Children of Tomorrow, Arthur Leo Zagat [good books to read for beginners TXT] 📗

the fading yellow of the field beyond, saw that Bengreen and Danhall had their bows lifted, arrows across them.

“Don’t shoot them things off at me,” the shape said, its voice thin as a Girl’s but higher-pitched and very tired sounding. “Not that I got much to live for, but I’m a friend, and I came to help you.”

“Don’t shoot, Boys,” Dikar said, and moved nearer, peering. He made out that it was a woman who stood waiting for him, her dress gray and shapeless about her thin, bent frame, the skin of her face stretched tight over the bones beneath, her hands like birds’ claws, her hair brown as Marilee’s, but drab and lifeless. “You are white,” he said. “You are not one of them.” In one of her hands was something Dikar could not make out.

“No,” the woman laughed, and the sound of her laugh sent a chill through Dikar. “No. I’m not one of them. My name’s Martha Dawson and I was born in that house on the hill, and my father was born there, and his father before him. But who and what I am doesn’t matter, and it’s better for me not to know who you are. I can see that you must have escaped from one of their concentration camps, and I came down to warn you to get away quick, before the patrol comes along to change the guard here, and finds you.”

“I can’t go away,” Dikar said. “My Marilee is hurt too bad to be taken away.”

“Your who?” Martha Dawson looked in the direction Dikar had motioned. “Oh. The Girl who fell out of the tree. I heard her scream and I looked out of the window and saw you catch her.” She was bending over Marilee. “She is hurt bad, isn’t she? She must have been cut by a stone when she fell. Oh, the poor thing.”

The woman went down on her knees, putting what she carried down on the ground. “So pretty too, and her hair’s long. I never seen—Why, she has no clothes on, only this queer grass skirt. You all must have been hiding in the woods a long time. Yes, I can see that you were. You look too well fed to have been living on the scraps they give us. Your wife has lost an awful lot of blood. She is your wife, isn’t she?”

“My—” Dikar checked himself. He’d remembered what “wife” meant. It was the same as mate. “Yes. She is my wife.”

“I thought so when you called her ‘my Marilee.’ Well, don’t you worry about her. I saw the way you fought the soldier and I thought one of you might be hurt, so I brought some stuff along. I’ll just put a plaster on this cut to hold it together, and then you can carry her up to the house and I’ll fix her up right.”

“Carry her-!” The way Martha Dawson’s hands were working at Marilee’s side, Dikar knew that she could heal her, but—“But won’t They find her there? Won’t that get you into trouble with Them?”

“I’ve had trouble enough. A little more won’t hurt. Besides, I don’t think They’ll find her, or you neither, unless they search a lot harder than they have already—Oh!” She rocked back on her heels, her eyes widening. “But they will. They’ll find that soldier dead in the field and they’ll know I couldn’t have killed him but they’ll be sure I know who did it.”

“We can hide Jubal in the woods.”

She shook her head.

“No. That won’t do. They’ll see the blood all around here, and they’ll find him, never fear, them blacks is like Indians. Oh goodness. I don’t know what to do.”

“I do,” Dikar exclaimed. “Look, Martha Dawson. One of us wanted to give us away to them an’ we had to kill him.” By the calm way the woman had acted when she saw how bad hurt Marilee was he knew he could tell her that without her getting excited. “We’ll fix things so it will look like he shot Jubal with an arrow, an’ that Jubal killed him with his gun before he died.”

“Good!” The woman nodded. “That will do it. But you better carry your wife up the hill while your friends are fixing things. We’ll go up by the road, the way come down, so as not to leave more tracks than can be helped.”

Dikar told the others what to do and then be picked Marilee up in his arms, and went to the road, Martha Dawson beside him, went up the road toward where the house was a pale glimmer in the deep dusk that now had come down over the hill and the fields. just as they reached the house, Dikar heard a shot, and he knew that Tomball had no face any longer, knew that Bengreen was laying the long gun back in Jubal’s dead hands, and that Danhall and Henfield were wiping out as much as they could of the marks that would show there had been more there than just Jubal and Tomball.

Martha Dawson opened a door for Dikar, and he went into darkness that smelled a little like the eating place on the Mountain. The door closed behind him, and he felt a hand on his arm.

“Bring her upstairs,” the woman said. “This way.”

Dikar didn’t know what she meant, but he went the way her hand guided him. His toes struck wood, and he half stumbled. “Come on,” the woman said, tugging at his arm.

“But there’s somethin’ in the way here. I can’t go any further.”

“Something? Oh dear Lord! Don’t you know what stairs are?”

“Stairs?”

“Wait. I’ll strike a match.” Dikar stood stock-still, listening to the sound of her going away from him. He didn’t like this place. He was afraid of it. It was too closed in. He could hardly breathe. The woman was coming back, and there was a strange, scratching sound and then there was a little flame growing on the end of a tiny piece of wood in her hand, and her other hand was cupped over it, and she was looking at Dikar as if she’d never seen a Boy before.

“Don’t know what stairs are,” she said again. “Well, I never-! Look. There they are in front of you.” Dikar looked and he saw a kind of hill built out of wood. “Hurry and take her up, before someone comes.”

Dikar climbed up what Martha Dawson called stairs, and came to a level place, and they went along the level place, and came to more stairs that he climbed. At the top of these stairs they came into a big room whose roof was high in the middle but slanted down low towards the sides, so that there were hardly any walls at all except in one place where the wall was made higher to make space for a little window.

Dikar stood still, Marilee nestled in his arms, and looked around him. By the light of another match Martha Dawson held he saw that the room was full of tables and little benches, and boxes, and a lot of things Dikar had never seen before, all old-looking and dirty and piled every which way on top of one another, right up to the roof. So full was the room that Dikar couldn’t see where he was to put Marilee.

“Wait,” the woman said and went past Dikar to a box that stood on end in the middle of the pile’s front, a black box almost as big as she was. She knocked on this in a funny way.

The box moved—not the box but the side that was all Dikar could see of it. The side swung out on one up-and-down edge, like a door, and inside the box was a tall man with a thin white face and gray hair. The man was stooped over, and his eyes, deep-sunk in his face, glittered in the matchlight like the eyes of animals glitter in the night-blackened woods.

The man saw Dikar. His lips pulled away from his teeth and his hand came up, and in his hand was a little gun that aimed right at Dikar.