"Then shove off!" ordered Rurak. "We will bring up the rear and stand them off as best we can."
Even as he spoke and the two heavy boats slid away from the sheltering tree-roots a shout of hideous triumph sounded from further upstream as a flotilla of hollowed-out logs manned by the clicking, whistling Yzaps of Jokar Ged swept into view. The fugitives bent to their paddles then and slowly the gap between ceased to narrow.
Several times Rurak lifted his rocket pistol and sent a bullet crashing through a savage Yzap's head. Every time the insect men hurled a volley of spears in return that always fell woefully short. But soon Jokar Ged saw that most of his men were weaponless, save for their stone knives and short knotted clubs, and he forbade them to waste any more spears uselessly.
"Floating village," clicked Tis and they swept around an abrupt wedge of jungle growth and swung back toward the left into a widening of the river.
"Big one," grunted Elko Sohm. "Twenty-odd huts and a central dome. Better hug the shore. Bad medicine, these swamp Yzaps."
"Too late," Tis told them. "Already warriors in round boats coming to attack."
A dozen bowl-shaped craft of reeds daubed with some sticky waterproof substance were shoving off from the U shaped island of buoyant, linked water plants. Before the conical low domes of slime-smeared reeds and branches there swarmed the mates and young of the hideous Yzaps, urging their warriors on to the attack of these two hapless dugouts from further upstream.
The insect men paddled their clumsy-seeming boats swiftly across the path of the Martians and their two loyal Yzaps and then started to encircle them. They closed in.
The insect men swung up their spears ready to hurl them into the bodies of their five victims and in that instant two things happened that saved the Martians from death beneath those bristling shafts.
From far up the river a piercing challenge of hatred and savage challenge rolled up as the Yzaps of the renegade Martian swung into view, and beneath the dugouts of the trapped ones a vast saurian bulk, dulled-yellow-scaled and vast, heaved upward.