The boats, they knew, were broad canoes roofed like sampans against the omasha, but with no sail. "Not moving, are they?"
"No—anchored maybe." Sears mopped his round face.
Without the telescope, Paul could see brownness on the water of Lake Argo's southern end, near the spot where the outlet tumbled over a high falls to a smaller lake. It meant that hundreds more must have been portaged past the falls from Vestoia during his two days on the island....
The fifty red-green flowing miles became a pain of delay. Sears too would be aching for the gray square of their "fortress" to claim the eye in the north, touched by early sunlight, a brave structure twelve feet high, fifty square, built of split stone by the labor of giant friends. Outside it ran a moat twenty feet wide, ten deep, with a drawbridge of logs, bark matting, grass-fiber ropes, the bottom flooded with lake water. There was room within for living quarters, a supply of smoked meat, dried vegetables.
Lantis understood scaling ladders, Pakriaa said. Lantis had patience for a siege. There was no defense, Pakriaa said, in these measures. The only defense was to attack, to retreat, and attack again. It had always been so in the old wars. It was still so with this Lantis and her Big-Village-Vestoia, this bastard begotten of a red worm and Inkar, goddess of kaksmas. It would always be so—at least, until.... Paul remembered Dorothy, cherishing Helen at her brown breast, asking neutrally, "Until what, Abro Pakriaa?"
Pakriaa had studied the giants' walls with contempt. "Until I shame this worm spawn Lantis into meeting me alone. She must respect custom. Her first answer is a—what word?—rejection, because she has fear. I have sent a second challenge. She will meet me, or her own people will condemn her. I will pin her belly to the ground. Her government will be mine." There had been no mistaking it: for the first time in the year since the idol of Ismar fell and was not restored, Pakriaa was making vast decisions wholly her own, with only perfunctory interest in what the Charins might think. In her wrath against the mighty soldier ruler in the south there was natural grief at the outrages of past years, but something else too. Her red face glaring southward said: She has what I desire; she is doing what I would do. Pakriaa had finished her answer quietly: "It is I who will be Queen of the World."
Three days ago. It could have been a mistake to leave the camp at all. Now—a streak of sunshine on gray at the end of familiar meadow. With fuel for only a few more flights, Paul knew he had never made a better landing. The drawbridge was down. Dorothy ran to meet him. Sears was shouting, "Chris! It's perfect—no kaksmas—everything Paul said it was—"
Paul stammered, "You look like a million dollars."
"Dollars. What're those?"
"I forget. What's news?"