“Go on, then,” Luz said in a low voice.
Vera looked mildly puzzled.
“Go back to the Town. Tonight. I’ll let you out. And I’ll tell my father, tomorrow, that I did so. I can do something—something besides sit here and sew and swear and listen to that stupid Macmilan!”
Lithe, robust, and commanding, the girl had leapt to her feet and stood over Vera, who sat still, looking shrunken.
“I’ve given my word, Luz Marina.”
“What does that matter?”
“If I don’t speak truth I can’t seek truth,” Vera answered in a hard voice.
They stared at each other, their faces set.
“I have no child,” Vera said, “and you have no mother. If I could help you, child, I would. But not that way. I keep my promises.”
“I make no promises,” Luz said.
She cleared a strand of thread from the spindle, Vera wound it onto the skein.
6
Whip butts rattled on doors. Men’s voices rang out; down by River Farm somebody was shouting or screaming. Villagers huddled together in a group in the cold, smoke-scented fog; it was not daybreak yet, houses and faces were lost in the fog and dark. Inside the little houses children, frightened by their parents’ fear and confusion, screamed aloud. People tried to get lamps lighted, to find their clothes, to hush the children. The City guards, excited, armed among the weaponless and clothed among the unclothed, flung open doors, shouldered into warm dark interiors of houses, shouted orders at the villagers and each other, pushed men one way and women another; their officer could have no control over them, dispersed as they were in the dark, among houses, and in the growing crowd in the one street of the village; only the docility of the villagers prevented the excitement of brutality from becoming the ecstasy of murder and rape. They protested, argued, and questioned verbally, but since most of them thought they were being arrested, and all had agreed at the Meeting House not to resist arrest, they obeyed the guards’ orders as promptly as they could; when they understood the orders, they passed the information on readily and clearly—grown men out onto the street, women and children stay indoors—as the best means of self-protection; so the frantic officer found his prisoners rounding themselves up. As soon as there was a group of twenty or so, he told off four guards, one armed with a musket, to march them out of the village. Two such groups had been marched off from Tableland Village; the fourth from South Village was being brought together when Lev arrived. Lyons’s wife Rosa had run from Tableland to Shantih, and, exhausted, had hammered at the Shultses’ door, gasping, “They’re taking off the men, the guards, they’re taking off all the men.” Lev had set off at once, alone, leaving Sasha to rouse the rest of the Town. As he came up, panting from the three-kilometer run, the fog was thinning, growing luminous; the figures of villagers and guards on the South Road bulked strangely in the half-light, as he cut across the fields to the head of the group. He stopped in front of the man at the head of the half-bunched, half-straggling line. “What’s going on?”
“Labor draft. Get in line with the others.”
Lev knew the guard, a tall fellow named Angel; they had been at school together for a year. Southwind and the other girls from Shantih had been afraid of Angel, because he cornered them in the hallway when he could and tried to handle them.
“Get in line,” Angel repeated, and swung up his musket, resting the end of the barrel on Lev’s chest. He was breathing almost as hard as Lev, and his eyes were widely dilated; he gave a kind of gasping laugh, watching how Lev’s winded breathing made the gun barrel rise and fall. “You ever hear one of these go off, boy? Loud, loud, like a ringtree seed—” He pushed the musket harder against Lev’s breastbone, then swung the gun up suddenly pointing at the sky, and fired.
Dazed by the terrific noise, Lev staggered back and stood staring. Angel’s face had gone dead gray; he also stood blank for some seconds, shaken by the recoil of the crudely made gun.
The villagers behind Lev, thinking he had been shot, came surging forward, and the other guards ran with them, yelling and cursing; the long whips uncoiled and cracked, flickering weirdly in the fog. “I’m all right,” Lev said. His voice sounded faint and distant inside his head. “I’m all right!” he shouted as loud as he could. He heard Angel also shouting, saw a villager take a whiplash straight across his face. “Get back in line!” He joined the group of villagers, and they huddled together, then, obeying the guards, strung out by twos and threes, and started to walk southward down the rough track.
“Why are we going south? This isn’t the City Road, why are we going south?” the one next to him, a boy of eighteen or so, said in a ragged whisper.
“It’s a labor draft,” Lev said. “Some kind of work. How many have they taken?” He shook his head to rid it of a buzzing dizziness.
“All the men in our valley. Why do we have to go?”
“To bring the others back. When we’re all together we can act together. It’ll be all right. Nobody got hurt?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’ll be all right. Hold fast,” Lev whispered, not knowing what he was saying. He began to drop back through the others until he came alongside the man who had been whipped. He was walking with his arm across his eyes, another man was holding his shoulder to guide him; they were last in line; barely visible in the ground mist, a guard followed behind.
“Can you see?”
“I don’t know,” the man said, pressing his arm across his face. His gray hair stood up ruffled and tufted; he was wearing a nightshirt and trousers, and was barefoot; his broad bare feet looked curiously childlike, shuffling and stubbing on the rocks and mud of the road.
“Take your arm away, Pamplona,” the other man said anxiously. “So we can have a look.”
The guard following behind shouted something, a threat or an order to move along faster.
Pamplona lowered his arm. Both his eyes were shut; one was untouched, the other was lost in an open bleeding slash where the whipthong had cut from the corner of the brow to the bridge of the nose. “It hurts,” he said. “What was it? I can’t see, there’s something in my eye. Lyons? Is that you? I want to go home.”
More than a hundred men were taken from the villages and outlying farms south and west of Shantih to begin work on the new estates in South Valley. They got there in mid-morning, as the fog was lifting off Mill River in writhing banners. Several guards were posted out on the South Road to prevent troublemakers from Shantih joining the forced-labor group. Tools were distributed, hoes, mattocks, brush-knives; and they were put to work in groups of four or five, each watched over by a guard armed with whip or musket. No barracks or shelters had been set up for them or for the thirty guards. When evening came, they built campfires of wet wood and slept on the wet ground. Food had been provided, but the bread had got rain-soaked so that most of it was a mass of dough. The guards grumbled bitterly among themselves. The villagers talked, persistently. At first the officer in charge of the operation, Captain Eden, tried to forbid them from talking, fearing conspiracy; then, when he realized that one group among them was arguing with another lot who were for running off during the night, he let them talk. He had no way to prevent them from sneaking off by ones and twos in the darkness; guards were stationed about with muskets, but they couldn’t see in the dark, there was no possibility of keeping bright fires going in the rain, and they had not been able to build a “compound area” as ordered. The villagers had worked hard at ground-clearing, but had proved inept and stupid at constructing any kind of fence or palisade out of the cut shrubs and brambles, and his own men would not lay down their weapons to do such work.