Chapter 612: Trestles

Location: Wild Confederacy — Settlement Windbreak; the long house

Date/Time: TC1858.03.15 – TC1858.03.16

Frost had come in through the door overnight and laced every board in the long house white, every board but the broken ones. Where the floor had split open, the frost stopped. Mei could see the line from the doorway, clean as a cut, white boards on one side and on the other the dark wet earth of the two holes, and the animal still lying in the nearer of them, sunk to the shoulders, with the herder’s spear still upright in its neck behind the plate.

Nothing grew frost on that earth. It was too warm.

Nobody was in the long house. The two east-camp families had slept in the pavilion the last two nights, and the screeners in the store sheds, and Galen’s five wherever Galen put them, and nobody had asked to come back in. The stove was out. Somebody had swept the hearth.

Mei stood in the doorway until her feet were cold, and then went to find Naida.

+++

Naida was at the gate with Nye, and she had a sheet in her hand, and she held it out before Mei had reached her.

“From Seven Peaks,” Naida said. “A copy of Halbrook’s. It’s twelve days old.”

There were two names at the head, neither of them names Mei knew. Under them, in Thorne’s copying hand, the account of a night in a stone barn on the Millford road. She read it standing in the snow by the gate post. Nothing came up through the stone. A second plate over the joint.

Then: No bite.

She read that line again. It didn’t change.

“The third,” Naida said. “They had that on the third.”

Mei counted it. The third, at Halbrook. The twelfth, in the long house, with the herder’s spear in her hands and Ansel’s hands on the hearthstone, and her voice telling five people to wait. Nine days. For nine days the thing she’d been waiting for had already stopped happening, and the only people in the country who could have told her had written it down and sent it the long way around.

“I’d have waited anyway,” Mei said. “Even if I’d read it. I’d have thought it was Halbrook’s. I’d have thought ours were different.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No.”

Naida took the sheet back and folded it on its creases. She said no more about it.

“There’s another line,” Naida said. “Nothing came up through the stone.”

“I read it.”

“We haven’t got any stone. Nothing but the hearthstone.”

That was true. Mei had walked the flats for most of a winter and knew it was true. The ground for a day in any direction from Windbreak was the graded fill, and under the fill more fill, and under that whatever the bores had gone into and never come out of. Windbreak was wood and hide and packed earth because there was nothing else out here to build with. Nobody could name stone nearer than the hills, and nobody was taking a sledge across the flats to the hills.

“The Speaker’s in the long house,” Nye said.

Mei looked at her.

“Went in after you came out,” Nye said. “With Silas. They’ve got a rule each, and they’re measuring the floor.”

+++

Speaker Kael-Ren was on his knees on the white boards near the far wall, with a builder’s rule laid along a plank and his big hands at either end of it, and Silas was standing over him with his right arm still strapped across his chest and his left holding a lamp that the daylight didn’t need.

“It came up through wood,” the Speaker said, without looking up. “So the wood was the problem. That’s the obvious thing, and I don’t trust it.”

“Why not?” Mei asked.

“Because it’s obvious.” He shifted the rule a hand along. “The wood held where it was wood. It broke where it lay on earth. Every board it came through was a board with earth right under it.” He settled back. “So I want the wood off the earth.”

Silas looked at Mei, and then at the floor, and didn’t say anything, which with Silas meant he’d already said it once and lost.

“Off the earth how?” Mei asked.

“Up.” The Speaker held his hand out palm down at the height of his knee, then raised it to the height of his waist. “On legs. With nothing under it. Air under it, and lamplight under it, so that if anything comes up, it comes up into the open, where it’s got to come out of the ground altogether to reach the floor. Where people can see it. Where it’s got a back.”

Mei thought about the plate. About where it lay over the joint like a tile, and how the edge was only there from behind.

“Where it’s got a back,” she said.

“That was your word for it. Behind, under the edge. I’m trying to build a house where there’s a behind.”

“The legs stand on earth,” Silas said.

“I know.”

“Anything that can pull a man through a doubled board can pull a leg.”

“I know that as well. So we put feet on the legs.” The Speaker pointed toward the door, toward the old drying ground where the stock was penned. “The hide frames. Every one of them’s got a pair of runners on the bottom so we can drag it into the wind. Runners are wide. Wide is hard to pull straight down.”

“Hard isn’t the same as can’t.”

“No,” the Speaker said. “It isn’t. I’ll take hard.”

Silas shifted the lamp to look at the near hole, and the dead thing in it, and the spear.

“It might not work,” Mei said.

“Then we’ll have seen it not work,” the Speaker said, “from up off the ground, with a lamp on it. That’s more than we saw last time.”

+++

The work went on until dusk.

The first thing was the carcass. They couldn’t build over it, and they couldn’t leave it, so Galen’s five put ropes around its front limbs and the base of its neck, and eight people took the ropes, and the Speaker counted, and on the third pull the animal came up out of the floor all at once with a sound like a boot coming out of deep mud.

Under it the hole went down.

It was narrower than the animal, a little narrower than a man’s shoulders, and it went straight down for an arm’s length and then turned away under the north wall. The earth around its lip was dark and soft and steamed slightly in the cold air from the door. Dace, from Galen’s five, the short man whose jaw was scarred from an old burn, the one who’d been thrown back into the line, leaned over it with a lamp.

“You can feel it,” he said. “Warm. Like a bread oven with the door open.”

“Don’t put your hand in it,” Galen said.

“My hands are staying in my coat.”

They filled it. There was no stone to fill it with, so they used what there was: frozen fill hacked up from the yard in lumps, and snow, and the broken boards cut short. The snow went in first, a shovel at a time, and Mei watched it go dark at the edges and shrink and then go to water and run down out of sight before the next shovel came. It took eleven shovels of snow before any of it stayed white. Then the frozen lumps on top, stamped down, and then the snow again over that, and it held.

Nobody remarked on the shovels. Mei saw Ulla, the woman from Galen’s five who wore her hair in one long braid down her back, count them on her fingers, and then put her hand in her coat.

Mei had asked her name on the second day, the way she asked everybody’s now. Ulla had told her, and then told her the name of her mother, the way it was said at the gate, and then laughed at herself for doing it, because Mei wasn’t from here.

“You don’t have to say both to me,” Mei had said.

“I know,” Ulla had said. “It’s habit. You’ve got to have something to put in front.”

+++

The hide frames came in through the door one at a time on their runners, eight of them, and the Speaker had them stripped of the stretched hides and laid on their sides in two rows down the length of the long house, so the runners stood under them like the feet of a bench. Over the frames went the planks. All of them that weren’t split, doubled the way they’d been doubled on the flats, laid crossways and pinned with the same spikes Kestrel had pried out of the bore deck. Mei drove some of them herself, with a mallet from the stores.

By dusk the floor of the long house stood knee-high above the ground, over two-thirds of the house’s length. Under it, the earth. The frozen fill where the holes had been. The runners of eight hide frames laid along the earth like sledges somebody had left. And air, and the hollow sound of it when you walked across the planks, so that everybody walked softly without being told.

It didn’t cover the whole house. There weren’t enough planks. The near end, by the door and the stove, stayed what it was, bare earth, and the Speaker had a line of short stakes driven across the width of it to mark where the floor began, and said that nobody was to stand on the near side of the stakes after dark, not to tend the stove, not for anything. The stove would go out. They’d be cold.

“Who sleeps on it?” Naida asked.

There was room on the platform for perhaps forty, close. There were the two east-camp families, twelve people with the children. There were the screeners, six. There were Galen’s five, and Mei.

“Children first,” the Speaker said. “Then whoever’s got children. Then the screeners. Then the five, at the ends, where it can see the floor. Then anybody else who wants to.”

“And everybody else in Windbreak?”

He was quiet.

“On the ground,” he said. “The way they were last night. Until there’s more planks, or a better idea.”

Naida nodded. She had known the answer.

+++

Galen set the watch.

“Somebody faces down,” he said.

His five looked at him.

“There’s the door,” Galen said. “And there’s the walls. And there’s under. Under’s new.” He pointed at the edge of the platform at the far end, where it stopped a hand short of the wall, and you could look straight down into the space beneath. “Lamp under there. Somebody on their belly at the edge, looking along the ground. Two hours, then the next one. If anything moves under the floor, you say where. Count the frames from the door. First, second, third.”

“Like rows in a field,” Dace said.

“Like counting,” Galen said. “Mei. You’ve got the first.”

So she lay down on her stomach on the planks at the far end with her chin at the edge and looked under the floor.

The lamp was set on the earth at the far wall, turned low, with a pot behind it so it threw its light along the length of the house and not up into anybody’s eyes. In its light the ground under the platform was gray-white with frost, the cold coming down through the planks now that there was air under them, frost on the earth for the first time in two days. The runners of the frames lay in their two rows, black on white. Where the holes had been, the stamped fill showed gray, and on top of it the snow they’d packed in, white again.

Behind her and above her, on the planks, forty people were trying to sleep on a floor that knocked when anybody turned over. A child cried and then didn’t. Somebody snored. The doubled boards creaked as they cooled. Mei kept her eyes on the frost.

Her two hours went by. Nothing moved. She gave the edge to Ulla and lay down at the end with her coat over her and her face to the wall and Raven’s letter against her ribs where it always was, still on its first folds.

She didn’t sleep. She hadn’t expected to.

+++

It was Dace who called it, in the last watch before light.

“Third,” he said. Not loud. “Under the third frame. Something—”

Mei was on her stomach at the edge beside him before she had decided to move. Galen was already there on the other side. Down the platform behind them, she heard people waking and Galen’s voice, low and level: “Stay up. Stay on the floor. Nobody gets down.”

She looked under.

The frost lay gray-white along the ground, and across it, from the north wall, there was a line. A dark line, a hand-wide, running out over the frosted earth toward the third frame, where the frost had melted off in a track as if something warm had passed along just under it. While she watched, the line went on getting longer. Not fast. It went the way frost goes off a window when you breathe on it, the dark spreading from the end of it a finger at a time, out from the wall, along the ground, toward the runner of the third frame.

It reached the runner and stopped.

The runner moved. Mei saw it, the width of a finger, the near end of it lifting off the frost and settling back. Over her head, the planks above the third frame creaked once, and somebody up there drew a breath and held it.

“Stay up,” Galen said.

Nobody got down. Nobody so much as moved.

The runner lifted again. More this time. Then it settled again, and stayed down, and the dark line along the frost stopped growing.

They waited.

Mei waited with her eyes on the earth under the third frame and the herder’s spear in her right hand where she’d had it all night, the same spear that had come up out of the floor that morning in the dead thing’s neck. She thought about where the back would be if it came up there. She thought about how far it was from the edge of the platform to the third frame, and how you would get down off the planks and along under them on your belly to the place behind it, and whether you could. She didn’t think you could.

It didn’t come up.

The line didn’t grow. Then, while she watched, the far end of it began to whiten again, frost coming back over it from the wall end first, the way the frost comes back to a window when you’ve stopped breathing on it. Whatever was making the earth warm had gone back the way it had come.

Galen let out his breath.

“It looked,” he said.

“It came to the third frame,” Mei said. “It lifted the runner twice. It went back to the north wall.”

“That’s what it did.”

“That’s what we’ll write.”

+++

At first light Mei climbed down off the platform beside the lamp and crouched on the frozen earth under the floor with the planks a hand above her head, and looked at what was left of the line.

It was faint now. The frost had come back over most of it. But from where she crouched she could still see it, a slightly darker track through the white, a hand wide, running straight out from the base of the north wall to the runner of the third frame, and stopping there, at the runner, as cleanly as a line somebody had drawn on a slate and stopped drawing.

The runner sat level. The Speaker came and crouched beside her, and looked at it, and then took a wedge out of his coat and set it against the runner’s near end, and tapped it home with the side of his fist.

Then they stayed where they were, under the floor, the two of them, and watched the frost finish closing over the track until there was nothing there at all.

Bored or looking for something else to read?

Why not try Jayde’s story?