The Lights of Skaro Read Free

plodding hour, behind our reluctant, bleating convoy.
    The loudspeaker blare reached out to meet us as we followed a dung-cart into town. Its wheels, and the hooves of the lumbering oxen that drew it, stirred up a welcome cloud of dust to begrime our skin and clothing. I had no fear of going into a village at that point. We reached it only five or six hours after our thefts, too soon for the thefts to have been discovered for what they were. We were safe enough, for the moment. But we still had to arrive at a working agreement, for that and later moments which would be more dangerous.
    In the screen of dust behind the dung-cart, I said, “From now on, it’s a matter of staying in character. Don’t forget you’re a Moslem woman. Keep your eyes down and your yashmak up. Don’t look any man in the face. Don’t walk in front of me unless I tell you to. Don’t—”
    “Don’t lecture me!’ She pulled the yashmak higher across the bridge of her nose with an irritated jerk. “I’m not a child who has to be told when to wipe its chin!”
    “That’s another point. Moslem women are inferior in the sight of Allah. They have to be told when to wipe their chins. And they don’t argue with their men, in public. If I tell you to do something, do it. With downcast eyes and an attitude of humble respect, if you can manage it. Save the debates until we’re alone.”
    Her eyes were neither humble nor downcast. They blazed at me above the dusty cloth covering her face. She said,“Mine not to reason why, mine but to do or die. Is that what you’re trying to say?”
    “That’s it. I didn’t invent the system. I don’t support it. But we have to recognize it, or give ourselves away. If we attract any attention by not acting the part, we’re finished.”
    “And if you insist that I do something stupid, what then? Humbleness and downcast eyes?”
    “I won’t ask you to do anything stupid.”
    “I wish I had as much faith in it as you have!”
    “It’s a matter of preserving my own skin as well as yours. If you lose, I lose. Another thing. When we talk at all, which shouldn’t be any more often than absolutely necessary, we’ve got to avoid English. It’s less risky to take a chance on being overheard and understood than being overheard and identified as foreigners.”
    If she had an argument for that, she swallowed it. The wheels of the dung-cart were rattling on the paving stones at the beginning of the village street. We followed close behind.
    There were no indications of a Security watch in the village, but I ran my hand over my face to smear dirt and sweat together when we lost the protection of the dung-cart’s cloud of dust. We passed it and went on to the tiny village square near the mosque, the goats following their noses to the water of the fountain in the square.
    Except for the constant roar of the loudspeaker high on the minaret, and a painted wooden Red Star hung from a balcony below it, the village drowsed in the thin autumn sunlight as it must have drowsed in the days of Suleiman the Magnificent. A few skull-capped stall-keepers sat with folded hands by the wares they offered for sale, a few baggy-trousered peasant women peered at the goods over their veiling yashmaks, a few villagers went about their business. A cobbler, cross-legged in the shade of an awning, banged nails into a shoe. Across the square from where he sat, another awning was spread over a brazier on which an old woman was grilling koftes.
    The smell of the broiling meat was too much to resist. We hadn’t eaten since the evening of the night that had ended with our break. I told Cora to stay with the goats – they were already scampering eagerly for the fountain – and went over to the brazier, fumbling coins out of my pocket before I got there. We didn’t have much money, but there was nothing better than food to spend it on.
    The old woman had a wooden tub full of dolmas, cool in their wrapping