Free The Lights of Skaro by David Dodge Page A

followed his ear more readily than he did the collar, I found – and took him, the ewes trailing reluctantly behind, to the fountain. When we had watered them I led off again, carrying my pack like any other grimy, stubble-whiskered peasant homeward-bound from the market with his livestock, his woman, and his household purchases for the week. The pail I had bought, which I had hung on the outside of the pack, rattled noisily with the tin cups and spoons it held. Dealing with the roko mentality, boldness of movement, even noisiness, diverted suspicion. Furtiveness and quiet inevitably attracted it.
    A pair of them waited, huge and silently ominous, in the gateway through which we left town in the direction opposite to the way we had come. Still not knowing what they were looking for, nor what to expect from us, they had been posted along the line to terrify us into giving ourselves away by some act of indecision, some nervous misstep at the sight of them that would betray whatever disguise we might have assumed. It was a standard technique. They were so menacing even to look at that people with guilty thoughts ran from them instinctively, convicting themselves.
    These two, in their coffin-shaped undertakers’ coats, looked so much like the pair we had seen on the other side of the town that they might have been the same men. Had they been, and recognized one goatherd couple out of dozens, and exercised an elementary intelligence, they could have had us. Peasants coming to market from the east do not go home towards the west. But there was little chance that all three factors would work against us. We had the further help of an unpleasant diversion.
    A man ahead of us in the crowd that was pressing out through the gateway, a solitary traveler with a pack like my own, carried a burden of guilt as well. By some bad luck he must not have known that the town was posted. Any farmer coming in from the countryside would have seen it, any townsman passing through the marketplace would have heard about it. This man must have spent the day in some cellar grinding out anti-government propaganda on a hand-press, or plotting sabotage. He didn’t know that the rokos would be there waiting in the archway. When he saw them he forgot, for a moment, to be bold. He faltered, tried to turn back, changed his mind and went on, betrayed by his indecision.
    They let him go on past them before they called to him to stop. That was the roko mind. It pleased them to let the poor devil think, for a moment, that he had got by. When they called to him, he began to run, clumsy with his heavy load.
    They went after him like a pair of hunting dogs, and caught him within a few steps. One held him while the other went first through his clothes, then through his pack. I don’t know what they found, if it was anything. They began to beat him, methodically, swinging their ham fists at his face and belly, holding him up to go on with it when he sagged and would have fallen to the ground. The line of peasants we were in went stolidly on, eyes straight ahead. But it was impossible not to hear the thud of the fists, the grunts of the rokos when they struck. The man was unconscious, and made no sound himself. There were only the grunts, the thud of fists, the animal odor of fresh blood as we passed. Those, and the sound of the loudspeakers from the town behind us roaring stimulating music.
    We were fifty yards beyond the town wall, in the clear, before Cora pulled at her yashmak and said helplessly, ‘I’m going to be sick.”
    “Hold it.”
    “I-I can’t. I-”
    “Stay with the crowd. Keep moving. Keep your head down.”
    She was helpless for a minute, nauseated and staggering. I took her arm and kept her stumbling along. A donkey-driver who was switching his animal on past our goats looked at us with guarded interest as he went by, but there is nothing identifiably foreign or revealing about the distorted face of