Striking the Balance (55 page)

Liu Han studied him across a gap of incomprehension as wide as the separation between China and whatever weird place the little scaly devils called home. For the first time, she really grasped that Ttomalss and the rest of the little devils had acted without malice. They were trying to learn about people and went ahead and did that as best they knew how.

Some of her fury melted. Some—but not all. “You exploited us,” she said, using a word much in vogue in the propaganda of the People’s Liberation Army. Here it fit like a sandal made by a master shoemaker. “Because we were weak, because we could not fight back, you took us and did whatever you wanted to us. That is wrong and wicked, don’t you see?”

“It is what the stronger does with the weaker,” Ttomalss said, hunching himself down in a gesture the little devils used in place of a shrug. He swung both eye turrets toward her. “Now I am weak and you are strong. You have caught me and brought me here, and you say you will use me for experiments. Is this exploiting me, or is it not? Is it wrong and wicked, or is it not?”

The little scaly devil was clever. Whatever Liu Han said, he had an answer. Whatever she said, he had a way of twisting her words against her—she wouldn’t have minded listening to a debate between him and Nieh Ho-T’ing, who was properly trained in the dialectic. But Liu Han had one argument Ttomalss could not overcome: the submachine gun. “It is revenge,” she said.

“Ah.” Ttomalss bowed his head. “May the spirits of Emperors past look kindly upon my spirit.”

He was waiting quietly for her to kill him. She’d seen war and its bloody aftermath, of course. She’d had the idea for bombs that had killed and hurt and maimed any number of little scaly devils—the more, the better. But she had never killed personally and at point-blank range. It was, she discovered, not an easy thing to do.

Angry at Ttomalss for making her see him as a person of sorts rather than an ugly, alien enemy, angry at herself for what Nieh would surely have construed as weakness, she whirled and left the chamber. She slammed the inner door after her, made sure it was locked, then closed and locked the outer door, too.

She stamped back toward the roominghouse. She didn’t want to be away from Liu Mei a moment longer than absolutely necessary. With every word of Chinese the baby learned to understand and to say, she defeated Ttomalss all over again.

From behind her, a man said, “Here, pretty sister, I’ll give you five dollars Mex—real silver—if you’ll show me your body.” He jingled the coins suggestively. His voice had a leer in it.

Liu Han whirled and pointed the submachine gun at his startled face. “I’ll show you this,” she snarled.

The man made a noise like a frightened duck. He turned and fled, sandals flapping as he dashed down the
hutung.
Wearily, Liu Han kept on her way. Ttomalss was smaller than the human exploiters she’d known (she thought of Yi Min the apothecary, who’d taken advantage of her as ruthlessly as any of the men she’d had the displeasure to meet in the airplane that never landed save only Bobby Fiore), he was scalier, he was uglier, he was—or had been—more powerful.

But was he, at the bottom, any worse?

“I just don’t know,” she said, and sighed, and kept on walking.

“This is bloody awful country,” George Bagnall said, looking around. He, Ken Embry, and Jerome Jones no longer had Lake Peipus and Lake Chud on their left hand, as they had through the long slog north from Pskov. They’d paid a chunk of sausage to an old man with a rowboat to ferry them across the Narva River. Now they were heading northwest, toward the Baltic coast.

The forests to the east of Pskov were only a memory now. Everything was flat here, so flat that Bagnall marveled at the lakes’ and rivers’ staying in their beds and not spilling out over the landscape. Embry had the same thought. “Someone might have taken an iron to this place,” he said.

“Someone did,” Jones answered: “Mother Nature, as a matter of fact. In the last Ice Age, the glaciers advanced past here for Lord knows how many thousand years, then finally went back. They pressed down the ground like a man pressing a leaf under a board and a heavy rock.”

“I don’t much care what did it,” Bagnall said. “I don’t fancy it, and that’s that. It’s not just how flat it is, either. It’s the color—it’s off, somehow. All the greens that should be bright are sickly. Can’t blame it on the sun, either, not when it’s in the sky practically twenty-four hours a day.”

“We aren’t very far above lake level,” Embry said. “We can’t be very far above sea level. I wonder how far inland the salt has soaked. That would do something to the plants, I daresay.”

“There’s a thought,” Bagnall said. “Always nice having an explanation for things. I’ve no idea whether it’s the proper explanation, mind you, but any old port in a storm, what?”

“Speaking of which—” Embry took out a map. “As best I can tell, we’re about ten miles from the coast.” He pointed northwest. “That great plume of smoke over there, I think, is from the great industrial metropolis of Kohtla-Jarve.” He spoke with palpable irony; had it not been for the name of the place beside it, he would have taken the dot on the map for a flyspeck.

“Must be something going on in whatever-you-call-it,” Jerome Jones observed, “or the Lizards wouldn’t have pounded it so hard.”

“I don’t think that’s war damage,” Ken Embry said. “The volume of smoke is too steady. We’ve seen it for the past day and a half, and it’s hardly changed. I think the Germans or the Russians or whoever controls the place have lighted off a big smudge to keep the Lizards from looking down and seeing what they’re about.”

“Whatever it is, at the moment I don’t much care,” Bagnall said. “My question is, are we likelier to get a boat if we saunter blithely into Kohtla-Jarve or if we find some fishing village on the Baltic nearby?”

“Would we sooner deal with soldiers or peasants?” Jones asked.

Bagnall said, “If we try to deal with peasants and something goes wrong, we can try to back away and deal with the soldiers. If something goes wrong dealing with the soldiers, though, that’s apt to be rather final.”

His companions considered for the next few steps. Almost in unison, they nodded. Embry said, “A point well taken, George.”

“I feel rather Biblical, navigating by a pillar of smoke,” Jerome Jones said, “even if we’re steering clear of it rather than steering by it.”

“Onward,” Bagnall said, adjusting his course more nearly due north, so as to strike the Baltic coast well east of Kohtla-Jarve and whatever whoever was making there. As he had been many times, Bagnall was struck by the vastness of the Soviet landscape. He supposed the Siberian steppe would seem even more huge and empty, but Estonia had enough land and to spare sitting around not doing much. It struck him as untidy. The Englishmen would walk past a farm with some recognizable fields around it, but soon the fields would peter out and it would be just—land again till the next farm.

That they were approaching the Baltic coast didn’t make the farms come any closer together. Bagnall began to wonder if they’d find a little fishing village when they got to the sea. Hardly anyone seemed to live in this part of the world.

One advantage of traveling at this time of year was that you could keep going as long as you had strength in you. At around the latitude of Leningrad, the sun set for only a couple of hours each night as the summer solstice approached, and never dipped far enough below the horizon for twilight to end. Even at midnight, the northern sky glowed brightly and the whole landscape was suffused with milky light. As Ken Embry said that evening, “It’s not nearly so ugly now—seems a bit like one of the less tony parts of fairyland, don’t you think?”

Distances were hard to judge in that shadowless, almost sourceless light. A farmhouse and barn that had seemed a mile away not two minutes before were now, quite suddenly, all but on top of them. “Shall we beg shelter for the night?” Bagnall said. “I’d sooner sleep in straw than unroll my blanket on ground that’s sure to be damp.”

They approached the farmhouse openly. They’d needed to display Aleksandr German’s safe-conduct only a couple of times; despite their worries, the peasants had on the whole been friendly enough. But they were still a quarter of a mile from the farmhouse, as best Bagnall could judge, when a man inside shouted something at them.

Bagnall frowned. “That’s not German. Did you understand it, Jones?”

The radarman shook his head. “It’s not Russian, either. I’d swear to that, though I don’t quite know what it is.” The shout came again, as unintelligible as before. “I wonder if it’s Estoman,” Jones said in a musing voice. “I hadn’t thought anyone spoke Estonian, the Estonians included.”

“We’re friends!” Bagnall shouted toward the house, first in English, then in German, and last in Russian. Had he known how to say it in Estonian, he would have done that, too. He took a couple of steps forward.

Whoever was in the farmhouse wanted no uninvited guests. A bullet cracked past above Bagnall’s head before he heard the report of the rifle whose flash he’d seen at the window. The range was by no means extreme; maybe the strange light fooled the fellow in there into misjudging it.

Though not an infantryman, Bagnall had done enough fighting on the ground to drop to that ground when someone started shooting at him. So did Ken Embry. They both screamed, “Get down, you fool!” at Jones. He stood gaping till another bullet whined past, this one closer than the first. Then he, too, sprawled on his belly.

That second shot hadn’t come from the farmhouse, but from the barn. Both gunmen kept banging away, too, and a third shooter opened up from another window of the house. “What the devil did we start to walk in on?” Bagnall said, scuttling toward a bush that might conceal him from the hostile locals. “The annual meeting of the Estonian We Hate Everyone Who Isn’t Us League?”

“Shouldn’t be a bit surprised,” Embry answered from behind cover of his own. “If these are Estonians, they must have taken us for Nazis or Bolsheviks or similar lower forms of life. Do we shoot back at them?”

“I’d sooner retreat and go around,” Bagnall said. Just then, though, two men carrying rifles ran out of the barn and toward some little trees not far away to the right. He flicked the safety off his Mauser. “I take it back. If they’re going to hunt us, they have to pay for the privilege.” He brought the German rifle with the awkward bolt up to his shoulder.

Before he could fire, three more men sprinted from the back of the farmhouse toward an outbuilding off to the left. Ken Embry shot at one of them, but the light was as tricky for him as it was for the Estonians. All three of them safely made it to the outbuilding. They started shooting at the RAF men. A couple of bullets kicked up dirt much too close to Bagnall for his liking.

“Bit of a sticky wicket, what?” Jerome Jones drawled. Neither the hackneyed phrase nor the university accent disguised his concern. Bagnall was worried, too.
Bugger worried,
he told himself—
I’m bloody petrified.
There were too many Estomans out there, and they too obviously meant business.

The two men in the house and the one still in the barn kept shooting at the Englishmen, making them keep their heads down.

Under cover of their fire and that of the fellow behind the outbuilding, the two Estonians in the trees scooted forward and farther to the right, heading for some tall brush that would give them cover.

Bagnall snapped off a couple of shots at them as they ran, to no visible effect. “They’re going to flank us out,” he said in dismay.

Then another rifle spoke, from behind him and to his right. One of the running men dropped his weapon and crashed to earth as if he’d been sapped. That unexpected rifle cracked again. The second runner went down, too, with a cry of pain that floated over the flat, grassy land.

He tried to crawl to cover, but Bagnall fired twice more at him. One of the bullets must have hit, for the fellow lay quiet and motionless after that.

One of the Estonians behind the outbuilding popped up to shoot. Before he could, the rifleman behind the RAF men squeezed off another round. The Estoman crumpled. He must have dropped his rifle, for it fell where Bagnall could see it. “We have a friend,” he said. “I wonder if he’s Russian or German.” He looked back over his shoulder, but couldn’t see anyone.

The man in the farmhouse who’d fired first—or perhaps someone else using the same window—fired again. At what seemed the same instant, the marksman behind Bagnall also fired. An arm dangled limply from the window till it was dragged back inside.

“Whoever that is back there, he’s a bloody wonder,” Embry said. The Estomans evidently thought the same thing. One of them behind the outbuilding waved a white cloth. “We have a wounded man here,” he called in oddly accented German. “Will you let us take him back to the house?”

“Go ahead,” Bagnall said after a moment’s hesitation. “Will you let us back up and go around you? We didn’t want this fight in the first place.”

“You may do that,” the Estonian answered. “Maybe you are not who we thought you were.”

“Maybe you should have found out about that before you tried blowing our heads off,” Bagnall said. “Go on now, but remember, we have you in our sights—and so does our friend back there.”

Still waving the cloth, the Estonian picked up his fallen comrade’s rifle and slung it on his back. He and his hale companion dragged the wounded man toward the farmhouse. By the limp way he hung in their arms, he was badly hurt.

While they did that, Bagnall and his companions crawled backwards, not fully trusting the truce to which they’d agreed. But the Estonians in the house and barn evidently wanted no more of them. Bagnall realized he was withdrawing in the direction of the rifleman who’d bailed them out of that tight spot. Softly, he called,
“Danke sehr,”
and then, to cover all bases,
“Spasebo.”

“Nye za chto
—you’re welcome,” came the answer: he’d guessed right the second time. That wasn’t what made his jaw drop foolishly, though. He’d expected whatever answer he got to be baritone, not creamy contralto.

Jerome Jones yelped like a puppy with its tail caught in a door. “Tatiana!” he exclaimed, and went on in Russian, “What are you doing here?”