"Skagarach," I said, "I won't try to fool you. I don't have any dawn memory. As far as I know I never ranged the fens or slew the upstart Man in the ages past." I was talking like him. He was an overwhelming personality. "But I know this: I feel a terrible, inchoate anger against almost everything. I think it must be what you call the primal rage. And I also feel a hell of a strong kinship with you, if not with Bill Cuff. I lied to you. My brother and the space station aren't on Pompey. They're on Odo Island."
"Well," he said easily, "well, I thought you might have been trying to outwit us. I thought we might have to flay your woman an inch at a time to make you talk. But by God, that knock on the cranium fixed you! Congratulations—and welcome to the Old Companions." He chuckled. "If you wonder why we trusted your first word to such an extent, I'll say that we knew the moon was on one of these islands. We knew that if it wasn't Pompey, it wouldn't be too damned far." He started forward in the boat. "I'll change our course," he said.
And it was at that moment that I realized something. I had turned traitor because I couldn't let my wife be maltreated. I had counted on a feeble plot, a one-in-a-thousand chance that I would be able to beat the Old Companions; and I'd known quite well that I was only excusing myself for my craven weakness. Only now did I remember that the real answer, the only thing a man could have honorably done, was to kill Nessa and myself immediately—to grip her and leap into the sea, and dive deep and deeper until we both drowned. Then my wife would have been safe from them, and I would be dead with a clean conscience.
But it was much too late to think of that now.
I flung myself down beside her, put my arms around her waist, and began softly and vividly cursing myself for the prize fool and the biggest yellow-livered skunk of all time.
CHAPTER VII
We came in toward the shores of Odo Island at ten minutes to midnight. Bill Cuff and Skagarach and Trutch and I were sitting on the top of the bow ramp in the lead boat, straining our eyes toward the small forested bit of earth ahead. Starshine showed us a broken coastline of rock that didn't look passable, not for a monkey. I said so. Bill Cuff muttered, "We can make it."
Behind us crowded the cave beasts, each of them equipped with at least one weapon; some had grenades slung in belts over their shoulders, others carried .45 revolvers, tommyguns, and rifles. Skagarach had apologized for not giving me a gun. He said that of course they couldn't trust me that far yet. I said it was okay. I had my own automatic and thank God they hadn't discovered it.
Bill Cuff said now, "Tell them to bring the boats in just under the rocks, Skagarach."