"Bring them all to the woods. Spread the bowmen at the edge: they will meet the first charge with arrows, nothing else, and then join our retreat. Send a hundred spearwomen to guard and help Tocwright's group: they will go straight north. Send another hundred through the villages to save what they can—the children, the old—and take them west and north to join the others. All the rest will stay with you and me and Elis to fight in the rear—delay and confuse—fighting retreat, Brodaa. I see nothing else."
"Nothing else," she said evenly. "As you say...."
Elis was with him, waiting under the trees, and Nisana, who said, "No gods? There must be other gods. Not Ismar...."
Elis watched the meadow over the crouching bowmen. "Within you, Captain. The god within you made you save the life of my friend. I saw that. I even think I begin to understand. But that might be vanity."
6
A sorry day moved into evening, and when evening became an approach to moonless dark, this day of retreat was in Paul's mind a passage of distorted images, true or false.
True that he was now limping through forest stillness between Nisana and a skinny ghost who was Christopher Wright and Wright carried Pakriaa, who moaned at times like a child with a nightmare, and up ahead were five white drifting mountains, one of them ridden by a man who was silent in pain, Sears Oliphant. It might or might not be true that at some time during the day Paul had thrashed on the ground with a broken head in front of some squalling danger until black arms swept him up away from—whatever it was.
Tejron and the two other giant women Karison and Elron, and Mijok, still lived. Elis was walking behind Paul, unhurt; therefore the mind of Elis would still be probing at the borderland of known and unknown, searching and incorruptible. All true. Apparently true that the gash in Paul's side had stiffened, his right leg was knotting itself in some unimportant distress, and his bandaged forehead no longer throbbed.