The Lights of Skaro (10 page)

Cora got her appetite back quickly when pieces of mutton began to pop and hiss on the coals. We ate ravenously, dragged between weariness and hunger. Nothing else seemed important, only food and sleep, with sleep winning in my case as the warmth of the fire, a long-delayed physical reaction, food, and, finally, hot tea and a cigarette combined to drug me. I was propped with my back to the wall, torpid, not thinking, only aware in a bug-like way that I was alive and warm and comfortable, when Cora said, “Will you look at my heels again? I think the bandages ought to be changed.”

“Sure.” It was a real effort for me to add, “Do you want me to go outside?”

She had to take off the pantaloons to unfasten her suspenders and I knew how little she wore underneath. In the cramped space that we had cleared from the rubble, I couldn’t even turn my back.

“Modesty seems kind of silly for people in our fix, doesn’t it? You can close your eyes, if you will.”

“It won’t be hard.”

I meant nothing by it except that I could hardly keep my eyes open. It was a harmless remark. But she read something else into it. I heard the pantaloons rustle, then other sounds, then the rustle again. She said, “Why do you dislike me, Jess?”

“What makes you think that I do?”

“You never tried very hard to hide it. You can open your eyes now.”

I opened them. She stood in front of me, bare-ankled and barefooted except for the grimy bandages on her heels. I lifted one of her feet to my knee.

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“I’ve been more concerned about staying alive for the last couple of days than liking anybody, Cora. If I’ve been snappy—”

“I’m not talking about the last couple of days. You disliked me when we first met, in Rome. As much as I disliked you.”

“I could ask why you disliked me, then.”

The bandage was grey with road dust outside, white inside when I began to unwind it. There was no blood.

“I couldn’t have answered you, yesterday.”

“I can’t answer you now. A difference of temperament, maybe.”

The big blister had burst. The end of the bandage stuck to it. I peeled the cloth away as gently as I could. She didn’t wince.

“I stopped disliking you today,” she went on soberly. “I hated you yesterday. Today, I saw something different. I saw that what I had disliked about you were qualities I wanted to believe I had myself; courage, and strength, and determination, and integrity of character, and independence of will. It isn’t a difference of temperament that makes us grate on each other.”

There was warm water in the pail by the fireplace. I washed the blister, dabbed mutton fat on it, ripped the soiled end from the bandage, then began to rewind it, rebuilding the pad that would have to stand between her – us – and an eighty-mile grind.

“You think we’re too much alike?”

“Not too much. Just alike. I’ve got good qualities, too, Jess. I’ve recognized yours. I wish you would try to recognize mine. So far, I’ve done all the adapting to circumstances. I’ve had to. You made it clear that you’re a man and I’m a woman and you have a physical superiority over me that you’re prepared to use — because you can. That isn’t civilized. It’s the kind of advantage Bulič would take. I think we’re both civilized. Between people like us, and Bulič—”

On the name, her whole body went rigid. With my hands cupping her foot on my knee I felt it. I looked up, caught in the barest flash of a glance the significance of her frozen stare and turned my neck in time to see the movement of a thick-fingered, big-knuckled hand at a corner of the blanket that screened the window over my head.

It wasn’t courage or strength or determination or integrity of character or independence of will or any other virtue of nature that drove me to my feet and at the window. I had to get out. The four stone walls around us were no longer a shelter but a cage, and the wedged door a bar to my animal-like instinctive scramble to escape the trap. I like to believe that I was, as Cora said, civilized; that I was thinking of her as well as myself, and thought I could do best for us both by getting out in the open. In honesty I didn’t think at all, only reacted.

I took the screening blanket with me when I went through the window. I hadn’t freed myself from it before I was grabbed, and there has never been any need for me to decide whether I meant to run like a rabbit or fight. I fought.

The man who had me was very strong. His wrist, when I got hold of it for a moment, was like a hard root. I tried to break his arm, then to find his eyes, then to crush his toes, then to knee him, anything to weaken his grip. It was useless. He smothered me with greater weight and size. He was wrestling me to the ground, making odd, panting noises under his breath:
na! na! na! na!
I thought of the others who would be standing around us in the blackness, waiting to use their feet as soon as I was down and they could tell which body to kick. I refused to go down for them. The man I was fighting could not put me down. I gathered my legs under the crush of the weight he was bearing on me, and in the tight bear-hug that had by then immobilized my arms and was squeezing the breath out of me, used the spring of my legs to butt him under the chin with everything I had left.

My ears sang from the blow. But he went down, still clutching feebly to pull me with him, then falling loosely away. There was no rush from the surrounding dark, no sound except my own hard breathing and a restless bleating from the goats penned in the cowshed. No lights, no voices, no other sign of Security. Nothing. Only Cora’s head silhouetted in the faint light of the window I had jumped through, and her low, frightened voice.

“Jess! Are you all right?”

“Come out of there! Quick! Don’t wait to take anything. We’ve got to—-No. No. Wait a minute.”

It took me that long to accept the fact that the man I had fought was alone.
Rokos
travel either in pairs or in packs. And
roko
or not, we could handle one unconscious man more easily than we could run from him. Another panic would only cost us what we had already won.

I tied him, as best I could in the dark, with the pack line Cora passed me through the window. When I had got his heavy body inside the farmhouse I dumped him by the door and restored our blackout precautions before I dragged him over to the fireplace and built up the dying fire so that we could see what we had to combat.

He was the tall bearded peasant who had bought the ewe from me that afternoon. He lay like a log. Unconscious, without his scowl, he looked much younger than I had thought him in the marketplace. The pirate’s beard did not hide the youthfulness of his face. He was twenty-two or three; old enough to value the reward he could make by selling a couple of fugitives, young and bold enough to go after them. I knew how he had followed us from the way the goats in the shed were keeping up their low, uneasy bleating.

“He bought the ewe from me when you were asleep in the market,” I explained to Cora. “He must have followed us out of town, keeping us in sight until we turned off the highway, then waited for dark and let the ewe smell out the trail. She’d be eager to get back with the herd. He either cut her throat as soon as he located us or tied her up and gagged her so she wouldn’t bleat and give him away. Our goats know she’s around here somewhere. We’ve got to find her and get her under cover before daylight, dead or alive.”

“What made him suspect us?” Cora’s voice was steadier than my own.

“I don’t know. Anything. It doesn’t matter. He did.”

The peasant opened his eyes. They were blue, alert, and wide awake.

“
Na, na
,” he said. “Talk a language I can understand, so I will know what you are going to do with me. It does me no good to lie here and listen to — English, is it?”

In his own language I said, “What did you do with the ewe?”

“Tied her to a root with a string around her snout to keep her quiet. She was a bloodhound, that one. I could hardly hold her back.”

He was as cool, as indifferent to his position as if we were talking about the prospects of rain. He made no effort to test the knots that held him.

Cora said, “What do you want from us? Why did you follow us?”

“I want nothing from you. I followed you to see if you wanted anything from me.”

“Why would we want anything from you?”

He twisted himself to roll over and lie flat on his back, his beard jutting upward, his bound hands resting on his chest. He said, “When a peasant woman sleeps in the marketplace wearing shoes on which there are rubber heels it makes a man curious to know why she wears city shoes yet still sleeps with a
yashmak
hiding her face, and why her husband has driven good goats so hard that they are dry. When the husband will not bargain for his goats, as a peasant should, but takes, in silence, less than the fair price even for a dry ewe, a man becomes even more curious. Particularly when the
rokos
are out looking for someone. There were other things, including the palms of your hands,
gospod.”

“Why didn’t you put the
rokos
on us?”

“I told you. I want to help you, not betray you.”

“Why?”

He turned his head to look at us. In the flickering firelight his face was old again.

“
Gospod
and
gospa,
whoever you are—”

“
Gospodična
,” Cora said. “We are not husband and wife.”

“
Gospodična,
then. It doesn’t matter. I ask no questions of either of you. I saw you in the marketplace, and I saw how you were sick on the road,
gospodična
, at what the
rokos
did to the man they beat. I followed you here, and heard through the window the language you spoke between yourselves, in hiding. You are foreigners and fugitives. From the activity of the
rokos,
you are important fugitives. The kind who will die if they are caught. You need help. I can give you help.”

I said again, “Why?”

“I am against the
rokos,
and violence, and beatings, and the things you run from.”

“That’s not enough. What are you for?”

He rolled his head from side to side.

“
Na, na.
I do not ask you why you are fugitives.”

“You know that we are. We don’t know anything about you except that you followed us and fought with me. Now you say you are against violence.”

He smiled.

“I didn’t fight you. You fought me. Whose chin is aching? Who lies tied hand and foot, helpless?”

It was true. He didn’t have to be there, tied. He could have clubbed me as I came through the window, if he had wanted to lay me out. Or been ready for me with a knife. Or broken my neck with his big hands. I didn’t know what to make of him.

Cora said, in English, “He must be one of Djakovo’s followers. He talks like it. If he is we might be able to trust him.”

He caught the name. He said quickly, “What do you know of Djakovo?”

“You weren’t going to ask questions.”

“About you, no. About Djakovo—”

He rolled his head again. “Understand me,
gospod
and
gospodična.
I don’t ask questions about you, not even your names. It is not good to know too much when you take chances with the
rokos.
They have their ways of finding out how much it is you know. If it is too much, you are dead. If it is only a little, you are beaten, but you live. I have been beaten before and lived through it. If they take me helping you, I know nothing about you, or what it is that makes you dangerous to them. I am not touched by your danger, as you are not touched by any danger which may be my own. You will know nothing about me except that I am a peasant whose name might be Piotr. We cannot betray each other, or others dependent upon us. That is why I say we should exchange no confidences. But Djakovo—” He hesitated, then went on: “I am Djakovo’s man. Most of us are, here, so it is not a confidence. We have heard that he has been taken by the
rokos
in Varya Banya, and that he has not yet been taken but is in great danger, and that he is dead, and that he is not dead but in prison. We have no source of information we can trust. We don’t know what to believe. If you have any news of him – not as a payment for help, because I ask no payment from you—”

He didn’t know how to finish what he wanted to say. The appeal in his voice was enough.

Cora and I looked at each other. It seemed natural for me to wait for her nod of agreement before I began to untie him. It didn’t occur to me until later that it was the first time I had ever asked Cora for agreement on anything.

The knots in the pack line were so poorly tied that he could have pulled his hands loose at any time. He hadn’t tried. When I freed him he sat up and rubbed his ankles. He looked at me, then at Cora, back at me again, waiting. At the end, he kept his eyes on Cora. She had been the one to use Djakovo’s name.

She shook her head at his unspoken question.

“I can’t tell you what you want to hear. I don’t know all there is to tell. Ask him. He knows.”

He asked me. “Is he alive?”

“Yes.”

To tell him anymore was difficult. Piotr, if that was his name, wanted news, not confidences. He was right about confidences. The less he knew of us and what we knew, the smaller his own danger from the contagion of dangerous knowledge.

While I was puzzling over what to tell him and what not to tell him, Cora put a chip of wood on the coals of the fire. It flared up, showing the trouble in his young bearded face, the growing pain of his thought that I hesitated to go on because I didn’t want to tell him that his leader was alive in the hands of Security and therefore, in a very real sense, dead to his followers.

I said, “He is alive and safe. He got out of the country.”

The pain went away. Disbelief took its place. He said flatly, “I don’t believe it.”

“Why don’t you believe it?”

“He would never abandon us, even to save his life.”

“He had more than his life to save. They had him trapped. They were going to try him for the— a murder when they took him. He would have been made to confess before they hanged him.”