Way of the Pilgrim, page 21
And now, his awareness of what they had done was making decisions he had expected to be straightforward surprisingly complex.
His original idea had seemed such a simple and easy one. The Resistance people, he had known, longed for a chance to revolt. All he had to do, he had told himself, was to give them an excuse, fully aware as he did so that such a revolt would be hopeless, but that he could use the putting down of it to his own advantage, to gain security for himself and Maria…and possibly one or two others worth saving, like Peter.
The thought of including Peter and possibly others in those he might be able to save was one of those complexities that now seemed to crop up all too freely. The idea stopped his thoughts dead for the moment. But before he could examine it further, the cab was drawing up to the curb.
It halted. Shane got out and paid the driver. The place he had been brought to was a basement of one of the tall old row houses, the sign of which was a painted board illuminated by a single incandescent light bulb, given a rosy cast by some scraps of translucent red plastic that had been glued together around it to form a globe. He went down the stairs to its entrance and opened the door there to enter a small, shabby room with what looked like very old tablecloths of various colors over card tables. Each table was supplied with a tall, homemade candle, of which the only ones lit were those at occupied tables. To his right he almost stumbled over a chalkboard on which had been listed the two choices for dinner— curried lamb and chicken pie. Wine by the glass was noted as being available.
The lamb would be mutton, he knew, and the curry designed to cover up any off-taste in the meat or in the rest of the dinner. The chicken pie would have very little chicken meat in it and a great deal of flour and water thickening. The “wine” would simply be that—whatever they had on hand at the moment. White or red was not specified.
Looking across the room, he saw Peter already at a table in one corner, isolated by surrounding empty tables from the other diners in the room. Peter beckoned him over.
There was no place to leave his coat and hat. Shane took them off as he approached the table. They would have to be draped over the back of his chair—unless the very evident chilliness of the room forced him to put them back on again, as some of the other diners had already done to stay reasonably warm.
He reached Peter’s table. There was a large glass of red wine in front of the other man that looked as if it had hardly been touched. There was a second glass of wine in front of the chair opposite. Shane sat down there and laid his coat and hat on the floor between his chair and the wall. He picked up the wine in front of him and tasted it. It was raw and almost undrinkable.
“Been here long?” Shane asked.
“Since the place opened for dinner,” said Peter. The tone of his voice was light, but had an edge to it. “Don’t worry. I’ve watched everyone who’s come in. There’s been no one I know, and that makes it pretty certain there’s no one here who knows me.”
“Good,” said Shane. He picked up the menu on the plate before him and glanced at it. “I’ll have the curried lamb. You do all the ordering.”
“When the waitress gets here,” said Peter evenly.
“What’s the latest count of people who’ve shown up from across the Channel?” Shane asked.
“Eight,” said Peter. “Anna ten Drinke came in from Amsterdam and Georges Marrotta from Milan—you remember him, the man who spoke to you in Basque? Albert Desoules of Paris was already here, and Wilhelm Herner, so we’ve got the big four.”
“I’m surprised at—who did you say they were—ten Drinke and Marrotta?” Shane said. “Amsterdam’s so close and Marrotta knows who I am and knows about Maria’s being here. I’d have thought they two would have been among the first to show up. Does it mean anything, do you suppose, that they took this long to come?”
“I wouldn’t know their reasons,” said Peter. “Some of the less well known names might have come just for the trip to London—this call of yours makes a good excuse. Marrotta and ten Drinke don’t need excuses. No more do Desoules and Herner, so they probably decided to take as short a time off from ordinary business as they could get by with.”
“I see,” said Shane.
“Meanwhile,” said Peter, “they’re growing impatient—understandably so—to meet you, now they’re here. I’ve told them about the new Governor Unit project and your connection with it, and given them the idea that it wasn’t easy for you to get away from it safely, and that that’s what’s been holding you back from meeting them. But they’re getting restless, just the same.”
“They can see me tomorrow afternoon—” Shane interrupted himself as a heavy, middle-aged waitress passed by their table too close.
“…In fact,” he went on, “it’s most important they see me tomorrow. But they won’t be able to talk to me, just see me, until evening.”
Peter gazed steadily across the table at him in the dim light.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that in the day I’m going to put on a show for them in a public place; and I want you to see they’re there to take it all in. But they mustn’t make any attempt to speak to me there, or get close to me.”
“I see,” said Peter, “and you’re going to need our help to put on this show, too, of course?”
Shane looked back across the table at him and saw a perfectly expressionless face except for a particular stoniness of gaze.
“That’s right,” he said gently. “Something wrong with that?”
“There could be,” answered Peter. “This isn’t Denmark or Milan. This is my ground; and what you do on it hits me directly. You told me you wanted to meet for dinner to talk to me about something. Now you have. And now it’s my turn to talk to you, as I said I’d need to.”
Shane studied the other man for a moment. There was something here he had not seen in Peter before; or if he had seen it, he had not paid proper attention to it.
“Your turn?” he said. “All right. Go ahead.”
“I’ll do that,” said Peter. “I know what involves every one of the people you saw at that meeting I brought you to when you first got here—I know why each one of them’s in the Resistance. There wasn’t one of them there who hadn’t lost someone close—relative or friend—to the aliens; either directly killed by them or their human troops, or dead because of some change the aliens made. So answer me this. You’ve got a lot of personal freedom, money and just about everything anyone could want, the situation being what it is. As far as I can find out you’ve no relatives or friends outside the other collaborators who work with the aliens. So, tell me. What exactly was it that made you mark the sign of the Pilgrim, that first time, on the wall in Denmark?”
Shane stared at him. The question called for so complicated an answer that he did not know where to start. Finally, he managed to say something.
“The Aalaag have a word for it,” he said. “Yowaragh.”
“Eeyah…what?” said Peter.
“Don’t try to pronounce it,” said Shane. “It’s one of the more impossible words for a human to say properly. Yowaragh. It means beasts who suddenly go insane to the point where they try a perfectly hopeless physical attack on an Aalaag.”
Peter looked at him narrowly. “You did this?”
“No, no.” Shane shook his head. “Not me. Remember the Dane I told you about after you, shall we say, escorted me to your hiding place in Milan? The one who attacked the Aalaag who accidentally killed the man’s wife?”
“I remember,” Peter said. “But it’s still not clear to me what that has to do with your joining us now.”
Shane had told, at that first meeting in Milan, about the execution in the square he had been made to watch, about getting drunk in the tavern and being attacked outside by the Nonservs, but he had not told about the butterfly.
Now, he tried to explain to Peter why the Aalaag had felt they had to execute the man publicly, on the hooks, how they would not tolerate anything but obedience. And he tried to explain about the tension he always felt, living close to them all the time and knowing as he did how uncompromising they were in their rules and laws, even when their own children were involved. He told Peter about the father Aalaag solemnly bringing his son to task for being responsible for the deaths of two valuable beasts. How the son had defended himself saying it was an accident, he was only trying to save the woman from being trampled by the riding beast, and how the father scorned all excuses. He tried again to explain the term yowaragh, the craziness that overcame him at times and made him want to strike out, no matter what the consequences.
“There was a—” Shane broke off. He found these words hard to come by.
“It was spring,” he said. “There was a butterfly on a branch of a tree there, just coming out of the chrysalis. You know how the Aalaag’ve cleared all insects and wild creatures of any kind out of the cities? These two didn’t see the butterfly; and so this won’t make any sense to you, but it seemed to me that if the butterfly could just last long enough to get its wings working and escape, then we’d have gained a life— even if it was only the life of a butterfly—for the two they’d just taken from us. I know this doesn’t make sense….”
Peter was looking at him oddly.
“Nevermind,” said Peter. “Go on.”
“So I concentrated on the butterfly. Kept my eyes on it. And it got away. The man died. Then all of us who’d been required to stand and watch were free to go; and I found the tavern not far away. The barman sold me some illegal homemade liquor. I got a little drunk and I was still all shaken up by what I’d had to watch. I left and right away I was jumped by the three Nonservs who wanted to rob me. I beat them off with my staff—killed two of them, actually; and ended up thinking what a great warrior I was, until I saw how they were nothing but skin and bones—they’d been starving to death.”
He stopped.
“Go on,” said Peter.
“On my way back, I had to pass through the square again. There was no one in it but the dead man and his wife. I had to do something—it was yowaragh, as the Aalaag say. All I could think of doing was making some kind of protest where people could see it—putting some kind of mark there to say, even if only to myself, that they may have killed the man and woman but the butterfly lived. Something lived…that’s all there is to it.”
He said no more and Peter was silent for a long minute or two.
“So,” he said, “you still didn’t do anything about the Aalaag until you were in Milan, the time we picked you up.”
“I could see Maria there through one of the vision screens they have in their offices. Just waiting…it was Aalborg all over again. I thought if I could only make sure she lived, save one life. It was the way it had been with thebutterfly….”
He ran down.
“Well,” said Peter after a bit. He had been staring off across the room at nothing in particular; now he brought his gaze back to Shane. “That answers me.”
Shane took a deep breath and drank some of the god-awful wine.
“I’m glad,” he said.
“So am I,” said Peter.
“And now,” said Shane, gathering strength, “now that I’ve told you all about me, how about telling me about you? I don’t know a thing about you. Who you are, or what you do. Your turn to tell me.”
“I’m a solicitor,” said Peter, staring moodily at his wineglass. He lifted it to his lips, but at the first taste set it quickly down again.
“A lawyer?”
Peter opened his mouth to answer and closed it again as the heavy-bodied, middle-aged waitress, with a wisp of hair dangling down on a forehead shiny with sweat, came to their table and took their orders.
“One kind of lawyer,” he said when she was gone. “You know we’ve got barristers, who actually appear in court, and solicitors—”
“I do know. I’m sorry,” said Shane. “It’s not an important point. Go on about yourself.”
“Well, that’s all there is about me, really.” Peter frowned at the tablecloth, on which he was drawing lines with the tines of his fork. “I’ve got a little independent income; but I try to get into the office fairly regularly to look busy to the aliens and the police, if nothing else.”
“Why are you in the Resistance?” asked Shane bluntly.
“Well, there isn’t much choice, is there?” said Peter. “I can’t say I and those close to me have been directly and personally misused by the aliens. Though it was a result of their occupation that my father and mother are dead now. They were old, you see. I was an only child and a late child. They had all sorts of little things wrong with their health; and the way they had to live after the aliens came was fairly hard on my father. He died about a year after the aliens took over and my mother only about six months after that. But I can’t say I’m out for revenge, anything like that.”
“Oh?” Shane looked at him. Peter’s eyes were still on the marks he was making in the tablecloth. “What is it that made you an Aalaag-fighter then?”
Peter raised his gaze and looked straight at Shane.
“I suppose you could call it some kind of duty,” he answered. “As I said, this is my ground. In fact, this is my world. If a thief comes and sets up camp in your house, you do something about it, don’t you? You don’t just sit there and let him use the silver and empty the refrigerator. You do whatever has to be done to get rid of him.”
“Including facing what the Aalaag will do to you when they catch you?”
“More of the if and less of the when, if you don’t mind,” said Peter. “Of course. Whatever’s necessary. There’d hardly be much point in living, otherwise.”
Shane looked down at the lines in the tablecloth, at a loss for something to say. Peter, seeing his eyes upon the fork tines, laid the fork down.
“I expect everybody has their own reason,” he said with unexpected gentleness.
Shane shook his head. “I guess there’s nothing we can do about ourselves, anyway,” he said. “Well, shall I tell you what I’ve got in mind to show the visiting firemen?”
“Firemen?”
“The visitors here from the Continent to see me,” said Shane.
“All right, then. What is it?”
“I want you to get all of them into positions—separate positions—close to the Houses of Parliament, so that they’ve got as close a view as is safe, of Big Ben, at just a little after noontime, tomorrow. There’s an Aalaag on his riding beast always on duty around the Houses of Parliament—”
“I know,” interrupted Peter.
“I know you know,” said Shane. “I’m trying to tell you something. Please listen. He rides from position to position around the building, sits his riding beast a short while at each position, then moves on. He usually stops just before the clock tower at noon, or a little after. Tell your people that when they see him ride into position there and stop, to start watching the face of Big Ben. They may have to wait some minutes before they see anything, but they’re to keep their eyes on the clockface until they do, or they’ll miss what I want them to see.”
“And what is it they’re going to see?” demanded Peter.
“Let me finish telling you what I’ll need, first,” said Shane. “Now, I want you, personally—”
He broke off as the waitress once again approached their table, this time with filled plates. He waited until she had gone again, then picked up where he had left off.
“… I’ll need you standing out about twenty yards beyond the Aalaag on his riding beast; and you’ll have a car either parked, or driving around close enough by so that you can get me into it and away in the shortest possible time. There’s nothing about that that’ll be difficult to arrange, is there?”
“No,” said Peter. “Go on. What’s all this for?”
“A show for the visitors, as I said. One to make sure they don’t doubt my bona fides as the Pilgrim,” Shane went on. “Most of them are probably going to be coming in with strong doubts—”
“You can count on that,” said Peter.
“I am. This should put their doubts to rest. I haven’t got time to go around convincing them all individually. Let me go on—I want you standing by ready to guide me to that car, or to where it can pick me up. Our visitors who’re observing will have to see to getting themselves out of the area and meeting·us somewhere else later. They can be given instructions on what to do and where to go. I’ll be wearing my pilgrim outfit, of course, with the hood pulled together in front, just as I will when I talk to them that evening. I suppose you’ve warned them about the fact I’ve got to preserve my anonymity; and they’ve agreed to go along with that?”
Peter nodded.
“Right,” he said. “Now—and no more nonsense about it —what is it you’re planning to do?” Shane took a deep breath.
“Mark a Pilgrim symbol on the face of the clock,” he answered, “while the Aalaag on duty’s right there—and walk away under his nose while all our friends watch.”
13
