Chapter 559 - 558: Twenty Paces

Chapter 559: Chapter 558: Twenty Paces

Location:The North Road — The Long Shoulders, two days above the last camp

Date/Time:TC1857.04.13 – TC1857.04.17

They heard the children before they saw them, and that was the first thing that was wrong.

It came up the shoulder on the wind in pieces — not words, nothing you could take a word out of, just the pitch. High and thin and ordinary. Somebody small was saying something to somebody else small, at conversational volume, a kilometer away on open ground, and had been doing it for long enough that nobody had told them to stop.

Mei went flat on the grass beside Jace and did not understand for a moment why her hands had gone cold.

Then she did.

A person being taken somewhere by a thing that kills people does not chat.

***

They lay on the crest for the better part of an hour, and Jace would not let anybody move.

The column was down on the flat, going north, and it was exactly what the prints had said it would be. Seven children in a line, more or less. Two of the smaller ones were walking together, and one of the older ones was carrying a pack that was too big and being allowed to. They were not tied. They were not driven. They stopped once while Mei watched, all of them at the same time, and one sat down, and after a while got up again, and the line went on.

And twenty paces off to the left, on the soft ground, one animal walked with them.

Just the one. Long and low and the color of the ground, and it did not hurry, did not close, never once turned toward them, and it held that twenty paces and did not vary it by a stride.

"How is it doing that?" Mei asked.

"It isn’t doing anything." Jace had not blinked in a while. "That’s what’s wrong with it. It’s just walking north beside them, and they’ve stopped being frightened of it, which took a day or two, and it let that happen."

Bjorn was on Mei’s other side and had said nothing for the whole hour.

The Northern woman had been silent as long, and then she said a great deal, very fast, and Bjorn’s face changed while she was still speaking.

"She says don’t."

"Say the rest of it."

"She says that is a fire with meat on it." Bjorn did not take his eyes off the flat. "Nothing takes seven children two hundred kilometers north at a walking pace unless it wants them where they are going or unless it wants somebody to follow them, and it isn’t hurrying, so it isn’t the first one. She says Look at the ground on both sides and count the folds. She has been counting them for an hour."

Mei looked.

There were four folds she could see from the crest, running down toward the flat on either side of the line, the same kind of fold the Northern woman had put their own camp in on the second night, for the same reason.

Mei made herself count the folds again from the beginning, slowly, because the first count had been done by somebody with her heart in her throat and she did not trust it.

Four. The nearest one was perhaps three hundred paces off the line the children were walking, and it ran down toward the flat at a shallow angle, and its lip was high enough on the near side that you could not see the bottom of it from where the column was. From where the column was, it was a dip in the ground. From the crest it was a trench with a roof of sky on it.

She had lain in one of those, four nights ago, on the Northern woman’s orders, and had thought at the time that it was an excessive amount of care.

"So what do we do?" Mei asked.

Nobody answered for a moment.

Then Bjorn answered it himself. "There’s nothing to work out," and got up off the grass onto one knee, and started checking his straps. "It’s seven children. We’re going down there. She knows it, and she said it anyway because she’d not be able to live with not saying it, and now she’s said it, and she’s coming."

The Northern woman was already moving.

***

Jace put them in the only order the doctrine allowed and did it out loud so that everybody had heard it and could not later pretend otherwise.

Pairs. One in front for the arms and one at the side for the neck, and a third behind each pair whose entire job was the head, and nothing else, and who was not permitted to strike at anything for any reason. Bjorn and the exile as one pair with a Corps man behind them. Jace and the Northern woman as the other, with Mei behind.

"You watch the head," Jace told her. "Not me. Not her. The head. If it starts to come around, you say head, and you keep saying it until somebody moves."

"And if it doesn’t come around?"

"Then you’ve had a boring afternoon, and I’ll be delighted." He was already going. "Mei — when the children run, they’ll run away from the noise. That’s us. Get behind them and turn them."

***

It went wrong in the first eight seconds, and it went wrong from the folds.

Three came out of the fold on the right and one out of the fold behind it, and they were on the party before it had crossed half the flat, and Mei understood in the middle of running that the twenty-pace animal had never been the problem and had never once been meant to be.

The noise was the worst thing. She had expected silence, because everything anybody had ever written said silence, and the animals were silent, and so the noise was all people: Jace shouting the order again, the Corps man swearing in a way that turned into something else halfway through, and Bjorn — Bjorn made a sound she had never heard a person make and would hear for the rest of her life.

Then the exile went down.

He had gone in front, taking the arms, exactly as he was supposed to, and the arms came, and he took them on his spear and the spear held, and he did the job. That was the thing Mei kept coming back to. He did the job. He stood in front of it and made the arms be somewhere else so that Bjorn could get to the side, and he was still doing it when the second animal came out of the fold behind him at the run, and he did not turn around, because turning around would have let the arms go.

Bjorn killed the first one. He was three-quarters of a second too late for it to matter, and he knew it while he was doing it.

He killed the second one as well, and that took longer and cost more, because the second one had its whole length across the exile and did not want to give him up, and Bjorn had to come at it from the open side with nobody in front of it and nobody watching the head, which was every rule they had made on the crest an hour earlier, in order.

The Corps man went in front for him without being told. He was somebody Mei had spoken maybe six sentences to on the entire road, and he stepped into the reach of a thing that had already killed a man in front of her, and he took the arms on a shield-side arm that broke doing it, and he stayed there while it broke.

The edge went in. Bjorn was still holding the haft when the whole animal came down sideways into the grass.

There was blood on the outside of it, which Mei noticed and had time to be surprised by, and it was not the animal’s.

***

Mei watched the head.

She did it the whole way in, and she did it while the ground went past and she did it with her heart going in her ears, and she did not look at Jace once, and never once at the Northern woman, and afterward that would be the only part of the whole afternoon she was certain she had done right.

The pair went in on the third animal clean.

Jace took the arms on the crossed daggers and turned them out and down and made a space that was maybe as wide as a doorway, and the Northern woman went into it low and forward with her weight going the right way and the edge angled down and forward the way she had made Bjorn say it twice in a bright room three weeks ago.

The head came around.

Mei saw it start. She saw the plate at the base of the skull lift, and the whole long line of the neck begin to fold back along the body’s own flank, the way a bird looks behind itself, the way nothing with a spine should, and she was shouting before she had finished seeing it.

"Head — head, head —"

The Northern woman heard her.

That was the part Mei would go over and over for months afterward with Raven and with Lin Yue and with anybody who asked, and she never once changed it, because it was true and because it mattered: she heard me. She was already committed. She was under it with her arm inside the reach of a thing whose reach was the whole of it, and she had a half second, and she used the half second to finish the strike.

The edge went in behind the plate. Mei saw it go in.

Then the head reached her.

***

Jace got her out. He came back through and got a hand in the collar and hauled, and the animal came down on top of both of them, dead, and it took Bjorn and the Corps man and Mei all three to lift enough of it for Jace to get out from under, and when he came out his left arm was not the shape an arm is.

The Northern woman was already gone. Mei knew before anybody said it.

The fourth animal broke off.

It did not die, and it was not driven. It broke cover at the run, got about halfway across the flat, and stopped, and stood there for a moment with the wind coming down the shoulder, and then turned and went north at the same unhurried pace as the one on the line.

The one on the line had not moved at all. Not once, in the whole of it. It had kept its twenty paces and walked its children north and had not so much as turned its head while four of its own kind rose out of the ground behind it.

Mei ran at it.

She got about thirty paces before Bjorn caught her by the back of the coat and put her on the ground, and she fought him, and he let her, and did not let go.

"Look," he told her.

She looked.

It had stopped. All seven children had stopped with it, in a line on the flat, and the animal had turned for the first time in three days and was standing side-on, and it was looking at nothing, because it had no eyes.

Then it walked away north on its own and left them where they stood.

***

The children came back to them across the grass.

They did not run. She could never get that into the report properly, and Ostrek would eventually take it down in her own way, which was to write what had happened and nothing whatever about what it meant. Seven children who had walked five days with an animal beside them came across the flat toward the shouting at a walk, and the older girl brought the little ones in a line, and the first thing any of them said was to ask whether the party had food, because theirs had run out on the second day and the animal had not fed them and had not stopped them foraging.

They had eaten grass seed, and one of the boys had a rabbit he had killed himself with a rock and had not been allowed time to cook.

Mei sat down on the grass with them while the food came out and did the only useful thing she could think of, which was to ask them ordinary questions in the wrong order. What the smallest one’s name was. Whether the pack was heavy. Whether anybody’s boots had gone through.

The older girl answered all of it and then asked her own.

"Is it coming back?"

"I don’t know."

"It came the second night and stood at the edge of where we were, and then it went away and came back in the morning." She said it flatly, in the way northern children apparently said everything. "It never got closer than it is now. I counted. I made everybody count, because if you’re counting something you’re not doing the other thing."

Mei looked at her for a moment.

"How far did you count?"

"Twenty paces. Every day. It never changed once."

She wrote that down too, later, in the same book, on the same page.

Nobody had been touched. Mei went over all seven of them herself and then made the Corps man do it again after her, and there was not a mark on any of them that had not come off the ground.

***

They buried two on the shoulder that evening because the ground was not going to get any softer and because Jace could not travel far with his arm and because the Northern woman had said, at some point on the road, in front of Bjorn, that she did not intend to be carried anywhere.

The exile went in first.

Bjorn said something over him in Old Northern that took about half a minute. Nobody asked him what it was.

Mei asked, afterward, what his name had been.

"He hasn’t got one." Bjorn did not look up from the earth. "Not one I can give you. A clan takes the name back when it puts a man out. He goes on without it, and he doesn’t tell it to anybody after, because it stopped being his to tell." He put the spade in. "You’ve none of you ever asked me mine either, and I’d have told you the same thing."

"Then what do I write?"

"Write that he stood in front and did not turn around."

Then he stood over the second grave and did not say anything at all for long enough that the Corps man started to look at Mei.

"I can’t do hers," he admitted at last. "She’s not clan, and she’s not exile, and she’s not mine, and there’s a form for all three of those, and I’d be using the wrong one, and she’d have told me so."

Mei got the small book out of her coat.

She had thought about it the whole way down the shoulder, and she still did not know if it was hers to do, and she did it anyway, because there was nobody else who had it and because the alternative was that nothing got said.

She read out what she had written by firelight four nights before, in her own words, with the date.

A third one, behind. Doing nothing except watching the head. She says that is not doctrine. She says that is what she would do.

"That’s not a grave-word," Bjorn observed, after a moment.

"No." Mei closed the book. "It’s the only thing she ever asked anybody to write down."

***

They found the second group’s escort on the second morning going south, four hundred paces off the line the children had walked, in the long grass where nobody would have walked.

One woman. She had been dead about six days. Mei looked at her once and then not again, and the Corps man was the one who went through her coat, and there was a bone comb and a folded square of cloth and a strip of birch bark with marks cut into it that nobody in the party could read.

Bjorn read it.

He stood there in the grass for a long time with the bark in his enormous hands and then said, "It’s a count. It’s the days and the children’s names, one line a day, so somebody would know how far they got." He turned it over. "She kept it up to the last morning."

"Her name was on the girl’s list at the gate," Mei said. "She gave it. She gave it to Raven and I heard her give it."

"Sigrun," Bjorn said.

"Then I’ll want it written down properly. Not as the escort."

"It will be." He put the bark inside his own coat. "At the top of it, above the count. She wrote every one of them down, and there was nobody behind her to write hers."