Chapter 573 - 572: Not Nine Days in Winter

Chapter 573: Chapter 572: Not Nine Days in Winter

Location:The Northern Ranges — Cold Shoulder, The Third Point of the Escort Route

Date/Time:TC1857.10.21 – TC1857.10.24

The first snow on Cold Shoulder took the sound out of everything, and the thing Freya listened for after that was breathing.

Twelve children in a line on a slope in snow make almost no noise at all. The boots go in and come out, and the snow takes it. The packs creak, and the snow takes that too. What is left, if you walk at the back and keep your mouth shut, is twelve small sets of breathing, and you learn them in a day, and after that you can tell from the back of the line which one is tired and which one is frightened and which one has decided to stop talking to the one in front.

She had been learning this for three weeks and a leg and a half, and what she had understood by the second leg was that walking at the back was not guarding.

It was counting.

***

The girl at the front of the line had eleven years on her and had not stopped counting since the first handover.

She did it out loud, under her breath, at each point — the children, then the adults, then the children again — and she did it in Old Northern, and nobody had asked her to, and the Seven Peaks teams at the first two points had learned to stand still while she did it because the one time somebody moved she started again from the beginning.

Freya liked her a great deal and had told nobody.

They came up onto Cold Shoulder at the fourth hour of the afternoon with the light going flat and the snow coming in sideways off the ridge, and the girl stopped at the handover cairn and counted, and then turned round and looked at Freya down the length of the line and said, "Twelve," in the voice of somebody who wanted it confirmed.

"Twelve," Freya said.

"And you."

"And me."

The girl nodded once and turned back round, and the team at Cold Shoulder came down out of the rocks to meet them, and the one at the front of it was Kira Desh.

***

"You’re not on the sheet," Freya said.

"I’m on the sheet. I’m on the one that went south four days ago." Kira Desh had the bad arm inside her coat against the cold, and her face was burned red down one side where the wind had been getting at it. "Commander Vahn published me on the sixteenth. Point three, reassigned from the camp, purpose as before. You’ll have been walking when it went."

"You came north."

"We’re the ones who go." Kira Desh said it without any irony at all, which Freya found she respected. "I said it on a terrace to the person who runs the mountain, and then I stood there for a day afterward and worked out that if I didn’t come up here and find out whether it was true, I’d have said a thing I didn’t know."

"And?"

"And I’ve been here four days, and it’s cold." She looked at the line of children, and her face did something and then stopped doing it. "Twelve. Good. Bring them into the shelter, and we’ll count them again inside where the wind can’t take the number."

***

The shelter at Cold Shoulder was stone at the back and hide at the front, and it held twenty if nobody minded, and nobody minded.

Freya did the thing she did at every point, which was to walk it before she slept. The shelter, the rocks either side, the ground above. She did it in the dark with no lamp because a lamp told you where the lamp was and nothing else, and she went slowly because the snow was a hand deep now and would be a knee deep by morning, and she did it with her knife in her hand and not on her belt, because a woman she had met twice and never been told the name of had said on the north road that a thing in your hand is a thing you have, and Bjorn had brought it home.

Above the shelter the slope went up into rock and then into a saddle, and the saddle was where the wind came from, and she stood at the lip of it and listened until her ears hurt.

Nothing.

She went back down and lay in the hide end with her back to the wall and did not sleep much.

***

Nine days, the clans had said. By rider in summer and by the first rider in spring, and it is not nine days in winter, and you should write that down as it is and not as you would like it.

Freya had been born in the ranges and had not needed telling.

What she had not known until she walked it was how the route itself changed when the snow came. The first leg in the ninth month had taken four days and the second had taken three. This leg had taken five, and they had not yet started down the far side. The rivers were fine; the rivers would be fine until the deep cold. It was the slope. A slope in snow is twice the slope, and a child on a slope in snow is three times the child, and a line of twelve on a slope in snow at dusk moves at the speed of the smallest, and the smallest was six.

She lay there doing that arithmetic in the dark, and at some point after the fourth hour of the night she heard the breathing change.

Not the children’s. Theirs had gone slow and even an hour ago.

One of the Corps team, on watch at the front, had stopped breathing the way a person breathes when they are bored.

***

It came down out of the saddle, and there were five of them, and they came through the snow at a pace that nothing their size should have managed in a knee of powder, and Freya was on her feet with the knife before she had worked out why.

Then she was out of the hide, and she could see them in the reflected white, low and long, coming down the slope in a line — and not a line. Two and two and one. The one at the back not doing anything.

Threes. In pairs. With the last one watching.

"Front," Kira Desh called, very clearly, from somewhere to Freya’s left. "You on front — I’m on the head — Freya, get them to the back wall."

Freya got them to the back wall.

She did it by the method she had worked out on the second leg, which was to say one word in Old Northern that the girl at the front would understand, and let the girl do the rest, and the girl did the rest — stood up, said four words to the others, and walked them into the stone end of the shelter in a line with the smallest in the middle, counting as she went, under her breath, out loud.

Then Freya went back to the hide end and stood in it with the knife, because that was where the back of anything was.

***

She saw most of what happened next through a gap in the hide the width of her hand, and she has never said more about it than she saw.

The first pair came onto the flat in front of the shelter, and the Corps team met them in the form. Front, side, head. The man on the front — one of the Corps who had come north with her from the camp — took the arms on a shield and held. The side went in low and forward, and the edge went behind the plate, and the first one went down in the snow and stayed down.

It worked. Freya wanted that said afterward, and she said it to Bjorn first and then to anybody who asked. On the flat in the snow in the dark, the form worked.

The second pair came in behind the first, and the snow slowed them. She saw it happen. They came off the slope onto the flat and the powder there was over their front legs, and they lost a stride doing it — exactly the stride the woman with no name had not been sure about, in the middle country, in the first month.

It was enough. The second team took the second one.

The fifth one did not come down.

It stood at the lip of the saddle where Freya had stood four hours earlier, side-on, looking at nothing, and it watched the other four die, and it did not move.

***

It was the fourth one that killed Kira Desh, and it did it because she broke the form.

Freya has told this part the same way every time, and it is the only part of the night she has ever been asked to tell twice.

The front man on the second team went down. Not dead — down, in the snow, his footing gone on the slope, the arms of the thing in front of him already coming round — and there was nobody to take the front, because the side man was already committed and the third position was Kira Desh and Kira Desh had one arm.

She left the head.

That is the thing the doctrine forbids. The third position does not strike and does not move and does not leave, for any reason, because the point of the form is that somebody is watching the one thing nobody else can see. The dead woman had said it. It was on the sheet with her name that was not a name at the top of it.

Kira Desh left it anyway and stepped over the man in the snow and took the arms.

With one good arm and one that had been broken twice and set once and had been planned around since the fifth month. She took them the way you take them, which is to put your body where the arms will go and hold, and she held — Freya saw her hold — for about as long as it took the side man to go in behind the plate.

The edge went in.

Then the head came round, because there was nobody watching it, and reached her.

***

The fifth one left when the fourth one died.

It turned and went back up into the saddle and over, and it was not hurt, and nobody went after it, and Freya wrote that down later in the first column with the time and the direction, because that was what you did now.

Then she went out into the snow.

Kira Desh was already gone. Freya had expected that and was not ready for it anyway.

The man on the front of the first team was sitting in the snow with his shield arm across his lap, broken, and he was all right. The front man from the second team was on his feet. Two of the Corps had wounds that Mira would have words about.

And there was a third body, further up the slope, where the first pair had come off the saddle, and Freya went up to it because nobody else had yet.

He was Corps. She knew his face. He had been on the first leg in the ninth month and on the second, and he had carried the smallest child for most of a day on the second leg without being asked, and she had heard him say perhaps nine words in three weeks.

He had a splint on the wrist that had been made out of a spoon handle and a bootlace, and it was old and soft, and he had never taken it off.

She did not know his name.

She stood in the snow with the knife still in her hand and worked out that she had walked behind this man for three weeks and a leg and had never once asked it, and that she had assumed somebody else knew, and that she had no idea whether anybody did.

***

She went over the carcasses at first light because nobody else on Cold Shoulder had read the sheets as often as she had, and because Bjorn would ask, and because the sheet from Ferrow’s Rest said confirm on carcasses at the bottom in a dead woman’s hand, and it had become a thing people did.

There were four. She turned the nearest with a spear shaft and knelt in the snow beside it.

The belly was plated, the way the sheets said. Continuous chitin with the seam down the middle, thinner than the back but whole, and no flank anywhere on it. She had expected that.

She put her hand flat on the back of it, where the sheet from Ferrow’s Rest said there would be a crust, gray and flaking, about the thickness of a thumbnail, that came off in the hand.

There was nothing. Plate, and under her glove the plate was just plate.

She turned the second one and the third and the fourth, and it was the same on all of them, and she knelt there in the snow for a long moment working out why that frightened her more than finding it would have.

The crust at Ferrow’s Rest had been fuel. Lin Yue’s word, on the sheet. A thing put on the outside of an animal for no purpose except to be burned away first by the one person on the continent who could burn it.

That person was on a mountain three hundred kilometers south and had published that she would not come unless asked twice.

So they had not bothered.

Freya wrote it down exactly like that — no crust on any of four; checked by hand — and left the column beside it empty, and it was the hardest thing she had done in a month not to write in it.

***

They buried two on Cold Shoulder in the morning, in the stone end, because the ground above was already frozen and the stone end was not.

The girl counted the children again before it was light and then came and stood beside Freya at the graves without being asked and said, in Old Northern, quietly, "Two."

"Two."

"And we’re still twelve."

"We’re still twelve."

The girl nodded and went back to the others.

The front man from the first team knew the other man’s name. They had come north on the same cart. He told Freya, and she said it back to him to be sure she had it, and he said it again.

Then Freya took a strip of birch bark out of her pack, which she had been carrying since the spring because a woman she had never met had carried one, and a knife, and sat down in the snow at the stone end of the shelter at Cold Shoulder, and cut the day into it and the number of the children and then the two names, one under the other, above the count.

She did not have the form for it. She was not clan and not exile and the dead were not hers.

She cut them anyway, and when she was finished, she put the bark inside her coat, next to the other one, and stood up and got the line moving, because it was not nine days in winter and there were three more legs and a hundred and eighty-five behind them.