The Eye of the Heron

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.

Luz was no longer listening to what the two men were saying. She stepped away from the house wall, standing straight, as if indifferent to any eye that saw her. She walked on around the house to the back entrance, went in through the peaceful, dirty kitchens of siesta time, and to the room that had been given to Vera Adelson.

Vera had been taking siesta too, and received her sleepily.

“I’ve been eavesdropping on my father and Herman Macmilan,” Luz said, standing in the middle of the room, while Vera, sitting on the bed, blinked at her. “They’re planning a raid on the Town. They’re going to take Lev and all the other leaders prisoner, and then try to make your people get angry and fight, so they can beat them up and send a lot of them to work on the new farms as punishment. They already sent some of them down there, but they all ran away, or the guards ran away—I didn’t hear that part clearly. So now Macmilan is going with his ‘little army’ and my father tells him to force the people to fight back, then they’ll betray their ideas and then he can use them as he likes.”

Vera sat staring. She said nothing.

“You know what he means. If you don’t, Herman does. He means let Herman’s men go for the women.” Luz’ voice was cold, though she spoke very quickly. “You should go warn them.”

Vera still said nothing. She gazed at her own bare feet with a remote stare, either dazed or thinking as fast as Luz had been talking.

“Do you still refuse to go? Does your promise still hold you? After that?”

“Yes,” the older woman said, faintly, as if absentmindedly, then more strongly, “yes.”

“Then I’m going to go.”

“Go where?”

She knew; she asked merely to gain time.

“To warn them,” Luz said.

“When is this attack to be?”

“Tomorrow night, I think. In the night, but I wasn’t sure which night they meant.”

There was a pause.

“Maybe it’s tonight. They said, ‘It’s better if they’re in bed.’” It was her father who had said that, it was Herman Macmilan who had laughed.

“And if you go … then what will you do?”

Vera still spoke as if sleepy, in a low voice, pausing often.

“I’ll tell them, and then come back.”

“Here?”

“No one will know. I’ll leave word I’m visiting with Eva. That doesn’t matter.—If I tell the Town people what I heard, what will they do?”

“I don’t know.”

“But it would help if they knew, and could plan ahead? You told me how you have to plan what you’re going to do, get everybody ready—”

“Yes. It would help. But—”

“Then I’ll go. Now.”

“Luz. Listen. Think what you’re doing. Can you go in broad daylight, and nobody notice you leaving the City? Can you come back? Think—”

“I don’t care if I can’t come back. This house is full of lies,” the girl said in the same cold, quick voice; and she went.

Going was easy. Keeping on going was hard.

To take up an old black shawl as she went out, and wrap herself in it as a raincoat and a disguise; to slip out the back door and up the back street, trotting along like a servant in a hurry to be home; to leave Casa Falco, to leave the City, that was easy. That was exciting. She was not afraid of being stopped; she was not afraid of anybody. If they stopped her all she need say was, “I am the daughter of Councillor Falco!” and they wouldn’t dare say a word. No one stopped her. She was quite sure that no one recognized her, for she went by back alleys, the shortest way out of the City, up past the school; the black shawl was over her head, and the rainy sea wind that seemed to blow her on her way blew in the eyes of anyone coming against her. Within a few minutes she was out of the streets, cutting across the back of the Macmilans’ lumberyards, among the stacks of logs and planks; then up the bluffs, and she was on the road to Shanty Town.

That was when it began to be hard, when she set her feet on that road. She had only been on it once in her life, when she had gone with a group of her friends, suitably escorted by aunts, duennas, and guards from Casa Marquez, to see the dancing at the Meeting House. It had been summer, they had chattered and laughed all the way, Eva’s Aunt Caterina’s pedicab had lost a wheel and plumped her down in the dust and all afternoon Aunt Caterina had watched the dancing with a great circle of white dust on the rear of her black dress, so that they couldn’t stop giggling … . But they had not even gone through the Town. What was it like there? Whom should she ask for, in Shanty Town, and what should she say to them? She should have talked it over with Vera first, instead of rushing out in such a hurry. What would they say to her? Would they even let her in, coming from the City? Would they stare at her, jeer at her, try to hurt her? They were not supposed to hurt anybody. Probably they simply would not talk to her. The wind at her back felt cold now. Rain had soaked through shawl and dress down her back, and the hem of her skirt was heavy with mud and moisture. The fields were empty, gray with autumn. When she looked back there was nothing to be seen but the Monument Tower, pallid and derelict, pointing meaninglessly at the sky; everything she knew now lay hidden behind that marking point. To the left sometimes she glimpsed the river, wide and gray, rain blowing across it in vague gusts.

She would give her message to the first person she met, let them do what they liked about it; she would turn straight round and come back home. She would be back within an hour at most, long before suppertime.

She saw a small farmhouse off to the left of the road among orchard trees, and a woman out in the yard. Luz checked her rapid walk. She would turn aside to the farm, give the woman her message, then the woman could go on and tell the people in Shanty Town, and she could turn back right here and go home. She hesitated, started toward the farm, then turned and strode back through the rain-soaked grasses onto the road again. “I’ll just go on and get it done and come back,” she whispered to herself. “Go on, get it done, come back.” She walked faster than ever, almost running. Her cheeks were burning; she was out of breath. She had not walked far or fast for months, years. She must not come in among strangers all red and gasping. She forced herself to slow her pace, to walk steadily, erect. Her mouth and throat were dry. She would have liked to stop and drink the rain off the leaves of roadside bushes, curling her tongue to get at the cool drops that beaded every blade of wild grass. But that would be like a child. It was a longer road than she had thought. Was she on the Shanty Town road at all? Had she mistaken the way and got on some loggers’ road, some track with no end, leading out into the wilderness?

At the word—the wilderness—a cold jolt of terror went right through her body, stopping her in mid-step.

She looked back to see the City, the dear narrow warm crowded beautiful City of walls and roofs and streets and faces and voices, her house, her home, her life, but there was nothing, even the Tower had dropped behind the long rise of the road and was gone. The fields and hills were empty. The vast, soft wind blew from the empty sea.

There’s nothing to be afraid of, Luz told herself. Why are you such a coward? You can’t get lost, you’re on a road, if it’s not the Town Road all you have to do is turn back and you’ll get home. You won’t be climbing so you won’t come on a rock scorpion, you won’t be in the woods so you won’t get into poison rose, what are you so afraid of, there’s nothing to hurt you, you’re perfectly safe, on the road.

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.

She looked at his hands on the chair back; he was gripping the wooden bar tightly; his hands were nerve and bone under the dark skin, strong, fragile.

“All right. I have to go back,” she said, and stood up.

“Wait. You should tell this to the others.”

“I can’t. You tell them.”

“But you said you ran away from Macmilan. Now you’re going back to him?”

“No! To my father—to my house—”

But he was right. It was the same thing.

“I came to warn you,” she said coldly, “because Macmilan was going to trick you, and deserves to be tricked himself. That’s all.”

But it wasn’t enough.

She looked out the open door and saw the lane she would have to walk on, beyond it the street, then the road, then the City and its streets and her house and her father—

“I don’t understand,” she said. She sat down again, abruptly, because she was shaky again, though not with fear, now, but with anger. “I didn’t think. Vera said—”

“What did she say?”

“She said to stop and think.”

“Has she—”

“Wait. I have to think. I didn’t then, I have to now.”

She sat still in the chair for some minutes, her hands clenched in her lap.

“All right,” she said. “This is a war, Vera said. I should be—I have betrayed my father’s side. Vera is a hostage to the City. I’ll have to be a hostage to the Town. If she can’t come and go, neither can I. I have to go through with it.” Her breath stuck in her throat, making a catching sound at the end of the sentences.

“We don’t take hostages, make prisoners, Lux—”

“I didn’t say you did. I said I have to stay here. I choose to stay here. Will you let me?”

Lev strode off down the room, ducking automatically as he came under the low crossbeam. His shirt had been drying on a chair before the fire; he put it on, went into the back room, came out with his shoes in his hand, sat down at a chair by the table to put them on. “Look,” he said, stooping down to get his shoe on, “you can stay here. Anybody can. We don’t make anybody go, we don’t make anybody stay.” He straightened up, looking directly at her. “But what is your father going to think? Even if he believed you were staying here by choice—”

“He wouldn’t allow it. He’d come to get me.”

“By force.”

“Yes, by force. With Macmilan and his little army, no doubt.”

“Then you become the pretext for violence they seek. You must go home, Luz.”

“For your sake,” she said.

She was simply thinking it out, seeing what she had done and what consequences must follow. But Lev sat motionless, a shoe—a muddy, battered, low boot, she noticed—in his hand.

“Yes,” he said. “For our sake. You came here for our sake. Now you go back for our sake. And if they find out you’ve been here—?” There was a pause. “No,” he said. “You can’t go back. You’d be caught in the lie—yours and theirs. You came here. Because of Vera, because of us. You’re with us.”

“No, I’m not,” Luz said, angrily; but the light and warmth in Lev’s face bewildered her mind. He spoke so plainly, with such certainty; he was smiling now. “Luz,” he said, “remember, when we were in school? You were always—I always wanted to talk to you, I never got up the courage—We did talk once, at sunset, you asked why I wouldn’t fight Angel and his crowd. You never were like the other City girls, you didn’t fit, you didn’t belong. You belong here. The truth matters to you. Do you remember when you got mad at the teacher once, when he said coneys don’t hibernate and Timmo tried to tell how he’d found a whole cave of them hibernating and the teacher was going to whip him for being insolent, do you remember?”

“I said I’d tell my father,” Luz said in a low voice. She had turned very white.

“You stood up in the class, you said the teacher didn’t know the truth and was going to whip Timmo for telling it—you were only about fourteen. Luz, listen, come with me now, we’ll go to Elia’s house. You can tell them what you told me and we can settle what to do. You can’t go back now and be punished, be ashamed! Listen, you can stay with Southwind, she lives outside of town, you can be quiet there. But come with me now, we can’t lose time.” He reached out his hand to her across the table, that fine, warm hand full of life; she took it, and met his eyes; her eyes filled up with tears. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, in tears. “You only have one shoe on, Lev.”