The Lights of Skaro (12 page)

Djakovo said, “Violence is never an answer.”

The peasant ignored him.

The engine was rocking dangerously now. They were travelling much too rapidly for the condition of the track. The peasant growled over his shoulder, ‘Too fast, driver. Cut it down.”

The driver neither answered nor moved. He was leaning head, chest, and shoulders from the cab window. His body swayed loosely, his arm hung limp. When the peasant, reaching impatiently to ease the throttle himself brushed against him, he still made no move. The yardmaster’s single shot had smashed his throat.

Instead of moving the body, the peasant propped it higher in its seat, using the dead man’s sweat-rag to tie his hand to the throttle bar.

Djakovo said, “Why do you do that?”

“There’ll be more shooting at the frontier. They’ll waste bullets on him instead of you.”

“A man should be allowed some dignity when he is dead.”

“Save your sermons for someone who will listen to them, Anton Djakovo. He was unimportant, alive or dead. You are not.”

“Why am I important to you? You are not one of my followers?”

“No. Who follows a fool?”

“Then why—?”

“Save your wind.” The peasant pointed at the coal scoop. “Use it to shovel after I get off. You’ll have to keep steam up for six or seven minutes. They’ll have word of you at the frontier, but no time to block the rails. There’s nothing but a board fence across the track. When you see it coming, get down on the floor.” The peasant smiled, or sneered, his teeth gleaming briefly in the light from the open firebox. “And pray, of course. A prayer helps stop stray bullets.”

“Why are you doing this? Who are you?”

The peasant had picked up his gun. He slung it from his shoulder and bent to expose his face to the direct glare of light from the open firebox.

“Look for yourself, preacher.”

Djakovo wet his lips and shook his head.

“I know who you are not,” he said. “You are not the man you want me to think you are. I am sure of that.”

“Are you?’ The peasant mocked him. “Are you sure of anything, preacher?”

“I am sure of who you are not,” Djakovo repeated stubbornly. “If you will not tell me who you are, tell me why you do this.”

“So you can live and preach.”

The peasant, without touching the set throttle under the engineer’s dead hand, reached across the body to move the brake lever. Brake blocks ground against the wheels. The rock of the cab changed as they slowed, the drivers pulling against the drag of the blocks. When their speed had been reduced to a crawl, the peasant freed the brakes. As the engine began again to pick up speed he swung down the steps of the cab until he stood on the last step, holding to the handrail with his face at the level of Djakovo’s knees and clutching his skull-cap against the rush of wind. He took only a single quick look up the track to pick his dropping-off point.

“Now shovel like hell, Djakovo,” he said mockingly. “When you are free, preach. Tell the world what it is you have escaped, and how, and who it was that helped you. See how many will believe you, preacher.”

He swung wide from the engine by the handrail. Still clutching his skull-cap, he dropped into the dark.

There was more to Oliver’s story; the crash of the runaway engine through the border fence and an ineffectual, hurriedly-built barricade; a volley of shots that riddled the dead driver and left Djakovo unharmed on the floor of the cab, praying; his reception and identification by the U.N. command in Free Territory. Oliver’s hunch, because of the rumor I had mentioned and Djakovo’s stubborn insistence that he could not identify the man who had helped him, had been to ask flatly if the peasant looked like Bulič. Djakovo denied it, too strongly. He would not, could not, blacken his escape with even a remote suggestion that Bulič had been involved. Oliver was morally certain that the peasant had Bulič’s face, and that the skull-cap he was so careful to keep on his head hid the fact that he did not also have Bulič’s scars. Oliver didn’t know what it all meant, and was too experienced to inject a mystery into a news story. But he did add a scribbled postscript to the copy of the manuscript he sent me, for general information and such use as I could make of it.

I didn’t repeat any of Oliver’s conjectures, or my own, to Piotr. For him I thought the story should end where the peasant left it and his leader was safe.

When I finished he stared into the fire for a while before he said, “Why did the peasant insist on showing his face? What did he want Djakovo to believe?”

“I could only make a guess. It’s better for you not to hear it.”

He nodded gravely.

“You are a sensible man,
gospod.
I have no more questions. Thank you for telling me what you have. Now tell me about the goats, and where you got them, and the clothes. Only what is necessary, so I will know what we have to face.”

I was reminded, by that, of the ewe he had left tied to a root. I went to get her where he said I would find her, while Cora told him about our thefts from the collective, and what had happened since.

When I found the ewe I left the string around her jaws until I had milked her lean bag, then ungagged her and penned her, bleating, in the cowshed with the others. They lost interest in her the minute she got there and went soundly to sleep while she was still nuzzling them.

Piotr drank the small cupful of milk I brought back. He would not eat the meat we offered him, but took a piece of bread and another cigarette when he left us for the night. He slept with the goats, refusing to share either our fire or the blankets.

“
Na, na, gospodična,'
he told Cora when she suggested that the removal of more rubble would give us all room to stretch out in front of the fire. “The goats will do for me. You do not want a smelly peasant in your bedroom.”

We both objected. He was cleaner than either of us, and smelled better. But he insisted that he should sleep with the goats so that he could take them away in the morning, before light, and return with a new and better cover for us. He wouldn’t tell us what cover he had in mind.

“But I’ll find one,” he promised. “Wait here for me until I come back, and don’t worry if it takes a little time. I won’t run off, nor let the
rokos
have me.”

When he had gone and Cora and I lay in the flickering dark enjoying the comfort of a blanket apiece and dry earth to sleep on instead of a chilly ditch, I felt a new confidence. Piotr had been the greatest stroke of luck that could have happened to us. As a member of the underground opposition, he could bring an effective organization to our help. We might — I tried to shut my mind to optimism, but it kept coming back — we might even have a reasonable chance of escape. I had never believed until then that it was more than a remote possibility.

Cora was thinking the same thoughts. From the dark, she said, “Are you still pessimistic?”

“We’re not out of trouble yet, by a long way.”

“We’re better off than we were.”

“A lot better off. I didn’t have any idea what we were going to do in the morning.”

“You would have thought of something. “

“Thanks. I’m still glad Piotr came along.”

There was a long silence. The fire burned lower.

She said, “Have you thought of any possible reason to explain him?”

We had begun to establish a kind of
rapport,
Cora and I. I knew she was thinking about Bulič, not Piotr. I said, “No sensible reason.”

“If we could solve
him
, Jess – if we could see what it is that makes him do what he does – we know what he hopes to accomplish, but it doesn’t explain the Gorzas, or Djakovo. They’re his enemies, as we are. Maybe he even wants us to escape, for some reason we don’t understand. Maybe—”

“Piotr isn’t Bulič in disguise, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“That isn’t what I’m thinking. I know Piotr is genuine. But why isn’t it possible to assume that if Dr. Gorza and Djakovo were allowed to get away, the same reasons behind their escape will work for us, whatever they are?”

“It’s possible. It isn’t sensible.”

“It would help if we could believe it.”

“It would be the most dangerous kind of belief, Cora. We’d stop fighting him. We’d begin to disbelieve our own danger. We’d lose the fear that has carried us as far as we’ve gone. You may be right. I don’t believe you are, and unless we’re absolutely certain that you
are
right – until we’ve solved Bulič, as you said – we’ve got to believe that he intends for us the worst that could happen. I don’t mean something simple like a firing squad.”

We went to sleep with that thought in our minds.

The gutted farmhouse was near a village of some kind, although out of sight of the village minarets. At first dawn, in the early quiet before even birds began to twitter, I heard the distant faint roll of the Red Army March when the loudspeakers began their nineteen-hour blare. I got up, creakily, and built a fire so that the smoke of its kindling would dissipate before full light.

Early as I was, Piotr had already gone with the goats. I brought a pail of water from the well, heated it, made tea and warmed up a piece of mutton. Cora slept on. I didn’t want to disturb her, but I meant to go scouting and didn’t want her to wake up and worry. I wrote
spying, back unsoon
with charcoal on a piece of bark, propped it up where she couldn’t miss it, and left her my blanket to supplement her own.

The hedgerows made good cover against observation, and it was still not sun-up. By the time the sun rose I was snug in a crow’s nest I had made for myself in the hedgerow we had followed back from the highway. I could see the road for a long stretch in both directions. Because my hedgerow was a particularly old, thick, and high growth, and my crow’s nest up on top, I had a view as well of a good part of the countryside which the intersecting hedges cut into a patchwork of field and meadow. I was in a fine position to see Piotr’s approach when he came, and any signs of the search which I felt sure would soon be developing for a peasant couple with six stolen goats.

Nothing at all came along for several hours. Smoke rose from the chimneys of several farmhouses, and there were signs of early activity around barns and cowsheds. An oxcart loaded with cabbages finally came in sight, crawling up the road, but the man with the ox-goad was shorter than Piotr. The only other visible moving objects were a small band of grazing sheep, until a Security car came by.

It was not travelling as fast as the
rokos
ordinarily travelled. When it drew abreast of the ox-cart, its driver pulled sharply in front of the oxen to stop the cart while questions were asked and answered. The ox-driver, an old man with white hair, took off his skull-cap and hunched his shoulders while he was questioned, the picture of humble subjection to Authority. He pointed eagerly in the direction from which both he and the
rokos
had come. The car turned around and went back, fast. When it was gone, the peasant spat after it, then burst into laughter that kept him happy for several minutes. I could see him wag his head and chuckle with enjoyment at his private joke.

A truck went by next, then a couple of farm wagons. After the colorful bustle of market day, the road was relatively deserted. It would have been easy to spot a small herd of goats on it from a distance. I knew, with a mixture of fear and satisfaction, that we had abandoned the goats barely in time when a small scout plane flew over, low, following the line of the road westward.

My fear was partly for Piotr, who had the goats on his hands. But I realized immediately that the evidence of the still-scouting plane meant that he must have got them safely out of sight. I liked to remember that his religion prevented him from killing an animal. Somewhere the goats would be reaping a reward in a field of tall grass, without sticks flailing at their tired rumps.

After the plane passed, there was nothing to watch except the grazing herd of sheep. They cropped their way along the bases of the hedgerows where long grass grew among gnarled roots, beyond the reach of plough or reaper.

Some Party statistician once calculated that nearly ten per cent of all arable land in the Republic was wasted on hedgerows and their flanks of useless, untillable ground. Because of the country’s desperate need for food, all possible threats, bribes, punishments, wheedlings, and propaganda was brought to bear in favor of a farm collectivization program that would make the hedgerows unnecessary. Among the most effective propaganda weapons were teams of young girls, recruited from the youngest and most fanatic Party organizations, who toured the countryside in trucks singing Party songs, preaching the benefits of collectivization wherever they could find an audience and, by their frank display of themselves, holding the unwilling attention even of peasants who were bitterly opposed to the whole program. To most peasant men, a woman above the age of twelve in public was a shapeless, sexless creature in baggy pants, baggy blouse and
yashmak,
an unapproachable bundle with feet, hands, and eyes, nothing else. The girls of the propaganda teams wore sandals, shorts, and open-necked shirts, with nothing beneath the shirts except themselves and this fact made obvious. They were picked as much for their physical attractions as for their devotion to the Party, and indoctrinated with the idea that they could do no wrong as long as what they did advanced The Cause. The nature of their job, its lack of restraint and freedom from hard work, attracted many girls who, without a Cause which was its own reward and in a different society, would have performed substantially the same job for pay on a side-show barker’s platform or burlesque runway, wearing even sketchier costumes. The girls of the propaganda teams were no different. Many even believed that public exposure of their legs and breasts to gawping peasants was a sacred duty. Others joined in to sing the Party songs because they enjoyed riding around the country and singing more than they did compulsory labor on a road gang or farm.

A truck-load of the singers came along the road while I waited for Piotr. Six or eight girls standing in the bouncy truck body were chanting ‘Brotherhood and Unity’. The truck, an old stake-body with a plume of steam boiling from its radiator, wore the Red Star painted on its engine hood, the Party flag flapping from a fender. The flag was a passport on any road they chose to travel. They could turn off at any farm, disrupt the farm operations to call a meeting, stay as long as they liked, sing, flirt, preach, romp in the hay with the farmhands if they chose, and report dangerous anti-collective attitudes afterwards if the romps did not produce converts. Peasant farmers saw them coming with mixed feelings of uneasy delight and fear. But no peasant ever felt as I did when the truck turned off on the cart-track that led to our hideout.