The Lights of Skaro (6 page)

The reaction had drained all the strength out of my arms. I was crushing her under my full weight. I rolled off, wiped the sweat from my face and stood up as soon as I felt that my legs would support me.

Afterwards I hid our discarded clothes under a bush. There were reasons for carrying them with us, including the extra warmth they would give us when night came. But concealing the texture of good foreign cloth was impossible with nothing to wrap it in, and the risk of betraying ourselves to curious eyes was too great. I had another calm, well-founded argument ready for Cora if she was reluctant to abandon her clothes.

She wasn’t. She didn’t say a word until we were on our way again, feeling much more comfortable under the hot sun and, for my part at least, cautiously encouraged because we had come through our second contact with Security. When she did speak, she surprised me.

“You’re a resourceful man, Jess. I don’t think I ever appreciated you before.”

“Thanks. If you mean because I threw you into a ditch, there was nothing else to do.”

“I know. But it was quick thinking. I would have tried to get dressed, and failed.” Minutes later she added soberly,

“I’m sorry about the way I behaved this morning. You were right and I was wrong. It won’t happen again.”

A concession like that, from Cora, took a lot of giving. To pass it off I said, “How are the heels?”

“Comfortable. Thanks to you and in spite of me.”

“What are you trying to do? Charm me?”

She smiled. “Do you mind?”

“No. But it isn’t necessary. I’m on your side, with or without charm.”

She still smiled.

A mile or two farther on we caught up with a man driving a loaded donkey that travelled even more slowly than our goats. The donkey was slung with clusters of live turkeys, balanced bunches of them hanging head down on either side of a pack-saddle, their heads and necks crooked up out of the road dust like live umbrella handles with beady, indignant eyes. From the dust that covered donkey, driver and turkeys, they had come a long way. I guessed that they were going to market even before we found that we were part of a gradually swelling stream of countrymen and countrywomen, some with other turkey-laden donkeys, some driving sheep, cows, goats or pigs, others in carts loaded with farm produce. The direction of the stream was the same as our own, towards the quadruple minarets of a good-sized town on the road ahead of us.

“We’re in luck,” I said. “We’ve hit a market day. We may be able to sell the goats and buy a cow or a bunch of pigs.”

“Not pigs, Jess.” She wrinkled her nose above the
yashmak. 
”Goats are bad enough.”

“We’ll have to take whatever we can get.”

“I know. But if there’s a choice, could it please be a cow?” I liked the way she said “please.” We were getting along.

I said, “It will be a cow if we can manage it.”

We entered the town trailing behind a small flock of sheep which, with their baa’s and their barking flock dog, made so much noise that we weren’t afraid to talk. The town was an old fortification, still encircled by remains of the crumbling stone wall that had guarded it in the days of the Turks. The road went in through a high, pointed arch where heavy double doors had once swung from massive iron supports set in the stone. The doors were gone, although the supports remained. In the shadows of the archway, Security waited for us.

Cora saw them first. I was busy keeping the goats in line, and did not look beyond the bellwether’s horns until she said in my ear, “
Rokos.
In the archway. Two, at least.”

I saw them then, standing tall and coffin-shaped in the ugly box coats they all wore.

Those coats were like a uniform. You could always tell a
roko
by his clothes, as well as by the width of his shoulders and the size of his knuckly fists. They were big, rock-faced, hard-mouthed, deadly men, most of them with the scar-thickened eyebrows and broken noses of street fighters. They were the arms and fists of Security, centurions of the Cause, brutal men to whom violence was a natural expression of will. They were not a genuinely ‘secret’ police, nor intended to be. Their most important functions were to terrorize by their obvious and ominous presence, frighten conspiracy and opposition out of existence before it could take shape, or beat it into submission if it did form. To operate in real secrecy a police force requires intelligence, at the lowest working level as well as at the top. Security had intelligence only at the top.
Rokos
gained their favored positions because they had bull necks, heavy shoulders, hard fists, and a taste for their jobs. Not brains. They could outrun us, outfight us, or overwhelm us, but they couldn’t out-think us. On that article of belief we had to stake our lives. Nothing else sustained us.

Cora said, “What are we going to do?” Her voice was thin but steady.

“Go right through under their noses. They don’t know about the goats yet, or we wouldn’t have got this far.”

“They’re looking for us. They’re not here just because it’s market day.”

“I know it. But they don’t know what they’re looking for.”

The goats were already bunching up behind the herd of sheep that now crowded the archway. We didn’t have much time left to talk. I said, “This is the time for strong nerves, Cora. Trust me once more. Keep your
yashmak
up and your eyes down, and
don’t hesitate!
That’s all.”

She gave me a quick nod that was as good a declaration of faith as a prayer. Maybe she prayed, too. I never knew.

The bellwether helped us. At the last moment he balked at entering die shadows of the archway. I had to drag him through it, his hooves set and his legs stiff, so that I pulled against his stubborn resistance with my back bent and my head down. I passed one of the
rokos
so closely that I nearly stepped on his foot.

They made no movement. As I had reasoned, or guessed, or hoped, they didn’t yet know what they were looking for.

Cora came along behind the ewes, swinging her stick. When the wether saw sunlight beyond the arch he stopped holding back and charged, the ewes charging after him. We were through, with a clatter of hooves on the stones of a cobbled street. Behind us, a cart loaded with pumpkins rumbled into the archway.

The town marketplace was a haven. It was crowded with peasants; men, women and children with their livestock and produce. Every farmer in the Republic had to sell at least three-quarters of what he produced to the state, at fixed prices which were ruinous. The other quarter, plus whatever he dared to hold back out of the state’s three-quarters, was his to dispose of on the free market at any price he could get, and spend the money as he liked. No peasant voluntarily missed a market day and its opportunities for buying as well as for selling.

There were two loudspeakers over the marketplace, roaring from the twin minarets of a good-sized mosque. In what had once been the mosque courtyard, the flowing fountain for ritual washing of hands, forearms, feet and face before prayers now served as a drinking trough for goats, sheep, pigs, turkeys, cows, horses and human beings. The courtyard was full of the overflow from the marketplace, all the livestock adding their bleats, baas, grunts, moos, gobbles, and whinnies to the sound of their owners’ voices haggling over prices and the rumble of the speakers.

Our goats went straight for the fountain. When they had drunk what they could hold, I worked them through the crowd over to a corner of the courtyard where there was a pile of straw in the shade of the mosque wall. The pile was big enough to serve as goat fodder; at the same time it gave us a place to sit down.

“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t sleep for a while, if you can manage it in this din,” I said. “We’ve got several hours before we have to move along.”

“What about you?”

“I want to keep an eye open for possible goat buyers.”

“Can’t we do it in turn?”

“Sure. I’ll wake you when your turn comes.”

She curled down in the straw and was asleep in seconds. I tied the wether’s makeshift lead-rope to my ankle, then wrapped my arms around my knees and locked my hands together so that if I dozed off my grip would loosen and I would fall over and wake myself up. After that I sat and waited, falling over now and then.

I couldn’t wander around shouting my wares, as others were doing. Although Cora and I both spoke the language well enough, no one acquires the authentic Slavic click unless he is born to it. Our accents would have given us away. But anything on display in a town marketplace is for sale, so I could sit there and look receptive to offers whenever some peasant stopped to feel the ewes’ udders.

That usually ended the deal before it started. The goats had been driven too hard. Their milk was about finished. I finally got a bid, for one ewe, from a tall, broad man with a scraggly black beard. He looked like a pirate and traded like one. He walked by, hesitated, scowled at me, scowled at Cora asleep in the straw, scowled at the goats, made his examination of their udders, and offered a price that was probably half of what a ewe, even a dry one, was worth.

I shook my head. When he shrugged and started to move along, I shrugged and held out my hand. He paid me and led the ewe away by an ear. She bleated unhappily about leaving her sisters, who had bedded down in a clump around Cora and were contentedly munching straw.

It took me the better part of an hour to sell the one ewe. At the rate I was going and the price I was getting, we had no hope of converting the goats into what we needed to take their place. But at least I had enough money to do some necessary shopping. I tied the wether to Cora’s ankle – she didn’t move even when I lifted her foot – and went away for half an hour.

She still hadn’t changed her position when I came back with a pack made up of what I had bought; two good blankets, a pail, a heavy knife, homespun socks for both of us, a couple of tin cups, a couple of big spoons, food, salt, matches, and a handful of loose cigarettes I had bought by ones and twos, as a peasant would buy them. After I had gnawed on a piece of roast mutton and a slab of bread, I smoked one of the cigarettes while I waited for more business.

There was none. All the potential goat buyers had looked over our stock and gone somewhere else. Nobody came near us again. The goats drowsed and munched, the loudspeakers clattered over our heads.

There was still no news on the air, no mention of two American fugitives, but plenty of noise. Cora slept on-in spite of the blare. Once she mumbled something in her sleep, and put up her hand to push at th
e yashmak
that muffled her breathing.

It came away, exposing her face. I leaned over to replace it. She pushed it away again, muttering, still asleep although on the point of waking if I did it again. In our secluded corner it seemed safe to let her breathe freely as long as I was there and awake to cover her face if anyone came too close. I took up my stay-awake position, my hands locked around my knees, and sat there guarding her in a kind of half-doze, neither asleep nor awake, feeling a faint surprise at myself for being more concerned about her rest than my own, and thinking how strange it was that fate, or destiny, or
inshallah
or whatever it is that arranges those things, if they aren’t just sheer accident, should put the two of us down together in a Balkan marketplace with a bunch of smelly goats that had a better chance for freedom and survival than we who had stolen them and were driving them to exhaustion.

I first met Cora in Rome, although I saw her most often afterwards in Paris. Paris was her natural environment if one was ever created for a woman.

She was a phenomenon. A woman with brains, beauty, drive, a sure instinct for what constitutes news in the field of international relations, and the ability to write well about it does not crop up often. There are dozens of working news-hens with one or more of the attributes, because without at least one they couldn’t survive as reporters. Cora had everything.

She began to attract attention, first as a stringer for Allied Press and then as a regular, in the years just after the war. In the beginning we – meaning her competition in the European news gathering field – thought her success as a reporter stemmed mainly from her looks. She was so photogenic that cabinet ministers and important military figures enjoyed having their pictures taken with her, and didn’t mind handing out a few quotable items while the photographs were being snapped. The rest of us were inclined to write her off as a pretty flash-in-the-pan who would fade when her chin began to sag.

We were wrong, as we soon found out. She could write crisply and convincingly. She had a good reporter’s nose, she was quick to learn any language that was important to her job, and on top of her other accomplishments she had a studied, possibly synthetic, but generally effective personal charm, that she could turn on and off like a light. It was one reason I never liked her very much. She used her charm consciously, as a tool of her trade, stepping up the voltage when it was worthwhile, turning it off when it served no purpose. She never wasted it simply to be charming. But when she was after a story she could soap, wheedle, and coax co-operation out of a bronze statue or, an even more difficult job, a Party member. The rest of us, not having her advantages, had to work through conventional channels, setting up painstaking pipelines to tap available sources of information and hoping that no one else would cut in on our private systems, as Cora often did by turning her high-powered voltage on somebody who was being paid to supply one of her competitors with news. More than one reporter sitting tight on a story he had been building for weeks began to sweat when Cora was around. She was a very good newspaperwoman, and not too scrupulous.

So there were understandable feelings of mixed relief, surprise, and jealousy among foreign press correspondents in Western Europe when A.P. sent her into the People’s Free Federal Republic. It was immediately after the Big Switch. The Party line had changed overnight from consistent international enmity to ‘mutually profitable trade with other countries irrespective of differences in political systems’, ‘peaceful co-existence’, ‘realistic approaches to a resumption of normal relations between East and West’, all the rest of the strategic shell game. No Western reporter had been allowed inside the Republic since late 1946, and the only news that came out was either official propaganda or underground counter-propaganda, both unreliable. Now, with a new menu to be served, a few reporters were allowed.