Chapter 24 Six Days by Cart

Audit of T. Marsh. Note 25. Subject departed Harrowgate by the east gate at approximately half past the second bell after noon, Day 41. Gate guard's report: "He went past. That's all I saw. He went past." I have no further figures. I am not sure there are figures for this. H.Q.

The east gate guard was the same one who'd charged me the weapon tax on my first day. The beer money one. He saw me coming down the last bit of hill at a run, and stepped out into the road with his hand up, and said, "Oi! Weapon..."

Then I was past him.

I heard him shout something behind me. I didn't hear what. The wind took it.

* * *

I'd never run. Not properly. Not once in my life.

You don't run on a farm. You walk, steady, because there's always another job after this one and you'll need your legs for it. When something comes up through the barn floor you don't run at it. You walk, and you set your feet, and you wait for it to rear. I'd run as a little kid, I suppose, the way kids do. But not since I was nine. Not since I first picked up the cleaver and Biscuit went funny and Dad started saying it every day.

You're nothing special, son.

So I'd never found out how fast I could go. There'd never been any reason to.

There was a reason now.

The road out of the east gate goes downhill for a mile, through market gardens and cottages, then flattens out along the river. I came down that mile and onto the flat and leaned forward and let my legs go, and something happened that I don't have good words for.

The road started to go past.

Not the way it goes past when you walk. The way the ground goes past under a hawk. The cottages on either side went by in a smear. A man with a barrow turned round to look at me and I was gone before his head came all the way round. A dog barked and the bark was behind me. The wind came in my face so hard my eyes ran, and Hal's coat cracked out behind me like a flag, and the cleaver on my back was the only thing in the world that didn't move.

It wasn't hard. That was the strangest thing. I'd expected it to be hard. My chest wasn't burning. My legs weren't aching. It was like I'd been carrying a full sack on my back for seventeen years and somebody had just taken it off, and my body had gone, oh, there you are, and started doing what it had always been able to do.

* * *

The river road went by. The first village. The second.

I passed a mail coach going east, four horses at full gallop. I came up behind it and the horses heard me and screamed and tried to leave the road, and the driver was hauling on the reins and swearing, and I went round the outside of them on the verge and was past them and gone. When I looked back they were very small, and still slewed across the road, and the driver was standing up on his box, staring.

I passed a farm where they were ploughing. The team saw me coming across two fields and bolted with the plough still on, straight through a hedge.

I thought about Fen, back in the city at the Ram's Head with his mutton chops, and his four daughters, and the ribbons. I hoped he was all right. I hoped the drovers had money on me.

It was about two hours after the gate when I went past the inn where Fen had told me about levels. I could see it coming a long way off, the same low thatch, the same yard. Fen had sat at the table by the window with his hands round his mug and told me commoners went from one to ten, and a Gold was a hundred and fifty or better, and the cap was nine hundred and ninety-nine, and nobody had ever got past six hundred.

Seems a waste of numbers, I'd said.

I went past the inn so fast the sign over the door swung behind me. Across the road, at the waystation where we'd left Haines, the same grizzled sergeant was out in the yard mending a bridle. Every horse in his stable started screaming at once. He looked up, and I raised a hand to him as I went by, and he raised his slowly back, with the bridle hanging off it, and his mouth open.

* * *

I thought about Dad. You can't run that long and not think. Your legs do it on their own after a while and your head goes wherever it likes, and mine went to Dad.

The kitchen table. The pipe. You're nothing special, son. Just stubborn. And stubborn's enough.

He'd known. That was the thing I kept coming back to, all along the river road. He'd known since I was nine years old, since the night I picked up Grandad's cleaver and it cut my hand and bonded. He'd known what was under the barn. He'd known what I was killing. He'd known what the pretty rocks were worth. He'd turned down offers for the farm, Miss Quill said, from people who knew too, and never said one word to me about it.

He'd stood at the barn door with me since I was ten, teaching me the trick with the seam under the jaw. Like it was a trick any farmer could learn. Like it was nothing.

Mine rats. Nothing to get excited about.

I was angry about it. I'd been angry since the Guild steps. It was sitting in my chest like a stone. He'd lied to me every day for seventeen years and let me think I was a farmhand, when I could have been, could have done, could have...

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Could have what?

I ran past Gallow's Cut with that question in my head. The cutting where Haines had come out from behind the felled tree. The tree was gone now. Someone had cut it up for firewood. I went through the Cut in about three breaths and out the far side.

Could have what? Gone to the city. Joined the Guild. Killed Ruin Wyrms for four hundred gold a time, and Gravemaws, and whatever else, and got famous, and had songs sung about me, like Gareth.

And left the farm.

And left the cleaver hanging somewhere other than its hook by the flue.

And the barn would have opened the week I went. The way it did. And the screamy ones would have come across the paddocks, and the fence-chewers, and whatever else is down there. And Dad would have been in the barn on his own with no cleaver and a pitchfork. And Mag on her veranda. And Thornfell.

That was why. That was the whole of it. He didn't lie because he wanted to keep me small. He lied because he wanted to keep me home, and he couldn't think of any other way to do it that would work on a boy. Because if he'd told me the truth, I'd have gone. Any boy would have. Any boy who found out he was the strongest thing in the world would have wanted to go and see the world.

So he told me I was nothing special. Every day. And I believed him, because he was my dad. And I stayed. And the barn stayed shut for seventeen years.

Stubborn's enough. Enough to stay. That's what he meant. That's what he'd always meant. Fen had asked me, on the Wool Bridge, if Dad ever said enough for what, and I hadn't had an answer.

Enough to stay. Enough to hold it shut.

And then I thought about that one time.

The winter I was nineteen. I'd never told anyone about it. I'd told Miss Quill I didn't talk about it, and I hadn't, not even to myself, much.

It hadn't come up through the drain. It had come up through the whole barn. The floor went first, then the walls bowed out, then the roof lifted off the beams in one piece and turned over in the air like a leaf and came down in the home paddock. And the thing that came up was not a rat, or a screamy one, or anything I had a name for. It was tall. Taller than the barn had been. It was made of angles that didn't meet the way angles should, and when you looked at it your eyes slid off, the way the ant writing slid off the Ledger Stone. The air round it bent. The snow fell upwards.

I'd been asleep. The cleaver was on its hook by the flue.

Dad got there first. He came out of the house in his nightshirt and went straight past the hook, and took the cleaver off it in both hands, and ran with it. Across the yard, through the snow. Forty paces, to where I was coming out of the back door in my boots. And he put it in my hands, and his hands came away from the handle black.

I didn't understand that, at the time. I thought it was the cold. I went into the barn with the cleaver and I did what I did, and it took most of the night. In the morning there was no barn and the thing was gone back down where it came from, and Dad was sitting on the back step with his hands in a bucket of snow. He never used them properly again. He never said a word about it. He was sick, on and off, from that winter on. Three years later his heart stopped.

Forty paces through the snow, carrying a thing nobody else alive could lift. Carrying everything I was, in his two bare hands, to put it in mine.

Mine rats. Nothing to get excited about.

The stone in my chest didn't go away. But it changed shape. It's hard to be angry at a man for lying to you, once you understand what it cost him to do it every day.

* * *

The camping ground by the bridge came up out of the late afternoon, where Fen and I had eaten rat tail in the rain and he'd laughed at me for calling it rat. There was nobody there now. The ashes of somebody's fire, and a crow.

I was past before it had finished looking at me.

The hedge near the Ellsby turn. Where I'd slept my first night away from home, with Hal's coat over me and my hand on the cleaver. I saw the place. The grass was still flattened a bit.

The creek road. The country I knew. Every field, every tree, every gate. The sun going down behind me now, so my shadow ran out ahead of me down the road, long and thin, a hundred yards long, and I was catching up with it.

A mile short of Thornfell there was a cart on the road, coming the other way.

It was Tam Fulbright's cart, with his mule in the shafts and the three youngest Fulbright kids in the back on top of bedding and pots, and Tam's wife beside him with the baby. The mule saw me and stopped dead and sat down in the road. Tam stood up on the seat with a pitchfork, then saw who it was and nearly fell off.

"Tobin? Tobin Marsh? Gods, where did you come from? Col only went for you five days back."

"Where's Elsie?" I said.

His face did something terrible.

"In there," he said. "In Thornfell. She wouldn't leave the cow. Your cow. She said she promised you." He sat down hard on the seat. "I couldn't make her. I had the little ones. I couldn't make her, Tobin."

"I'll get her," I said.

"There's things in the fields. You can't..."

But I was already past him, and the mule was still sitting in the road, and the kids in the back were standing up on the bedding to watch me go.

That was when I saw the smoke.

It was ahead and to the left, low over the hills, grey against the evening. A lot of it. Not one chimney. A lot of chimneys, or something worse than chimneys. It was coming from the direction of Thornfell.

Then I was close enough to hear.

You could hear it a mile out. A long, high, terrible sound, coming and going, rising and falling. Not one voice. Dozens. Like the wind in a broken window, if the wind hated you. I knew it. I'd heard it under the barn floor, some winters, coming up through the boards at midnight.

The screamy ones.

Under that, a sound like a thousand saws, grinding. Fence-chewers. Eating something wooden and big.

And under that, very faint, so faint I nearly didn't hear it over the wind and my own feet, a voice I knew. An old woman's voice. Shouting, high and cracked and furious, the way you'd shout at a dog that's got in the chook shed.

"Get back! Get back, you bastards! Get BACK!"

Mag.

* * *

I came over the last rise above Thornfell as the sun went under, and stopped, for the first time since the gate.

I didn't stop because I was tired. I wasn't tired. I stopped because I had to see. Because I had to know what I was going into before I went into it, the way you look at a big rat before you step out from behind the feed bin.

Thornfell's log wall was on fire on the north side. Not all of it. A long stretch, maybe thirty feet, burning low and smoky. Somebody had set it on purpose, I reckoned, to keep the chewers off, because the chewers hated fire. The rest of the wall was grey and seething, crawling with something that moved like a carpet of iron filings, and where it crawled the logs were going thin, and thinner, and in two places they'd gone right through and there were gaps.

In the paddocks round the wall, the screamy ones were drifting. White and tall and thin, like sheets on a line in the wind, with long arms trailing in the grass. Twenty of them. Thirty. More coming across the fields from the east, from the direction of home.

On the wall above the gate there was a little figure with a lantern and a spear.

There were other figures on the wall. Not many. Too few. But that one I'd have known anywhere. Small and bent and furious, with the lantern held up high in one hand and the spear jabbing down at something on the other side of the gate.

I looked at it all for about the time it takes to take one breath.

Six days by cart from Harrowgate to Thornfell. It had taken me one afternoon.

I hadn't even felt it.

I unslung the cleaver, and went down the hill.