Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [88]
‘ Citoyennes!’ boomed a third woman. ‘This is all so much hot air. What we need is action, immediate action. Get your men to follow the right track, to fulfil their duties. We must put our backs into it! We must strike without mercy and destroy those who are undermining the Commune! Men must cooperate or be shot! If tomorrow we sent a hundred cowards before the firing squad, you can be sure that the next day a thousand would come forward to serve the Commune.’
‘You don’t have the day after tomorrow,’ said Ace loudly. ‘You don’t even have tomorrow.’
There were shouts and murmurs. The women on either side of her stopped knitting. ‘Order!’ someone called from the table at the front.
‘And you know it. You know there’s no time left. No one’s made proper plans to defend the city. What have you managed to accomplish? What about all the incompetence, all the screwing around? What have you really done?’
‘War widows have been adopted by the Commune, married or not – they won’t starve,’ said one of the women behind the table.
171
‘There are plans for a girl’s industrial school. Plans for nurseries, so that poor mothers can earn a crust. Plans to organize women workers so that they can share in the profits generated by their labour.’
‘Plans, plans,’ said Ace. ‘If the Commune disappeared tomorrow, all your plans would be forgotten.’
‘That doesn’t excuse us from the duty of making those plans.’ The young speaker got to her feet.
‘What’s the point?’ Angry murmurs were moving through the crowd, but it didn’t matter. None of it mattered. ‘It’s like Akhenaten, it’s all going to be torn down anyway. What’s the point if you’re all going to be shot?’
And now she saw the weariness in the young woman’s eyes, felt the desper-ation of the crowd. ‘If that is our destiny, we cannot escape it.’ said the young citoyenne quietly. ‘No matter. One day there will be schools for women. One day we will be able to work as we please, and be no-one’s slaves. Even if we die, we will not be forgotten.’ The crowd hushed. ‘The Commune may not last one more day, even one more hour. But it has already planted the seeds of a hundred revolutions. Even if it is only a temporary arrangement, that makes it no less valuable. Not unlike life itself, Mademoiselle.’
There was another smattering of applause. The women were getting up, picking up hats and children and heading for the doors. ‘She knows her stuff, that one,’ said the woman on Ace’s right, packing away her knitting.
Ace sat down, closed her eyes again, tasting the dust of the desert. Even if it is only a temporary arrangement, that makes it no less valuable. It did count.
It did matter.
The young citoyenne was surprised when the Anglaise came up to her, a rifle slung across her back. ‘So,’ she said, ‘what’s the plan?’
Kadiatu came down the stairs, cradling the child’s body in her arms. Hiding it in the bolt of tarpaulin had seemed like a pointless exercise. The bloodbath that would start tonight would make counting corpses just as pointless, moral nitpicking.
The child had been dead a day; the sooner she got it into storage, the better.
She unrolled the little girl from the tarp, picked her up by the scruff of her shirt and stuffed her into an empty sac hanging from the wall. Green liquid overflowed down the walls of the blister, lifting the girl’s tiny hands, soaking into her dirty clothes and highlighting her painfully thin face in a soft reddish glow.
Kadiatu sealed the blister, strode to her research bench, reached down behind it and twisted her fingers in Benny’s hair.
The woman was trying to dart aside, moving like a hologram with the play-back speed set too slow.