Chapter 25 Thornfell

Audit of T. Marsh. Note 26. Subject not present. I have audited an empty chair at Mrs Ostry's breakfast table for one morning. It is the most difficult audit I have ever conducted. H.Q.

The screamy ones saw me coming before I reached the bottom of the hill.

They turned all at once, the way a flock of starlings turns, every one of those long white shapes in the paddocks swinging round together, and they screamed.

I'd heard that sound through the barn floor most winters of my life. At midnight, from a long way down, it's bad. Right up close, from thirty of them, it's like somebody's put their hand inside your skull and is squeezing. I could feel my legs want to stop. I could feel the cold wanting to come in. It's how they kill you. They stop your legs with the noise and then they come and put their hands on your face.

But I've had a lot of practice not stopping.

The first one came at me across a ditch with its arms out. I went through it with the cleaver from the shoulder down. It's mist, a screamy one, mostly, or near enough, and you'd think a blade would go through it and do nothing. It doesn't. The cleaver cuts what I mean it to cut. It always has. The screamy one came apart like wet paper in the rain, and its scream went up very high and stopped.

The rest of them came for me then. All of them. They left the wall and came across the paddocks for me, and that was what I wanted.

* * *

I don't know how long it took. The light was gone by the time I'd finished with the last of them in the paddocks. It was dark and cold and I was wet to the knees from the ditches, and there were long cold marks on my arms where they'd got their hands on me and not held on long enough.

The wall was still being eaten.

You can't fight fence-chewers with a cleaver. There's too many. They're small and grey and quick and there's thousands, and they go into the wood like weevils into flour. The north side of the wall was still burning where someone had set it, and I could see the chewers wouldn't go near that bit. The rest of the wall, east and south, was seething with them.

I went to the burning stretch. There was a log there, a whole length of the wall, maybe twenty feet of grey pine, burning end to end. It had come loose at the bottom where the chewers had eaten the post-hole out. I got my hands under it.

It was heavy, I suppose. It was on fire, certainly. I didn't stop to think about either. I lifted it off the wall, and turned with it, and carried it round the outside to the east side, and laid it down along the bottom of the wall where the chewers were thickest, and rolled it.

You could hear them burn. A noise like fat in a pan.

I rolled it the whole length of the east wall, and round the corner, and along the south. When I got to the gate, the chewers that were left were pouring off the logs and back out across the paddocks towards the east like water out of a tipped bucket, and the log was burned down to half its thickness and I'd taken the skin off both palms.

I put it down in the road. My hands hurt. That was new. I looked at them for a moment.

Then somebody shouted from on top of the gate.

"You took your bloody time!"

* * *

Mag was standing on the fighting step over the gate with Hal's boar spear in one hand and her lantern in the other. There was blood down one side of her face from a cut in her scalp, and her hair had come out of its bun, and she was leaning on the spear like a walking stick.

"Six days by cart, Mag," I said.

"I'd wager it took you an afternoon," said Mag.

I looked up at her. She looked down at me.

"Open the gate," I said. "There's people in there need looking at."

"Can't. Bram jammed it. He's got a cart behind it and two dead pigs." She jerked her head at the wall. "Climb, if you're so bloody special."

I climbed.

* * *

Thornfell was packed. People everywhere. In doorways, on roofs, in the street. They'd been up on the wall and on the roofs since sundown, by the look of them, with pitchforks and axes and anything that would cut. When I came over the top of the gate, a lot of them turned to look.

Some of them knew me. Some of them didn't. All of them stared.

"That's the Marsh boy," somebody said. "That's Aldous Marsh's boy."

"He carried the wall," said somebody else. "Did you see? He carried a burning log round the wall. On his own. I saw him."

I didn't stop to talk. Haddie Brennick was sitting against the wall of the tannery with a fleshing knife in each hand and a bandage round her thigh, and she was all right, she said, she was fine, go on, go on. Bram was in the door of the reeve's house with his bad knee in a splint and his other leg in a worse one, giving orders from a chair. He saw me and closed his eyes for a moment, and opened them again, and said, "About time, lad," quite quietly. Annis came out behind him with a cup of tea, and put it in my scraped hands without a word, and kissed my cheek, and went back inside to the wounded.

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"Where's Elsie?"

He pointed down the side of the house.

* * *

The reeve's back yard had Duchess in it.

She was tied to the woodshed, with her ears back and her eyes rolling, and in front of her, between her and the yard gate, was Elsie Fulbright. Fourteen years old, in her dad's old coat, with a pitchfork in both hands.

And at the yard gate, drifting in over the top of it, long and white and thin, was a screamy one. It must have come in through one of the gaps in the wall before I got there. It had its arms out. It was screaming, very softly, the way you'd hum to a baby.

Elsie wasn't moving. I could see why. Her legs had gone. She was standing there in front of Duchess with the pitchfork held out and her whole body shaking, and she couldn't move a muscle, and the screamy one was coming down off the gate towards her with its hands reaching for her face.

I came over the woodshed roof and down into the yard between them, and put the cleaver through it.

It came apart. It screamed. It stopped.

The yard was very quiet.

Elsie's legs went. I caught her before she hit the ground and sat her down on the chopping block. She was shaking so hard her teeth were going. She looked up at me.

"I promised," she said. "I promised you I'd mind her."

"You did," I said. "You minded her."

Behind me, Duchess let out a long breath through her nose, the way she does when she's been made to wait for the milking. I turned round. She looked at me with great dignity, and then deliberately looked away.

"Hello, Duchess," I said.

She didn't answer. She was angry with me, I could tell. I'd been gone five weeks.

* * *

The walking haystack came at midnight.

I'd only ever seen one before, the once. It came across the paddocks out of the east, the way home lay, and you heard it a long time before you saw it. A sound like a hill moving. Trees cracking. The ground shaking under your feet so the pots on the reeve's dresser rattled.

Then it came into the light of the burning wall.

It's not a haystack. That's just what it looks like, if you're ten and you don't know any better. It's a mound of earth and thorn and root as tall as Thornfell's chapel, moving on legs as thick as old tree trunks, with long whips of bramble coming off it in every direction, thrashing. Things are caught in the brambles. Fence posts. A sheep. The Pryors' gate. Somewhere in the middle of it there's a light, deep in, red and slow, like a coal in a heap of ash.

It came straight at the gate.

People on the wall started screaming. People in the street started running. I heard Mag shouting at them to hold, hold, hold the bloody wall. I heard Jory Pryor's crossbow go, and go again. The bolts went into the thorns and vanished.

I went over the gate.

It saw me. I don't know how, it hasn't got eyes, but it saw me. It stopped. All the brambles stopped thrashing at once and came round towards me, the way the screamy ones had, the way everything does now that I think about it. They came round and pointed at me like fingers.

Then they came for me.

I won't tell all of it. It was a long time, and it was hard, and there was a while in the middle where I couldn't see anything but thorns and I was being lifted off the ground and I couldn't get my arm free to swing. The brambles are strong. They go round you and they pull, every one in a different direction. Hal's coat went. My shirt went. The thorns went into my back, and that hurt, and that was new too.

Then I got my arm free.

I went in. Not out. In, through the thorns, through the earth and the roots, cutting, towards that red light in the middle. It was like digging a post-hole through a bramble patch with your bare hands, only the bramble patch was trying to pull you apart. I could hear Mag shouting somewhere outside. I could hear people on the wall. I went in, and in, until I could see the light right in front of me, red and slow, beating like a heart.

I put the cleaver through it.

* * *

When I came out, it was a hill.

That's all it was. A hill of earth and dead brambles and old roots, right in front of Thornfell's gate, steaming in the cold. The red light was gone. I came out of the side of it on my hands and knees with the cleaver in one hand and a pretty rock in the other, a big one, dark red, bigger than both my fists, still warm.

There was no noise from the wall at all.

I stood up. I looked at the rock. I put it in my pocket, because I didn't know what else to do with it, and because Miss Quill had said to bring them to her.

Then Thornfell started cheering.

* * *

The rest of the night was quiet.

The things that were left in the paddocks drifted back east, the way they'd come, towards Marsh Hold. The chewers went first, then the last few screamy ones, thinning out into the dark like mist burning off. By the time the sky went grey, there was nothing moving out there at all but crows.

Jory Pryor came and found me while I was helping carry the wounded into the chapel. He had his crossbow over his shoulder and his one hand was black with soot from the wall fire. He stood in front of me and didn't say anything for a while.

"I shot at it," he said at last. "The big one. I shot at it twice."

"I heard you."

"I couldn't shoot at the white ones. When they got Dad. My legs went. I couldn't do anything." His face worked. "But I shot at that one."

"That took some doing," I said. "Most people would've run."

He nodded, very fast, several times, and went away, and I saw him sit down on the chapel step with his face in his hand.

Seven dead, all told. Old Pryor and Corrie, and the hired man from the Selby place, and a woman called Nettie Hollow who'd been caught outside on the first night, and three more I didn't know, from holdings further out. Bram knew all their names. He said them to me, one at a time, from his chair, at sunrise.

I sat on the fighting step over the gate with Mag. She'd got her pipe going. She had a bandage on her head that Annis had tied, and her hands were still shaking, and she didn't seem to mind me seeing.

"Did you bring my bottle?" she said.

"No. Sorry, Mag."

"Bugger," said Mag.

We sat there a while. Down below, in the reeve's yard, Elsie was milking Duchess. I could hear the hiss of it in the pail.

"Your father told me," said Mag. "When you were born. Not everything. Enough. That there was something under the barn, and the Marsh men had held it shut a long time, and the cleaver was part of how. That Wendel knew. That if you ever left with it, I'd know, and I was to write." She drew on her pipe. "He made me promise again at the end, on Hal's grave. I told him he was being bloody dramatic."

"Who'd you write to, Mag?"

She looked out at the paddocks for a long time.

"Somebody your father said to write to," she said. "If it ever opened. Someone who's supposed to come." She took the pipe out of her mouth. "They haven't. Maybe they won't. Aldous said they mightn't."

"Who?"

"When they come," said Mag, "you can ask them yourself." She looked at me sideways. "He carried it to you once, you know. That winter. I saw his hands, after."

"I know," I said. "I remember."

She was quiet a long time.

"He was proud of you," she said. "Every day. He just couldn't say it. Saying it would have been the same as telling you."

I didn't answer. I couldn't, for a bit.

Away over the hills, towards home, there was a glow in the sky. Faint. Red. Not the sunrise. The sunrise was coming up off to the right of it, grey and gold. This was lower, and redder, and it didn't move.

"It's still open," I said.

"It's still open," said Mag. She knocked her pipe out on the step. "And it's yours. It always was."

I stood up. My hands hurt, and my back hurt where the thorns had gone in, and I'd lost Hal's coat. I picked up the cleaver.

"Mag," I said. "Tell Elsie to keep Duchess here."

"Where are you going?"

"Home," I said, and went down off the wall.