Chapter 562 - 561: What They Built For Her

Chapter 562: Chapter 561: What They Built For Her

Location:Ferrow’s Rest — The Sexton’s Yard; The Screening Shed; The Graded Bed

Date/Time:TC1857.05.14 – TC1857.05.16

The paste tasted of nothing for the first count and then of wax and something green and bitter under it, and Maren Harren had been putting it on her own tongue twice a week for seven months and had never once got used to it.

"You don’t have to do it with them," Emrys Dunmore observed from the door.

"I do." She got the wooden spoon out and wiped it. "Forty-one people in this village have had that in their mouths because I asked them to, and three of them cried about it, and if I sat on a stool and watched I’d be a woman asking other people to do a thing. Which I am. But there’s two kinds."

Emrys grunted, which was the whole of what he thought about that, and came in and sat down anyway.

He was fifty-something and the sexton of a village that had been dug up twice, and he had refused Seven Peaks to Raven’s face and had never once taken it back. He had also been in the screening shed on every screening morning since the turn of the year, and had learned the paste and the timing and the recording from Maren Harren, and could now run the whole thing without her, which was the point and which neither of them said.

"Twenty-two today," he reported.

"Twenty-two. And I want you doing the reading and me on the book, because you’ll be doing both in the autumn whether either of us likes it or not."

"Not for your mountain."

"Nobody said mountain." She put the spoon down. "I said autumn."

***

Ostrek came in at the eighth minute with her boards under her arm and her face doing its usual nothing.

She had been at Ferrow’s Rest a week by then, because Raven had sent her to sit with the bed and the spoil heaps and the two stages of graded ground, and because there was nobody else alive who had made the original record. She sat where she always sat, at the end of the bench, and set out her boards in the order she set them out in: what happened, when, who saw it, and a fourth column for what it meant, ruled and empty and going to stay that way.

"Anything from the north?" Maren Harren asked.

"Three sheets. None of them changed anything." Ostrek uncapped her pen. "The Northern form is the same form we’re teaching. That’s the first time in five months that a sheet has arrived and told us we were already right, and I’ve written that down because it’s a fact about the sheets and not about us."

"And you don’t like it."

"I don’t like anything. I record." Ostrek looked up briefly. "But I’d note that nothing has come out of the ground here since the second month, and Ferrow’s Rest has been the place where things come out of the ground for a year, and a quiet spring is a thing with a shape to it."

Maren Harren, who was seventy-one and had buried a husband and two brothers and had learned a long time ago which sentences to take seriously, put her hand flat on the bench.

"How long’s it been quiet?"

"Ninety-one days."

***

The screening ran to the twelfth minute, and Emrys called it, and nobody had read past seven, which was normal, and the twenty-two of them went out into the yard in the sun to get the taste out of their mouths with bread.

Maren Harren was still writing when the church bell started.

Not the hour. Ferrow’s Rest rang the hour on the small bell and the other thing on the big one, and it had rung the big one twice in the past year, and the second time she had been here for.

She got up faster than a woman of seventy-one ought to and got to the door and looked where everybody in the yard was looking, which was east, at the graded bed.

There were a great many of them.

She did not count. Nobody counted. Somebody said a number afterward and somebody else said a different one and Ostrek wrote both down with both names beside them and refused to average them, and the number that went in the record in the end was more than sixty and fewer than a hundred, from two witnesses who disagreed.

They came across the graded ground at a run, and the ground did not slow them at all.

***

Raven came down out of the sky about nine minutes later, which Maren Harren only knew afterward because somebody timed it, and which at the time felt like an hour and a half.

Before that there was the wall.

Ferrow’s Rest had a wall because Ferrow’s Rest had been dug up twice, and it was three courses of dry stone and a bank, and it was not a wall for stopping anything. It was a wall for making things come over one line and no other. Emrys had built it that way himself with forty people in nine days and had explained it to anybody who asked in exactly those words, and on the day it turned out to be worth every hour of it, because the line was where the neck teams were.

Three to an animal. Front, side, head.

They held for four minutes. Maren Harren was on the bank with the book because she was seventy-one and because somebody had to write the names of who went where, and she saw all of it and she is the reason the record exists.

It is not a clean thing to watch from above. The wall made them come up over a lip, and coming up over a lip is the one moment those animals are slow, and the front man took the arms at the top of it, and the side man went in underneath, and the third stood back and said nothing at all unless there was something to say. Three people, one animal, about four seconds. Then the three of them stepped back a pace and breathed and waited for the next one, and the whole line did that, up and down, like men unloading a cart.

She wrote the names as fast as she could and got most of them.

It is the most orderly thing she has ever seen people do, and it lasted exactly as long as the supply of threes.

It worked. She wanted that said first and kept saying it afterward. The form worked. Where three people stood together and did the three jobs, the animal died, every time, and they killed eleven of them on the wall in four minutes and did not lose anybody in the first three.

Then there were not enough threes.

***

Raven arrived on the east side and went straight into the open ground beyond the wall, alone, which Maren Harren understood at the time to be brave and understood afterward to be arithmetic.

She had seen the cutting line twice before. It is not a big thing to look at. It is a narrow bar of nothing that makes the air over it shake, and it goes through what it goes through, and Maren Harren had watched it open a heavy at Ferrow’s Rest in the winter and take nine seconds to do it and had watched Raven be unable to stand up afterward.

The first one she put it into came apart.

The second one did not.

Maren Harren saw it and did not understand it, and Ostrek saw it and did understand it, and had her pen going before the animal had finished not dying.

The line went in, and the outside of the animal came off.

It came off in sheets — gray, flaking, about the thickness of a thumbnail, a whole crust of the thing sloughing away from the plate underneath in the second the line touched it, and the line spent itself on the sheets and the animal ran on through with its back bare and smoking and went for her legs.

She killed it. It took her a second line, and then a third.

She killed the next one, and it took her two.

***

They did not go anywhere else.

That was what Maren Harren could not get out of her head afterward, and what she put in the letter, and what she said to Raven’s face on the third day when Raven would not sit down.

Sixty or more animals came across that ground, and none of them turned aside for anybody. They went past the wall. They went past the shed with twenty-two people in it. There were children in the lane behind the church, and two of them were standing in the open, and an animal went within an arm’s length of one of them at a dead run and did not alter its line by a hand’s breadth.

They went for Raven. All of them. In sequence, without gaps, one arriving as the last one died, for something over twenty minutes.

"It’s the tempo," Ostrek answered that night, without stopping writing. "Nine seconds. That’s what a heavy cost her in the winter, and I have it in the book with the date on it. They have built a thing that takes three lines instead of one, and they have sent enough of them that there is never nine seconds."

"Say that in plain words for the sheet."

"That is the plain words." Ostrek did not look up. "Somebody watched her fight, and counted, and built for the count."

***

Emrys Dunmore died on the wall at about the eighteenth minute, and Maren Harren was ten paces away and saw it.

He had been in the third position, behind, watching the head, which was not where a sexton of fifty-something should have been and was exactly where he had put himself because there were not enough people who could do it and he had made himself learn.

He called the head. Maren Harren heard him call it — head, head — in a voice she had heard call the hours for a year, and the pair in front of him moved because he called it, and both of them lived.

Then a second animal came in behind him on the line he had been watching away from, because there were too many of them and because a man who is watching one head cannot watch two.

He went down on the bank inside his own wall.

Maren Harren got to him. She wants it on the record that she got to him and that he was not on his own, and that he said one thing, and that the one thing was not about Seven Peaks and was not about the mountain and was not a change of mind.

He asked whether the shed was shut.

She told him the shed was shut, which was true, and he went.

***

Ostrek died standing up at the end of the bench with her boards in front of her.

Maren Harren did not see it and has never pretended to. What she knows is what the bench looked like afterward, because she was the one who went in and got the boards, and she has described it the same way every time since and refuses to make it better.

The boards were in order. The pen was capped.

The last line on the first board is in Ostrek’s hand, and it is steady:

Outer layer sheds under the line. Estimate two to three times the cost per animal. Confirm on carcasses.

And beside it, in the fourth column, the one that was ruled and empty and going to stay that way, there is nothing.

She did not write in it. She had a quarter of a page and something coming through the wall of the shed, and she did not write in it.

***

It stopped at about the thirtieth minute, and the way it stopped was that it stopped.

The ones still alive turned and went back east across the graded bed at the same pace they had come, and nobody chased them, because there was nobody left standing who could have.

Raven was on her knees in the open ground and did not get up for a long time.

The count, when it was finally made and checked twice: thirty-one dead at Ferrow’s Rest. Forty-some hurt. Maren Harren had the village roll in the same book as the screening and did the arithmetic on the back of it that night, and then scratched it out, because it was a true number and there was nobody left in Ferrow’s Rest it would have helped. Eleven animals killed on the wall by the threes. Twenty-two killed by Raven in the open ground, in sequence, at two and three lines apiece.

The rest walked away.

***

They went over the carcasses on the second morning because Ostrek had written confirm on carcasses and because not one person left alive in that village was going to leave that instruction unfollowed.

The crust came off the dead ones in the hand. It was not armor. That took a while to get across to people afterward, and Lin Yue would say it better in a month: it was not armor, it was fuel — a layer put on the outside of the animal for no purpose except to be destroyed first, so that the thing that destroyed it had less left afterward.

It was thin. It was brittle. It did nothing against a knife at all.

Emrys Dunmore’s neck teams had killed every animal that came over the lip with the crust still on them and had not noticed it was there.

***

Maren Harren started the letter on the third evening and got four lines into it and stopped, and went and found Raven, who was sitting on the step outside the screening shed doing nothing at all, which Maren Harren had never seen.

"I’m writing to Elian," she told her. "I write to him every week. He’ll have had nothing for a fortnight by the time this gets there, and he’ll have worked out why, because he’s nine and he counts."

"He does."

"So I’m going to tell him. All of it, in a letter, from me." She sat down on the step, which took a while. "I’d like to know whether you’re going to stop me, and if you are, I’d like you to say so now rather than in a room in four days."

Raven did not answer for a moment.

"What are you going to say about Emrys?"

"That he wouldn’t come to your mountain and he learned every part of it anyway, and he stood in the worst place on the wall because nobody else could, and what he asked me at the end." Maren Harren looked at her hands. "And that he was right about the shed. Twenty-two people in it and not one of them touched."

"And the rest of it?"

"Seven minutes." Maren Harren did not look up. "That’s what he read. I took it myself, and I’ve never said the number out loud to him or to anybody else, and I’m not starting now, so it isn’t going in the letter either." She put her hands flat on her knees. "But I’d like one person alive to know that I know what’s gone into the ground here, and that there’s a shed to open on the second day of the week and I’ll be opening it."

Raven did not answer at once.

"Then no. I’m not going to stop you." Raven was looking out at the graded bed, which was empty and flat and went on to the horizon. "But put one more thing in it, because he’ll want it and nobody else will think to tell him."

"What?"

"That it isn’t about him. That I know what he’ll do with this, and he needs telling before he does it." She said it without any softening at all. "Every one of those animals went past twenty-two people and two children in a lane to get to me. Not to the village. Not to the anchors. Not to him. Somebody built sixty of those things for one person, and it isn’t a nine-year-old on a mountain three hundred kilometers away, and he is going to lie in the dark tonight and decide it is, and I want that sentence in a letter in your handwriting before he’s had a week to build on it."

Maren Harren wrote it down on the back of her hand so she would not lose the words.

"And what do I say when he asks what it’s about, then?"

Raven did not look away from the flat ground.

"Say that nobody knows," Raven answered. "Put it in the fourth column."