West Of The Sun Part 28

Mijok said softly, "First-light is a good time."

"I think there won't be any fighting," Miniaan said, and she relaxed and leaned happily against Muson's plump knee and ate the meal Arek had ready for her in fastidious birdlike bites. "If they're troubled by the rumors I scattered they'll slip away and hide, not fight.

They're weary, bewildered, disillusioned people--at least that is the temper of the city as I felt it."

Nisana murmured, "With Spearman's bodyguard it could be different."

"Why," said Wright, "he'd never turn them against us. Not if he's the man I used to know, or anything like that man. He came a long way with us once." But Paul had to wonder: _Was he ever with us?_

There were six giants in the party: Mijok, Arek, Muson, Elis, Sears-Danik, Dunin. Elis was the year's Governor at Adelphi, but Dorothy had held that position the year before and would a.s.sume its simple duties in his absence. Nisana's eldest twin daughters had wanted to come, but Nisana had not allowed it, requiring them to stay in school under Brodaa's temperate discipline; the only pygmies here were herself, Pakriaa, and Miniaan. The group had come 120 miles overland, after _Argo IV_ set them on a beach north of the coastal range: this had seemed better than taking the sloop south, where harbor would be uncertain and the winds and currents unknown. The first twenty miles ash.o.r.e had been a retracing of Abara's long-ago journey with the olifants, through swampy and treacherous jungle.

After rounding the range they could follow the eastern edge of the gra.s.sland that spread on its lee side, traveling in the open only at night, to avoid omasha. For all of one day they were bedeviled by a swarm of biting flies, and since there were brown wings circling they could not escape into full sunlight, where the flies would not follow.

Eventually Pakriaa found an evil-smelling plant and remembered its use from old times. The juice of the root was a protection; the smell was almost as distressing as the bites but less dangerous. Miniaan of Vestoia had never heard of the plant's use: perhaps that explained why Vestoia had never exploited the otherwise pleasant region due west of Lake Argo.

There was fitful sleep in the daylight following Miniaan's return, and then an evening meal. Arek and Muson and the two young giants seemed untroubled by tomorrow, full of speculative curiosity. Mijok was uneasy, though he would not put it in words; Elis, too, would be remembering. Wright said again, "He came a long way with us.... Jensen chose him--remember that: chose him from among seven hundred other physically fine youths who had the same training, the same kind of courage, who wanted the--privilege, as he did."

"I can always wonder what Jensen himself would have made of Lucifer."

Wright said, almost with reproach, "Jensen was a great engineer, Paul, but he was also a student of history. Compared with what his leadership would have been, mine has been weak, vacillating, academic--it was bound to be. I take credit for some achievements.

I've said give protoplasm a chance. We have done that. We've established the climate of liberty under law (for our very small group) and proved that a human mind can by-pa.s.s twenty thousand years of blundering, with no other help than a flexible language and the few basic rules of civilized action--as the so-called savages of Earth always proved it whenever they had a chance to secure a genuine education and fair treatment. But--in our material development there must have been a thousand lost opportunities--things Jensen (and probably Ed Spearman) would have seen at once."

Paul laughed. "Ed could have designed a better sloop."

Wright dismissed that with a chuckle. "Ach--she floats, boy. She sails.... When I get angry or impatient or discouraged--when I stick too tight to a plan of my own and fail to hear the opposing argument--then I remember that Jensen had a charity, a patience, a kindliness, almost as great as Sears had--"

"Tocwright," said Pakriaa, half amused, "why do you search yourself?

Must you always be sitting in judgment on your own mind?"

"Why, yes, dear, I must." His fingers played in his white beard.

"Cod-and-baked-beans origin.... Remember my fussy little _History of the Americas_, the first book Dorothy and Nisana copied out for me when we found how to make good paper from the marsh gra.s.s...? But self-searching is a vice-and-virtue not limited to the Charin tribe, Pakriaa--ask yourself. And ask Elis." The black giant smiled.

"So--I'll go on with it just a little. Paul, is it weakness in me to ask that when we find Ed Spearman, you do most of the talking? I want to be--merely friendly if I can, not say much. At least until we know what sort of man he's become. Nine years ago, I don't think he ever had much resentment against you. You hear both sides--usually the surest way to make an extremist hate you bitterly, but somehow people don't. You're a--kindly listener; I only try to be, pushing down a big part of my natural temperament to do it.... Why, I think I never even appreciated the full nastiness of sarcasm until one time (it's not such a small matter)--one time on the s.p.a.ce ship, when Sears reproached me for it: something that went against his own nature, by the way, because he was always too afraid of finding fault with others."

"I'll talk with him first, Doc, if you want me to. But I wonder what I can say. I keep seeing Ann. The things she told us--he things Miniaan has told us today."

"A city that never was," said Miniaan sleepily, "never was even in the old times. Maybe I dreamed it. If you are quiet, maybe I will allow us to wake up in a moment on the island of Adelphi...."

"Ann is not changed," Muson reflected, "even though the baby died."

Mijok said, "I'm not sure. I think she is. In what way I can't define.

But she's not the same sad little thing I watched when she was sleeping in that fever. Well now, that was truly long ago. She puzzled me more than the rest of you, and you were all a great mystery--and I with a dozen words and the old terrors crawling on my skin like lice.

Maybe it was her seeming weakness, her secret look of listening--which I thought I began to understand when she taught me the Earth music, but I don't suppose I ever did understand it." Mijok laughed and looked away. "Doc, it was very difficult for me to grasp that you were not begotten out of the west wind by a thunderbolt. You'll never know how difficult, because you were never a savage. You were born to be articulate. Those twenty thousand years of blundering--bad I don't doubt they were, but they gave you something. I am as if the forest had generated me, with no past."

Miniaan murmured and rolled over on her back to look up into the leaves. "I too. I was never born. Someone with no father nor mother looked at that filthy mound they say is the grave of the Queen of the World. The mind of a white-furred Charin is my father and my mother."

Elis suggested: "Ann has come neater to the immediate present."

"Why, Elis--" Pakriaa was surprised. "She said something like that to me herself, a short while before we came away. She said, 'My yesterdays became tomorrows before I lived them. I want to find today, Pakriaa. Where is today?'"

Miniann pursued the dark stream of her own thought, which now seemed to be giving her pleasure and not pain: "This morning I found how yesterday can bury itself with only the smallest scattering of years.

There will be other cities. Never again Vestoia."

Wright asked gently, "But you can remember good and pleasant things of the old city, the way it was when you were young there?"

"Oh, I can, I can. But I'll have today, too. I think I found it first when I bore my little sons, at Adelphi." She sat up, leaning on Pakriaa's shoulder. "I've had good todays at Adelphi. I don't understand how it could have been abandoned by this Spearman I've never seen."

"In a way," Paul said, "you did see him. You were one of those who came on the canoes up Lake Argo. You saw the boat set your fleet afire."

"Yes. That was war.... And before I was wounded I killed, I think, seven of your people, Pakriaa. One with a blue skirt. I wounded her in the throat, and I have heard she died in the forest, looking north."

"Yes, Tamisraa. My sister Tamisraa was a bitter woman," Pakriaa said, "and quite brave. Miniaan, all that was over long ago, in a forgotten country. Now we pull weeds in the same garden."

Night came tranquilly. Elis, who kept the last quarter of the watch, waked them before first-light. There was the help of a full red moon, and they followed the sound of a swift river which flowed into North Lake through the palace district of Vestoia.

For more than a mile outside the city the jungle was like a park, undergrowth removed, vines cut away. But the vines were coming back.

Greedy purple fingers curled to recapture and reclaim....

In the outskirts no one halted or questioned them. They saw no armed women; here and there a man crouched in a weedy doorway with staring children half hidden behind him. Mijok, Elis, Sears-Danik and Arek walked on the outside, with shields upheld against a possible arrow or thrown spear. Rifles and pistols were now history, all ammunition spent; they lay in a closet off Wright's room at Adelphi which he called the Terrestrial Museum. Paul, Wright, and Elis had Earth-made hunting knives, still keen. Miniaan, leading them, held a spear, but there was a blue-flower garland below its blade, symbol of peace.

Pakriaa and Nisana preferred to carry no weapons; Muson and young Dunin had never handled one in their lives. Miniaan said over her shoulder, "There is the old stockade. Here we turn right, toward the palace."

There was scurrying and disturbance now. Beyond Mijok's shield Paul saw a few lean women running; one of them halted at Miniaan's call and approached uneasily. There were questions, dubious replies. At the far end of the shaded avenue was a growing cl.u.s.ter of red bodies before a thatched building with one tall doorway. Miniaan explained: "I told her that we come peacefully and want to talk with Spearman-abron-Ismar. And she says she thinks he would be asleep at this hour."

"So?" Wright frowned and fretted. "But the word you left yesterday would certainly have reached him." The Vestoian twittered a last word or two and ran away down the street; Paul saw her elbowing through the crowd in front of the palace. "We might go forward a little...."

Most of the group melted away; some forty armed women remained, in a ragged formation blocking the entrance. They made no threatening or even warning gestures, but their staring was heavy and cold. The volunteer messenger returned, pushing through them to speak again with Miniaan; once or twice a halting gabble of something like pidgin English made Miniaan wave her hand impatiently. She turned to Paul.

"It seems Spearman told her to say that he is under the--the climate?

The weather? Is this meaningful?"

Wright said, "Tell him his third-born son is dead and the doorway of his palace is too narrow for our friends. Wait.... He asked nothing about Ann?"

"She does not say so."

"I can send him no message. You see what I meant, Paul?

Paul--you--send whatever word you think best."

"Well.... Miniaan, ask her to tell him that--Ann could not come with us. That we want to talk with him and, as Doc said, that his door is too narrow for some of us."

The soldiers seemed to catch a glimmering of it; they made way for the messenger, and it might be there was less suspicion in them, more curiosity. Sears-Danik, Tejron's dreamy eldest boy, whispered to Paul, "I am trying to remember him. Not much hair on his head--it was brown.

I was only seven when he flew us to Adelphi. His voice--heavy."

"Yes. His hair may be gray now, Danny, as mine is. His face will look older--it never had a young look. His body will not have changed much."

Dunin asked, "He is older than you?"

"No, dear, a little younger."

But Spearman seemed older by far, appearing abruptly in the doorway, arms spread against its frame, face thrust intently forward and eyes squinting as if they troubled him. He wore a black loincloth of bark fabric, nothing else. His spa.r.s.e hair was wholly gray with streaks of white at the temples, his cheeks, leathery, deeply grooved, and flushed. "I didn't believe her," he said. Seeing him, the guards held their spears as if they were Earth-born soldiers presenting arms, then grounded the b.u.t.ts; they remained rigidly at attention when Spearman paid them no heed. "I didn't suppose...." Spearman hiccuped; he rubbed both hands across his face.

Seeing tormented uncertainty in Christopher Wright, Paul stepped forward. "Sears died, long ago. Doc and I got through, with--some of our friends." He paused, short of the guards, and held out his hand, and Spearman stared at it, communing somehow with himself, approaching at last, clumsily, to take hold of it in the old Earth gesture. There was alcohol on his breath; his bloodshot eyes fought an open struggle with bewilderment; his handclasp was damp, unsteady, quickly withdrawn.

"Sorry," he said, "not well. Hard to get it through my head.

Well--Christ, I'm a bit drunk. Not strange, is it...? Mijok." His glance traveled over Pakriaa and Nisana without recognition; it lingered at Arek, but he did not speak her name. There was the beginning of a stiff smile, unreadable, as his eyes fixed on Christopher Wright.