Chapter 603 - 602: The Path

Chapter 603: Chapter 602: The Path

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

Date/Time:TC1858.03.12

Snow, melted in Hob’s pot, tasted of iron and onion and the bottom of somebody else’s cooking.

Nissa Halbrook drank it anyway, standing by the hearth-stone in the gray before light, holding the cup close. It was the second potful. The first had been his stew.

Nobody had lifted the lid the night before. She’d lifted it at the fourth hour, because the barn needed water and the well was across the yard at the house, and there was snow drifted deep under the eaves at the north gable that somebody could reach with a bucket from the loft door. She’d taken the lid off and found the stew underneath, cold and set, a skin of white fat over it, and the meat in it gone soft the way he’d said it would if you put it in last. She had stood there holding the lid.

Then she had got bowls, and woken the ones who were awake already, and given it out. Nobody said whose it was. Everybody ate it. Maude Quarry ate hers sitting against the wall with the bowl on her knees and her bruised wrists showing below her cuffs, slowly, all of it, and then sat holding the empty bowl until Nissa took it from her.

After that she’d scoured the pot with a handful of straw and filled it with snow, and the snow had melted down to almost nothing, and she’d filled it again. Now they had water. It tasted of the pot.

Across the yard, the cows were bawling.

They had been bawling since first light the day before, low and on and on, cows wanting one thing and unable to think about anything else. The trough in the byre had been frozen since the tenth. Nobody had broken it, because nobody had crossed the yard, because Hob Lomax had been taken a pace from the threshold at noon in full sun.

She had told Bram Corliss, a month ago, standing in this barn with ten soldiers listening, that if they wanted the cows they could have the cows. She had meant it. She’d buy more cows.

She hadn’t known it would sound like this.

+++

"Stone," she said.

They were around the hearth-stone, most of them, the ones not at the door. Sera Vahn had her strapped arm across her chest. Bett was crouched on her heels with her split knuckles on her knees.

"They come up through earth," Nissa said. "Not through stone. Every time. Your sheet says it. Nothing came up through the stone. My floor says it." She nodded at the flags under them. "So put stone on the earth. From this door to the byre door. A path. Then I can water my cows."

The barn was quiet.

"It’s twenty paces," Ivo said. He’d done it already, she could see, on his fingers. "Near enough. Twenty flags, if they’re the big ones."

"There’s four lying out there now," Nissa said.

Bett turned toward the door. "And the rest are at the wall gap."

Nissa nodded.

"Across the yard."

"Forty paces of it."

Bett said nothing. Her eyes met Sera Vahn’s, and neither of them said what Nissa could see them both thinking, which was that the last time anybody had carried a flag across that yard it had cost a man.

"I’m not asking anybody to carry," Nissa said. "I’ll carry."

"You’re not carrying," Bett said.

"They’re my cows."

"They’re your cows. It’s my yard." Bett stood up. "Since the fifteenth of last month, it’s been my yard, and I’ve stood in it every night, and I’ll say who crosses it." Then she said, differently, down at Nissa: "It’s a good idea. It’s the best one anybody’s had in this barn in a month. I’m not saying no. I’m saying you’re not carrying."

+++

Edric Fairley went up on the roof.

It was his idea, and he said it to Sera Vahn and not to Bett, and Sera Vahn said, "Ask her," and he did. The barn roof was slate on old timber, steep, with a ridge you could sit astride, and from the ridge you could see every part of the yard and the field beyond the road wall and the road both ways to the bend. They got him up through the hay loft and out through the loft door on the north gable, above the boarded owl hole, with a rope around his waist that Ambrose Wick tied to a beam and checked twice, and he went up the slates on his hands and knees and sat astride the ridge with the whole yard under him.

"I’ll call it," he said, from up there. His voice came down thin. "I’ll see it from here before anybody on the ground does. You’ll have time."

"How much time?" Nissa asked.

He didn’t answer straight away.

"Some," he said.

They carried in pairs. One to carry and one to watch the carrier’s feet, so that whoever was carrying didn’t have to look anywhere but where they were going. Tamsin Kemp and Ambrose Wick first. They went out across the yard at a fast walk, not running, because Bett said running meant falling, and you didn’t want to fall out there; and at the wall gap Tamsin bent and found a flag with her boot and got it up, and they came back with it, fast, Ambrose a pace behind with his eyes on the snow, and the whole barn held its breath until they were over the threshold.

Bett took the flag from Tamsin at the door and laid it on the snow outside, in the trodden place in front of the threshold, square, and stood on it and rocked it, and knelt and packed the edges with snow and then with earth she scraped from beside it, and stood on it again.

"One," she said.

Nissa stood in the door and took it in. It was outside. It was the first stone in the yard that anybody had put there on purpose. A gray square on white, the size of a door’s width, with Bett standing on it.

Behind her, Ivo made a mark on his fingers and said nothing.

+++

The four lying in the yard came in first.

Nobody had wanted to touch them. They’d lain where they fell since noon the day before, and everybody in the barn knew whose was whose. The two in the middle of the yard were near enough that Bett could reach them from the path as it grew; she laid the second flag and the third, and then stepped out along them and reached and dragged Edric’s in, and then Ambrose’s, grinding them across the snow, and laid them each at the end of the line.

Tamsin went for her own, the one by the woodpile, without being asked, and came back with it on her shoulder and her teeth set, and Bett laid it.

That left Hob’s.

It lay where it had lain, four paces out from the threshold, square to the door, just past the patch where the crust had broken and closed again. When Bett laid the path, she’d laid it at an angle from the door, the first flags reaching out to the left, toward the byre, so that the line didn’t cross that patch of ground at all. Nissa had watched her do it and understood.

Now they needed it.

Nobody moved. Tamsin, standing on the path with her hands on her knees, didn’t look at it. Bett, kneeling at the end of the line with her knuckles bleeding again through the rag, didn’t look at it.

Nissa went out.

She went out along the path, stone to stone, the way she’d watched the others go, and at the end of it she stepped off onto the snow, because there wasn’t anything else to step onto, and somebody behind her said her name sharply, and from the roof Edric said nothing at all. She walked the four paces to Hob’s flag and bent and got her fingers under the edge of it.

It was heavier than she’d thought. Frozen in at the bottom where it had lain all night. She pulled and it didn’t come and she pulled again, and it came free with a crack, and she got it up high against her chest, as Hob had carried his, both arms around, and turned with it.

The path was four paces away. It seemed a very long way.

She walked it. She didn’t run. She stepped up onto the end of the path with the flag against her and held it out to Bett, and Bett took it from her without a word and laid it, and rocked it, and packed it.

Nissa stood on it. It was steady.

Then she went back inside and sat down on the barn floor next to her son, and found that her hands were shaking, and pressed them flat on the stone until they stopped.

Joss was watching her.

"That was the one by the door," he said.

"Yes."

He thought about it. Then he picked up two of his packing stones from the row along the bare strip and got up and went to the threshold, and stood on the first flag outside, the one Bett had laid, and turned to face her.

"I’ll do the cracks," he said. "From on top. I won’t step off."

Bett glanced at the boy, and at his feet on the stone, and nodded once.

"Go on, then," Nissa said.

+++

The rider came a little before midday.

Edric saw him first, from the ridge. "Road," he called down. "From the north. One. Riding." And then: "Seven Peaks. He’s got a bag."

Bett went to the door. Sera Vahn went with her. They watched him come down off the rise and along the road toward the gate, and when he was close enough to hear, Bett cupped her hands and shouted, "Stay up! Don’t get down! Ride to the door!" and the rider, who must have been told something on the road or must have seen the four dark squares and the path and the barn with everybody in it at noon, didn’t argue. He came through the gate at a trot and across the yard and pulled up at the barn door with his mount’s forefeet on the first flag, and handed the bag down from the saddle without dismounting.

He was one of the Corps. Nissa didn’t know his name. He was gray-faced from the road.

"Windbreak’s sheet," he said. "Thorne’s copy. Three days and a bit. The road’s bad past the sheepfold." His eyes went past Bett to the barn, full, and then at the path running out across the yard toward the byre with a boy kneeling on it. "They were striking the tents when I rode out," he said. "Up at the mountain. The camp. Moving in off the ground into the Hall, in tent order, under the roll on the Wall."

Sera Vahn didn’t say anything. Nissa saw her face, and then didn’t look at it again.

"Who said?" Sera Vahn asked.

"Nobody said. Lowther was going down the line asking everybody." He paused. "They were going."

Sera Vahn nodded slowly.

Bett read the sheet standing in the door. She read it the whole way down, and then turned it over to the back, which was blank, and then read the front again. The neck was covered over with a second plate. A gap in it, when the head bent back to bite, for as long as it held the person it had bitten. There are no safe hours.

"No safe hours," Bett said, to nobody.

She gave it to Sera Vahn. Sera Vahn read it one-handed, holding it against her strapped arm. She took longer over the part about the gap. Then she folded it into her coat, with Edric’s.

The rider took his mount around to the end of the barn where there was a lean-to over a patch of stone, and came back on foot along the wall, keeping his shoulder to it, and came in.

+++

By the middle of the afternoon the path was fifteen flags long, and the wall gap was nearly bare of anything that would lie flat.

Tamsin and Ambrose had made eleven trips. Maude had made four with Brisk Alder watching her feet, and then Bett had stopped her, because her wrists wouldn’t close properly on the stone. Edric had called nothing from the roof. Every so often his voice came down: "Nothing. Nothing on the road. Nothing." It got hoarse. Nobody told him to stop.

At the gap, Tamsin went over the last of it with her boot and came back empty-handed.

"Round ones," she said. "That’s all that’s left. Round ones and rubble. They’ll roll."

Bett stood at the end of the path facing the byre.

It was four paces. Four paces of bare snow between the last flag and the byre door. Inside, the cows had stopped bawling some time ago, which Nissa did not like.

"The ladder," Bett said.

They brought it down from the hay loft: long, heavy, old ash, the rungs worn smooth in the middle from forty years of feet. They laid it down on the snow from the last flag to the byre threshold, and it reached, with a hand to spare at either end.

"It’s wood," Ivo said.

"It’s what we’ve got."

"It’s on earth."

"I know what it’s on," Bett said. She stepped onto the end of it and stood there, and then took her weight off it and stepped back onto the stone.

"It’ll take somebody across," she said. "Not a cart. Not two at once. One, with buckets, quick."

"I’ll go," Nissa said.

Bett held her eye. This time she didn’t say no.

+++

Nissa took the buckets from inside the door, the two she’d set down there the day before, side by side. She filled them from Hob’s pot, which wasn’t enough, and from the pail of snow-water they’d been melting on the hearth-stone all afternoon, which nearly was.

She walked the path. Stone, and stone, and stone. Fifteen of them. Her son was kneeling on the ninth one with a fist-sized rock in each hand, and he moved his knees to let her past and didn’t say anything, and she didn’t either.

At the end she stopped.

The ladder lay across the snow in front of her with its rungs up. She would have to walk on the rails. She’d done it as a girl, in the loft, when nobody was looking.

From the roof, Edric’s voice came down, hoarse: "Nothing."

She stepped onto the rail. It gave a little under her on the uneven ground, and settled. She walked it. Four paces. She didn’t look down at the snow on either side, or at the gaps between the rungs where there was nothing but snow, and the buckets pulled at her shoulders, and then she was on the byre threshold, which was stone, and the door was in front of her.

She pushed it open with her shoulder.

The cows turned their heads. All of them. They were standing where they’d been standing, the three of them and the heifer, in the dim, steaming a little, and they looked at her with their wet dark eyes and then at the buckets, and the old red one stretched her neck out and made a sound that wasn’t a bawl.

The trough was a block of ice. Nissa broke it with the side of her fist, as she had every morning of every winter of her life, and it hurt as it always hurt, and she poured the first bucket in on the broken ice and stood back.

They drank. She stood in the door and listened to them drink.

When she turned around, the path ran back from her across the yard to the barn door: the ladder, and then stone, and stone, all the way, with her son kneeling on the ninth one and the soldiers in the doorway beyond him and Edric small and dark on the ridge of the roof against the sky.

From where she stood, it could have been a road.