7
The trail was obvious only to the pygmies, through a border region ofmeadow and forest that was full of dappled light, a warm hurry of lifefeeding, struggling, wandering. Aware of his own power and readiness,able now to enjoy the shifting scents and noises of this new trail,Paul watched Ann's quick slenderness and the swing of Spearman's solidshoulders. They, and Sears Oliphant, had emerged unharmed from theillness. During a week unmeasurably long in retrospect, all six of theparty had found the ease and sureness of physical acclimation. Theirbodies rejoiced in the hot clean air of day and the moist moderatenights; the only rebel was the Earth-born brain--grudging, frightened,trailing, making endless reservations and timid of shadows. In SearsOliphant it was an almost open battle between a brave and curious mindand flesh that could not hide its wincing from pain and danger. His"Oh my, yes" had a tremor which angered himself and oppressed hisnatural garrulity.
When Ann Bryan had drifted out of the sleep of illness, Ed Spearmanwas petting her hands, sponging her forehead. Paul had seen somethinghappen in Ann at that moment, like an innocent putting forth of leaveswhen winter is not surely gone. Ann had never taken a lover. On theship, not so much unawakened as unwilling, she had rejected all that;Spearman, making no secret of wanting her, had not been insistent. Norhad he seemed outwardly much distressed, but (at a time whenEarth-harbored youth of his nature would have been in their liveliestand most demanding prime) he had buried himself in _Argo's_ technicallibrary to the point of red-eyed exhaustion, a desperation ofunceasing study in the technologies that Captain Jensen would havehelped him explore if Jensen had lived. Ann had read other mattersafter the violin strings were gone, read and daydreamed. If she'd wept(and Paul thought she had) she had done it alone, in that pocket of aroom sacred to herself. To the others, she was a passionately silentadolescent turning into a tiredly silent woman, who made too muchpoint of doing her own work and asking for nothing.
Yes, Ann was different now. The thin beauty of her face, vivid whiteunder heavy black hair, was still too quiet, but with a troubledradiance. During this long week she had talked much with Dorothy--talksuperficially inconsequential, but Paul assumed it had a meaning belowwords, as if Ann had only just realized, probably without envy, thatthe brown girl was a thousand years older in heart and mind.
Beyond Ann and Spearman were the six bowmen of the escort, bodiesbright with a sour-smelling oil, grouped around Abro Pakriaa at adeferential distance. The princess wore Dorothy's locket. "Abro," Paulhad learned, was best translated as "princess" or "queen." A flame-redflower behind her ear caught sunlight from the early afternoon. Fiveothers were following Paul--women, with skirts of every tint butPakriaa's blue, taller than the men, carrying spears with blades of awhite stone resembling quartz. The men were unvaryingly soft, roundedin contour, lacking the women's tough-sinewed vigor. It was plain,merely from the manner of Abro Pakriaa and her spear bearers, thatamong this people to be a woman was to be a leader and soldier, nodoubt a hunter and head of the household by virtue of size andstrength. In muscular power, a male pygmy was to a female as theweakest of Earth's women was to the toughest male athlete. These ofthe bodyguard were soldiers of a sort: the bows were small, the arrowsonly big darts. The bowmen never spoke except meekly in response tosome patronizing word of the princess. Pakriaa's height topped fortyinches; none of the bowmen was quite three feet tall. Paul's fingersitched for brush and palette. They were available in the lifeboat. Thefact that he had not even unpacked them he blamed on a preoccupationwith the daily work needed for mere survival, but there was a deeperreason: perhaps a fear of finding his moderate ability vanished if heshould once try to hint with oil at the welling profusion of color andline that was Lucifer. Now he found himself trying to measure thequality of Pakriaa's rich copper against the softness of leaves thatwere burnt umber, malachite green, saffron, purple, and he thought: _Imust be recovering. Wake up, ego, and look around._
Spearman was carrying rifle and automatic; Paul had preferred to leavehis rifle behind; Ann, hating firearms, had only her knife.
Abro Pakriaa had entered the camp at noon, her fourth visit in theweek. Her gloomy majesty unchanging, she had indicated that she wishedthem to come to her village. But Dorothy had turned her ankle theevening before and it still pained her. Wright, no doubt hungeringmore than any of the others for a sight of Pakriaa's way of living,had fretted and bumbled and elected to remain with Dorothy and Sears,urging Paul needlessly to remember his anthropology. Sears, sweatingout a microsection of a water insect from Lake Argo, had flapped a fathand and boomed: "You be sure 'n' telephone, damn it, if you'restaying for dinner, hey?"
Remaining uneasily close to Wright, as he did whenever the pygmiesappeared, Mijok had said carefully, "Telephone?"
"Word without meaning," said Wright gently, patting the huge arm."Noise word for fun."
The attitude of Pakriaa's people to Mijok suggested the studiousignoring of an indecency. They would not harm the ugly animal, theirmanner said, so long as he was the property of the important skypeople....
Life was generously abundant in this thinner forest. Things buzzed andflew; Paul noticed a few webs cunningly extended before burrows in thehumus. Ann's ocean-gray eyes glanced back, brave and uncertain. "Thosegirls are too quiet. Paul, how much _do_ they know of our language?"
"Not much." He moved up to walk on her other side. "Doc and I havemade only those two efforts to swap languages. A lot of that time hadto be wasted on theirs, a dead end for us."
Spearman grunted, "Why? They've got a civilization, as Doc says."
"Our voices are wrong. Pitch effects meaning for them. You've noticedthere's no pitch difference between their male and female voices.Their language is tied to one section of the scale; a full octave ofit is above the range of even Ann's voice. They can shape our wordsthough, if they're willing. Basic English may appeal to the princesswhen she condescends to take it seriously."
"They could have picked up more than we suspect. They could have beeneavesdropping outside the camp."
"No, Ed. Mijok would have known and told us."
"Yeah--Fido. Can hardly speak freely in front of him now."
"Don't think anything you wouldn't want him to hear."
"Paul, I swear, sometimes you're worse than Doc." But Spearman wantedto cancel the ill temper of the remark, and added: "You know, Ithought _I_ knew something about Basic English--we all had drillenough in it. Beats me, the things Doc can do with it--the man's awizard."
Paul was silent with unappeased annoyance. It was true: Mijok appearedto be a natural student too, already far beyond Basic English in aweek of keen listening. "Nan," Paul said, "how did you like Mijok'shumming when you were singing for us yesterday evening?"
"Good." She flashed him an almost cheerful smile. But when Ann spokeof her singing--and in the singing itself--there was, in spite of her,an aching wordless reminder of the violin gone silent. Her voice wassweet but without strength or resonance, and she took no ardentpleasure in using it. Her love was the violin--covered as well asmight be in the comparative safety of the lifeboat, waiting for adistant day. If the day ever came (Sears had already dissected out,dried, and oiled some long leg-tendon fibers of a deerlike animal in ahumble experiment aimed chiefly at Ann's morale)--if the day came,there would still be no piano, no answering of other strings, nosplendid cry of brass. Crude wood winds, perhaps, sometime.... "Yes,he was good," said Ann, smiling. "Organ point in the tonic, and rightin our own scale. Once he even upped to the dominant. Instinct, huh?Sounded good, Paul, even with you trying to fill in the middle."
"Hell, I didn't think you heard me," Spearman snorted.
"You kind of stood out," she said, "because Mijok was much better onpitch, my good man. It did sound hollow without something to fill in.He was on A-flat below the bass clef and no fooling.... _Why_ haven'twe seen other giants?"
"We got something on that this morning. I guess it was while you werein swimming. Each giant male has an inviolate hunting territory, andthey don't t
respass. Definite breeding season: the month before therains. That was five or maybe six red-moon changes ago. Mijok wasn'ttoo clear on the count--doesn't like mathematics much better than Ido. The women go where they please, in small groups, with the childrenwho still need care, but I gather the males are expected to stay intheir own private grounds until the Red-Moon-before-the-Rains."
Spearman wondered: "Will the pygmies have a season too?"
"Doubt it. Probably like us--except that women are the bosses. Theclothes suggest a continuing sex consciousness."
The pygmy leaders halted. A murmuring explained itself as the music ofa stream. Paul consulted his memory of the map made from orbitphotographs and of his one solo exploration flight in the lifeboat.There could be few such flights: the charlesite, even with the surplussalvaged from the wrecked boat, must be hoarded. Ann and Ed had flownover the lake on the day after their recovery, searching for any signof _Argo_. Returning, Ed's face had been a leather mask of grief, andneither had wanted to talk of it. Later they explained: the lake was aprofundity of secret blue; a shelf of sand or possibly white stone ranout some yards offshore, under water marvelously clear, and endedabruptly. Beyond it, where _Argo_ must have fallen, no bottom couldeven be guessed at; the lifeboat's camera confirmed the presence of anabyss that would have thwarted the most complex twenty-first-centurymachinery.
This stream, Paul knew, came from the western hills, flowing east andslightly north until it entered the lake northeast of the clearingcalled home. Another creek joined it east of the spot where they nowstood, and Pakriaa's village--if the parallel lines did represent itslocation--was not far upstream from that junction.
Worn boulders rose above noisy water. The stream was twenty yardswide, sluggish even here in the shallows. A steppingstone crossing.
Nearly all the rivers on the map passed through jungle for most oftheir length; numberless smaller streams would be hidden from the sky.There was grassland for fifteen to twenty miles on the eastern side ofevery range of hills. The prevailing winds were from the west; perhapsa dryness in the lee of the hills favored the grass. The broadeststretch of such open land lay east of a rugged coastal range seventymiles to the southwest; some of the mountains in that seacoastformation were mighty enough to hold a blur of snow at their summits.The base of the coastal range was narrow--hardly more than twentymiles. From this the peaks shot up with incredible sheerness to greatheights of bare rock that glittered in morning sun like black and redglass. This grandeur, like nothing known on Earth, was clearly visiblefrom the camp above the near hills, especially at midday, when themists were gone.
And ten miles offshore from that dizzy range, Paul remembered amountainous island. On his solo exploration two days ago, with thelifeboat's panoramic camera and a head full of puzzled dreams, he hadsoared above it, noting a peninsular strip of red sand at its southernend, sheltered mountain valleys--one framing a jewel of lake. In thenorth was a white beach where landing should be easy, and this wasprotected by a low headland of red cliffs running out to the very tipof the island. Surely a place to carry in the mind, it seemed toinvite human living as did no other near region in this continent ofLucifer. Wright thought so: he listened to Paul's description andnamed the island Adelphi....
North of the camp, the range of low western hills dwindled to rollingland and was lost in a tremendous expanse of unbroken jungle, whichended only at the shore of one of the great lakes four hundred milesaway--an inland sea fourteen hundred miles long. Sixty-odd miles tothe south there was that large cluster of parallel lines in jungle,and beyond it the forest gave way to more open ground, prairie, reddesert, and bare mountains.
Abro Pakriaa dipped her spear in the water; she lifted a handful,letting it trickle away while she spoke a rippling invocation; thenshe was lithely crossing on the stones after the bowmen. The bottomwas pale sand with varicolored pebbles.
Beyond the stream, Pakriaa followed a path a short way and pressedinto undergrowth. Spearman grumbled, "Good path for once, and we haveto--"
"Path's probably booby-trapped. She expects us to know that."
"Hell...." It was difficult passage, stooping on a trail meant forlittle folk; it ended at a ditch six feet wide and five deep. Theditch made a right angle, both lines stretching away straightly as faras the eye could go; the inner side of the ditch was heaped with drysticks and bundles of grass. Pakriaa trilled orders to an oldblack-skirted woman with a whip, in charge of a gang of four women andthree men, all totally naked. They were struggling to shove a movablebridge into place across the ditch--two logs bearing a mat of vinesand bark. It was grunting work for them, and when the end of thebridge was in reach, Pakriaa's escort made no motion to help. Spearmanstarted to; Paul interfered. "We'd lose face. Those are slaves. Womentied together at the ankles--one of the men a eunuch. Look at thebrands on their cheeks. Nan, you're the dominant sex--try to look morelike the president of a women's club."
Her finely modeled face had dignity enough, he thought, if she couldkeep the worry out of it.... The old woman in the black skirt bowedarrogantly to Pakriaa; the slaves cringed, with the hating stare ofthe trapped. All were scarred and young except for the eunuch, who waswrinkled and flabby. One female had a recent chest wound; the effortat the bridge had made it bleed, but she ignored it. Paul sawSpearman's face settle into lines of poker blankness and thought:_Good_. _And if, to patience and courage, he could add (I hear you,Doc) charity and self-knowledge--Oh, be quiet, critic, be quiet._...
Trees had been felled--some time ago, for the stumps were rotted--andthe spacing was such that the tops of the trees left standing provideda gap twenty feet wide, the entire length of the village. There wouldbe two other such gaps, visible from the sky as parallel lines,admitting full midday sunlight but shutting out the omasha."Nan--let's try to learn something about that big settlement in thesouth--the other parallel lines."
It was surprisingly easy to convey the question to Pakriaa with thehelp of signs, but her response when she understood it was a shrillsnarl and shaking of her spear, a repetition of a name, "Vestoia,"which seemed to be the place, and of another name, "Lantis," a namethat caught in her throat and made her spit. Paul said, "We make facesat the south too, and do it fast." It seemed to appease the princess:she even smiled.
The area bordering the ditch had been left wild, a barrier of vines,brush, untended trees. Inside were orderly rows of plants, somebroad-leaved, resembling beets, some bushy; another type was rangywith cosmos-shaped blooms of startling emerald green. Near the row oftrees was a path which Pakriaa followed; under the trees stoodgrass-thatched structures. Paul counted thirty, well separated, beforethe princess left the path, and no sound came from them. The treeswere mostly of the same species, thin-trunked towers with darkserrated leaves, blazing with scarlet blossoms like the one Pakriaawore. They were the source of an odor like frangipani which filled thevillage, heady and sweet but clean. It was no primitive agriculture inthis part-sunny corridor: rich darkness of earth was drawn up aboutthe plants; there was not a weed in sight. And there was no trace ofthe strangling purple vines.
Pakriaa's male attendants had slipped away; her spearwomen accompaniedher through an opening into the next corridor, where her people werewaiting for her, the soldier women in three formal ranks. There wereabout fifty in each rank, and here again were dyed skirts of everycolor but the regal blue that was Abro Pakriaa's. Small facesmaintained the flat indifference of the unliving copper theyresembled.
Pakriaa's intricate oratory flowed over them. More than two thirds ofthe stiff soldiers were gashed with recent wounds, ranging fromscratches to lost hands or breasts or eyes. Some had deep body woundsso ugly it was amazing that they could stand upright, but thereseemed to be no evidence of infection and there was no wavering in thelines while Pakriaa declaimed. Her right hand soared with spreadfingers. The lifeboat? The name Torothee occurred; when it wasrepeated the women swayed with unchanging faces, murmuring it inunison like a breath of wind. Pakriaa faced her guests. Tears were notunknown to
her; laughter might be. She clenched and relaxed her hands,the fourteen fingers rising and falling until Paul lost count of themotions--more than twenty. She pointed to the soldiers, repeating thedisplay more slowly and only ten times; then one hand rose alone withthe thumb curled under. Paul muttered, "I think she's saying only 146are left after the war, from--maybe three hundred."
Pakriaa laid her spear at Ann's feet. Paul advised: "Give her yourknife, same way." Pakriaa took it and placed it across the spear andstood back, motioning to Ann to do the same. When the three hadwithdrawn, Pakriaa still made impatient gestures. Paul whispered, "Ed,you and I are trifling males. We stand further back."
"We do like hell," said Spearman in his throat.
"We do, just the same. It's nothing but ceremony. Safety's off on my.38. We can handle anything. Stand back."
Ed Spearman stood back, muttering. At a shrill summons from Pakriaa, ashuffling procession swung out from the tree shadows. These were allmen, decrepit, ancient, dirty; some limped and two had empty eyesockets and one, from a pathological fatness, could barely waddle.They were striped and splotched with paint in elaborate designs,mostly of white and yellow, and their skins, either with dirt or age,had darkened to dull mahogany. They formed a hobbling circle aroundthe crossed knife and spear; each grotesque, as he passed the weapons,spat on them and scattered on them a handful of earth until the placebecame a low mound. As they did this, they muttered and howled andsqueaked, performing precise evolutions with twiddling fingers. Theycarried white thigh-bones like clubs, and shell ornaments jangled ontheir raddled throats and ankles. It was, on the surface, a simpleceremony of peace and friendship, but the casual contempt of thesemale witches cast a foulness over it. Their sidelong glances at thestrangers were poisonous with furtive malignancy. "Medicine men,"said Paul under his breath. "Distant equivalent of the wise women insome patriarchal groups. Ed, we stay on the good side of those loopyscarecrows, or it's just too bad." And with a certain hunger hestudied the mask of the man who had never offered the relaxation offriendship, wondering how far it was physically possible for Spearmanto accept a world in which engineering science was the dream and crudesurvival the reality.
The ceremony ended in a dribble of anticlimax. The hideous old menmerely shambled away from the mound toward the shadows after aceremonial whoop that caused the soldiers to relax. But they did notquite go. They huddled and squatted under the trees. They stared. Theyspat and scratched and consulted together. Some of the green eyes wereclose-lidded, veiled; others were wide, making no effort to conceal ahatred compounded of jealousy and fear. The fat monster nursed hisobscene belly between scrawny knees and whispered a stream ofinformation into the close ear of a witch with empty eye sockets, andthe whispering dark lips wore a destroying smile.