Chapter 604 - 603: The Squares

Chapter 604: Chapter 603: The Squares

Location:Seven Peaks — The Hall; The North Camp; The North Gate

Date/Time:TC1858.03.10 – TC1858.03.11

Boots, mostly. A boot at the foot of every bedroll, toe up, and Hanne Lowther counted them with her fingertips in the dark.

There was no light to read the Wall by at the third hour, and she couldn’t have read it lying down anyway, so she had stopped trying on the first night. She went down the line under the Wall on her knees, from the east end, and touched the toe of each boot and said the name over it without sound. Where there was no boot there was bare flag, and the bare flag was cold in a way the rest of the floor wasn’t, and she rested two fingers on it for one breath and went on.

Three hundred and some. She knew the boots now. One pair near the east end had a split welt. One pair was too big and stuffed at the toes with straw. One woman slept with hers inside the blanket, so you touched wool and felt through it for the shape of the toe.

At the west end she knelt up and wrote the count on the slate by feel, two columns, and stood up with her knees cracking.

There was one more.

+++

The tent stood in the middle of the field like the last tooth in a jaw.

All around it the camp’s ground lay in squares, three hundred and some of them, dark on the white where the tents had been, each with its ring of peg holes at the corners. The snow had come down on the second night and not settled on them. It fell and melted. Every square was black and wet and soft at the edges, and the snow between them stood a hand deep and frozen, so that from the gate the field was a board for some game nobody played anymore.

She went out the north gate with a shuttered lamp and the slate under her arm and walked down the trodden path to the tent. The path ran straight between the squares. Somebody had said in the second day that it was quicker to walk on the squares, because they weren’t frozen, and somebody else had said not to, and nobody had.

Tilda Rudd stood on the east side of the tent with a spear, facing out. Lisle Thorley stood on the west, facing out. Neither turned when Hanne came up.

"Hanne," Tilda said.

"Change at the fourth."

"I know."

The lamp was lit inside the tent. The canvas glowed with it, dull yellow, and she could see the shape of Odo Pask sitting up against the pole with something across his knees.

"Odo."

"Hanne."

"Count’s done. You’re the last."

"I know I’m the last. You tell me every night."

"I’m going to keep telling you."

There was a pause inside the canvas. Then the flap moved, and Odo’s head came out, gray and unshaven, with the camp mallet in his hand, the big one with the iron-banded head they used for driving pegs.

"They’re coming up again," he said. "The pegs. I drive them in at dusk, and they’re a finger out by midnight. I’ve done that corner twice." He jerked his head at the north-east corner of the tent. "It’s softer this side than it was."

Hanne found the peg with the lamp. It stood a finger proud of the snow, a dark ring of wet earth around it.

"It’s not frost doing that," Odo said. "There’s no frost under me. I’ve had my hand on it."

"Then come in."

"No."

"Odo, I’m asking."

"I’ve slept in this tent every night since I came over," he said. "My name’s on that wall in your hand, and every night there’s a line of people lying under it with their mouths open, and one day there’ll be a line through mine and a bare bit of floor under it where I’d have been. I’m not lying down under it till there is." His eyes came to hers. "I’m not being clever. I can’t do it. I tried, the first night. I stood in the door."

"I know. I saw you."

"Then you know."

She did know. She stood in the snow and didn’t say anything else, because there was nothing left to say, and he took his head back in and the flap fell.

Tilda said, without turning: "He drove that corner at the second hour. I heard him."

"Tell me if he does it again."

"Why?"

"I want to know how fast it comes up."

She went back along the path toward the gate. She was about halfway, and the gate arch was a black shape against the lamps in the yard, when Lisle Thorley said behind her, quietly:

"Ground."

+++

She turned with the lamp.

It wasn’t under the snow. That was the first thing. There was no ridge in the snow. The snow between the squares didn’t move at all.

The squares moved.

Out on the east side of the field, one of the dark squares humped up in the middle, wet earth lifting and parting and settling back, and then the one beside it, and then the one beyond that, coming in toward the tent. It was going from square to square. Under the frozen snow between them, and up through each soft one as it passed, so that the camp’s own ground showed where it was like footprints.

"Odo," she shouted. "Out!"

The flap came open. Odo came out on his knees with the mallet, and stood up, and saw it.

Three squares from the tent it stopped coming up.

Hanne held the lamp high and waited, and nothing moved, nothing at all, and then the square on the path side, between the tent and the gate, between Odo and her, rose and split and kept rising, and it came up out of it.

All of it. The head and the shoulders and the long gray body, black with wet earth, on to the snow on the far side of its square. It shook itself. Then it lay down.

It lay down across the path, lengthwise, head toward the east, tail toward the west, between the three of them at the tent and the gate, and folded its forelimbs against itself and did not move.

"It’s the lane," Hanne said aloud. She’d heard the sheet read twice. "It’s the lane at the bore."

Nobody answered her. Tilda had come around the tent to the path side with her spear. Lisle had come around the other side. Odo stood between them with the mallet.

"Go around it," Hanne called. "Go wide. Go around it on the snow."

Tilda turned her head left. The snow there was ten paces wide between two squares, and then there was another square, and then snow, and then square. To go around it she would have to walk the board.

"Which ones?" Tilda said. Her voice was very calm. "Hanne. Which ones are safe?"

Hanne didn’t know.

Behind her, in the gate, the bell went. Not twice. Over and over, as fast as somebody could pull it.

+++

They came out of the Hall in their stockings, some of them. They came into the gate passage and stopped there, on the paving, in a crowd, because Hanne held her arm out across it and said, "No," in the voice she used at the morning count when somebody moved, and they stopped.

Raven came through them.

She came through them fast, in shirt and trousers, barefoot on the stone, and stopped beside Hanne at the edge of the paving where the trodden path began. She saw the thing lying across the path, and the three beyond it, and the tent, and the field of dark squares. Then she lifted her hand, open, toward the animal.

Hanne had never seen it. She had heard about it from people who had, at Ferrow’s Rest, at the east wall. She had pictured something larger.

It was a line. It came out of Raven’s hand narrow and white, and so bright that for the rest of the night Hanne saw it whenever she shut her eyes, and it went across the forty paces of snow and hit the animal along its back.

The back came off.

It came off in sheets, gray, the way ash comes off a log when you knock it, and blew away into the dark smoking, and underneath it the animal was bare and black, and it got up.

It got up on its legs and turned toward the gate.

Raven’s hand was still out. The line went again. This time it went into the bare back, and its legs went out, and it lay down on its side in the snow, smoking, and lifted its head and set it down again.

Raven made a sound, very small. She didn’t lower her hand.

The third line went through it at the neck. The joint. Hanne saw the plate there, the second one, the one from the sheet, and saw it go dull red and then not be there. The head stopped moving.

Raven went down. Not far: onto one knee on the paving, both hands flat on the stone, her head hanging. Hanne had heard about that too. She counted without meaning to, the way she counted everything. One. Two.

"Now!" Hanne shouted. "Over it — over it, on the path, come on —"

Tilda came first. She came straight up the path and over the carcass, stepping on it, because it was the only thing between her and the gate that wasn’t earth, and it smoked under her boots, and she came on. Lisle came after her.

Odo was last. He had the mallet. He’d turned, as a fifth turns, to look behind them, at the tent, at the squares.

The square under his feet was the one the path ran past. The path’s edge. He was on the snow, a pace off it.

The snow didn’t move. Hanne would remember that. The snow under Odo Pask didn’t lift or crack or do anything at all. The square beside him opened, and something came sideways out of it, low, very fast, the way a fish takes a fly, and took him at the knees and went back down into the square with him.

That was all. One breath. Less.

The mallet lay on the snow where he’d been. The square closed over. The wet earth settled and was flat and black and steaming a little in the cold, the same as all the others.

+++

Eight. Nine. Raven got up, and went out.

Hanne saw her go and didn’t understand, and then did. Raven walked off the paving onto the path, barefoot, past Tilda and Lisle coming the other way, and they turned to grab her and she was already by. She went down the path to the carcass and over it and on, to the square where Odo had gone, and she stood at its edge and held both hands out, open, toward the ground.

The line went into the earth.

It made a noise like water poured on a forge. The square boiled. Black mud jumped and spattered, and steam went up in a column, and there was nothing in it. She put a second line into it, and a third, until the steam was everywhere. Nothing came up. Nothing moved under it. It was mud.

Her arms were shaking.

Then she stopped, and stood in the steam with her hands still out, and Hanne saw the next square over lift.

It lifted in the middle, as the first ones had, and then the one beyond it, going away from Raven. Then it stopped and turned. The square nearest to her heels lifted, just a little. A hand’s width. As if something under it had come up close to have a look.

"Raven," Hanne said.

She hadn’t shouted it. She’d said it the way she said a name at the count, once, and Raven heard it and turned her head.

"Come back," Hanne said. "Come back to the gate."

Raven’s eyes went down to her own bare feet on the trodden snow of the path, a pace from the boiling square, and then to the square behind her heels, which had settled again. She stayed on that one longer than Hanne liked.

Then she walked back. She didn’t run. She walked back along the path and over the carcass and up to the paving, and when she got to the paving her knees went, and she sat down on the stone in the gate passage where she’d stopped, with her back to the wall, and didn’t get up.

Kairos was there. Hanne didn’t know when he’d come. He crouched beside Raven and took her hands, which were shaking and would not stop, and held them in his own and didn’t say anything at all.

Out on the north slope, past the last of the squares, something pale stood side-on to the gate in the light from the yard. Hanne saw it when she lifted the lamp. It stood there long enough for her to see that it was looking at the gate passage, at the people on the stone, at the woman sitting against the wall. Then it went over the shoulder of the slope and was gone.

+++

At first light Tilda came to the gate first, before anybody else was up off the floor, and stood in front of Hanne with her spear grounded.

"You asked how fast it came up," she said. "The corner. He drove it at dusk. He drove it again at the second hour, because it was a finger out. It was a finger out again by the third. I put my hand on it."

Hanne wrote it on the slate under the count. North-east corner. Driven at the second hour. A finger out by the third.

Then Tilda went back out for the mallet. She walked out along the path and over the carcass, which had frozen in the night with the steam still on it in frost, and picked it up off the snow where it lay, and walked back, and laid it on the paving at Hanne’s feet with the iron head toward the field. Nobody went with her. Nobody told her not to.

Hanne waited in the gate arch with the slate.

The field was the field. Three hundred and some dark squares on white, in rows, in tent order. The square where Raven had burned it was gray with ash and frozen hard on top for the first time, a crust of baked mud gone white with frost. Every other square was black and wet.

In the middle, where the tent had stood, the canvas lay on the ground. It had come down when the pole went. Somebody would have to go out and get it.

Around it, at the four corners and along the sides, the pegs still stood in the earth. Odo had driven them at dusk, and the one corner twice, and they stood a finger proud, every one, in a ring around nothing.

Hanne wiped the count off the slate with the side of her hand and wrote it again, one less.