He nodded to show it was all right and that he didn’t mind. That was all over now.
“So that was fine, for a while. They didn’t spend much time here, but it was enough to mean that the Cardassians left us alone. Left us to mind our own business, Mum used to say. Then they stopped coming altogether. Dad went down to Manea, and when he came back he said that everyone was saying that the Maquis were finished. I think he meant that they had all been killed. A couple of weeks later, we saw the ships in the sky. They were full of Jem’Hadar, bringing Cardassians with them. Some soldiers, mostly settlers. The Jem’Hadar came to all the farms and rounded us all up—all the humans, I mean. Then they made us walk out to a big camp they’d built to the west of Littleport.” She took another mouthful of soup. “It wasn’t so bad. But they took Dad and all the other men off to a different one and we didn’t see him again.”
An internment camp, like the one he been in briefly on Destiny. “Was it bad?”
“Not really. Boring, mostly. Some of the Cardassian guards were mean, but some of them were nice to us kids. We were there for about a year, me and Mum. Perhaps it was more. At the end it went weird for a few weeks. All the Cardassian guards went away, and there were only Jem’Hadar left. Then the Jem’Hadar went away too. That was really scary, like something bad was about to happen and they were all getting away before it did. But they left us there. All the security fields were still in place and we couldn’t get past them. We started to run out of food and we were hungry and some people got sick. We kept on thinking that eventually the Jem’Hadar would come back, or the Cardassians, but nobody did. There was a big quarrel about what we should do, whether we should wait or try to escape, and eventually some of the women wouldn’t wait any longer. They got the security fields down and we all walked out. Nobody came and stopped us. Two days later we saw Jem’Hadar ships in the sky—they were leaving. That was horrible. Because, you know... if we’d waited for them to come back, and hadn’t got ourselves out, we might all have starved...”
She took a deep breath before carrying on. “They could have taken the shields down, couldn’t they? If they knew they were going. Shouldn’t they have taken the shields down?”
“Yes, they should have.”
“And the Cardassian guards. Some of them had been nice.” She shot him an accusatory look. “Why didn’t they do it?”
Choosing his words carefully, Rugal said, “Right at the very end of the war, the Cardassians and the Dominion fell out. The Cardassians became enemies of the Jem’Hadar, like you and your people. I don’t think they would have been given the chance to take the shields down.”
“You mean they killed them?”
Rugal sighed. “Yes.”
“That’s better. I mean,” she said, quickly, “I don’t want them to be dead. But I didn’t like to think that they had left us there.” She frowned and chewed at her bottom lip.
Rugal understood. How much easier it would have been if she could simply have hated them outright. But some of them had been nice. “What happened next?”
“A big group of us walked down to Littleport to see if there was anyone there. It was empty. A big warehouse on the edge of town had been burned down. Mum pretended that she didn’t know what had happened, but my friend Jane overheard someone saying there were Cardassian bodies inside.”
Rugal felt sick. Was it only soldiers there, or settlers too? Was that were Penelya was? He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Sorry,” Hulya said awkwardly. “She might not have been there. Some of the Cardassians got away. I’ve seen some.”
“It’s all right,” Rugal said. “Go on. What happened next?”
“It took a while to get everyone down from the camp to Littleport. So we did that. Other people were passing through the town, and they had heard that the war was over, and the Dominion had surrendered. We had a party that night; we lit a big fire and there was dancing and singing...” Her eyes went distant for a moment. “Then people started heading off home. Me and Mum went back to our place. We thought Dad would come and meet us. Our farm had been farther down the valley, before the Cardassians came. It was a mess. They had churned up most of the fields and turned our house into a stockroom! Mum was furious. But the Cardassians like these really big farms, with hardly anyone living on them. It’s not good for the soil. That’s what Dad used to say. We waited for him for ages, but he didn’t turn up. Then Mr. Kavanagh—he taught chemistry at the school in Littleport and he had been taken away with all the other men—Mr. Kavanagh came past and he told us that Dad had been killed ages ago, not long after we’d all been split up. He got into a fight with one of the Cardassians after they took us away, and one of the Jem’Hadar shot him. All that time we’d been talking about him as if he was still alive, and all that time he had been dead. That was horrible. Mum was really angry. She said he always had to be the hero and really he was a farmer and why couldn’t a farmer be good enough for him?” Her voice had started to rise. “Why was she so angry with him?”
Rugal thought about that for a while. “I think that we get angry when people die because we feel like they’ve left us behind. They’ve left us having to carry on and cope with the whole mess of being alive.”
“I suppose so. I suppose that makes sense.” She sighed. “I wish she’d stopped being angry with him before... Before.”
They were getting close to the heart of her story now. Rugal said nothing, letting the girl go entirely at her own pace.
“The next farm down the valley belonged to Mr. Rowse. I walked down there one morning. We needed a part for one of the water pumps and he’d said he’d get one for us the next time he went into Manea and then I could come and get it. When I got there, the door was open but I couldn’t see anyone about—”
“Like when I arrived here.”
She blinked at him. “Yes, like that, I suppose. I couldn’t find him anywhere. It was creepy. I thought maybe we’d got the day wrong, or perhaps he’d had to go into town the day after he’d said, so I turned round and went home. When I came over the hill, I saw smoke coming out of the front window. There was a skimmer there too, one of those big ones that can go over rough ground really easily. Dad always wanted one. So I knew that there were people there. Eventually they came out from around the back of the house. There were four of them. They filled the skimmer up with loads of our stuff and then they went. I went down to the house to look for Mum. I went inside...”
She stopped, and Rugal didn’t make her go any further. “Is that when you decided to come over here?”
“I thought that maybe they were the reason why Mr. Rowse’s house had been empty too, and that meant they were heading northwest, along the road. I was too scared to go into Littleport in case they were going there and they saw me. So I came this way instead. I knew there’d been a Cardassian farm here, but I didn’t know whether there were any Cardassians still living here or whether the Jem’Hadar had been here and taken them all away like they’d taken us away. There weren’t Cardassians anywhere around, and I liked how green it was behind the walls, so I used what there was here, and when you turned up, I hid in the wood. I’m sorry that I took things from your friend’s farm, but I didn’t know where else to go.”
“Penelya wouldn’t mind. If she’d been here she would have asked you to come inside. She would have looked after you. She was like that. I’m glad you came here and I’m glad you’re here now.”
“I’m glad too,” she said. Then she seemed to run entirely out of words. They stared at each other across the empty plates and devastation. This madness that gripped his species, Rugal thought, it had reached everywhere. This child, her life ripped to shreds, like millions of Bajorans before her, like all those outliers that Cardassian society had refused to admit—Penelya, Tekis and Erani, Ziyal. Himself. They had been in the grip of a great delusion—and this was the price. With a sigh, Rugal began gathering up their plates. Hulya got up and helped him. “Thank you for supper,” she sai
d, very politely.
“Sorry it was so bad.”
“That’s all right. But we will fix the replicator tomorrow, won’t we?”
“Yes, we will.”
“And then we’ll save what’s left of the fruit?”
“We’ll do that too. But you’ll have to tell me what to do. I haven’t got a clue.”
He smiled at her and got a smile in return. As they made up the bed for her in the room next to his, she said, “And you should fix that window in the kitchen too. It looks horrible. It looks like nobody cares.”
Eleven
At Hulya’s instruction, Rugal fixed the window and the replicator. He also picked what was left of the fruit, cleaned the house from top to bottom, and brought back to life an elderly skimmer that had been left in an outbuilding to rust in peace. That satisfied her for a day or two. Under his own steam, he boxed up Penelya’s possessions—her clothes, the padds she had been reading with the markers still set keeping her place—and stored them away where he could not come across them unexpectedly. Hulya found him while he was doing this, sitting on the bed holding an amber pendant that Pen would sometimes wear, which he had found dropped behind a storage unit. It had been her mother’s. That convinced him, if he still needed to be convinced, that she was dead. She would not have abandoned it, not willingly, any more than he would have abandoned his earring. When Hulya asked what it was, Rugal closed his hand around it, dropped it in the box, and said, “Finished.” She understood. It was something else from before that had once mattered, but now needed to be put away in case it shattered everything that was new and fragile.
He discovered that he was glad of the company of this child, who made him eat and work, and didn’t seem to notice that there were times when he could barely move from bed, but would sit by his feet talking about what they were going to do that day until he got up and did it. He was glad, too, to be there when the nightmares gripped her, or when something they had been doing didn’t work right, and her rage and hysteria broke through. He remembered being that way himself, when he was a child on Bajor.
One morning, she announced, “We need to sow the wheat.” Doubtfully, he agreed to give it a try. He had no idea how to start, but he supposed that people—hers and his—had been throwing seeds at the ground on a hundred thousand worlds for millennia now, so how hard could it be? Besides, there was always the replicator. They sat at the kitchen table one night with some padds and she listed everything they needed. “Most of it we can get from Littleport,” she said. “But I don’t want to go there. I suppose we could get it from our farm...”
Rugal didn’t like the idea of her going back there, but she refused point-blank to go to the town, where she seemed to think she would come face-to-face with the people who had murdered her mother. He could have told her that she wouldn’t find any Cardassians there, but he did not want to press the issue. “What if I go there by myself?” he said. “It’ll only take a few hours—”
“No!” she said quickly. “I don’t want you to go there by yourself! If there are people there, they won’t like Cardassians. They might hurt you—”
He was always surprised—grateful, too—at how the fact of his species seemed not to bother her, when his people had brought her nothing but grief. “I’m good at looking after myself, Hulya,” he said gently, but the idea of him going and never returning had by now thoroughly gripped her imagination. When he saw that she was beginning to tremble, he put a halt to the conversation before she became irrevocably distressed. He was getting very good at spotting the warning signs. His love, his respect, for Etra and Migdal deepened every day. How had they coped with this? Somehow they had.
Lying awake that night, pondering their options, Rugal had another idea. He didn’t like it much, but he thought it might alleviate some of Hulya’s fears. The next morning he dug out the pack he had lugged all the way from Ogyas and unearthed his disruptor. He hadn’t handled it in months, and it was not pleasant to be looking at it again. He put it on the kitchen table, and when Hulya came down for breakfast, she sat for a while staring at it, wide-eyed and wary. He said, “How about if I took that with me?”
“Is that real?”
“As real as I am.”
“Where did you get it?”
“It was issued to me. You know I was a soldier once.” He gave a wry smile. “Not one of the mean ones.”
“Yes, I know that.”
“If I took that with me to Littleport, would that be all right?”
It was deemed acceptable, so the next day he left her at the house and took the skimmer out beyond the wire fences.
First he went over to what had been her parents’ farm. There was a freshly dug grave in the garden and a green branch had been set in the ground as a marker. Someone else had been here before him and buried her mother. Rugal was deeply thankful that he did not have to face the task, that there was not someone else over whom he would not know the right ceremonies to perform, the right words to say. Did they think the little girl had died here too? They would not have found a body. Was there someone he should find to tell about her? She had not mentioned anyone. She did not seem to want to see anyone else.
Inside, even through the dust and neglect, and the evidence of the murder that had happened here months ago, it was obvious that this had been a happy home, well-run and comfortable. Upstairs, he found Hulya’s small room; quickly, he packed clothes and the nearest toys, some pictures of a smiling family of three. In one of the outbuildings he found tools, power cells for those and for the replicator, and seed. He was not entirely sure what he was looking for, but Hulya’s descriptions had been detailed to the point of flamboyant. He threw it all in the back of the skimmer and left quickly. Soon he was on the road to Littleport.
It was five or six weeks since he had been through the township, and it was now without doubt inhabited again, almost busy. Everybody he saw was human. Conspicuous and nervous, but trying to be friendly, Rugal tried to buy what he needed at several different places. Some people looked through him, some were outright hostile, while others would sell but wouldn’t talk. One man asked where he had come from. “Oh, out that way,” Rugal said, gesturing in roughly the opposite direction, and moving on. He took care to head out of town the way he’d pointed, and he took a back road home. He was glad to get away. He was even more relieved that he had not needed to reveal the existence of the disruptor.
It was late afternoon when he got back. There was a light on in one of the downstairs rooms. Hulya, at the sound of the skimmer, sped out of the house and down the steps. When he got out of the skimmer, she flung herself into his arms and howled. A sick horror swept over him. “What’s happened? Are you all right? What’s happened?”
It took a while for her to communicate—and for him to work out—that nothing had happened other than that she had been alone all day and worked herself up into a frenzy. “Don’t go again,” she pleaded with him. “Don’t leave me again.”
He picked her up and carried her inside. She was weeping against his chest. “I won’t, I promise I won’t. If I have to go to town again, you can come with me.”
“Promise you won’t leave me!”
“Hulya, I promise.”
“Don’t go there again. I don’t want you to go there again.”
It took a long while to calm her down that evening. He sat by her bed, stroking her cheek and whispering to her until she fell asleep. As he watched her breathing, he thought of Etra, doing the same on many nights for him, and he thanked the Prophets that he did not worship for Etra, thanked them on behalf of Arys, and he swore to this child’s mother that he would do the same for her.
The next day Hulya looked through what he had brought back for her from her home. She kept some of it around her for a day or two, and then he found her packing the lot away in the storage unit where he had hidden Penelya’s possessions. “Finished,” she told him firmly, and he entirely understood.
• • •
By the
time the two fields were ploughed and the seed they had was sown, Rugal was exhausted. True, it had been his default state in recent years, but this was nothing like the exhaustion they had all suffered on Ogyas, the corollary of fear and privation. Nor was it like the way he had felt when he had first arrived here at the house, when he had been so thoroughly depleted he could sleep through whole days. This felt better. It felt almost like being alive.
Soon the weather took a turn for the worse. There was rain most days; some days the sun seemed barely to have risen by the time it was dark again. They kept indoors and relied on the replicator. One morning, after heavy rain had bashed the house, he saw that the roof had sprung a leak. Quick investigation of their stores revealed that they did not have the materials to fix it. He would have to go back to Littleport. After some silence and some thought, Hulya agreed to go with him. But she was not happy about it.
The township was even busier than it had been during his previous visit, but still Rugal saw no Cardassians. He was convinced more than ever that the Jem’Hadar had been successful in their purge of this area, and that Penelya was in that burnt-out building on the edge of the town. Surely some Cardassians should have passed his way by now? Perhaps it was like Slokat, and whoever was left was keeping to their side of the country. Perhaps he really was the only Cardassian on Ithic.
During their whole time in Littleport, Hulya kept her hand firmly in his, or held onto his sleeve. They could not find what they needed; in every place they tried, the proprietors said how short of material they were. Rugal believed a few of them. “Let’s go,” he said to Hulya eventually. “We’ll think of something else. Perhaps try another town. Or think about going up to Manea for a couple of days—”
In a low fierce voice, she said, “I just want to go home.”
They had almost got back to the skimmer when someone called out to them from across the street. “Hulya? Hulya Kiliç?”
Star Trek: DS9: The Never-Ending Sacrifice Page 26