All night Paul heard the distant barbarous thunder of the drums. In the hour before first-light his advance company formed; a furious serpent, it stole two miles south through grassland following the pallor of the beach. Near first-light, Paul knew, they would see a thread of new moon. In this present darkness the Vestoians might be slipping north on the lake; there would be no betraying sound above the passion of the drums. As for the land army, that could be miles to the south or over the next rise of ground.

His mind fought a pressure of alternatives. Better to have kept the army in one unit? To wait in the forest for news of Abro Samiraa's thrust in the northeast? Never mind: no time now. At least his body was meeting the challenge without rebellion. His wiry legs carried him in silence; his senses were whetted to fineness. Rifle, pistol, field glasses, hunting knife made a light load. Ahead of him Mijok loomed against a division of two shadows, sky and earth. Not first-light: only a sign that five thousand miles away on the eastern shore of this continent there might be the shining of a star now called the sun. Mijok carried a shield of doubled asonis hide; his only weapon was a seven-foot club, since his smallest finger was too large to pass the trigger guard of a rifle. Though keeping watch with Paul, Mijok had spoken little during the night—brooding perhaps, trying (Paul imagined) to see a new world in the matrix of the old. But there was no guessing a giant's thoughts. Lacking the stale burden of human guilt and compromise, they had the strength as well as the weakness of innocence; the country of their minds must wait on the explorations of centuries.

Abro Pakriaa, close to Paul's right, moved like a breeze in the grass. She and her small soldiers despised the use of shields, despised the arrows of their own bowmen as fit only for timid males. They never threw their spears but kept them for close quarters; their only other weapon was a white-stone dagger.... The army groped through the meadow in three ranks, widely spaced at Paul's order; beyond the right flank the archers were concentrated. Four hundred fighters altogether—against six thousand.

A wooded knoll grew into silhouette fifty yards from the beach, ten feet above the level of the meadow. "We meet them here," Paul said. By prearrangement Pakriaa halted a hundred of her spearwomen between the knoll and the beach, the other two hundred on the west side, the hundred bowmen out beyond. Paul and Mijok penetrated the blackness of the knoll, pushing through to its southern side, where Pakriaa joined them. Even in that short passage the heaviness of dark had altered with a promise. There were few clouds. The day (if it ever came) would be hot, windless, and beautiful. No more blue fireflies were wandering. The planet Lucifer had become three gray enigmas of lake and meadow and sky, but in this blind hush when morning was still the supposition of a dream, the shapes of the trees were attaining a separate reality; in the west Paul could find a hint of the low hills standing between him and the West Atlantic.

Seventy or eighty miles over yonder Dorothy's brown eyes would be watching for first-light on the sea, watching for it not on the great sea, he knew, but on the channel that shut her away from the mainland, from himself. With his child at her breast, another unknown life in the womb. Ann Bryan too, her troubled secret mind still full of protest at the contradictions and unfulfilled promises which made up the climate of life on Lucifer as well as elsewhere; and the ancient giantess Kamon, and Rak and Muson, Samis, Arek, and those giant children perennially puzzling and lovable.... No time. Mijok was peering out on the west side of the knoll. "Nicely hidden. Your soldiers are very good, Abro Pakriaa," said the giant, whose knowledge of war was almost as dim a product of theory as his knowledge of the planet Earth, where his Charin friends had been born.

The pygmy princess did not answer. Paul thought with held-in anger: Can't she understand even now that Mijok is one of us, the best of us...? But Pakriaa was staring south; she might not have heard. She pointed.

Thus, after a year of waiting, wonder, rumor; a year when Lantis of Vestoia, Queen of the World, had been a half-mythical terror, symbol of tyranny and danger but not a person; a year that Ed Spearman spoke of as "lost to the piddlings of philosophy"—Paul saw them at last.

Saw rather a waving of the grass, a cluster of dots shifting, bobbing, advancing. Pakriaa's tree-frog voice was calm: "They come fast. They want to reach our forest before the light makes the omasha fly. Your plan is good, Paul: we hold them in the open, the omasha have good meat."

A man could dourly accept it, somehow. Bred to gentleness, undestructive labor, study, contemplation, Paul could tell himself that a certain spot (even as it bloomed like a nodding flower in the telescopic sights) was not flesh and blood and nerve, only a target. Would it be so if I were fighting only for myself...? He held the spot in focus; he said, "Your soldiers are prepared for the fire stick? They know they must not charge till they have the order from you?"

Her voice had warmth: "And they know you are my commander."

Paul squeezed the trigger.

Too soon—and too damned quiet. The clever makers of twenty-first-century firearms on Earth had cut down the shout of a .30 caliber to a trivial snap. The savage eyes out there might not even have caught the flash at the muzzle. There ought to have been the glare and circumstance of a rocket. How could they be panicked by a silly pop and a spark? Even though—well, one of the dots had vanished, true enough. Maybe he had killed his first human being.

He glanced westward, wondering how soon the gray must change to saffron and crimson. The new red moon—there it was. A bloody sliver of a sword above the far shore of the lake.

And he saw the boats.

They were half a mile out. No others were visible north of them, but that meant nothing: these might or might not be the lead canoes of the fleet. The noise of drum boats in the south was constant: those would stay anchored in hiding, letting their wrath appear to come from all parts of the world.

The leading boat jumped to clarity in the sights. Forward the bark roofing reached the gunwale; aft, the sides were open to leave space for two paddlers. Paul saw the tight mouth of the one on the port side: she could have been Pakriaa's blood sister. Now it was necessary to think of Abro Pakriaa's ambassador torn in quarters, head and arms sent back as a message from the Queen of the World—until the mind of the student of Christopher Wright rebelled: Vengeance was one of the ape's first discoveries. It became more necessary to think: Make it a good head shot—she won't feel it....

It was not a very good shot. The scream came weakly across the water. The paddler tumbled, an arm dangling. The starboard paddler seemed not to understand and labored stupidly, making the canoe lurch to port. The prow of a following boat rammed it, tore away the matting, revealed the huddled soldiers who became splashing legs and arms in a sudden foam. While the land army came on....

Dots that were bald red heads, white specks that were spear blades. A simple arithmetic: less than a hundred rounds for the rifle; four hundred soldiers; a heart divided but angry, and the devotion of an eight-foot giant with a big stick. Against six thousand in the land army alone. "Pakriaa, it's a single column—the fools! Send your bowmen out west, catch them on the flank." Pakriaa ran down the knoll.

Paul shot twice at the head of the column. A flurry. No halt. Some of the boats were no longer sliding north, but driving down on the beach, forty or fifty, like hornets from a torn nest. Another mistake—no, not if it diverts them from the camp. Pakriaa's hundred on this side of the knoll were holding firm for an order. Paul's wave was enough: they spread out in the grass at the edge of the beach, quivering like waiting cats. The light was changing their bodies from vagueness to familiar copper, black skirts, white body paint.... Mijok tore a half-buried rock from the ground and hurled it out to splinter the nearest boat. But the soldiers would merely swim ashore. "Mijok! Stay with me!"

The head of that column was less than two hundred yards away. Paul fired mechanically, seeing life tumble backward and lie still. "Let them see us now, Pakriaa, Mijok——"

They strode down the south slope of the knoll in plain sight under the beginning of morning as the bowmen in the meadow released a harsh flight. The beach on the left became a seething of yells, snarling, trampling, clash of white stone. First-light—first-light—and where in damnation is Ed Spearman with the lifeboat...?

The column was confused by the many pressing up from behind. A few dozen spearwomen streamed out toward Pakriaa's archers; a second and third flight downed most of them—the little men had skill. No Vestoian bowmen had appeared. "Now, Pakriaa——"

Her one cry brought the spearwomen out of the grass west of the knoll, skimming forward like red bullets, spears low in the left hand until they crashed into the column; then weapons rose and plunged and rose.

The Vestoians wore no white paint. Their leaders had caps of green. Their grass skirts were mere fringes. They died easily. They killed easily.

Some distance down the column—for it was still a column, still a rolling machine that could not halt—a tall structure was swaying, hard to assess in this tortured twilight. A litter? Lantis of Vestoia, the Queen of the World herself? Paul checked his own running advance to send two shots at it. Then he and Mijok were surrounded by a writhing of arms, white-stone, and blood, Mijok raging but bewildered. Paul saw Pakriaa's spear drive down below naked ribs and withdraw from what sprawled on the ground. She was untouched. Her lean little body dripped with sweat, her teeth gleamed in a devil's grin. Two purple-skirted captains joined her; the three smashed into a cluster of shrieking souls who only began to understand what was happening.

Arithmetic still ruled. This column might be only one of many pushing up between lake and hills, bent on reaching Pakriaa's forest before the omasha soared in from those hills to feed on living and dead.

Mijok brushed through the fighters with his shield and down the line till he was clear of Pakriaa's white-painted demons. His stick swung, destroying everything in a half circle before him. He was not confused now, not even shouting, but saving breath. He worked stolidly, like a man beating at a swarm of rats.... Pakriaa jumped on a fallen thing to point at that clumsy framework down the line. "Lantis! That is Lantis——"

The litter wobbled toward the center of confusion on the shoulders of six women. Paul fired twice again at it. He had a glimpse of a scrawny figure with a high green headdress leaping down, snatching a spear, vanishing in an improvised protective phalanx. He shot into that, dropping one of the outer soldiers. Mijok saw; he changed the course of his attack, a bulldozer aiming at a new clump of brush. Pakriaa screamed in frenzy, without meaning. Her spear was still a part of her. She was bleeding from a thigh wound; her bright blue skirt had been torn away; she glittered with sweat and paint and blood, a dancing devil mindlessly happy. Then she was down once more in the press, squirming toward the phalanx, and Paul could not shoot.

But it was the toiling giant, Paul thought, who made Lantis break. Again he saw the snarling face of the Queen of the World and heard her squeal an order. Before Mijok could cut his way to her the phalanx was running, sheltered by the mere mass of soldiers. It was necessary to call Mijok back.

The whole Vestoian army was running. "Pakriaa!" Paul plunged after her, caught her shoulder. "No pursuit!" Her eyes glazed in mad rejection; he thought she would bite his wrist. "Turn your soldiers! Bring them down on the Vestoians from the boats—the boats!"

She could understand that. Her order was the shriek of a rusty nail on glass, and it turned them. It brought them howling down to the beach to aid what was left of the first hundred. The water was a jumble of abandoned boats—even the paddlers had struggled ashore to kill and die.

Mijok ploughed in a second time.... That ended it. Some of the Vestoians might have glimpsed what he did to the land soldiers. A few forgot all custom and threw their spears, which Mijok's shield carelessly turned; then they stared with sickness at their empty hands and waited for the club. Meanwhile the strengthened crowd of pygmies worked on till the sand was redder than the sky and there was no more to be done. "Back!"

Pakriaa screamed "No!" and pointed south. Paul stumbled on something slippery. He stooped to her, yelling, "Omasha! The sky will be full of them. Let them fight Lantis. We've lost a hundred already——"

Her face became sane and blank in agony. "My people—my people——"

"Yes! And other boats are still going north. Your soldiers must pick up the hurt and run for it."

There were not many living wounded in this sudden quiet. A spear has scant mercy. And the lifeboat had not come.... Mijok was holding out his shield on both arms; he had tossed his stick aside. "Put them on this. I can carry six—seven." When the shield could hold no more he lifted it, his face contorted and changed. "Paul—I told myself I was back in the old life, when we always killed them if we could. But the new laws—oh, Paul, the laws——"

"War perverts all laws. But the laws are true. It is—climbing a mountain, Mijok: we slip, fall back, try again. Nothing good in war, only necessity, choice of evils. Now make the best speed you can, friend—don't wait for us." Mijok ran with his vast strides, holding the shield out in front so that the motion of his body would not jounce it.

Pakriaa would not move till the last of the survivors had stumbled past her. They were disciplined. Already some of the soft bowmen had taken out arrows of the whining, glittering type that sometimes frightened off the omasha. They were ready. Paul tried to count, gave it up. Less than three hundred. The archers had not suffered much. Paul said, "Your leg is hurt, Abro Pakriaa. I'll carry you."

She was indifferent. "I thank you." He slung his rifle and caught her up, naked and slippery with blood and acrid-smelling paint. Her weight was less than forty pounds. Her head lolled back; she whispered to the sky, "No one should call me Abro. I am Pakriaa the child, weak as a male, a fool. I could have followed. I could have brought her to the ground. I let her go. I am a red worm. I blame you for it, Paul-Mason. You and your friends. All of you—except Sears, who is a god with a window on another world."

"Hush! The world Sears shows you in the microscope is this world, Pakriaa. He tells you so himself. And I tell you there'll be a new way——"

She was not listening. Still he saw no threat of brown wings, and no lifeboat. But time was a deception; dawn on Lucifer was abrupt on cloudless mornings. The battle which had seemed long as heart-break had been a skirmish, a brush of advance parties lasting perhaps ten minutes from his first shot to the retreat. Pakriaa's head twitched from side to side; her eyes were dry. "I have betrayed Ismar, Creator-and-Destroyer-Who-Speaks-Thunder-in-the-Rains——"

"Pakriaa——"

"My people are to burn me in the pit for the kaksmas with lamp oil. I will order it. I would have been Queen of the World." Making no effort to escape from his arms, she burst into rage at him; a rage pitiable, not dangerous: "Why have you come, you sky people, you speakers of new words? We had our life, no need of you. We were brave—you weaken us with words, with words. Your friendship is the green-flower weed that kills the self. You make children of us. You break our beautiful image of the god and tell us she never lived. You say that now?" She slashed her fingers down her side, drawing blood.

Firing? Firing at the camp?

She clung to him, wailing: "And now you carry me. I cannot even hate you. You steal our strength. The priests were right—the priests——Ismar, help me! Ismar!"

Paul forced himself into a run. It was firing, rapid and sharp, pistols and rifles. The ammunition would melt fast at that rate. He could hear yelling. Catching up with the running soldiers, leaving them behind, he could see Mijok, far ahead, swerve to the left.

And the lifeboat was in action.

It curved grandly from near the surface of the lake, which was dim with smoke. It circled over jungle, descended in another swoop at the canoes. Red bodies tumbled overside; the silver nose tilted as if in disdain; the jet spoke for one second, blasting the near canoes into nothing, sending up the further ones in yellow fire, driving the lifeboat into its seeming-careless leap. But there was still firing from the gray stone fortress, a human tangle on the beach before it, a high long screaming.

Forward detachments of the lake fleet must have passed in the dark. Paul ran on, only his arms remembering Pakriaa. She slipped down, grabbed a spear as her soldiers caught up with her, and ran straight for the beach.

That part of the agony was almost done. No more boats were coming in—Ed Spearman's sky weapon had seen to that. There were more canoes, many more, but they were holding off, grouping clumsily at a distance. Paul waited for the lifeboat to slip over him and waved to the south. Spearman altered the course of the glide, dropping after one more group of panicked boats but heading south. A longer burst of the jet, and Spearman's weapon lifted, straightened, shot out of sight across the meadow.

Paul could picture the big man's intent and mirthless grin, the cold gray eye alert on the fuel gauge. And when this fuel was gone—no more. It might stand for a while, somewhere, a decaying artifact....

Those left alive on the beach were bringing in casualties. The boats were still withdrawing. Christopher Wright was in the fortress with the wounded, his narrow face tight in the misery of a doctor who can do almost nothing. "Doc—how many have we lost here?"

"You! I had almost—Oh, Mijok, what've you got there...? Paul, they jumped us at first-light. No time even to remind Ed to go after you——"

"No, he did right. More needed here. We've stalled the land army, but they'll come on. They have to." In the sky the brown dots had appeared at last, pouring from their foul rock ledges in the hills. All of them were flying south. "Pakriaa, look! Lantis has two wars now."

She stood naked and stiff, watching, her underlip thrust out, despair giving way to a glare of satisfaction at the far-off wings, the beasts who ate everything, feared nothing. The southwestern sky was heavy with them. Paul had been right; he sickened at his own cleverness. "How many, Doc?"

"Forty or worse. This defense on the beach was by Kamisiaa's people and our giant girls—who can shoot." Paul saw the golden-furred girl Lisson smile uneasily at him; there was a sober stare from brown Tejron. The other two giant women, old Karison and young Elron, seemed more deeply disturbed, Elron studying her rifle as if it were a living thing. Wright said, "With Abro Brodaa's help I made the others stay in the woods where you posted 'em. Surok ran over from the right flank—I had him run back and tell Sears and the rest to sit tight.... Pakriaa"—Wright strode out to her—"let me bind that up—you're bleeding." She permitted it....

The boats were clustering a quarter mile away. Paul fumbled for his field glasses; they were lost. Little Abroshin Nisana, whom he had ordered to remain at the fortress, spoke beside him, slowly and carefully because her English was not good: "Commander, Abro Samiraa is return. The plan—good. She crossed the stream, catch them in blackness. A few escape. We lose twenty. One was Abro Duriaa—I am not know how she is killed." She scuffed her little seven-toed foot in the dust; there was nothing alien in her smile. "Those who return Tocwright is send west." She was puzzled, not disapproving. "Why are we most strong in the west? The Vestoians follow lake shore."

He said, not quite honestly, "Their straightest approach to Abro Pakriaa's village—your village—is in the west. Were there prisoners?"

"Abro Samiraa is not like to take prisoners. We took not any on the beach. Wrong?"

He smothered a sigh of exhaustion. "It may not matter." With Mijok, the stout giantess Tejron was moving among the wounded. Paul noticed a heap of torn cloth, all that remained of Earth-made shorts and jackets and overalls, ripped for bandages. Wright's idea, no doubt, and good: the pygmies' pounded-bark fabric was a poor second best. After the war we can go naked—fair enough.... He saw a pygmy woman shrink from Tejron's approach; she might be from one of the northern villages, her stoicism unequal to accepting the touch of the huge beings she would always have regarded as wild animals. Paul knelt, hoping to reassure her, as Tejron eased a bandage around a pierced abdomen. There would be internal bleeding. "You are from the north?"

She looked hurt that he did not know her face. "I am of Abro Brodaa's village." Then in spite of her shrinking her question was directed at Tejron: "Abro Brodaa has say to us—we are all one flesh. That—that——"

Tejron was able to say, "That is true." And while Paul searched for other words that might affirm, comfort, explain, the soldier died.

The only omasha now visible were soaring stragglers. The swarm would have found the army of Lantis—which must and would continue to advance. There was a limit to the gorging of the bat-winged beasts; they too could die on the spears. Meantime the lifeboat was gone, the boats were landing, in a moment of darkly sweet quiet which was the eye of the storm.

Paul checked the giant girl Lisson from firing at the landing party. "Save ammunition." He indicated a tall blue-flowered shrub a hundred yards out in the meadow. "We wait at the edge of the woods until they pass that bush, then charge them. If they break us down here, everyone is to fight west, away from the lake—west. Now run down the line, pass on these two orders." Lisson sped away, her golden fur bright and unstained. "Doc—get the wounded together, have the other women and Mijok take them west, beyond Sears' group, well back in the woods. Try to find out where Abara's got to with the olifants but send a runner back (if there's time)—don't come back yourself. And keep Mijok with you. I don't want him to do any more fighting if we can help it—it's tearing him up inside."

"I——" Wright checked himself, nodded, hurried back into the fortress.

"Pakriaa, Abro Kamisiaa, get your soldiers at the edge of the woods."

They vanished. The meadow was empty of life; the many open eyes on the beach would not see what was to come. Wright's party left the enclosure, Mijok carrying the shield. Wright could not look back nor wave, for his own arms were full, his head bent in some consoling speech. Paul was striding for the woods when Pakriaa met him and murmured in contempt, "We hide too, Commander?"

He answered out of a moment of black indifference. (Probably we all die and everything I have done is a mistake.) "Pakriaa, they may break easier if they don't see us till we charge." She shrugged, following him into the obscurity, pointedly ignoring Nisana, who came to his other side, perhaps still hating the little captain for her independence of yesterday, when Paul was chosen commander of this grotesque army.

The Vestoians from the boats were rising out of the grass and coming forward. Steadily now, with no more apparent haste than the first breakers leading a destroying wave. It was possible to think with amazing leisure of the high meadows and wooded roads of New Hampshire. Paul's brother had always been a little too fat and fond of ice cream. There was a bookstore in Brattleboro. And the waves of the South China Sea were moving mountains with snowcaps of foam as they came in on Lingayen. Why, there was a war there once, more than a hundred years ago, when the Republic of Oceania was hardly even a thought. Yes: they called it a Second World War....

The Vestoians passed the blue shrub. The breaker was red, with a foam of white-tipped spears.

Paul was swept into the open, not only by the howling drive of his own pygmy army, but by the machine within, relentless again, briefly free from the compromise of thought. He was firing with precision in the scant time available before the white-painted bodies crashed into the unpainted and churned up a froth of battle.

He had time to wonder why Nisana was here with him a few yards back of the hand-to-hand frenzy. She was not afraid; her spear was balanced. A break in the line of fighters let through a Vestoian soldier, dark mouth squared in a yell. Nisana's spear widened the mouth to a death mask and withdrew. Paul stepped into the breach and sent a few shots toward a trio of green-capped leaders. Something slapped and gouged at his chest—nothing serious. But his own fighters to the left of him were going down, outnumbered. He shouted at a brief gleam of Pakriaa's face, "West! Fight west!"

Golden Lisson was running back from her errand, her rifle waving, her lips straining in wild laughter. She passed him, trying to bring her rifle into use as she ran; it did not fire. A Vestoian was forcing Nisana away from Paul and beating down her spear. "Why, damn you!" The Vestoian face dissolved in pulp and strangeness under his rifle butt, and Paul reeled back, believing for an unbounded second that ghosts from a place only a few light-years away had swirled across this stinking battlefield to shriek at him: "Yes! Your people always fought that way—the ape picked up a stone...." But Nisana was alive; Nisana was unhurt and alive. He could look up again and see the girl Lisson also using her rifle as a flail.

She was between him and the beach. Three pygmies had caught the butt, and now she swung them absurdly high; she had almost shaken them off when a spear pierced her arm and hung there. The rifle dropped. She was down, under the leaping spears and red bodies. She did not even cry out again; the golden fur was reddened and defiled. Paul beat his way toward her, scarcely seeing what his swinging rifle hit, knowing it was too late, forgetting his own order to drive west. Aware too of another tawny shape flashing toward him.

Surok, who had loved Lisson, who would have been her playmate in the next Red-Moon-before-the Rains. Paul tried to stop him—but if any sound came out of his own throat it would have been lost against Surok's mindless crying. The giant tore into the press around Lisson's body and fell almost at once, crushing a few as he rolled....

"West! Stay behind my rifle, Nisana—-"

It had become a methodical insanity like Mijok's, a cutting of red hay that spouted blood. He noticed blood on his right hand too—nothing: front sights of the rifle gouging him. The Vestoians in this direction were thinning out and giving way. He caught up with a white-splashed back and bandaged thigh—Pakriaa, ploughing her way west. Abro Samiraa drove across his path in the wrong direction, chasing an isolated group of three; squat and heavy-faced, she looked happy and more than life-size in the moment of her death, as she took a spear thrust over her heart and lay down with the enemy to grin at the sky and cease hating.

A rifle barked ahead of him. That could only be Sears Oliphant: Wright would surely follow orders and keep Mijok and the giant women with him to protect the wounded.... Abro Brodaa was fighting through to aid Pakriaa, not yelling, not excited, keeping somehow an air of dreamy contemplation, as if the arms driving her spear and dagger were not quite hers. Nisana cried out, "They are not following! They go back——"

It was true. Partly true. Here in this patch of bloody meadow there was not much left to fight. The defenders had functioned like a single organism, forming a new semicircular line. Behind it was a quiet, where Pakriaa was gasping, pounding her foot into a body that felt nothing.

And this dear monster, this fat naked grotesque, panting and smeared with red—this must be Sears Oliphant, late of John Hopkins University. The monster smiled in a black beard. "Few got by, oh my, yes. Tamisraa's girls fixed 'em—had to club m' rifle—dirty cave man—no fear, Paul—no fear! Muscle man with an empty head. They had—couple bowmen with 'em—no harm done." No harm? Was he unaware of the broken arrow shaft below his ribs, deeply bedded, with dark blood oozing around the wood? "They quit, Paul?"

"They haven't quit." He looked south, seeing why they wouldn't quit.

"Tamisraa got a bad one—throat." Sears coughed painfully. "I sent her to Doc—he's just back of those trees. And my pets, Paul, my olifants, why, they're standing fast, boy. With Abara, bless him—'bout half mile north. You can't beat 'em. We must figure some way to ferry 'em over to the island—must—they're people, those olifants——"

"You go to Doc yourself, Jocko, and fast. That——"

"Oh, that, that. Mere prac'l dem'stration nobody loves fat man——"

The Vestoians would not quit because of what was coming half a mile away in the south under a cloud of brown wings, coming fast. The horde would be ignoring the omasha, striking them aside, spearing them when there was time, granting them the necessary toll for passage, and coming fast. Oh, they would be less than six thousand now—somewhat less. Meanwhile the remnant from the boats was waiting, regrouping, drawing breath, readying itself for the climax of massacre, maybe deliberately postponing it until Lantis of Vestoia, Queen of the World, could arrive to enjoy it. Paul tried again to count his people in the sturdy half circle. Black Elis was striding among them, a great stick in each hand, rumbling comfort and encouragement, and none of them shrank away from him.

It looked like less than seven hundred. A hundred lost at the knoll; forty, Wright said, in the first skirmish at the camp; twenty in Samiraa's night expedition. Perhaps three hundred in this last wave of the battle. And Samiraa herself; Duriaa; Tamisraa wounded, Pakriaa insane with grief; Lisson and Surok dead. Lame Kamisiaa—Paul could not find her. Abro Brodaa—still calm, unhurt, competent. Very well—seven hundred against somewhat less than six thousand of the land army, somewhat less than four thousand from the boats.

How I dreamed! There would be no southward drive to the island. The omasha alone made it an absurdity. He had been idiotic to imagine it.

Pakriaa broke her spear across her knee. She walked out into the meadow toward the advancing swarm. She looked back stupidly at Paul's shout, and Nisana ran to her, crying out in the old language. Pakriaa, with no change of expression, lunged at the captain, striking flat-handed across her face, forcing her back until Paul reached them to interfere and Sears caught Pakriaa's wrist, mumbling, "Come now—come with me, princess."

"I am no princess."

"I call you so," Sears said clearly, and speaking with sternness for possibly the first time in his life. "Now come with me."

Paul stammered, "Have Doc get that damned arrow out of you. Then he's to start north with the wounded—at once."

"North." Sears nodded.

"There are no gods," said Pakriaa.

"Yes, north. We'll catch up with you."

"I thought of you as a god."

"Think of me as a friend who loves you. It is better." She went with him, stumbling as Paul had never seen her do, and when the leaves closed behind them it seemed to Paul that there was surely the cloud of another world. She might have been a small girl going for a walk in the woods with her grandfather....

There was no lifeboat above that rolling swarm. Ed Spearman must have——No time to think about it.

But he had to, a little. Spearman was forced down by lack of fuel and killed. Or forced down, isolated somewhere, miles away. Or he had kept good watch of the fuel gauge until there was just enough for another trip to the island and had gone—right, reasonable, what he ought to have done, what Paul would have ordered him to do if he could have.... Paul turned to Brodaa. "Your sister Kamisiaa—I don't see her——"

"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 gods? There must be other gods. Not Ismar...."

Elis watched the meadow over the crouching bowmen. "Within you, Captain. The god 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."