But she walked in terror, her eyes on every stone and shrub and clump of trees, until over the crest of a stony rise she saw red-thatched roofs, and smelled hearth smoke. She came walking into Shanty Town. Her face was set, her back straight; she held the shawl wrapped tight around her.
The small houses stood straggled about among trees and vegetable gardens. There were a lot of houses, but the place wasn’t gathered in, walled, protective, like the City. It was all straggling, damp, humble-looking in the quiet, rainy afternoon. There were no people nearby. Luz came slowly down the wandering street, trying to decide—should I call to that man over there? should I knock at this door?
A small child appeared from nowhere in particular and stared at her. He was fair-skinned, but coated with brown mud from toes to knees and fingertips to elbows, with more mud in splotches here and there, so that he seemed to be a variegated or piebald child. What clothes he wore were also ringstraked and spotted with an interesting variety of tones of mud. “Hello,” he said after a long pause, “who are you?”
“Luz Marina. Who are you?”
“Marius,” he said, and began to sidle away.
“Do you know where—where Lev Shults lives?” She did not want to ask for Lev, she would rather face a stranger; but she could not remember any other name. Vera had told her about many of them, she had heard her father mention the “ringleaders’” names, but she could not remember them now.
“Lev what?” said Marius, scratching his ear and thus adding a rich deposit to the mudbank there. Shanty-Towners, she knew, never seemed to use last names among themselves, only in the City.
“He’s young, and he …” She didn’t know what Lev was, a leader? a captain? a boss?
“Sasha’s house is down there,” said the variegated child, pointing down a muddy, overgrown lane, and sidled away so effectively that he seemed simply to become part of the general mist and mud.
Luz set her teeth and walked to the house he had pointed out. There was nothing to be afraid of. It was just a dirty little place. The children were dirty and the people were peasants. She would give her message to whoever opened the door, then it would be done and she could go home to the high, clean rooms of Casa Falco.
She knocked. Lev opened the door.
She knew him, though she had not seen him for two years. He was half-dressed and disheveled, having been roused from siesta, staring at her with the luminous, childish stupidity of the half-awake. “Oh,” he said, yawning, “where’s Andre?”
“I am Luz Marina Falco. From the City.”
The luminous stare changed, deepened, he woke up.
“Luz Marina Falco,” he said. His dark, thin face flashed into life; he looked at her, past her for her companions, at her again, his eyes charged with feelings—alert, wary, amused, incredulous. “Are you here—with—”
“I came alone. I have a—I have to tell you—”
“Vera,” he said. No smile on that flashing face now, but tension, passion.
“Vera is all right. So are the others. It’s about you, about the Town. Something happened last night, I don’t know what—you know about it—”
He nodded, watching her.
“They’re angry, and they’re going to come here, I think it’s tomorrow night, the men young Macmilan has been training, the bullies, and try and take you and the other leaders prisoner, and then—outrage the others so that they’ll fight back, and then they can beat them and make them work on the latifundia for punishment for rebelling. They’re coming after dark, tomorrow I think but I’m not sure of that, and he has about forty of them, I think, but all with muskets.”
Lev still watched her. He said nothing. Only then, in his silence, did she hear the question she had not asked herself.
And the question took her so off guard, she was so far from the merest beginning of an answer to it, that she stood there and stared back at him, her face growing dull red with bewilderment and fear, and could not say another word.
“Who sent you, Luz?” he asked at last, gently.
It was natural that this should be his answer to the question, that he should think she was lying, or was being used for some kind of trick or spying by Falco. It was natural that he should think that, that he should imagine she was serving her father, and not imagine that she was betraying her father. All she could do was shake her head. Her legs and arms tingled, and there were flashes of light in her eyes; she felt that she was going to be sick. “I have to go back now,” she said, but did not move, because her knees would not work.
“Are you all right? Come in, sit down. For a minute.”
“I’m dizzy,” she said. Her voice sounded thin and whiny, she was ashamed of it. He brought her inside and she sat down in a wicker chair by a table in a dark, long, low-beamed room. She pulled the shawl off her head to get rid of the heat and weight of it; that helped; her cheeks began to cool, and the lights stopped flashing in her eyes as she got used to the dusk of the room. Lev stood near her, at the end of the table. He was barefoot, wearing only trousers; he stood quietly; she could not look at his face, but she sensed in his stance and his quietness no threat, no anger, no contempt.
“I hurried,” she said. “I wanted to get back quickly, it’s a long way, it made me dizzy.” Then she got hold of herself, finding that there was, under the fluster and the fear, a place inside her, a silent corner where her mind could crouch down and think. She thought, and finally spoke again.
“Vera has been living with us. In Casa Falco. You knew that? She and I have been together every day. We talk. I tell her what I hear that’s going on, she tells me … all kinds of things … . I tried to make her come back here. To warn you. She won’t, she says she promised not to run away, so she has to keep the promise. So I came. I heard them talking, Herman Macmilan and my father. I listened, I went and stood under the window to listen. What they said made me angry. It made me sick. So when Vera wouldn’t come, I came. Do you know about these new guards, Macmilan’s guards?”
Lev shook his head, watching, intent.
“I’m not lying,” she said coldly. “Nobody is using me. Nobody but Vera even knows I left the house. I came because I’m sick of being used and sick of lies and sick of doing nothing. You can believe me or not. I don’t care.”
Lev shook his head again, blinking, as if dazzled. “No, I don’t—But slow down a little—”
“There isn’t time. I have to go back before anybody notices. All right, my father got young Macmilan to train up a troop of other men, Bosses’ sons, as a special army, to use against you people. They haven’t talked about anything else for two weeks. They’re coming here because of whatever it was that happened down in South Valley, and they’re supposed to catch you and the other leaders, and then force your people into fighting so you’ll betray your idea of peace, of what do you call it, nonviolence. And then you’ll fight and you’ll lose, because we’re better fighters, and anyway we have guns. Do you know Herman Macmilan?”
“By sight, I think,” Lev said. He was so utterly different from the man whose name she had just said and whose image filled her mind—the splendid face and muscular body, broad chest, long legs, strong hands, heavy clothing, tunic, trousers, boots, belt, coat, gun, whip, knife … . This man was barefoot; she could see the ribs and breastbone under the dark, fine skin of his chest.
“I hate Herman Macmilan,” Luz said, less hurriedly, speaking from the small cool place inside her where she could think. “His soul is about the size of a toenail. You should be afraid of him. I am. He likes to hurt people. Don’t try to talk to him, the way you people do. He won’t listen. He fills up his whole world. All you can do with that kind of man is hit him, or run away from him. I ran away from him.—Do you believe me?” She could ask that, now.
Lev nodded.