Chapter 596 - 595: No Hours

Chapter 596: Chapter 595: No Hours

Location:Wild Confederacy — Settlement Windbreak; the pavilion; the north gate yard

Date/Time:TC1858.02.28

The planks were ticking.

Naida heard it as soon as she came in under the hide. A small dry knock, then nothing, then another from further along, then two together. The sledge had come into the pavilion with its load still lashed on, because nobody had wanted to unstrap it in the yard with Esker only just lifted off the top, and somebody had dragged it near the stove and left it there. Now the doubled boards were warming through after a day on the crust, and every few breaths one of them gave a little in the grain and knocked.

Speaker Kael-Ren was at the long table with a lamp and nothing in front of him. Mei sat on the end of the sledge, on the planks, with her hands open on her knees. They were still gray at the fingertips. Somebody had given her a bowl of something, and it sat beside her, untouched, with the steam gone off it.

The five’s head stood by the stove. He hadn’t sat down since the gate. His side man was in the long house having his thigh closed, and the other three were asleep somewhere or pretending to be, and he had come here instead, with his spear still in his hand because he’d forgotten to lean it anywhere.

Naida took her gloves off. She laid them on the table, the scorched thumb uppermost, and pulled a clean sheet across and uncapped the pen.

"From the start," she said. "Who was where."

+++

The five’s head told the first of it. The deck, nearly cleared. Kestrel with the bar, going out along the lane to the next spike. His five posted on the deck’s corners, looking outward. The sun.

"Sun on the snow," he said, as if that were a thing that had been done to them. "Middle of the afternoon. Plenty of light left."

Naida wrote it. Mid-afternoon. Sun out.

"Then the boards on the deck came up. One after another. Like something went along under them."

"Under the crust?"

"Below the boards. Below the crust. I don’t know how deep." He shook his head once. "Not deep."

"Then the lane," Mei said.

She told Kestrel. She told it in the same voice she’d used for everything since the gate, very level, each piece of it set down separately and left alone, and Naida wrote each piece as it came. The lane heaving up under Kestrel. Kestrel on the crust. The head up through the crust beneath her, and then down again, with her. The hole, and the snow sliding into it.

"I dug," Mei said. "It was soft underneath. Not frozen. I dug with both hands. There wasn’t anything."

Naida’s pen stopped.

She made it go again. Dug at the place. Unfrozen below the crust. Nothing found.

"Esker pulled me out," Mei said.

"Then the plate," the five’s head said. He’d come a step closer to the table without seeming to notice. "Write the plate."

"Tell me."

"My front went in at the joint. Where it goes. Where you’ve always put it, everybody, every sheet." He held up a hand and turned it sideways in the lamplight to show her the angle. "It slid. Went in a hand and slid along the plate. There’s a plate there now that wasn’t. Lies over the joint. Over the top of it."

"I saw it from the lane," Mei said. "Then my point went onto the other one, and it did the same. There’s a second edge. It overlaps the first."

Naida wrote: The neck joint is covered. A second plate lies over it and overlaps the first. A spear at the joint from the front slides off. Seen on two animals.

She read it back to them. The five’s head listened to it with his jaw working.

"That’s it," he said.

"And then Esker."

Nobody spoke. The planks knocked. Speaker Kael-Ren hadn’t moved since Naida sat down; he had his big hands resting on the table on either side of the lamp, and he was watching Mei.

"Esker stepped off the board," Mei said. "Onto the crust. He wasn’t armed. He was drawing it off me. He called the head for me." Her voice didn’t change. "It came around and took him. Shoulder and neck. And when it folded back to hold him, the plates came apart. On the bend. There was a space between them the whole time it had him. I went in there, and it died."

Naida wrote it as she’d said it. Then she stopped, with the pen lifted.

"Say the next part again," she said. "The plates."

"When the head folded back. All the way back. The two plates slid apart where the neck bends. It was open the whole time." Mei looked at her hands. "It wasn’t open before. I tried before. It’s only open then."

There is an opening at the joint only when the head bends right back to bite. It stays open while it holds the person bitten. Mei killed it through the gap. Esker was the person it held.

Naida kept her eyes on the last line.

"They’ll read that," Speaker Kael-Ren said.

It was the first thing he’d said. Naida didn’t look up.

"They were there," she said. "It isn’t news to them. It’s only news to us."

"I know. I’m saying it so it’s been said."

She nodded, and left the line as it was.

+++

The five’s head told the rest. His five on the third one at the north corner, holding it. The limb across his side man’s thigh. Three spears, and the neck took none of them.

"Then it went down," he said. "While we were setting for the fourth. Down through the boards, back into the ground, and the boards came back over it. We didn’t kill it. Write that. We lost it."

"I’ll write lost."

"Write it."

She wrote it. The five held the third at the north corner. Three spears to the neck; none went in. It went down through the boards into the ground. The five lost it.

"And the one that watched," Mei said. "Out past the pit. In the sun. It stood a long time, and then it went north."

One stood off past the pit and watched. In full daylight. It went north.

Naida counted down the sheet with the end of the pen. "Four," she said. "One took Kestrel and went down. One Mei killed. One went down from the five. One watched."

The five’s head nodded.

"One killed. Three gone." She wrote the tally under it, the numbers on their own line, and nothing next to them.

+++

Speaker Kael-Ren stood up.

He went to the sledge and stood looking down at the planks, the whole lashed stack of them, warm now and smelling faintly of the pit and the wet clay that was still caught in the grain. One knocked under his eyes, quite loud, and he didn’t move.

"Daylight only," he said. "That was mine."

Naida waited.

"I said it in this pavilion with Kestrel shouting in the yard because she was pleased to be going. I said nobody was staying out once it got dark." He touched the top board with two fingers, as though to see whether it was as warm as it sounded. "I thought dark was the thing. Every time it’s come, it’s come in the dark, or near enough. I thought if I kept them off the flats at night I’d kept them off the flats."

"So did I," Naida said.

"It doesn’t matter what you thought. It was my order." He turned around. "It goes in."

"Under the account, or with it?"

"Under it. In my words." He came back to the table and didn’t sit. "Write this. The order was daylight only. It was the Speaker’s. Kestrel and Esker were on the flats because of it. There are no safe hours. Nobody from Windbreak goes to the bore site again, by day or by night."

She wrote it. When she’d finished she turned the sheet so he could see it, and he read it standing, and held his hand out for the pen, and signed under the last line rather than at the foot.

"My sword’s in the one I killed," Mei said.

Speaker Kael-Ren looked at her.

"I’d like it back," she said. "I didn’t try very hard to get it out. I’d like it back."

"It stays."

"It’s on the lane. It’s not far from the deck. In daylight—"

"There isn’t any daylight." He said it without heat. "That’s what I’ve just written. It stays in it, and Kestrel’s bar stays where it fell, and the spur stays out there, and every plank we didn’t bring in can split in the frost." He looked at the sledge. "She’d have had something to say about that."

"She said the frost would split them," Mei said. "On the rope, coming in from the bore. A winter’s mending."

"Then she was right about that too."

Mei nodded. She picked up the bowl beside her, looked at it, and set it down again.

"The herding camps," Naida said.

Speaker Kael-Ren had been about to sit. He stayed standing.

"The herders out on the edge of the flats," she went on. "Nobody’s told them anything since the bore."

"They come in." He said it at once. "All of them. Stock and all, or without the stock if the stock won’t move. Inside the wall."

"Tonight?"

He opened his mouth, and shut it again. Naida watched him get to the end of it.

"No," he said. "Not tonight. Tomorrow. I’ll send in the morning, in daylight, because I haven’t got anything else to send them in." His hand went back to the table. "Write that too. That I sent them by day, knowing."

"It isn’t part of the account."

"Then give it a line of its own. I’d rather somebody reading this at the mountain knew we’d been told and gone anyway than thought we hadn’t understood what we’d written."

Naida wrote it on its own line, below his name. Riders to the herding camps at first light. Sent by day. There is no other way to send them.

She did the other sum while the ink dried, because she always did. Nine days to Seven Peaks, if the road was no worse than it had been. Three more to the Millford road if the mountain copied it the morning it came, which it would. Twelve days before anybody at the holding with the stone barn knew that the joint had closed over. Longer before it reached the far end of anything.

She didn’t say the number.

+++

There was one more thing, and Naida had known since the gate that she would have to say it.

The Halbrook sheet lay on the table by her elbow, where it had been since she sat down. Thorne’s copy, two names at the head that meant nothing to anybody here, and the account under them, and at the foot the line she’d read standing on the step that morning while the sledge was still out of sight.

The floor was earth. Look down.

"Thorne’s copy reached the gate a little after the sledge went out," she said.

Speaker Kael-Ren glanced at the sheet, and then at her.

"I read it on the step. I read it twice. I thought it was about barns." She kept her voice level, because there was no reason for it to be anything else. "Eight kilometers. A runner on foot could have been at the deck by noon. I didn’t send one."

"You couldn’t have known."

"I’m not saying I could have known. I’m saying I had it in my hand, and I didn’t send it." She looked at the line again. "I don’t know if it would have changed anything. They’d have looked down, and seen boards, and crust. Kestrel might still have gone out along the lane. It might have made no difference at all."

"Then—"

"Then I don’t know. And I won’t decide it wouldn’t have, because that would be very convenient for me." She pulled the account back toward her. "It doesn’t go on this. It isn’t anything that happened out there. But I wanted it said, in this room, before the sheet’s closed. Somebody had a warning in her hand this morning and kept it on the step."

Mei was looking at her. Naida let her look.

"I’d have gone out along the lane anyway," Mei said at last. "I knew where the spikes were. That was why I was there."

"I know."

"I’m not saying it to make you feel better."

"No," Naida said. "You wouldn’t."

+++

Nye came in near midnight with snow on her shoulders and stood inside the flap until Speaker Kael-Ren nodded her forward.

"Are they going at the top?" Nye asked.

"Both of them," Naida said.

"Kestrel too."

"Kestrel first. She went first."

Nye looked at the sheet, upside down, at the blank space Naida had left at the head of it. Then she said a woman’s name, quietly, and Naida wrote it. And then Kestrel. Then another woman’s name, and Naida wrote that, and then Esker.

"Nothing next to hers?" Nye asked. "About there not being anything to bring."

Naida thought about it.

"It’s in the account," she said. "Where it happened. Not at the top. At the top, she’s the same as him."

Nye nodded. She stood looking at the four names in Naida’s hand, two that only this settlement would know and two that anyone might. Then she went back out into the dark toward the gate, where she’d be until the rider left, because that was where she always was.

+++

Naida read the sheet through from the top.

The names. The deck and the sun. The ripple under the boards. Kestrel. The plate over the joint. Esker, and the gap. The five’s third, lost. The one that watched in daylight. The tally on its own line. And under it, in her hand, the Speaker’s words, and the Speaker’s name under those, heavy and plain.

She didn’t add a line at the bottom. The last time she’d sent a sheet south she had added one, because the mountain hadn’t known the flats could be crossed and had needed telling. This time the Speaker’s lines were at the bottom.

She folded it, and sealed it, and wrapped it in the oilcloth for the rider’s bag.

Mei had gone to sleep sitting up on the sledge with her back against the lashing rope and her chin on her chest. The five’s head had gone at some point; Naida hadn’t seen him leave. Speaker Kael-Ren sat at the far end of the table with the lamp between them, his eyes on the flame.

The planks knocked, now and then, more slowly.

Naida’s gloves were still on the table where she’d laid them. She picked them up and went over to the sledge. Mei’s hands lay open on her knees, gray at the fingertips. Naida worked the gloves onto them, left and then right, the scorched thumb and the other, and Mei didn’t wake.

The planks knocked, now and then, more slowly.

When the gray came in at the top of the hide, Naida took the bag out to the gate bare-handed.