Chapter 574 - 573: By Hand and by Name

Chapter 574: Chapter 573: By Hand and by Name

Location:Seven Peaks — The North Camp; Medicine Hall; Tianlei’s Room, East Side

Date/Time:TC1857.11.02 – TC1857.11.05

The sheet from Cold Shoulder was written in two hands, and Sera Vahn could see both of them from across the command tent before she had it in her own.

The top half was Bjorn’s, square and heavy and pressed hard enough to show through, the way a man writes who learned it as an adult and does not trust it. The bottom half was somebody else’s, smaller and faster and slanted, and she had read that hand on requisitions for two and a half years before the unit had a name, and she knew which of her people had written it before she had read a single word, and she knew what it meant that he was the one writing.

She put it down on the table without reading it.

Then she went outside and walked the line, which she did at night and never in daylight, and the camp watched her do it, and nobody said anything, because by now they could all read her from thirty paces as well as she could read them.

When she came back she read it.

***

Two names.

The first one she had been expecting since the sixteenth of the tenth month, when she had written point three, reassigned from the camp, purpose as before on a return and signed it, and had sat for an hour afterward with the pen still in her hand.

The second one she had not expected at all.

She read the account of the second one twice. He had carried the smallest child for most of a day without being asked. He had said perhaps nine words in three weeks. He had a splint on his wrist made of a spoon handle and a bootlace that he had never taken off, from the north road in the fourth month, when he had put himself in front of an animal for Bjorn Frostborn without being told and had stayed there while his arm broke.

And at the bottom of Bjorn’s half, in Bjorn’s heavy hand: Freya did not know his name. Nobody on the route did except the man who came up on the same cart. She would like it known that she asked, afterward, and she would like to know why she had to.

Sera Vahn sat there with that for a long time.

She knew his name. She had always known it. She knew every one of their names, because she counted the camp every morning by hand and by name and had done so since the first winter, and it had never once occurred to her that the rest of the mountain did not.

***

She took it up to Raven herself because that was how it was done now and because she did not want to be a commander who sent it.

Raven read it standing. She read how Kira Desh had left the head and said nothing, and read about the second man and still said nothing, and then read the last line of Bjorn’s half and put the sheet down on the table very carefully, as if it might go off.

"Say his name."

Sera Vahn said it.

Raven wrote it down on a separate page, in her own hand, and looked at it.

"Where was it before now?"

"On my roll. On the Corps roll, which is in my tent and in my head, and which I have never once been asked for by anybody on this mountain, because nobody on this mountain has ever needed a Corps soldier’s name for anything." Sera Vahn heard her own voice go flat, and let it. "Three hundred and seventy-five of them, and I could give you every name in the order I count them, and I have just found out that the woman who walked behind one of them for three weeks had to ask a stranger what to cut into the bark over his grave."

"That’s on me."

"It’s on both of us, and I would like it written that way, because otherwise you will take all of it and I will let you, and in a year it’ll have been your failing and not a thing that was true about the camp." She did not raise her voice. "I kept the names because I’m their commander. I never once gave them to anybody because nobody asked, and I decided that not being asked meant they weren’t wanted. That was a decision, and I made it."

***

"What do you want done?"

"The roll goes on the wall." Sera Vahn had thought about this on the walk up and had it ready. "Not the list for limbs. A separate one. Every name in the Corps, in the order I count them in the morning, in the same size as everything else on that wall. And when somebody goes north, or goes anywhere, their name goes on the return with it, not one of the Corps and not a soldier. The name."

"That puts three hundred and seventy-five names on a page to three governments every month."

"It puts the names of the ones who went on a page to three governments every month." Sera Vahn did not blink. "The Federation already has the roll. They had it before we did. The Empire can have it and so can the Confederacy, and if anybody wants to hold my people’s names against them they were always able to, and all we’ve been doing is making sure the people standing next to them couldn’t."

Raven looked at the separate page with the one name on it for a moment longer.

"Yes," Raven answered. "Put it up."

***

She wrote the roll up herself the next morning, on the Hall wall, beside the limb list and Thorne’s two columns, and it took her until the middle of the afternoon.

Three hundred and seventy-five names in the order she counted them. She did it standing, from memory, without the book, because she wanted to find out whether she could and because anybody watching would see whether she could, and she could. Four times she stopped and stood with the chalk against the wall for a moment and then went on. Nobody asked her about those four times, and she did not say.

People came to watch. That was not a thing she had expected, and it was not a thing she could stop. They came in from the camp in ones and twos, the way they had come to look at the four-line list in the fourth month, and stood behind her and read the names as she wrote them, and at some point in the second hour one of them — a man she had counted every morning since the first winter and had exchanged perhaps a hundred words with — said, quietly, to the man beside him, "That’s the tent order. She’s writing them in the actual tent order."

The two dead names she wrote in their place in the order, as if they were still in it, and then drew a line under each and wrote the date and the place beside it, the way a struck line goes on a Seven Peaks sheet.

Then she wrote the rest.

***

Mira had the carcass page from Cold Shoulder by the evening, because Freya had sent it separately by the same rider and marked it for the Medicine Hall and for the boy with the boards and for nobody else.

Sera Vahn was there because Mira had asked her to be, which she did not understand until Mira turned the page round.

No crust on any of four. Checked by hand.

"Elian’s had it since noon," Mira told her. "He’s put it in the first column, and he’s put the Ferrow’s Rest figure and the east wall figure beside it, and then he stopped writing, and he’s been sitting with the three of them since. He asked me to find somebody who would not have a view about it and sit in the room with him. I found you."

"Why me?"

"Because you’ve got the night book and you’ve got two conditions about not having opinions, and he’s read them, and he says you’re the only person on the mountain who’s written down what you won’t do and then done it." Mira did not dress any of it up. "He’s nine. He’s worked something out, and he doesn’t want to be the one to say it, and he doesn’t want to be told it, and he doesn’t want to be alone with it. Those three together leave about one person."

***

Elian had the three figures laid out on the board in a column, in his own hand, with the dates.

Ferrow’s Rest, fifth month — crust present.East wall, seventh month — crust present.Cold Shoulder, tenth month — no crust. Checked by hand. Freya.

He did not look up when Sera Vahn came in, and she did not say anything, and she sat down on the chair by the door where Aldis Stell used to sit and put her hands in her lap.

After a while, he broke it. "I know what it means."

"I haven’t got a view."

"I know. That’s why I asked for you." He had the rule across the board but was not using it. "I’m not going to write it. I’m going to say it once to somebody who won’t write it either, and then I’ll leave it in the fourth column where it goes, because I can’t prove it and Ostrek didn’t and nobody’s going to until somebody is standing in front of an animal and knows why it’s got a crust on or hasn’t."

Sera Vahn waited.

"They put the crust on where she’s going to be." He said it evenly. "And they didn’t put it on where she isn’t. And the only reason they’d know where she isn’t is that she wrote it down and sent it to everybody. Do not send for me."

He stopped.

"That’s a finding about the crust. It isn’t a finding about why. I know the difference. I wanted to say the why out loud to one person so that I’d stop saying it inside, and I wanted it to be a person who’d tell me I’m not allowed to write it."

"You’re not allowed to write it."

"Thank you."

He put the rule down and sat there, and Sera Vahn sat there, and neither of them said anything else for most of an hour, and at the end of it he picked the pen up and wrote the date in the first column under the three figures and nothing else, and she thought it was the most disciplined thing she had watched anybody do all year.

***

Raven had the carcass page by the time Sera Vahn came down from Elian’s room, and she had it on the table in front of her in the Hall, and she was not doing anything with it.

"He’s worked it out," Sera Vahn said.

"I know. So has Freya. She wrote, checked by hand, and then stopped, and I can see from the pen where she stopped." Raven did not look up. "So have I. It doesn’t take a great deal."

"Are you going to withdraw it?"

"Do not send for me?" Raven put one finger on the page. "No. And I want to say why, because somebody is going to argue that I should, and they’ll be half right, and I’d rather the other half was on record first.

"It doesn’t change what’s safe. The crust only matters against the line. Against a knife it’s nothing — the neck teams at Ferrow’s Rest never noticed it was there. The north doesn’t get a more dangerous animal because I’m not coming. It gets a cheaper one." She took her finger off the page. "What it changes is what I know they know. And the only thing I’d get by withdrawing it is to put the crust back on the northern animals and put myself back on a road to every village that calls, and that’s the thing Elian worked out in the fifth month, in a bed, in half a minute."

Sera Vahn stood there.

"You’re going to leave it published, knowing they read it."

"I’m going to leave it published because they read it." Raven did not soften it. "Everything we publish, they read. We’ve known that since the east wall. The only question was ever whether we’d stop publishing because of it, and I stood in a yard in front of the Assessor and said I’d publish it again, and I meant it, and it doesn’t stop being true when the thing they’ve read is about me."

***

She went up to the east side at the usual hour and found that she could not do it.

She got as far as the door of Tianlei’s room with the night book under her arm and stood there, and she could hear him breathing on the other side of it, slow and even, and she found that her hands were not steady and that she was thinking about a man with a spoon on his wrist and about a name she had carried for two and a half years without giving it to anybody.

That was the condition. She had written it herself and put it in the front of the book in her own words: if she could not keep the book on a given night, somebody else took it that night and not the following morning.

She had assumed, when she wrote it, that the reason would be an order.

She went back down the stairs and found Mira still in the Medicine Hall, and handed her the book, and said, "Tonight. I can’t."

Mira took it without asking why.

"I’ll write that you handed it over," Mira offered, "and the time, and that you said you couldn’t, and nothing about the reason."

"Write the reason."

"You’re sure?"

"It’s the first time I’ve used the condition. Whoever reads this book in eight years should be able to see what it’s for." Sera Vahn stood there with her hands empty. "Write that the keeper handed it over because two of her people died at Cold Shoulder and one of them nobody knew the name of, and that she did not trust herself to have no view tonight. Write it in that order."

Mira wrote it, in that order, standing in the Medicine Hall, and read it back, and went up the stairs with the book.

Sera Vahn went down to the camp and walked the line in the dark, and at the west end, where the newest tents were, she stopped and said the names out loud as she passed each one, quietly, in the order she counted them, which she had never once done where anybody could hear.

Somebody in the third tent said, "Commander?"

"Go to sleep," Sera Vahn told the tent. "I’m counting."