3

Above them came the sound of something scraping across the floor. The woman was hiding the trapdoor with furniture. Two Hawks took out his flashlight and examined the room. His nose had already told him that there were strips of garlic and sausage and other food hanging from the roughly hewn beams above. There was a door close by; he pushed this open and then turned off the light. Enough light came through several chinks in the log wall of the house above for him to see. The large chamber was lined with shelves on which sat dust-covered glass jars. These contained preserved fruits, vegetables, and jellies. On the floor beneath the shelves were piles of junk; stuff the owner had not been able to throw away or else considered worth repairing some day. One item that particularly caught his attention was a large wooden mask, broken off at one corner. To examine it closer, he turned on his flashlight. It portrayed the face of a demon or a monster, painted in garish scarlet, purple, and a dead-white.

‘I don’t like being down here, Lieutenant,’ O’Brien said. He came close to Two Hawks as if he found comfort in the proximity. Although it was cool in the dark cellar, the Irishman was sweating. He stank of fear.

Then he said, ‘There’s something funny as hell about all this. I meant to ask you, but I thought maybe you’d think I’d cracked. Did you feel as if you were being, well, sort of twisted. I got a sickish feeling, just before that German showed up. I thought I’d been hit at first. Then things got too exciting to think about it. But when we was back in the woods, sitting there, I got the same feeling. Only not so strong. Just feeling that there was something a lot more wrong than being shot down and hiding away from the krauts.’

‘Yeah, I had the same feeling, too,’ Two Hawks said. ‘But I can’t explain it.’

‘I felt like, well, like Old Mother Earth herself had disappeared for a minute,’ O’Brien said. ‘How about that, huh?’

Two Hawks did not answer. He heard the vehicle approaching down the road, then stop in front of the house. The motor sounded like an old Model T. He directed the sergeant to help him pile junk beneath one of the chinks and then stood up on the unstable platform. The hole was only a little larger than his eye, but it permitted him to see the car and the soldiers getting out of it. It was a peculiar-looking vehicle, perhaps not so much peculiar as old-fashioned. He remembered O’Brien’s comment when they had first landed about the cars at the head of the ox-drawn wagon train.

Well, Rumania was supposed to be a very backward country, even if it had the largest and most modern oil refineries in Europe. And the soldiers certainly were not members of the Wehrmacht. On the other hand, their uniforms did not resemble anything in the illustrations he had seen during his briefing in Tobruk. The officer wore a shiny steel helmet shaped to look like a wolf’s head. There were even two steel ears. His knee-length jacket was a green-gray, but the collar had a strip of grayish animal fur sewed to it. There was an enormous gold-braided epaulette on each shoulder and a triple row of large shiny yellow buttons down the front of his jacket. His trousers were skintight, crimson, and had the head of a black bull on each leg just above the knees. He wore a broad leather belt with a holster. A strange-looking pistol was in his hand; he gestured with it while giving orders to his men in a Slavic-sounding speech. He turned and revealed that he was also wearing a sword in a scabbard on his left side. Shiny black calf-length boots completed his uniform.

Several of the soldiers were within Two Hawks’ range of vision. They wore helmets that had a neck-protecting nape, but the shape above the head was cylindrical, like a steel plug hat. Their black coats came to the waist in front, then curved to make a split-tail in back that fell just below the back of the knees. They had baggy orange trousers and jackboots. There were swords in the scabbards hanging from broad belts and rifles in their hands. The rifles had revolving chambers for the cartridges, like some of the old Western rifles.

All had full beards and long hair except for the officer. He was a clean-shaven youth, blond and pale, certainly not a dark Rumanian type.

The men scattered. There were shouts from above, the tread of boots on the floors, and smashing sounds. The officer walked out of sight, but Two Hawks could hear him talking slowly, as if in a language he had been taught in school. The woman answered in the same speech, which had to be her native tongue. Two Hawks found himself straining to catch its meaning, almost but not quite succeeding. Ten minutes passed. The soldiers reassembled. Frightened squawks announced the ‘expropriation’ of hens. A certain amount of stealing was to be expected, Two Hawks thought, but by the woman’s own people? No, the soldiers could not be of the same nationality as she, otherwise there would be no language difficulty. Perhaps the woman belonged to one of the minorities of Rumania. It seemed logical, but he did not believe it.

Two Hawks waited. He could hear the soldiers laughing and talking loudly to each other. The woman was silent. About twenty minutes later, the officer apparently made up his mind that his men had had enough fun. He strode out of sight, and his voice came loudly to Two Hawks. Within a minute, the soldiers were lined up before him while he gave them a short but sharp lecture. Then they got into the car and drove off down the road.

‘I don’t think they were looking for us,’ Two Hawks said. ‘They must know that the house has a cellar. But if not us, what were they looking for?’

He wanted to go out immediately, but he decided that the soldiers could be coming back up the road soon or another group could pass by. Better for the woman to tell them when it was safe. The day passed slowly. There was no sound from outside for a long while except for the clucking hens and mooing cows.

It was not until dusk that they heard furniture moving above the trapdoor. The door creaked open, and light from a lamp streamed through the oblong.

Two Hawks took the automatic from O’Brien and went up first, determined to shoot anybody waiting for them. Despite all the evidences of her trustworthiness, he still was not sure that she had not changed her mind and summoned the troops. It did not seem very likely since the soldiers would not have bothered waiting around until dusk. But you never knew, and it was better to take no chances.

There was a man standing in one corner of the kitchen and munching on a piece of dried meat. Two Hawks, seeing he was unarmed except for a big knife in a scabbard sheath, put his automatic in his belt. The man looked at them stone-facedly. He was as dark as the woman and had an eagle-like nose and high cheekbones. His straight black hair was cut in the shape of a helmet—a German helmet. His black shirt and dirty brown pants looked as if they were made of some coarse and tough cotton. His boots were dirty. He stank as if he had been sweating out in the fields all day. He looked old enough to be the woman’s father and probably was.

The woman offered the two bowls of stew from the kettle still simmering in the fireplace. Neither was hungry, since they had been sampling the contents of the cellar. But Two Hawks thought it would be politic to accept. It was possible these people might believe that it was a gesture of hospitality and trust to offer a stranger food. They might believe that a man who ate under their roof was automatically sacrosanct. And the reverse could be true also. A stranger who accepted their bread would not break a taboo by harming them.

He explained this to O’Brien. While he was talking, he saw the farmer’s expression break loose from its stony cast. He looked puzzled and frowned as if he thought there was something familiar about the language. However, he had no more success in translating than Two Hawks had had with their language.

The two aviators sat down at a five-legged table of smoothly planed but unvarnished pine. The woman served them, then busied herself working around the kitchen. She pumped water out of a handpump over the sink. Two Hawks felt a touch of nostalgia and homesickness at this, since it reminded him of the kitchen pump in his parents’ farmhouse in upper New York when he had been a little boy. The man paced back and forth, talking to the woman, then sat down with the two and began eating from a large bowl. This was of ceramic with some symbols painted in blue on it. One of them was the likeness of the broken mask Two Hawks had seen in the cellar.

When he had finished eating, the farmer stood up abruptly and gestured at them to follow him. They stepped out through a swinging screen door with a mosquito net made of closely woven cotton fibers. Its interstices seemed too large to do its job, but the threads had been soaked in oil. Suddenly, Two Hawks recognized the odor. It was the same oil with which the woman had plastered her hair.

Although the oil was not sunflower seed oil, it triggered off a sequence of thought. Some of the older women on the reservation near his father’s farm had used sunseed oil on their hair. His mind leaped at a conclusion which he could only reject because it was incredible. But there was also the undeniable fact that he now recognized the speech of the two peasants as a form of very peculiar Iroquoian. It was still largely unintelligible. But it was not Rumanian nor Hungarian nor Slavic, neither Indo-European nor Ugro-Altaic. It was a dialect related to the tongue of the Onondaga, the Seneca, Mohawk, and the Cherokee. Not only in its phonology but in its structure.

He said nothing to O’Brien but silently followed the man and girl across the now dark barnyard. They passed an outhouse, and O’Brien made a request which Two Hawks tried to pass on to the farmer. The man was impatient, but he agreed. A few minutes later, they resumed their path to the barn.

O’Brien said, ‘We’re really in the sticks. They don’t have no paper; there’s a pile of clean rags and a bin for dirty ones. They must wash them afterward. Geeze, and to think we was eating from food she made. I bet she doesn’t even wash her hands!’

Two Hawks shrugged. He had more important matters to thing about than sanitation. The man opened the barndoors, and they stepped inside.

The two large barndoors swung shut with a creaking of wooden hinges. In the darkness, Two Hawks put his hand on O’Brien’s shoulder and pushed gently to urge him several feet to the left. If the farmer planned to surprise them with an attack, he would not find his victims where he had last seen them. For about thirty seconds, there was no noise. Two Hawks crouched down on the ground, O’Brien by his side. He closed his fingers around the butt of his .32 and waited.

Then the farmer moved through the straw on the ground away from Two Hawks. Slightly metallic sounds made Two Hawks wonder if blades, or maybe guns, were being taken from a hiding place. Suddenly, a match flared, and he saw the farmer applying the flame to the wick of a lantern. The wick caught fire; the farmer adjusted the flow of oil; the interior of the barn was cut into light and shadows.

The farmer, seeing them crouching on the ground, smiled briefly. His smile seemed to indicate more of approval than anything else. He gestured for them to follow him. They rose and came after the farmer and the girl. Near the back of the barn, a pig grunted from a stall. Large brown eyes looked at them in the lantern light from behind wooden bars. Cows and pigs and sheep, thought Two Hawks, but no horses. Could the Germans have taken them all? Perhaps they had requisitioned all the horses of this particular farmer. But the photographs taken by reconnaissance planes before the raid had shown plenty of horses on Rumanian farms. And then there was O’Brien’s brief sight of the column on the road. Cars and oxen-drawn wagons.

The farmer stopped before a shed built on to the back wall of the barn. He knocked three times, waited several seconds, knocked three times again, waited, and rapped three more times. The door swung open; the shack was dark inside. The two natives went inside, and the farmer gestured at them to come on in. As soon as the two fliers had entered, the door was closed, and the farmer turned up the lantern flame.

There were six people crowded inside the shed. The odor of dried sweat and rancid hair oil was strong. Four men, dark, eagle-faced, dressed in heavy cloth garments, were squatting or else leaning against the wall. All wore small round caps with single red feathers projecting from the top of each cap. Two had muzzle-loading, long-barreled muskets. One had a quiverful of arrows strapped to his back and a short recurved bow of horn in his fist. Two had the same type of rifles with revolving cartridge chambers that the soldiers had carried. All had long knives in scabbards at their belts; the handle of a tomahawk was thrust into the belt of one.

‘Jeeze!’ O’Brien said under his breath. He may have exclaimed because he was in a trap or because of the oddity and disparity of the weapons. More probably, he was startled by the sixth person, a woman. She was dressed in the same clothes as the others, but she was obviously not one of them. Her skin was very white, where there was no dirt, and her long hair was golden. She had a pretty although tired-looking face with a snub nose and a sprinkling of faint freckles. Her eyes were large and deep blue.

Two Hawks, standing close to her, knew she had been in her clothes a long time. She stank, and her hands were dirty, the fingernails half-moons of filth. The whole group had the air and looks of fugitives. Or of guerrillas who had been a long time from their base.

The leader was a tall man with hollow cheeks and burning black eyes. His coarse black hair was cut to resemble the shape of a German helmet, and he wore heavy leather boots. His shirt was of buckskin and hung outside his belt. The backs of his fists were tattooed with the faces of monsters or demons.

He spoke at length with the farmer and his daughter. Now and then he glanced sharply at the two Americans. Two Hawks listened with his ears tuned up. Occasionally, he could make a little sense out of the rapid firecracker explosions. Yes, the phonology was familiar, and so was a word or a phrase here and there. But he would never have understood anything if he had not had a fluent knowledge of all the Iroquoian languages, including Cherokee.

Once, the leader (his name was Dzikohses) turned to speak to the blonde. He used an entirely different language then, but it was one that also seemed vaguely familiar to Two Hawks. He was sure that it belonged to the Germanic family and that it was Scandinavian. Or was it? Now he could swear it was Low German.

Abruptly, Dzikohses focused his attention on O’Brien and Two Hawks. His index finger stabbing at them, occasionally indicating items of their uniforms, he rattled off one question after another. Two Hawks understood the pitches of interrogation, but he did not understand the questions themselves. He tried to reply in Onondaga, then Seneca, then Cherokee. Dzikohses listened with his eyebrows raised and a puzzled, sometimes irritated, expression. He switched to the same speech he had used with the blonde. Finding that this was not understood, he tried another language and worked his way through three others before Two Hawks could comprehend a word. The final attempt was in some form of Greek. Unfortunately, although Two Hawks had a fair reading knowledge of Homeric and Attic Greek, he had not conversational ability. Not that this knowledge would have helped him much, since Dzikohses’ Greek seemed to be only distantly related to those that Two Hawks knew.

‘What the hell’s he gibbering about?’ O’Brien growled.

‘Ask him something in Gaelic,’ Two Hawks said.

‘You nuts?’ O’Brien replied, but he rattled off several sentences.

Dzikohses frowned and then threw his hands up as if to indicate that he was thrown for a complete loss. One thing Two Hawks was sure of, however. Dzikohses was no peasant. A linguist of his ability had to have traveled much or been well educated. And he bore himself as a man used to command.

Dzikohses became impatient. He gave several orders. The men checked their weapons; the girl pulled a revolver from under her loose fox skin jacket and examined the chambers. Dzikohses held out his hand for Two Hawks’ automatic. Smiling, Two Hawks shook his head. Slowly, so that he would not startle the others or cause them to misinterpret his actions, he took his automatic from his holster. He ejected the clip of bullets and then reinserted them, making sure the safety was on before he put the gun back into the holster.

The eyes of the others widened, and there was a starburst of questions from them. Dzikohses told them to shut up. The farmer extinguished the lamp, and the whole group left the shed. Within two minutes, they were in the woods. The farmer and the daughter bade them a soft goodbye, then returned under the light of the half-moon to their house.