"I call you so," Sears said clearly, and speaking with sternness for possibly the first time in his life. "Now come with me."
Paul stammered, "Have Doc get that damned arrow out of you. Then he's to start north with the wounded—at once."
"North." Sears nodded.
"There are no gods," said Pakriaa.
"Yes, north. We'll catch up with you."
"I thought of you as a god."
"Think of me as a friend who loves you. It is better." She went with him, stumbling as Paul had never seen her do, and when the leaves closed behind them it seemed to Paul that there was surely the cloud of another world. She might have been a small girl going for a walk in the woods with her grandfather....
There was no lifeboat above that rolling swarm. Ed Spearman must have——No time to think about it.
But he had to, a little. Spearman was forced down by lack of fuel and killed. Or forced down, isolated somewhere, miles away. Or he had kept good watch of the fuel gauge until there was just enough for another trip to the island and had gone—right, reasonable, what he ought to have done, what Paul would have ordered him to do if he could have.... Paul turned to Brodaa. "Your sister Kamisiaa—I don't see her——"
"My lame sister is dead." Her eyes were shrewd, counting. "We have more than seven hundred. Two hundred of them bowmen."