Chapter 614: Nothing That Isn’t Us

Location: The Millford road — the Halbrook holding; the stone barn; the yard

Date/Time: TC1858.03.17

Cows had a smell when they were thirsty, and Brisk Alder had not known that.

It came across the yard at first light with the wind behind it, sour and hot, wet straw and dung and something under both that caught at the back of her throat. She was east of the barn door with Innes Garrow’s spear, where she had stood every first light since the second, and she breathed it in through her mouth and then through her scarf, and it was the same either way.

The cows had bawled most of the night. Around the fourth hour they had stopped. Nobody in the barn had said anything about the stopping, and Brisk had stood at her post and listened to the quiet and decided it was worse.

Then the boards went.

It was a crack and then a second crack and a long splintering, from the byre, out of the gray. Behind her in the barn somebody sat up. Sedge was on his feet at the bare strip inside the door with his hackles up and no sound out of him.

“Byre,” Edric called down. He had gone up the loft ladder and out onto the ridge as soon as there was light to see by, the rope around his waist and tied to the beam. His voice had come back a little in three days. “It’s the heifer. She’s kicked the boards out. Low on this side.”

Brisk could see it now. A dark gap at the foot of the byre’s yard wall, two boards wide, with straw sticking out of it. The heifer’s head came through first, then her shoulders, and then she was out on the snow, standing with her legs braced and her head down, licking at the crust.

The three cows came out behind her one at a time. They were slower. They stood together on the snow in front of the byre with their heads low and their ribs showing, and licked.

“Nissa,” Bett said, from inside.

Nissa was already at the door. She stood on the last flag inside the bare strip with her coat on over the shirt she had slept in, and watched her cows.

“They’ll founder on that,” she said. “Snow. They can’t get enough out of it to matter, and it’ll chill them through.”

“I know.”

“They need water.”

“I know,” Bett said again. “I’ve got none for them out there.”

“I’ve got it in here.”

Hob’s pot was full on the hearth-stone, and there were two buckets of melted snow standing inside the door that Nissa had carried down from the loft before light. Brisk had heard her going up and down the ladder in the dark, eight times or ten, and had not asked.

“You’re not carrying it out,” Bett said. “Not on the path. Not on the snow.”

“I’m not going to.”

“Then what?”

Nissa’s eyes went down to the dog.

+++

“He’s a dog,” Bett said.

“He’s a cow dog,” Nissa said. “He’s brought them in every evening of his life. Pitch taught him.”

“Nissa.”

“They don’t touch the cows.” Nissa did not raise her voice. She had not raised it since Brisk came. “Not at midwinter. Not on the fourteenth. Not when one went under the byre door on the eleventh and stood under them. Every cow in that byre was standing where it was. They don’t touch anything that isn’t us.”

“Nothing that isn’t us yet,” Bett said.

“Yes.”

“And if they take him?”

“Then they’ll have started on dogs,” Nissa said. “And we’ll know that, and it’ll be on the sheet.”

Joss was sitting on his blankets against the north wall with his knees up. He had his arms around them. He did not say anything. Brisk watched him look at the dog and then at his mother and then at the dog again.

Sera Vahn had come to the door. Her right arm was strapped across her body the way it had been since she rode in, and she stood a little behind Bett with her shoulder against the door frame, because standing up straight still cost her something.

“It’s a dog,” Sera Vahn said. “It’s not one of us. It’s not on any roll.”

Bett looked at her.

“I’m not telling you,” Sera Vahn said. “It’s your yard.”

Bett stood with her split hands at her sides. Then she gave Nissa one nod and stepped back off the threshold.

“Everybody on the stone,” Bett said. “Fives at the door, inside the line of it. Nobody puts a foot on the strip. Edric.”

“Here.”

“Watch the ground. Not the dog. Not the cows.”

“The ground.”

Joss got up off his blankets and came across the barn. He went down on his knees beside Sedge at the edge of the flags and wrapped both arms around the dog’s neck, his face in the fur. He stayed there long enough that Brisk looked away. Then he let go and sat back on his heels and wiped his nose on his sleeve.

“Go on,” Joss said.

Nissa whistled. It was two notes, low and then high. Brisk had never heard her make the sound before.

Sedge went.

He went over the bare strip in one jump and out of the door between Brisk and the man across the doorway from her, and he did not go straight at the cows. He went wide. He ran out along the front of the barn and then away to the east on the snow, low, fast, his belly almost on the crust, and came around in a long curve behind the byre until he was on the far side of the four of them. Then he stopped and crouched and looked at the heifer.

The heifer lifted her head out of the snow and looked back.

Brisk had grown up in a Federation town with paved streets and had never in her life watched a dog work cattle. She watched it now. She watched Sedge come in a few steps and crouch again, and the heifer swing her head away and take a step, and the cows bunch behind her. She watched him drift out to the right when the last cow turned the wrong way, and the cow turned back. He didn’t bark once. He moved them with nothing but where he put himself.

She had turned her head to watch it. She had turned her shoulders.

“Ground,” Edric said from the roof. “Ground. East wall. Coming along the east wall.”

Brisk turned back.

The ridge was ten paces from her. It was coming along the foot of the barn’s east wall, close in where the snow had drifted against the stone, a long, low hump in the crust moving toward the door at the pace of a man walking. It had come all the way from the corner. She had not seen any of it.

“Inside,” Bett said. “Back. Off the threshold. Brisk.”

Brisk stepped back over the threshold stone onto the flags inside, and then back again over the bare strip, and stood where the flags began with the spear up and her heart going. The man across the doorway stepped back with her. Ivo had come up on her left. Somebody behind them had taken hold of Joss.

The ridge reached the corner of the doorway and stopped.

Then it turned along the front of the barn and lay there, a body’s length out from the threshold, across the width of the door. The snow on top of it had cracked in a line.

Out in the yard the cows were coming.

+++

Nissa said, “Let them come.”

Nobody had asked her anything. Brisk thought she was saying it to herself.

They came across the yard in a bunch with the heifer in front and Sedge behind them, not on the path, straight over the snow from the byre to the door, the cows’ feet breaking the crust at every step. The heifer had smelled the water. Brisk could see her nostrils going. She came on at a heavy trot with her head out and her bag swinging and the three cows behind her, and she walked straight over the crack in the snow where the ridge lay without breaking stride.

Her feet went down onto it and through the crust. Nothing happened.

The three cows walked over it after her. The last one stopped on top of it with her front feet on one side of the crack and her back feet on the other, and Brisk saw the snow lift under her and settle again. The cow blew and stepped forward. That was all.

Then the heifer’s head was in the door, and her breath was hot and wet and smelled of the byre, and she put her nose down into the first bucket and drank.

Nissa knelt on the last flag inside the strip and held the bucket.

Brisk had not known how much a cow could drink. The heifer emptied the bucket in a long, noisy pull and lifted her head and looked for more, water running off her chin. Nissa pushed the second bucket forward. The first cow had her head over the heifer’s back, trying to reach it. Joss was pulling away from whoever held him, saying, “Pot, Mama, the pot,” and Tamsin Kemp went across to the hearth-stone and brought Hob’s pot over in both arms and set it down on the flags next to Nissa, slopping.

“Ladle,” Nissa said.

Ivo found the ladle. Nissa filled the empty bucket from the pot and held it out for the cow behind. The heifer shoved for it. The cow shoved back.

Sedge had come around the side of the bunch to the door, and he did not come in. He stood out on the snow at the cows’ heels, close to the barn wall, with his head down and his nose an inch from the crust, and he growled. It was the sound Ivo said he had made through the barn door the night of the floor, low, going on without a break.

He was growling at the ground under the cows.

“Edric,” Bett said quietly.

“It’s still there,” Edric said from the roof. “Under them. It hasn’t moved.”

The heifer was finished with water. She lifted her head out of the pot and looked into the barn, at the people, at the lamp, at the hay piled against the north end. Then she stepped forward over the threshold stone onto the bare earth of the strip.

“Back her out,” Bett said. “Nissa. Back her.”

Nissa came up off her knees and reached for the heifer’s head to turn it. She caught the heifer by the halter. To get her shoulder to the heifer’s face, she had to take one step, and she took it, and her right boot went down off the last flag onto the strip.

The earth beside the heifer’s forefeet opened.

It came up the way the snow had opened beside Ambrose Wick on the path, without a ridge, without a crack first. The forelimbs came out of the bare strip between the heifer’s front legs and the stone, both of them, black with the earth, the ground edges on the inside of them gray and dull. The near one closed on the heifer’s left foreleg above the knee.

The heifer bellowed and threw her head.

The limb held the leg. Brisk saw it hold. Then it opened and let go, and moved, low, along the earth, feeling, toward Nissa’s boot on the strip.

Brisk had Innes Garrow’s spear. She dropped it.

She took Nissa by the collar of her coat with her right hand and by the belt with her left and threw herself backward. Nissa came off the strip and over the edge of the flags with her and they went down together on the stone, Nissa on top of her, the back of Brisk’s head striking the flags hard enough to put lights in her eyes. She did not let go of the collar. She dragged with her heels and her elbows and got them both another body’s length up the barn.

The limb closed on the place where Nissa’s boot had been. It closed on the earth.

The heifer came forward onto the flags in a scramble, her feet skidding on the stone, and the cow behind her came after her, and the next, until all four of them were inside the barn bellowing and turning in the space between the door and the hearth, and people were flat against the walls to keep from under them.

Brisk lifted her head.

The limbs were going back down into the strip. They went slowly, as they had come, until there was nothing, and the strip lay bare and dark and churned where the heifer had stood on it.

Outside on the snow, Sedge was still growling at the ground.

“It’s going,” Edric called. “Back the way it came. Gate end. It’s going.”

+++

Nobody moved. The cows settled. The heifer stood at the north end with her nose in the hay, shivering along her flanks, and the three cows stood around her in the warm. One of them let her water go on the stone, a long steaming flood that ran in the cracks Joss had packed, and the smell of it filled the barn, and nobody said anything about that either.

Nissa got up off Brisk. She sat down against the wall. Her hands had started to shake. She kept her eyes on the strip and let them.

“It had her,” Nissa said. “It had the heifer’s leg.”

“I saw,” Bett said.

“It let go.”

“I saw it.”

Bett walked to the edge of the flags and stood over the churned earth. She had her hands at her sides. In the end she said, without turning around, “Crowe.”

“Ready.”

“Write it.”

Ovid Crowe had his board on his knees already. He wrote with the board resting on his knees and Bett’s pen, slowly, and read it out as he went so she could stop him.

“Seventeenth. First light. The heifer kicked the byre boards out in the night and the cows came out on the snow.” He raised his head. “Do I put the dog?”

“Put the dog.”

“Sent the dog out to bring them in. Not touched.” He wrote. “One came along the east wall under the snow and lay across the front of the door. The cows walked over it to the door and drank. It did not touch them.” He stopped and wet his lips and went on. “The heifer went onto the bare strip inside the door. Two limbs came up through the strip. One held the heifer by the foreleg above the knee.” He stopped again.

“Go on,” Bett said.

“It held the heifer by the foreleg and let go,” Crowe read. “Then it went along the earth toward Nissa Halbrook’s foot on the strip. She was pulled off. It closed on nothing and went down.”

“That’s it,” Bett said. “That’s what it did.”

“Do I put who pulled her?”

Bett’s eyes went to Brisk.

“No,” Brisk said.

“Then don’t,” Bett said.

Crowe wrote it without.

Brisk sat on the flags and felt the back of her head. Her fingers came away clean. She went and found Innes Garrow’s spear where she had dropped it, lying where the flags ended, its point out over the strip, and she picked it up by the butt and drew it in.

Sera Vahn was standing by the door frame where she had been the whole time, the strap across her chest. When Brisk came back to the door with the spear, Sera Vahn glanced at her, then out at the yard.

“East side’s yours,” Sera Vahn said.

Brisk nodded.

Sera Vahn said nothing more. Brisk had not expected her to. She took the east side of the door again, on the stone, with the strip behind her and the yard in front of her, and she faced out.

+++

They didn’t put the cows back. There was nowhere to put them. Bett walked the length of the barn twice in the afternoon looking at the floor, and then had Ivo and Tamsin pull the hay down off the pile and spread it at the north end over the flags, and the cows stood in it. Nissa milked. Brisk heard it behind her through the afternoon, the hiss into a bucket and Nissa talking to each cow under her breath, low, the way she’d talked to the dog. It went into the cups, and people drank it warm. Somebody pushed a cup into Brisk’s hand at her post, and she drank it without turning around.

Sedge came in on his own a little after noon. He came across the yard from the byre side at a trot and jumped the strip and went straight to Joss and lay down on his feet. He did not go out again.

In the middle of the afternoon Edric called ground once, from out by the road, and then called it gone. That was all.

Ivo came and stood beside her at the end of his turn on the west side. He did sums on his fingers, looking out at the yard, and then he didn’t, and stood there.

“It held the leg,” Ivo said. “And let go. How does it know?”

“I don’t know.”

“It knew the leg wasn’t us.”

“It knew.”

“That’s a thing it can tell,” Ivo said, “by holding on.”

Brisk didn’t answer. She was facing the yard, and he was facing the yard, and there wasn’t anything out there but snow and the dark gap at the foot of the byre wall and four tracks of cows coming straight across from it to the door.

At dusk the fives took the door. Brisk took the east side. Behind her she heard the cows lie down one after another, the big slow fall of each of them onto the hay and the long breath going out.

The heifer did not lie down in the hay.

Brisk heard her come down the barn toward the door. Heard Nissa say her name, once. Heard her stop. Then a heavy settling close behind Brisk’s back, right at the edge of the flags, and the hard breath going out of her, and then the sound of her chewing.

“She’s on the dirt,” Joss said, from somewhere behind.

“She’s lying down,” Nissa said.

Nobody went to move her. The heifer lay across the strip of earth by the door, the ground none of them could stand on, and chewed, and Brisk stood with her back to her and the spear in her hands and faced out into the dark, and listened to it for the rest of her watch, and did not turn around.