Free Prisoner of Fate by Tony Shillitoe Page A

‘We promised that we would hide them from the Ranu until the war settled down, but they didn’t want that. They wanted to fight. They said that if we didn’t fight, the Ranu would rape and kill us and they wouldn’t let that happen—not to us.’ She sniffed and fought back a sob. ‘We didn’t know what the Ranu were like. You know the stories. The government has always told us that the Ranu are monsters, peoplewith strange habits and violent ways. We believed it. And we were terrified that they were coming so quickly. Tom and the others rallied all the young people and some of the older men too. They knew they couldn’t fight the whole Ranu army, so they set up traps and ambushes and hiding places to kill as many Ranu as they could without getting caught. They said that if we were persistent the Ranu would give up and leave us alone.’ A woman in the room suddenly cried out and her companions moved to comfort her. Dyan looked down at Meg’s ashen face, saw that her eyes were closed as the tears trickled down her cheeks, and sighed. ‘It wasn’t like that at all when the Ranu came. They were too many and too strong. It took them just three days to round up the resisters. Tom and the others killed some, but it didn’t stop them. They—they hung everyone they caught. They even hung the ones who they caught helping them.’ She stopped to look at the other women again. Everyone was caught in the moment of silence, trapped in their personal worlds of grief. Dyan plainly did not know how to tell Meg her daughter’s fate. The words were too terrible to be spoken aloud. She swallowed and whispered, ‘I’m sorry.’
    She crept out of Dyan’s house before sunrise and briskly walked barefooted through the dark shadowy town, avoiding the night watch’s gaze as she passed them. The Ranu soldiers made no attempt to stop her. If they had, she would have pushed them away. They had no right to stand between her and her daughter. They had no right. A weak frost gave the grass an icy edge when she trod on it outside the ruin of her home, the sky paling in the east, but she was numb to all feeling except the empty hole in her being where hope had resided. In the ash at the centre of the desolation, from where Dyan and Letta carried her the previous afternoon, she sank and wept openly, trembling, her mind awash with the brutal questions ofgrief. Why Emma ? she begged. Why my daughter? Why ? Over and over the questions circled like carrion birds, cruel and bitter and relentless. Why my children? Why must it always be my children ?
    She started at the touch of a hand on her arm and looked up to find two Ranu soldiers, one holding a lantern, offering to help her up. Rage leapt and she rose, flailing the men with her arms and screaming incoherently until they retreated to the roadside, and then she sank again into the ashes, leaving the Ranu to shake their heads at the mad Andrak woman as they walked back towards the town centre.
    In her mind she saw Emma at ten helping her tend the garden, pulling weeds and asking what each plant was and why Meg didn’t like it. She saw Emma at fifteen, a young woman in her bright blue smock, cranking the wheel to lift water from the well, the early morning sun shimmering on her red hair. And then Emma was laughing and rubbing her swollen belly, proud to be pregnant and in love with a young man standing beside her in his green Andrak uniform. ‘You killed my daughter,’ Meg hissed and punched the earth, raising a white plume of ash. ‘Why did you come back?’ she wailed. ‘Why?’
    The first morning rays were gilding the canopies when Meg, hearing a rustle in the ash, opened her swollen eyes and soft pressure against her hand drew her gaze down. A black bush rat looked up at her. ‘Whisper!’ she cried and scooped the rat into her arms, pressing her against her chest and chin until the rat squirmed in protest and dropped into her lap. ‘Whisper,’ Meg repeated, ‘You’re alive,’ and