Chapter 592 - 591: Bring Them Back

Chapter 592: Chapter 591: Bring Them Back

Location:Wild Confederacy — Settlement Windbreak; The North Gate; Jessa’s Lane; The Pavilion

Date/Time:TC1858.02.24 – TC1858.02.25

The iron was colder than the air.

Mei had it under her left arm, wrapped in its sacking, and the cold of it came through the sacking and the coat and the sleeve and found the healing line on her forearm and settled there. Eight kilometers of crust. She could have put it on the sledge. Twice the man on the rope ahead of her had looked back at it and then at her, and twice she’d shaken her head, and he’d turned around again and gone on hauling.

His name was Esker. She’d learned it at the bore, after, from the deck five’s head, who’d said it the way you’d mention a tool you’d been glad of. He was the one who’d walked beside the sledge when they brought Jessa in. He was broad and slow and pulled like a man who’d settled years back on how fast he went and saw no reason to change it.

The other on the rope was a woman called Kestrel, younger, all elbows, who had talked most of the first three kilometers and then stopped.

"Should’ve brought the planks," she said now, into the wind. She hadn’t said a word in an hour. "That’s good timber. Doubled. That’s a winter’s worth of mending lying out there for the frost to split."

"Speaker said bring his people," Esker answered. "Didn’t say bring his planks."

"He’d want the planks."

"Then he can go and get them."

Kestrel thought about that for twenty paces. "He would, as well," she said, and sounded satisfied, and didn’t speak again until the wall.

***

Windbreak came up out of the white the way it did, all at once, the palisade gray against a sky that was a paler gray, smoke standing straight up from a dozen roofs because the wind had dropped at last. Mei could smell it before she could see the gate: woodsmoke, and dung, and something frying in fat, and under all of it the warm animal smell of a lot of people living close together through a winter. After eight days on the flats it went through her like a blow. She hadn’t known she’d stopped smelling things out there until she started again. Somebody on the wall saw them and called down. By the time the sledges reached the last slope, there were people along the top and in the yard below the gate, and the gate woman was on her step.

Mei had passed under her twice now, going out. She’d never come in with a sledge behind her that wasn’t carrying a body.

The gate woman looked at the crates. She looked at Silas, walking at the back with his arm strapped across him and his face gray with the eight kilometers. She looked at the long bundle under Mei’s arm and didn’t ask.

Then Esker dropped the rope and stood in front of her step, and the gate woman looked him up and down and said a woman’s name Mei didn’t catch, and then, "Esker."

He nodded. He went on in.

She did it for Kestrel. She did it for each of the crew, one by one, the winch hands and the sample-line man who wasn’t Orrin. Each time a stranger’s name first, then the one Mei knew. That took a while. Nobody hurried her.

When she came to Silas, she stopped, and looked at him, and stood aside without a word. He went through.

When she came to Mei, she stopped again.

"You were out with Jessa," the gate woman said.

"Yes."

"I’m Nye." She didn’t put her hand out. "I haven’t a name for you to go in front. You’re not from here." She looked at the bundle. "Is that hers?"

"It’s her iron."

Nye looked at it a long moment. Then she stood aside, and Mei went in under the gate with the iron still under her arm, and the noise of the yard closed around her, voices and a dog and somebody splitting wood, and she didn’t put it down.

+++

The lane ran downhill from the yard between houses set close against the wind, their eaves almost touching overhead, and the snow in it had been trodden to a gray ice that rang under her boots. Somebody’s child watched her from a doorway with a spoon in its mouth. Somebody’s shutter banged. She kept the bundle tucked tight and her eyes on the ground, and counted doors, though she knew which one it was.

The house at the end of the lane had smoke coming out of it. That was something.

Mei knocked. It was the older woman again who opened the door, gray-haired and narrow, with flour on her hands, and she looked at Mei and then past her up the lane, as if to see who’d come with her, and nobody had.

"She’s in the back," the woman said, and went to get her.

Wend came to the door in her stockings. She’d grown, or the coat had been let out again; it hung differently. She stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame and looked at Mei, and then at the bundle.

Mei crouched. She’d done it last time. She did it again because it had been right, and set the bundle across her knees, and untied the twine. It was stiff with cold and took a while. The sacking fell open.

The iron lay there. Black along most of its length, a long rod of plain iron with a hook bent into the handle end so it would hang on a nail. The other end was dull and pitted and still had a gray crust on it from the place it had been, and Mei had tried to scrub that off at the bore and hadn’t been able to.

Wend looked at it.

"That’s the pan iron."

"Yes."

"She takes the skin off with it." A pause. "Took."

"Yes."

Wend reached out and put one finger on the handle end, where the hook was. Then she pulled her hand back into her sleeve.

"Why was it out there?" she asked. "Why wasn’t it on the pan?"

There it was. Mei had known it was coming since she’d left the step on the sixteenth. She had thought about it on the sledge rope going out and at the pit every dawn, lying awake inside the five with the cold rising through the planks, and she had thought of several things to say, and every one of them had been longer than the last, and none of them had been true enough to say to somebody that young.

Naida had said: the same thing again.

"Your mother held the iron," Mei said. "She was watching my back. I’m sorry."

Wend looked at her. It went on a long time.

"That’s what you said before."

"It’s what happened."

The girl’s eyes went down to the iron again. Then she bent, and got both arms under it the way you’d lift a sleeping cat, and stood up with it. It was nearly as long as she was. The hook end swung and knocked against the doorframe, and she steadied it without looking.

"I’m going to put it back on its nail," Wend told her.

"All right."

She turned around and went into the house with it, carefully, end first, the way you’d carry anything long through a door. The older woman stood back to let her pass and watched her go and didn’t help. Then she looked at Mei, still crouched on the step with the empty sacking across her knees.

"Come in," she said. "There’s bread."

Mei said she couldn’t. The woman nodded as if she’d known that, and shut the door, gently, and Mei stayed crouched a little while, then folded the sacking into a square and put it in her pocket, because it was good sacking and somebody would want it.

***

The pavilion was warm for once. They’d got the stove going hard against the cold that came behind the wind, and the hide walls had stopped moving, and the long table had the crates on it already, open, with Silas standing over them.

Speaker Kael-Ren stood across the table from him with both palms on the wood. Naida was at her usual place by the hide wall. Mei came in quietly and stood by the door, and nobody told her to come further.

The tubes lay in their straw in two rows, labels up. Eighty of them. The Speaker was reading down the rows without touching anything, the way the labels had been laid out to let you, and his lips moved once or twice, and then they stopped moving at seventy-one, and he looked at it a while before he went on.

Under the last tube, he found the sheet. He found the last line, and the name under it, and the three words after.

"By Mei’s hand," he said.

"I can’t write," Silas answered. "Not with this." He moved the strapped arm, a little. "We’d agreed she’d write it and I’d write under, if it came to that. It didn’t come to that. But I wanted my name on it."

"It’s on it."

"In her hand. Not mine."

The Speaker looked at him across the crates. Then he looked down at the sheet again, at String ended here, and put one finger on the line, and left it there a while.

"I said it keeps going," he said. "And then you sent to tell me it was the string and not you. I didn’t need telling."

"I know. I needed to have told you."

Speaker Kael-Ren nodded slowly, as if that was a thing he understood very well.

"Eighty."

"Where the string ran out," Silas answered. "With an edge in it. Same as all the rest."

Nobody said anything about the hundred.

"Did anything come?" the Speaker asked. "While you had it coming up."

"One. Dusk on the twenty-third." Silas shifted his weight, and the strapped arm moved with him, and he waited for that to stop hurting before he went on. "Out past the pit, on the crust. It stood and looked at the rig while we pulled it, and then it wasn’t there. It’s in the post book."

"It looked at the rig."

"As near as I could tell. It was a long way off."

"It’s never touched the rig. Not once. Not the night it took Jessa, not any night." The Speaker’s palm had gone back down on the table. "Then what is it it wants with—"

"Write that it looked," Naida put in, from the wall.

He stopped. He looked across at her, and she looked back, level, and after a moment he took the hand off the table.

"It looked," he agreed. "That’s all we’ve got, and that’s what goes in." He turned to the nearest of his people at the door. "The planks are still out there. Doubled board, the whole road and the deck. Kestrel’s been telling everybody who’ll stand still. Send her for them, with a sledge and a five, daylight only, and back inside the wall before the light goes. I’m not leaving good timber to the frost, and I’m not leaving anybody out there after dark for it either."

Somebody went. Mei heard Kestrel’s voice in the yard a moment later, raised and pleased, and then a laugh from somebody else.

The Speaker straightened and took his hands off the table. "Close them up," he said to whoever was nearest. "They go into the dry store. Nobody opens them." He looked at Silas. "And you go and lie down before Naida has to tell you to, because she will, and I’ll have to watch."

Silas went. He went slowly, and at the door he stopped beside Mei for a moment as though he meant to say something, and didn’t, and put his good hand briefly on her shoulder instead, and went on out.

***

Naida hadn’t moved from the hide wall. Mei crossed the floor to her.

She took off the gloves. The left came off easily. The right she had to work off finger by finger, because the healing line on her forearm pulled when she flexed the wrist, and she did it slowly so that she wouldn’t wince and didn’t quite manage. Then she held them out, both together, the way Naida had held them out to her at the gate.

They were not what they’d been. One thumb was scorched brown where she’d got it too near the trench, and there was a dark stain across the back of the right she didn’t want to think about, and the lining had come loose at one wrist.

"I burned the thumb," Mei said. "I’m sorry."

Naida took them. She turned them over in her hands, both sides, the way she’d have turned over a report. Her thumb found the scorch and the stain and the loose lining, one after the other, and stopped on each.

Then she put them on.

She did it without hurry, left and then right, working each finger down, and pulled the cuffs straight. She looked at her hands in them.

"They’re mine."

"I know."

"You brought them back."

"You said to."

Naida looked at her. Mei had stood beside her in the screening shed long enough to know that the look was all she was going to get, and that it was more than most people got.

"Go and eat," Naida said. "Then sleep. In a bed. The Speaker’s put you in the long house with the screeners; there’s a place by the stove." She paused. "Whatever comes up the road next, you’ll hear it when I do."

Mei nodded. She turned to go.

"Mei."

She turned back.

Naida had one gloved hand lifted a little, not toward her, just lifted, and she looked at it as though she’d forgotten what she’d meant to do with it. Then she lowered it.

"The thumb’s nothing," she said. "I’ve burned worse."

***

The long house was dark and full of people breathing, and the place by the stove was a pallet with two blankets and a third folded at the foot, and somebody had put a cup of broth on the floor beside it, gone lukewarm, with a skin on top.

Mei sat on the pallet and unlaced her boots, which took longer than it should have, because her fingers had forgotten how to bend somewhere around the fifth kilometer and hadn’t fully remembered yet. Across the room, a screener she half knew turned over and muttered and was still. Mei looked at the skin on the broth.

Then she broke it with her finger, and drank it, all of it. It tasted of smoke and the pot and nothing else at all. She lay down in her coat with the letter from the mountain still inside it, folded against her ribs, and pulled the blankets up, and listened to the wind come back and lean on the walls, and slept before she’d meant to.