the women kneeled and lifted their bows.
Soil jerked another handle and the motor multiplied its sound. The boat jerked forward.
The arrows came. They were not random shots. They passed well wide of the engine section, that the archers did not want to damage, and centered on the personnel. They did not miss by much. Only Soli's sudden burst of speed spoiled their aim.
The second volley was already nocked, and Var knew this one would score, though the boat was now fifty feet away and moving swiftly. He grabbed one of the round amazon leather shields and held it behind Soil's back, for she could not see the arrows coming while she was driving.
Three arrows plonked into the shield surely fatal to her, had they not been intercepted. Two struck Var. One was in his right arm, rending flesh and bone; the other was in his gut.
He clung to consciousness, for they were not out of danger yet. He left the arrows where they were, but shifted the shield to his left hand and kneeled behind Soil, protecting her by both his shield and his body.
Two more arrows plunged into the leather, their points coming through but without much force. Another skewered his unprotected thigh. One more passed just beside his head and struck the wood near Soli.
'Var, can't you' she said, turning.
Then she saw his situation and screamed.
Var passed out.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
He woke and fainted many times, conscious of pain and the passage of time and the rocking of waves and Soil's attentions, and of very little else. The arrows were out from his arm and leg and gut, but this brought him no relief. His body was burning, his throat dry, his bowels pressing.
She took care of him. She propped him up inside the boat's cabin and held water to his mouth, and it made him sick and the heaves wrenched his abdomen cruelly, but his lips and tongue and throat felt better. He soiled himself many times and she cleaned him up, and when she washed his genitals they reacted and that made him ashamed but there was nothing he could do. He kept bleeding from his wounds, and she would wash them and bandage them, and then he would move and the blood would flow hotly again.
He thought deliriously of the Master, in the badlands seven years before, his illness from radiation. Now Var knew what the man had gone through, and why he had sworn friendship to the wild boy who had aided him then.
But the thought brought another torment, for he still could not fathom why the Master had reversed that oath and become a mortal enemy.
But most of all, he thought of Soli, she who cared for him now in his helplessness. A child yet but a master sticker and faithful companion who had never remarked on the colors of his skin or the crudity of his hands and feet and hunch. She could have returned to her father, whom she loved, but had not. She could even have gone to the Master, who had offered to adopt her as his daughter. Such offers were never casually made. She had stayed with Var because she thought he needed help.
And he did.
It was night and he slept. It was day and he moved fitfully and half slept, hearing the roaring of the motor, smelling the gasoline she poured from stacked cans into the funnel It was night again, and cold, and Soil hugged him close and wrapped rough blankets about them both and warmed him with her small body while his teeth knocked together.
But he did recover.
In one of his lucid moments and he was aware they were not frequent she talked with him about the mountain Helicon and the nomads.
'You know, I thought you people were savages,' she said. 'Then I met you, and the Nameless One, and I knew you were merely ignorant. I thought it would be good to have you joined with underworld 'nology.'
'yes..........'! He wanted to agree, to converse on her level, sure he was able to do so now. But the sentence played itself out in silence.
'But now I've seen what it's like beyond the crazy demesnes, where the common man does have some 'nology, technology and I'm not so sure. I wonder whether the nomads would lose their primitive values, if'
