The Lights of Skaro (22 page)

“Have you decided?”

“We go. It’s difficult to explain—”

“Why bother to explain, then? Does she agree?”

He nodded at the loft.

“She will. She left it up to me.”

“But you have thought together?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know your minds and I will not press you further. Although—”

He shook his head. “
Inshallah.
We should start as soon as possible.”

“We can’t do anything in Skaro until after dark.”

“If we start now the girls and I can be a long way from Skaro by nightfall. Whatever happens, we will be better off. I’ll leave you in a safe place.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not as thoughtful about you as you are about us, Piotr. I’ll go wake the girls.”

They were already awake; stretching, yawning, pulling straws from each other’s hair, pushing straws down the necks of each other’s shirt. They were as giggly and carefree as ever.

The lighthearted horseplay, in view of what lay ahead of Cora and me, fired up my still smoldering resentment at people who could sleep when I could not. I was pretty nervy that morning. I almost barked at them before I realized that they still didn’t know, and might never know, what we were up against, or how much they had done for us at what risk to themselves. It cooled me down without taking the edge off my nerviness.

I said, “We’re going to Skaro. Piotr says to get moving.”

It meant nothing to them. Skaro was another town, another place to sing and shout Party slogans. All Cora said was, “So early?”

“Piotr wants to cover as much ground as possible after he unloads us.”

“I see.”

That was the end of it. She never asked another question or offered a single reproach. Even when my decision proved to be as bad as it could have been.

We got away from the farm about an hour later, after a good breakfast, served to us by the tight-lipped farmer’s wife, who still disliked us. The farmer waved us off. The two lanky boys raced after the truck as far as the highway, loping along behind us like colts to shout goodbyes and come-back-agains. The girls shouted goodbye and threw teasing kisses until a bend in the road hid us from their two admirers.

They were singing when we drove into Skaro, picking up a tune that boomed from the loudspeakers. There was no road-block at the town gate, but the town was full of soldiers. The few civilians we saw were mostly dressed like Party members, men and women alike in shirts and shorts, or overalls similar to my own. Two peasants with a herd of goats wouldn’t have got fifty yards without being questioned. We, protected by Red Star, Party flag and Party hallelujahs, banged over cobblestones with traffic police clearing a way for us, bumped round the edge of town farthest from the river, up a steep hill which the old truck barely made grinding in low gear, and at last to a little graveyard on the very top of the hill, a pretty, overgrown, neglected plot of ground with a shattered stone wall crumbling around it and cypresses shading the graves.

The grave-markers were all old, all Moslem; elaborately carved and fluted stone with slanting lines of Arabic scriptchiseled in the rock. Most of them were tipped and some had tumbled over, but a few graves showed signs of recent care. I spoke to Piotr about the possibility that other visitors might come to the graveyard while we were there.

He said, “No one would risk publicly wasting time in a graveyard during the working day except a Party member, and Party members are not supposed to believe in things like a prayer for the dead, or flowers on a grave. If anyone comes, you will have to decide for yourself whether to hide or act defiant. But remember that anyone who finds you here will also be wondering whether to hide or act defiant, so measure them accordingly. You can see most of the town from here, and the river. It will help you to spend the day studying the route you intend to follow through town. I don’t know Skaro well myself or I would point a way out for you.”

He sounded almost apologetic.

“Piotr, I wish there were some way to tell you—”

He cut me off, quickly.

“
Na, na.
Do not try to say it.” He put one hand on my shoulder, the other on Cora’s, and smiled at us. “It is too hard a thing to say. I know what you feel. Say what you can for us when you are free and can speak out. And come back some day, when this—” he waved his arm in a wide sweep “is done with. It can’t last forever.”

“It can’t last forever,” Cora repeated. “Goodbye, Piotr.”

She held out her hand. He took it awkwardly, not sure what to do with female fingers, but when he shook my hand it was with a solid grip and a grin. That was the way we parted, without a word of thanks offered or asked.

The girls all embraced us; first Cora and then me. They still didn’t know what it was all about, or where we intended to go from there. They were as lighthearted as ever. Sidik, the tease, made her hug something for me to remember her by, from knees to neck, and climbed into the truck with a sly backward glance that said, “Try to forget
me,
if you can.” Karsta almost broke my ribs with a bear hug, and lifted Cora off the ground like a doll. The others were less demonstrative, although warm enough. Piotr herded them into the truck one by one as they finished squeezing us. I wound the crank of the Ford for the last time, the old motor popped to life, steam spurted from the radiator. Piotr waved once as they drove off.

The girls waved as long as they were in sight. We heard them singing afterwards. The song was ‘Brotherhood and Unity’.

Nobody came to the graveyard to disturb us, that last day. We spent most of the time lying side by side in the grass studying the town through a gap in the crumbling graveyard wall. We had no food, but I was screwed up so tight inside with nerves and lack of sleep that I couldn’t have eaten anyway, and I doubt that Cora felt any pangs of hunger.We had water from the night’s rainfall, in pools and puddles among the graves. We got by, although it was a long day.

In other circumstances Skaro would have been a town worth studying for its sheer beauty. It was a medieval fortress guarding the crossing of a swift, clear mountain river in a wooded setting of peculiar charm. Part of the town, a section that must have dated back to the fifteenth or sixteenth century, was built on a low rocky bluff which protruded into the river like a blunt prow, the strong current protecting it on three sides. A thick semi-circular wall had once guarded the fourth side of the bluff, but the town had grown beyond the wall, down the slope of the bluff and up and around our higher nearby hill, with a new circle of wall built to take in the enlargement and the old one torn down to make place for houses which marked where the old wall had stood by their shape and the relative recency of their construction, hundreds of years after their neighbors. From the exact prow of the bluff an extraordinarily graceful stone bridge sprang in a single shallow arch a hundred yards to the far bank of the river. The bridge was centuries old, so old that it had been built before the principle of a flat roadway on a supporting arch developed. The shallow arch was itself the roadway, wide enough for only a single vehicle except in the middle of the arch, where a diamond-shaped enlargement permitted, or had once permitted, a turn-out and passing-point. Now, a heavy steel-mesh gate barred the diagonal of the diamond. Barbed wire festooned the top of the gate and protruded in bristling loops beyond it on either side of the bridge parapets to snare a climber trying to work his way around the gate supports. Armed soldiers guarded the gate on our side. A further guard was posted at the near end of the bridge. At the other end, on the far shore, there was a small, lonely lath-and-tarpaper shack, with a stove pipe protruding from the roof, a bench beside the door and two bored, yawning American Army M.P.s sitting in the shade.

They were too far away for us to see their faces or hear them talk, but nobody could mistake the white leggings, the white belts, the white helmets and the arm brassards. Nor the trimness of their uniforms. Nor the snap and precision of the salutes when a jeep drove up with their relief and took them away. I could spot an American M.P. at a greater distance. Their post was about two hundred and fifty yards from our hilltop, the length of a good golf-drive.

I studied the direct approach for an hour before I said,

“The bridge is out. We wouldn’t stand a chance. How well do you swim?”

“Fairly well. I can stay afloat indefinitely.”

“I’m a pretty strong swimmer. If you run out of gas I’ll help you. What we have to do is get into the river at the right point and ride the current. It shoots out quite a way beyond the bluff before it turns. If we hit it right it will take us half-way across. After that we just keep paddling for the far bank while we float downstream.”

“Getting to the river will be difficult.”

“Did you think it was going to be a lark?”

She turned her head to give me a quick look. I didn’t meet it. I was wound up like a clock spring.

There were two mosques in Skaro; one with a single minaret, one with twin minarets. Only the dome and minarets of the larger mosque were visible to us over its surrounding houses, but the nearer, smaller one stood in an open square facing the bridge, clear of other buildings. Its single minaret was unusually tall; pencil slim and graceful. We could see, and hear, the loudspeaker which hung from its balcony.

We saw something more when the guard was changed simultaneously on the bridge arch, the bridge head and elsewhere. Two soldiers went up into the minaret, two others came down.

“I suppose they’ll have a machine-gun up there, won’t they?” Cora said.

“Probably a searchlight as well. And the same set-up at the other mosque. And the waterfront patrolled. And all the streets blocked.”

“It’s not very encouraging, is it?”

“No.”

I was thinking,
Suggest something! Pull your own weight! Come up with an idea instead of lying there waiting for me to work a miracle. I didn't ask for this command!

She went on waiting for me to work a miracle.

It would take no less than a miracle to get us to the river. As far as I could see after four or five hours of concentrated study, Skaro was as tightly guarded as a penitentiary. The guards weren’t always in evidence, but when the watches changed, which they did every few hours, a number of armed soldiers appeared and disappeared from sight. The concentration was particularly strong in an area that extended about twenty-five yards back from the river bank through the whole length of the town, from one extremity of the semicircular wall to the other. People in the streets avoided that zone carefully. We saw no one in civilian clothes enter it except one pair of obvious
rokos,
and they stopped to present their papers to a soldier who stepped out of a doorway as soon as they approached the quarantined area. The Army ran Skaro, with rifles, barbed wire, searchlights and machine-guns mounted in minarets to command a sweep of the bridge and river bank. Their counterparts in Free Territory were two bored American kids sitting on a bench, yawning because nothing came across the river to break their tedium. The gate on the bridge did not open all day.

I couldn’t keep my eyes off those M.P.s. I tried to concentrate on picking out an approach from the graveyard to the upstream side of the bluff, the only place we could jump to catch the thrust of current. But my eyes kept wandering to the far end of the bridge.

Two hundred and fifty yards. It was no more than shouting distance. I could stand up, yell, “Hey, Joel” and make them look at me. I could shout, “Call out the reserves, we need help!” and perhaps even have them telephoning a report of strange activity on the far side of the river before we were taken. I could scream, “We’re Americans! They’re going to kill us!” before they
did
kill us. I could do any number of hysterical things to send a last message to the Outside before we lost our gamble, but I couldn’t bring those two M.P.s and the power they stood for over to our side; against Bulič, the Red Army, the Party and the
rokos.
We had to beat them ourselves. We had to beat the guns and the searchlights and the guards and the barbed wire and the fists and the clubs and the boots on our own. Just Cora and me. And she expected me to lead the way.

So, having come that far, I lost my nerve. Completely and utterly. I said, “We can’t do it.”

“What can’t we do?”

“Get to the river. We haven’t a chance.”

“I know we haven’t a good chance, Jess. But it isn’t hopeless.”

“It
is
hopeless.” I rolled over on my back and stared up at the sky, with a piece of rubble from the broken wall digging into my back and not enough spirit left in me to move off it.“I’ve cooked us. I’ve put us in a box. We can’t go on from here, and it’s too late to back out.”

“Don’t talk that way!”

“It’s true.” The bitterness and tension boiled up in my throat. “It was your idea that I take charge. You picked a weak reed.”

I have already said that we were lying side by side on the grass. She leaned on her elbows, looking at me with a curious expression on her face that was neither disgust nor shock nor fear.

It may have been the first time she ever saw a man lie down and quit like a dog. It was certainly the first time I had ever let her see me with my paws in the air. I was down, out, and finished. It makes what she did for me an even greater thing than it would have been in other circumstances.

She bent her head suddenly to kiss me on the mouth. It wasn’t a sisterly gesture. It was a kiss that said as plainly as words that she wanted more to follow. My mind wasn’t on kissing at first, but the surprise, and the fire she put into the kiss, drove everything else out of my mind quickly. I suppose the male body functions on its own even when the male ego has given up. I reached up to put my arms around her. She came down on my chest with her own arms tight around my neck, her mouth hard on mine and her body pressing against me, trembling as I was beginning to tremble. I forgot Skaro,Bulič, our danger, everything except that we were alive and still had a time to live.

We spoke no words of love or promise. I took her as she gave herself, freely. All the strain and tension and tightness in us went into the act of love. It was quick, it was fierce, it was glorious. I don’t remember anything afterwards except a feeling of relaxed emptiness, the softness of her shoulder against my cheek and then, later, her hand moving in front of my eyes. It held a bunch of grass she was using to keep flies from my face.