The Eye of the Heron Page 5
The heron turned away, bent its head, searching the dark water for fish.
Lev stood up, trying to move as quietly and deftly as the heron itself, and left the circle of the trees, passing between two of the massive red trunks. It was like going through a door into a different place entirely. The shallow valley was bright with sunlight, the sky windy and alive; sun gilt the red-painted timber roof of the Meeting House, which stood on the south-facing slope. A good many people were at the Meeting House already, standing on the steps and porch talking, and Lev quickened his pace. He wanted to run, to shout. This was no time for stillness. This was the first morning of the battle, the beginning of victory.
Andre hailed him: “Come on! Everybody’s waiting for Boss Lev!”
He laughed, and ran; he came up the six steps of the porch in two strides. “All right, all right, all right,” he said, “what kind of discipline is this, where are your boots, do you consider that a respectful position, Sam?” Sam, a brown, stocky man wearing only white trousers, was standing calmly on his head near the porch railing.
Elia took charge of the meeting. They did not go inside, but sat around on the porch to talk, for the sunlight was very pleasant. Elia was in a serious mood, as usual, but Lev’s arrival had cheered the others up, and the discussion was lively but brief. The sense of the meeting was clear almost at once. Elia wanted another delegation to go to the City to talk with the Bosses, but no one else did; they wanted a general meeting of the people of Shantih. They arranged that it would take place before sundown, and the younger people undertook to notify outlying villages and farms. As Lev was about to leave, Sam, who had serenely stood on his head throughout the discussion, came upright in a single graceful motion and said to Lev, smiling, “Arjuna, it will be a great battle.”
Lev, his mind busy with a hundred things, smiled at Sam and strode off.
The campaign which the people of Shantih were undertaking was a new thing to them, and yet a familiar one. All of them, in the Town school and the Meeting House, had learned its principles and tactics; they knew the lives of the hero-philosophers Gandhi and King, and the history of the People of the Peace, and the ideas that had inspired those lives, that history. In exile, the People of the Peace had continued to live by those ideas; and so far had done so with success. They had at least kept themselves independent, while taking over the whole farming enterprise of the community, and sharing the produce fully and freely with the City. In exchange, the City provided them tools and machinery made by the Government ironworks, fish caught by the City fleet, and various other products which the older-established colony could more easily provide. It had been an arrangement satisfactory to both.
But gradually the terms of the bargain had grown more unequal. Shantih raised the cottonwool plants and the silktrees, and took the raw stuff to the City mills to be spun and woven. But the mills were very slow; if the townsfolk needed clothes, they did better to spin and weave the cloth themselves. The fresh and dried fish they expected did not arrive. Bad catches, the Council explained. Tools were not replaced. The City had furnished the farmers tools; if the farmers were careless with them it was up to them to replace them, said the Council. So it went on, gradually enough that no crisis arose. The people of Shantih compromised, adjusted, made do. The children and grandchildren of the exiles, now grown men and women, had never seen the technique of conflict and resistance, which was the binding force of their community, in action.
But they had been taught it: the spirit, the reasons, and the rules. They had learned it, and practiced it in the minor conflicts that arose within the Town itself. They had watched their elders arrive, sometimes by passionate debate and sometimes by almost wordless consent, at solutions to problems and disagreements. They had learned how to listen for the sense of the meeting, not the voice of the loudest. They had learned that they must judge each time whether obedience was necessary and right, or misplaced and wrong. They had learned that the act of violence is the act of weakness, and that the spirit’s strength lies in holding fast to the truth.
At least they believed all that, and believed that they had learned it beyond any shadow of a doubt. Not one of them, under any provocation, would resort to violence. They were certain, and they were strong.
“It won’t be easy, this time,” Vera had said to them, before she and the others left for the City. “You know, it won’t be easy.”
They nodded, smiling, and cheered her. Of course it wouldn’t be easy. Easy victories aren’t worth winning.
As he went from farm to farm southwest of Shantih, Lev asked people to come to the big meeting, and answered their questions about Vera and the other hostages. Some of them were afraid of what the City men might do next, and Lev said, “Yes, they may do worse than take a few hostages. We can’t expect them simply to agree with us, when we don’t agree with them. We’re in for a fight.”
“But when they fight they use knives—and there’s that—that whipping place, you know,” said a woman, lowering her voice. “Where they punish their thieves and … .” She did not finish. Everyone else looked ashamed and uneasy.
“They’re caught in the circle of violence that brought them here,” said Lev. “We aren’t. If we stand firm, all of us together, then they’ll see our strength; they’ll see it’s greater than theirs. They’ll begin to listen to us. And to win free, themselves.” His face and voice were so cheerful as he spoke that the farmers could see that he was speaking the simple truth, and began to look forward to the next confrontation with the City instead of dreading it. Two brothers with names taken from the Long March, Lyons and Pamplona, got especially worked up; Pamplona, who was rather simple, followed Lev around from farm to farm the rest of the morning so he could hear the Resistance Plans ten times over.
In the afternoon Lev worked with his father and the other three families that farmed their bog-rice paddy, for the last harvest was ripe and must be got in no matter what else was going on. His father went on with one of these families for supper; Lev went to eat with Southwind. She had left her mother’s house and was living alone in the little house west of town which she and Timmo had built when they married. It stood by itself in the fields, though within sight of the nearest group of houses outlying from the town. Lev, or Andre, or Martin’s wife Italia, or all three of them, often came there for supper, bringing something to share with Southwind. She and Lev ate together, sitting on the doorstep, for it was a mild, golden autumn afternoon, and then went on together to the Meeting House, where two or three hundred people were already gathered, and more coming every minute.
Everyone knew what they were there for: to reassure one another that they were all together, and to discuss what was to be done next. The spirit of the gathering was festive and a little excited. People stood up on the porch and spoke, all saying in one way or another, “We’re not going to give in, we’re not going to let our hostages down!” When Lev spoke he was cheered: grandson of the great Shults who led the Long March, explorer of the wilderness, and a general favorite anyhow. The cheering was interrupted, there was a commotion in the crowd, which now numbered over a thousand. Night had come on, and the electric lights on the Meeting House porch, powered by the town generator, were feeble, so it was hard to see what was going on at the edge of the crowd. A squat, massive, black object seemed to be pushing through the people. When it got nearer the porch it could be seen as a mass of men, a troop of guards from the City, moving as a solid block. The block had a voice: “Meetings … order … pain,” was all anyone could hear, because everyone was asking indignant questions. Lev, standing under the light, called for quiet, and as the crowd fell silent the loud voice could be heard:
“Mass meetings are forbidden, the crowd is to disperse. Public meetings are forbidden by order of the Supreme Council upon pain of imprisonment and punishment. Disperse at once and go to your homes!”
“No,” people said, “why should we?”—“What right have they got?”—“Go to your own homes!”
“This delegation from the City has a right to speak,” Lev said, loud and clear. “And to be heard. And when we’ve heard what they say, we may disregard it, but remember that we are resolved not to threaten by act or word. We do not offer anger or injury to these men who come amongst us. What we offer them is friendship and the love of truth!”
He looked at the guards, and the officer at once repeated the order to disperse the meeting in a flat, hurried voice. When he was through, there was silence. The silence continued. Nobody said anything. Nobody moved.
“All right now,” the officer shouted, forcing his voice, “get moving, disperse, go to your homes!”
Lev and Andre looked at each other, folded their arms, and sat down. Holdfast, who was also up on the porch, sat down too; then Southwind, Elia, Sam, Jewel, and the others. The people on the meeting ground began to sit down. It was a queer sight in the shadows and the yellowish, shadow-streaked light: the many, many dark forms all seeming to shrink to half their height, with a faint rustling sound, a few murmurs. Some children giggled. Within half a minute they were all sitting down. No one remained afoot but the troop of guards, twenty men standing close together.
“You’ve been warned,” the officer shouted, and his voice was both vindictive and embarrassed. He was evidently not sure what to do with these people who now sat silently on the ground, looking at him with expressions of peaceable curiosity, as if they were children at a puppet show and he was the puppet. “Get up and disperse, or I’ll begin the arrests!”
Nobody said anything.
“All right, arrest the thir—the twenty nearest. Get up. You, get up!”
The people spoken to or laid hands on by the guardsmen got up, and stood quietly. “Can my wife come too?” a man asked the guard in a low voice, not wanting to break the great, deep stillness of the crowd.
“There will be no further mass meetings of any kind. By order of the Council!” the officer bawled, and led his troop off, herding a group of about twenty-five townsfolk. They disappeared into the darkness outside the reach of the electric lights.
Behind them the crowd was silent.
A voice rose from it, singing. Other voices joined in, softly at first. It was an old song, from the days of the Long March on Earth.
O when we come,
O when we come to the Free Land
Then we will build the City,
O when we come … .
As the group of guards and prisoners went on into the darkness the singing did not sound fainter behind them but stronger and clearer, as all the hundreds of voices joined and sent the music ringing over the dark quiet lands between Shantih and the City of Victoria.
The twenty-four people who had been arrested by the guards, or had voluntarily gone off with them, returned to Shantih late the following day. They had been put into a warehouse for the night, perhaps because the City Jail had no room for so many, and sixteen of them women and children. There had been a trial in the afternoon, they said, and when it was done they were told to go home. “But we’re supposed to pay a fine,” old Pamplona said importantly.
Pamplona’s brother Lyons was a thriving orcharder, but Pamplona, slow and sickly, had never amounted to much. This was his moment of glory. He had gone to prison, just like Gandhi, just like Shults, just like on Earth. He was a hero, and delighted.
“A fine?” Andre asked, incredulous. “Money? They know we don’t use their coins—”
“A fine,” Pamplona explained, tolerant of Andre’s ignorance, “is that we have to work for twenty days on the new farm.”
“What new farm?”
“Some kind of new farm the Bosses are going to make.”
“The Bosses are going in for farming?” Everybody laughed.
“They’d better, if they want to eat,” a woman said.
“What if you don’t go work on this new farm?”
“I don’t know,” Pamplona said, getting confused. “Nobody said. We weren’t supposed to talk. It was a court, with a judge. The judge talked.”
“Who was the judge?”
“Macmilan.”
“Young Macmilan?”
“No, the old one, the Councillor. The young one was there, though. A big fellow he is! Like a tree! And he smiles all the time. A fine young man.”
Lev came, at a run, having just got news of the prisoners’ return. He hugged the first ones he came to, in the excited group that had gathered in the street to welcome them. “You’re back, you’re back—All of you?”
“Yes, yes, they’re all back, you can go eat supper now!”
“The others, Hari and Vera—”
“No, not them. They didn’t see them.”
“But all of you—They didn’t hurt you?”
“Lev said he couldn’t eat anything till you got back, he’s been fasting.”
“We’re all right, go eat some dinner, what a stupid thing to do!”
“They treated you well?”
“Like guests, like guests,” old Pamplona asserted. “We’re all brothers. Isn’t that so? A good big breakfast they gave us, too!”
“Our own rice we grew, that’s what they gave us. Fine hosts! to lock their guests up in a barn as black as night and as cold as last night’s porridge, I have an ache in every bone and I want a bath, every one of those guard people was crawling with lice, I saw one right on his neck, the one that arrested me, a louse the size of your fingernail, ugh, I want a bath!” This was Kira, a buxom woman who lisped because she had lost her two front teeth; she said she didn’t miss the teeth, they got in the way of her talking anyhow. “Who’ll put me up for the night? I’m not going to walk home to East Village with every bone aching and a dozen lice creeping up and down my backbone!” Five or six people at once offered her a bath, a bed, hot food. All the freed prisoners were looked after and made much of. Lev and Andre went off down the little side street that led to Lev’s home. They walked in silence for a while.
“Thank God!” said Lev.
“Yes. Thank God. They’re back; it worked. If only Vera and Jan and the others had come back with them.”
“They’re all right. But this lot—none of them was ready, they hadn’t thought about it, they hadn’t prepared themselves. I was afraid they’d be hurt, I was afraid they’d be frightened, get angry. It was our responsibility, we led the sit-down. We got them arrested. But they held out. They weren’t frightened, they didn’t fight, they held fast!” Lev’s voice shook. “It was my responsibility.”
“Ours,” Andre said. “We didn’t send them, you didn’t send them; they went. They chose to go. You’re worn out, you ought to eat. Sasha!” They were at the door of the house. “Make this man eat. They fed his prisoners, now you feed him.”
Sasha, sitting by the hearth sanding down a hoe handle, looked up; his mustache bristled, his eyebrows bristled over his deep-set eyes. “Who can make my son do what he doesn’t want to do?” he said. “If he wants to eat, he knows where the soup bowl is.”
5
The Senhor Councillor Falco gave a dinner party. During most of it, he wished sincerely that he had not given a dinner party.
It was to be a party in the old style, the Old World style, with five courses, and fine clothes, and conversation, and music after dinner. The old men arrived at the hour, each accompanied by his wife and an unmarried daughter or two. Some of the younger men, such as young Helder, also arrived on time, with their wives. The women stood about the fireplace at one end of the hall of Casa Falco in their long gowns and jewelry, and chattered; the men stood about the fireplace at the other end of the, hall in their best black suits, and talked. All seemed to be going well, just as it had gone when Councillor Falco’s grandfather Don Ramon had given dinner parties, just like dinner parties back on Earth, as Don Ramon had often said with satisfaction and conviction, for after all his fa
ther Don Luis had been born on Earth and had been the greatest man in Rio de Janeiro.
But some of the guests had not come on time. It got later, and still they did not come. Councillor Falco was summoned by his daughter to the kitchen: the cooks’ faces were tragic, the superb dinner would be ruined. At his command the long table was carried into the hall and set, the guests sat down, the first course was served, eaten, cleared away, the second course was served, and then, only then, in came young Macmilan, young Marquez, young Weiler, free and easy, without an apology and, what was worse, with a whole rabble of their friends, uninvited: seven or eight big bucks with whips in their belts and broad-brimmed hats which they didn’t know enough to take off indoors, and dirty boots, and a lot of loud dirty talk. New places had to be set, crowded in among the others. The young men had been drinking before they came, and went on swilling Falco’s best ale. They pinched the maidservants, but ignored the ladies. They shouted across the table, and blew their noses in the embroidered napkins. When the supreme moment of the dinner arrived, the meat course, roast coney—Falco had hired ten trappers for a week to supply this luxury—the latecomers piled their plates so greedily that there was not enough to go round, and no one at the foot of the table got meat. The same thing happened with the dessert, a molded pudding made with root starch, boiled fruits, and nectar. Several of the young men scooped it out of the bowls with their fingers.