Chapter 598 - 597: Where the Stone Was

Chapter 598: Chapter 597: Where the Stone Was

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

Date/Time:TC1858.03.02 – TC1858.03.03

Somebody had swept the bare strip after the laying, and the broom marks were still in it, faint parallel lines running the long way.

Ovid Crowe sat on a bucket turned over at the edge of the last course with the strip in front of his boots and the north wall beyond it. Three paces of earth, wall to wall. Two hours of looking, and he knew where every one of the lines went.

Bett had posted him here at full dark. She’d come in off the door with her split knuckles wrapped and stood over the strip and said, "Watch it. Say if it moves," and gone back out without telling him what moving would look like. He hadn’t asked; if he had to ask, he wasn’t the right person to be sitting on the bucket.

That took one from the West Five. Bett had said so out loud, at the door, so that nobody would find it out later. West’s a four tonight. Nobody had argued about that either.

Behind him, by the door, Nissa Halbrook sat against the wall with her son asleep across her lap and a blanket over both of them. The dog lay at the line where the stone ended, a body’s length to Crowe’s left, with his head up and his eyes open. Every so often the dog’s ears moved. Crowe had stopped looking at the dog each time it happened. It happened too often.

Outside, the night was very still. The fives were breathing at the door, close enough to hear, and somebody’s boots shifting on frozen ground, and once a low word he didn’t catch, and the answer. Ulric Dunnet’s voice, known by its depth.

The lamp hissed on its nail.

+++

Somewhere past the third hour the broom marks moved.

Not that he saw them move. They were simply not where they had been. The nearest line, the one that ran a hand’s width from the foot of the north wall, had been straight for two hours, and now it bowed, very slightly, toward the middle of the strip. As if the earth under it had settled a finger’s breadth.

There was the lamp. The flame was low and yellow and leaning a little in the draft from the door, and the shadows on the floor leaned with it, and he thought: that’s the lamp. It’s moving the shadows. Look again when it stands up straight.

He waited for the flame to stand up straight.

It did. The line was still bowed. And the next one along had bowed with it, and the dark patch at the hay end, where the earth was newer, had gone a little darker, the way ground does when something underneath has let water up into it.

The dog was on his feet. Crowe hadn’t seen him get up.

"Bett," Crowe said. It came out quieter than he wanted, and he said it again, properly. "Bett. It’s moving."

She was through the door before he’d finished. Two from the east five came in behind her, and Ulric Dunnet behind them, stooping under the lintel. Bett went past Crowe without looking at him and stopped at the edge of the stone with her spear down and her eyes on the strip.

"Where?"

"The middle. And the hay end." He pointed. "The marks bent. I thought it was the lamp."

"How long ago?"

"A breath. Two." He made himself say it. "I waited for the lamp."

Bett didn’t answer that. She was watching the floor.

The earth in the middle of the strip sank. It went down slowly, a shallow dish of it, a hand deep and then two, and the broom lines in it ran down into the dip and disappeared.

Then the floor under Crowe’s feet scraped.

He felt it through the soles of his boots before he heard it: a long dragging pressure under the stone, moving, the whole length of a man and longer, passing beneath the course he stood on and on toward the door. The flag under his left boot lifted the width of a hair and settled. The next one along lifted and settled. Then the sound of it, a grinding underneath, stone on whatever was down there, going away from him toward the door where Nissa sat with the boy.

"It’s under the stone," he said.

Nissa was standing. She had the boy against her shoulder, still asleep, and her back to the wall.

The grinding went the length of the barn and stopped below the door. Crowe held his breath. Nothing came up. It turned in a long scraping arc under the stone and came back, slower, the whole way, the flags rising and settling one after another in a line down the middle of the floor like a row of keys being tried in a lock.

None of them gave.

It came back to the edge of the stone, under Crowe’s feet, and stopped. And in the middle of the bare strip, the dish of sunken earth broke open.

+++

The head came up out of it gray and streaming and swung toward the light.

Bett went at it before it was clear of the ground. She went low and in and set her point at the place behind the head where the plate stopped, and the neck began.

It didn’t go in.

The point slid. Crowe watched it catch and ride down the back of the neck along another plate that lay over the first, edge on edge, and come off the end of it into nothing, and Bett’s whole weight go after it, so that she staggered and had to catch herself on one knee on the stone.

"It’s covered." She was already getting up. "The joint’s covered."

The animal came up another length. Its forelimbs came out of the hole folded and opened, long and jointed backward, and one of them swept across the stone at the height of a man’s shins and took one of the east five off his feet. He went down hard on the flags and rolled and was up again, his shield arm hanging.

"Stone," Bett said.

Crowe didn’t understand her.

"Stone. The floor. Lift it. From the door end." She was standing between the hole and the rest of them with her spear held crosswise like a bar. "It can’t come through the stone. It came up where there isn’t any. Cover the hole."

Dunnet understood before Crowe did. He turned and went back down the barn to the door end, to the first course Bett had laid that morning, and got his fingers under the edge of a flag and lifted it out of its bed whole. The small stones the boy had packed around it fell out and rattled on the earth underneath. Back up the barn it came, against his chest, the way he’d carried them in all afternoon, and he didn’t hurry, because a man carrying a weight like that can’t.

"Which side?"

"This one. Over the edge. Push it in."

The animal had stopped coming up. It was half out of the ground with its head turned toward the lamp and its forelimbs folded again, and it was doing nothing at all. Dunnet laid the flag on the bare earth at the edge of the hole and set his weight on it and slid it, grinding, toward the head.

The head dropped.

It went straight down into the hole, as if the ground had simply let go of it, and the flag slid over the place where it had been and tipped and dropped half a hand and stopped, wedged, covering a third of the hole.

"Again," Bett said.

Crowe went to the door end and found the next flag and got his fingers under it and it wouldn’t come; it was bedded too well, and he pulled at it until the skin went off two knuckles, and Nissa set the boy down against the wall, still asleep, and came and set her hands beside his and they lifted it together. It was heavier than anything he had ever carried. They got it up the barn somehow, crabwise, and Dunnet took it off them as if it were a tray and laid it beside the first.

The east man with the hanging arm brought a third, one-handed, dragging it.

Dunnet set the third flag at the far edge of the hole and knelt on it to slide it, and the earth beside him moved.

It was not the hole. It was the strip, a pace to the left of the hole, where the earth was still bare. Crowe saw it go dark and soft, and he said, "There—" and that was all he had time for.

The forelimbs came out of the earth under Dunnet’s knees. Not the head. Only the limbs. They came up out of the ground and closed on him at the thigh, and the earth under him opened and he went down into it to the waist before anybody moved.

Bett had him around the chest. Crowe had one of his arms. The flag was still under Dunnet’s hands; he’d been kneeling on it, and he had hold of its edge, and he was holding on to it, not to them.

"Let go of it," Bett said. "Ulric, let go of the stone, give me your hand—"

He didn’t. His eyes were on the hole beside him, the first one, with a flag and a half across it and a gap still open at the hay end. The stone was what he pushed; from where he was, sunk to the waist in the ground with the limbs around his legs, and the flag slid off its bed and went the last hand’s width and dropped into the gap and closed it.

Then he let go of the stone, and he let go of Crowe’s arm, and the earth took him.

Bett went over backward with nothing in her arms. Crowe was on his knees on the flag with his hand out over the place where Dunnet had been, and the place was a hole a little wider than a man, and then it wasn’t, because the loose earth was sliding in from the sides to fill it, the way water fills a footprint, and in a few breaths there was only a soft dark dip in the floor with the broom marks gone out of it.

Nobody spoke.

Under the stone, under all of them, something went scraping away toward the north wall. It went a long way. Then Crowe couldn’t hear it anymore.

+++

They laid the rest of the strip by lamplight with stone from the door end.

Bett said it, and then she didn’t say anything else for the length of the work. Crowe and Nissa and the east man with the bad arm carried. Bett laid. She bedded every flag the way she had that morning, with the heel of her fist and her weight and the rocking test, and the rag on her knuckles came off, and she didn’t stop to wrap it again. When the strip was covered there was a matching strip at the door end, three paces of bare earth with the boy’s small stones lying loose on it, and Bett looked at it and said, "Leave that," and went out to the door.

Crowe went to the door after her and stood in it.

He’d heard the yard while they worked. He’d heard it without looking, the way you hear rain on a roof while you’re doing something else: boots, and somebody shouting Ground, ground, twice, high and hard, from the yard side of the fives, and a crack like river ice going, and then the same voice not shouting anymore. Then spears. Then a long time of nothing much. He’d carried flags through all of it.

Now the yard was blue with the first of the light. The two fives stood where they’d stood at dusk, backs to the wall, both of them short. Brisk Alder at the east end of the wall, Innes Garrow’s spear upright in her hands. Ivo at the west, his face gray. And out past them, between the door and the woodpile, a place where the snow had heaved up in a long ridge and broken open at the end, and the crust lay in plates around the break.

Fenn Jarrow lay beside it on his back. His good arm was out across the snow. His legs were in the ground to the knee, and the ground had frozen back around them.

Brisk Alder didn’t look at him. She was facing out, east along the wall, the way she’d been placed. She spoke without turning her head.

"The snow came up in a line," she said. "From the gate. Toward him. You could see it go, like something swimming under a sheet. He saw it first. He called it." She stopped. "He called it twice. Then it came up under him and took his legs and pulled, and he went in to the knees, and something in him broke. It let go and went down. He didn’t call again."

"And the other one?"

"At the door. Mine wouldn’t go in." She moved the spear a little in her hands. "Behind the head. Where it goes. It slid off. There’s another plate."

"I know," Crowe said.

"It didn’t bite. It didn’t fold around to bite anybody. It held us off with the arms and looked at us, and when it had looked, it went back down." Brisk Alder shifted her grip. "Two of them did that. Down. And one on the road the whole time, by the gate post. Watching. It went off before the light."

Crowe counted. One under the floor. One that came up under Fenn. One at the door. One on the road.

"Four," he said.

Brisk Alder nodded once, at the empty yard. "And we didn’t kill one."

+++

He wrote it on Bett’s board, sitting on the crate against the byre, with Bett’s ink, as soon as there was enough light to see the page.

He wrote the names first, because that was where they went. Fenn Jarrow. Then Ulric Dunnet. Fenn went first because Fenn’s voice had stopped while Dunnet was still carrying, and that was the only order he had.

Then he wrote what had happened. He wrote that he had waited one breath for the lamp. Bett read over his shoulder and didn’t tell him to take it out, so it stayed.

Nothing came up through the stone. A second plate over the joint. No bite. He closed the hole before he let go.

Four. None killed.

He capped the pen.

Bett took the board from his knees and read it through once, from the names down, and gave it back to him.

"That’s right," she said.

Behind her, across the yard, the barn door stood open. Crowe could see in to the door end of the floor: the bare strip there, three paces of dark earth where the stones had come up in the night, and the loose fist-sized stones lying on it.

The boy was awake, kneeling on the stone at the edge of the bare earth with the dog beside him, and he was picking up the small stones one at a time and putting them in a row along the last course, where they’d have to go back in when the flags were relaid.

Nobody had asked him to. Nissa was sitting against the wall behind him, watching, with her hands in her lap.

He had six in a row. He picked up the seventh, turned it over, looked at the underside, and put it down at the end of the row, and reached for the next one.