That evening, by the cooking fire, Lev and three other villagers came to the captain again. “Senhor,” said one of the older men, “we’ve decided, see, that we’ll work here for a week, as community labor, if you City men work along with us. It won’t do, see, twenty or thirty of you just standing around doing nothing while we work.”
“Get these men back where they belong, Martin!” the captain said to a guard on watch duty. The guard lounged forward, hand on whip butt; the villagers looked at one another, shrugged, and returned to their campfire. The important thing, Captain Eden said to himself, was not to talk, not to let them talk. Night came on, black and pouring. It never rained like this in the City; there were roofs there. The noise of the rain was terrible in the darkness, all around, on miles, miles, miles of black wilderness. The fires sputtered, drowned. The guards huddled wretchedly under trees, dropped their musket muzzles in squelching mud, crouched and cursed and shivered. When dawn came, there were no villagers; they had melted off in the night, in the rain. Fourteen guards were also missing.
White-faced, hoarse, defeated, defiant, Captain Eden got his bone-soaked remnant of a troop together and set off back to the City. He would lose his captaincy, perhaps be whipped or mutilated in punishment for his failure, but at the moment he did not care. He did not care for anything they did to him unless it was exile. Surely they would see that it wasn’t his fault, nobody could have done this job. Exile was rare, only for the worst crimes, treason, assassination of a Boss; for that men had been driven out of the City, taken by boat far up the coast, marooned there alone in the wilderness, utterly alone, to be tortured and shot if they ever returned to the City, but none ever had; they had died alone, lost, in the terrible uncaring emptiness, the silence. Captain Eden breathed hard as he walked, his eyes searching ahead for the first sight of the roofs of the City.
In the darkness and the heavy rain the villagers had had to keep to the South Road; they would have got lost at once if they had tried to scatter out over the hills. It was difficult enough to keep to the road, which was no more than a track worn by the feet of fishermen and rutted in places by the wheels of lumber carts. They had to go very slowly, groping their way, until the rain thinned and then the light began to grow. Most of them had crept off in the hours after midnight, and by first light they were still little more than halfway home. Despite their fear of pursuit, most stayed on the road, in order to go faster. Lev had gone with the last group to go, and now deliberately held back behind the others. If he saw the guards coming he could shout warning, and the others could scatter off the road into the underbrush. There was no real need for him to do this, all of them were keeping a sharp lookout behind them; but it was an excuse for him to be alone. He didn’t want to be with the others, or to talk. He wanted to be by himself, as the wet silver sunrise lifted over the eastern hills; he wanted to walk alone with victory.
They had won. It had worked. They had won their battle without violence. No deaths; one injury. The “slaves” freed without making a threat or striking a blow; the Bosses running back to their Bosses to report failure, and perhaps to wonder why they had failed, and to begin to understand, to see the truth … . They were decent enough men, the captain and the others; when they finally got a glimpse of freedom, they would come to it. The City would join the Town, in the end. When their guards deserted them, the Bosses would give up their miserable playing at government, their pretense of power over other men. They too would come, more slowly than the working people, but even they would come to understand that to be free they must put their weapons and defenses down and come outside, equal among equals, brothers. And then indeed the sun would rise over the community of Mankind on Victoria, as now, beneath the heavy masses of the clouds over the hills the silver light broke clear, and every shadow leaped black across the narrow road, and every puddle of last night’s rain flashed like a child’s laugh.
And it was I, Lev thought with incredulous delight, it was I who spoke for them, I whom they turned to, and I didn’t let them down. We held fast! Oh, my God, when he fired that gun in the air, and I thought I was dead, and then I thought I was deaf! But yesterday, with the captain, I never thought “What if he fired?” because I knew he never could have raised the gun, he knew it, the gun wasn’t any use … . If there’s something you must do, you can do it. You can hold fast. I came through, we all came through. Oh, my God, how I love them, love all of them. I didn’t know, I didn’t know there was such happiness in the world!
He strode on through the bright air toward home, and the fallen rain broke in its quick, cold laughter round his feet.
7
“We need more hostages—especially their leaders, their chiefs. We must anger them into defiance, but not frighten them so much that they’re afraid to act. Do you understand? Their defense is passivity and talk, talk, talk. We want them to strike back, while we have their leaders, so their defiance will be disorganized and easily broken. Then they’ll be demoralized, easy to work with. You must try to take the boy, what’s his name, Shults; the man Elia; anyone else who acts as spokesman. You must provoke them, but stop short of terrifying them. Can you count on your men to stop when you say stop?”
Luz could hear no reply from Herman Macmilan but a careless, grudging mumble. Clearly he did not like being told that he “must” do this and that, nor being asked if he understood.
“Be sure you get Lev Shults. His grandfather was one of their great leaders. We can threaten execution. And carry it out if need be. But it would be better not to. If we frighten them too much they’ll fall back on these ideas of theirs, and cling to them because they have nothing else. What we want to do, and it will take restraint on our part, is to force them to betray their Ideas—to lose faith in their leaders and their arguments and their talk about peace.”
Luz stood outside her father’s study, just beneath the window, which was wide open to the windless, rainy air. Herman Macmilan had come stomping into the house a few minutes ago with some news; she had heard his voice, loud in anger and accusation—“We should have used my men in the first place! I told you so!” She was curious to know what had happened, and curious to hear anybody speak in such a tone to her father. But Herman’s tirade did not last long. By the time she got outside and under the window where she could eavesdrop, Falco was in full control and Herman was grumbling, “Yes, yes.” So much for Bigmouth Macmilan. He had learned who gave the orders in Casa Falco, and in the City. But the orders … .
She touched her cheeks, wet with fine rain, and then shook her hands quickly as if she had touched something slimy. Her silver bracelets clinked, and she froze like a coney, pressed up close to the house wall beneath the window so that if Herman or her father looked out they would not see her. Once while Falco was speaking he came and leaned his hands on the sill; his voice was directly above her, and she imagined she could feel the warmth of his body in the air. She felt a tremendous impulse to jump up and shout “Boo!” and at the same time was wildly planning excuses, explanations—“I was looking for a thimble I dropped—” She wanted to laugh aloud, and was listening, listening, with a sense of bewilderment that made tears rise in her throat. Was that her father, her father saying such hideous things? Vera had said that he had a great soul. Would a great soul talk so about tricking people, frightening them, killing them, using them?
That’s what he’s doing with Herman Macmilan, Luz thought. Using him.
Why not, why not? What else was Herman Macmilan good for?
And what was she good for? To be used, and he had used her—for his vanity, for his comfort, as his pet, all her life; and these days, he used her to keep Herman Macmilan docile. Last night he had ordered her to entertain Herman with courtesy, whenever he wanted to speak with her. Herman had no doubt complained about her running away from him. Great, whining, complaining bully. Bullies, both of them, all of them, with their big chests and their big boasts and their orders and their cheating plans.