Chapter 597 - 596: The Last Thing

Chapter 597: Chapter 596: The Last Thing

Location:The Millford road — the Halbrook holding; the yard; the stone barn

Date/Time:TC1858.03.02

Frost had skinned the underside of every stone in the wall, and it burned Ivo’s fingers through the wool.

He set it on the barrow with the others and blew into his gloves and went back for the next. The field wall ran along the road side of the holding for longer than he’d ever bothered to pace, dry-laid, waist-high, the stones fitted by somebody’s grandfather and frozen together since the first month. You had to rock each one before it would come. Rock it, feel it give, get your fingers under, lift with your legs. By midmorning he’d stopped feeling the cold and started feeling the stones, which was worse.

Bett had said the floor at first light, and nothing else, and gone to get the barrow.

Nobody had argued. Nobody had said much of anything for two weeks, not since they’d carried two men out through the door and Nissa had said their names. They stood their posts, and they ate, and they slept in turns in the barn with the boy, on a floor every one of them had seen open, and in the mornings Bett walked it, end to end, eyes down. Ivo had watched her do it every day. This morning she’d come back from the walk and said the floor, and he’d known what she meant before she’d finished the word.

He had the barrow halfway to the barn when the dog started up at the gate.

+++

Four on the road. Three walking and one riding, and the one riding sat crooked, with his right arm inside his coat.

"That’s Fenn," somebody said behind him.

It was. Ivo set the barrow down. Bett came out of the barn with dirt to her elbows, and stood, and watched them in off the road with her hand shading her eyes against the white.

Fenn Jarrow got down off his mount on the left side, awkwardly, the way a man does who’s had two weeks to learn it and hasn’t. He didn’t say anything to Bett. He reached inside his coat with his left hand and brought out a packet in oilcloth and held it toward her.

She didn’t take it.

"I sent you," she said.

"You did. I went." He held the packet out a little further. "I’ve come back."

"You’ve one hand."

"I have," Fenn said. "I can stand at the back and call. Somebody’s got to face out, and it doesn’t need hands." He tipped his head at the three standing behind him in the road. "And I brought these. Nobody sent them either."

Bett’s eyes went past him.

The first was a big man, the biggest Ivo had seen since Bram, with a gray beard frozen stiff at the ends and a pack on his back that would have bent Ivo double. The second was a tall Corps woman with a spear carried crosswise on her back, the shaft bound around the middle with cord where it had split. The third was young, younger than Ivo by the look of him, thin, with a satchel at his hip and ink worked into the heel of his writing hand so deep the cold hadn’t shifted it.

"Ulric Dunnet," the big man said. "I was a smith’s hand. I can lift."

"Brisk Alder."

"Ovid Crowe. I write. I can count."

Bett took each of them in turn, the way she’d look at a weapon somebody handed her, for the faults. Then she took the packet from Fenn.

"Seven," Ivo said. He couldn’t help it. It came out of him before he’d decided anything. "And three. Ten." He turned to Fenn. "Plus you."

"Two fives," Fenn said. "And me."

Bett was already unwrapping the oilcloth.

+++

She read it standing in the yard with the sun on the snow and the barrow of stone beside her, and Ivo read it over her arm because she didn’t stop him.

There were two sheets. The first was short, in a hand Ivo didn’t know: four names, Fenn’s at the top, and To the Halbrook holding, the Millford road, from the north gate, and a date. Nothing else. No reason. Bett folded it and put it in her coat without a word.

The second was longer, and the hand on it was the same one that had copied the Stonefall sheet in the second month, though the words weren’t Seven Peaks words. The names at the head were three. Bett’s eyes went across them once, slowly. Ivo watched her lips move on the first one and stop, because it meant nothing to her, and go on to the next.

Jessa. Orrin.

Under the names, the account. A board road on the flats past Windbreak, two fives, a lane, a deck left empty.

At the bottom, one line on its own.

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

Bett read it twice. Then she handed the sheet to Ivo and walked away across the yard to the barrow.

Ivo read the date at the head of the account. The thirteenth of the second month. He did it on his fingers without meaning to, the way he always did, thumb to each fingertip and around again. The thirteenth to the end of the month, seventeen. Two days into this one.

"Nineteen days," he said.

"Since it happened?" Ovid Crowe asked.

Ivo nodded. His eyes went to the three names. "Who’s the first one?"

"Nobody knew, up there." Crowe had his hands in his armpits against the cold. "She read it out to the whole Hall, all three, and said she didn’t know what the first one was, and she wasn’t going to say. That’s how it went in."

"She said that? Out loud?"

"In front of everybody."

Ivo looked at the name again. A woman’s, he thought. He didn’t know why he thought that.

"The other two are the bore dead," Crowe said. "The first one’s not in anything after."

"I can see that." Ivo handed the sheet back to Bett’s empty hand, except Bett wasn’t there; she was at the barrow, lifting. He folded it and kept it.

+++

They worked through the afternoon. All of them, except the five on the door, who changed at midday and went straight from the door to the wall.

Dunnet carried. He took the stones Ivo couldn’t shift, and some Ivo and Brisk Alder couldn’t shift between them, and set them down in the barn so gently you’d have thought they were eggs. He didn’t say much. Halfway through the afternoon, with a stone the size of a sheep’s body held against his chest, he stopped in the door and looked across the barn at the far end past the hay, where the earth was a different color from the rest. Darker. Newer.

"That’s where?" he asked.

"That’s where."

"And the one that went back down."

"Under there," Ivo said. "Somewhere. It went in, and it didn’t come out anywhere we’ve found."

Dunnet kept his eyes on the corner. Then he carried the stone to where Bett was kneeling at the line of the last course, and set it beside her, and went back out for another.

Bett laid. That was her job, and she’d given it to herself without asking anybody. She set every stone by hand, bedded it into the earth with the heel of her fist, tried it with her weight, lifted it and turned it if it rocked. She went from the door inward, course by course, so that the first thing anybody coming in stepped on was stone. Her knuckles split by the middle of the morning, and she wrapped them in a rag and went on, and by the afternoon the rag was black.

Brisk Alder came in at the change carrying her split spear and stood looking at it.

"It’ll go," she said, to nobody. "It went three days."

"There’s another," Bett said, without looking up from the stone she was bedding. "Against the wall by the door. Take that one."

Brisk Alder went and looked. It was a good spear, ash, the head bright where it had been cleaned. She picked it up and tried the weight of it and nodded.

"Whose?"

Bett set the stone down, pressed it, and lifted her hand away.

"Innes Garrow’s," Ivo said, because Bett wasn’t going to. "He was the east fifth. He died in that door. His spear was in the one that killed him."

Brisk Alder held it. Then she leaned her own split spear against the wall where his had been, and kept his, and went back out to the door.

+++

Ivo did the stones.

It was what he was good at, and Bett knew it, so partway through the afternoon she told him to stop carrying and count. He paced the barn twice, wall to wall and end to end, the way she walked it, except he wasn’t looking at the floor; he was counting his feet. He paced a stone. He worked out how many stones to a course and how many courses to the far wall, and stood in the yard with his gloves off and his lips going, the cold getting into his fingers while he used them, and came out with a number.

He paced the barrow pile. He counted what was left standing of the wall they’d been taking down since morning. It came out enough. A little over, even.

He told Bett. Bett nodded and went on laying.

It wasn’t enough.

He found that out with the light going. The stones from the bottom courses of the wall were rounder than the ones from the top, bellied underneath where they’d sat in the ground a hundred years, and a round stone laid down covers less floor than it looks as if it should. He’d paced the top of the wall. He’d counted the bottom as the same.

By the time the sky went yellow in the west, there was a strip of bare earth across the far end of the barn, three paces deep and the full width, from the hay to the north wall. The corner. The new dark earth.

They’d left it for last. Nobody had said so. Everybody had started from the door, because that was where you’d start, and worked in, and kept working in, and the far corner had stayed the far corner all day long.

"I counted it wrong," Ivo said.

Bett sat back on her heels and looked at the strip.

"I paced the top of the wall," he said. "The bottom stones are fatter. I didn’t allow for it. That’s three paces."

Bett nodded.

"There’s more wall."

"There’s no more light." She stood up slowly, one hand on her knee. "We’ll do it in the morning."

"We could do it in the dark."

"In the dark we stand in the door," she said. "That’s what the dark’s for."

"Cover it with the hay?" Ivo asked.

"No." She kept her eyes on it. "Leave it where we can see it."

+++

Ovid Crowe had been writing.

He sat on a crate by the byre with a board across his knees and Bett’s ink and Bett’s pen, which she’d given him at the midday change without explaining anything, and he’d been writing on and off since. Ivo went and looked over his shoulder because everybody did that here.

It was short. The Halbrook holding. The date. The barn floor flagged from the door inward with stone from the road wall. Three paces left bare at the north end by dark. Will finish in the morning. Under it, the four names of the people who’d come, and arrived at noon.

"That’s all?" Ivo asked.

"That’s what happened."

"You didn’t write why."

Crowe looked at what he’d written. "She didn’t tell me why," he said. "I’m not going to make it up."

Ivo nodded. He liked him for that, a little.

At the byre door the boy had come out with his mother, in his coat, with the dog against his legs. He’d been carrying all day. Small stones, the fist-sized ones nobody else bothered with, for packing the gaps between courses, one in each hand, back and forward across the yard until Nissa made him stop and eat. He’d packed every gap in the first six courses himself and Bett had let him, and had gone over every one of them after he’d gone in, without saying anything, and hadn’t moved one.

Now he was looking at the barn door with the lamp lit behind it and the stone floor shining a little where people had walked on it.

"Is it done?" he asked.

"Nearly," Nissa told him.

"Is it better?"

Nissa didn’t answer straight away.

"It’s different," she said.

The boy considered that, and seemed to find it fair, and went in.

+++

At dusk both fives took the door with their backs to the wall, the way they’d stood it since the twelfth of the last month. Brisk Alder took the east fifth with Innes Garrow’s spear. Ivo took the west. Fenn Jarrow stood a pace behind the two fives with his dead arm in his coat and his face to the dark, where there was nobody to hand him a weapon, and nobody needed to.

Ivo’s post was the length of the west wall. He walked it once before full dark, out and back, looking down. Frozen snow along the foot of the stone, trodden. Nothing sunk. Nothing new.

He came back past the open door and looked in.

The lamp hung from its nail on the beam above the floor, and the light went out across the stone, course after course of it, gray and fitted, the boy’s small stones packed in the joints. Nissa sat against the wall by the door with Joss asleep across her knees. Sedge lay where the stone stopped and the earth began, with his chin on his paws, facing the far end.

Ivo went in. He wasn’t supposed to leave the wall, and he went in anyway, for the length of a breath, and crossed the stone floor to the end of it, and crouched.

The bare strip was three paces deep, a little less at the hay end, and dark. He pulled off his right glove and pushed two fingers into the earth.

It gave. It wasn’t frozen. It hadn’t been frozen, not in here, not all winter. Outside, the ground was iron a hand deep, and things had to go under that to get anywhere. In here, with stone walls about it and a lamp burning every night and people sleeping on it, there’d never been any frost to go under at all.

He took his fingers out and looked at them. Then he pulled the glove back on and went back to the wall, and stood his post, facing west along the stone into the dark, and did the sum again on his fingers, the right way this time, the bottom of the wall as fat as it was.

It still came out three paces short.