Edgar Pangborn by West of the Sun

Author:West of the Sun [Sun, West of the]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-06-08T13:15:24+00:00

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All night Paul heard the distant barbarous thunder of the drums. In the hour before first-light his advance company formed; a furious serpent, it stole two miles south through grassland following the pallor of the beach. Near first-light, Paul knew, they would see a thread of new moon. In this present darkness the Vestoians might be slipping north on the lake; there would be no betraying sound above the passion of the drums. As for the land army, that could be miles to the south or over the next rise of ground.

His mind fought a pressure of alternatives. Better to have kept the army in one unit? To wait in the forest for news of Abro Samiraa’s thrust in the northeast? Never mind: no time now. At least his body was meeting the challenge without rebellion. His wiry legs carried him in silence; his senses were whetted to fineness. Rifle, pistol, field glasses, hunting knife made a light load. Ahead of him Mijok loomed against a division of two shadows, sky and earth. Not first-light: only a sign that five thousand miles away on the eastern shore of this continent there might be the shining of a star now called the sun. Mijok carried a shield of doubled asonis hide; his only weapon was a seven-foot club, since his smallest finger was too large to pass the trigger guard of a rifle. Though keeping watch with Paul, Mijok had spoken little during the night—brooding perhaps, trying (Paul imagined) to see a new world in the matrix of the old. But there was no guessing a giant’s thoughts. Lacking the stale burden of human guilt and compromise, they had the strength as well as the weakness of innocence; the country of their minds must wait on the explorations of centuries.

Abro Pakriaa, close to Paul’s right, moved like a breeze in the grass. She and her small soldiers despised the use of shields, despised the arrows of their own bowmen as fit only for timid males. They never threw their spears but kept them for close quarters; their only other weapon was a white-stone dagger… The army groped through the meadow in three ranks, widely spaced at Paul’s order; beyond the right flank the archers were concentrated. Four hundred fighters altogether—against six thousand.

A wooded knoll grew into silhouette fifty yards from the beach, ten feet above the level of the meadow. “We meet them here,” Paul said. By prearrangement Pakriaa halted a hundred of her spearwomen between the knoll and the beach, the other two hundred on the west side, the hundred bowmen out beyond. Paul and Mijok penetrated the blackness of the knoll, pushing through to its southern side, where Pakriaa joined them. Even in that short passage the heaviness of dark had altered with a promise. There were few clouds. The day (if it ever came) would be hot, windless, and beautiful. No more blue fireflies were wandering. The planet Lucifer had become three gray enigmas of lake

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