Chapter 609: The Edge

Location: Seven Peaks — the north gate; the north camp path

Date/Time: TC1858.03.12

Wool, and under it, iron. That was what snow tasted of when you ate it off the back of a glove you’d had on all winter, and Tilda Rudd had eaten a lot of it since the camp came onto the stone, because the water was inside and inside was behind her, and she did not walk away from the pegs.

Tilda had a mouthful of it when the third peg on the left came up.

She swallowed and pointed and said it, and down the paving behind her Thorne stopped counting and Raven turned around. Hanne Lowther wrote on her slate without looking at it. Tilda had watched her do that for two days and still couldn’t see how.

“Third left,” Tilda said again, because Lisle Thorley had come out of the gate passage with the bread and hadn’t heard the first time.

He’d brought two heels of it, one for each of them, still warm from the Hall ovens, and he held hers out to her across the path before he’d heard what she said. Then he heard it. He set both pieces down together on the paving and came to the edge on the right side of the path, where his half of the pegs were, and stood there with his toes on the last stone.

“Eat that after,” he said. “It’ll keep.”

That was the rule they’d made, the two of them, on the morning of the eleventh, with nobody’s permission: she took the left of the path, and he took the right, and you stood on the last stone, and you didn’t step off it, and you watched your own squares and nobody else’s, and when one came up you said which. It had worked three times. Three pegs, a finger each, and down again, and nothing else. Tilda had begun to think it was a thing that worked.

The third peg on the left settled. It went back into the mud the width of a finger and stood there with the rest.

“Down,” Tilda said.

Hanne wrote that too, with the hour beside it, the same as she had for the other three.

The light was going. It went faster on this side of the mountain than anywhere Tilda had served; one minute you could see the whole field, square by square, and the next the squares were just wet places in the snow, and the pegs were scratches on them. Tilda stood with her hands under her arms and her eyes on her eleven, counting along them from the path out, and the cold came up through her boot soles from the stone.

The fourth on the left came up.

“Fourth left.”

Then the second on the right, on Lisle’s side, and Lisle said it in his flat voice, “Second right,” and then the fourth on the left went down, and the fifth came up, and Tilda understood that she was watching something go along under her squares, out and away from the paving, square by square, as they had all gone on the night of the tenth.

“Fifth left. Going out.”

“Second right’s still up,” Lisle said.

It was. It stayed up its finger’s width, and didn’t go down, and didn’t move on.

Hanne’s chalk went on squeaking. Behind them on the paving, Tilda heard boots, and knew without turning that it was Raven coming up the stone, slowly, one step and a pause, in her unlaced boots. Thorne’s slower step came after.

“How many?” Raven said.

“Two,” Hanne said. “One going out on the left. One sitting under the second right.”

“Sitting.”

“It’s not moved since it came up.”

+++

Out past the end of the pegs, beyond where the old carcass lay across the path, white on its north side, the snow moved.

Not a peg. There were no pegs out there. A square lifted, out past the carcass on the left, and broke, and something came up out of it whole and gray and wet, and climbed onto the path beside the carcass, and lay down across it. It lay down just as the first one had, two nights before, lengthwise across the path to the gate, and then it did nothing.

It was gray. Not black. Gray all over its back, flaking, dull, the stuff Lin Yue had shown them on the belly of the other one, that came away under a thumbnail.

Nobody was out there. Tilda counted to be sure: nobody on the path, nobody on the field, the tent gone, Odo gone. Every person on this side of the north wall was standing on the paving or in the gate passage or inside, on the Hall floor. The thing lay across a path nobody needed.

Beside her on the paving, Raven took her hands out of her coat.

Gray wool still bound them, wet at the ends with salve. Raven held them out in front of her, together, toward the path.

“Raven,” Hanne said.

The line went.

It hit the thing on its back, and the gray came off in sheets and went up smoking into the dusk, and underneath the animal was black. It didn’t get up. The first one had got up and turned for the gate. This one lay where it was.

The second line went into the black back, and the animal shook and lay flatter.

The third went in at the neck. Tilda saw the plate there go red at the edge and then go.

Raven’s knee hit the paving.

All at once: the knee and then both wrapped hands on the stone, and her head hanging. The wool on her right hand was smoking. Tilda could smell it, scorched wool and the salve under it.

Hanne was counting. Not loud. Tilda heard her.

One.

“Second right’s gone down,” Lisle said.

Tilda’s eyes went across the path to his squares. The second peg on the right had gone back into the mud. Along the rest of them, then, out from the paving, as they’d agreed, one to eleven. None of them was up.

Two.

“Where’s it gone?” Lisle said. “It didn’t go along. None of them came up.”

Three.

Lisle shifted closer to the edge to see better down his row. He didn’t step off. Tilda would say that afterward to everybody who asked and to some who didn’t. His toes were on the last stone, as they’d agreed. He leaned and looked out over his first square, the one nearest the paving, to see whether the peg in it had moved, and the stone under his feet tipped.

It didn’t break. It tipped. The last slab of the paving, the one he stood on, a slab as long as a man and as wide as Tilda’s arms could reach, lifted on its outer edge as if somebody under it had put a shoulder to it, and its inner edge went down, and it was not a floor anymore. It was a slope. Lisle went down it on his back into the dark under it, into the earth the slab had been lying on, and his hands went out to the stone on either side and found nothing to hold, because there was nothing on the slab’s face but frost.

Four.

Tilda was across the path before she knew she was. She went down on the next slab, the one that was still flat, on her belly with her arms over the edge into the gap where the slab had lifted, and there was nothing in the gap to reach. Only the dark under the stone, and the smell of opened earth coming up out of it, and a sound below like something heavy being drawn along a trench.

Five.

The slab came down. It fell back flat with a sound like a door shutting, and the edge of it caught Tilda’s left forearm against the slab she was lying on and held it.

Not a noise out of her. Later she would be proud of that, and ashamed of being proud of it.

Six.

Thorne had her by the coat. Tilda felt him hauling her back by the collar, as you’d pull somebody off ice, and her arm pinned, and then he stopped hauling and got down beside her and put both hands under the edge of the fallen slab and lifted. It came up a hand. Her arm came out. When he let the stone go, it fell again, and that was the second time she heard it.

Seven.

Both heels of bread were still on the paving where Lisle had set them down, side by side.

Eight. Nine.

Raven got up.

+++

Her eyes went to the path, the two carcasses on it now, and then she turned around to Tilda on the stone and Thorne kneeling beside her and the slab lying at the end of the paving where it had always lain.

“Where’s Lisle?” she said.

Nobody answered her. Hanne’s chalk had stopped.

Raven’s eyes went to the slab.

She took one step toward it. Her hands came up, and the wool on the right one was still smoking.

“No,” Hanne said.

It was the same word, in the same voice, Hanne had used across the gate passage two nights ago with her arm out. Tilda heard Raven hear it.

“There’ll be nothing in it,” Hanne said. “You know there’ll be nothing in it. You did that once.”

Raven stood with her hands up in front of her. Then she put them down at her sides, slowly, the smoking one and the other, and stood there, and did not go to the slab.

Out past the carcasses, on the north slope, the pale one was standing. Tilda saw it because she was lying on the stone with her cheek almost on it and the slope was right there at the top of the world, gray on gray. It stood side-on to the gate. It held there while the light dropped another step, and then it wasn’t there.

Tilda kept quiet about it. Hanne had seen it. Hanne wrote it down.

+++

Somebody inside had heard the slab come down twice and had gone for Mira. Mira came out with a lamp and a bag and took Raven’s right hand and unwrapped it on the paving, in the cold, without asking. Under the wool, the skin of the palm was blistered in a line from the heel of the hand to the second finger. Mira studied it and said nothing and wrapped it again in clean wool from the bag, and then she came to Tilda.

The arm wasn’t broken. Mira said so, pressing along it with her thumbs, and Tilda believed her because it hurt in the way that meant bruised and not the way that meant the other thing. It would be black by morning, from the elbow nearly to the wrist, in the shape of the slab’s edge. The hand still closed.

“You’re lucky,” Mira said.

“He’s not.”

Mira didn’t answer that. She went back to Raven.

Thorne sat on the paving beside Tilda with his back to the gate wall and didn’t say anything. His trousers were wet through at the knees where he’d knelt. Then he got a pencil out of his coat and a folded sheet, and wrote on his knee by the light of Mira’s lamp, and Tilda watched him write Lisle Thorley at the top and stop.

“He was on the stone,” Tilda said.

Thorne turned his head.

“He didn’t step off. Last stone. That was the rule. We made it.” Her voice was going, and she let it. “I’ll say that to anybody. He didn’t step off.”

“I know,” Thorne said. “I saw.” He wrote it. Tilda watched the pencil go. On the stone. Did not step off.

Hanne came along the paving with her slate and crouched in front of them and held it so Thorne could see it, and Tilda read it too, upside down.

Pegs: third left, fourth left, fifth left, going out. Second right up, held, down. None up after.

One up beyond the pegs. Lay across the path. Nobody on the field.

Line used. Three. Killed.

Nine by count. Lisle Thorley taken inside it. The last slab tipped from under. Came down again.

The pale one on the slope after.

Nobody said anything about the line in the middle of it. Nobody on the field. Hanne had not underlined it. She had written it the size of everything else.

Raven read it over Mira’s shoulder, standing, with her new-wrapped hand held away from her. Tilda saw her read that line. Saw her stop on it, the way you’d stop on a step that wasn’t where your foot thought it was.

Raven said nothing. She stood in the lamplight until Mira took her by the elbow, and then she let herself be taken in.

+++

When the lamp had gone in, and Thorne had gone in, and Hanne had gone to write the count again, one less, Tilda stayed.

Her arm hurt. She held it against her body under her coat and walked up the paving to the end and stood one slab back from the last one. Not on the last one. Tilda didn’t think anybody would stand on the last one again.

What light came out of the gate passage showed it lying level. The same as it had been every day she’d been on this mountain. There was a line of frost along its edge where it met the next slab, broken now in one place where her arm had been.

The two heels of bread were where they had been, frozen now, with frost on their crusts. She picked up the one he’d held out to her and turned it over in her good hand. It was hard as a stone. She didn’t eat it. She tucked it into her coat beside the bruised arm, and left his on the stone where it was, because she didn’t know what else to do with it and nobody was going to tell her.

There were pegs in a heap at the foot of the gate wall, the ones they hadn’t used. Tilda took one in her good hand and the mallet in the other, Odo’s mallet, which had been lying there since she laid it at Hanne’s feet, and she knelt on the second slab and reached past the last one to the snow at its outer edge, where the paving stopped, and the field began.

Her bad arm couldn’t hold the peg for the swing, so her knees held it. It took four strokes, and the sound of them went out over the dark field and came back off the slope.

When it was in, she knelt back over it: one peg, at the very end of the stone, where no square was, and none of them had ever thought to look.

There was no number for it. She would have to think of what to call it, so that when it came up, somebody would know which.