“Where are all the men?” Par asked.
Morgan looked over. “The lucky ones are dead. The rest are
in the mines or in work camps. That’s why everything looks the
way it does. There’s no one left in this city but children, old
people, and a few women.” He stopped walking. “That’s how
it has been for fifty years. That’s how the Federation wants it.
Come this way.”
He led them down a narrow pathway behind a series of cot-
tages that seemed better tended. These homes were freshly
painted, the stone scrubbed, the mortar intact, the gardens and
lawns immaculate. Dwarves worked the yards and rooms here
as well, younger women mostly, the tasks the same, but the
results as different from before as night is to day. Everything
here was bright and new and clean.
Morgan took them up a rise to a small park, easing carefully
into a stand of fir. “See those?” he pointed to the well-tended
cottages. Par and Coil nodded. “That’s where the Federation
soldiers and officials garrisoned here live. The younger, stronger
Dwarf women are forced to work for them. Most are forced to
live with them as well.” He glanced at them meaningfully.
They walked from the park down a hillside that led toward
the center of the community. Shops and businesses replaced
homes, and the foot traffic grew thick. The Dwarves they saw
here were engaged in selling and buying, but again they were
mostly old and few in number. The streets were clogged with
outlanders come to trade. Federation soldiers patrolled every-
where.
Morgan steered the brothers down byways where they
wouldn’t be noticed, pointing out this, indicating that, his voice
at once both bitter and ironic. “Over there. That’s the silver
exchange. The Dwarves are forced to extract the silver from the
mines, kept underground most of the time-you know what that
means-then compelled to sell it at Federation prices and turn
the better part of the proceeds over to their keepers in the form
of taxes. And the animals belong to the Federation as well-
on loan, supposedly. The Dwarves are strictly rationed. Down
there, that’s the market. All the vegetables and fruits are grown
and sold by the Dwarves, and the profits of sale disposed of
in the same manner as everything else. That’s what it’s like here
now. That’s what being a ‘protectorate’ means for these peo-
ple.”
He stopped them at the far end of the street, well back from
a ring of onlookers crowded about a platform on which young
Dwarf men and women chained and bound were being offered
for sale. They stood looking for a moment and Morgan said,
‘ ‘They sell off the ones they don’t need to do the work.”
He took them from the business district to a hillside that rose
above the city in a broad sweep. The hillside was blackened and
stripped of life, a vast smudge against a treeless skyline. It had
been terraced once, and what was left of the buttressing poked
out of the earth like gravestones.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked them softly. They
shook their heads. “This is what is left of the Meade Gardens.
You know the story. The Dwarves built the Gardens with special
earth hauled in from the farmlands, earth as black as coal. Every
flower known to the races was planted and tended. My father
said it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He was
here once, when he was a boy.”
Morgan was quiet a moment as they surveyed the ruin, then
said, “The Federation burned the Gardens when the city fell.
They bum them anew every year so that nothing will ever grow
again.”
As they walked away, veering back toward the outskirts of
the village, Par asked, “How do you know all this, Morgan?
Your father?”
Morgan shook his head. “My father hasn’t been back since
that first visit. I think he prefers not to see what it looks like
now, but to remember it as it was. No, I have friends here who
tell me what life for the Dwarves is like-that part of life I can’t
see for myself whenever I come over. I haven’t told you much