West Of The Sun, Edgar Pangborn [world of reading txt] 📗

that was evidently not the intention. When Ann conveyed curiosity, Pakriaa was astonished that anyone could be ignorant of its function. "Kaksma!" she said, and pointed west. "Kaksma...!" Convinced at last that Ann's puzzlement was genuine, she drew a picture on the earth, with such vigorous art that she herself feared the image and drew back. It was a profile view of an animal larger than a rat, long-headed with a hump on the back. She had given it a tiny eye and a forward-thrusting tooth nothing like a rodent's; the forefoot was broad and flattened, a digger's foot. Giving Ann only[70] a brief time to study it, Pakriaa spat on the image and wiped it out with a violent heel. She muttered an angry incantation and pointed to the dry wood heaped by the ditch, while her dancing fingers told of flames that would defend the village....

In the second tree-sheltered area were the industries. Men, not slaves, glanced up from the shaping of earthenware vessels. They had no potter's wheel, only their hands, but there was a kiln of baked earth. Pakriaa called a favorite over, hugged him, and sent him back with a pat on the rump. He was quite old, toothless, and giggling. They passed a row of dye pots, three women braiding fiber into flat sheets, a square of ground with part-finished spearheads, arrow points, other devices, a rack where deerlike hides were stretched in some curing process. "They sleep on those," Ann said, "and use 'em for rugs. The palace was full of 'em...."

In the rear of the village was a stockade of stripped logs, guarded by two soldier women. In the space before it, but facing away from it so that the painted eyes brooded over the village, stood a monstrous wooden idol, eight feet tall, raised on a low platform. Pakriaa led her guests before the image and knelt. It was necessary to do the same, and Ann imitated her gracefully enough. As he knelt himself, Paul saw in a backward glance that three gangling male witches had followed and were observing every motion with a rigid malevolence. It was difficult to kneel with his back to them; Spearman, he hoped, had not seen them.

The idol was exaggeratedly female, with huge carnivorous teeth indicated in white paint. A slot representing the left hand carried a nine-foot spear upright. The right arm, a natural branch of the log, reached forward and spread into a rugged table; more wood had been neatly joined to make the table five feet long, but the whole gave the effect of a swollen accepting hand, and it was foul with bloodstains old and new. Pakriaa's long murmured prayer repeated the name Ismar many times. At the end she seemed satisfied; her glance at Ann was almost a smile. Paul saw that the witches had drifted away, but the pressure of their watching remained.

Pakriaa now took them into the stockade. It seemed to[71] Paul that the guards were scarcely needed....

These naked men, women, and children had no danger in them. No life. They moved and functioned as if in life: walked, spat, scratched, yawned; a woman nursed a baby mechanically; a man strolled to a trough in the center of the compound and ate a handful of damp stuff like poultry mash, then rubbed his side against the wooden edge as a pig might. Beyond such elemental motions there was no life. A woman followed a man for several paces; both flight and pursuit were dull, unfinished, a fumbling response to a sluggish stimulus. They paid no attention to Pakriaa and the strangers. The slack emptiness of their faces denied the possibility of any thought more than a flurry in response to physical need. They were all over-plump; some of the females were scarred, but the wounds were old and healed. Paul could see no anatomical differences between them and their lively free kindred. A drug...?

Pakriaa walked among them like a farmer in a flock of chickens. She lifted a young girl, who made no effort to escape, and showed her to Ann with contented pride, pinching a fat thigh and middle. The child was limp, unexcited, mumbling a mouthful of the mash. Fighting back a retching, Ann muttered, "Paul, when can we get out of here?"

Abro Pakriaa caught the tone. She tossed the little girl away and led them out of the stockade. She seemed hurt rather than angry—disappointed that her important friends had shown no admiration at this thriving industry....

The soldiers had gathered again in the clearing, but now there was a waiting, a tension with the descent of twilight, and a gloom. A long fire had been built; Pakriaa's wave at her guests appeared to mean that they should sit where they pleased. Ann had not been able to convey the wish for an escort home, and Pakriaa's mind was plainly filled with some other, graver concern, having no more time for hospitality. Pakriaa entered her blue house. While she was gone, the soldiers seated beyond the fire scattered handfuls of earth in synchronized motions and the witches grouped behind them set up a monotone of chanting. Pakriaa returned wearing a white skirt,[72] bare of all her paint and jewelry; she walked back and forth along the line of the fire, praying, until daylight was wholly gone. At her call, old men, neither painted nor grotesque, carried out burdened hides and laid them open beside the fire: white bones, broken weapons, skirts, loincloths, necklaces, arrows, little earthen pots and wooden bowls, many images of clay. The soldiers threw themselves face down, their foreheads on their arms, and wailed.

Spearman's voice was tortured with perplexity: "Eat some, mourn for others. Murder them and love them—"

"Yes, they're human."

"Oh, shut up, Paul. What do you mean, human? These animals?"

"Human mourning, isn't it? Listen to it."

Ann spoke with held-in fury: "At least we're not cannibals. There may still be war back on Earth, but after all—"

"Better to murder in groups of a thousand at long distance? Just listen to it, Ann...."

It was music, becoming after a time the only thing existing under the red moon and the delicate unceasing dance of blue fireflies. It was the music they had heard on the first night in the jungle, a pouring forth of lamentation, wonder, supplication, whatever the spirit may feel in the contemplation of death and its troubling counterpart. A music that was meant to go on unchanging as the song of tree frogs for the thirteen hours of a night of Lucifer.... Pakriaa took no vocal part in the ritual, but sat alone, guarding the relics of the fallen. From time to time small man shapes carried new fuel to the fire. And there were stern sidelong glances from the princess: she had not forgotten her guests. Once or twice Paul caught himself dozing off, dragged into a partial hypnosis by the endless lamentation....

"Paul?"

"Yes, Nan. I'm awake." He saw Spearman's head jerk upright.

"Doc asked me yesterday—if I would bear him a child."

Spearman's arm sought for her gently. "Why bring that up now? Can't think with all this damn caterwauling."

"I—did get to thinking.... Everything we used to live[73] by—it's so far away. Paul, you're close to Doc. You understand him, I guess."

Two troubled faces were turned to Paul in the mystery of firelight. A glance from Pakriaa conveyed annoyance at the sound of voices. "Dorothy told me she wants Sears to be the father of her second. It won't take her away from me. Not natural perhaps, but right under the circumstances. Some of the most important laws and customs can't be started by us. They'll be established by our grandchildren, if we can have them."

"I know." But her upward look at Spearman's worried, half-angry face said that her decision would be made by him, no other.

"He mustn't talk. The queen no like...."

It might have been an hour later that Paul saw Spearman's head sag down on his chest. Ann leaned against him, but his arm around her had gone slack. Paul searched for the cause of a sense of danger that prickled his skin. Not the witches: they were grouped as before, chanting a faint counterpoint to the soldiers' wailing. No—it was Ed Spearman himself, and Paul came broad awake in a certainty of what would happen. Too late. Spearman's head twitched, and his unconscious throat let loose a resonant, uncompromising snore, a snore that had been famous on the great ship Argo. Sears Oliphant had always claimed that if only Ed could be harnessed in sleep to the reaction chamber ... But this was not going to be funny....

Pakriaa leaped up and shrieked a raging order. The wailing ceased. The soldiers were staggering upright, grabbing spears, forming a circle of violence around the guests before Spearman could even rise. He gasped, "Wha's matter?" and ten pygmy women were hauling him away by wrists and ankles, clear of the ground.

Paul shouted. "Don't fight 'em, Ed! Keep quiet!" Two soldiers were clinging to each of his own arms, there was a ring of shivering spears around him, and others had dragged Ann out of sight, but she was screaming as if they could understand: "Don't hurt him! He didn't do anything! Let him go!"

Without twitching his hampered arms, Paul moved[74] slowly against the circle of spears. They had no quarrel with him, he sensed, but only meant to restrain him: it was at least the only action worth a gamble. The spearwomen stepped backward away from him. The whole circle moved in slow motion, following where Spearman had been carried—through the tree shelter, on across the next clearing, and into the space before the looming god.

Ed had not been able to snatch his rifle; he still had his holstered automatic. Paul could not see Ann, nor Pakriaa. He could see Spearman's face, a concentration of craft and fighting fury. The pygmy women lifted him and flung him on the table before the idol. He was ready. He bounced like a great cat, gained his feet, and twitched out the pistol, which banged once—at the huge blade of the idol's spear. The stone blade crumbled; the crash of the little gun made his captors wince back in shocked reaction. Then Ed Spearman stooped, grasped the reaching wrist of the idol, and heaved upward with the whole of his strength.

The god swayed, groaned like a thing of life, and toppled over, squashing one of the howling witches—a blind one—like a red bug.

The village dropped into total silence. Paul could see Ann now. The pygmies had let her go. The whiteness of her face had more than terror in it: it had exultation, a glory of excitement and wrath. Paul's own captors had lurched away; his automatic had slipped into his hand without conscious effort; he searched in desperation for something that might restore his friends to steadier sanity. "Walk," he said. "Walk, don't run, to the nearest exit...."

The pygmies allowed it. The god had fallen. They even stood back, too profoundly dazed for any thought or protest.... At the edge of the village Spearman jumped in the ditch, reached for Ann, swung her up on the other side. "Did anyone bring a flashlight?"

"Oh, I—I did," said Ann, and began to cry. "Brought flashlight—'stead of gun...."

Paul stayed in the rear. "They won't follow, I think. Not for a while."

The stooping passageway was hard to find. But when they won clear of it there was the guiding sound of the[75] stream. Paul held the flashlight on the line of stepping stones until the others had crossed. Ann was still weeping in reaction. "We'll never win. It's all madness—the ship, everything. All human beings are crazy, crazy—"

"Hush, dear," Spearman said. "We got out, didn't we?"

Now, where was the trail? A madness of groping, blundering, where there was no path, no guidance, and even their little thread of light a mockery and confusion.

Abruptly, ahead of them, there were other lights, then voices—Mijok's soft rumbling, Wright's clear outcry: "There they are! All three, Mijok—"

Paul ran to him. "The others—Dorothy? Sears?"

"Right as rain, son," Wright mumbled. "Except Dot's been frantic about you since we heard the shot. We left Sears practically sitting on her—well, figuratively. Women are odd, you know: they don't like shots in the night when the best boy friend is out on the tiles."

"Had a little trouble. They may come after us—don't know ..."

Ann was quiet. Paul saw her white hands starfished on the gray of Mijok's chest. She said, "Mijok, I'm tired and sick. Will you carry me?"

Spearman groaned: "Ann, what—Use your head...."

But Mijok knelt at once to make a cradle of his arms, and Christopher Wright said, "Why not? Why shouldn't we need each other?" Mijok went ahead with her on the blind trail.

Paul heard Spearman choke: "I would have carried her." It was not meant to