West Of The Sun Part 21

"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 G.o.ds? There must be other G.o.ds. Not Ismar...."

Elis watched the meadow over the crouching bowmen. "Within you, Captain. The G.o.d 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 pa.s.sage 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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.lcat, but singlemindedly, saving her strength to deal with those who threatened him.