West Of The Sun Part 26

"You went to the beacon fire and put on more wood."

"Well," she said vaguely, "of course. We all did.... That _is_ smoke, Paul. Lantis' pygmies or the wild giants couldn't be there on the cliffs."

Dunin said, "Oh, there are no giants in that country, Dorothy. Those low hills I remember west of the first camp--those kaksma hills were an impa.s.sable boundary in the old days. The country west of them--n.o.body went there, ever. And south of them--Vestoia. My wild kindred are all very far north of here...."

_Argo IV_ eased up to the wharf, where Elis and Arek handled her like a toy, making her fast with ropes of a fabric as good as linen. Wright was there with them, and Tejron, and Pakriaa and Nisana, who were inseparable. "Too far," said Wright, and handed Paul the field gla.s.ses. "Just smoke."

Elis grumbled, "What's up there to burn? No vegetation. Rock."

The smoke seemed to be thinning. "How long since our last trip over?"

"Eight days, Paul," Tejron recalled. "My impatient eldest wanted to see if he could handle Betsy's oars, remember?"

"He could, too." Paul remembered. "Sears-Danik pulled his weight, my lady. Yes, that was the last time. And we saw nothing unusual."

Only Nisana thought to ask, "Good voyage today, Paul?"

"Fine, darling. You should have come."

Wright was carefully calm. "I'll go over, with Paul, Elis--and--"

"And me," said Dorothy, not smiling.

"Well.... Okay, Dope."

Pakriaa's thin wrinkled face turned to him. "Nisana and I?

Miniaan--she would remember the Vestoian dialect--but she is at the city. It would need an hour to send for her, and then it would be getting dark."

"Yes, come with us...."

The site of Jensen City was not where Wright and Paul had originally dreamed of it but two miles south, where the radiance of Sears Lake hung in the hills. A gap in the west admitted ocean winds; the outlet of the lake ran for a mile to the edge of a red stone cliff and tumbled over in a waterfall five hundred feet high. There would one day be houses along that mile of river. Already, near the waterfall, there was a temple of red and black stone devoted to quiet without ritual, thought of sometimes as a memorial to Sears and to the other dead, more often simply as a place to go for the satisfactions of silence. It had no name; Paul hoped it would never have one.

Miniaan of Vestoia was an eager citizen. The old wound had left one side of her head cruelly scarred; from the other side she was beautiful, by Charin as well as pygmy standards. Younger than Pakriaa, she was the mother of four, by Kajana--the archer whom Mijok had once carried on his shield, who would never walk again nor live a day without pain, and who was more cheerful as a permanent habit of mind than any of the other pygmy survivors of that war. The fifty-four pygmy children of Jensen City were all fathered by Abara and Kajana--a fact which caused old Abara to draw dead-pan comparisons between himself and Mister Johnson and to grow darkly desperate when Kajana wistfully asked him to explain why it was a joke....

Elis shipped the oars; Paul let down the anchor, a heavy block of stone, in two fathoms of blackening water; Elis lifted the dugout over the side and held it for them. He himself swam the short distance to the beach and eased the canoe through the shallows. Even now at low tide there was barely a quarter mile of gray sand between water and cliffs. Chipping away of building stone had created a fair path a hundred feet up; beyond, natural irregularities made it possible to climb another two hundred to the first setback of the great sea wall--a ledge which ran only as far as the next patch of beach, five miles south. Sunset had been ending when _Argo IV_ came home; here there was a depth of evening quiet, no sign of smoke or life, no sound but the long hiss and moaning of small waves. "We might make a fire here," Wright said. "But there's enough light. They--they?--must have seen _Argo_."

"There," Dorothy said, and ran up the sand.

The others watched in frozen helplessness as the woman came down the crude cliff path, gaunt, seeming tall only because of the gauntness--flaring ribs, thighs fallen in, every arm bone visible. Her hair was black disorder to her waist, her body a battleground of bruises, dirt, scars old and new, and she winced away from Dorothy with protesting hands. "You mustn't touch me because I'm very dirty, but I know who you are. Besides, I had to burn the last of my clothes.

My baby died. I know who you are. You see, my milk stopped. You're Dorothy Leeds. I left him on the cliff. Matron would not approve. You see----"

"Ann--Ann----"

"I have two other sons, but this one died. On the cliff. I used to know a man who called me Miss Sarasate, but that was just his way of talking--I don't happen to be in practice." Still trying to fend off Dorothy's arms, Ann fell on her face....

Pakriaa was speaking softly, in the room where Ann was sleeping--Wright's room. "She will be healed," Pakriaa said. "I can remember--and you remember it too, Paul--how my own mind refused to be my servant for a while." Since Ann had been brought to Jensen City, Pakriaa and Nisana had never left her: the little women, both now far from youth, took on the duties of nursing with a fierce protectiveness, so that there was little for even Dorothy to do. Ann had slept heavily all night and morning. At noon the stone-walled house remained cool; mild air entered at the screenless window openings, stirring the wall map of Adelphi and the three of Paul's paintings which were the only decorations Wright allowed in this ascetic shelter. There was gla.s.s-making now, but in such a climate, with no serious insect pests, it seemed a waste of effort to make windows; a long overhang of the eaves was sufficient against the rains. The house was large, U-shaped around a garden courtyard open toward Sears Lake; the walls were of black stone, the roof of a material indistinguishable from slate, carried by hardwood timbers.

Wright shared this house with Mijok and Arek, Pakriaa, Nisana, Miniaan, and their children and Arek's. There were five other such communal houses overlooking the lake; a seventh was building. The children were everywhere: it was, and would be for many years, a city of the young. Rak had died in the Year Four, a matter of falling asleep without waking, but Kamon lived, sharing a house with Tejron, Paul and Dorothy, Brodaa and Kajana. Lately Sears' daughter had taken over the task of caring for Kajana in his helplessness, lifting him to and from a wheel chair that Paul and Mijok had contrived or carrying him to a hammock slung near the waterfall, where he could watch the ocean and its changes. In middle age, Kajana had taught himself to write, and kept a journal of the colony with a sober pa.s.sion for detail.

Ann had not waked when Dorothy and Nisana washed her and clipped the dreadful tangle of her hair. "She will be healed," Pakriaa insisted.

"Maybe in the next waking." And when Ann's gray eyes came open an hour later, they did show a measuring sanity, recognizing Dorothy and Paul, but wincing away when Nisana smiled and touched her.

"Do not be afraid of us," Pakriaa whispered. "We are still proud. But our pride now is that no one is afraid of us.... You came to my house in the old old days, remember? My blue house, and I thinking I would be Queen of the World? I laugh at that now. Do not look at what I was, Ann."

"Pakriaa.... Paul, you haven't changed much."

"One of our other friends is about to bring a man-sized meal----"

"Why, Paul, you must be----"

"Fifty, Earth calendar----"

Dorothy said, "We measure it in Lucifer years, pretty please."

"Nicer," Paul admitted. "That way I'm around thirty-seven. Ann, you--let's see: one Earth year, one point three eight--d.a.m.n mental arithmetic--let's call you half past twenty-seven."

"Imagine that." Ann achieved a smile. "And--Pakriaa?"

"Twenty-nine. See--already I am an old woman and ugly."

"Don't be absurd, Pak," Dorothy said. "And this lady----"

"You would not remember me," said Nisana.

"Oh, but I do, I do. You--voted for Paul----"

Pakriaa chuckled with unforced gaiety. "Politics," Nisana chirped.

"P.S., I got the job." Paul pinched her tiny ear lobe and stepped out to the kitchen, where he found Wright with Arek. The children were at school, with Brodaa, Mijok, and Miniaan: ordinarily Wright would have been there too. When the youngest of this house were through with lessons they would go wandering in the hills with Mijok and Muson, so that Ann might have quiet, with only distant sounds of the laughter and playing in sunlight. "She's awake," Paul said, and Wright hurried to the bedroom, but Arek lingered, filling a tray.

Arek had grown almost to Mijok's height, filling out, a red mother G.o.ddess still bemused by inner discoveries. Her fine soft-furred fingers fussed at the earthen dishes on the wooden tray. "No ambition, no achievement--nothing, I think, could be worth the price of what's happened to her. Whether she recovers completely or not. There's human right and wrong. I think sometimes, Paul, it's not necessary to do much wondering. You can look straight at a thing and say: 'This ought not to be.'"

"Granted," Paul said, watching the garden through the broad kitchen window. His eldest, Helen, must have elected to do a little work after school instead of strolling away with the others. She was weeding, her brown head sheltered from the sun by an improvised hat of leaves; but for that she was prettily naked as the day she was born, and though she was humming to herself, she restrained the sound so that Paul could hardly hear it. She saw him in the window and grinned and waved.

She had most of Dorothy's warm coloring, with Paul's long-legged slimness.

Arek saw her too and smiled. "What Ann should have had too.... Paul, I told you once, we love you. All the good new things we have--your work. All the same there's a devil in--some of you. As in us too, of course. Need of the laws is obvious. If Spearman is responsible--the Vestoians too, maybe?--then I think we live in too much seclusion here." She took up the tray. "Too easy to live all the time in Paradise and--leave things undone."

"Yes. Vestoia is big, Arek--or was, when it almost destroyed us."

"True. But you tell me that over there on the beach she said, 'I have two other sons.' Living, did she mean? We must find them, and Spearman too."

"I believe she can tell us about it soon."

"Understood that I go with you when you find them."

"Yes. Yes, Arek...."

In the bedroom Arek's manner was altogether changed. "Observe: this is asonis _roti a la mode Versailles_, whatever that means. All I did was roast it. These are (Paul says) lima beans Munchausen, and here we have could-be asparagus. And by the way, the cheese tastes better'n it smells."

"Cheese----"