Chapter 601 - 600: The Haul

Chapter 601: Chapter 600: The Haul

Location:The Millford Road — the Halbrook Holding; The Stone Barn; The Yard

Date/Time:TC1858.03.11

Onion and woodsmoke, and under them the dried meat, gone in last and softening in the pot. Maude Quarry smelled it before she was properly awake.

Hob had got the pot on the barn’s hearth-stone before light. Nobody had told him there was a hearth-stone; he’d found it, a broad slab set into the floor by the east wall where somebody long ago had kept a brazier, and he’d scraped it clean and built a fire on it no bigger than two hands, and now the whole barn smelled of food. Maude lay on her blanket with her eyes shut and breathed it in. It was the first hot thing anybody at Halbrook had cooked in a week. Bett’s people had been living on bread and cold meat since the night the floor went in. Nobody had wanted to cross the yard to the house to cook, and nobody had said that was the reason.

Hob was stirring the pot. Then the scrape of the lid going back on, and his voice saying, to nobody, "Not yet."

She got up.

+++

Sera Vahn had Edric’s sheet out on the feed crate by the door, and Bett was reading it.

Maude stood a little way off and watched Bett read. She had watched Bett since they rode in, because Bett was the one who’d held this place for a month and Maude wanted to know what that had done to her. It had made her very still. Bett read the sheet once, and then again, with her split knuckles on the crate on either side of it, and when she’d finished the second time she didn’t look up.

"Noon," Bett said.

"A little past."

"In a field. Off the road."

"A hundred paces out. Keeping pace with us." Sera Vahn’s voice was level. "Into a fold behind some thorn after that. It never came out."

Bett’s eyes went to the door. It stood open on the yard. The sun was up and the snow out there was white and hard and very bright, and across it the dark line of the road wall ran to the gate and stopped at the gap where they’d taken it down.

"We’ve stood that door every night for a month," Bett said. "And worked the yard every day. Hauled the stone across it. Fed the stock. Fetched water from the house." She stopped. "I never once thought about the day."

"Nobody did."

Bett nodded slowly. She creased the sheet back along Edric’s fold and handed it over.

"We still need the door end," she said. "Three paces. And the stones for it are out there." She tipped her head at the wall gap. "Forty paces of yard."

"Then we’ll stand a five around the people carrying," Sera Vahn said. "Fifth facing out. Nobody alone on the open ground."

Bett didn’t argue. Maude watched her not argue, and couldn’t tell whether that was because Bett agreed or because Bett had been holding the place alone for a month and was tired of being the one who decided.

+++

They split it the obvious way. Bett’s people had stood the door all night, so Bett’s day five took the form: Brisk Alder facing out with Innes Garrow’s spear, Ivo watching the carriers, three of the others Maude didn’t have names for yet. Sera Vahn’s people were fresh, so Sera Vahn’s people carried.

Maude carried. So did Tamsin, and Ambrose, and Edric, and Hob, who had taken the pot off the fire and set it on the stone floor by the wall with the lid on and said, "Leave that alone," to the barn in general, and gone out with the rest.

The wall gap was at the far side of the yard, where the road wall came down to meet the field. What was left there was rubble mostly, the round bottom stones Ivo had counted wrong and some broad ones off the top that had come down in the taking and lain half buried since. The flat ones were what Bett wanted. You had to find them under the snow with your boot, then crouch and get your fingers under the edge and break them free of the ground.

The five stood around them while they did it. Brisk Alder faced out toward the road with the spear. Ivo faced the carriers and watched.

Maude found a flag and broke it free, lifted it against her chest, and turned and walked it back across the yard.

It was a long forty paces. She hadn’t thought it would be. The snow was trodden hard along the line they were making, and her boots slid on it, and the stone pulled at her arms and her back, and she walked with the five moving around her like a fence somebody was carrying alongside, and she set the flag down on the stone inside the barn door where Bett could reach it and went back out for the next.

Joss was inside, kneeling at the edge of the bare strip with his row of packing stones. He’d made it two rows since the day before. Nissa was beside him, and the dog. When Maude came in with a flag, the boy watched her set it down and then went back to his stones.

Second trip. Third. By the fourth, her arms had stopped hurting and gone dull, which was worse. Bett laid what they brought as fast as it came. The bare strip at the door end got shorter by a flag each time somebody came in.

On the fourth trip Nissa came to the door as Maude set a flag down. She had a bucket in each hand.

"The trough in the byre’s frozen over," she said to Bett. "They’ve had nothing since yesterday."

Bett didn’t look up from the flag she was bedding. "After."

"They’re cows. They don’t know about after."

"After," Bett said again, and Nissa stood there with the empty buckets, and then set them down inside the door, side by side, and went back to the boy. Across the yard the byre door stayed shut.

Hob carried more than anybody. He was heavy and slow, and he didn’t hurry, and he picked the biggest flags because he could, and he carried them the way you’d carry a sleeping child, high on his chest with both arms around. Tamsin tried to take one off him on the fifth trip, and he said, "Get your own," without stopping.

Edric didn’t carry as fast as the rest. Maude saw why on the third trip. He was watching the yard. Every few steps, with a stone in his arms, he turned his head and looked across the snow, left and then right, and then went on. Nobody had told him to. He wasn’t in the five. Nobody had put him on watch.

+++

It was a little past noon when he dropped his stone.

Maude heard it go. A heavy sound on the hard snow, and then Edric’s voice, high and clear and loud enough to carry to the road.

"Ground. Ground — from the gate —"

Maude turned her head. The snow between the gate and the woodpile was lifting.

It came in a line. A long low ridge rising and settling, rising and settling, the crust glittering on top of it where it broke, coming across the yard toward them. It was not fast. It didn’t need to be.

"Stone," Sera Vahn said, from the barn door. She didn’t shout it. "Get on the stone. Now. All of you."

Maude ran.

She still had a flag against her chest, and she didn’t think to drop it, so she ran with it, and the barn door was twenty paces off and then fifteen, and the snow under her was hard and loud. The five broke around them. Brisk Alder was running backward, the spear out, her eyes on the ridge. Tamsin went past Maude with her arms empty. Ambrose had Edric by the coat and was hauling him.

Ten paces. Five. Maude went over the threshold and onto the flags, and the stone was solid and still under her boots, and she let the flag drop and turned around.

Hob was behind her.

He’d been furthest out, at the wall gap, bent over a stone he was working free, and he’d started late. Hob was coming as fast as he could, which wasn’t fast, a flag still in his arms. He’d dropped it at last, and the ridge was coming across the yard to his left, angled to meet him a few paces short of the door.

He saw it. Maude watched him see it. He put his head down and came on.

Three paces from the threshold, he was clear of it. Two. The ridge reached the trodden line behind him and stopped, and the snow there went still.

Then the ground in front of him opened.

It came up between Hob and the door. Not the head. The forelimbs, both of them, out of the snow a pace short of the stone, long and dark and jointed back on themselves, and they closed around him at the chest.

Maude went.

She went off the stone and back out onto the snow, which nobody had told her to do and everybody would have told her not to, and she got hold of his wrists. Both of them. His arms were out toward her already. His hands were huge and very cold, and his grip on her wrists was hard enough to hurt.

He was going down. Not fast. The ground under him was giving the way wet sand gives under a wave, and the limbs were drawing him into it, forward and down, and he was heavy, and her boots were sliding on the trodden snow toward the place where he was going.

Somebody had her by the belt. She felt it jerk tight behind her. Tamsin’s voice in her ear, low and steady: "I’ve got you. Hold him. I’ve got you."

She held him. The ground had him to the waist. His face was very close to hers and gray, and he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking past her shoulder at the barn.

"Maude. You’re on the snow. Get off it."

"No."

He let go of her wrists. She felt his hands come off them and grabbed for his coat, and his hands came up flat against her breastbone instead, both of them, with the whole weight of his arms behind them, and he shoved.

She went backward. Tamsin had her belt, and Tamsin went backward with her, and the two of them came down hard across the threshold, half on the stone and half off it, Maude’s heels still kicking at the snow.

When she got her head up, he was in to the shoulders. He didn’t reach for anything. Then the ground had all of him.

Tamsin dragged her the rest of the way onto the stone.

Inside, behind her, Nissa had the boy turned against her coat with her hand over the back of his head. Joss wasn’t fighting it. His row of packing stones lay along the edge of the bare strip where he’d been setting it, and one had rolled out of line, and nobody moved it.

Out on the snow a pace from the threshold there was a place where the crust was broken and the earth showed through, dark and wet, and as she watched, the snow around the edges slid in a little and stopped. The flag Hob had dropped lay three paces back from it, square to the door, where he’d let it fall.

+++

Nobody spoke on the stone.

They stood on the flagged floor just inside the door, thirteen of them and a woman and a boy and a dog, and they watched the yard.

The ridge came back. It came along the front of the barn, slow, a body’s length out from the wall, the whole width of the doorway and then past it, and it didn’t turn in. At the corner it stopped, and stayed. Then it went on along the east wall, toward the byre, and Maude lost it behind the stone.

A second one came from the direction of the house. It went straight across the yard to the byre and under the byre door, and they heard the cows shift and low inside, and then nothing. When Bett went to look, much later, every cow was standing where it had been.

Edric said, quietly, "Gate post."

There was a pale shape at the gate. It stood broadside to them in the full noon light where the road came in, perfectly still, white on white, looking at the door of the barn, or at the people in it, or at nothing. It stayed while the sun moved a hand across the sky. Then it turned and went up the road.

+++

They did not go back out.

Bett laid the last of the flags they’d brought in. There weren’t enough. When she’d set the last one, there was still a strip at the door end a little less than two paces deep, bare earth, Joss’s packing stones in their rows along the edge of it. Bett studied it, kneeling, and then got up.

"That stays," she said.

Sera Vahn was standing in the doorway, at the edge of the stone, looking out at the yard. Her strapped arm was across her chest. She hadn’t moved since Hob.

Bett went and stood beside her.

"Standing a five around them," Sera Vahn said. "That’s how you stand at a crossing. There wasn’t anything to stand against out there. It came from under."

Bett said nothing at first.

"I didn’t argue," she said.

"I know."

"I should have."

"You didn’t know either."

"I knew it came from under," Bett said. "I’d watched it come up through my floor." She stopped. "I just didn’t think about the day."

Behind them Maude sat on the flags with her back against the wall. Her wrists hurt where he’d held them, and her breastbone where he’d shoved. Marks were coming up on both, the shape of his fingers, red going dark.

By the east wall, Hob’s pot sat on the stone with the lid on. The fire on the hearth-stone had burned down to nothing, but the pot was still warm. Nobody had lifted the lid.

Out in the yard, the flags they had been carrying lay where people had dropped them. Two in the middle, where Ambrose and Edric had let theirs go. One near the woodpile that Tamsin had thrown. And one a few paces short of the door, square to the threshold, behind the place where the snow had slid in.

Nobody went out to fetch them. By evening the light had gone off the yard, and they were four dark shapes on the snow, in a broken line across the yard to the barn, and nobody looked at them, and everybody could have said where each one lay.