“Don’t feel bad,” she said kindly, presenting Jillian with a full pail. “I expect, living in the city, you don’t do a lot that would strengthen your hands.”
“I expect not,” Jillian agreed, suppressing a slightly hysterical laugh. It had never occurred to her that she should do anything at all with her hands except keep them white and smooth and well manicured to fit the part of her character in Love for Living.
“Can I feed Tomi?”
Jillian surrendered Tomi and the lambs’ feeding-bottle to Felisha and went off to sit on the steps beside a morose Alun.
“You seem to have had a successful day,” she said in a bid to cheer him up.
“You think so? I wouldn’t call it much of a success.” He picked up a pebble and tossed it towards Babur.
“Well. You did find a lot of animals.”
“Not much compared to what we used to run, before.”
“Before the raid?”
“Before everything fell apart. We were killing off our own sheep just for food, all winter.”
Alun appeared determined to resist any cheering-up. They sat in uncomfortable silence for a few minutes.
“Do you understand women?”
Jillian thought it over. “Maybe. Sometimes.” At the moment she wasn’t sure she understood herself very well, let alone anybody else.
“Kaytlin…” He sighed. “Look. I know she’s too young. Only fifteen. But I was going to ask her when she turned eighteen, and she knew that, and it always seemed to me that she liked me well enough. Only last night and today she’s been acting as if I had the burning cough and she’d catch it from me if she so much as met my eyes.” He scowled across the yard where Kaytlin was combing the snarls and burs out of a suitably tied-up Babur.
“Oh.” Jillian thought she knew exactly why Kaytlin wouldn’t meet Alun’s eyes. And she thought Alun must be as dumb as a box of rocks if he couldn’t work it out.
“When did the bandits raid here?”
Alun looked up in surprise. “You think that’s got something to do with it? But that was…” He counted on his fingers. “Two weeks ago.”
“Well, the experience isn’t two weeks ago for the girls,” Jillian said with some asperity. “In case you haven’t observed, those raiders weren’t nice guys. Why did you think they took Kaytlin and Felisha with them?”
“I thought… I was afraid that… But they seem all right now! Whatever happened, it’s over now!”
Dumb as two boxes of rocks. “It’s not over for Kaytlin,” Jillian said, “and it won’t be for some time. Right now she’s got two weeks of terrible memories to shed, and most of them have to do with being abused by men. When you get close to her she’s not thinking, oh, it’s Alun, my old friend, who’d never do anything to hurt me. She’s thinking a man, and just being close to a man – any man – brings up those memories.”
She took a deep breath. It was easier to explain about Kaytlin than to admit she felt exactly the same way. That didn’t make it easy.
“It won’t last forever.” I hope. “But while that’s still fresh in her mind, you need to be very patient. Don’t crowd her, and make sure you never make her feel trapped – blocking the door, backing her into a corner, anything like that. You have to let her work it out in her own time, in her own way. You just have to believe that eventually she’ll come home to you.”
“I… I see.” Alun stood up abruptly. “I believe I’ll, I’ll, um, check on the sheep.”
Behind her, in the kitchen doorway, Ruven cleared his throat. Jillian jumped. “I thought you were working in the tool shed!”
“Nay, I’ve done with that,” Ruven said. “Just now… I’ve been listening to some good advice. I believe I’ll try it with my own woman.”
***
They made a late start the next morning. It was not really possible to be brisk and efficient with half a dozen sheep being herded by Felisha, three goats on a rope led by Kaytlin, and a push cart full of food, cooking utensils and other small items Jillian had never before thought of as treasures.
“I think I’m happier about finding a comb than anything else, even the food,” she said over her shoulder to Kaytlin.
“For me it was the nail scissors,” Kaytlin confessed.
“Toothbrushes instead of chewed twigs!” Felisha called from her place behind the sheep.
Jillian grinned. “Well, we’re cheap dates anyway. Doesn’t take much to make us think we’re living in the lap of luxury.”
“I would seriously fight anyone who tried to take my can of tooth powder,” Felisha said.
Alun and Ruven took turns with the cart, with the one who wasn’t pushing on guard duty. No one interfered with them that day, though they did pass a cooperative fenced off with thorn bushes where the inhabitants retreated as soon as they caught sight of the travelers. Farther up the river there was a group of houses on the far bank. They saw no one, but heard some doors being slammed.
“Folk used to be friendly all up and down the river,” Ruven grumbled. “Can’t they tell we’re peaceable?”
Jillian eyed the improvised spear he carried and the butcher knife stuck into Kaytlin’s belt. “It, ah, might not be immediately obvious.”
She did worry a little that they might have to sleep outside that night. True, Tomi was pink and flourishing and kicking with the new strength given him by the goats’ milk. True, it was summer and so warm they would hardly need blankets. But what if it began to drizzle? What if he caught cold?
What if we’re welcomed into another trap? The memory of Lost Maples made spending the night under the stars retreat into the category of minor inconveniences. She and Tomi had already survived so much. He wouldn’t die of a little night air.
All the same, she was relieved when, in late afternoon, Ruven returned from a scouting trip up-river to take the shafts of the push-cart from Alun. “Found a place for the night,” he said.
“Are you sure the people are all right?”
“No people,” Ruven said. “Just chickens. Dinner, if we can catch some.”
The deserted farm cooperative looked worse than the wool cooperative had; the living quarters and most of the outbuildings had burned. But there were, as Ruven had promised, semi-wild chickens fluttering around a dilapidated shed and squawking pointless alarms about these invaders.
Or maybe not so wild. They came readily enough for the handful of oats Ruven sprinkled on the ground, and he was able to catch two of them with one double-handed grab. The rest, of course, flounced off with cries of alarm… and were back at the grain before he’d wrung the second bird’s neck.
“Don’t kill the rooster!” A shabby man came around the corner of the shed, swinging a pitchfork wildly. “Take some chickens, I can’t stop you, but I need that rooster!”
Ruven released the furiously clucking rooster and it scuttled over the ground, clearly telling its remaining hens to flee the invaders.
“Peace, friend. We didn’t know anybody was living here. That’s your only cock, is it?”
“Unless one hatches out. I’ve got two setting hens, but the way they forget their job and wander off the nest, I’ll be lucky to get one clutch out of the two of them.” The man squatted down next to the feeding hens and felt one of them anxiously. “Where did you come from? I haven’t seen anyone in months.”
“Where’d everyone else go? This farm was still operating when I went down the river last fall… Wait a minute, I think I know you. Graym, isn’t it?”
The man looked at him carefully. “And you’re Ruven, the dairy farmer. I thought you were dead.”
Ruven winced and Jillian guessed what he was thinking. This didn’t sound good for Ash Grove.
“Is Ash Grove deserted too?”
Graym shrugged his shoulders. “I wouldn’t know. I do know some of your people came through this winter, right after the fire. A lot of ours were disheartened, not having had anything from the city but threats and taxes. And what with the living quarters burning up,
there wasn’t much decent shelter here. They were going down river to look for a better place. Didn’t they come to the city?”
“They did not,” Ruven said shortly. Again, Jillian could guess his thoughts. A lot of things could have happened to a party headed from here to the city in mid-winter, and none of them good. Cold and starvation. Bandits. The burning cough. Lost Maples. Gangs on the outskirts of the city.
Again they were delayed for a day. Graym was willing to join them – with his chickens – but they had to repair a cart and build something to contain the cackling idiots.
“These animals,” Jillian panted, after a futile chase after the rooster, “give new meaning to the term ‘bird-brain.’ Don’t they want safety and regular food?”
“I don’t think that cock is completely with the program. Hey, you scatter bread crumbs – I think he’s getting bored with oats – and I’ll sneak up behind him.”
That didn’t work out quite as Kaytlin had planned it. Instead of being trapped in the folds of her skirt, the cock gave a hoarse cry and launched himself at Jillian. “Grab him!” Kaytlin screamed. “Don’t let him get away! Hold on!”
Jillian had an insecure hold on the rooster’s neck, which left him free to rake at her with his claws until Kaytlin succeeded in wrapping an apron around him.
“Well, now we know what he wanted,” Jillian said. “Blood.” She dabbed at the ugly slashes on the back of her hand.
“I suppose you think this is silly, going to so much trouble for one bad-tempered bird.”
“Not at all,” said Jillian, proud of her new understanding. She wasn’t going to repeat her silly mistake about Babur. “Obviously you’ve got to have a rooster if you want any eggs.”
Well, it was something of an achievement to have made Felisha and Kaytlin laugh. “We only need the rooster for fertile eggs,” Felisha finally giggled.
Wasn’t that what she’d said?
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Krisi had been almost right: the Assembly debated for nine long months before agreeing to fund a small expeditionary force to “investigate the current situation of the nation of Harmony.” Jef, sixteen and a half now and tall for his age, was able to enlist without too much scrutiny. He rather thought the recruiter knew he was stretching the truth slightly, but when he explained that he couldn’t supply his birth records because they were in Harmony City, the man gave him an approving nod.
“Harmonica, then? Going to reclaim your birthplace? Right thing to do. Or were you enlisting for the citizenship?”
Jef hadn’t even registered that the Assembly had deemed service in the Esilian Expeditionary Force a full and sufficient qualification for Esilian citizenship, no tests required. When he returned to the shop to announce his successful enlistment, he mentioned that for the first time he really regretted that his textbooks were all in e-reader format rather than nicely bound chunks of dead tree like the famous Reference Library.
“Why?” Krisi asked.
“Because then I could kick Civic History and Current Affairs across the room!”
She frowned at him. “Just because you’re hoping for a technical decree of citizenship doesn’t mean you aren’t obliged to know something about your country! And anyway, what happens if your precious Expeditionary Force just marches into Harmony City, declares it a disaster area, and marches out again? The Assembly won’t be handing out citizenships for the great military service of sailing to Harmony and back again. Retracting that offer will be one of the fastest decisions they’ve ever made!”
Jef’s spirits were dashed. “I didn’t say I was going to delete it off my reader… Anyway, we’re going to do more than take a quick look and report back. We’re having three months of fitness training and weapons use before we sail. And tactics. Recognizing ambushes and booby traps, leapfrogging through urban areas, clearing buildings.”
“Oh, wonderful!” Krisi said. “You’re planning to march into something you know nothing about, you and your little blaster? Has it not occurred to you that since most of Harmony’s elites ran here, somebody else has likely seized power and they might not be overjoyed to see you lot marching in? And they’re probably not very nice people, and they probably don’t debate for months before deciding to kill all of you? You idiot!” Hand to her mouth, she ran for the door.
“But last year, she was all for me joining up,” Jef said, staring at the shop door.
“Well, girls,” Chuy said comfortingly. “They’re a different race. Probably some kind of space aliens with a mission to drive us crazy.”
“Allow me to sprinkle some pearls of wisdom,” said Chaco. “Last year the EEF was only a spark in some senator’s eye, and this was all theoretical. Now it’s real, and she’s dealing with the possibility you might get into some nasty fighting. It’s really a good sign for you that she’s upset.”
Jef and Chuy stared at Chaco.
“It is?”
“Chaco, since when do you know how girls think?”
“Age,” Chaco said, “and experience.”
But this was presuming altogether too much on his five years’ advantage. Chuy and Jef made a concerted attempt to tackle Chaco and bring him down, and some rolling around on the shop floor ensued during which a table was knocked down, cuffs were exchanged, and they all wound up feeling about sixteen.
***
Krisi had been right about one thing: establishing order in Harmony City was anything but easy. Esilia had sent just one troop ship; the other eight ships were loaded with food. The minimal Esilian Expeditionary Force had to deal not with one central government, but with several bands of gangsters claiming different sections of the city. The first battle was a debacle which they barely won. The green Esilian troops had made, so their colonel said after the action, every possible stupid mistake and some that shouldn’t even have been possible. If they hadn’t been better fed and better armed than the gang they fought, they would have suffered a lot more than two casualties.
But they learned fast. As a cheerful and very young captain reported to the colonel, in mopping up the second gang they omitted quite a number of possible mistakes – while still committing enough to raise his hair.
By the third fight they considered themselves old hands, and by the fifth they had started referring to the gangsters as cockroaches who needed to be exterminated.
“Tell you another way they’re like cockroaches,” the captain said to Jef.
“What’s that?”
“Plenty more where those came from…”
As the captain’s aide-de-camp – rapidly promoted to that position once he realized Jef’s encyclopedic knowledge of the city and the tremendous help that could be – Jef had more of an overview of the fighting than the average grunt. And now he thought the captain might be wrong.
“We’ve cleared every major sector of the city, sir.”
“The streets. There could be nests of these scum hiding in every block of apartments.”
“Could be. But if they’d been minded to fight, wouldn’t they have come out? I think our biggest problem now will be taking care of the survivors who weren’t in gangs.”
These were easily distinguished from the former gang members who joined the food lines at the docks. The gangsters were unhealthily thin; the civilian survivors were skeletal. The supply ships unloaded as fast as they could and returned to Esilia for more.
Once the city was under control, a part of the force was detailed to march part way up the river and report on conditions in the country.
“Not all the way?”
“Takes too long. I don’t want to have my forces split for months. And we really should have people looking at the coast fishing towns too,” said a harassed colonel half buried in forms on flimsies, “but I’m not splitting my forces three ways!”
“Once we’ve fed these people enough to get them back into some kind of condition,” said Jef’s captain, “we can organize a peacekeeping force of locals – led by one of us, of course – to che
ck out the south coast. After all, it’s their country; they can’t expect us to do everything.”
“Good idea. See to that, will you?” And in payment for his bright idea, the sputtering captain was detached from the up-river expedition and set to identify local citizens who could be drafted into the temporary exploration and peacekeeping force. “Who’s going to lead the troops up-river, then?”
“Young Elmasri. He knows most about what we’re likely to encounter.”
“But – I need him here! It’s the city he knows, not the country! And besides, he’s only a sergeant, and he hasn’t even been that for long!”
That was how Jef Elmasri, aged almost seventeen, came to be promoted to lieutenant and put in charge of one-third of the Esilian Expeditionary Force.
The march up-river was a grim one. They passed deserted sasena cooperatives, half-burnt farms, and new-made mounds that proved, on inspection, to be mass graves. They couldn’t even feed the people who crept out at the sight of a body of healthy, well-organized men; they were carrying just enough rations to take them to the farthest distant official cooperative and back again. “Go down the river,” Jef repeated over and over again. “Go to the city. They’re giving out food at the docks.”
He strongly suspected that the troops were disobeying orders and sharing their rations with the starvelings they met, but he wasn’t in a position to come down hard on them. Most of his rations for that day had gone to a trio of children who looked too weak to drag themselves to the city.
“I don’t get why all these people are starving,” he grumbled to his newly made staff sergeant. “They grew the food for the whole country.”
“I think that system was breaking down even before the crisis,” his sergeant said. “Fellow I talked to said quotas went up, prices were set so low they’d be losing money by sending produce to the city, a lot of places just hunkered down and grew barely enough to feed themselves. And every so often the Central Committee would send a force up to ‘make an example,’ which meant executing most of the people in a cooperative and burning it down. Crazy! On the verge of a famine, the government made it worse! But then,” he concluded, “that’s mostly what governments do, isn’t it. Say, weren’t you still in Harmony then? Can you tell me what they were thinking?”
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