“Yeah, I had the same feeling, too,” Two Hawks said. “But I can’t explain it.”
“I felt like, well, like Old Mother Earth herself had disappeared for a minute,” O’Brien said. “How about that, huh?”
Two Hawks did not answer. He heard the vehicle approaching down the road, then stop in front of the house. The motor sounded like an old Model T. He directed the sergeant to help him pile junk beneath one of the chinks and then stood up on the unstable platform. The hole was only a little larger than his eye, but it permitted him to see the car and the soldiers getting out of it. It was a peculiar looking vehicle, perhaps not so much peculiar as old-fashioned. He remembered O’Brien’s comment when they had first landed about the cars at the head of the ox-drawn wagon train.
Well, Rumania was supposed to be a very backward country, even if it had the largest and most modern oil refineries in Europe. And the soldiers certainly were not members of the Wehrmacht. On the other hand, their uniforms did not resemble anything in the illustrations he had seen during his briefing in Tobruk. The officer wore a shiny steel helmet shaped to look like a wolf’s head. There were even two steel ears. His knee-length jacket was a green-gray, but the collar had a strip of grayish animal fur sewed to it. There was an enormous gold-braided epaulette on each shoulder and a triple row of large shiny yellow buttons down the front of his jacket. His trousers were skintight, crimson, and had the head of a black bull on each leg just above the knees. He wore a broad leather belt with a holster. A strange-looking pistol was in his hand; he gestured with it while giving orders to his men in a Slavic-sounding speech. He turned and revealed that he was also wearing a sword in a scabbard on his left side. Shiny black calf-length boots completed his uniform.
Several of the soldiers were within Two Hawks’ range of vision. They wore helmets that had a neck-protecting nape, but the shape above the head was cylindrical, like a steel plug hat. Their black coats came to the waist in front, then curved to make a split-tail in back that fell just below the back of the knees. They had baggy orange trousers and jackboots. There were swords in the scabbards hanging from broad belts and rifles in their hands. The rifles had revolving chambers for the cartridges, like some of the old Western rifles.
All had full beards and long hair except for the officer. He was a clean-shaven youth, blond and pale, certainly not a dark Rumanian type.
The men scattered. There were shouts from above, the tread of boots on the floors, and smashing sounds. The officer walked out of sight, but Two Hawks could hear him talking slowly, as if in a language he had been taught in school. The woman answered in the same speech, which had to be her native tongue. Two Hawks found himself straining to catch its meaning, almost but not quite succeeding. Ten minutes passed. The soldiers reassembled. Frightened squawks announced the “expropriation” of hens. A certain amount of stealing was to be expected, Two Hawks thought, but by the woman’s own people? No, the soldiers could not be of the same nationality as she, otherwise there would be no language difficulty. Perhaps the woman belonged to one of the minorities of Rumania. It seemed logical, but he did not believe it.
Two Hawks waited. He could hear the soldiers laughing and talking loudly to each other. The woman was silent. About twenty minutes later, the officer apparently made up his mind that his men had had enough fun. He strode out of sight, and his voice came loudly to Two Hawks. Within a minute, the soldiers were lined up before him while he gave them a short but sharp lecture. Then they got into the car and drove off down the road.
“I don’t think they were looking for us,” Two Hawks said. “They must know that the house has a cellar. But if not us, what were they looking for?”
He wanted to go out immediately, but he decided that the soldiers could be coming back up the road soon or another group could pass by. Better for the woman to tell them when it was safe. The day passed slowly. There was no sound from outside for a long while except for the clucking hens and mooing cows.
It was not until dusk that they heard furniture moving above the trapdoor. The door creaked open, and light from a lamp streamed through the oblong.
Two Hawks took the automatic from O’Brien and went up first, determined to shoot anybody waiting for them. Despite all the evidences of her trustworthiness, he still was not sure that she had not changed her mind and summoned the troops. It did not seem very likely since the soldiers would not have bothered waiting around until dusk. But you never knew, and it was better to take no chances.
There was a man standing in one corner of the kitchen and munching on a piece of dried meat. Two Hawks, seeing he was unarmed except for a big knife in a scabbard sheath, put his automatic in his belt. The man looked at them stone-facedly. He was as dark as the woman and had an eagle- like nose and high cheekbones. His straight black hair was cut in the shape of a helmet—a German helmet. His black shirt and dirty brown pants looked as if they were made of some coarse and tough cotton. His boots were dirty. He stank as if he had been sweating out in the fields all day. He looked old enough to be the woman’s father and probably was.
The woman offered the two bowls of stew from the kettle still simmering in the fireplace. Neither was hungry, since they had been sampling the contents of the cellar. But Two Hawks thought it would be politic to accept. It was possible these people might believe that it was a gesture of hospitality and trust to offer a stranger food. They might believe that a man who ate under their roof was automatically sacrosanct. And the reverse could be true also. A stranger who accepted their bread would not break a tabu by harming them.
He explained this to O’Brien. While he was talking, he saw the farmer’s expression break loose from its stony cast. He looked puzzled and frowned as if he thought there was something familiar about the language. However, he had no more success in translating than Two Hawks had had with their language.
The two aviators sat down at a five-legged table of smoothly planed but unvarnished pine. The woman served them, then busied herself working around the kitchen. She pumped water out of a handpump over the sink. Two Hawks felt a touch of nostalgia and homesickness at this, since it reminded him of the kitchen pump in his parents’ farmhouse in upper New York when he had been a little boy. The man paced back and forth, talking to the woman, then sat down with the two and began eating from a large bowl. This was of ceramic with some symbols painted in blue on it. One of them was the likeness of the broken mask Two Hawks had seen in the cellar.
When he had finished eating, the farmer stood up abruptly and gestured at them to follow him. They stepped out through a swinging screen door with a mosquito net made of closely woven cotton fibres. Its interstices seemed too large to do its job, but the threads had been soaked in oil. Suddenly, Two Hawks recognized the odor. It was the same oil with which the woman had plastered her hair.
Although the oil was not sunflower seed oil, it triggered off a sequence of thought. Some of the older women on the reservation near his father’s farm had used sunseed oil on their hair. His mind leaped at a conclusion which he could only reject because it was incredible. But there was also the undeniable fact that he now recognized the speech of the two peasants as a form of very peculiar Iroquoian. It was still largely unintelligible. But it was not Rumanian nor Hungarian nor Slavic, neither Indo-European nor Ugro-Altaic. It was a dialect related to the tongue of the Onondaga, the Seneca, Mohawk, and the Cherokee. Not only in its phonology but in its structure.