Survivors (Harmony Book 3)

by Margaret Ball

  “Oh… I almost forgot about those.” They’d been a present for Trisha when she first fell pregnant, an extravagant purchase only a holostar could afford; squares of smartcloth with specially augmented cleaning nanos.

  Ruven enthused about them for some time. They wouldn’t handle everything, but the diapers would keep a baby dry, and when he filled his diaper all you had to do was shake it out over the toilet, wipe him with a clean cloth, and refasten the smartcloth with two pinches. No laundry, no need for a vast stock of clean diapers!

  “You don’t often hear a man getting so excited about such things,” Jillian said with a small smile.

  “You don’t often meet a man who’s changed as many diapers as I have in the last two weeks.”

  “Oh, come off it. I bet you conned Sheri and Stayci into doing it.”

  “As often as I could,” Ruven admitted, “but not all the time. You do understand that’s why I keep pestering you to drink Merdis’ mixes, don’t you? I can hardly wait to hand over Tomi to you. I’ve become a poor downtrodden man with nothing to do but serve the women’s mysteries.”

  Jillian actually laughed. “Women’s mysteries – that’s what you call it?”

  “Art of persuasion, as you taught me,” Ruven said. “Finish your soup like a good girl.”

  Jillian regained her strength as fast as possible once she understood their situation better. There was next to no food to be found anywhere in the city; Merdis was producing the thin daily soup from a precarious combination of hoarded supplies, edible weeds, and lucky finds. She and her husband and sons were among the last residents of the Donteven, and they planned to go to the south coast, where she had relatives in a fishing village. Reading between the lines, Jillian thought they probably would have left by now if not for her illness. Sheri and Stayci were going with them. Lorens Danko had never returned from a foraging expedition. That left only her, Ruven, and baby Tomi.

  Poor Ruven! First he’d stayed over the winter because Jillian could not leave Trisha; now he probably felt it his duty to stay with the poor helpless thing she’d become. Jillian took to walking every day, first up and down the room, then along the balcony, forcing strength into her shaky legs by concentrated will. Ruven might have changed his mind about the desirability of being saddled with a city girl and a baby. He would certainly find it easier to travel on his own. Oh, she felt sure that his sense of responsibility would force him to offer the shelter of his cooperative in any case. But if he didn’t want them – she meant to be strong enough to walk away, if that proved to be the case. Strong enough to tag along with the Abadi family on their way to the south coast.

  The family’s departure day became imminent, and Jillian tackled Ruven. “Are you sure you don’t want Tomi and me to go with the Abadis?”

  “Why would I want that? Our way lies west, up the river. Taking the south coast road wouldn’t get us any closer to the cooperative.”

  “Your way lies west,” Jillian corrected. “You don’t have to take Tomi and me along. We can get along perfectly well with the Abadis.”

  Ruven rested his hands lightly on her shoulders. “Jillian Lisadel, are you trying to tell me you’ve tired of me? That you were just using me for amusement during a boring winter, and now you want to go back with your own class of folk?”

  “No! But – well, things have changed. I’m not on my own any more. I’m not as strong as I used to be, and I’ve got a baby to take care of. I’d – understand – if you felt that was more responsibility than you bargained for.”

  Ruven used several words she was unfamiliar with, although they seemed to have something to do with excrement, farm animals, and pigheaded women. “You would, would you? Well, I wouldn’t understand! Did you think I could only love you as long as you were healthy and unencumbered? Did you really think that?” His hands slipped down and tightened, painfully, on her arms. “And did you never wonder how I might ‘get along’ without you? Get your strength back fast, Jilli, because I want to shake the idiocy out of you!”

  Tomi, alarmed by Ruven’s loudness, began to cry, and Jilli slipped out of his grip to pick the baby up out of his improvised crib.

  It hadn’t, she thought, been the kind of declaration of love that would get applause on Love for Living. But she had no complaints to make.

  ***

  They left the city two days after the Abadis departed, on a warm day of spring gliding quietly into summer. The city blocks were eerily quiet. Occasionally Jillian heard scuffling noises, but no one ventured to interrupt their progress, possibly because they were walking confidently down the middle of a broad avenue, possibly because their sidearms were visible. The Abadis had taken most of the block defense patrol’s weapons, but had left them with two blasters of relatively recent vintage. To these Ruven had added a knife stitched into an inner sheath in his boot, a short sword slung from his belt, and a slender dagger for Jillian to wear under one sleeve.

  “Did you raid a military museum?” Jillian had asked.

  She’d meant it as a joke, but Ruven said, “Yes – while you were sick. We’d begun planning, you see.”

  “Well, Tomi might feel left out. Don’t you have anything he can tuck into his diaper?”

  “It might cut…. Woman. Are you making fun of me?”

  But once they were in the outskirts of the city, Jillian felt no impulse to laugh at Ruven’s improvised armory. Open spaces were overgrown with tall grass; shuttered buildings and burnt-out shells lined the street. They saw no chances to add to their scanty food supplies.

  Tomi was the only cheerful member of the party. Strapped to Jillian’s back, he gurgled happily and kicked his little bare feet.

  “Aye, no doubt but he finds the outing a rare treat,” Ruven said. “What, he’s riding on his favorite person, has a great view, and is seeing the world for the first time!”

  When Ruven tried to take Tomi for a while, the baby wailed displeasure. “No loyalty,” Ruven said. “All those diapers I’ve changed, and he’d still rather ride with this woman I’ve picked up!”

  “Ha! I always thought Sheri and Stayci did more of that than you admitted.”

  Gradually Ruven took over everything else Jillian was carrying. Even then, it was amazing to her how much one small baby could weigh. They had to stop much too frequently for her to rest. Just as she’d feared, she was an impediment to Ruven’s travel.

  She was so tired and footsore when the float overtook them, she thought it was a hallucination. It was clean, even shiny; the sound of the motor was regular and even, not stuttering on impure fuel; the driver and his companion were dressed in something like a uniform, with white smartcloth shirts and red scarves knotted at their throats.

  “Hello, friends!” Ruven called, moving out into the middle of the street. “Where to?”

  “None of your business!”

  A blaster appeared in Ruven’s hand, so quickly that Jillian blinked and wondered if he’d been holding it all along. “And what if I make it my business?”

  The float slowed. “See, friends,” Ruven said more quietly, “my woman’s tired, and we’ve a ways to go. Now if you could see your way to giving us a lift, I’d take that kindly, and in return you’d have a third man to defend whatever it is you’re carrying.”

  “Defend – or take?”

  “I’m a farmer, not a bandit. All I want is to get us back to my cooperative.”

  “Oh, why not?” the passenger said. “It’s not like we’re overloaded on the way out.”

  And as easily as that it was settled. Jillian climbed in the back and Ruven handed Tomas to her, then joined the other two in the front. His steady, unthreatening chatting elicited the information that they’d been sent by “the Provisional Committee,” to locate and bring back food from the up-river cooperatives.

  “Pro-vis-o-nal,” Ruven repeated as though he found the word hard to understand. “I thought ‘twas called the Central Committee.”

  The driver laughed. “Where’ve you been? Cen
tral Committee, Inner Circle, all them on the Hill ran away over the winter. We made our own Committee, and we’re running things now.” He went on to tell Ruven how the “traitors” in the cooperatives had stopped sending barges of food down the river.

  “And it’s not safe to use the river for transport any more. They sank three boats in a row, boats the Committee sent up-river to get food.”

  “Who did?”

  “The damned farmers, who else? Ah, present company excepted,” the driver said with a glance at the blaster resting in Ruven’s hand.

  Ruven raised his free hand in a placating gesture. “Nay, I’m on your side! We’ve been stuck in the city since the beginning of winter, and a hard, starving winter it was, too. If your Pro-vi-so-nals have decided to stop waiting for deliveries and just take what you need, I’ll help. My own cooperative is too far up-river to have been involved in blockading boats out of the city; I’ll wager if we can get that far, they’ll be happy to share what they have.”

  Jillian made herself comfortable against a pile of sacks in the back of the float, settled the baby in her lap, and watched the fields on this side of the river drift by. The sight was not promising; barren fields covered with weeds were succeeded by acres of flat sasena paddies where the heavy heads of reddish grain showed nothing had been harvested this year. Trees closed in after a while, and she dozed in their shade as the miles passed until the float came to a jarring halt.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The roadblock was serious: rusted pieces of farm machinery were lined up across the road, and the line extended to the river on their right and to the distant trees on the left. Jillian supposed the float driver had tried to push right through it. Not one of his better ideas. The noise had awakened guards; three armed men stood on the far side of the roadblock, with more flanking them on either side.

  “This is as far as you go,” the man in the center shouted. He wore a broad-brimmed hat from which bits of shiny things dangled; they jittered and caught the light when he yelled. “We’ve had enough of you city thieves coming to take our food.”

  The driver and his companion had their hands in the air. “Hey, man, it’s not worth our lives. Just let us turn around, we’ll go.”

  Ruven slipped out of the float and began walking slowly towards the rusty improvised roadblock. “Friends, I’m one of you,” he called. “Ruven Malach, Ash Grove Dairy Cooperative. Just trying to get home with my woman and the kid.”

  “Let’s see them, then.”

  Ruven waved to Jillian to come forward, but she was already climbing out of the cargo section. This could be a terrible mistake. But what else were they to do? These gangsters who called themselves Provisionals might have access to food somewhere in the city – difficult to see what else would buy their loyalty – but they would hardly share with strangers. If they could not go on up the river to Ruven’s cooperative, what were they to do?

  She lifted Tomi down and tied him to her with her triangular shawl. He gurgled cheerfully and waved his fists at the strangers when she came close enough for him to see them. She noticed that Ruven’s sidearms had disappeared, as had the knife in his belt.

  Ruven put his arm around her. “You see? We want nothing from you except safe passage through your… territory.”

  “Looks as if you could use more than that,” the leader said, and Jilli noticed that all three of the men closest to her looked, not well fed exactly, but certainly not close to starvation.

  “Aye, that we could and all,” Ruven agreed, “but if’n you’re not minded to have guests, we’ll go on our way peaceable.” His accent was broadening, getting a distinct burr to it; a country voice, Jillian supposed.

  Ruven and Jillian retrieved their packs before the Provisionals took off. Once the float and its drivers were out of sight, the leader swung a piece of machinery out of the way – a sort of disguised gate, barely wide enough to let them pass one at a time. He closed it after them and immediately it blended in with all the other wheels, racks, and other broken machines.

  “You can stay the night,” the leader said, setting a swift pace along the riverside path. “Swap dinner for news of what’s going on in the city. Himself will even pay for extra information.”

  “Himself?”

  “Our head man. This – ” he gestured at the roadblock behind them – “was his idea. Himself came to us with new ideas, gave us new hope. He had so many ideas for our defenses alone. And he organized us all into work parties and patrol parties. So many ideas!” he repeated.

  “Such a great man must surely have a great name,” Ruven said.

  “Just ‘Himself.’ He says we mustn’t have a cult of personality. Now me, I’m Jimmen. And that’s Bor, and Goner.” He jerked his chin at the two others who’d been in the front.

  “And your other friends?” Jillian asked. But they’d already vanished. Patrolling?

  “Woman, what do you need to know for?” Jimmen looked sideways at Ruven. “You should train your woman better. Don’t let her get in the habit of questioning men.”

  Jillian pressed her lips together, but felt the angry color rising in her cheeks. Jimmen nodded at Ruven again. “Look at her face! You need to beat that temper out of her.”

  Ruven sighed. “Aye, so I’ve been told, but look at her. She’s that skinny, the touch of my hand would break her. I need to get her home, feed her up. Wasteful to break a good woman.”

  “Not much use though, is she?”

  Tomi, the traitor, was laughing and reaching his hands out to Jimmen, trying to catch the flashes of light that came from the metal shards hanging from his hat. Jillian bit her tongue.

  When Jimmen and the other two drew ahead, Jillian leaned toward Ruven. “Is this what all coop people are like?”

  “Not mine,” Ruven muttered, “and not these either – this must be Lost Maple Cooperative – leastways, not when I came through last fall. I wonder what this ‘Himself’ is like.”

  “What’s that you’re saying?” demanded the one called Goner.

  “Just wondering what other improvements Himself had made.”

  “No point saying that to your woman, what does she know? Come up with us, we’ll fill you in as we go.”

  With an apologetic glance at Jillian, Ruven joined the three local men and left her and Tomi to make their own way. Her backpack grew heavier and heavier as she walked, and so did Tomi. But she suspected that it would be a serious mistake to call Ruven back to help her. She couldn’t hear what the men ahead of her were telling him. But she didn’t feel good about this coop, or about ‘Himself.’

  Her reservations vanished, though, when they came to the high walls protecting the cooperative. Two smiling women came running out a narrow little door almost immediately after Jimmen called up to the sentry in the tower to announce their presence. One slipped Jillian’s backpack off her shoulders while the other took Tomi and cooed to him. “Oh, what a fine big man! But you look to’ve had a hard journey, sister. Come inside the walls and let us help you wash the dust off.”

  The one who’d taken the backpack said, “I wager she’d like to wash her hair too. Come along in, sister. Oh, I’m Hana and this is Bor’s woman.”

  “Jillian. And the baby’s Tomas.” Didn’t ‘Bor’s woman’ have a name? Oh well, country ways, she supposed. The suggestion of a good wash sounded like a vision of heaven to Jillian, and she immediately changed her mind about the cooperative. Jimmen and Goner might be boors, but clearly the rest of the farmers weren’t like them.

  “Ah, we’ll not impose on your hospitality,” said Ruven. “We can camp fine right here.”

  Hana and the other woman shrieked and fluttered and fussed at the very assumption. “At least let your woman come inside and wash!”

  “I’ll do that,” Jillian said quickly, before anybody else made the assumption that she was waiting for Ruven’s permission. “And thank you for the offer.”

  As soon as the welcoming committee had fluttered off ahead of them, Ruven mur
mured, “But we leave as soon as you’re done. There’s something not right about this place.”

  Since Jillian had just decided not to think that, his intransigence annoyed her. “You’re just determined to find fault,” she said. “It would be rude to refuse a perfectly polite invitation.” And she followed Hana through the narrow door.

  “You’re lucky,” Hana told her, “it’s our afternoon to use the bath.”

  Her reverent tone led Jillian – briefly – to anticipate something more luxurious than the wood-walled room to which the women led her, with a supply of cold water in buckets, a dish of soft soap and some patched rags. But what was she complaining about? Compared to a sponge bath in the woods, this was luxury.

  While she scrubbed herself and Tomi with a wet rag dipped in the harsh soap, Bor’s woman worked more soap through her long hair and chatted in a soft voice about the cooperative, how happy she was that they’d come, and how much she’d hoped Jillian could stay.

  “I – you’re very hospitable,” Jillian said, “but we have to be moving on tomorrow. Ruven is eager to return to his home cooperative.”

  “Ah, well, you’ll have to talk to Himself about that,” the nameless woman said. “Your man looks like a good worker.”

  “He is, and I expect his cooperative really needs him back.”

  “There’s always a place for good workers here,” she said as though Jillian’s and Ruven’s plans were totally irrelevant. “Himself will talk to your man. I do hope you can stay too, but…”

  She paused while Hana sluiced Jillian down with a bucket of cold water. “She doesn’t look very strong, does she?” Hana commented.

  “No… Well, it’s nice to have a woman visitor, anyway.”

  A handful of other women, sweaty and tired, came into the bath while Jillian was drying herself off and putting her clothes back on. They nodded cordially to her but were in too much of a hurry to wash themselves to make conversation.