Under the Yoke

  Shuddering, she forced a different picture into the forefront of her mind, the Savior on the cross. Lord,they flogged you until the ribs showed, beat nails through your hands and feet, stabbed you in the side with a spear, and when you cried out for water they gave you vinegar to drink. As you died you called out to the Father to forgive them.

  "Your way is hard. Lord," she whispered to herself.

  "I will try." To the guerrilla whose concern she could sense through the near-absolute darkness of the nighted woods: "I can walk, my child, but turn your back for a moment, please."

  He obeyed, moving off a few paces with an embarrassed mutter. Marya fumbled up her skirts, improvised a pad from the handkerchief and the rags of her undergarments to absorb the flow of blood. She winced again at the pressure of cloth on the bruised, torn flesh, and distracted herself with the prayers the Rule prescribed when it was necessary to touch the private parts; the words served well enough to take the mind off pain.

  "Come," she said, forcing discomfort down into the dark well where she kept fear and loneliness and despair, waiting until there was time to deal with them. She looked up, hunting stars to confirm the map in her mind. "We've got a fair distance to cover and shelter to find before dawn."

  Chapter Ten

  Riots in Mexico City [NFS] President Marshall confirmed today that Federal troops would be called out at the request of Miguel Perrez y Ayala. newly-elected Governor of Anahuac, who announced earlier this morning that anti-immigrant rioting was continuing in Hispanic areas of Mexico City for the fourth day. Governor Perrez conceded that state and local police were unable to quell the violence, although they had confined it largely to the older residential portions of the city. The troubles are believed to have been sparked by the Senate's authorization of funds for a new settlement of European refugees in the Mexico City metropolitan zone, and by housing shortages caused by the rapid influx of English-speaking migrants attracted by the area's booming electronics and aircraft industries.

  "There are legitimate grievances behind this unrest," the governor said in his radio broadcast Conceding that Anahuac is now the northernmost state with a Spanish-speaking majority, he deplored the exploitation of ethnic tensions by irresponsible demagogues. "Violence will accomplish nothing; our language and heritage must be preserved through peaceful economic and cultural development for which the Democratic-Progressive party has always stood. Anahuac cannot remain a backwater, and growth means increased immigration from out-of-state. The alternative is a return to the conditions before the New Deal, when our sons and daughters were forced to migrate to Chicago and Havana to seek employment."

  In related news, the Supreme Court today upheld the 12th Federal Circuit Court's judgment that Guatemalan state law cannot require literacy in English or Spanish as a qualification for the franchise. "The Fourteenth Amendment is unequivocal." Chief Justice Fineberg stated, delivering the majority judgment Republican sources in Guatemala have denounced the move as partisan, citing statistics showing most of the unilingual Indian-speaking communities of the highlands would vote overwhelmingly Democratic-Progressive if the franchise restrictions were lifted.

  New York Times

  April 16, 1947

  CHATEAU RETOUR PLANTATION,TOURAINE PROVINCEJULY, 1947

  "Must we do it today?" Chantal LeFarge asked, shifting the ledger restlessly from one arm to another.

  "It will do you good to get out of doors," Marya Sokolowska said firmly. The other woman had been losing weight and sleep… The nun forced herself not to think of the real reason: it was not something she could alter, and bringing it up would help neither of them. "Besides, we've done as much as we can without instructions. This way."

  They turned right from the south-facing main doors, between tall beeches that threw dazzling leaf-blinks of sunlight in their faces. The gardens to the east of the Great House were warm and softly murmurous with bee-hum, drowsing in the early summer afternoon. Further out they grew shaggy, where fields had been enclosed for future care. Labor and time were still too short for much to be spent on adornment, and the von Shrakenbergs had merely transplanted sapling trees where avenues and groves would be. Sheep grazed there, keeping the grass mowed short and starting the process that would end in dense velvet-textured lawns. Lately they were joined by a group of dikdik, miniature antelopes four inches at the shoulder; by peacocks and red deer and flamingos.

  One of the huge black-coated hounds the Draka kept ambled over to the two women, nosing at Marya's hand; she ruffled the beast's ears, which were nearly at the level of her chest. Lion dog indeed, she thought. That was the Draka name for the breed. For their size, and the thick manelike ruff the males grew. And because they were used in catsticking, putting lions at bay for mounted hunters with lances. It wagged its tail, sniffed suspiciously at Chantal, who was holding herself rigid with control. Lion-dogs were also used to hunt runaway serfs, and they had both seen the scars on a man who had tried to make the Channel, soon after the plantation was founded; he had been kept alive at considerable trouble, as an example.

  "It's only a dog, Chantal," Marya said. "Touch it, go ahead." The younger woman extended a hand, which received a perfunctory sniff; it wagged its tail and trotted away, nails clicking on the bricks. They continued around a screen of bushes, past a dry fountain, its link to the water-main not yet finished.

  Marya stopped at an open manhole cover; the man sitting on the edge beside a wheeled tray of tools stubbed out his cigarette and made to rise, removing his flat cloth cap.

  "No, Marcel," the nun said. "How is the leg? I thought you had permission to rest a while yet." Although he's making a good recovery, she thought critically. Still drawn and underweight, but it had been only three months since the ambush in the gorge, and it was excellent progress for such a serious injury, followed by major surgery. Of course, the Domination's medical corps had a matchless fund of experience in dealing with wound-trauma.

  He laughed with a slightly sheepish expression and slapped the cap against the stainless-steel prosthetic that replaced his left leg above the knee. "A good afternoon, Sister. Don't worry, I'm not walking far on it yet, I sit on the cart and young André here"—an adolescent popped his head out of the hole, nodded to Marya and Chantal, and returned below to the accompaniment of a metallic clanking and banging—"pushes me about. He's a good apprentice, but he needs direction. I only work where I can sit, vraiment… and I was getting bored, sitting in the cottage and annoying Jacqueline, she has her own work to do. Believe me, Sister, it does a man good to get out in the fresh air and feel he's doing something useful. Very interesting system of piping they've put in here, extruded aluminum where we'd've used cast-iron."

  He yawned, paused to look down. "No, no, the number three connector, imbecile!" To Marya: "And is it true there's to be a holiday, Sister?"

  Chantal answered, running her hand through her uncombed hair. "Yes. The next generation of tyrants is a month old."

  The air was warm, scented with tea-roses and freshly cut grass, but a chill seemed to touch them. "Now, that was a very stupid thing to say, Mademoiselle LeFarge," the plumber replied softly. "Very stupid indeed." Down the hole, where the noises had ceased: "Continue, André and keep your ears shut."

  Chantal glared at him through red-rimmed eyes; the pipefitter had belonged to the Catholic trade union, before the War. Class-traitor, she thought: just the sort one would expect to turn out a collaborationist. "You were expecting a song of praise for our owners, perhaps?"

  "Chantal!" Marya whispered sharply.

  "No, Sister, let me reply."

  Marcel picked up a wrench and spun the adjusting screw, but his eyes never left Chantal's. "I heard a great deal of that sort of thing before the War," he said. The nun looked at his hands, broad and battered like any workingman's, but also scarred across the knuckles. "Union jurisdictional disputes" in Lyon had meant more than handing out pamphlets, she suspected.

  "In the Army, too, after I was called up; that was in
'40, before the Nazis attacked Russia. The Party men were always going on about how it was a war for the rich only; after we lost, they said right out we should collaborate. I know, I spent three years in a German prisoner-of-war camp and they let copies of L'Humanite circulate. Then when we were released I fought again us a volunteer against the Draka, in Belgium, and I escaped because a Flemish peasant saw a rosary in my hand when he found me lying wounded in the woods. And it was a Frenchman who shot off my leg.

  "So now, comrade LeFarge, I have my work, my garden, a child on the way and a wife who I do not intend to leave alone again. That is all that concerns me. About what used to be, I try not to think at all; I have fought enough. Too much to be pushed by someone like you, the type who lost us everything. Now if Father Adelard, or the good Sister here, tells me to do more, I would consider it… As for you, comrade, endanger yourself if you must. But not me or my family! Or you may suffer an accident. You understand me?"

  The Frenchwoman's eyes slid away from his. He nodded to the nun. "A beautiful day, Sister, isn't it? As pretty a place to work as any, as well." A shaky smile. "Better smelling than most a man in my trade gets."

  Marya nodded, and decided not to rebuke the man for the threat. Besides which, he was right; it was pure folly to take risks without need or hope of results. Sinful, even; prudentia was a virtue, and God had not given the gift of life to be spent recklessly.

  "Indeed it is. Marcel," she replied gently; he was sweating, struggling to control his breathing and put on an appearance of calm. There were so many with memories too hurtful to bear, on this wounded earth. She glanced around. "Beautiful, today."

  Here, closer to the manor, the changes were more extensive, old plantings with alterations in the Draka taste; French gardens were too formal and close-pruned to suit them. Pathways in tessellated colored bricks salvaged from ruins and towns, ponds and watercourses, a few fine pieces of statuary in bronze or marble, mostly loot as well. And flowerbeds, bush and trellis roses, young hedges of multiflora, banks of purple violets, impatiens in mounds of hot coral and magenta, geraniums nodding in trembling sheets of pale translucent lavender. She had seen Tanya's watercolors of what the grounds would look like when the plans were complete; this was merely a foreshadowing.

  Well, at least they use their stolen wealth for something besides tanks and bombers, she thought wryly.

  "I'm sorry," Chantal said, beside her. "It's just—I—

  "I know," Marya said, putting an arm around her shoulders. She could feel a quiver under her palm. "I understand, child. Do you want to go back? I can give the mistress her summaries myself."

  "No, no." Chantal drew herself up. "You do more than your share already."

  The pergola was set in the middle of a maze, the young hedges only knee-high as yet, with tall beeches and poplars left standing from the pre-War gardens. The inner passages opened into a lawn; centered within was a low U-shaped platform of dark red-veined marble, facing west. Three-meter pillars of Italian alabaster around its edge supported a low dome of chiseled bronze openwork, and continued in a freestanding colonnade to the entrance. There a dancing nymph poured water from a vase into a seashell, and a little stream chuckled down a carved stone bed through the risers of the stairs. Climbing roses twined through wooden trellises between the columns, over lacework arches above them, through the verdigrised metal flowers of the dome; for a moment Marya thought of blood-drops on a sheet of crumpled green velvet. Music sounded over the quiet plashing of the water.

  "Solange," Chantal said. Marya nodded; the instrumental portion was a recording but the voice of Tanya's body-servant was unmistakable, a soaring mezzo-soprano, beautifully trained. Solange had spent two years in the Conservatoire in Paris, and practiced faithfully since.

  "Delibes," Chantal continued. The nun nodded, startled at another flash of the scholarship the girl from Lyons occasionally showed. "Delibes' Lakme, the Fleurette á deux.

  "Quite good," she continued. "Not meant for a solo, but quite good." It was spoken grudgingly: there was bad blood between the two.

  The two bookkeepers entered, made their obeisance; Tanya von Shrakenberg signaled them to wait with an upraised palm.

  Marya looked at her, then transferred a fixed gaze to the edge of the pergola above, blushing furiously. The mistress of Chateau Retour was reclining on a lounger covered in white samnite, wearing an undergarment that seemed to be made of nothing but two triangles of silk. Shameless, the nun thought. I should be accustomed to it, but I cannot. She herself was dressed in an ankle-length skirt and a high-collared blouse that buttoned at the wrist; she wiped sweat from her upper lip and suppressed a moment's envy at the cool comfort of the long body resting in the dappled shade. Indecent. The Rule of her own Order forbade even bathing without at least a shift.

  Of course, it could be worse: at least Tanya was a woman; Draka men were equally careless. Grimly she forced her eyes down again, aware that her ears had turned a bright burning pink and that her owner would see and be amused. The Draka was lying with one arm behind her head, the other resting on a table beside the couch that bore a Carries coffee service and a bowl of strawberries beside a tall glass of clotted cream. Beyond that was a wheeled stroller with her month-old twins; one was looking around with the mild wide-eyed wonder of any infant, the other suckling at the breast of the wetnurse who sat beside the carriage.

  That did not embarrass her; it was something you saw every day in a Polish village. Madonna and child, she thought with a brief warmth. A real thing, and also the representation of a Mystery, the first icon of compassion; even the heathen in the days before Christ had made the Mother and Babe a symbol of holiness. Marya watched the wetnurse as she smiled and stroked the baby's cheek; remembered hearing that Draka women almost never breast-fed their infants, and wondered how they could bear not to.

  Lovely, Tanya thought, as she watched Solange sing. The piece: French music had reached its absolute peak in those two generations before the Great War. The voice: it had a smooth purity like mercury on dry ice, soaring without the slightest hint of strain, and enormous range. Solange herself: living disproof of the old operatic convention that singers had to be barrel-built.

  She stood beside the needle-player in a long white gown and embroidered vest, head thrown back and eyes closed in the transport of her craft. The early-afternoon sun was filtered onto her face through the green and crimson of the rose-vines, moving in shimmering patterns of light, shade, color. Leaf-tinted light on white silk, an onyx ripple on the long cascade of black hair, salmon-pink glinting on the pale fine-grained skin of her neck and shoulders. A classic French face, oval beneath a broad smooth brow, short straight nose, a delicate cleft in the small squared-off chin, and a cupid's bow mouth with a long upper lip; she had a dancer's figure, slender limbs and curves more subtle than opulent.

  The music ceased and Solange stood for a moment outlined against the sunlit falling water of the fountain; then her sooty lashes fluttered open to reveal the strange violet rims around the iris of her eyes, strange enough to be a slight shock every time they were seen.

  Exquisite, Tanya thought, with a moment's helpless frustration; she would never be able to capture that on canvas.Exquisite, like a piece of jewelry by Fabergé, or a Fragonard painting.

  "Exquisite," she breathed.

  Solange smiled, nodding to Marya and Chantal before switching off the player and coming to kneel gracefully beside the lounger.

  "I'm pleased you like my adaptation, Mistress," she said demurely, peering up from the curtain of her hair.

  It drifted along Tanya's flank, and she shivered slightly at the ghost-feather touch, running her fingers through the cool strands. They smelled of sambuc-jasmine perfume, mingling with the pleasant natural odor of clean sun-warmed skin.

  Solange sighed. "Mmmm… It really needs a live orchestra and another singer, for the original."

  "Well, the music, yes. Must get a recordin' made, next time we're in Tours. Mais je parle ď toi, ma dou
ce," Tanya continued, as her free hand dipped one of the strawberries into the sugar-dusted cream. She took it between her lips and leaned forward; Solange giggled, held her hair aside with one hand and propped herself on an elbow to meet the Draka. They nibbled inward from opposite sides of the berry until their lips met; Tanya smiled through the kiss, and chuckled as Solange delicately licked the juice from her chin.

  "Just thinkin'," she said. The serf completed the task with a linen cloth from the table and knelt back, resting her cheek on Tanya's stomach. The Draka stretched, feeling the slow warm movement of the summer air over her skin, the soft resilience of the samnite beneath her, the butterfly brush of Solange's lashes; savoring the mingled tastes of strawberry, cream and the mint flavor of the other's mouth.

  "Of what, maîtresse?" Solange said, sighing and throwing an arm across the other's body.

  "Just thinkin'," Tanya continued, "that these are the fabled hardships an' trials of the pioneer life." She stroked the serfs hair, feeling her silent smile through the slim muscles at the back of her neck. Briefly she remembered Paris and the screams that had made her kick open the office door; Solange had been crawling and choking over the garbage-strewn floor of her father's office, face battered into a puffed oozing mask, her skin bruised and marked by fists and boots and teeth.

  "Also that it's a damn' good thing I was the one who got yo'," she mused. "Absolute sacrilege to think of yo' fallin into the hands of someone who couldn't appreciate you. Like usin' a da Vinci as a dishrag."