The Lights of Skaro Read Free Page B

food to eat, a drink of cool water, and she had forgotten to be afraid.
    I was afraid enough for both of us. And I welcomed the spur of anger I felt at her taunt. I said, “Get up. Now. We’re leaving.”
    She shook her head, still without opening her eyes. “No. Not for a while.”
    I picked up my stick. I said, “Have you ever seen a peasant beat his woman? It’s an accepted form of discipline in this country when she doesn’t do what she’s told. Get up!”
    She opened her eyes at that. In a voice of absolute incredulity she said, “You wouldn’t dare! I’d—I’d—”
    Before she could think what it was she would do, I had shortened my grip on the stick and was lifting it to swing at her shoulders.
    I didn’t have to bring it down. She scrambled to her feet. Her lace, as much as I could see of it above the yashmak, was flaming at first, then white under the dirt. She didn’t speak to me, or look at me, or acknowledge my existence for the rest of the afternoon. When we left the village, she stayed on her side of the goats, I stayed on mine. We plodded westward, mile after bone-wearying mile.
    We were both stumbling with fatigue before we stopped for the night. We couldn’t sleep in a village or farmhouse without signing a house-book and producing identity papers we didn’t have, and it would invite suspicion to travel after nightfall even if we had had the strength to keep going. As soon as it was dark enough, we left the road for a bramble-grown ravine with a trickle of water running down it and a stand of dry grass among the brambles. The water and grass would keep the tired goats in the ravine, but to prevent them from grazing too tar up or down it I tore strips from my shirt and braided a rope to tie the wether. The ewes would stay near his bell.
    When that was done, I milked one of the ewes into my skull-cap. It wasn’t as clean as it might be, but we had no other container.
    While I was milking Cora said, “What can I do to help?”
    They were her first words since the incident at the village, and they weren’t an overture for a restoration of diplomatic relations. She still hated me. But sagging as she was with fatigue, done in, dead on her feet, she had to keep up her end.
    “Can you milk a goat?”
    “No. I’m sorry.”
    “It doesn’t matter. Here.” I held the brimming skull-cap up to her. “Drink this. It won’t taste very good, but it’s all the food we have. We’re going to need all the energy we can get.”
    “After you.”
    It infuriated me beyond all reason. I was overtired and overstrained, no more than she was, but nevertheless, on the ragged edge of exhaustion. Her insistence on that small gesture of equality and independence made me boil over with senseless anger.
    Hating her as much as she hated me, and with less reason I said, “There’s plenty of milk, more than we can possibly use. It’s convenient for me to sit here and strip this ewe dry while you’re drinking what you can hold. I’ll get my own later, from the next one. Furthermore, if you’ll drink yours now while there is still some light left, you can be gathering grass for a bed while I finish my own job. If we submitted the whole argument to a board of arbitration, they’d hold unanimously that the most practical procedure would be for you to drink first. Now take it!”
    She did, wordlessly. I filled the skull-cap again, and a third time, and got her to try a fourth capful before she gagged. Afterwards I drank all I could hold of the warm, goaty, nauseous, sweat-and-felt-flavored milk, washed the taste out of my mouth with a drink from the runnel at the bottom of the ravine, stripped the remaining ewes’ udders dry, and was through for the day.
    Cora had gathered enough grass to make a kind of pallet under the lip of a bank. She was lying on it, flat and exhausted. I sat down beside her. When she moved wearily to make room for me I said, “So there won’t be any