West Of The Sun Part 13

"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 inst.i.tutions 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 s.h.i.+ne. 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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--anch.o.r.ed 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, gra.s.s-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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d begotten of a red worm and Inkar, G.o.ddess of kaksmas. It would always be so--at least, until....

Paul remembered Dorothy, cheris.h.i.+ng Helen at her brown breast, asking neutrally, "Until what, Abro Pakriaa?"

Pakriaa had studied the giants' walls with contempt. "Until I shame this worm sp.a.w.n 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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, "d.a.m.n it, Nancy--"

Sears patted her shoulder and ignored her speech as she ignored the touch. "Chris, I've labored, myself, over that d.a.m.n 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."