Breath smoking around him, P?ts clumped back to the barn to milk the cows and sheep. The animals grunted in sleepy surprise and complaint as he threw open the door. They had not evolved to spend forty-odd continuous hours in darkness, and did not care for it one bit. Two cows kicked him as he milked them, both just above his knee. He was swearing and limping as he walked down to the river to check the vegetable plot.
Weeding by starlight was something he hadn't anticipated when BuReloc dumped him here (there were a lot of things he hadn't anticipated when BuReloc dumped him here). He had to do it, though. Turnips and onions, like cattle and sheep, hadn't evolved to spend so long a time in the dark. They went dormant. The local plants kept right on growing. If he wanted to keep his vegetables unsmothered till Byers' Star rose again, his trowel had to stay busy.
The knees of his trousers were thickly padded, to keep his own knees warm as he crawled along on the frigid ground. After a while, the cold seeped through the padding. P?ts keep weeding all the same.
After a couple of hours, he heard footsteps coming along the path. He glanced up, expecting his son-in-law. But it was not Konstantin. The broad-shouldered silhouette limned by starlight and the wan illumination of Cat's Eye's lesser moons wore a bulging fur cap with earflaps. That meant it was a Russian; like P?ts, Estonian men generally favored wool headgear.
Letting the gloom hide his scowl, P?ts said, "Good day," in Russian. He spoke it fluently enough, as did most of his compatriots. Only a handful of Russians in Tallinn Town had bothered to learn more Estonian than t?i-louse.
This Russian paused now, peered toward him in the gloom. "Who-? Oh, it's you, P?ts," he grunted-in his own tongue, of course. "Maybe you think it's a good day, but then you're already at your plot. You cursed Estonians took all the land close by the town when you got here. Me, I have another hour's walk before I can even begin my work."
"We didn't know more people were going to be settled here, Iosef Trofimovich," P?ts said, as patiently as he could. He addressed the Russian by first name and patronymic, more politeness than Iosef Mladenov had granted him.
Mladenov grunted again. "We are as many as you. These plots should be shared out more fairly. One day, they will be shared out more fairly, whether you like it or not-and the fields as well, where again your holdings keep ours at arm's length from our own homes."
P?ts wanted to rise up and brain Mladenov with the trowel he held now in a clenched fist. Only two things held him back. First, though Mladenov was short, he was hard and strong, and likely carried a trowel of his own. And second, even if P?ts did stretch him dead and bleeding on the ground, that would be just the start of internecine strife in Tallinn Town. Life on Haven was hard enough without neighbors at one's throat.
But the Russians-! P?ts clenched his teeth, tore a weed out of the ground, ripped it to pieces, and threw the pieces aside. The Russians drank too much; the first thing they'd done after the BuReloc trucks chugged back toward Shangri-La Valley was build themselves a still. They worked too little; they weren't used to the idea that they had to keep busy even if no one was watching. On Haven, if you didn't keep busy, you starved.
Worst of all, they were Russians, members of one of the CoDominium's two leading states. Even if they were politically crazy Russians, they still found more sympathy in Shangri-La Valley than any Estonian could hope for. P?ts and his fellows had had to beggar themselves with the bribes they needed to bring a handful of ancient bolt-action hunting rifles to Tallinn Valley. He knew for a fact that these Pamyat fanatics had Kalashnikovs, maybe worse.
That gave him a third reason for leaving Iosef Mladenov alone. If the Estonians and Russians aid go at it, he was afraid his people would lose. But oh, P?ts longed for the days when Tallinn Valley had belonged to the Estonians alone. Were the Russians not content with tyrannizing their homeland for centuries? Now did they want to steal this place of exile as well?
As if to underscore his worry, another Russian came padding down the path in soft felt valenki. The fellow cheerfully whistled Prokofiev as he walked. He too paused when he spied P?ts stooped in his plot. "Is that you, Anton Avgustovich?" he asked. His voice was light and young. P?ts recognized it at once.
"Da, Sergei Dmitrovich, it's me," he said resignedly. Here was a friendly Russian. All things considered, he preferred the surly Mladenov.
"How are you this fine day, sir?" Sergei Izvekov went on.
"I am well," P?ts said.
"And your charming daughter Ana, she is also well, I hope?"
She is well," P?ts agreed. Ana was his young daughter-more to the point, his unmarried daughter. Izvekov had been sniffing around her for the better part of a T-year. P?ts had not been able to discourage him this side of a thrashing. One of these days, it might come to that.
Perhaps finally taking a hint from P?ts' string of short answers, Izvekov went on his way. The Estonian returned to weeding. In the darkness, he did not see that one of the plants he was pulling up was a fireweed sprout. The acid in the leaves burned his fingers. He swore, foully. Between Russians and fireweed, his mood was black.
He hardly brightened when his son-in-law, Konstantin Laidoner, at last came to help him. "Took you long enough," he growled. Even having his own language in his mouth again hardly gave him pleasure.
"I am sorry, father of my wife," Laidoner answered. "I did not want to leave right after I woke. Sarah felt unwell. I think she is pregnant, father of my wife."
P?ts' mouth fell open. Sarah, pregnant? His Sarah, who had been born on the hellish flight out from Earth aboard the Red October, whom he had held in one hand as if she were a potato, whose dirty linens he had changed, whose skinned knees he had kissed miraculously back to health? He knew she was a woman now. With a communal bed in his house, how could he help knowing it? But in his heart, she remained eternally his little girl. Pregnant?
In his heart now came fear. This was a valley, though by Earthly standards the equivalent of highland country. She could deliver safely, if everything went well. If things went not so well, the nearest real doctor with real instruments was thousands of kilometers away. Would the CoDominium fly such a doctor to Sarah's aid? Even imagining that set scornful laughter echoing in his mind.
As was his way, he covered fear with gruffness. "Get down here and weed with me, Konstantin. If she is pregnant, she'll need all the turnips we can coax from the ground."
They worked together until the little plot was free of native plants. Then they got up and trudged out to their field to do the same thing. The barley and rye looked to be doing well; for some reason, the oats were having trouble. No doubt an agronomist could have solved the problem in a few days, but if no obstetrician would come from Shangri-La Valley to care for a woman, what were the odds of anyone flying out to check on some plants? If people outside the main valley couldn't make it on their own, that was their lookout, as far as what passed for a central government was concerned.
"Now what?" Laidoner asked after they had finished weeding and doing what they could for the ailing oats (which mostly consisted of making sure they had enough water and manure).
"Gather the eggs, unless one of the women has seen to the hens by now. Slop the pigs. Churn the butter. Check the cheeses, to see how they're doing. Jaak says he'll make some new boots for us when one of those sheep's-milk wheels is ripe. Always something to do, youngling, always something to do. I remember back on Earth when I was your age, not long before they shipped me out. I'd sit around in a tavern for hours on end, drinking beer and telling lies to friends as idle as I was."
Konstantin had headed back to Tallinn Town before P?ts could finish the sentence. As he started after his son-in-law, he wondered how many times he'd told that tavern tale. Too many, evidently. Konstantin must have known it by heart.
A couple of Russians came down the road toward Laidoner. One of them carried a hoe on his shoulder, as if it were a rifle: the Russians were on their way out to cultivate too, then. Instead of making way for Konstantin, they blocked his path. "Let me by, please," he said.
"Let me by, please," the one with the hoe echoed, mockingly mimicking his accent. "If it weren't for troublemakers like you, Estonian scum, the rodina never would have had to suck up to the Americans to make the CoDominium. And they never would have shipped us to this Christless place for speaking the plain truth that Russia should be Russian. Grab him, Gleb; let's pound some respect into his stupid, ugly face."
Laidoner sprang to one side, but the Russian called Gleb grabbed him and wrestled him to the ground. The fellow with the hoe stood over them, waiting for a clear chance to swing it.
P?ts plucked a knife from his boot and ran toward the fight. He blindsided the Russian with the hoe. The Russian hit the ground like a sack of flour. P?ts sprang onto him, jerked up his chin by the beard, set the edge of the knife against his windpipe. "Get away from my son-in-law," he snarled at Gleb, "or I'll let all the air out of your friend here." To emphasize what he said, he let the Knife dig in a couple of millimeters. The Russian he was sitting on wailed.
Gleb rolled off Konstantin, who got shakily to his feet. "You cut my brother, Estonian louse," Gleb said, "and we have war in this valley."
"That didn't worry you when you thought you had the drop on one of us," P?ts retorted. All the same, Gleb's words gave him pause. He did not want war with the Russians. He did not want to live with them, either, but no help for that now. Reluctantly, he got off the fellow he had tackled. He kicked him in the ribs, about half as hard as he wanted to. The Russian took it like a man, which only annoyed him more. "Go your way and well go ours," P?ts said to Gleb.
"We'll go," Gleb said. "This time. Come on, Boris, let's get you on your feet."
After a couple of tries, Boris managed to stand. Even so, he walked with a list, as if he'd sprung a leak on one side. Gleb picked up the hoe. He looked back at P?ts, who stayed in a knife-fighter's crouch. The two Russians turned and went on down the path. Snatches of Boris' words floated back: "-castrate that bastard-think he broke one of my ribs-"
"Come on, Konstantin," P?ts said. "It's over."
"This time," his son-in-law said, echoing Gleb.
"Yes, this time," P?ts agreed. "Russians." Back on Earth, they had outweighted Estonia a hundred to one, and used their weight to hold the land down whether the Estonians liked it or not. Here in the Tallinn Valley, the numbers of the two groups were more or less even, but the Russians still behaved as if everything was theirs by right. The arrogance of conquerors- With a distinct effort of will, P?ts made himself shove the Russians into the back of his mind. "Are you all right, boy?"
"I'll live," Laidoner answered drily. "They didn't have a chance to do much to me. Thank you, father of my wife. And speaking of Sarah, I'd sooner not tell her of this. I don't want her to worry, especially not now."
"All right," P?ts said. Konstantin was right; if Sarah was pregnant, she needed to take things easy. If Sarah is pregnant, you're going to be a grandfather. Somehow that thought had taken this long to catch up with him.
After dealing with the pigs and the cheeses (the women had gathered the eggs), P?ts and his son-in-law went back to the house for food; working in the cold left a man with a land gator's appetite. Even before he opened the door, P?ts smelled the creamy richness of soup on the kettle. Saliva flooded into his mouth.
He sighed with pleasure as he went inside and walked over to the fireplace to warm his hands. Konstantin stood beside him, soaking up heat like a tamerlane basking on a rock. The kettle hung over the fire. P?ts peered down into it, smiled at what he saw: barely, carrots, and pork shanks all bubbling together. "It's almost ready," his wife Eva called from the kitchen.
"Good," he boomed. "I'm starved."
Eva came bustling in: a small, fine-boned woman gracefully going from gold hair toward silver. She tilted up her face so P?ts could kiss her, but she was more concerned with the soup. She dipped in a hand-carved wooden spoon, tasted, frowned. She went back to the kitchen, returned with salt. When she tasted again, she nodded. "Sarah! Ana! Blow out the candles in there and put away your knitting. It's ready."
P?ts' daughters hurried into the front room. They were younger versions of their mother, and reminded him of now lovely she'd been when he won her. Was Sarah a touch paler than usual? In the ruddy firelight, it was hard to tell.
Eva ladled soup into bowls. "Let's eat here by the fire," P?ts said. "Too cold to go back to the kitchen." No one argued with him. When they had all sat down, they bent their heads as he said grace. Sometimes he wondered why he should thank God for marooning them on Haven. It was, he supposed, preferable to the bullet in the back of the neck he might have earned for what the CoDominium called attempted subversion of the state.
"This soup is wonderful, mother of my wife," Konstantin Laidoner mumbled around a pork bone. He tossed the bone into his bowl, went back to the kettle to fill the bowl once more. When he sat down again, he said, "You should eat more, Sarah, put strength on yourself." Eva nodded vigorously. She knew, then.
Sara said, "I try to eat, Konstantin, truly I do. But I Have no appetite. I-" She broke off abruptly and ran for the front door. P?ts heard her retching outside. Eva had been sick too, all the way through both pregnancies.