The Lights of Skaro
Jess Matthews, a fully accredited foreign correspondent, had come into the People’s Free Federal Republic in comfort on the Orient Express. But events had moved too swiftly in the Balkans and now he was trying, desperately, to escape from that terrorized country by masquerading as a peasant driving a herd of goats.
He had come in alone. Going out – if he was ever to get out – he had the company of Cora Lambert, an ambitious and attractive American newspaper woman, who was equally in trouble. For Jess and Cora had learned a secret that could destroy Bulič, head of the dreaded Security Police, and to Bulič it was a choice of his life or theirs.
Jess had decided their only chance of survival was to head for the frontier at the border town of Skaro – with the Security Police hot on their heels. Adventure piled on adventure, escape on hair-breadth escape. Mile by mile the two correspondents made their way towards the hoped-for lights of freedom, hiding in gutted farmhouses, riding in a Model T truck full of singing girls, and, finally, creeping into a darkened graveyard above the brightly lit frontier river – just short of safety.
DAVID DODGE
THE LIGHTS OF SKARO
Copyright 1954 © by David Dodge
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The Lights of Skaro
for
George & Sophy Winterbotham
The
goats were poor travelling companions. There were six of them, five ewes and a bellwether. The ewes were all in milk, and their swollen udders made them reluctant to move as long as grass was within cropping range. For two days I whacked them along from dawn to dark, driving them until their udders were no longer swollen but thin and dry, and they hated me and my stick as much as I hated them and their stubborn bony rumps. But they saved my life and the life of a girl named Cora whom I didn’t like and with whom I had nothing in common except that we were both Americans in a strange land, both press reporters, and both expecting to die, after some preliminary nastiness, if we were caught.
The Security police of the People’s Free Federal Republic were hours, possibly only minutes, behind us when we came on the goats, grazing on a hillside pasture. We were pushing through a cornfield we had reached at the end of a pointless, planless, frantic dash to get away and out of sight, anywhere, before Security came for us. It was early morning of an autumn day. Although the cornstalks were already dry and brittle the ears had not yet been gathered, only half-broken from their stalks and bent downward so that rain would not run into the husks, then left to dry that way. A few ears had fallen near a fence that separated pasture from cornfield. The goats were nuzzling for them, stretching their necks through the fence.
It gave me an idea. We had had no plan until then, only the drive of terror. We ran while we were able to run. And because Security could move faster than we could once they found our trail, any idea was better than none. Even a reckless idea.
Cora was coming along behind me through the cornstalks, already lagging after a few hours of flight. She had drive, plenty of it, but she wasn’t physically up to hard scrambles through ditches and hilly cornfields. I wasn’t in the best shape myself, for what we were up against. I caught my breath while I waited for her.
“We have a bare chance to throw them off the trail if I can steal some clothes,” I told her. “Not a good chance, but one we have to take. There’s a farmhouse at the bottom of the hill. Wait here while I see what I can do.”
“No, Jess.” She shook her head and held to my coat-sleeve, breathless for a moment. “We’ve come this far together. We’ve got to stay together. I’ll go with you.”
That was Cora. The breathlessness was as much from panic as from exertion, but it wasn’t panic that made her refuse to be left behind. Anything anybody could do she could do better, or at least as well. It was basic with her to believe it, and much of the time she was right. In this case, she was wrong. She would be dead wrong, in the simplest and most elementary sense of the word, if she continued to cling to her faith in her own capabilities as she was clinging to my sleeve. So would I. My own panic made me lash out at her in a way that would hurt.
I swore at her. I said, “Damn you, you’ll stay here, and be as little a handicap as possible! I can rob a farmhouse on my own, without you stumbling at my heels!”
She let go of my sleeve, quickly. A little color came into her face. A slap would have produced the same effect.
I said, “Stay here, scrub your make-up off, work dirt under your fingernails, and make yourself as ugly as you can. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
I left her, warm with the flash of anger at first, then cold again with panic and the realization that what I had just said was only a hopeful boast. But I was a farm boy, although long gone from the furrows, and I thought one farm would be pretty much like another. Even in the People’s Free Federal Republic there should be scarecrows in a field, or old clothes hanging in a barn somewhere.
Only peasants drove goats where we were. We had to look like peasants. I got what we needed, not out of a barn but by raiding a couple of bunkhouse dormitories. From the number and size of the farm buildings and the propaganda posters tacked up everywhere, it was a good-sized collective. In the early-morning daylight, I had better luck than I could have hoped for under cover of darkness. All the workers, men, women, and kids, were busy in the shearing sheds, loud with bawling sheep and barking dogs whose noses were too full of dust and the stink of wool grease to smell a stranger.
Panic and all, I took time to find worn clothes, not too clean. The peasant odor might help keep other farm dogs from getting nosey. When I crept back into the cornfield I had enough to cover both of us, except for shoes. We had no use for shoes which wouldn’t fit as well as our own.
Cora had scrubbed off her lipstick and was trying to make herself look ordinary when I got back with my loot. It was a harder job than most women would have making themselves eye-catching. She had that kind of face. There was never the shadow of a chance that she could pass as a broad-jawed, flat-faced Slavic peasant woman on close examination, but it was our luck that the Turks had imposed their culture on that part of the Balkans for five centuries before the People’s Free Federal Republic substituted its own brand, and although religion was no longer a recognized social force in the country, Moslem traditions were strong among the peasants. The older women, particularly, still wore
yashmaks,
head coverings that could be wound around the mouth and chin to serve as a veil against male eyes. I had brought
a yashmak.
The other clothes I stole for her were a loose blouse, a short, sleeveless jacket, and a pair of baggy, ankle-length Moslem pantaloons. They made up one of the two most common costumes habitually worn by countrywomen in the Republic. The other, at the opposite emancipated extreme, was a pair of very short shorts and an open-necked shirt, worn by young Party members to show their defiance of the traditional muffling of feminine face and figure. Cora’s free choice would have been the shorts and shirt, and for the same reason that Party girls wore them; defiance of a tradition imposed by males on females. But it was not a time to argue when I told her to put on the clothes.
They were ugly, shapeless garments, intended to be roomy and concealing. By doubling her skirt up over her hips and tucking the hem into her waistband, she could get the pantaloons on over her other clothes. The doubled skirt helped change her figure, making her look chunky through the middle, and a fold of
the yashmak
hid her face below the bridge of the nose. Except for her shoes, she could have melted into a crowd of peasants like a drop of water into a pool.
We dressed quickly, without conversation. She was still angry at what I had said to her. But anger is better than panic, equally stimulating to the muscles and not as great a drain on the nerves. I thought it might be a good thing for both of us to go on disliking each other.
I broke off a couple of ears of corn for the goats, to bait them near the fence while we put on our stolen clothing. I couldn’t hide my face, but it wasn’t particularly distinguishable from other faces, as hers was. I rubbed loam into my skin to darken it, pulled on the heavy felt trousers, shrugged the smelly sheepskin jacket on over my own coat, and put the bowl-shaped felt skull-cap on the exact top of my head, as the peasants wore them. I would pass at a distance.
When I picked up a sharp pebble and went to work on her shoes, scuffing the newness from them, she took the pebble from me and did it herself, tight-lipped. It gave us a little extra charge of animosity to start off with. We had a hundred miles to go, a strongly guarded border to cross, and the entire organized police force of the Republic to dodge while we were doing it.
I scuffed my own shoes while she scuffed hers. When we had done all we could to change our appearance, I said, “We’re going to steal the goats. We need a cover, some excuse to be on the road. They’re it. The ewes will follow the bellwether, and the bellwether will follow you if you hold an ear of corn under his nose. Take them straight up over the top of the hill and out of sight, then just keep them moving until I catch up with you.”
“What are you going to do?” She was cool, remote.
“Arrange a diversion. Go ahead.”
“Something quixotic and daring? Some distinctive masculine gesture that can’t be accomplished by a mere woman?”
I had broken a piece of stick from the fence to use on the goats, and for a moment I wished she were one of them. It would have simplified everything. But I said, “Don’t be a fool, Cora. We’re wasting time. I’ll be right behind you.”
She picked up an ear of corn, wiggled under the fence with it, and got the wether started. The ewes followed his bell, although not as quickly as I wanted them to. Before I crawled under the fence to hurry them, I pulled an armful of dry stalks together in a shock and touched off a bonfire.
The cornfield was popping into crackling flame behind us when I caught up with the ewes at the hilltop and beat them into a trot. The wether lost interest in Cora’s ear of corn when he found he couldn’t get it away from her. Because he was always at the head of the herd, where I couldn’t reach him until I had first driven five ewes past him, he gave us trouble until I told Cora to take him by his bell collar and tug him along. I would have given her the stick and taken the wether myself except that I knew she wouldn’t have the stomach to beat the ewes as cruelly as I was beating them. For our lives, they had to suffer.
She was awkward with the wether, afraid of his horns, but we made better time after she took his collar. We got the herd to the lower end of the pasture, through a gate and trotting down a back road leading towards the west without seeing anyone or being seen except by a couple of cows.
Smoke from the burning cornfield poured up beyond the hilltop like a forest fire. There were no field-workers in sight, and no houses, only pasture and more cornfields. The wether followed the road, once he was on it. Cora didn’t have to lead him. I kept the herd at a blatting, protesting trot for about fifteen minutes, then slowed down less for their sake than for our own. The morning air was still nippy, but we wore two full sets of clothing. We could not run far or fast without blinding ourselves with the perspiration that dripped into our eyes. Besides, there was no chance of outrunning Security. We had to outfigure them, if we were going to survive.
Cora said, “Why did you burn the cornfield? Won’t it attract attention?”
“I wanted it to attract attention.”
She reacted to the curt reply as I expected, with heightened color and a quickened pace. Having goaded her, I said, “I burned the cornfield because it will look like ordinary anti-government sabotage of a collective. It will also kill our scent if they come after us with dogs, and the goats could be expected to run from fire. It may be as long as a couple of days before missing goats, stolen clothes, and the fire are put together for what they are. By that time, we’ll have found another cover. If we’re lucky.”
“What if we aren’t lucky?”
“Then we’ll be just as dead as we would have been sitting in the cornfield waiting for Security to find us. This is our best chance.”
I didn’t have to explain further. She knew as well as I that every peasant in the Republic had a work quota to fill and a place to fill it. Countrymen behind the Curtain are not allowed to roam freely from farm to farm or village to village as they choose, only with reason. Our reason was a herd of goats; to sell, to deliver, to milk in the next marketplace, to take to our farm somewhere over the horizon. It didn’t matter. An explanation would never be necessary, because if anyone ever grew suspicious enough of us to ask questions, we were finished. Until we were questioned, we were a Moslem countryman and his veiled and pantalooned woman going about our legitimate business, two of ten million peasants in the country. There were only thirty-two thousand
rokos
to find us.