The Eye of the Heron

10

“It’s all right,” Luz said. “Everything is going well. Don’t worry.” She had to speak loudly, and she felt foolish, always saying the same thing; but it always worked, for a while. Vera would lie back and be quiet. But presently she would be trying to sit up again, asking what was happening, anxious and frightened. She would ask about Lev: “Is Lev all right? His hand was hurt.” Then she would say she had to go back to the City, to Casa Falco. She should never have come with those men with the guns, it was her fault, for wanting so badly to come home. If she went back to being a hostage again things would go better, wouldn’t they? “Everything is all right, don’t worry,” Luz said, loudly, for Vera’s hearing had been damaged. “Everything is going well.”

And indeed people went to bed at night and got up in the morning, did the work, cooked meals and ate them, talked together; everything went on. Luz went on. She went to bed at night. It was hard to get to sleep, and when she slept she woke up in the black dark from a horrible crowd of pushing, screaming people; but none of that was happening. It had happened. The room was dark and silent. It had happened, it was over, and everything went on.

The funeral of the seventeen who had been killed was held two days after the march to the City; some were to be buried in their own villages, but the meeting and service for all of them was held at the Meeting House. Luz felt that she did not belong there, and that Andre and Southwind and the others would find it easier if she did not come with them. She said she would stay with Vera, and they left her. But when a long time had passed in the utter silence of the house in the rainswept fields, Vera asleep, Luz picking the seeds from silktree fiber to be doing something with her hands, a man came to the door, a slight, gray-haired man; she did not recognize him at first. “I am Alexander Shults,” he said. “Is she asleep? Come on. They shouldn’t have left you here.” And he took her back with him to the Meeting House, to the end of the service for the dead, and on to the burial ground, in the silent procession that bore the twelve coffins of the dead from Shantih. So she stood in her black shawl in the rain at the graveside by Lev’s father. She was grateful to him for that, though she said nothing to him, nor he to her.

She and Southwind worked daily in Southwind’s potato field, for the crop had to be got in; another few days and it would begin to rot in the wet ground. They worked together when Vera was asleep, and took turns, one in the field and one in the house, when she was wakeful and needed someone with her. Southwind’s mother was often there, and the big, silent, competent Italia, Southwind’s friend; and Andre came by once a day, though he too had fieldwork and also had to spend time daily at the Meeting House with Elia and the others. Elia was in charge, it was Elia who talked with the City men now. Andre told Luz and Southwind what had been done and said; he expressed no opinion; Luz did not know if he approved or disapproved. All the opinions, beliefs, theories, principles, all that was gone, swept away, dead. The heavy, defeated grief of the great crowd at the funeral service was all that was left. Seventeen people of Shantih dead, there on the Road; eight people of the City. They had died in the name of peace, but they had also killed in the name of peace. It had all fallen apart. Andre’s eyes were dark as coals. He joked to cheer up Southwind (and Luz saw, as she saw everything now, dispassionately, that he had been in love with Southwind for a long time), and both girls smiled at his jokes, and tried to make him rest for a while, there with them and Vera. Luz and Southwind worked together, afternoons in the fields. The potatoes were small, firm, and clean, pulling up out of the mud on their fine-tangled tracery of roots. There was a pleasure in the fieldwork; not much in anything else.

From time to time Luz thought, “None of this is happening,” for it seemed to her that what did happen was only a kind of picture or screen, like a shadow-play, behind which lay whatever was real. This was a puppet show. It was all so strange, after all. What was she doing in a field in the late afternoon in a misty dark drizzle, wearing patched trousers, mud to the thighs and elbows, pulling potatoes for Shanty Town? All she had to do was get up and walk home. Her blue skirt and the embroidered blouse would be hanging clean and pressed in the closet in her dressing room; Teresa would bring hot water for a bath. There would be big logs in the fireplace at the west end of the hall of Casa Falco, in this weather, and a clear fire burning. Outside the thick glass of the windows the evening would darken bluer and bluer over the Bay. The doctor might drop in for a chat, with his crony Valera, or old Councillor Di Giulio hoping for a game of chess with her father—

No. Those were the puppets, little bright mind-puppets. That was nowhere; this was here: the potatoes, the mud, Southwind’s soft voice, Vera’s swollen, discolored face, the creaking of the straw mattress in the loft of this hut in Shanty Town in the black dark and stillness of the night. It was strange, it was all wrong, but it was all that was left.

Vera was improving. The physician, Jewel, said the effect of the concussion had worn off; she must stay in bed at least a week longer, but she would be all right. She asked for something to do. Southwind gave her a great basket of cottonwool, gathered from wild trees over in Red Valley, to spin.

Elia came to the door. The three women had just had their noon dinner. Southwind was washing up, Luz was straightening the table, Vera was sitting up against her pillow tying a starter-thread on the spindle. Elia looked clean, like the little potatoes, Luz thought, with his firm round face and blue eyes. His voice was unexpectedly deep, but very gentle. He sat at the cleared table and talked, mostly to Vera. “Everything is going well,” he told her. “Everything is all right.”

Vera said little. The left side of her face was still misshapen and bruised where she had been kicked or clubbed, but she tilted that side forward in order to hear; her right eardrum had been broken. She sat up against her pillow, set her spindle whirling, and nodded as Elia talked. Luz did not pay much heed to what he said. Andre had told them already: the hostages had been freed; terms of cooperation between City and Town agreed upon, and a fairer exchange in tools and dried fish for the food supplied by the Town; now they were discussing a plan for the joint settlement of the South Valley—work parties from the City opening up the land, then volunteer colonists from the Town moving there to farm.

“And the northern colony?” Vera asked in her quiet thin voice.

Elia looked down at his hands. Finally he said, “It was a dream.”

“Was it all a dream, Elia?”

Vera’s voice had changed; Luz, putting away the bowls, listened.

“No,” the man said. “No! But too much, too soon—too fast, Vera. Too much staked rashly on an act of open defiance.”

“Would covert defiance have been better?”

“No. But confrontation was wrong. Cooperation, talking together—reasoning—reason. I told Lev—All along, I tried to say—”

There were tears in Elia’s blue eyes, Luz noticed. She stacked the bowls neatly in the cupboard and sat down by the hearth.

“Councillor Marquez is a reasonable man. If only he had been Chief of the Council—” Elia checked himself. Vera said nothing.

“It’s Marquez you mostly talk with now, Andre says,” said Luz. “Is he Chief of the Council now?”

“Yes.”

“Is my father in jail?”

“Under house arrest, they call it,” Elia replied, with extreme embarrassment. Luz nodded, but Vera was staring at them. “Don Luis? Alive? I thought—Arrest? What for?”

Elia’s embarrassment was painful to see. Luz answered, “For killing Herman Macmilan.”

Vera stared; the pulse of her heart throbbed in her swollen temple.

“I didn’t see it,” Luz said in her dry calm voice. “I was back in the crowd with Southwind. Andre was up front with Lev and Elia, he saw it and told me. It was after Macmilan shot Lev. Before any of us knew what was happening. Macmilan’s men were just beginning to shoot at us. My father took a gun out of one of the men’s hands and used it like a club. He didn’t shoot it, Andre said. I suppose it was hard to tell, after the fighting there, and people trampling back and forth over them, but Andre said they thought the blow must have killed Macmilan. Anyway he was dead when they came back.”

“I saw it too,” Elia said, thickly. “It was—I suppose it was what—what kept some of the City men from shooting, they were confused—”

“No order was ever given,” Luz said. “So there was time for the marchers to rush in on them. Andre thinks that if my father hadn’t turned on Macmilan, there would have been no fighting at all. Just them shooting and the marchers running.”

“And no betrayal of our principles,” said Southwind, clearly and steadily. “Perhaps, if we hadn’t rushed forward, the City men wouldn’t have fired in self-defense.”

“And only Lev would have been killed?” Luz said, equally clearly. “But Macmilan would have ordered them all to fire, Southwind. He’d started it. If the marchers had run away sooner, yes, maybe fewer would have been shot. And no City men beaten to death. Your principles would be all right. But Lev would still be dead. And Macmilan would be alive.”

Elia was looking at her with an expression she had not seen before; she did not know what it meant—detestation, perhaps, or fear.

“Why,” Vera said in a pitiful dry whisper.

“I don’t know!” Luz said, and because it was such a relief to be saying these things, talking about them, instead of hiding them and saying everything was all right, she actually laughed. “Do I understand what my father does, what he thinks, what he is? Maybe he went insane. That’s what old Marquez told Andre, last week. I know if I’d been where he was, I would have killed Macmilan too. But that doesn’t explain why he did it. There is no explanation. It’s easiest to say he was insane. You see, that’s what’s wrong with your ideas, Southwind, you people. They’re all true, all right and true, violence gains nothing, killing wins nothing—only sometimes nothing is what people want. Death is what they want. And they get it.”

There was a silence.

“Councillor Falco saw the folly of Macmilan’s act,” Elia said. “He was trying to prevent—”

“No,” Luz said, “he wasn’t. He wasn’t trying to prevent more shooting, more killing, and he wasn’t on your side. Don’t you have anything in your head but reason, Senhor Elia? My father killed Macmilan for the same ‘reason’ that Lev stood up there facing the men with guns and defying them and got killed. Because he was a man, that’s what men do. The reasons come afterward.”

Elia’s hands were clenched; his face was pale, so that his blue eyes stood out unnaturally bright. He looked straight at Luz and said, gently enough, “Why do you stay here, Luz Marina?”

“Where else should I go?” she asked, almost jeering.

“To your father.”

“Yes, that’s what women do … .”

“He is in distress, in disgrace; he needs you.”

“And you don’t.”

“Yes, we do,” Vera said, with desperation. “Elia, are you insane too? Are you trying to drive her out?”

“It was because of her—If she hadn’t come here, Lev—It was her fault—” Elia was in the grip of emotion he could not master, his voice going high, his eyes wide. “It was her fault!”

“What are you saying?” Vera whispered, and Southwind, fiercely, “It was not! None of it!”

Luz said nothing.

Elia, shaking, put his hands over his face. No one said anything for a long time.

“I’m sorry,” he said, looking up. His eyes were dry and bright, his mouth worked strangely as he spoke. “Forgive me, Luz Marina. There was no meaning in what I said. You came to us, you’re welcome here among us. I get—I get very tired, trying to see what ought to be done, what’s right—it’s hard to see what’s right—”

The three women were silent.

“I compromise, yes, I compromise with Marquez, what else can I do? Then you say, Elia is betraying our ideals, selling us into permanent bondage to the City, losing all we struggled for. What do you want, then? More deaths? You want another confrontation, you want to see the People of the Peace being shot again, fighting, beating—beating men to death again —we who—who believe in peace, in nonviolence—” “Nobody is saying that of you, Elia,” Vera said.

“We have to go slowly. We must be reasonable. We can’t do it all at once, rashly, violently. It’s not easy—not easy!”

“No,” Vera said. “It’s not easy.”

“We came from all over the world,” the old man said. “From great cities and from little villages, the people came. When the March began in the City of Moskva there were four thousand, and when they reached the edge of the place called Russia already there were seven thousand. And they walked across the great place called Europe, and always hundreds and hundreds of people joined the March, families and single souls, young and old. They came from towns nearby, they came from great lands far away over the oceans, India, Africa. They all brought what they could bring of food and precious money to buy food, for so many marchers always needed food. The people of the towns stood along the side of the road to watch the marchers pass, and sometimes children ran out with presents of food or precious money. The armies of the great countries stood along the roadside too, and watched, and protected the marchers, and made sure they did no damage to the fields and trees and towns, by being so many. And the marchers sang, and sometimes the armies sang with them, and sometimes the men of the armies threw away their guns and joined the March in the darkness of the night. They walked, they walked. At night they camped and it was like a great town growing up all at once in the open fields, all the people. They walked, they walked, they walked, across the fields of France and across the fields of Germany and across the high mountains of Spain, weeks they walked and months they walked, singing the songs of peace, and so they came at last, ten thousand strong, to the end of the land and the beginning of the sea, to the City Lisboa, where the ships had been promised them. And there the ships lay in harbor.

“So that was the Long March. But it wasn’t over, the journey! They went into the ships, to sail to the Free Land, where they would be welcomed. But there were too many of them now. The ships would hold only two thousand, and their numbers had grown and grown as they marched, there were ten thousand of them now. What were they to do? They crowded, they crowded; they built more beds, they crowded ten to a room of the great ships, a room that was meant to hold two. The ships’ masters said, Stop, you can’t crowd the ships any more, there isn’t enough water for the long voyage, you can’t all come aboard the ships. So they bought boats, fishing boats, boats with sails and with engines; and people, grand rich people, with boats of their own, came and said, Use my boat, I’ll take fifty souls to the Free Land. Fishermen came from the city called England and said, Use my boat, I’ll take fifty souls. Some were afraid of the small boats, to cross so great a sea; some went back home then, and left the Long March. But always new people came to join them, so their numbers grew. And so at last they all sailed from the harbor of Lisboa, and music played and there were ribbons in the wind and all the people in the great ships and the little boats sailed out together singing.

“They couldn’t stay together on the sea. The ships were fast, the boats were slow. In eight days the big ships sailed into the harbor of Montral, in the land of Canamerica. The other boats came after, strung out all across the ocean, some days behind, some weeks behind. My parents were on one of the boats, a beautiful white boat named Anita, that a noble lady had lent to the People of the Peace so that they could come to the Free Land. There were forty on that boat. Those were good days, my mother said. The weather was good and they sat on the deck in the sun and planned how they would build the City of Peace in the land they had been promised, the land between the mountains, in the northern part of Canamerica.

“But when they came to Montral, they were met by men with guns, and taken, and put into prisons; and there were all the others, from the big ships, all the people, waiting, in the prison camps.

“There were too many of them, the leaders of that land said. There were to have been two thousand, and there were ten thousand. There was no land or place for so many. They were dangerous, being so many. People from all over the Earth kept coming there to join them, and camping outside the city and outside the prison camps, and singing the songs of peace. Even from Brasil they were coming, they had begun their own Long March northward up the length of the great continents. The rulers of Canamerica were frightened. They said there was no way to keep order, or to feed so many. They said this was an invasion. They said the Peace was a lie, not the truth, because they didn’t understand it and didn’t want it. They said their own people were leaving them and joining the Peace, and this could not be allowed, because they must all fight the Long War with the Republic, that had been fought for twenty years and still was being fought. They said the People of the Peace were traitors, and spies from the Republic! And so they put us into the prison camps, instead of giving that land between the mountains they had promised us. There I was born, in the prison camp of Montral.

“At last the rulers said: Very well, we’ll keep our promise, we’ll give you land to live on, but there’s no place for you on Earth. We’ll give you the ship that was built in Brasil long ago, to send thieves and murderers away. Three ships they built, two they sent out to the world called Victoria, the third they never used because their law was changed. No one wants the ship because it was made to make only the one voyage, it cannot come back to Earth. Brasil has given us that ship. Two thousand of you are to go in it, that is all it can hold. And the rest of you must either find your way back to your own land across the ocean, back to Russia the Black, or live here in the prison camps making weapons for the War with the Republic. All your leaders must go on the ship, Mehta and Adelson, Kaminskaya and Wicewska and Shults; we will not have those men and women on the Earth, because they do not love the War. They must take the Peace to another world.

“So the two thousand were chosen by lot. And the choosing was bitter, the bitterest day of all the bitter days. For those that went, there was hope, but at what risk—going out unpiloted across the stars to an unknown world, never to return? And for those that must stay, there was no hope left. For there was no place left for the Peace on Earth.

“So the choice was made, and the tears were wept, and the ship was sent. And so, for those two thousand, and for their children and the children of their children, the Long March has ended. Here in the place we named Shantih, in the valleys of Victoria. But we do not forget the Long March and the great voyage and those we left behind, their arms stretched out to us. We do not forget the Earth.”

The children listened: fair faces and dark, black hair and brown; eyes intent, drowsy; enjoying the story, moved by it, bored by it … . They had all heard it before, young as some of them were. It was part of the world to them. Only to Luz was it new.

There were a hundred questions in her mind, too many; she let the children ask their questions. “Is Amity black because her grandmother came from Russia the Black?”—“Tell about the space ship! about how they went to sleep on the space ship!”—“Tell about the animals on Earth!”—Some of the questions were asked for her; they wanted her, the outsider, the big girl who didn’t know, to hear their favorite parts of the saga of their people. “Tell Luz about the flying-air-planes!” cried a little girl, very excited, and turning to Luz began to gabble the old man’s story for him: “His mother and father were on the boat in the middle of the sea and a flying ship went over them in the air, and went boom and fell in the sea and blew up and that was the Republic, and they saw it. And they tried to pick people up out of the water but there weren’t any and the water was poisonous and they had to go on.”—“Tell about the people that came from Afferca!” a boy demanded. But Hari was tired. “Enough now,” he said. “Let’s sing one of the songs of the Long March. Meria?”

A girl of twelve stood up, smiling, and faced the others. “O when we come,” she began in a sweet ringing voice, and the others joined in—

The clouds were moving away, heavy and ragged-fringed, over the river and the northern hills. To the south a streak of the outer Bay lay silver and remote. Drops from the last rainfall fell heavy now and then from the leaves of the big cottonwool trees on the summit of this hill that stood east of Southwind’s house; there was no other sound. A silent world, a gray world. Luz stood alone under the trees, looking out over the empty land. She had not been alone for a long time. She had not known, when she set off toward the hill, where she was going, what she was looking for. This place, this silence, this solitude. Her feet had borne her toward herself.

The ground was muddy, the weeds heavy with wet, but the poncho-coat Italia had given her was thick; she sat down on the springy leaf mold under the trees, and with arms around knees beneath the poncho sat still, gazing westward over the bend of the river. She sat so for a long time, seeing nothing but the moveless land, the slow-moving clouds and river.

Alone, alone. She was alone. She had not had time to know that she was alone, working with Southwind, nursing Vera, talking with Andre, joining little by little in the life of Shantih; helping to set up the new Town school, for the City school was closed henceforth to the people of Shantih; drawn in as guest to this house and that, this family and that; drawn in, made welcome, for they were gentle people, inexpert in resentment or distrust. Only at night, on the straw mattress in the dark of the loft, had it come to her, her loneliness, wearing a white and bitter face. She had been frightened, then. What shall I do? she had cried in her mind, and turning over to escape the bitter face of her solitude, had taken refuge in her weariness, in sleep.

It came to her now, walking softly along the gray hilltop. Its face now was Lev’s face. She had no wish to turn away.

It was time to look at what she had lost. To look at it and see it all. The sunset of spring over the roofs of the City, long ago, and his face lit by that glory—“There, there, you can see what it should be, what it is … .” The dusk of the room in Southwind’s house, and his face, his eyes. “To live and die for the sake of the spirit—” The wind and light on Rocktop Hill, and his voice. And the rest, all the rest, all the days and lights and winds and years that would have been, and that would not be, that should be and were not, because he was dead. Shot dead on the road, in the wind, at twenty-one. His mountains unclimbed, never to be climbed.

If the spirit stayed in the world, Luz thought, that was where it had gone, by now: north to the valley he had found, to the mountains he had told her of, the last night before the march on the City, with such joy and yearning: “Higher than you can imagine, Luz, higher and whiter. You look up, and then up, and still there are peaks above the peaks.”

He would be there, now, not here. It was only her own solitude she looked at, though it wore his face.

“Go on, Lev,” she whispered aloud. “Go on to the mountains, go higher … .”

But where shall I go? Where shall I go, alone?

Without Lev, without the mother I never knew and the father I can never know, without my house and my City, without a friend—oh, yes, friends, Vera, Southwind, Andre, all the others, all the gentle people, but they’re not my people. Only Lev, only Lev was, and he couldn’t stay, he wouldn’t wait, he had to go climb his mountain, and put life off till later. He was my chance, my luck. And I was his. But he wouldn’t see it, he wouldn’t stop and look. He threw it all away.

So now I stop here, between the valleys, under the trees, and I have to look. And what I see is Lev dead, and his hope lost; my father a murderer and mad; and I a traitor to the City and a stranger in the Town.

And what else is there?

All the rest of the world. The river there, and the hills, and the light on the Bay. All the rest of this silent living world, with no people in it. And I alone.

As she came down from the hill she saw Andre coming out of Southwind’s house, turning to speak to Vera at the door. They called to each other across the fallow fields, and he waited for her at the turn of the lane that led to Shantih.

“Where were you, Luz?” he asked in his concerned, shy way. He never, like the others, tried to draw her in; he was simply there, reliable. Since Lev’s death there had been no joy for him, and much anxiety. He stood there now, sturdy and a little stooped, overburdened, patient.

“Nowhere,” she answered, truthfully. “Just walking. Thinking. Andre, tell me. I never want to ask you while Vera’s there, I don’t like to upset her. What will happen now, between the City and Shantih? I don’t know enough to understand what Elia says. Will it just go on the way it was—before?”

After a fairly long pause, Andre nodded. His dark face, with jutting cheekbones like carved wood, was shut tight. “Or worse,” he said. Then, scrupulous to be fair to Elia, “Some things are better. The trade agreement—if they keep to it. And the South Valley expansion. There won’t be forced labor, or ‘estates’ and all that. I’m hopeful about that. We may work together there, for once.”

“Will you go there?”

“I don’t know. I suppose so. I should.”

“What about the northern colony? The valley you found, the mountains?”

Andre looked up at her. He shook his head.

“No way—?”

“Only if we went as their servants.”

“Marquez won’t agree to your going alone, without City people?”

He shook his head.

“What if you went anyway?”

“What do you think I dream of every night?” he said, and for the first time there was bitterness in his voice. “After I’ve been with Elia and Jewel and Sam and Marquez and the Council, talking compromise, talking cooperation, talking reason?—But if we went, they’d follow.”

“Then go where they can’t follow.”

“Where would that be?” Andre said, his voice patient again, ironic and miserable.

“Anywhere! Farther east, into the forests. Or southeast. Or south, down the coast, down past where the trawlers go—there must be other bays, other town sites! This is a whole continent, a whole world. Why do we have to stay here, here, huddled up here, destroying each other? You’ve been in the wilderness, you and Lev and the others, you know what it’s like—”

“Yes. I do.”

“You came back. Why must you come back? Why couldn’t people just go, not too many of them all at once, but just go, at night, and go on; maybe a few should go ahead and make stopping-places with supplies; but you don’t leave a trail, any trail. You just go. Far! And when you’ve gone a hundred kilometers, or five hundred, or a thousand, and you find a good place, you stop, and make a settlement. A new place. Alone.”

“It’s not—it breaks the community, Luz,” Andre said. “It would be … running away.”

“Oh,” Luz said, and her eyes shone with anger. “Running away! You crawl into Marquez’s trap in the South Valley and call that standing firm ! You talk about choice and freedom—The world, the whole world is there for you to live in and be free, and that would be running away! From what? To what? Maybe we can’t be free, maybe people always take themselves with themselves, but at least you can try. What was your Long March for? What makes you think it ever ended?”