oically wounded, his voice
wavering from weakness. He had been propping himself against a tree to
appear unharmed, but now he moved so that his braves could see he was
pinned to the trunk by an arrow and could not walk. They cried out.

He said, "Leave me and escape. But remember...." No words came, just
the feeling of being what he was, a dying old eagle, a chief of
warriors, speaking to young warriors who would need advice of seasoned
humor and moderation to carry them through their young battles. He had
to finish the sentence, tell them something wise.

Ronny tried harder, pulling the feeling around him like a cloak of
resignation and pride, leaning indifferently against the tree where
the arrow had pinned him, hearing dimly in anticipation the sound of
his aged voice conquering weakness to speak wisely of what they needed
to be told. They had many battles ahead of them, and the battles
would be against odds, with so many dead already.

They must watch and wait, be flexible and tenacious, determined and
persistent--but not too rash, subtle and indirect--not cowardly, and
above all be patient with the triumph of the enemy and not maddened
into suicidal direct attack.

His stomach hurt with the arrow wound, and his braves waited to hear
his words. He had to sum a part of his life's experience in words.
Ronny tried harder to build the scene realistically. Then suddenly it
was real. He was the man.

_He was an old man, guide and adviser in an oblique battle against
great odds. He was dying of something and his stomach hurt with a
knotted ache, like hunger, and he was thirsty. He had refused to let
the young men make the sacrifice of trying to rescue him. He was
hostage in the jail and dying, because he would not surrender to the
enemy nor cease to fight them. He smiled and said, "Remember to live
like other men, but--remember to remember."_

And then he was saying things that could not be put into words,
complex feelings that were ways of taking bad situations that made
them easier to smile at, and then sentences that were not sentences,
but single alphabet letters pushing each other with signs, with a
feeling of being connected like two halves of a swing, one side moving
up when the other moved down, or like swings or like cogs and
pendulums inside a clock, only without the cogs, just with the push.

It wasn't adding or multiplication, and it used letters instead of
numbers, but Ronny knew it was some kind of ar