Chapter 4

Paul heard the drums from within the room that was his and Dorothy’s--merely a section of the thatched lean-to inside the fortress wall, but Dorothy had given it the reality of a living place. There were no chairs: one sat on a rug which was a cured uskaran pelt, a gift from Abro Brodaa, whose people had hunted down the tigerish beast after it raided her village. The bed was only a clumsy framework with an asonis hide stretched across it. But the shelter had become dear with use, and Dorothy had hung a few of Paul’s paintings on the walls--a portrait of Mijok, one of Christopher Wright which had caught something of the old man’s brooding alertness. The red jungle flowers were too cloyingly rich to be kept here, but Dorothy had found a blue meadow shrub, and a white bloom that hid in shady ground and recalled the scent of jonquils...

It was too dark to see her plainly; Paul knew her eyes were open on him. Barely audible against his shoulder, she said, “I thought I’d be insatiable. I only want to be near and not think.” Nevertheless thought goaded her. “Ten thousand--ten thousand--What can you do?”

All he could say was rehearsed, mechanical, and she had heard it before. “Frontal attack first, because the pygmies couldn’t be led into anything else. But I shall turn it into an ordered retreat--to the island. Drive south, skirt the southern end of the hills, then straight for the coast. We’ll be at the island in--oh, soon--”

“But the range--the coastal mountains opposite the island--you can’t cross them--they rise so sheer--”

“Remember the river that flows almost due west from these little hills? It comes to the sea north of the range. We’ll make rafts to get down that, I think. There aren’t any falls. At the coast we’ll contrive something--dugouts with outriggers. I’ve already shown old Rak how to make one; he may be working on it now.”

Dorothy pressed a hand over his mouth. She stammered, “Make this moment last.” But even during the fine sharp agony there were words: “I shall keep--a bonfire on that beach--night and day...” and when his hand was slack in her hair and she seemed to be hardly breathing, Paul heard the drums.

They were far off and everywhere. Only the remembering brain insisted they were on the lake. They were not sound at all, at first. A pressure pain in the back of the skull, a rasping of nerve endings. Nothing but drums. Hollow logs with a hide membrane, rubbed and pounded by tiny painted savages. “You must go tonight after all.” Dorothy could not speak. He put Helen in her fumbling arms; he hurried out to the open space, saw the eye of the lifeboat returning. The drums took on a rhythm, a throbbing in 5/8 time, rapid, venomous. But far away. Still not quite sound--Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah-ah-ah--growing no nearer, no louder, but gaining in vicious urgency, relentless as a waterfall, a runaway machine. Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah...

Paul hoped that Wright and Sears might be sleeping. It would be an hour yet before Pakriaa could return with the other leaders, if indeed she ever did. Elis and Abara were on sentry duty. The three giant children still at the camp--would they be sleepless, keyed up to vivid fantasies of the island, like Charin children before a great journey?

Kamon sat alone by the gate. A small figure drooped at the other end of the enclosure. Since there was no immediate task for her, Paul had told Abroshin Nisana to rest, but he knew her little bald head turned to follow him. “Kamon--I’m going to have the third flight made tonight. There would be room for you too in the boat. Will you go?”

Black lips and ancient white face smiled up at him. “If you wish.”

“I do. Stay close to Dorothy. That will leave four of you giant women here. I wish they could all go. Tejron’s sober and wise--she’ll keep them together. You’re more needed on the island. Don’t let Dorothy be much alone.”

The old woman mused: “This Charin love is a strange thing. It isn’t our natures for two persons to come so close. But I see something good in it, I think...” Paul struggled to hear her over the almost subsonic yammer of the drums. Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah--it seemed not to trouble Kamon much, though she would be hearing it even more plainly. “I will stay with her, Paul,” she said, and watched the long glide as Spearman brought the boat in.

On the drawbridge Spearman cocked his head at the drums. “That’s it.” He read Paul’s thought: “The rest tonight, huh? Better, I’d think.”

“Yes. Get something to eat, why don’t you? Kamon is going too.”

Spearman nodded, unsurprised. “Not hungry ... Wonder how long they keep it up...”

Wright came from his room with sleepless eyes. “Till they attack, probably. All night, maybe all tomorrow. To soften us up. Damn them...”

Somehow Paul was walking to the boat, carrying the baby for Dorothy. He climbed in with her, adjusted the straps. Helen waked and was fretful till she found the breast “You bore her alone--without any--”

“Alone!” Dorothy was astonished. “I had you. Doc’s a fine medical man, whatever he says. Don’t you remember how Mijok held out his arm for me to grab when it got tough? He said, ‘I am a tree.’” Now she was holding his look with an indestructible smile until the rest came and Paul had to back out of the cramped cabin to give them room; then had to stand aside while the bright relic of twenty-first-century man spat its green flame and hot gases at the lake and leaped to soaring and slid into moonless darkness above the hills. The drums wept, raved, obscenely whispered.

Paul did not know Sears Oliphant was with him till he heard the voice: “I think, Paul--the drums defeat their purpose. They make me sore instead of scared. I think you won’t need to worry about me, Paul.”

“I never have.” He glanced at the fat man’s holstered automatic, remembered the cleanness of the rifle hanging in Sears’ room. “My father used to say most men are good watchdogs, who know they’re scared but stand guard in spite of it; only a few are rabbits and possums.” Paul turned his back on the hills. Nothing was there to see, nothing at all. “I wish you’d known my father. He was a tall man. Nuts about animals--always brought ‘em into the talk--illustration, example. Couldn’t stand to see even a wasp beating against the glass; you never knew when a deer mouse would climb out of his pocket and run down his pants leg.” Paul laughed. The drums fretted in 5/8, passionate, soft, cruel.

Sears watched blue fireflies over a lake so peacefully still that the sapphire reflections were as real as their cause. “A teacher, wasn’t he?”

“For a while, till he settled in New Hampshire. They wouldn’t let him teach nineteenth and twentieth-century history as he saw it. He saw it in terms of ethical conflict, the man versus the state, self-reliance versus the various dreary socialisms, enlightened altruism versus don’t-stick-your-neck-out, and he didn’t give a good god-damn whether the first atomic submersible was built in 1952 or ‘53. Doc would have loved him too: he knew what was meant by a government of laws. He made his students search out not only theory but the actual dismal consequences of the doctrine that the end justifies the means--Alexander, Augustus, Napoleon, Lenin, Hitler. That was regarded as ‘wilfully minimizing the significance of technological advance.’ He didn’t minimize it; he just recognized that other matters were vastly more important, and he didn’t care to see the machine built up into one more mumbo jumbo. So he sent me through college by breeding children’s riding ponies and selling hatching eggs. Not a bad life, or so he said ... Jocko, will Pakriaa come back?”

“I believe so ... Ah, Chris--nice evening for the month of Charin.”

Wright was a paleness in the dark; stern, weary, tall, watching the lake, talking to himself: “The month we named for ourselves--end of Year One--oh, I do call that a pardonable vanity ... Paul, I was wholly selfish in choosing you. I’ve given you a burden no one should have to carry.”

“We’re all carrying it.”

“Thank you, son.” Wright moved away to stand alone at the rim of the lake, listening to the crawling thunder of the drums. Twice, Paul heard him speak, with an intensity beyond pain: “No one is expendable. No one is expendable...”

Sears exclaimed, “Look!” There were five white cloud-like shapes at the edge of the woods. “Oh, they’ve never done this before. Susie! What’s the matter? There now, girl, come tell the old man--”

Paul followed him. “It’s the drums--don’t you think?”

The five had been complaining softly, but that ceased as Sears moved among them, patting their legs, soothing them. “But Paul--their grounds are mostly north of here--there now, Mister Smith, you old bastard--so why didn’t they travel away from the sound? Take it easy, Millie, Miss Ponsonby--”

“The wild ones probably did. But these had to come to you.”

“Oh ... That detachment of Lantis--the one in the northeast--”

“Don’t think so, Jocko. Pakriaa’s spies are all around up there--we’ll have warning. Elis is posted half a mile north of us--he’d know--smell ‘em if he didn’t hear ‘em. However, I’ll go talk with him...”

The depth of forest muted the drums--a little; they were still a cumulative torture of anger in the inner darkness of the mind. Paul saved the fading power of his Earth-made radion flashlight by following his sense of the trail. He had learned to move as softly in the jungle as any Charin could hope to do--more softly than Spearman, softly enough to steal within spear range of the asonis. There was not much danger here, unless it might be from the uskaran, a beast Paul had glimpsed alive only once and then dimly, a striped thing slipping snakily out of his vision in a sun-striped afternoon; the rug in his and Dorothy’s room could almost have been a tiger pelt. The black reptiles were lovers of hot sun and shallow water, never going inland. The squeak and rustle of a kaksma horde, it was said, could be heard far off except during the rains, when all noises were smothered in the long rush and whispering of waters. For all his silence, black Elis was aware of him before Paul knew he had reached the sentry post. “Paul--isn’t it?” The night vision of the giants was better than the Charins’ but not like a cat’s; they hunted at night only if the moon was strong.

“Yes. Everything quiet?”

“Quieter than my heart.”

Paul still could not see him. “Saving my flashlight. Where are you?” Elis chuckled and slipped an invisible hand around Paul’s. “The olifants came to the meadow. We wondered what disturbed them.”

“Drums. Nothing in the northeast yet. But a great many of the pygmies are moving from the upper villages. I heard, and smelled the red flowers.” The people of Lantis, Pakriaa said, never wore those flowers, and it would not be the nature of Elis to exaggerate his powers of smell and hearing.

“I think the animals wanted Sears. Could that be, Elis?”

“Alojna--” Elis murmured the old word for them: it meant “white cloud.” “Two things nobody knows--the thoughts of Alojna and the journeys of the red moon and the white moon when we cannot see them. So we used to say. You give us a hint of knowledge of both things, and more than a hint of much greater mysteries.” Elis had always been tireless in questioning Wright; more than Mijok, he was haunted by a need to grope after intangibles, push outward the uneasy border between known and unknown. “So there’s never an end of mystery?”

“Never.” The hand was warm. “What is the nature of courage?”

The giant’s breathing was too quiet to be heard. “To go out, away from a world, in a little shell--that must have needed courage.”

“Perhaps only a response to a drive of uncomprehended forces. But I think courage is a known thing, Elis, an achievement of flesh and blood--to hear the drums in the dark and stay at the post as you are doing, as I hope I can do myself. I must go back. Lisson will come and relieve you soon...”

Pakriaa had returned, with her five equals. Wright had lit one of the clay lamps. It burned pleasantly with an oil from the carcasses of the same reptile that had once nearly destroyed Mijok, a thing which pleased Mijok, for he liked to think that a creeping danger could also be a source of light; and the use of this oil had been taught them by the pygmies, who made almost monthly expeditions to marshy regions and butchered the beasts by the dozens for the oil alone.