Chapter 610: Set on End

Location: Seven Peaks — the Medicine Hall; the north gate paving

Date/Time: TC1858.03.12 – TC1858.03.13

Shears in wet wool make a small chewing sound, and Mira took her time with it. She cut the burned wrapping off Raven’s right hand in short bites from the wrist down, and lifted each piece away with two fingers and dropped it in the bowl, and the bowl hissed faintly every time because some of the wool was still warm.

Raven sat near the stove with her hand held out, palm up, and watched the shears.

“Don’t look at it,” Mira said.

“I’m looking at the shears.”

“Then keep looking at them.”

The last piece came away. Underneath, the palm had a line across it from the heel of her palm to the root of the second finger, white and raised and full of water, with the skin either side of it gone red. It was the line the wool had held against her when she drew. Raven had not felt it at the time. She felt it now.

Mira turned the hand to the lamp and kept quiet long enough that Raven knew what she was going to say before she said it.

“A week before you close it. Two before you use it.”

“And the line?”

“I’m not your teacher. I’m telling you what the skin will do.” Mira dipped a cloth and laid it across the palm, and the cold of it went up Raven’s arm to the elbow. “If you draw through this before it closes, it’ll open to the meat. I’ll dress that too. I’d rather not.”

From outside, faint, through the shutter and the wall, came four strokes of a mallet on wood, spaced out, the third one harder than the others. Then they came back again, smaller, off the slope.

Mira’s hands stopped.

“That’s Tilda,” Raven said. “She’s putting a peg in.”

“At this hour.”

“She’s putting it where the stone ends.”

Mira went back to the hand. She bound it in clean wool, not tight, and tied the end off at the wrist and tucked it in, and then she straightened and met Raven’s eyes instead of her hand, which she had not done all evening.

“Hanne showed me the slate,” Mira said.

Raven didn’t answer.

“I’m not going to say anything about it. I’m telling you I’ve read it, so you don’t have to wonder.”

“Thank you.”

Mira picked up the bowl of wool and took it to the door and threw it out into the yard, where the snow would have it by morning.

+++

Kairos was in the corridor outside, on the bench where the Corps had sat the night of the tenth waiting for word about Odo Pask. He had a cup in his hands that had gone cold, and he stood up when she came out, and fell in beside her without asking where she was going.

She was going nowhere. She walked to the end of the corridor and stood at the window there, which looked north over the wall to the field, and there was nothing to see but dark and, very far down, the lamp in the gate passage.

“Why did you draw?” Kairos asked.

He said it the way he asked her what she had eaten, flat, with no weight on any word. She had heard him ask Thorne about the price of lamp oil in the same voice.

“It was there.”

He waited.

“It was there, and it had the crust on, and I knew how many lines it would take. Three. I knew to the line.”

“That is two answers.”

“The first one’s the true one.”

Kairos turned the cold cup in his hands. Raven looked at the gate lamp and thought about the animal laid down on the path with nobody on the field, and her own hands coming out of her coat before Hanne had finished saying her name. She had not decided anything. She had known the count, and the count had been enough.

“I’m not going to ask you anything else,” Kairos said.

“I know.”

“I want you to know I wanted to.”

He drank the cold tea, all of it, and made a face at the bottom of the cup, and went back down the corridor to the Hall, where three hundred people were asleep on stone under the names, and two more places along the Wall had nobody lying under them since the tenth.

+++

At first light the paving was white with frost from the gate passage to the end, and Tilda Rudd was already there, on the second slab with her left arm inside her coat.

“It came up,” she said, before Raven asked. “The edge one. A finger at the second hour. Down by the third.”

Raven looked at the peg. It stood in the snow just past the outer edge of the last slab, alone, with nothing to the left or right of it but the ordinary squares and their ordinary pegs, all of them still.

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing else all night. Just that one.”

Hanne Lowther came up the paving with her slate, and Lin Yue behind her with her book under her arm, and behind them Taron, carrying an iron bar as long as he was tall over one shoulder and a pair of oak chocks from the forge yard in the other hand. Raven had told Thorne at midnight that she wanted to see under the last slab, and Thorne had told whoever Thorne told things to, and here was Taron.

“Up,” Taron said.

“I want to see what’s under it. That’s all.”

“Up, then.”

He set the chocks down on the second slab and walked to the end of the paving and studied the last slab without touching it. Raven studied it too. Frost had whitened the join between it and the second slab, except in one place where it was broken. On the slab, near its outer edge, lay a heel of bread with frost on its crust.

Tilda saw her see it.

“That’s his,” Tilda said. “I didn’t move it.”

Taron worked the end of the bar into the join at the outer corner, where the slab met the snow, and put his weight on it. The slab lifted a finger, a hand, and grated, and he got a chock under it, and moved the bar along and lifted again. Two of the Corps came off the gate watch without being asked and put their shoulders under the edge with him. They worked from the second slab, reaching, with their boots on stone.

The slab came up on its outer edge until it stood knee-high and sat there on the chocks, tilted. The heel of bread slid down its face and dropped into the dark under it, and nobody reached for it.

They looked in.

The bedding sand under the slab was gone from the outer half. Where it should have lain, firm and level, there was a scoop, a hollow the width of the slab and as deep as a forearm at its deepest, its floor going down toward the field side in a slope, and at the bottom of the slope, against the snow, a hole. The hole went down and away north, under the field, under the first squares. The earth around its mouth was dark and wet and did not steam, though the air was cold enough that everything else steamed.

The inside half of the bedding was still there, under the inner edge. The slab had been resting on half a bed. Something had taken the outer half out from under it and left the inner half to be the hinge.

Lin Yue got down on the second slab and leaned in with her book shut against her chest. The walls of the scoop were cut, not dug. Each cut ran straight down the face of the sand and the earth under it, and each one was the same width, a little finger, side by side, overlapping, the way a plasterer’s float leaves overlapping strokes on a wall.

“That’s the forelimb,” Lin Yue said. “The ground edge. It’s the width I measured.” She opened the book and looked at a page and shut it again. “I can show anyone who wants to look. Put a rule on the cut and a rule on the carcass.”

Raven found she had stepped back.

She was two slabs back from the hole, standing alone in the frost, with her wrapped hand against her chest. She did not remember moving. Taron had turned his head and was looking at her, and then he wasn’t.

She came forward again to where she had been.

+++

“How far does it go?” Hanne asked.

Nobody knew. Taron took the bar out from under the slab, carefully, leaving the chocks to hold it, and lay down on his belly on the second slab with his chest at the edge of the scoop, and put the end of the bar down the slope and into the hole, and fed it in.

It went in a forearm, two, three. It went in until his hands were at the lip of the scoop and the bar was more than half its length underground.

“Soft,” Taron said. “Warm.”

He began to draw it back out.

It came a hand’s width, and stopped.

Raven saw the muscles in his back move under his coat. He pulled. The bar did not come. Then it moved the other way, slowly, the length of a finger, as if something down there had taken hold of it and leaned back.

“Bar’s going,” Taron said.

“Let it go.”

“Holding.”

“Taron. Let it go.”

It went another finger. Taron’s boots were braced against the slab behind him and the slab was the inner one, the second, and Raven saw its outer edge, the edge against the open scoop, dip. Not much. The width of a coin. Enough that the frost along the join cracked with a sound like a fingernail on a slate.

Taron let go.

The bar slid down the slope of the scoop, slowly, not falling, drawn, and its end went into the hole, and the rest of it followed a hand at a time, and the last of it went out of sight with a small sound of iron on stone at the lip, and was gone.

Taron got up and stepped back one slab. The one he had been lying on had moved. Its outer edge sat a coin’s width lower than it had.

“Second one,” Taron said.

Nobody needed it said twice.

Raven’s hands had come up.

She did not decide it. She saw the hole and the place where the bar had gone, and her hands came up out of her coat on their own, the bound one first, and she felt the line gather at the back of her, ready, the count already running in her head, how far, how deep, how many.

“Nobody on the field,” Hanne said.

Hanne said it flatly, as if she were reading it off the slate. Not loud. Not at Raven, quite. Into the air between them.

Raven held her hands where they were.

There was nobody on the field. There was a hole that went north under the squares, and an iron bar somewhere down it, and whatever had taken the bar, and Lisle Thorley somewhere under all of it since dusk. There was nothing in the hole a line could reach that the line would not spend itself getting to. She knew that. She had known it last night at the gate and drawn anyway, and on the tenth at Odo’s square, and drawn anyway.

She put her hands down.

“Hanne.”

“Yes.”

“When I put my hands up, you say that.”

Hanne looked at her.

“Every time,” Raven said. “Whether there’s anybody out there or not. You say it. And if there is somebody, you say who.”

“And if you don’t put them down?”

“Then you’ve said it, and it’s on your slate that you said it, and I’ll have done it with that in front of me.” Raven looked at the hole. “I’m not asking you to stop me. I don’t think anybody can. I’m asking you to say it.”

Hanne wrote something on the slate. Raven didn’t ask what. Tilda, beside her, had not moved at all.

+++

They let the slab down off the chocks. Taron did it with his hands on the inner edge and two of the Corps on the corners, all of them standing on the third slab back, and it went down onto the half bed that was left and rocked, and settled with its outer edge low, a thumb’s width below the second.

Then for a long breath nobody spoke, and the frost went on whitening the join.

“It’s an edge,” Raven said finally. “Wherever we stop paving, it’s an edge. If we take this row up, the next one’s the edge. If we pave the whole field, the far side of the field’s the edge.”

“So,” Taron said.

“So you don’t lay it flat.”

She thought in walls when she thought at all. She knew what the last course of a wall did that the others didn’t, and what a path did where it met a lawn so the turf wouldn’t creep in, and what a step did where it met the ground so the frost wouldn’t lift it. She knew it in her hands.

“A stone laid flat is as deep as it’s thick,” she said. “A stone set on its end is as deep as it’s long.”

Lin Yue looked at her.

“I can’t tell you it’ll hold,” Lin Yue said.

“No.”

“I can tell you how deep the cut goes.” Lin Yue opened her book. “A forearm under the slab. Then the hole. How far the hole goes, I can’t tell you, and I’m not going to guess.”

“Then a stone longer than a forearm,” Raven said. “On end. Along the whole edge. So there’s nothing under the last flat one but more stone, going down.”

“And under that?”

“Under that there’s earth. There’s always earth.” Raven looked at the second slab with its sunk edge. “It’s not an answer. It’s a deeper edge.”

Taron had already turned and was walking back down the paving toward the forge yard, where the broken coping from the east wall had lain in a long row since the seventh month. Every piece of it was longer than a forearm.

+++

It took them the day.

They dug the trench from the stone, two at a time, reaching down off the edge of the second row with short spades from the stores, and Tilda and Hanne stood at the end with their eyes on the pegs, the squares and the one at the edge, and called nothing, because nothing came up. When the trench was a forearm and a half deep along the width of the paving, the Corps lowered the coping pieces into it on ropes, one at a time, on end, standing side by side like the teeth of a comb, and packed the earth back around them by hand and with the backs of the spades, and Taron walked along the top of the row and stamped each one, and none of them moved.

They did not lift the last slab again. The hole was under it, and the bread, and they left them there. They set the new stones a hand’s width out from its outer edge and filled the gap between with broken coping, hammered down, so that where the paving had ended in a line of frost on snow it now ended in a row of rough gray stone standing up out of the ground a finger high, and under that, going down, more of the same.

Raven carried nothing. Mira had come out at noon, looked at her and then at the trench, and gone back in, and after that Raven stood at the end of the paving with her hands in her coat and watched every stone go down.

Kairos came out at dusk with two cups and gave her one. It was too strong, and it tasted of the pot, and it was hot.

“You built a curb,” he said.

“I built a deeper edge.”

“That is what a curb is.”

She drank the tea.

Out past the new stones, in the snow, Tilda’s peg still stood where Tilda had driven it, a finger clear, alone. Tilda came along the paving in the last of the light with the slate under her good arm, and stopped beside the row of standing stones, and stood over the peg without speaking.

Then she went to the gate watch, who had just come on, and pointed past the curb to it.

“That one’s Edge,” Tilda said. “If it comes up, say Edge.”

The watch nodded, and said it back once, under his breath, to have it.