Tilting the Balance

Anielewicz made himself nod. The worst thing was that the Pole was right, at least from his parochial perspective. No one would give his people any special help, so they’d have to help themselves. But if every people helped itself at the expense of its neighbors, how would any people-or all the peoples together-withstand the Lizards?

With a wave, Anielewicz headed down the road, leaving the Pole to trundle his turnips on toward Warsaw. The Jewish fighting leader (Jewish refugee, he corrected himself-someone new would head the fighters now) wondered what the peddler would have done, knowing he was a Jew. Probably nothing much, since he had a gun and the Pole didn’t, but he didn’t think he would have got the turnips, let alone the belt of vodka.

A Lizard jet flew by, high overhead. Its vapor trail caught Anielewicz’s eye before he heard the thin, attenuated bellow of its engines. It probably carried a load of destruction. He hoped someone, would shoot it down… after it had dropped the load of destruction on a Nazi’s head.

The road ran through fields of barley, potatoes, and beets. Peasants and their animals plowed those fields as they had every spring for the past thousand years. No tractors snorted or chuffed alongside the horses and mules-gasoline was next to impossible to come by. That had been true under the Germans and was even truer under the Lizards.

Overall, though, the aliens’ rule lay lightly on the land. Alter that armored troop carrier splattered past him, Anielewicz didn’t see another Lizard vehicle for the rest of the day. The Lizards garrisoned Warsaw and other towns like Lublin (to which Anielewicz intended to give a wide berth, for just that reason), but used the threat of their power rather than the power itself to hold down the countryside.

“I wonder how many Lizards there are altogether, not just in Poland, but all over the world,” he mused aloud. Few enough so that they were stretched thin trying to hold it down and run it, that seemed clear.

He wondered how humanity could best exploit such a weakness. That musing quickly turned to one more practical: he wondered what he was going to do about supper and a place to sleep. Sure, he had hard bread and cheese in his pack to go with the turnips, but none of that was inspiring fare. Similarly, he could roll himself in a blanket on the ground, but he didn’t want to unless he had to.

The problem soon solved itself: a farmer coming in from the fields waved to him and called, “Are you hungry, friend? Always happy to feed an Armija Krajowa man. Besides, I killed a pig yesterday, and I’ve got more meat than my family can eat. Join us, if you care to.”

Anielewicz hadn’t touched pork since the ghetto walls came down, but to decline such a feast would only have made the farmer suspicious. “Thank you very much,” he said. “You’re sure it’s no trouble?”

“Not a bit. Come in, wash up, sit and rest your feet.”

The farmhouse stood between two thatch-roofed outbuildings. The farmer shooed some chickens away from the woodpile and into a henhouse in one of those outbuildings, then slammed the door on them. At the fellow’s urging, Anielewicz clumped up the wooden stairs and into the foyer.

A big brass basin there served for a sink. He washed his hands and face, dried them on a linen towel hung on a nail above the basin. The farmer courteously waited for him to use the water first, then cleaned himself off. After that, introductions were in order: the farmer gave his own name as Wladyslaw Sawatski; his wife was Emilia (a pleasant-looking woman who wore a kerchief over her hair), his teenage son Jozef, and his daughters Maria and Ewa (one older than Jozef, one younger).

Anielewicz said he was Janusz Borwicz, giving himself a good Polish name to go with his Polish looks. Everyone made much of him. He got the seat at the head of the table in the parlor, he got a mug of apple brandy big enough to make three people shikker, and he got the family’s undivided attention. He gave them all the Warsaw gossip he had, especially the part pertaining to the Polish majority.

“Did you fight the Germans when the Lizards came?” Jozef Sawatski asked. He and his father-and both his sisters, too-leaned forward at that.

They wanted war stories, Mordechai realized. Well, he could give them some. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I did,” he said truthfully. Again, he edited the tales to disguise his Jewishness.

Wladyslaw Sawatski, who had a brandy mug the size of Anielewicz’s, slammed it down on the table with a roar of approval. “Well done, by God!” he exclaimed. “If we’d fought like that in ‘39, we wouldn’t have needed these-creatures-to get the Nazis off our backs.”