Chapter 607 - 606: Tiles

Chapter 607: Chapter 606: Tiles

Location:Wild Confederacy — Settlement Windbreak; the long house

Date/Time:TC1858.03.12 – TC1858.03.13

Kestrel’s spike holes were still in the boards.

Mei found them in the dark with her fingertip, the way she’d found them every night since the planks came in: two square holes a hand apart, the wood around them crushed where the bar had bitten, a splinter standing up from one edge that she had not pulled out and was not going to. The board ran under her pallet from the stove side toward the wall. There were thirty-some boards on the long house floor, doubled, laid over the earth on the Speaker’s word the day after the last plank party came home. Some of them still had frost-cracks in them from the flats. Some of them still smelled of the mix.

Mei lay with her finger in the hole and listened to the long house sleep.

It slept louder than it had before the herders came in. Two families from the east camps had the far end, behind a hide hung on a cord, and one of their children coughed in his sleep as regularly as a pump. Outside, beyond the wall of the long house and the next wall and the next, all of Windbreak’s stock stood packed in pens built of hurdles across what had been the drying ground, and the sound of them came in through the timbers all night, a low shifting, a bell on somebody’s lead goat, the occasional complaint. It had been like that for eleven days. Nobody had slept well in any of them.

By the stove, a little apart from his own five, the side man lay on his back with his bad leg straight and his good one bent. His name was Ansel. Mei had asked him the second night, when she brought him broth, and he had looked at her as if she had asked him something odd and then told her. She asked people their names now. It had started on the walk back from the bore, with Jessa’s iron left standing in the dead animal behind her, and she had not stopped.

Ansel’s thigh had been closed with a dozen stitches and was healing badly. With a stick he could walk on it. Standing a post was beyond him. Galen, who led the five and who had a voice like a man reading out a list of stores, had told him to sleep by the stove because it was warmest, and Ansel had said he would sleep where he liked, and then had slept by the stove.

The rest of Galen’s five slept along the door wall in their coats, spears laid beside them on the boards. One of them was always awake. Tonight it was a woman with a long braid whose name Mei had not yet asked.

That was the long house. Mei took her finger out of Kestrel’s spike hole and folded her hands on Raven’s letter, which was still in her coat over her ribs, still folded on its first creases, and shut her eyes.

+++

The board under her lifted.

Not much. A hair. Her back felt it before she understood it, the way you feel a cart go over a stone. Then it settled.

Mei opened her eyes.

The stove had burned down to red. In its light the boards ran away toward the far wall in their doubled rows, and Mei watched them. The woman with the braid was sitting up against the door wall with her spear across her knees, looking at the hide curtain where the child was coughing.

The board by Ansel’s feet lifted. Settled. The one beside it. The one beside that, coming toward the stove from the wall, one after another, a hair each, the way the deck had lifted at the bore in the sunshine while Kestrel was saying something about drinks.

"Galen," Mei said.

Not loudly. The way you’d say it across a table. Galen was awake at once, which she would think about later, and his eyes went to her and then to the floor, because the boards were lifting now in a line he could see, from the far wall to the stove.

"Boards," the woman with the braid said. Then, louder, "Boards—"

"Up," Galen said. "Everybody. Ansel—"

Ansel was already trying. His good leg came under him, and he pushed with his hands, and the stick went out from under him on the boards and skidded away, and he was halfway up and braced on the stove’s stone hearth when the boards beside him came up.

They didn’t lift this time. They broke. Two of them, doubled, split along Kestrel’s spike holes and came up in a tent shape, and out of the dark under them came the forelimbs. Only the limbs. Long, jointed back, gray with earth. They closed on Ansel from both sides at the waist and held him against the hearth.

He shouted. Then he stopped shouting and took hold of the hearth stone with both hands.

Galen came across the boards for him, and the woman with the braid came behind with her spear, and Mei came around the far side of the hearth with the herder’s spear the five had lent her for the wall. She set her feet on two boards that were still whole and held the point at the hole, low, where the head would come.

"Don’t pull him," she said. "Wait for the head. When it comes back for him, there’s a gap. I’ll go in at the gap."

Galen stopped with his hands out. He had stood in the pavilion while Naida wrote it down. There is an opening at the joint only when the head bends right back to bite. It was the only kill anybody at Windbreak knew. So he stayed a pace from Ansel with his spear raised, and the woman with the braid stopped beside him, and the two others came up behind and stopped too, and there were four spears and Mei’s held over the hole by the hearth and nobody touching the man in it.

The head didn’t come.

Mei held the spear on the hole. Behind her, the herders’ end of the long house was waking, the hide pulled aside, somebody saying what in a voice thick with sleep, a child, the whole room getting up and finding the floor moving under it. None of it reached her properly. Her eyes were on the hole for the plate to show, for the head to fold up and back over the limbs and reach for Ansel, so the plates would open on the hinge as they had at the bore and she could put the point through.

It didn’t come. The limbs pulled. Not hard. Not fast.

Ansel’s eyes found hers across the hearth. Nothing from him. His hands were white on the stone.

"Mei," Galen said.

Ansel’s hands slid. One finger and then another came off the edge of the hearth, and he went down into the boards to the hip, the broken edges scraping his coat, and Mei understood, all at once, that nothing was going to fold back and nothing was going to open.

"Pull him," she said. "Pull—"

Galen went to his knees and got him by the collar. The woman with the braid dropped her spear and got his wrist. They had him a breath, and then they didn’t, because he was already in to the chest and the boards under Galen’s knees had begun to lift, and Ansel went down to the chin with his face turned up toward the roof beams, and then he was gone. The broken boards fell back together over the place with a clap, and earth came up between them, and the hole was a gap in the floor a hand wide with nothing in it.

Mei put her point into the gap and pushed, at earth.

+++

Somebody at the far end was screaming. Mei could not have said who.

"Door," Galen said. On his feet already, his voice not changed at all. "Everybody to the door. Keep to the boards. Don’t run. Walk to the door."

They walked. The herders came along the door wall with their children, and the screeners from the middle of the long house came with their bedding still in their arms, and the five stood in a line between them and the hearth with their spears. Mei was in the line without remembering getting there.

In the middle of the long house, between the screeners’ trestles and the stove, the floor went up.

This one came out. The doubled boards rose in a hump the height of a man’s knee and broke along their length and slid away to either side, and the head came up through them, flat and black with earth, shoveling, the way the Halbrook sheet said one had come up through a floor there. It came up to the shoulders and stopped there, half out of the floor, the rest of it still down in the hole it had made. It lifted its forelimbs clear and held them out to either side, wide.

It didn’t come at them. It stayed where it was and turned its head, slowly, from the screeners’ trestle to the line of the five, to the door, to the herders and their children. No eyes. The fine hairs at the edge of the head-plate were moving.

"Hold," Galen said.

The five held. One of them, the one beside Mei, a short man with a burn scar along his jaw, couldn’t stand it. The short man stepped forward and drove his spear in behind the head, and the point went onto the plate and slid. Mei heard it. Mei had heard it on the flats. It was the sound of a knife on a slate roof.

A forelimb came across and took the short man off his feet and threw him back into the line, and the line caught him, and the animal put the limb back where it had been, wide, and went on looking.

It was looking at the door. At the people at the door.

Mei’s eyes went to the back of its neck.

From where she stood, the plate showed plainly. The lamp the herders had lit at the far end was behind it, and the light ran along the top of the head and down over the hump where the head met the body. The second plate lay there the way she remembered it from the bore: down over the joint and over the first plate, lapping it the way roof tiles lap.

She thought about roofs. She had watched one mended once, and the man mending it had shown her how the tiles went. Each one over the one below. Water ran off them from the top. You couldn’t get under a tile from above, from the ridge, because the one above lay over its head. But from below, from the eave, every one of them had an edge.

Every sheet had sent people at the joint from the front. From the head end. From the ridge.

The tail end of the plate was toward the body. Toward the hole. Behind it.

"Galen," Mei said. "Keep it looking at you."

Galen didn’t ask why. One pace out of the line he went, with his spear up, and the animal’s head came around to him, and stayed on him.

Mei went sideways along the door wall and then out across the floor, around behind the screeners’ trestle, onto the boards beyond the hole. They were broken here, heaved up and laid back at angles, and under them she could feel the earth soft and give when her weight came onto it. Her eyes stayed off it. She came around until the animal’s back was in front of her and the hole was at her feet, the hump of its body rising out of the black earth an arm’s length away, and she could see the lower edge of the second plate where it lay over the joint, a dark line in the lamplight, a little lifted, like the bottom of a tile.

The point of the herder’s spear went onto that edge. Mei set it low and pointing up along the neck toward the head, the way you’d slide a blade under a slate, and leaned her shoulder into the shaft and pushed.

The point went under the edge.

It went under and in, between the plate and whatever the plate was covering, and it kept going. She pushed until her front foot went down through a broken board into the earth to the ankle, and kept pushing, and felt something give, deep, and the animal’s head came up and back very fast toward her and stopped halfway, and stayed stopped.

The forelimbs folded in. Slowly. The way a sleeping person’s hands close.

Then the head went down onto the boards in front of the screeners’ trestle, and lay there, and did not move again.

Mei pulled her foot out of the earth. The earth was warm. Mei stepped back onto a board that was still whole and stood there holding the spear, which was still in the animal, and didn’t let go of it until Galen came around the trestle and laid his hand over hers on the shaft and said, "It’s dead. Mei. You can let go."

She let go.

+++

Nothing else came up. They stood at the door until the lamp at the far end burned down and somebody lit another one, and nothing else came up.

Naida came at the third hour. She came in from the yard with her coat over her nightclothes and her hands bare. Her eyes went to the floor, to the dead animal with the spear standing out of the back of its neck, and to the gap by the hearth a hand wide with nothing in it. "Who?"

"Ansel," Galen said.

Naida stood still.

"Nye’s on the gate," she said. "She saw one on the flats side, outside the wall, standing. Pale. It’s gone." Then: "The pens?"

"Nobody’s been out."

"I’ve been out. They’re all standing. Every one."

Galen nodded. Then he sat down on the boards by the door with his back to the wall and his arms across his knees, and did not say anything else.

Naida crossed to the hump in the floor and crouched by the animal’s head over the place the spear went in, and stayed there. Then her eyes came up to Mei.

"Not the front," she said.

"From behind. Under the edge."

Naida’s eyes went back to the spear. "And Ansel?"

"I told them to wait for the head." Mei kept her voice level. It came out level. "I told them not to pull him. So it would bite, and there’d be a gap. It never put its head up. It just pulled."

"You didn’t know it wouldn’t bite."

"No."

"Nobody here knew."

"I was standing there with the spear waiting for it to bite him," Mei said.

Naida didn’t answer that. Nor did she say it was all right, which Mei had known she wouldn’t. She stayed crouched by the dead animal’s head, and then she said, "That goes on the sheet. What you were waiting for, and why, and that it didn’t. Everybody who has our sheet is waiting for the same thing."

"Yes."

"And this goes on it." Naida touched the shaft of the spear, just above where it went into the plate. "From behind, under the edge. In your words."

"It might not work twice."

"Then that goes on it too."

+++

At first light the long house was empty except for the two of them and Galen, who had not moved from the door, and the dead animal.

Galen got up when the light came and crossed the broken floor carefully, stepping on what was whole, and stood over the hump, and Mei crouched by the animal’s head and took hold of the spear and worked it free. It came out stiffly. There was earth on the shaft a hand up from the point.

"Show me," Galen said.

Mei laid her finger on the second plate, at the top, by the skull, and drew it down along the neck to the lower edge where it lay over the joint. At the edge she stopped.

"From the top it slides," she said. "Here."

She hooked her fingertip under the edge and lifted it, a little, the thickness of a fingernail, and let it fall back.

Galen crouched beside her. A big man, he crouched badly, and kept his eyes on the plate.

Then he put his finger where hers had been, and pushed, and it went under.