Alone!" Dorothy was astonished. "I had you. Doc's a fine medical man, whatever he says. Don't you remember how Mijok held out his arm for me to grab when it got tough? He said, 'I am a tree.'" Now she was holding his look with an indestructible smile until the rest came and Paul had to back out of the cramped cabin to give them room; then had to stand aside while the bright relic of twenty-first-century man spat its green flame and hot gases at the lake and leaped to soaring and slid into moonless darkness above the hills. The drums wept, raved, obscenely whispered.

Paul did not know Sears Oliphant was with him till he heard the voice: "I think, Paul--the drums defeat their purpose. They make me sore instead of scared. I think you won't need to worry about me, Paul."

"I never have." He glanced at the fat man's holstered automatic, remembered the cleanness of the rifle hanging in Sears' room. "My father used to say most men are good watchdogs, who know they're scared but stand guard in spite of it; only a few are rabbits and possums." Paul turned his back on the hills. Nothing was there to see, nothing at all. "I wish you'd known my father. He was a tall man. Nuts about animals--always brought 'em into the talk--illustration, example. Couldn't stand to see even a wasp beating against the glass; you never knew when a deer mouse would climb out of his pocket and run down his pants leg." Paul laughed. The drums fretted in 5/8, passionate, soft, cruel.

Sears watched blue fireflies over a lake so peacefully still that the sapphire reflections were as real as their cause. "A teacher, wasn't he?"

"For a while, till he settled in New Hampshire. They wouldn't let him teach nineteenth and twentieth-century history as he saw it. He saw it in terms of ethical conflict, the man versus the state, self-reliance versus the various dreary socialisms, enlightened altruism versus don't-stick-your-neck-out, and he didn't give a good god-damn whether the first atomic submersible was built in 1952 or '53. Doc would have loved him too: he knew what was meant by a government of laws. He made his students search out not only theory but the actual dismal consequences of the doctrine that the end justifies the means--Alexander, Augustus, Napoleon, Lenin, Hitler. That was regarded as 'wilfully minimizing the significance of technological advance.' He didn't minimize it; he just recognized that other matters were vastly more important, and he didn't care to see the machine built up into one more mumbo jumbo. So he sent me through college by breeding children's riding ponies and selling hatching eggs. Not a bad life, or so he said.... Jocko, will Pakriaa come back?"

"I believe so.... Ah, Chris--nice evening for the month of Charin."

Wright was a paleness in the dark; stern, weary, tall, watching the lake, talking to himself: "The month we named for ourselves--end of Year One--oh, I do call that a pardonable vanity.... Paul, I was wholly selfish in choosing you. I've given you a burden no one should have to carry."

"We're all carrying it."

"Thank you, son." Wright moved away to stand alone at the rim of the lake, listening to the crawling thunder of the drums. Twice, Paul heard him speak, with an intensity beyond pain: "No one is expendable. No one is expendable...."

Sears exclaimed, "Look!" There were five white cloud-like shapes at the edge of the woods. "Oh, they've never done this before. Susie! What's the matter? There now, girl, come tell the old man--"

Paul followed him. "It's the drums--don't you think?"

The five had been complaining softly, but that ceased as Sears moved among them, patting their legs, soothing them. "But Paul--their grounds are mostly north of here--there now, Mister Smith, you old bastard--so why didn't they travel away from the sound? Take it easy, Millie, Miss Ponsonby--"

"The wild ones probably did. But these had to come to you."

"Oh.... That detachment of Lantis--the one in the northeast--"

"Don't think so, Jocko. Pakriaa's spies are all around up there--we'll have warning. Elis is posted half a mile north of us--he'd know--smell 'em if he didn't hear 'em. However, I'll go talk with him...."

The depth of forest muted the drums--a little; they were still a cumulative torture of anger in the inner darkness of the mind. Paul saved the fading power of his Earth-made radion flashlight by following his sense of the trail. He had learned to move as softly in the jungle as any Charin could hope to do--more softly than Spearman, softly enough to steal within spear range of the asonis. There was not much danger here, unless it might be from the uskaran, a beast Paul had glimpsed alive only once and then dimly, a striped thing slipping snakily out of his vision in a sun-striped afternoon; the rug in his and Dorothy's room could almost have been a tiger pelt. The black reptiles were lovers of hot sun and shallow water, never going inland. The squeak and rustle of a kaksma horde, it was said, could be heard far off except during the rains, when all noises were smothered in the long rush and whispering of waters. For all his silence, black Elis was aware of him before Paul knew he had reached the sentry post. "Paul--isn't it?" The night vision of the giants was better than the Charins' but not like a cat's; they hunted at night only if the moon was strong.

"Yes. Everything quiet?"

"Quieter than my heart."

Paul still could not see him. "Saving my flashlight. Where are you?" Elis chuckled and slipped an invisible hand around Paul's. "The olifants came to the meadow. We wondered what disturbed them."

"Drums. Nothing in the northeast yet. But a great many of the pygmies are moving from the upper villages. I heard, and smelled the red flowers." The people of Lantis, Pakriaa said, never wore those flowers, and it would not be the nature of Elis to exaggerate his powers of smell and hearing.

"I think the animals wanted Sears. Could that be, Elis?"

"Alojna--" Elis murmured the old word for them: it meant "white cloud." "Two things nobody knows--the thoughts of Alojna and the journeys of the red moon and the white moon when we cannot see them. So we used to say. You give us a hint of knowledge of both things, and more than a hint of much greater mysteries." Elis had always been tireless in questioning Wright; more than Mijok, he was haunted by a need to grope after intangibles, push outward the uneasy border between known and unknown. "So there's never an end of mystery?"

"Never." The hand was warm. "What is the nature of courage?"

The giant's breathing was too quiet to be heard. "To go out, away from a world, in a little shell--that must have needed courage."

"Perhaps only a response to a drive of uncomprehended forces. But I think courage is a known thing, Elis, an achievement of flesh and blood--to hear the drums in the dark and stay at the post as you are doing, as I hope I can do myself. I must go back. Lisson will come and relieve you soon...."

Pakriaa had returned, with her five equals. Wright had lit one of the clay lamps. It burned pleasantly with an oil from the carcasses of the same reptile that had once nearly destroyed Mijok, a thing which pleased Mijok, for he liked to think that a creeping danger could also be a source of light; and the use of this oil had been taught them by the pygmies, who made almost monthly expeditions to marshy regions and butchered the beasts by the dozens for the oil alone.

Pakriaa was almost meek. Her smile for Paul could have been a Charin smile; there was a tremor in her hands, and once they flew up to cover her ears. The drums, he thought, might be a worse pain for her than for his own breed. There was unconscious pathos in the precision of her English: "I did not make clear that I will obey you. I may have been angry; for that I am sorry--it is past. My sisters have agreed."

Squat Abro Samiraa; lame, thin Abro Kamisiaa; sober Abro Brodaa--these three Paul had met before. Abro Duriaa and Abro Tamisraa were from the farthest villages, and shy; Duriaa was fat, with a foolish giggle; Tamisraa had a feral furtiveness--the painted bones of her necklace looked like human vertebrae. In Abro Samiraa Paul saw competence as well as smoldering violence: the green of her eyes was dark jade; she was a flat pillar of muscle from shoulder to hip. Paul guessed her to be a devil of bravery, good in the front line and intelligent. Lame Kamisiaa's bravery would be shrewd, vicious, and careful. In fat Duriaa he thought he saw a politician, not a fighter; in Abro Brodaa--there might be a thinker, even a dreamer, in Abro Brodaa.

The princesses had brought news. A scout from Brodaa's village had succeeded in locating the northeastern detachment of Lantis' army; it was camped twelve miles to the northeast, on the far side of a deep but narrow stream. The scout had shown the kind of nerve the pygmies took for granted: she had crossed the creek to listen in the reeds and had drifted downstream the entire length of the encampment. The Vestoians were careless, overconfident, their dialect enough like her own so that she could grasp the essentials; their unit was six hundred strong, with no bowmen. The scout had heard discontented soldiers' talk: the spearwomen missed their subject males, who were camp followers as well as second-line fighters. Returning, the scout had located and stalked a Vestoian sentry, stunned and gagged her, and brought her to Brodaa's camp, where she was made to talk. Brodaa had been about to describe this when Pakriaa glanced at Sears and interrupted: "They plan to cross the stream before daylight, move straight west, and try to push us down into the open ground, where the rest of the army will roll over us."

_The sentry is probably dead. I don't want to know, not now...._ The machine in Paul took charge of the council of war, rejecting compassion, rejecting everything beyond immediate need. "Abro Samiraa--take the soldiers of your village and of Abro Duriaa's. Abro Duriaa, you will be in command of your own people, but accept Abro Samiraa's orders as if they were mine." Pakriaa intervened to translate for the fat woman, who showed no hostility but rather relief, and placed her hands formally under the spread fingers of Abro Samiraa in token of subordination. "Abro Samiraa, take those three hundred and the bowmen to the stream as quickly as you can with silence, and attack. The important thing is to scatter them before they are ready to move. If they retreat, follow them only enough to confuse them and then return here at once. If you can take prisoners, bring them here, unharmed. But do not be drawn into any long pursuit. There are still eleven hours of darkness. I hope to see you return long before sunrise."

"Good!" Pakriaa exclaimed, and Samiraa grunted with pleasure. Brodaa said, "Take my scout, sister. I have given her the purple skirt; she is Abroshin now, and my friend." Duriaa waddled behind, and Paul sent Abroshin Nisana to relieve Abara from sentry duty. Nisana was glad to go, for Pakriaa still sent her sour glances, remembering the election.

Sears was fretting: "My pets. Damn it, Paul, I dunno--they're huddled out there in the meadow--just get in the way, get hurt."

"Would they follow Abara?"

"I think so...." Abara slipped in and puffed with pride when he learned what was wanted. "Certainly they will follow Mister Johnson, and Mister Johnson will follow me."

Pakriaa laughed. She caught him by a prominent ear and hugged him to her leanness, grinning at Brodaa over his head. "So ugly!" Pakriaa nibbled his neck. "And he leads olifants! Don't be afraid, little husband--I was never angry with you. Look at him!" She spun him around for the lewd admiration of the other royalty. "I couldn't do without him. When the war is over I'll have him back in my bed. But now he leads olifants. Hurry, Abara--and don't hurt yourself." And she sent him off with a pinch.

"Keep them in the woods," Paul told him. "And stay with them."

"Good." Pakriaa sobered. "He could do nothing. He never learned the bow.... Ah, look!" The red dot of the lifeboat had caught her eye. "Look, Abro Tamisraa--you never saw it fly at night." It moved with apparent slowness, like a mad star, not toward them but toward the lake, perhaps ten miles away; it was still high when the searchlight beam stabbed down, probing from northeast to southwest, and vanished. "It's all right," Paul said, "I suggested he scout the lake on the way back...." The red eye silently tumbled; Wright gasped. "Still all right," said Paul. "A dive. He can make it talk." But the moment dragged out into an ugliness of waiting.

Then orange fury glared against the underside of clouds and the clamor of drums abruptly ceased. Paul said loudly, mechanically, "I think he gave 'em the jet--set a few boats afire. I didn't order it, Doc. And wouldn't try it myself...." Now the red dot was shooting upward, disappearing as the boat circled once, then growing larger. Briefly the searchlight illuminated the meadow, and Spearman came in, overshooting slightly, driving almost to the moat before he checked. He swaggered in, satisfied. "See it?"

"Uh-huh. What did you learn?"

"Those were drum boats. Why, my God, they opened out like little orange flowers...! Well--the main fleet is 'way behind them, say thirty miles down the lake, coming slow. Couldn't spot the land army--no campfires."

"All right. Sit in on this, Ed...." And the plan was drawn up, so far as there could be a plan when the odds were ten to one in a world that never asked for them.

Paul, with Mijok and Pakriaa, would lead three hundred spearwomen and a hundred bowmen south before daylight, in the hope of disorganizing the advance with surprise and gunfire, but unless the Vestoians were demoralized beyond expectation, this could be only a skirmish. They would fall back, try to avoid losses. The remainder of the army would stay at the edge of the woods until Lantis was in sight: Wright at the fortress with the giant women, now only four, who could handle rifles; Abro Kamisiaa and Abro Brodaa in the center; Sears and Abro Tamisraa on the right flank in the west, with Elis and Surok. Spearman in the lifeboat would follow the advance party at first-light. Paul said nothing of the second drive, to the southeast, the retreat that would seem like attack. When the time came for that, he must have in one unit all that remained after the first wrath had spent itself--and even then the pygmies would have to believe that they were attacking single-heartedly, or they could not reach the southern end of the range, but would probably be driven into the trap of the kaksma hills.

The drums began again. They began after the council was ended and Sears had gone to take charge of his command on the right flank, with Elis and Surok and shifty Tamisraa. The other small red sovereigns had gone too, and Wright had stalked into his room--to sleep, he said--and Paul had followed Spearman out to the boat, where Spearman would sleep until it was time to go. Spearman tapped his elbow. "You're surprising me, boy. Better than I could have done, I think. We'll knock 'em over." And the drums began.

Spearman stared off at the lake; after a while he grinned, and the lamp burning in the fortress caught the grimace. "Yeah," he sighed, "well, I knew I only singed 'em." He climbed into the boat and glanced down with a half salute, which Paul answered mechanically. But as Paul walked away the thought stirred: _That was like goodbye...._

Paul went along the path at the edge of the woods. It was wide and easy, broadened during the Year One by much travel between the camp and Pakriaa's village. There were occasional small-voiced greetings from the woods: these were Kamisiaa's and Brodaa's people, who knew him. Brodaa cherished a painting he had made of the singing waterfall above her village in return for that uskaran pelt. Many of these soldiers would be chosen by Pakriaa to bring up the number of the advance party to four hundred.

There was no red moon tonight. The white moon was half the size of the planet Earth, so far away that its glow was scarcely more than that of a star, but Paul knew that by what light it gave the pygmies could see him smile in response to their greetings. They would be studying him, trying to weigh the tone of his answer. _One of them might save my life tomorrow; certainly I shall have to see some of them die. They are people._

There were two visible planets to follow the wandering of the no longer alien star that was the sun. One was hidden tonight; the other, red like Mars, hung over the eastern jungle in tranquillity. A little shape detached itself from the trees to meet him. Abro Pakriaa. "Will you not sleep tonight, Paul, before we go?" It was a human question, sweetly spoken and meant kindly.

"Later, I think." He stood by her awhile; in the blackness from which she had come there was a steady mumbling, and Paul knew what it was: the witches also had their part to play in these heavy hours, although long before battle was joined they would be cowering in the villages. Somewhere in the tree shadows they were squatting, muttering the antique prayers. He wondered whether to go on and visit with Sears awhile. _No: Elis is a rock, better company than I would be at the moment...._ There was much, he thought, that would be good to talk about with Pakriaa tonight; there ought to be words that would reach her. Perhaps on this night a glimpse of Wright's vision would meet with something better than amusement and distrust. But in the end he only said, "We'll always be good friends, you and I."

He thought she might take hold of his hand in the Charin gesture. She did not--undignified perhaps. But she said, "Tocwright says we are all one flesh." She said it thoughtfully, without contempt.

"Yes. We are all one flesh." And lest he become a true Charin and spoil a moment of truth with unnecessary words, Paul turned back to the camp, seeing that she remained there in the open, looking south, the grumbling witches behind her, before her the long night of drums and no red moon.

Mijok was not asleep. He sat cross-legged by the lamp. "I wanted to thank you. Doc's gone to sleep at last, and before I could find the words I wanted. It will be difficult to talk in the morning."

Paul sat by him, puzzled. "To thank me?"

"Because I've learned so much. And had so much pleasure in the learning." Mijok yawned amiably, stretching his arms. "To thank you for that, in case you or I should be dead tomorrow."

It would have been easy to say: "Oh, we'll be all right--" Something like that. Paul buried the words unspoken, knowing their triviality would be a discourtesy, a dismissal of the insight and patience which made it possible for Mijok to speak so casually. Mijok loved to be alive; there was no moment of day or night that he did not relish, if only for its newness and from his sense that every gift of time is a true gift. "I thank you for being with us." Mijok accepted the words without embarrassment or second thought.

"Why, you know," he said, "in the old days I never even knew that plants were alive. But look at this--" He lifted one of Dorothy's white flowers from his knee. "It was in your room, Paul. She put it beside that painting you made of me, before she left." He peered into the white mouth of the flower, touched the fat stamens, and stroked the slim stalk. "Everything it needs. Like ourselves. But I never knew that. We are all one flesh."

Paul glanced over his shoulder. The red planet like Mars was still high over the jungle. He thought: _When that is hidden, it will be time to go._

5

All night Paul heard the distant barbarous thunder of the drums. In the hour before first-light his advance company formed; a furious serpent, it stole two miles south through grassland following the pallor of the beach. Near first-light, Paul knew, they would see a thread of new moon. In this present darkness the Vestoians might be slipping north on the lake; there would be no betraying sound above the passion of the drums. As for the land army, that could be miles to the south or over the next rise of ground.

His mind fought a pressure of alternatives. Better to have kept the army in one unit? To wait in the forest for news of Abro Samiraa's thrust in the northeast? _Never mind: no time now._ At least his body was meeting the challenge without rebellion. His wiry legs carried him in silence; his senses were whetted to fineness. Rifle, pistol, field glasses, hunting knife made a light load. Ahead of him Mijok loomed against a division of two shadows, sky and earth. Not first-light: only a sign that five thousand miles away on the eastern shore of this continent there might be the shining of a star now called the sun. Mijok carried a shield of doubled asonis hide; his only weapon was a seven-foot club, since his smallest finger was too large to pass the trigger guard of a rifle. Though keeping watch with Paul, Mijok had spoken little during the night--brooding perhaps, trying (Paul imagined) to see a new world in the matrix of the old. But there was no guessing a giant's thoughts. Lacking the stale burden of human guilt and compromise, they had the strength as well as the weakness of innocence; the country of their minds must wait on the explorations of centuries.

Abro Pakriaa, close to Paul's right, moved like a breeze in the grass. She and her small soldiers despised the use of shields, despised the arrows of their own bowmen as fit only for timid males. They never threw their spears but kept them for close quarters; their only other weapon was a white-stone dagger.... The army groped through the meadow in three ranks, widely spaced at Paul's order; beyond the right flank the archers were concentrated. Four hundred fighters altogether--against six thousand.

A wooded knoll grew into silhouette fifty yards from the beach, ten feet above the level of the meadow. "We meet them here," Paul said. By prearrangement Pakriaa halted a hundred of her spearwomen between the knoll and the beach, the other two hundred on the west side, the hundred bowmen out beyond. Paul and Mijok penetrated the blackness of the knoll, pushing through to its southern side, where Pakriaa joined them. Even in that short passage the heaviness of dark had altered with a promise. There were few clouds. The day (if it ever came) would be hot, windless, and beautiful. No more blue fireflies were wandering. The planet Lucifer had become three gray enigmas of lake and meadow and sky, but in this blind hush when morning was still the supposition of a dream, the shapes of the trees were attaining a separate reality; in the west Paul could find a hint of the low hills standing between him and the West Atlantic.

Seventy or eighty miles over yonder Dorothy's brown eyes would be watching for first-light on the sea, watching for it not on the great sea, he knew, but on the channel that shut her away from the mainland, from himself. With his child at her breast, another unknown life in the womb. Ann Bryan too, her troubled secret mind still full of protest at the contradictions and unfulfilled promises which made up the climate of life on Lucifer as well as elsewhere; and the ancient giantess Kamon, and Rak and Muson, Samis, Arek, and those giant children perennially puzzling and lovable.... _No time._ Mijok was peering out on the west side of the knoll. "Nicely hidden. Your soldiers are very good, Abro Pakriaa," said the giant, whose knowledge of war was almost as dim a product of theory as his knowledge of the planet Earth, where his Charin friends had been born.

The pygmy princess did not answer. Paul thought with held-in anger: _Can't she understand even now that Mijok is one of us, the best of us...?_ But Pakriaa was staring south; she might not have heard. She pointed.

Thus, after a year of waiting, wonder, rumor; a year when Lantis of Vestoia, Queen of the World, had been a half-mythical terror, symbol of tyranny and danger but not a person; a year that Ed Spearman spoke of as "lost to the piddlings of philosophy"--Paul saw them at last.

Saw rather a waving of the grass, a cluster of dots shifting, bobbing, advancing. Pakriaa's tree-frog voice was calm: "They come fast. They want to reach our forest before the light makes the omasha fly. Your plan is good, Paul: we hold them in the open, the omasha have good meat."

A man could dourly accept it, somehow. Bred to gentleness, undestructive labor, study, contemplation, Paul could tell himself that a certain spot (even as it bloomed like a nodding flower in the telescopic sights) was not flesh and blood and nerve, only a target. _Would it be so if I were fighting only for myself...?_ He held the spot in focus; he said, "Your soldiers are prepared for the fire stick? They know they must not charge till they have the order from you?"

Her voice had warmth: "And they know you are my commander."

Paul squeezed the trigger.

_Too soon--and too damned quiet._ The clever makers of twenty-first-century firearms on Earth had cut down the shout of a .30 caliber to a trivial snap. The savage eyes out there might not even have caught the flash at the muzzle. There ought to have been the glare and circumstance of a rocket. How could they be panicked by a silly pop and a spark? Even though--well, one of the dots had vanished, true enough. Maybe he had killed his first human being.

He glanced westward, wondering how soon the gray must change to saffron and crimson. The new red moon--there it was. A bloody sliver of a sword above the far shore of the lake.

And he saw the boats.

They were half a mile out. No others were visible north of them, but that meant nothing: these might or might not be the lead canoes of the fleet. The noise of drum boats in the south was constant: those would stay anchored in hiding, letting their wrath appear to come from all parts of the world.

The leading boat jumped to clarity in the sights. Forward the bark roofing reached the gunwale; aft, the sides were open to leave space for two paddlers. Paul saw the tight mouth of the one on the port side: she could have been Pakriaa's blood sister. Now it was necessary to think of Abro Pakriaa's ambassador torn in quarters, head and arms sent back as a message from the Queen of the World--until the mind of the student of Christopher Wright rebelled: _Vengeance was one of the ape's first discoveries._ It became more necessary to think: _Make it a good head shot--she won't feel it...._

It was not a very good shot. The scream came weakly across the water. The paddler tumbled, an arm dangling. The starboard paddler seemed not to understand and labored stupidly, making the canoe lurch to port. The prow of a following boat rammed it, tore away the matting, revealed the huddled soldiers who became splashing legs and arms in a sudden foam. While the land army came on....

Dots that were bald red heads, white specks that were spear blades. A simple arithmetic: less than a hundred rounds for the rifle; four hundred soldiers; a heart divided but angry, and the devotion of an eight-foot giant with a big stick. Against six thousand in the land army alone. "Pakriaa, it's a single column--the fools! Send your bowmen out west, catch them on the flank." Pakriaa ran down the knoll.

Paul shot twice at the head of the column. A flurry. No halt. Some of the boats were no longer sliding north, but driving down on the beach, forty or fifty, like hornets from a torn nest. _Another mistake--no, not if it diverts them from the camp._ Pakriaa's hundred on this side of the knoll were holding firm for an order. Paul's wave was enough: they spread out in the grass at the edge of the beach, quivering like waiting cats. The light was changing their bodies from vagueness to familiar copper, black skirts, white body paint.... Mijok tore a half-buried rock from the ground and hurled it out to splinter the nearest boat. But the soldiers would merely swim ashore. "Mijok! Stay with me!"

The head of that column was less than two hundred yards away. Paul fired mechanically, seeing life tumble backward and lie still. "Let them see us now, Pakriaa, Mijok----"

They strode down the south slope of the knoll in plain sight under the beginning of morning as the bowmen in the meadow released a harsh flight. The beach on the left became a seething of yells, snarling, trampling, clash of white stone. _First-light--first-light--and where in damnation is Ed Spearman with the lifeboat...?_

The column was confused by the many pressing up from behind. A few dozen spearwomen streamed out toward Pakriaa's archers; a second and third flight downed most of them--the little men had skill. No Vestoian bowmen had appeared. "Now, Pakriaa----"

Her one cry brought the spearwomen out of the grass west of the knoll, skimming forward like red bullets, spears low in the left hand until they crashed into the column; then weapons rose and plunged and rose.

The Vestoians wore no white paint. Their leaders had caps of green. Their grass skirts were mere fringes. They died easily. They killed easily.

Some distance down the column--for it was still a column, still a rolling machine that could not halt--a tall structure was swaying, hard to assess in this tortured twilight. A litter? Lantis of Vestoia, the Queen of the World herself? Paul checked his own running advance to send two shots at it. Then he and Mijok were surrounded by a writhing of arms, white-stone, and blood, Mijok raging but bewildered. Paul saw Pakriaa's spear drive down below naked ribs and withdraw from what sprawled on the ground. She was untouched. Her lean little body dripped with sweat, her teeth gleamed in a devil's grin. Two purple-skirted captains joined her; the three smashed into a cluster of shrieking souls who only began to understand what was happening.

Arithmetic still ruled. This column might be only one of many pushing up between lake and hills, bent on reaching Pakriaa's forest before the omasha soared in from those hills to feed on living and dead.

Mijok brushed through the fighters with his shield and down the line till he was clear of Pakriaa's white-painted demons. His stick swung, destroying everything in a half circle before him. He was not confused now, not even shouting, but saving breath. He worked stolidly, like a man beating at a swarm of rats.... Pakriaa jumped on a fallen thing to point at that clumsy framework down the line. "Lantis! That is Lantis----"

The litter wobbled toward the center of confusion on the shoulders of six women. Paul fired twice again at it. He had a glimpse of a scrawny figure with a high green headdress leaping down, snatching a spear, vanishing in an improvised protective phalanx. He shot into that, dropping one of the outer soldiers. Mijok saw; he changed the course of his attack, a bulldozer aiming at a new clump of brush. Pakriaa screamed in frenzy, without meaning. Her spear was still a part of her. She was bleeding from a thigh wound; her bright blue skirt had been torn away; she glittered with sweat and paint and blood, a dancing devil mindlessly happy. Then she was down once more in the press, squirming toward the phalanx, and Paul could not shoot.

But it was the toiling giant, Paul thought, who made Lantis break. Again he saw the snarling face of the Queen of the World and heard her squeal an order. Before Mijok could cut his way to her the phalanx was running, sheltered by the mere mass of soldiers. It was necessary to call Mijok back.

The whole Vestoian army was running. "Pakriaa!" Paul plunged after her, caught her shoulder. "No pursuit!" Her eyes glazed in mad rejection; he thought she would bite his wrist. "Turn your soldiers! Bring them down on the Vestoians from the boats--_the boats_!"

She could understand that. Her order was the shriek of a rusty nail on glass, and it turned them. It brought them howling down to the beach to aid what was left of the first hundred. The water was a jumble of abandoned boats--even the paddlers had struggled ashore to kill and die.

Mijok ploughed in a second time.... That ended it. Some of the Vestoians might have glimpsed what he did to the land soldiers. A few forgot all custom and threw their spears, which Mijok's shield carelessly turned; then they stared with sickness at their empty hands and waited for the club. Meanwhile the strengthened crowd of pygmies worked on till the sand was redder than the sky and there was no more to be done. "Back!"

Pakriaa screamed "No!" and pointed south. Paul stumbled on something slippery. He stooped to her, yelling, _"Omasha!_ The sky will be full of them. Let them fight Lantis. We've lost a hundred already----"

Her face became sane and blank in agony. "My people--my people----"

"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.

Wright's voice came thinly in the dark: "Abara, stop them! Sears----"

Millie halted and knelt without an order: Nisana jumped down. Paul saw the shapes of Elis and Sears suddenly bright under Wright's flashlight--the only radion light left. "Easy," Elis said. "I have you." And he lowered the man's bulk to the ground as Susie moaned and shifted her feet. Sears had said nothing, but he was smiling, his face red and vague above the disorder of the black beard.

"Paul, hold the light for me." Wright removed the stained bandage. There was a wide area of inflammation; the lips of the arrow wound were purple. "Pakriaa! You said once you never heard of poison on the arrows----"

Pakriaa gaped, rubbing her eyes. It was Brodaa who answered: "Our people never had it on the arrows. But in the war with Lantis last year some of our soldiers had wounds like this."

"And what happened?"

"Ismar--" Pakriaa stumbled forward. "Ismar took----"

"My sister," said Brodaa, "be quiet, my sister."

"Elis," Paul whispered, "have Tejron and the other women keep watch--we must stay here a while. Where is Mijok?"

"Here." Mijok spoke behind him. "I have put my shield--over there." His voice became a whisper for Paul: "There are only three on it now. One little man, two women. They might live. Paul--is it happening, Paul?"

"I can't say it. I don't know...." Sears was talking, ramblingly, very far from this patch of earth. One could only listen till he was silent. Then Paul said, "I think so, Mijok. He needs to speak; we need to remember."

"What is this--Tel Aviv----"

"The place on the other planet where he was born."

"And there were the vineyards, oh my, yes--the little white and tan goats----" Sears could see it, Paul thought, that small country, a quiet corner of the Federation, where every grain of sand might remember blood spilled in the follies of hatred, where a teacher of mercy had been crucified. But now for Sears it was not a place of history: he saw gardens defying wasteland, the homes and farms, centers of music and learning where he moved, thoroughly at home, discovering the country of his own science, himself a citizen of no one place except the universe. Later he was recalling the hot white streets of Rio, the genial clutter of London, Baltimore, the majestic contradictions of New York.

"Why, yes, Doctor," he said--and he did not mean Christopher Wright, but some friend or instructor whose image might be standing in front of the shadows of Lucifer, "yes, Doctor, you could say I've traveled a great deal, in my sort of blundering fashion. And I would not exactly say that people are the same everywhere, but you'll have noticed yourself--the many common denominators are much more interesting than the seeming-great differences, aren't they, hey...? What? Sorry, Doctor, I've got no damned use for your abstraction Man, and why? Because he doesn't exist, except as a device in a brain that wants to prove something--which may or may not be useful. In any case it's not my dish. There are only men and women. They get born and love and suffer and work and grow old and die; or sometimes, Doctor, they die young. Men and women I can love and touch; sometimes I can even teach them the few things I know. You may take Man to the library; feed him back into your electronic brain and don't bother me with the results so long as I'm alive to see a child discovering his own body--or for that matter a bird coming out of the egg, a minnow in a spot of sunlight, a blade of grass."

Pakriaa wailed: "What is he saying? He is not here." She squirmed past Wright, dropped to the ground, her cheek pressed on Sears' tangled hair, her free arm wandering over his face and shoulder as if she wanted to cover him like a shield. "He talked to me once. Sears, you said--you said----"

He was back among them, gazing around in sane bewilderment. "I should be riding.... Pakriaa--why Pak, I'm all right." Paul moved the torch here and there to pick out his own face, Wright's, Mijok's, the white bulk of Susie looming close by, the pouting ugly mask of Abara, who had stolen up close, his underlip wobbling in an effort to speak. "I fell asleep--took a tumble?"

"Almost," Wright muttered. "Just lucky chance I saw you tottering. You need to rest a bit."

"Oh no." Sears frowned. "Can't stop." He smiled at Pakriaa, who had lifted herself to watch him pleadingly. "What's the matter, Pakriaa? What's the time?"

"First-light before long," Paul said. "We made good distance, Jocko. The Vestoians won't have traveled in the dark. Plenty of time and we all need rest. Take it easy a while."

But Pakriaa could not hide her knowledge that he was dying; Sears touched her cheek with a curious wandering finger. "You liked looking in the microscope, didn't you?" She nodded. "Remember--must be sure you've got the best focus you can before you make up your mind about anything. But this is more serious, Pak--because I think you love me and you have trouble. I tell you again, you must go to the island with the others. You must live. Now I expect to go there too, but--"

Abara moved away. Paul glimpsed him striding back and forth, striking the air with little fists. When he returned, Paul made way for him.

"--for a teaching is a gift, Pakriaa, not to be thrown away--"

Abara stammered. "You have talk to me too, Sears--"

"Why, to all of you. Certainly to you, Abara.... What's the profit of any effort if the result is thrown away in a time of weakness? You discard only if what you have is proven false. We haven't much--we never have much. Some things appear to be empirically certain. Not many.... You know, I believe I've given a few people--call it a wakening of curiosity. I think that's good. Curiosity and patience. Good as far as it goes. I'm not ashamed." He was trying to see Wright's gaunt face. "You picked a tougher subject, didn't you, Chris? Don't worry--give you an A for something more than effort.... Now look, this hanging around here won't do." He caught Paul's hand and heaved himself upright. "I remember--map--damn it. Need another whole day before we pass the hills. Susie--down, Susie--"

But Susie, fumbling at him with her trunk, would not kneel. Paul heard Mijok's agonized whisper: "She knows."

Sears laughed. "All right, make the old man climb." And before anyone could stop him he had tottered a few steps and burned out the last of his strength in a heaving jump toward her neck, which barely lifted him from the ground and dropped him at Paul's feet. Groping for him, Paul saw that he was dead, saw also, above the arching of the trees, a lucid cruelty of morning.

7

Twice that day Elis dropped far behind to listen and reported there was no pursuit. It was hard to judge their distance from the foothills of the western range, for now there was no open ground--only Wright's compass, the memory of the map, and treetop surveys that Mijok made from time to time. Abara rode Mister Johnson in the lead, making the beasts travel slowly since the pygmies were faint with weariness. Susie trailed forlornly; she had not been willing to abandon the grave till the others went on without her.

The pygmies carried only half a dozen makeshift stretchers; the number of unwounded had diminished too. "They slip away," Brodaa said to Paul. He saw three men carrying children too small to walk; no old women. The fat witch rode his litter, unconcerned at the fatigue of its bearers; the other old man, smeared with white and purple paint, stalked beside him. Brodaa said, "My sister Tamisraa ended life with the white-stone dagger. While Elis and Mijok made the--what word?--grave. We left her body looking north to help the spirit journey. There are many lost who will have no prayers--bad--they may follow us. What is this--burial, Paul-Mason?"

"A Charin custom. Most of us believe the spirit dies with the body: different parts of the same thing."

"Ah?" She did not seem shocked. "Maybe true for your people."

"We live in others," Paul said. "Sears lives so long as we remember him. That will be always...." It seemed to Paul there were scarcely a hundred in this worn line. "We mustn't try to hold them if they want to go. If you, Brodaa, or any others want to leave us, you know you are free."

Her answer was firm and considered: "I will not leave you...."

Wright had not spoken since the burial, nor had Pakriaa. They kept together; Paul was with them sometimes. Behind them Mijok carried his shield. It was Elis who heard the bleat of asonis and stole off to bring back meat for an afternoon meal. It was Elis, before that, who said, "We have done what we could, Paul. We could not have made these people retreat in time to save themselves. If we had abandoned them Lantis would have left no more than a fire leaves in the Red-Moon-of-Dry-Days. Pakriaa is too sick to understand that, yet. She carries a grief like a little one swelling in the womb: it must grow greater before she is delivered of it."

In the afternoon halt, it was Elis who tried to make Wright eat something and sleep, but Wright could do neither.

The giant women Elron and Karison also refused the meat. They sat apart with stout brown Tejron. She was eating, keeping close to her the still unconscious Vestoian, whom the pygmies had given no more than disgusted glares. Tejron might be listening to Karison's undertone--it was in the monosyllables of the old language. The girl Elron held her eyes downcast, fondling the rifle. She and Karison had been much together in a peculiar loneliness since the children were flown to the island: Karison was old, her children grown and gone away before the Charins came; Elron was too young to have given birth. Three of the children at the island were Tejron's; the others were children of Muson and Samis and of a mother who had died in the old life. Tejron wiped her lips and grunted impatiently; she took up her charge in careful arms and left the two. Paul sensed what was to come when Elron set her cherished rifle at his feet. Karison approached Wright, humble but determined: "We must leave you."

Before Wright could speak, Mijok answered her with a sullen anger Paul had never heard from him: "I brought you from the jungle with empty heads. We gave you the words, the beginning of the laws we must make together. You lived like the uskaran, furtive and cruel--"

"No," Wright said. "Mijok, no...."

Karison had winced, but she repeated: "We must go. The old way--we need it."

"Then you must go," Wright said, his spread fingers white-nailed on the ground. "And remember always that you go with our good will."

"That is so." She was torn two ways. "But the old life--"

Elis rumbled: "Elron, come here." The girl would not. "I hoped that in the next Red-Moon-before-the-Rains--"

She muttered, "When the change comes you will return to us--"

Elis laughed, roaring at her, "You're a fool, a child!" The harshness, Paul knew, was calculated, in the hope of changing her mind by shaming her. "You think the old life was a freedom. Freedom to live like an animal without an animal's peace, Elron, because of the thing in you that struggles for knowledge--oh yes, in spite of yourself, and always. Freedom to hunt all day or else sleep on an empty stomach, jump with fear at every creaking branch. Freedom to cram yourself with moss root and slugs from the streams--never enough--in the bad moons when the asonis go north. Freedom to kill the pygmies and be hunted by them, never an end to it--that's your freedom without the laws, without the words. No, so long as you're a fool I don't want you." She turned away, speechless; he shouted after her in a different voice, "He said you go with our good will. That is true. You can't forget us, Elron. You're not the wild thing Mijok brought out of the woods. You'll feel us pulling you back--you feel it now--and you will come back." But she was gone in the shadows, Karison following her, and Elis rubbed his broad forehead on his arms.

Wright whispered, "If they wanted it--it had to be so."

Elis waited for his angry breathing to calm. "Mijok, do you remember? In the old days I couldn't even have been your friend. Remember how angry _I_ was--only a year ago? You stepping over the border of my territory, telling me--I've wondered how you did it with our few stumbling words--telling me every being should be free to go as he pleased anywhere in the world? You were in danger, Mijok. I am older, bigger, heavier--I nearly went for your throat. Long ago. So--don't be angry with these two."

Tejron sat by Wright, holding the Vestoian like a nursing baby. "Maybe," she said, "maybe they will take some of what you teach us to others. Maybe it will be like the thing you showed us, how a little seed no bigger than the eye of illuama can become a tree...."

Pakriaa had watched indifferently; Paul hoped he was right, that her face was not quite so tightly set in lines of rejection and despair. Wright came stiffly to his feet, a hand on Tejron's shoulder, the other wandering into his gray beard. "Abro Brodaa, interpret for me--some of them have no English. Tell them we turn west soon, then south through bad country--swamp, heat, uskaran, marsh reptiles maybe, maybe the kaksmas swarm on the west side of the hills. Tell them we go through that. When we reach a river we have seen from the air--it has no falls and flows southwest--we shall make boats."

Brodaa put it into the high music of the pygmy tongue. Paul could see no change in the saddened faces; by rumor, most of them would already know this much. But the thin witch was muttering to his gross colleague, and some soldier faces turned to overhear that instead of attending to Brodaa.

"Tell them, Brodaa, this river will take us to Big-Water. We go south along the coast, to the island where our friends are, where we believe Spearman has gone in the winged boat. Tell them, on this island there are no kaksmas, the omasha never come, nor the lake boats of Lantis. There is game, good ground, room for all. Tell them--No, wait.... Oh, Brodaa, tell them in your own way that we hope to live there in peace."

The lean witch interrupted Brodaa's translation with a wailing diatribe, twitching his twigs of arms, lashing the battered soldiers with his oratory. Brodaa turned to Wright in misery: "He says--he saw Ismar change Spearman back to a marsh lizard and the boat to an omasha."

Mijok laughed savagely. "When did he see that? Ask him."

Brodaa did, on a thin shout. The scarecrow flashed her a glare of resentment and a snapping answer.... "He says he saw it in sleep picture."

Paul snarled, "Yes, a dream's as near as he came to a battlefield."

Brodaa was shocked, but Nisana laughed. The fat witch on the litter was fuming. Coming from Pakriaa's village, he probably had enough English to understand it; he leaned forward, embracing his hideous belly, croaking at the soldiers. Nisana translated in swift whispers: "Says--you Charins all marsh lizards, changed by Inkar-Goddess-of-Kaksmas.... Says we lose to Vestoians because image was broke; Ismar punishes.... Will I kill him, Paul-Mason?"

Brodaa choked: "You cannot touch Amisura. Your spear will turn--"

"My spear is lost," said Nisana, loudly enough for all to hear. "But Aksona, Amana, two other men of magic--those I saw killed at Abro Samiraa's village. Vestoian spears was not turn in the hand--I saw." She stepped forward, fingering her white-stone knife, and the fat Amisura cringed, squeaking.

Wright cried, "I forbid it, Nisana. Let them go. Brodaa!"

Brodaa said quickly, "He asks sacrifice--you, Paul, Pakriaa--"

Nisana laughed again. She dropped her white-stone dagger on the ground and slapped the thin witch in the face. The crowd gasped and shrank back. Such a man, Paul knew, was altogether holy, never to be touched; one must not even look him in the eye. But Nisana slapped him again and shoved him sprawling. She caught a pole of Amisura's litter, heaved at it, and he tumbled like a red melon. "_Now_ let them choose!" She came back to Paul with grin and swagger, patting her scarred chest. "I am little Spearman. I break images too."

And the pygmies were choosing, not as she or the witches had hoped--choosing headlong retreat from this sacrilege, dissolving away into the forest with sick-eyed backward looks. Paul saw Amisura weeping, humping pitiably back to his litter on all fours, and heard Pakriaa laugh. The two soldiers who had carried Amisura brought the litter nearer, not daring to touch him; when he flopped on it they bore him away. The other witch had run blindly, covering his insulted face, and Wright said like a machine, "Let them go--let them--"

Sardonically, Pakriaa had watched the whole incident without rising; now she seemed to want to catch Wright's eye, lifting a skinny shoulder as if to say: "What can you do with fools?"

When the panic was over, thirty followers remained....

In the early evening Mijok reported, after another treetop survey, that the last of the kaksma hills was about three miles southwest. West of them the jungle was level; it was time to turn. Elis had slipped away and returned with two heavy carcasses like wild boars. Sears had named these stodgy animals pigmors. The _mor_ suffix, he had insisted, was an intensely scientific shorthand for "more or less, damn it." The meat was high-flavored and coarse but safe.... Hearing Mijok's news, Brodaa sighed, thinking perhaps of the long history of her people, the groping for a narrow path of survival among endless perils. "We say the great uskaran hears a leaf fall to earth from a thousand paces away but the kaksma hears the leaf divide the air as it falls. Oh--three of your Charin miles, that is great length. Maybe enough."

The tremendous sheer spires of the coastal range, Mijok said, were visible in the southwest though nearly a hundred miles off; it would be a clear sweet night, he thought, with no clouds and many stars. They should go at least fifteen miles due west; then the course would be southwest rather than south, to miss the hills....

In the crowding darkness Mister Johnson's leading was again a thing of wisdom; his lifted trunk and sensitive eyes avoided dense growth and drooping vines that could endanger the riders. From each necessary detour he came back willingly to the course, under guidance of Abara's sense of compass direction, and the other four followed him as the arm follows the hand. Tonight Paul rode old Susie--she seemed to feel happier for it--carrying Nisana again; Wright was on Miss Ponsonby, with Pakriaa. Tejron, unfamiliar with the beasts but ready to learn, had climbed on Millie's back and kept her balance without trouble, holding the wounded Vestoian, who stirred and whimpered but was not truly conscious. Behind Paul was the more nervous bull Mister Smith without a rider, and Elis and Mijok walked beside him, Mijok with his shield, Elis holding Brodaa's hand. The thirty who had dared to choose the forbidden unknown trailed behind Brodaa with linked fingers, nine bowmen among them; there were few weapons, no wounded except on Mijok's shield, and this held only two, for one of the women had died. The wounded archer was yellow-faced with loss of blood from a hip injury, but that was clean and closed; he was free from the signs of fear, almost cheerful. The woman was a sturdy black-skirted soldier of the ranks, gashed in the face and with a leg torn from knee to ankle.

Another night of silence and of drifting--for a while. Wright's voice floated back: "I am thinking of Dorothy and Ann, and your daughter."

"And not of Ed Spearman?"

"Oh.... The fuel must have been getting low, Paul. Nothing the boat could do for us after we were back in the woods. He must be at the island."

Paul could only say, "I hope so." The thing Spearman had almost said when his anger and disappointment were high, the hint at joining forces with Lantis in abandonment of everything thus far achieved--nothing could be gained by speaking of that now. But some of Spearman's words murmured on in darkness: "_Lantis--terrific organization ... monetary system ... whole world for the taking ... pretty idealism that never worked even on Earth...._"

There had always been strain and mutual exasperation in argument with Ed Spearman--long ago, on the ship _Argo_. The Collectivist Party, surviving as an innocuous political group after the horrors of the Civil War of 2010-13, lived strongly in Spearman's mind, not only because his father had fought for it. Lacking the frenzied dogmatism of the antique communism it resembled, it was nevertheless communism's natural heir, a party of iron doctrines simplified for minds that resented analysis and magnified Man out of a dislike for men. Like communism, it needed to imagine a class war and felt that it had a tight vested monopoly of the underdog. The C.P., said one of its late twentieth-century prophets as humorless as his predecessors, "believed in Man." You could always fluster a collectivist by asking for a logical breakdown of that--and make an enemy: they were usually good haters and made a virtue of it. The years following the Civil War had been troubled though materially prosperous, darkened by the build-up of yet another monolithic state under Jenga the Mongol, who had inherited the desolation of the Russo-Chinese war of 1970-76; in those years the Collectivist Party in the Federation, unsupported by any conveniently foreign deity, had become not much more than a serio-comic decayed socialism with a dash of bitters. But it was alive; at the time _Argo_ left the spaceport it had had ten senators and a larger handful of delegates in the Federation Congress. It was respectable, no longer subversive, and owned a small hard core of the aggressively sincere.... Not Wright nor Sears nor anyone had ever been able to convince Edmund Spearman that evil means breed a further evil, which swallows up any good that may have been imagined in the beginning. Spearman could admit that (himself in no way an evil man) he would not do evil--if he could help it. But in the region of theory Spearman held quite simply that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, and that settled it....

"They should be safe," Wright said. "You and Jocko saw the island."

"It's beautiful. I know they're all right."

"Yes.... Would you say it was a place where Ann might--oh, how shall I say it?--might attain tranquillity? Not cry too much for the moon?"

"If there is any such place in the Galaxy."

"Time," Elis said. "Little Black-Hair needs time. She is like grass I have seen growing in too much shade. She is not like our Mashana Dorothy who will make sunshine if the other sun is clouded."

"Listen!" Brodaa's voice. "Listen...."

Paul heard nothing, at first. Up ahead Abara sputtered: "Mister Johnson--hoo-hee--be quiet. Is nothing--be quiet--"

Nisana came broad awake in Paul's arms. Wright's mount halted, as did Susie, but Susie was trembling, raising and swinging her head in a way to make balance difficult; Paul saw the white writhing of her trunk lifted to explore for a scent.... He heard it then: a long rustling, like a repeated tearing of paper behind a closed door; nothing else.... A wet howl from Mister Johnson sent a spasm through Susie's mass; her muscles bunched; Abara's voice wailed back: "Mister Joh--I cannot hold him--_kaksmas_!"

Transition from realization to stampede was a flash like the pain of a blow. Paul heard Mijok: "My shield--it will hold more." Elis cried something to Brodaa. Then Susie had plunged ahead, uncontrollable; Paul could only bend low above the clinging of Nisana, hold on with hands and knees, hope that no trailing vine or branch would sweep them off into death. Mister Johnson could make no careful choice of a trail now--he would be parting the jungle like a six-ton bullet. "Don't be afraid, Nisana--we can outrun them--"

"My people--"

"Elis and Mijok can outrun them too. They'll carry all they can." In spite of the agony of mere hanging on, mere straining to stay alive, he had to think: _They were loyal and we got them into this...._ Branches slashed across his back, stinging and scraping. Once Susie stumbled and recovered as the group went splattering across some invisible mud, and Paul wondered if Mister Johnson in his terror would run them into quicksand or marsh.

That ended; there was more thick jungle whipping his back for--five minutes?--an hour...? This too ended.

Crazed or purposeful, the beasts charged out into open land through a soft roaring of torn grass. Paul could twist his head to glance upward at a field of stars. He could not win a backward look for Elis and Mijok: his neck and arm muscles were stiffened in his grasp of Susie's ears, and he dared not risk disturbing Nisana's clutch of him. But to left and right he could make out other shapes under starlight and hear a frantic thudding of hoofs--fleeing asonis, other innocent woodland cattle with a hunger to live. Once he glimpsed a long-bodied thing pass off to the left in wild leaps lifting it above the grass tops: uskaran, he thought, the huge tiger cat, no enemy but a brother in panic.

The open ground ended at water; here at last the olifants slowed to a halt, unlike the lesser desperate brutes, for Mister Johnson was still wise, considering the stream, aware of his leadership. Paul could shout to the others now, and they all answered. But his backward staring found only the stars, the white mass of Mister Smith, the disturbed darkness that must be meadow. "Elis! Mijok!"

No answer could have reached him above the bleating and thunder of terrorized harmless things crossing the field and hurtling blindly into the river. Mister Johnson was wading in deliberately. There was splashing at first, then silence, as cool water came up around Paul's knees and Susie's motion changed to a smooth throbbing and heaving; he saw small foam where the curve of her lifted trunk cut the water. He whispered to Nisana, "We're safe, dear. Big river. Kaksmas won't cross it...." Mister Johnson was leading them in an upstream slant, bearing well to the right while the bobbing frantic heads of other creatures let the moderate current press them away to the left. This way--whether by Mister Johnson's wisdom or Abara's guidance--they might be able to come ashore clear of the dangerous passage of the stampede.

"My people cannot go through the water. We never--"

"Elis and Mijok can swim. They'll get them across somehow. Maybe the shield will float, Nisana."

The madness behind them dwindled into the faraway. In growing quiet, Wright's voice came back, not loudly: "I am a murderer."

Paul wondered what insight made him call out words not his own: "'What's the profit of any effort if the result is thrown away in a time of weakness?'"

The even motion became a clumsiness of wading in mud. Then there was solid ground. Paul said, "Halt them here if you can, Abara." Mister Johnson must have shared the sense of safety; they all calmed, heads drooping, shaken breathing slowing to sighs. "Down, Susie...." All but Abara descended. This was still open grassland, but there was a black velvet curtain of jungle not far off. "Doc--still got your flashlight?"

"Eh? No--lost somewhere." The old man spoke vacantly; he stumbled to the edge of the water, sat with his head on his knees. "Mijok-Mijok...."

Tejron still had her Vestoian, but now the pygmy woman was panting, fully conscious in Tejron's arms and witless with fear. Tejron said, "She's trying to break away. Can't someone talk to her?"

"Pakriaa!" Paul searched for the princess. "Here--please."

Nisana whispered, "I will talk to the Vestoian--yes?"

"Not yet. If Pakriaa--"

Pakriaa said thickly, "I am here. What to say? She is nothing."

"She is nothing to you, Pakriaa? Then Sears chose a poor student. Brodaa would have spoken to her. I ask you to tell her the war is over and she is among friends."

"Friends? She is Vestoian." Pakriaa approached Wright, who did not look up. "Tocwright--I must speak to the Vestoian kaksma? I owe you my life--will obey you."

He groaned: "I do not want you to obey me. If there is nothing inside to tell you what you should do, then I have nothing to say to you."

Pakriaa flung up her arm across her eyes as if struck. Tejron muttered, "I can't restrain her much longer without hurting her." It was Nisana who gave the Vestoian the message in the pygmy tongue, a ripple of sound that must have conveyed some reassurance, for the struggling ceased.

"Look!" Paul dug his fingers in Wright's shoulder. "Over there--"

The dark spot under starlight was surely the floating shield; behind it, another purposeful splashing, rise and fall of a driving arm.

"Mijok!" Wright was on his feet. "This way! A little upstream--"

Both giants were bleeding from small double stab wounds of the kaksma teeth. There were four pygmies on Mijok's shield. Elis had carried Brodaa and another in his arms and one on his back; they had clung to his fur as he swam the river. Mijok plucked a sodden thing from his thigh; its jaws had clenched in flesh when he smashed its body. He flipped the ratty thing into the water and remarked like a Charin, "Damned if I could ever care for 'em."

"The others--"

"We tried to help them into the trees," said Elis. "Could be some safety in that if the swarm passes by. But most of them ran blindly, so--beyond that, Doc, don't ever ask us. We must forget some things. We've all done what we could, so--let's rest a while and go on."

"Oh, we go on," Wright said. "Chaos, or maybe a little bit of light from time to time. What--sixteen of us now...? Which way was the swarm going?"

"North. Our flight was west. I think this place is safe."

Abara called down: "Mister Johnson says it is safe."

Paul said, "No more travel tonight. Wait here for daylight. This is not the river we wanted, but we know it reaches the sea somehow. Let's think about that in the morning. And--if you will, Doc--I'd like to make that my last order. Let Elis be our commander till we reach the island."

"I!" Elis was shocked. "But Paul.... I am a big baby, I wonder and wonder and never find the answer to anything."

Wright laughed; it sounded like laughter. At any rate when his voice found words it was warm, relieved, more like his own than it had been at any time since the drums sounded on Lake Argo. "That doesn't matter, Elis. Paul has done all anyone could, done it well, and leadership's a wearing thing. But you can carry it."

Paul wished he could see the black face in the dark; he might learn from it, he thought, so far as a Charin was capable of learning. Elis said dazedly, "If you all wish it--"

"I wish it," said Abro Brodaa.

"Yes," Mijok said. "Let's not trouble to vote. We know you, Elis."

"I'll do my best...."

Most of the pygmies collapsed in sleep. The bites the giants had received were not numerous enough to be a danger, but both were in some pain, and wakeful; Abara also said he would prefer to watch out the night and not sleep. Paul stretched on the damp grass, aware of Nisana, sitting near him. He tried to make a mental refuge of Dorothy and the island; for a time it was possible, but twice, as he thought he was drifting into true healing sleep, the present pulled at him and the thought was not of Dorothy, but of Pakriaa, throwing up her arm across her eyes as if Wright's words had been a deeper wound than any she had received in these days of calamity and defeat.

He woke while it was still night. The red moon had risen, changing the river to deep purple; the stampede was all ended, and stillness was everywhere, underlying the low voices of Wright and Elis. He saw the small silhouette of Nisana beside him; he could make out none of the others, but he heard the soft breathing of the olifants, and at least some of them must have gone to the jungle and returned, for there was a steady munching of coarse leaves. He thought: _Sears' pets--one of his ten thousand gifts we can never live long enough to assess. His laughter was another...._

Wright was talking placidly: "We suppose it must have been a similar story on this planet, Elis. The major patterns are the same. The small and simple forms must have grown to greater complexity through their millions of years, undoubtedly in the seas, the good saline medium for our kind. Then other millions of years, while the first creatures to try the land were clumsy amphibians, still needing the sea but developing ways to carry it with them, venture a little further. There's no hurry in history."

"And before the beginning of life?"

"Difficult, Elis. We think (there are other theories) that each star with planets was once two--a binary, our astronomers called it--"

Someone thin and small came near to Paul, speaking delicately, in an extremity of pain, and not to him. "Nisana," Pakriaa said. "Nisana--"

Nisana was looking up, a little afraid, uncertain. "Princess?"

"Only Pakriaa.... Nisana--I saw how you spoke to the Vestoian, how she was quiet. If you will bring her--and Tejron too? And we go and listen--Tocwright is talking about the stars--the world--I think, maybe, we tell her what he says? Will you come with me, Nisana?"