Her face became sane and blank in agony. "My people--my people----"
"Yes! And other boats are still going north. Your soldiers must pick up the hurt and run for it."
There were not many living wounded in this sudden quiet. A spear has scant mercy. And the lifeboat had not come.... Mijok was holding out his shield on both arms; he had tossed his stick aside. "Put them on this. I can carry six--seven." When the shield could hold no more he lifted it, his face contorted and changed. "Paul--I told myself I was back in the old life, when we always killed them if we could. But the new laws--oh, Paul, _the laws_----"
"War perverts all laws. But the laws are true. It is--climbing a mountain, Mijok: we slip, fall back, try again. Nothing good in war, only necessity, choice of evils. Now make the best speed you can, friend--don't wait for us." Mijok ran with his vast strides, holding the shield out in front so that the motion of his body would not jounce it.
Pakriaa would not move till the last of the survivors had stumbled past her. They were disciplined. Already some of the soft bowmen had taken out arrows of the whining, glittering type that sometimes frightened off the omasha. They were ready. Paul tried to count, gave it up. Less than three hundred. The archers had not suffered much. Paul said, "Your leg is hurt, Abro Pakriaa. I'll carry you."
She was indifferent. "I thank you." He slung his rifle and caught her up, naked and slippery with blood and acrid-smelling paint. Her weight was less than forty pounds. Her head lolled back; she whispered to the sky, "No one should call me Abro. I am Pakriaa the child, weak as a male, a fool. I could have followed. I could have brought her to the ground. I let her go. I am a red worm. I blame you for it, Paul-Mason. You and your friends. All of you--except Sears, who is a god with a window on another world."
"Hush! The world Sears shows you in the microscope is this world, Pakriaa. He tells you so himself. And I tell you there'll be a new way----"
She was not listening. Still he saw no threat of brown wings, and no lifeboat. But time was a deception; dawn on Lucifer was abrupt on cloudless mornings. The battle which had seemed long as heart-break had been a skirmish, a brush of advance parties lasting perhaps ten minutes from his first shot to the retreat. Pakriaa's head twitched from side to side; her eyes were dry. "I have betrayed Ismar, Creator-and-Destroyer-Who-Speaks-Thunder-in-the-Rains----"