At last, there was nothing more for Roberts and Hammell to report to the colonel. The colonel, who each day lifted off with Morrissey and Bergen to observe the progress of the different sections of the Road, suggested that Roberts and Hammell go to work on the Road. Then they could report to him the mood of the road workers on the job.
Carrying a large wicker basket between them, Roberts and Hammell reported for work the next day, and by noon were exhausted, though the peasants around them trudged sturdily on without complaint. Angered at this unexpected weakness, Roberts and Hammell were grimly persisting in the middle of the afternoon when a shout went up somewhere ahead. Lost in the rhythm of the work, they set down the basket, tilted its load down the face of the advancing head of the Road, and were starting back when a murmur of dismay went up around them. They came to sufficiently to look around, and there in the distance was another tongue of dirt, gravel, and stone—the head end of a road advancing toward them from the direction of Shachrim and Fazir.
As the men and wagons milled, a work chief’s voice rose angrily.
“Let the work go on! Fools! It is only another part of the Great Road! Did you think we would build it all ourselves?”
“But if they, too, are all at work on the Road—”
“Will you have your pay docked? Work, I say! Out of the way of the wagons, there!’ A large, strong hand roughly seized Roberts by the arm, and shoved him ahead of Hammell. “Keep moving! When you are back with the next load, you can take another look. All of you, keep moving!”
By the end of the day, when the gong sounded that signaled the end of the work, the two roads were close enough together so that the men from both work parties mingled. Roberts and Hammell could hear the same exclamations from both sides, with just slightly different accents:
“How are your crops over there?”
“What crops? We know you will have a great surplus in such a year as this, and with the Road, we can buy from you!”
“But we planned to buy from you!”
Before their eyes, the confident cheerful faces grew frightened.
“There is nothing to do, then, but to buy from the hill people and the backlanders. But the hill people have such poor land, there will be little to sell us. And to get over the river and swamp from the backlands to here with a decent load of grain will be impossible until the ground freezes.”
Roberts and Hammell looked at each other.
Another link in the chain of cause and effect had come into view.
XI
The two ends of the Great Road were joined, and abruptly the flood of money ceased. Men at once set out into the hill country, and along the back roads, to find out if conditions were as bad as they seemed. Already, the price of food was climbing, as hoards of silver earned on the Road were used to buy what was worth still more—food.
And then the men who had gone into the hills began to straggle back with the bad news: Here and there were those who had food enough for themselves, and would not sell it at any price, because then they would starve. The backlanders had some extra food and were willing to sell it. But after the harvest was in, the fall rains were sure to begin. Then the streams would fill, the rivers overflow, and the long winding roads would be more impassable than ever. Nothing would get through until the ground froze. That meant famine.
Already, Roberts and Hammell, serving as scouts for the colonel, could notice that people looked thinner.
Roberts said, “They’re rationing themselves.”
Hammell nodded. “They’ve been through scarcity before. But probably never like this.”
As the days slid into weeks, they realized it was no longer a question of “rationing.”
Now, as the price of food climbed, other prices began to fall, the proprietors of shops hoping to sell something, anything, so they could pay the ever-rising cost of food.
As Roberts and Hammell, during a brief hot break in the rainy weather, passed the barred front of a silver-smith’s shop, a voice called, “This copper tray, good sirs. I will let you have it for nearly nothing. One hand of small silver coins, good sirs! See the workmanship!”
An old woman, passing in the dusty street with her gray robes tightly wrapped around her, hissed, “Don’t do it. You will starve without silver.”
The voice came again from the barred shop front.
“Or will you have this burnished bowl? Of good solid workmanship, and it shines like gold! Four silver coins, good sirs—the small ones. That is all!”
A cloud of dust whipped down the street, and with a dry rattle a flurry of leaves whirled from the trees.
The old woman was gone around a corner, but the silversmith’s voice still followed them.
“Three silver coins, good sirs! I mistook the price! Three small silver coins! I have sold them for more than twenty. Come look. Look at it! It is a fine bowl.”
They passed open shops, where people sat listlessly, then there was a sudden scurry of dust and leaves, and a small hand clasped Roberts’ robes.
He looked down to see a thin face with neatly-combed brown hair, and large beseeching eyes. The face was vaguely familiar, and after a moment, Roberts remembered her. This was the little girl he’d given food to, the night that he’d first realized the famine was coming. He looked at her, and her gaze never wavered. The large eyes in the thin face held a steady look of faith.
Roberts took from his pocket a large silver coin, one of the kind locally called “wheels,” because of their size and the design on the back.
The little girl took it, stepped back and bowed low. Then she ran unsteadily down the street toward the food storehouse.
The wind whipped another flurry of leaves from the trees, and they rattled on the shop roofs, then blew across the roofs into the streets, to be caught up in whirling clouds of dust, and then rushed along, end-over-end, down the street.
Something gripped Roberts by the trouser leg.
A thin-faced boy said in a sing-song voice, “Please, good sir, give me silver. Or my mother dies.”
Hammell said harshly, “A woman across the street just sent him out to beg.”
The boy repeated, in the same singsong tone, “Please, good sir, give me silver. Or my mother dies.”
The boy’s eyes blurred, and he clung to Roberts’ trouser leg, his hand clasping the white robe on top, and the trouser beneath, as if he were clinging to life itself.
He began again, in a singsong tone, “Please, good sir, give me silver. Or my mother dies.”
Roberts took out eight to ten small and medium silver coins, and handed them to him.
The boy shut his eyes, swallowed painfully, and then stepped back and bowed.
“Come on,” said Hammell.
From a pottery shop up the road, a little girl, her face and hands painfully thin and her belly swollen out with gas, teetered into the road, looked around listlessly, then started toward the two men. Hammell angrily threw a few small silver coins in the dust before her, and strode past, his hand on Roberts’ arm propelling him at a fast pace.
“All that this giving to beggars does,” growled Hammell, “is to shift the starvation from one mouth to another. Look.”
They’d reached a private food warehouse, where a woman stood by a barred window, under a sign, “Silver Only.”
From this warehouse, the little girl was walking very soberly back toward her home, carrying, hugged to her body, a small coarsely-woven bag. Seeing Roberts, she paused and bowed, then went on, walking a few steps unsteadily, then breaking into a tottering run.
Roberts turned and looked back, and for a moment, he saw the little girl at the corner, her bag of food clutched tightly to her. Then she vanished down the street.
With a moan, the wind picked up, and the air filled with dried leaves, and clouds of brown dust rushed down the street.
Roberts drew a careful breath, and looked at the food warehouse.
The woman there was holding a bundle in one arm, and in the other, outstretched, several medium-sized silver coins.
“But I have the money.”
From the barred window came a patient voice.
“But we do not have the food. We have no grain at all, and will have no more roots and groundnuts till the hillmen come in again to sell to us. We have just sold the last.”
“But I have the money, and my child must eat.”
“Then go and try another storehouse. It may be that they have some. We have only enough for ourselves, and we live only from week to week. We cannot sell you what we do not have.”