Wright was carefully calm. "I'll go over, with Paul, Elis—and—"
"And me," said Dorothy, not smiling.
"Well... Okay, Dope."
Pakriaa's thin wrinkled face turned to him. "Nisana and I? Miniaan—she would remember the Vestoian dialect—but she is at the city. It would need an hour to send for her, and then it would be getting dark."
"Yes, come with us...."
The site of Jensen City was not where Wright and Paul had originally dreamed of it but two miles south, where the radiance of Sears Lake hung in the hills. A gap in the west admitted ocean winds; the outlet of the lake ran for a mile to the edge of a red stone cliff and tumbled over in a waterfall five hundred feet high. There would one day be houses along that mile of river. Already, near the waterfall, there was a temple of red and black stone devoted to quiet without ritual, thought of sometimes as a memorial to Sears and to the other dead, more often simply as a place to go for the satisfactions of silence. It had no name; Paul hoped it would never have one.
Miniaan of Vestoia was an eager citizen. The old wound had left one side of her head cruelly scarred; from the other side she was beautiful, by Charin as well as pygmy standards. Younger than Pakriaa, she was the mother of four, by Kajana—the archer whom Mijok had once carried on his shield, who would never walk again nor live a day without pain, and who was more cheerful as a permanent habit of mind than any of the other pygmy survivors of that war. The fifty-four pygmy children of Jensen City were all fathered by Abara and Kajana—a fact which caused old Abara to draw dead-pan comparisons between himself and Mister Johnson and to grow darkly desperate when Kajana wistfully asked him to explain why it was a joke....
Elis shipped the oars; Paul let down the anchor, a heavy block of stone, in two fathoms of blackening water; Elis lifted the dugout over the side and held it for them. He himself swam the short distance to the beach and eased the canoe through the shallows. Even now at low tide there was barely a quarter mile of gray sand between water and cliffs. Chipping away of building stone had created a fair path a hundred feet up; beyond, natural irregularities made it possible to climb another two hundred to the first setback of the great sea wall—a ledge which ran only as far as the next patch of beach, five miles south. Sunset had been ending when Argo IV came home; here there was a depth of evening quiet, no sign of smoke or life, no sound but the long hiss and moaning of small waves. "We might make a fire here," Wright said. "But there's enough light. They—they?—must have seen Argo."
"There," Dorothy said, and ran up the sand.
The others watched in frozen helplessness as the woman came down the crude cliff path, gaunt, seeming tall only because of the gauntness—flaring ribs, thighs fallen in, every arm bone visible. Her hair was black disorder to her waist, her body a battleground of bruises, dirt, scars old and new, and she winced away from Dorothy with protesting hands. "You mustn't touch me because I'm very dirty, but I know who you are. Besides, I had to burn the last of my clothes. My baby died. I know who you are. You see, my milk stopped. You're Dorothy Leeds. I left him on the cliff. Matron would not approve. You see——"