Paul still could not see him. "Saving my flashlight. Where are you?" Elis chuckled and slipped an invisible hand around Paul's. "The olifants came to the meadow. We wondered what disturbed them."
"Drums. Nothing in the northeast yet. But a great many of the pygmies are moving from the upper villages. I heard, and smelled the red flowers." The people of Lantis, Pakriaa said, never wore those flowers, and it would not be the nature of Elis to exaggerate his powers of smell and hearing.
"I think the animals wanted Sears. Could that be, Elis?"
"Alojna—" Elis murmured the old word for them: it meant "white cloud." "Two things nobody knows—the thoughts of Alojna and the journeys of the red moon and the white moon when we cannot see them. So we used to say. You give us a hint of knowledge of both things, and more than a hint of much greater mysteries." Elis had always been tireless in questioning Wright; more than Mijok, he was haunted by a need to grope after intangibles, push outward the uneasy border between known and unknown. "So there's never an end of mystery?"
"Never." The hand was warm. "What is the nature of courage?"
The giant's breathing was too quiet to be heard. "To go out, away from a world, in a little shell—that must have needed courage."
"Perhaps only a response to a drive of uncomprehended forces. But I think courage is a known thing, Elis, an achievement of flesh and blood—to hear the drums in the dark and stay at the post as you are doing, as I hope I can do myself. I must go back. Lisson will come and relieve you soon...."
Pakriaa had returned, with her five equals. Wright had lit one of the clay lamps. It burned pleasantly with an oil from the carcasses of the same reptile that had once nearly destroyed Mijok, a thing which pleased Mijok, for he liked to think that a creeping danger could also be a source of light; and the use of this oil had been taught them by the pygmies, who made almost monthly expeditions to marshy regions and butchered the beasts by the dozens for the oil alone.
Pakriaa was almost meek. Her smile for Paul could have been a Charin smile; there was a tremor in her hands, and once they flew up to cover her ears. The drums, he thought, might be a worse pain for her than for his own breed. There was unconscious pathos in the precision of her English: "I did not make clear that I will obey you. I may have been angry; for that I am sorry—it is past. My sisters have agreed."
Squat Abro Samiraa; lame, thin Abro Kamisiaa; sober Abro Brodaa—these three Paul had met before. Abro Duriaa and Abro Tamisraa were from the farthest villages, and shy; Duriaa was fat, with a foolish giggle; Tamisraa had a feral furtiveness—the painted bones of her necklace looked like human vertebrae. In Abro Samiraa Paul saw competence as well as smoldering violence: the green of her eyes was dark jade; she was a flat pillar of muscle from shoulder to hip. Paul guessed her to be a devil of bravery, good in the front line and intelligent. Lame Kamisiaa's bravery would be shrewd, vicious, and careful. In fat Duriaa he thought he saw a politician, not a fighter; in Abro Brodaa—there might be a thinker, even a dreamer, in Abro Brodaa.