The long days, and the marigees' screams, the slithering swish of the surf, the ghost-quiet movements of the baroons in the trees and the raucousness of their shrill voices. Drums.
Those sounds, and those alone. But perhaps silence would have been worse.
For the times of silence were louder. Times he would pace the beach at night and overhead would be the roar of jets and rockets, the ships that had roared over New Albuquerque, his capitol, in those last days before he had fled. The crump of bombs and the screams and the blood, and the flat voices of his folding generals.
Those were the days when the waves of hatred from the conquered peoples beat upon his country as the waves of a stormy sea beat upon crumbling cliffs. Leagues back of the battered lines, you could feel that hate and vengeance as a tangible thing, a thing that thickened the air, that made breathing difficult and talking futile.
And the spacecraft, the jets, the rockets, the damnable rockets, more every day and every night, and ten coming for every one shot down. Rocket ships raining hell from the sky, havoc and chaos and the end of hope.
And then he knew that he had been hearing another sound, hearing it often and long at a time. It was a voice that shouted invective and ranted hatred and glorified the steel might of his planet and the destiny of a man and a people.
It was his own voice, and it beat back the waves from the white shore, it stopped their wet encroachment upon this, his domain. It screamed back at the baroons and they were silent. And at times he laughed, and the marigees laughed. Sometimes, the queerly shaped Venusian trees talked too, but their voices were quieter. The trees were submissive, they were good subjects.
Sometimes, fantastic thoughts went through his head. The race of trees, the pure race of trees that never interbred, that stood firm always. Someday the trees—
But that was just a dream, a fancy. More real were the marigees and the kifs. They were the ones who persecuted him. There was the marigee who would shriek "All is lost!" He had shot at it a hundred times with his needle gun, but always it flew away unharmed. Sometimes it did not even fly away.