"Form your people in three lines with linked hands. The giant women Karison and Elron, and Elis, will guide them at the head, because their night vision is better than yours and mine. Mijok and Tejron will walk beside us. We must travel all night. I think the Vestoians will not."
"They will not," the princess Brodaa said. He wished he could see truly what was happening in her little face. "They will not because they have no giants or Charins to help them." It carried no hint of the obsequious.
"Thank you, Abro Brodaa. Wait here a moment." He patted Millie's trunk—she was a young beast, nervous but fond of him—and made her kneel. "Help Nisana climb up to me.... Abro Brodaa—the people of your village——"
"Most of them lost." It might have been the oncoming night itself speaking temperately. "These remaining are a few from all the villages. I think they will follow me. And I will go with you...."
In the rest of the night—a silence and a drifting, on the surge and thrust of the great animal under him—it was possible to reach a kind of sleep, knowing his body would not relax enough to fall or to weaken his hold on Nisana, who trusted him. She was deeply asleep in the first part of the night, occasionally snoring, a comic noise like a puppy's whine. All day she had never been out of his sight; she had fought like a hellcat, but singlemindedly, saving her strength to deal with those who threatened him.
It would have been possible to abandon these people; at one time, Paul remembered, he had almost favored it himself, and Ed Spearman had very nearly hinted that it might be better to join forces with the tyranny in the south.... Life seemed cheap to Pakriaa's tribe—others' life. Devil-worshipping cannibals, capable of every cruelty, committed for thousands of years to all the superstitions that ever crippled intelligence. You had to look beyond that, said Christopher Wright the theorist, the doctor, the anthropologist, the impractical daydreamer. Anyway I saved a Vestoian—if she lives. One balanced against how many that I destroyed...? No answer.... Unless you can see a world where the ways of destruction become obsolete under a government of laws. With the devils of human nature—the vanities, the greeds, the follies and needless resentments, the fear of self-knowledge, dread of the unfamiliar, the power lust of the morally blind, the passion for easy solutions, scapegoats, panaceas—how do you see such a world...? You say, Christopher Wright, that no one is expendable. I believe you. But—when I must choose between the life of myself or my friends and the life of the one whom the stream of history has tossed against me as my enemy——
When I do that, I only discover once more that I am caught in the same net with the rest of my kind and cannot escape until all of them escape—escape into a region of living where men do not set traps for each other and the blind do not lead.
Therefore——
"Are you awake, Nisana?" Her even breathing quickened. It seemed to Paul that there was faint color in his glimpses of sky; he remembered the silver moon that had appeared over the jungle with first-light so long ago—yesterday morning. The passage of the red moon around Lucifer was swift: tonight it would be rising two hours before first-light and would be something broader than the gory scimitar he had seen from the knoll.
"I am awake."