Chapter 587 - 586: Mother’s Name

Chapter 587: Chapter 586: Mother’s Name

Location:Wild Confederacy — Settlement Windbreak; The North Gate; The Pavilion

Date/Time:TC1858.02.14 – TC1858.02.18

Naida heard the runners before anyone on the wall saw anything.

A dry hiss, very faint, coming in off the flats from the northeast and stopping and coming again. Runners on crust. A sledge with weight on it, hauled by somebody who had to stop every few dozen paces and get their breath. She’d been at the shed door with the morning’s first child gone in and the glass not yet turned, and she put the glass down on the bench and walked to the north gate without telling the screener where she was going, which she would apologize for later.

The gate woman was already on the step with her hand up to shade her eyes.

"One pulling," the gate woman said. "One walking beside. Something long on the sledge."

Naida stood beside her and watched them come.

The one pulling was Mei. There was no mistaking the way she leaned into the rope, all of her weight forward, head down, like somebody walking into weather. The one beside her was a man from the bore crew whose face Naida knew and whose name she didn’t. He had one hand on the sledge rail. He didn’t seem to be doing much with it except keeping it there.

The long thing on the sledge was wrapped in a tent hide and lashed at three places.

Nobody on the wall said anything. By the time the sledge came up the last slope to the gate, there were perhaps twenty people along the top of it and in the yard below, and none of them had been called, and all of them were quiet.

Mei stopped at the gate and let the rope go slack. She didn’t sit down. Naida could see that she wanted to. She stayed on her feet until the thing on the sledge was inside.

The gate woman came down off the step. She looked at the hide, and at the lashings, and then at the man from the bore crew, who said a name very quietly. Then she laid her palm on the hide, over where the head would be, and said what was said at that gate to everybody who came through it and belonged there.

She said the mother’s name first. An old woman’s name, one Naida had heard a few times and never attached to a face. Then she said, "Jessa."

Then she took her hand away, and stood aside, and the sledge went in.

***

It was the man from the bore crew who told it, in the pavilion, with Speaker Kael-Ren sitting on the edge of the long table and Naida standing by the hide wall where she could see both of them. Mei sat on the stool at the end with her left forearm wrapped in a strip of shirt and didn’t speak unless she was asked. When she was asked, she answered in short, plain pieces, as if each one had been weighed out beforehand.

The lane. The one that lay down along it and didn’t fight. The tent five coming along to cross, the way the sheet let them, and the front taken off the planks into the flats and hauled out again with his knee broken. Nobody able to get past.

The pit branch. Mei and Jessa at the fire trench. Jessa calling the head.

The one that came across the soft ground.

Speaker Kael-Ren stopped him there. "Across it."

"Not along the planks," the crewman answered. "Across the flats, from past the pit where there’s no planking at all. It sank. It sank the way you’d sink, and it didn’t matter to it. It came anyway."

"You saw that."

"I saw it after. It’s still there. Half in the pit, half in the snow. Jessa’s iron’s still in it." He looked at his hands. "She put the iron in it. Hot. Where the head joins. It didn’t stop the head."

Mei’s hand moved very slightly on her knee. Naida watched it move and watched her stop it.

The crewman told the rest. The deck five going out along the lane in a knot. The deck left empty behind them. Orrin, and the flats beyond the planks, and Silas flat on the boards holding onto a sleeve.

"Nobody saw what put him there," Mei put in. It was the first thing she’d said without being asked. "I looked. Silas didn’t see it either. It came onto the deck while the deck was empty, and it put him off the edge, and then it wasn’t there. That’s all anybody knows."

"And the rig."

"Nothing touched it. Nothing’s ever touched it."

Speaker Kael-Ren sat on the table’s edge with his builder’s hands loose between his knees and looked at the floor of packed earth for a long time. Naida had watched him do that at every hard thing she’d ever brought him, for years. He didn’t pace, and he didn’t speak while he did it. He put his eyes on the ground as if the ground were going to give him the answer if he waited, and mostly, eventually, it did.

"The hole," he said at last. "Silas says?"

"Silas says he doesn’t know how much string’s left," Mei answered. "He says it’s more than last time. His right shoulder came out. It’s back in. He’s still at the rig."

"Of course he is." Speaker Kael-Ren looked up. "Does he want to stop?"

"He didn’t say."

"Do you?"

Mei took a moment. Naida watched her take it and didn’t help.

"It’s not mine," Mei answered. "It’s your ground and your name on it. I write what comes up. Orrin said it stops at a hundred and Jessa said it doesn’t stop at all, and they both wanted to know which, and they’re both dead, and I don’t think it’s mine to say we stop now because of that. I think it’s yours."

Speaker Kael-Ren looked at her a long moment. Then he got down off the table.

"It keeps going," he said. "On my ground, with my name on it, same as before. And nobody out there stands anywhere after dark that isn’t inside a five. Not at the pan, not at the latrines, not at the rig. If the fire goes out, it goes out, and we skin the hole in the morning. I’ll put that in writing tonight." He picked up his coat off the post. "I’m going to see her. Jessa’s girl."

"Mei’s going," Naida put in.

It was the first thing she’d said in the pavilion. He stopped with one arm in the coat.

"She screened her." Naida kept her voice level. "In the autumn. She was the one in the room with her for the whole count. The girl will know her face. Go after, if you’re going. Not first."

He looked at her a moment longer, and then at Mei, and then he finished putting on the coat and sat back down on the table to wait.

***

The girl’s name was Wend.

Naida walked with Mei as far as the end of the lane where Jessa’s house was, and no further. That was where she stood, at the corner, with the wind coming down the lane off the flats and the snow in it stinging the side of her face. She didn’t go closer and she didn’t look away.

Mei knocked. Somebody opened the door, an older woman Naida didn’t know, and then there was the girl behind her, thin and dark and very still.

Mei crouched. It put her face a little below the girl’s. She said something Naida was too far away to hear, and it was short, and then she stopped, and didn’t say anything else, and waited.

The girl stood there. Then she reached out and took hold of the sleeve of Mei’s coat, the too-big one, and held on to it, and didn’t do anything else either.

They stayed like that long enough for Naida’s face to go numb on the windward side. She did not move off the corner.

When Mei stood up at last she came back along the lane with her head down, and when she reached the corner she stopped beside Naida and stood looking at the snow.

"I said her mother held the iron," Mei said. "I said she was watching my back when it happened. I said I was sorry. That’s all I had."

Naida nodded.

"She didn’t ask me anything."

"She will," Naida answered. "Not today. When she does, tell her the same thing again."

Mei went back out on the sixteenth.

Naida found her at the north gate before light, lashing a crate of empty tubes to the same sledge, with Speaker Kael-Ren’s order folded inside her coat. The order ran to four lines. Naida had read it over his shoulder while he wrote it.

"Silas can’t do the labels one-handed," Mei said, before Naida could ask anything. "And there’s nobody else out there who’s been told what to write."

"I wasn’t going to stop you."

"I know." Mei pulled the last lashing tight with her good hand and her teeth. "You were going to stand there."

That was true. Naida stood there. Then she took off her gloves, which were Confederacy gloves, lined and double-stitched and a good deal better than the pair Mei had worn through at the fingertips, and held them out.

Mei looked at them.

"They’re mine," Naida said. "Not the settlement’s. Bring them back."

Mei put them on. They were too big for her, like most things she’d been handed that winter. She took up the rope and leaned into it, and the runners began to hiss on the crust, and Naida stayed on the step until the flats had taken the sound.

***

The rider from Seven Peaks came in on the eighteenth, two hours after first light, lips split from the wind the way everybody’s were who came across in the second month.

The bag had three sheets in it for Windbreak. Naida saw it opened, because she made a point of seeing every bag opened, though it was no longer her place to, and Speaker Kael-Ren had stopped remarking on it some while ago. The first was the ordinary monthly return. The second was a letter for Mei in Raven’s small, quick hand, which would have to go out to the bore. The third was a single sheet in Thorne’s careful copying, with names at the head of it that Naida had never heard.

She read it standing in the pavilion with the hide wall at her back.

Stonefall crossing. The twenty-fifth of the first month, at dusk. Two fives, one on each bank. The near fifth calling it and the five holding. Three at the far bank. And two into the river that stood on the stones and attacked nobody.

She read that line twice.

The near team going into the water to cross. The near fifth left on his own. The one that had stayed back among the trees until he was by himself.

Kelder Lowry. Edda Sowden.

And at the bottom, where the rule should have been, in the same hand and the same size as everything above it:

This is the rule we do not have.

Speaker Kael-Ren came and stood beside her and read it over her shoulder, which he did not usually do. She held it a little toward him so he could.

"The twenty-fifth of the first month," he read.

"Nineteen days before Jessa." Naida had done the arithmetic before she’d finished reading the date, and done it again to be sure. "They left Seven Peaks on the ninth. It was on the road for four days when the lane went. It was never going to get here in time. Nothing from there ever is."

"It’s the same thing."

"Yes. At Stonefall it was water. Out there it was the lane. A thing that lies across the way through and doesn’t fight, so the ones who’d cross can’t, and the one who’s left facing the other way is by himself." She laid the sheet flat on the table. "Orrin was on the deck when the deck went out along the lane. That’s the same man as the fifth. The one left behind when everybody else went to help."

Speaker Kael-Ren put one finger on the last line and left it there.

"She’s saying she hasn’t got anything."

"She’s saying she hasn’t got anything she believes." Naida looked at the line. "That’s different. I worked for her for nine years. She’d rather send nothing than send a thing she’d have to take back, and she’d rather everybody knew she’d sent nothing than let them think the old sheet was still good." She paused. "They’ll read it. At Stonefall they already knew there wasn’t a rule. They made sure of it."

"Then what do we send back?"

Naida didn’t answer at once. The wind leaned on the hide wall and the whole pavilion creaked with it, and outside somebody was calling a child in, a woman’s voice, patient, calling the same name over and over.

"The account," she answered. "Every position, laid out the way hers is. Jessa and Orrin at the head of it." She pulled a clean sheet toward her across the table and uncapped the pen. "And one line that isn’t on hers, because they don’t know it yet at Seven Peaks and they have to."

She wrote the account out plainly. The lane. The branch. The deck. She wrote it the way she’d once written reports that went only to Raven, which was without adjectives. At the top she wrote Jessa’s mother’s name, and then Jessa, because that was how it was said at this gate, and this was a sheet from this gate. Then Orrin.

At the bottom, under the account, she wrote the line.

They crossed the flats. The planks are not the edge of anything now.

She turned it around for Speaker Kael-Ren to read. He read it, and signed it under her hand, and did not change a word.

"You’re not her officer anymore," he said. "You could’ve left it to my clerk."

"Your clerk would’ve got it wrong twice, and I’d have made him do it again." She capped the pen. "This way it goes today."

It went at noon. The rider who’d brought the Stonefall sheet was asleep in the gatehouse and would be for a day, so another rider took it, a Windbreak one on a fresh mount, out through the south gate and down the long road toward the mountain. Nine days, the same as it had been coming up. Whatever the mountain did with it, it would be doing it nine days late.

She stood on the south wall until the rider was a mark on the snow and then not even that.

At the north gate behind her, when she went back down, the gate woman was on the step with a child beside her. A thin dark girl in a coat that had been let out at the hem and would need letting out again. The gate woman was teaching her the words. The girl said the first of them after her, carefully, her mother’s name, trying it out the way you’d try the ice on a pond, a step at a time.

"And then your own," the gate woman said.

The girl looked out at the flats a moment. Then she said it.

"Wend."

Naida went past them both without stopping, and didn’t look back until she was well along the lane.