“Those men are horrible,” Ris said. She’d barely gotten away from a big fellow who chased her to the borderline and threw a rock after her, which luckily just grazed her arm. “Brutes!”
Sallo was comforting little Oco, who had been following us into the orchard when we all came flying past her in a shower of rocks and clods. Oco was scared, but soon reassured by our laughter and Yaven’s posturing. Yaven was always aware of the younger children’s fears and feelings, and was particularly gentle with Oco.
He picked her up to ride on his shoulder while he declaimed, Are we then men of Morva, To flee before the foe, Or shall we fight for Etra, Like our fathers long ago?
“They’re just mean,” Astano declared. “The apricots are falling off the trees, they’ll never get them all picked.”
“We’re actually helping them pick,” said Sotur. “Exactly. They’re just mean and stupid.”
“I suppose we could go ask Senator Obbe if we could pick some fruit in his orchard,” said Uter, one of the skinny cousins from Herramand, a very law-abiding kind of boy.
“It tastes a lot better when you don’t ask,” Yaven said.
I was inspired by memories of our skirmishes and sieges in the sycamore grove, which I still missed despite their wretched outcome. I said, “They’re Morvans. Cowardly, brutal, selfish Morvans. Are we of Etra to endure their insults?”
“Certainly not!” said Yaven. “We are to eat their apricots!”
“When do they stop picking?” Sotur asked.
“Evening,” somebody said. Nobody really knew; we paid no attention to the activities of the farm workers, which went on around us like the doings of the bees and ants and birds and mice, the business of another species. Sotur was for coming back at night and helping ourselves freely to apricots. Tib thought they left dogs in the Obbe orchards to guard them at night. Yaven, taken by my warlike stance, suggested that we plan a raid on the orchards of Morva, but properly conducted this time, with reconnoitering beforehand, and lookouts posted, and perhaps some ammunition stockpiled with which to respond to enemy missiles and defend our retreat if necessary.
So began the great war between “Etran” Arca and “Morvan” Obbe, which went on in one orchard or another for a month. The farm workers on the Obbe estate soon were keenly aware of us and our depredations, and if we posted lookouts, so did they; but our time was free, we could choose when to strike, while they were bound to their work, to pick the fruit and sort and carry it away, all under the overseer’s eye and his lash if they were slow or lazy. We were like birds, flitting in and stealing and flitting off again. We thought nothing of their anger, their hatred of us, and taunted them mercilessly when we’d made a particularly good haul. They’d learned that we weren’t all slave children as they’d thought at first, and that tied their hands.
If a slave threw a rock and hit a young member of the Arca Family, the whole orchard crew might be in mortal trouble. So they had to hold their fire and try to intimidate us merely by numbers and by setting their cur-dogs on us.
To make up for their disadvantage we made a rule: if they saw us, we had to retreat. It wasn’t fair, Astano said, to take fruit openly, under their noses, since they couldn’t retaliate; we had to steal it while they were there in the orchard. This rule made it extremely dangerous and exciting, with only one or two tree-robbers per expedition, but any number of watchers and warners to hoot, tweet, chirp, and whistle when the enemy came close. Then, if we’d made off with some plums or early pears, we could pop up on the home side of the boundary, display our loot, and exult in our victory.
The great fruit wars came to an end when Mother Falimer told Ya-ven that a little group of our farm slave children had been savagely beaten by a group of orcharders at Obbe farm, who caught them stealing plums. One boy had had his eye gouged out. The Mother said nothing to Yaven beyond telling him what had happened, but when he brought the report to the rest of us, he told us that we’d have to stop our raids. The farm children had probably hoped to be mistaken for us and so get away unhurt, but the trick hadn’t worked, and the men from Obbe had taken their rage out against them.
Yaven apologised to us formally for his thoughtlessness in leading us into doing harm, and Astano, repressing tears, joined him. “It was my fault,” she said. “Not yours, none of you.” They took full responsibility, as they would do when they were grown, when Yaven was the Father of Arcamand and Astano perhaps Mother of another household, when every decision would be theirs and theirs alone.
“I hate those awful orchard slaves,” Ris said.
“The farm people really are brutes,” Umo said regretfully.
“Foul Morvans,” Tib said.
We were all disconsolate. If we didn’t have an enemy, we needed a cause.
“I tell you what,” Yaven said. “We could do the Fall of Sentas,"
“Not with weapons,” Astano said very softly and lightly, “No, of course not. I mean, like a play.”
“How?”
“Well, first we’d have to build Sentas. I was thinking the other day that the top of the hill behind the east vineyard, you know?—it’s like a citadel. There are all those big rocks up there. It would be easy to fortify it, and make some trenches and earthworks. Teacher-di has the book here—we could get the plans out of it. Then we could take different parts, you know—Oco could be General Thur, and Gav could say the Envoy’s speeches, and Sotur could be the prophetess Yurno… We wouldn’t have to do the fighting parts. Just the talking.”
It didn’t sound very exciting, but we all trooped up to the hilltop, and as Yaven paced around among the big tumbled rocks and described where we could build a wall or make an earthwork, the idea of building a city began to take hold. Later in the afternoon he got Everra to bring out the book and read us passages from the epic, and our imaginations caught fire from the grand words and tragic episodes. We all chose what characters we would be—and all of us were Sentans. Nobody wanted to be a besieging warrior from Pagadi, not even the great General Thur or the hero Rurec, not even though Pagadi had won the war and destroyed the city, so that now, after hundreds of years, Sentas was still a poor little town among great ruined walls. Usually we were on the side of the winners; but we were going to build doomed Sentas, and so her cause was ours, and we would fall with her.
We built Sentas and enacted her glory and her fall, all the rest of the summer. Building was hard work up there on the hilltop in the sparse dry grass with the sun beating down and no shade except under the rock walls and towers we piled up. The two little girls, Oco and Umo, toiled up and down the hill with water from the stream while the rest of us sweated and grunted. We swore with parched mouths when a stone refused to fit in its place or slipped and came down on a finger; we greeted the water carriers with praise and rejoicing. Astano’s delicate hands were rough and bruised, as hard, the Mother said, as horse hoofs; but the Mother smiled and did not reprove. She even came out several times and walked up the Hill of Sentas to see how the work was going. Yaven and Astano showed her our triumphs of engineering, the Eastern Gate, the Tower of the Ancients, the defensive ramparts. Erect in her light summer robes, smooth-faced, smiling, she listened, nodded, approved. I saw her hand sometimes laid lightly, almost timidly, on her tall sons arm, and saw the yearning in the gesture though I didn’t understand it. I think she was happy in our happiness and, like us, wanted it unshadowed by any thought of days past or days to come.