The Lights of Skaro (13 page)

I bolted out of the hedgerow like a rabbit, on the side away from the cart-track. The hedge hid me from the truck, although I could estimate its speed by the noise it made coming up the bumpy track, the squeaks of the truck body and the grind of its old motor adding a background to the song. I couldn’t outrun them. But I had a head start, and I got within sight of the farmhouse before they did.

Cora sat in the sun by the door. She had taken a bath, or at least washed her hair. She had her head bent, fluffing her hair with her fingers. She heard the singing and looked up as I sprinted into view, still hidden from the truck by the hedge. I waved to her to duck, get out of sight. She had the good sense to disappear behind the farmhouse instead of into it.

I couldn’t make the farmhouse or the cowshed before the truck came round the end of the hedgerow, and I didn’t want to be caught running from them. I had a three-day stubble of beard, the right clothes, plenty of dirt on my face and hands. With luck, if I kept my mouth sullenly shut, I might get by as a burned-out peasant who had sneaked home to see what he could restore of a ruined farm. I would be reported, but I might not be grabbed. It was a chance.

I faced the truck, hangdog, as it bore down on me. The girls were still singing. The plume of steam from the radiator spattered in my face before the truck squealed to a stop, its fender with the Party flag almost nudging my knee. Piotr put his bearded face out of the window of the driver’s seat and said, “Good-day, comrade. Will you join us in Brotherhood and Unity?”

Cora and I never did identify all the girls by name. There was Karsta, a big, cheerful cow with a baritone voice; Fatma, a dark-skinned beauty; and Sidik, who had slanting, wicked eyes and a way of moving her round hips when she walked that should have been enough in itself to collectivize a country. The other five – there were eight in the team, all told – were Sonjas and Marjas and Turus; all pretty, all dedicated, all behaving as if the deadly gamble in which they were risking themselves was a picnic.

“The
rokos
couldn’t see through us in a thousand years,” Piotr told me confidently. He had been giving orders like a top sergeant since their arrival, hurrying us into action first and saving explanations for later. Cora had gone into the farmhouse with a couple of the girls to change into the clothes they had brought her. I already wore a pair of grease-stained mechanic’s overalls, with a wrench sagging one hip pocket. Piotr was dressed as I was, except for the wrench.

“First, they will be on watch for the goats. We have no goats. Only lambs.” He chuckled. “Second, they will expect the
yashmak
and pantaloons. We hide your woman instead in a forest of bare arms and legs and exposed faces. Third, you are no longer a peasant but a mechanic to keep this – this—-” He gestured wordlessly at the truck. “I hope you know more about machinery than I do,
gospod.
I have been promised that it will break down every seven kilometers, regularly. It has pedals instead of a gearshift, and the power of a canary bird. I never saw anything like it before.”

I had. It was a model-T Ford, older than he was. As a high-school kid I had taken model-Ts apart and put them together with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers.

I said, “I can keep it going if it doesn’t fall apart entirely. Where did you get it?”

“From the Party.”

“And the girls?”

“Also from the Party.”

He smiled.

I said, “I don’t want to ask questions any more than you do, but we ought to know enough so that we won’t say the wrong thing in front of them. If they are from the Party why are they helping two fugitives from the Party?”

“They are from the Party, not for it. We have traitors in our organization. The Party has more traitors in its own. They
ask
us to join them. In this part of the country we have a majority in the Party as well as in the anti-Party. It is very helpful.”

He smiled again.

“All right. Only one more question. Do the girls know what they are risking?”

“They know there is a certain danger, yes. They are all volunteers. I could have had another dozen.” He added, as an afterthought, “I told them that you had helped Djakovo escape the
rokos.”

“
We didn’t.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter. We need help, but we don’t want to buy it that way.”

“
Gospod”
– he put his big hand lightly on my shoulder – “you can’t buy our help. We offer it because we believe in certain things. The news which you brought has put new life in all of us. We want to carry on Djakovo’s work. He would have helped you. If a little lie makes it easier for me to help you, what does it matter?”

“The girls should know the truth.”

He shook his head.

“They should know as little of the truth as possible. It’s their protection. Tonight we will take shelter with people who will not even know that we are not what we seem to be. Don’t you see how useless it would be for the
rokos
to try to beat information about you out of them, or about them out of you?”

I couldn’t argue.

Cora came out of the farmhouse dressed in shorts and shirt that were identical with those worn by the rest of the sorority. She wore sandals like theirs, and the homespun socks I had bought for her hid her bandaged heels. She fitted into the groups without any noticeable mark of distinction except that her arms and legs were whiter than the suntanned skins of the other girls. Above the line of the
yashmak
she was sunburned, below it pale. They were small points, but Piotr commented on them.

Fatma, the pretty, dark girl, was in charge of the team. She said, “It doesn’t matter. She’s a new convert. We all looked that way when we began. Besides, they never look at our faces.” She opened the neck of Cora’s shirt until Cora blushed bright pink. “There!”

The other girls laughed. Karsta, the big one, boomed, “Look at me!” and swelled her huge bosom. “Down with the
yashmak!
Away with the
haremlik!
Equality of sex, equality of opportunity, equality of reward!”

“Equality of chest measurement!” another girl shouted. Even Cora laughed. It was all very gay and frivolous and jolly until we heard, and saw, the scout plane coming back from the west, still low. It wasn’t on a course that would bring it near us, but the laughter died. The girls at least knew what the plane meant.

They gave us names.
Gospod
and
gospodična
weren’t used in the Party, only ‘comrade’, and ‘comrade’ wasn’t enough for a roll-call if we had to take one. Cora became Zara, I was Kasper. After that was settled we had a few words together while Piotr put his flock at the job of gathering up everything in sight that might reveal our stop at the ruined farm. He dug a hole to bury it; clothes, blankets, everything. He was not as contemptuous of the
rokos’
trailing ability as he was of their intelligence. He made a Slavic crack about what unusual smellers they were, the same kind of a pun that can be made in English. It had all the girls giggling again.

Except Cora. She was upset by their lightheartedness.

“He’s told them nothing, Jess. They haven’t any idea of the chance they’re taking. They think it’s all a lark.”

“He wants it that way.”

“It isn’t fair to them.”

“That’s what I thought. He sold me the idea that ignorance is their best protection.”

“Maybe. But — oh, I don’t
like
it! When it was just us, you and I, we couldn’t harm anybody but ourselves. Now, with all these – children – helping us, risking themselves without even knowing what it is they are risking or how dangerous we are – I feel like a secret leper! I can’t help it.”

“You couldn’t keep leprosy a secret in those clothes, if you had it.”

She reddened, pulling her shirtfront together. “Don’t joke. It isn’t funny.”

“I know it isn’t. We’ve got to try to make it funny. We’ve got to sing, and laugh, and shout Party slogans, and smile at the
rokos
when they stop us. It’s going to be a lot harder than skulking along with our faces hidden. You’ll have to ride in the back with the girls while I’m up front with Piotr, so we won’t have much chance to talk again, or pat each other on the back when we need a pat. In a pinch, when – if – things are tough – if it helps to know – I guess we’ve both learned a lot about each other in the last couple of days – things we didn’t see before—”

It was hard for me to get it out.

She looked at me gravely.

“I think it
would
help if I knew what you’re trying to say, Jess.”

“I’m trying to say that if I have to go down the drain with anyone, for any reason, I’m proud to do it in good company. That isn’t quite what I mean, either, but—-”

“I know what you mean.” She put out her hand to touch mine, for only a second. Her eyes were shiny. “It’s the nicest compliment anybody ever paid me. I’d rather have heard that from you than from anybody I know.”

Piotr called us to interrupt what had become an embarrassing moment. The girls were climbing into the back of the truck. Cora climbed in with them. I wound the crank of the shaky old motor while Piotr jiggled the spark lever. Karsta hit a baritone key, the other girls picked up the chord, and we bumped away to the rousing tune of the ‘Internationale’: Arise, ye prisoners of starvation; arise, ye wretched of the earth.

The truck quit on a steep climb ten miles down the highway, after spluttering for a while. I blocked the wheels and checked the petrol in the tank under the seat. As I had expected, the petrol level was too low for the old-fashioned gravity feed to work going up hill. Piotr had a couple of jerry-cans of petrol in reserve, which got us moving again. He was impressed by the way I had put my finger on the trouble at first guess. Another time, when the motor conked out in mid-rattle without even a splutter, I gave the loose spark coils a kick – after twenty-five years it was still instinctive to try that first – and got the motor started again while we were still rolling. Piotr shook his head in admiring awe. He thought I was a mechanical genius.

We ran into a road-block at the first town. The place was almost a city, with seven or eight minarets, a mill or factory of some kind belching smoke, a railroad station, and an Army post. Conscripts were training in a field behind barbed wire. A squad of soldiers with bayoneted rifles was on hand at the road-block, taking orders from a pair of
rokos.

The block had been set up at a bridge where the road crossed a river before entering town. When we got there a peasant with his wife, two small girls, and a farm cart loaded with household furniture was being shaken down.

Rokos
never wasted time on formalities. They weren’t looking at papers, only faces. When they wanted to look behind a woman’s veil, they reached for her veil. The peasant’s wife stood silently in the road, her head bowed and her
yashmak
dangling, afraid to cover her face until she was given permission. Her husband, his mouth set tight to keep back words that would only win him a beating, was unloading the cart, taking piece after piece of furniture off as one of the
rokos
silently jerked a finger at it, until there was no possible hiding-place in the cart remaining unexposed. The two little girls stood by their mother, looking frightened.

The
rokos
never said a word. When the cart was as empty as they wanted it, one nodded curtly and made a flicking motion with his fingers; go along. The peasant began to reload his cart. The
rokos
walked over to us, followed by the squad of soldiers.

I had got out of the truck. There was a small opening in the back of the cab through which we could look back at the girls, but all I could see through it was bare legs and ankles. It wasn’t enough to tell me what was going on. With the steaming radiator as an excuse to move around instead of sitting there watching my hands shake, I brought a can of water from the roadside ditch, then another, and afterwards went round feeling the treads of the thin tires. I did that partly to restore the dirt that had washed off my hands, partly to keep my head down. For a time I considered crawling under the truck to peer at the transmission, but boldness was our cue, not furtiveness. I tried to feel bold.

The girls were singing ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ again. Cora had already picked up the words and sang with the others. The
rokos
looked into the truck cab, staring silently and ominously at Piotr for half a minute, then came around to where I crouched by a wheel and turned the same stare on me.

It made sweat crawl down my back, although I knew the long, wordless, menacing look was only routine. They had no reason to expect abnormal fear reactions from two men with a Party truck. They passed me by to stare at the girls. It was a different kind of stare, this time.

The girls had Cora boxed in the middle of the chorus. Karsta flanked her on one side, another big girl on the other. Sidik and Fatma, the two prettiest of the lot, stood in front of her at the tail of the truck, selling their song, and themselves, directly to the
rokos.

The
rokos’
slow look crept over bare legs and arms and half-exposed breasts, inch by inch. Watching them, I thought of slugs crawling on naked flesh. The girls smiled and flirted and teased to hold their attention. Sidik wiggled her round hips in time to the music. One of the
rokos,
the larger of the pair, said something in an undertone to his partner. It was not a joke.

The soldiers were grinning and whispering, nudging each other and enjoying the leg show as any squad of soldiers would have done anywhere. The fun was normal, harmless. The big
roko’s
fixed stare at Sidik was neither.

He was a particularly ugly man even for a
roko.
Most of them, for all their size, were lean, rock-hard. This man was gross, with a big belly and rolls of fat cushioning his neck. His hands were enormous, broad, and fat-fingered. His face was as huge and round and blubbery as the rest of him, but bulging fat jowls and a narrowness of cranium between the eyes gave it the pear-shaped outline of an orang-utan’s muzzle. The ape resemblance was even more pronounced because of his flat nose and abnormally wide, abnormally thin-lipped mouth. Only his eyes failed to match. They were lizard eyes; small, cold, bright, unwinking. They saw nothing but Sadik, the tantalizing sway of her hips, the movements of her slim young body as she sang and postured and flirted to hold attention away from Cora.