Orson Card - Shadow Puppets

So she went to the well or the market of each village she entered, struck up conversations with other women, and soon found herself befriended and taken in. In the cities, she would have had to be wary of quislings and informers, but she freely trusted the common people, for they knew nothing of strategic importance, and therefore the Chinese did not bother to scatter bribes among them.

Nor, however, did they have the kind of hatred of the Chinese that Virlomi had expected. Here in the south of India, at least, the Chinese ruled lightly over the common people. It was not like Tibet, where the Chinese had tried to expunge a national identity and the persecutions had reached down to every level of society. India was simply too large to digest all at once, and like the British before them, the Chinese found it easier to rule India by dominating the bureaucratic class and leaving the common folk alone.

Within a few days, Virlomi realized that this was precisely the situation she had to change.

In Thailand, in Burma, in Vietnam, the Chinese were dealing ruthlessly with insurgent groups, and still the guerrilla warfare continued. But India slumbered, as if the people didn't care who ruled them. In fact, of course, the Chinese were even more ruthless in India than elsewhere-but since all their victims were of the urban elite, the rural areas felt only the ordinary pain of corrupt government, unreliable weather, untrustworthy markets, and too much labor for too little reward.

There were guerrillas and insurgents, of course, and the people did not betray them. But they also did not join them, and did not willingly feed them out of their scant food supply, and the insurgents remained timid and ineffective. And those that resorted to brigandage found that the people grew instantly hostile and turned them in to the Chinese at once.

There was no solidarity. As always before, the conquerors were able to rule India because most Indians did not know what it meant to live in "India." They thought they lived in this village or that one, and cared little about the great issues that kept the cities in turmoil.

I have no army, thought Virlomi. But I had no army when I fled Hyderabad to escape Achilles and wandered eastward. I had no plan, except a need to get word to Petra's friends about where Petra was. Yet when I came to a place where there was an opportunity, I saw it, I took it, and I won. That is the plan I have now. To watch, to notice, to act.

For days, for weeks she wandered, watching everything, loving the people in every village she stopped at, for they were kind to this stranger, generous with the next-to-nothing that they had. How can I plot to bring the war to their level, to disrupt their lives? Is it not enough that they're content? If the Chinese are leaving them alone, why can't I?

Because she knew the Chinese would not leave them alone forever. The Middle Kingdom did not believe in tolerance. Whatever they possessed, they made it Chinese or they destroyed it. Right now they were too busy to bother with the common people. But if the Chinese were victorious everywhere, then they would be free to turn their attention to India. Then the boot would press heavily upon the necks of the common folk. Then there would be revolt after revolt, riot after riot, but none of them would succeed. Gandhi's peaceful resistance only worked against an oppressor with a free press. No, India would revolt with blood and terror, and with blood and horror China would suppress the revolts, one at a time.

The Indian people had to be roused from their slumber now, while there were still allies outside their borders who might help them, while the Chinese were still overextended and dared not devote too many resources to the occupation.

I will bring war down on their heads to save them as a nation, as a people, as a culture. I will bring war upon them while there is a chance of victory, to save them from war when there is no possible outcome but despair.

It was pointless, though, to wonder about the morality of what she intended to do, when she had not yet thought of a way to do it.

It was a child who gave her the idea.

She saw him with a bunch of other children, playing at dusk in the bed of a dry stream. During monsoon season, this stream would be a torrent; now it was just a streak of stones in a ditch.

This one child, this boy of perhaps seven or eight, though he might have been older, his growth stunted by hunger, was not like the other children. He did not join them in running and shouting, shoving and chasing, and tossing back and forth whatever came to hand. Virlomi thought at first he must be crippled, but no, his staggering gait was because he was walking right among the stones of the streambed, and had to adjust his steps to keep his footing.

Every now and then he bent over and picked up something. A little later, he would set it back down.

She came closer, and saw that what he picked up was a stone, and when he set it back down it was only a stone among stones.

What was the meaning of his task, on which he worked so intently, and which had so little result?

She walked to the stream, but well behind his path, and watched his back as he receded into the gathering gloom, bending and rising, bending and rising.

He is acting out my life, she thought. He works at his task, concentrating, giving his all, missing out on the games of his playmates. And yet he makes no difference in the world at all.

Then, as she looked at the streambed where he had already walked, she saw that she could easily find his path, not because he left footprints, but because the stones he picked up were lighter than the others, and by leaving them on the top, he was marking a wavering line of light through the middle of the streambed.

It did not really change her view of his work as meaningless-if anything, it was further proof. What could such a line possibly accomplish? The fact that there was a visible result made his labor all the more pathetic, because when the rains came it would all be swept away, the stones retumbled upon each other, and what difference would it make that for a while, at least, there was a dotted line of lighter stones along the middle of the streambed?

Then, suddenly, her view of it changed. He was not marking a line. He was building a stone wall.

No, that was absurd. A wall whose stones were as much as a meter apart? A wall that was never more than one stone high?

A wall, made of the stones of India. Picked up and set down almost where they had been found. But the stream was different because the wall had been built.

Is this how the Great Wall of China had begun? A child marking off the boundaries of his world?

She walked back to the village and returned to the house where she had been fed and where she would be spending the night. She did not speak of the child and the stones to anyone; indeed, she soon thought of other things and did not think to ask anyone about the strange boy. Nor did she dream of stones that night.

But in the morning, when she awoke with the mother and took her two water pitchers to the public spigot, so she did not have to do that task today, she saw the stones that had been brushed to the sides of the road and remembered the boy.

She set down the pitchers at the side of the road, picked up a few stones, and carried them to the middle of the road. There she set them and returned for more, arranging them in broken a line right across the road.

Only a few dozen stones, when she was done. Not a barrier of any kind. And yet it was a wall. It was as obvious as a monument. She picked up her pitchers and walked on to the spigot.

As she waited her turn, she talked with the other women, and a few men, who had come for the day's water. "I added to your wall," she said after a while.