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Again, he assumed the scaly devils would follow the pattern the Party had used. Again, Liu Han found no reason to disagree with him. But Liu Mei asked, “Can we do anything more here before we have to leave?”
“No,” Nieh answered. “If we had a radio, we might direct fire-for a little while, till the scaly devils triangulated our position and flattened this building. That would not take long, and it would not help the cause. The best thing we can do is survive and escape and fight on.”
“He’s right,” Liu Han told her daughter. To prove she thought so, she started down the stairs. Nieh Ho-T’ing followed without hesitation. Liu Han looked back over her shoulder, fearful lest Liu Mei, in a fit of revolutionary fervor, stay behind to court martyrdom. But her daughter was following, though shaking her head in regret. Seeing Liu Mei made Liu Han go faster. When they got to the ground, she asked, “Which way out?”
“The scaly devils are coining from the north and south,” Nieh answered. “We would be wise to go east or west.”
“West,” Liu Mei said at once. “We’re closer to the western gates.”
“As good a reason as any, and better than most,” Nieh Ho T’ing said, while Liu Han nodded. Nieh went on, “The last thing we want is to get stuck in the city when it falls. That can be very bad.”
“Oh, yes. It can be bad in a village, too,” Liu Han said, remembering what had happened to her village at the hands of first the Japanese and then the little scaly devils. “It would be even worse in a big city, though.”
“So it would,” Nieh agreed. “It would indeed.”
A couple of youths ran past, both with shaved heads and wearing tight-fitting shirts with the patterns of body paint printed on them. They looked and sounded frightened, not of the people around them but of the little scaly devils whom they aped. Now they were discovering where their loyalties truly lay.
Some of their number, though, would be joining the collaborators who’d escaped the purges in welcoming the little scaly devils back into Peking. Liu Han was sure of that. Some of them, before too long, would be marked down for liquidation. She was sure of that, too.
Liu Mei said, “I’m afraid I don’t really know how to live in the countryside. I haven’t gone out there very often.”
“It’s not like the city-that’s true,” Liu Han said, and this time Nieh nodded in response to her words. “But we’ll get along. One way or another, we will.” She set a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “You’re not afraid to work. As long as you keep that in mind, you’ll do all right.”
The walls that in earlier years had shielded Peking from the world around it were now battered by the little scaly devils’ bombardment. People weren’t fleeing only at the gates; they were also scrambling out through breaches in the wall. Thousands-tens of thousands-of men and women would be descending on the villages around the city.
“Eee!” Liu Han said unhappily. “They will be like so many locusts-they will eat the countryside bare. There will be famine.”
That word, heard too often in China, was enough to make two women also hurrying toward the gate whip their heads around in alarm. Liu Mei said, “Would we do better trying to stay, then?”
“No.” Nieh Ho-T’ing and Liu Han spoke at the same time. Nieh continued, “Once we get among people who know who and what we are, we will not starve. They will set food aside for the leaders of the struggle against the little devils’ imperialism.”
“That is not as fair as it might be.” Had Liu Mei been able, she would have frowned. Her revolutionary fire burned very bright, very pure.
Nieh Ho-T’ing shrugged. “I could justify it dialectically. Maybe I will, when we have more time. For now, all I’ll do is say I don’t feel like starving, and I don’t intend to. When your belly cries for noodles or rice, you won’t feel like starving, either.”
That quelled Liu Mei till she and Liu Han and Nieh hurried out through the Hsi Chih Men, the West Straight Gate. It led to the great park called the Summer Palace, a few miles northwest of Peking, but the fugitives did not go in that direction. Instead, they fled through suburbs almost as battered as the interior of the city until, at last, buildings began to thin out and open fields became more common.
By then, the sun was sinking ahead of them. The moon, nearly full, rose blood red through the smoke and haze above Peking. Nieh said, “I think we had better sleep under trees tonight. Any building will already have snakes in it-two-legged snakes. We’d better keep a watch through the night, too.” He wore a pistol on his hip, and tapped it with his right hand.
“Good idea,” Liu Han said. They weren’t really in the countryside, not yet, but the very air around her felt different from the way it had back in Peking. She couldn’t have told how, but it did. She cocked her head to one side. “Come on,” she said, pointing. “There will be water over there.”
“You’re right,” Nieh said. “I can tell by the way the bushes grow.” Liu Mei looked from one of them to the other as if they’d started speaking some foreign language she didn’t understand.
Unlike Nieh Ho-T’ing, Liu Han hadn’t consciously known why she was so sure they would find water in that direction. She’d spent half her life in Peking. So much she’d taken for granted when she was young would seen strange now, to say nothing of unpleasant. But she hadn’t forgotten everything. She might not have known how she knew water was there, but she had.
“It tastes funny,” Liu Mei said after they drank.
“You’re not used to drinking it when it hasn’t come out of pipes,” Liu Han said. For her, water straight from a little stream was a taste out of childhood. Nieh took it for granted, too. But for Liu Mei, it was new and different. Liu Han hoped it wouldn’t make her daughter sick.
They found a place where pine trees screened them from the road, and settled down to rest there. Liu Han took the first watch. Nieh Ho-T’ing handed her the pistol, lay down among the pine needles, twisted a few times like a dog getting comfortable, and fell asleep. Liu Mei had never tried sleeping on bare ground before, but exhaustion soon caught up with her.
The late spring night was mild. Explosions kept rocking Peking. Careless of them, owls hooted and crickets chirped. Flashes on the eastern horizon reminded Liu Han of heat lightning. Fugitives streamed away from the doomed city, even in darkness. Liu Han hung on to the pistol. She hoped nobody else would try to rest here among the trees.
No one did, not while she was on watch. In due course, she woke Nieh, gave him back the automatic, and went to sleep herself. She didn’t think she’d been asleep very long when three gunshots hammered her out of unconsciousness. Screams and the sound of pounding feet running away followed those thunderclaps.
“Somebody who thought he’d try being a bandit, to see what it was like,” Nieh said lightly. “I don’t think he cared for it as well as he expected to. Bandits never think victims are supposed to have guns of their own.”
“Did you hit him?” Liu Mei asked-she was sitting up, too.
“I hope so,” Nieh Ho-T’ing answered. “I’m not sure, though. I know I scared him off, and that’s what matters. Go back to sleep, both of you.”
Liu Han doubted she could, but she did. When she woke, birds were chirping and the sun was rising through the smoke above Peking. Her belly was a vast chasm, deeper than the gorges of the Yangtze. She went back to the little stream and drank as much water as she could hold, but that didn’t help much. “We have to have food,” she said.
“We’ll get some.” Nieh sounded confident. Liu Han hoped his confidence had some basis. Had she been a peasant villager, she wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with refugees from the city.
When they came to a village, the peasants greeted them with rifles in hand. “Keep moving!” one of them shouted. “We have nothing for you. We haven’t got enough for ourselves.”
But Nieh Ho-T’ing said, “Comrade, is that the proper revolutionary spirit?” He went up to the peasant leader and spoke to him in a low voice. Several other peasants j
oined the discussion. So did a couple of their womenfolk. At one point, Nieh pointed to Liu Han and spoke her name. The women exclaimed.
That seemed to turn the argument. A few minutes later, Liu Han and Liu Mei and Nieh Ho-T’ing were slurping up noodles and vegetables. A woman came up to them. “Are you really the famous Liu Han?” she asked.
“I really am,” Liu Han answered. “Now I am also the hungry Liu Han.”
But the woman didn’t want to take the hint. “How did you get to be the way you are?” she persisted.
Liu Han thought about that. “Never give up,” she said at last. “Never, ever, give up.” She bent her head to the noodles once more.
Straha made the negative hand gesture even though Sam Yeager couldn’t see it, not with the primitive Tosevite telephone he was using. “No,” the ex-shiplord said, and added an emphatic cough. “I was not aware of this. It did not come to my attention before I, ah, decided to leave the conquest fleet and come to the United States.”
“Okay,” Yeager answered, an English word he sometimes threw into conversations even in the language of the Race, just as he sometimes used emphatic and interrogative coughs while speaking English. “I did wonder, and thought you might know.”
