Chapter 576 - 575: Below the Ford

Chapter 576: Chapter 575: Below the Ford

Location:The Northern Ranges — the first pass to the Middle Ford

Date/Time:TC1857.11.19 – TC1857.11.24

Iron gets cold enough in the high country that it takes the skin off a bare hand, and Bjorn had forgotten that in his years of southern forges and remembered it on the first morning of the surge when he put his palm flat on the ice-axe head to check the edge.

He left the skin on the steel and did not make a sound about it and wrapped the hand and went on, because forty-one children were watching him, and a man who shouts about his hand in front of children teaches them that hands are a thing to shout about.

The girl at the front of the line looked at the wrapping and then at him. She was about nine, and she had watched the eleven-year-old count the second group through the first pass in the tenth month, and had taken it up the next morning without anybody telling her to, and nobody on the route had stopped her since.

"Iron," she said, in Old Northern.

"Iron."

She nodded, as if that were information she had been missing, and turned back round and began to count.

***

Freya’s word came down from the second pass on the second day, carried by one of the Corps who had run the leg in a day and a half and sat down in the snow afterward and could not be made to get up for the better part of an hour.

It was not a letter. Freya did not write letters to him; she had never needed to. It was four lines in her hand on the back of the boy’s letter, and the boy’s letter was the front of it, in the boy’s two languages, one above the other.

Bjorn read the boy’s side first.

He read it the way he read everything, slowly, with his mouth moving on the Old Northern because he had learned the southern letters late and still did not trust them, and he got to the bottom — I have not let anybody clean the trough — and stood very still in the snow with forty-one children behind him and a Corps runner sitting in a drift.

Then he turned it over.

He did not write stay, and he did not write come home. He is right about the houses. I am going in.

Tell him I read it twice, and the second time I read it the way you read things.

The pass will be shut on the fifth day. Do not come up for me. That is not a request.

I have not got a form for this either. I am doing it anyway.

***

He did not say anything to anybody for about a quarter of an hour.

He read Freya’s four lines again in that quarter of an hour, and then the boy’s side again, and then Freya’s, and the thing he kept stopping on was not I am going in and not do not come up for me. It was the second line. The second time I read it the way you read things. Slowly, with the mouth moving, because the letters were late and not trusted.

She had never once in all their years remarked on how he read. He had assumed she had not noticed.

The children noticed. Children from the north notice when a large man stops talking, because in the north a large man who stops talking is about to decide something, and Bjorn felt forty-one sets of eyes on the back of his neck and did not turn round, because he did not yet know what his face was doing.

It was the girl who came back down the line in the end. She stood beside him with her eyes on the slope, the way you stand beside somebody in the north when you want them to know you are there and do not want to make it a thing.

"Freya," she said.

"Freya."

"Going in."

He looked down at her. She had not seen the letter.

"How do you know?"

"Because you stopped." The girl said it flatly. "When they go in, the people who love them stop. My aunt stopped when my uncle went in last winter." She did not say what her uncle had gone in to do, and Bjorn did not ask, and she did not seem to expect him to. "Is she going to say it?"

"Say what?"

"Not the children." The girl looked up at him for the first time. "At a fire. Is she going to say it?"

"Yes."

The girl considered that.

"Then they’ll have to stand still," she said, "because she walked at the back," and went back to the front of the line, and counted.

***

He moved them the way he had written it down.

Every point at once. His own team took the forty-one from the first pass down to Cold Shoulder and on past it, two legs in one, without sleeping at the shelter, and the Cold Shoulder team came up to meet them halfway and walked the second half with them, and it meant that for most of the third day there were eleven adults and forty-one children strung out along a slope in the open with nothing behind them but snow and nothing in front of them but more.

He had drawn it on a board. It had looked worse on the board than it did on the slope, which he did not trust.

They passed Cold Shoulder at the fourth hour of the second day without stopping, which was the plan and which every adult on the route hated.

The shelter was stone at the back and hide at the front, and the hide had been tied down for the winter, and at the stone end there were two cairns with the snow already over the tops of them. Bjorn did not slow down. He could not slow down; there were forty-one children on a slope and a pass closing behind them, and the entire plan was that nobody stopped.

The girl at the front slowed down.

She did not stop. She slowed, by about half a stride, as the line went past the stone end, and every child behind her slowed with her because that was how a line worked, and then she picked it back up again, and the line picked it back up, and she did not look round to see whether anybody had noticed.

Bjorn had noticed. So had the Cold Shoulder team, who had buried the two in the stone end four weeks ago. One of them said something under his breath that Bjorn did not catch and did not ask about.

Nobody had told her who was in the cairns. Bjorn worked out later that nobody had needed to.

He put the Corps in threes anyway, because it was the only thing anybody had, and he walked at the back himself, because Freya was not there to do it, and because he had watched her do it for five legs and had finally understood, somewhere on the fourth, why she would not let anybody else.

It was not guarding.

He had thought it was guarding until he did it. Walking at the back of forty-one children in snow is counting, and it is counting without stopping, and every time the count comes out right you have about four seconds before you have to start it again.

***

They came on the third afternoon, in the flat light, on the long traverse below Cold Shoulder where the slope went down on one side and up on the other, and there was nowhere to put anybody.

Four of them, off the upper slope, and Bjorn saw them before anybody else did because he was at the back and looking up.

"Down. Down and in."

The girl had the children off the traverse and into the lee of the rocks before he had finished the word, in a line, the smallest in the middle, counting.

The first three came off the slope at the front of the column and not at the children. They came at the lead Corps three, and they did it in a way Bjorn had not seen and had not read about on any sheet, and he understood it about two heartbeats after it started and could do nothing about it at all.

They went for the front man.

Not the side. Not the watcher. Two of them together, at the one man holding the arms, from two directions at once, and the front man went down under both of them in the first second and a half, and the side man was already committed, and the third position — a Corps woman Bjorn had walked beside for three legs and whose name was on the wall at Seven Peaks and on the return and in his head — saw the front go down and did what Kira Desh had done on Cold Shoulder.

She left the head.

And the fourth animal, which had been standing on the upper slope not doing anything, came down at exactly that moment, into exactly the place she had left, at exactly the man who was now under a thing with nobody watching its head.

***

Bjorn has told this part once, to Raven, in writing, and has refused to tell it out loud.

He got there. He is seven feet and he has no gift of any kind and he had an ice axe in the hand he had left the skin on, and he went up the traverse into it the way he had gone into things in the north before he ever came south, and he did not do anything that anybody would have put on a sheet.

He got two of them. The Corps got the third.

The fourth one — the watcher, the one that had come down last — did not stay. It went back up the slope as soon as the third was dead, at the same pace it had come, and did not look at anybody, and Bjorn let it go because there was a man in the snow and a woman kneeling beside him and he could not be in two places.

Three dead. The front man, the watcher who had left the head, and the side man, who had gone in to finish it after she moved and had been reached by the thing that came down into the space she left.

All of them Corps. All of them on the wall at Seven Peaks, in the order Sera Vahn counted them.

He knew all three names. That was the first thing he thought when he was standing in the snow afterward with the axe still in his hand, and he was ashamed of it as soon as he had thought it, and he thought it anyway.

He knew all three names, because a woman in a camp at the top of a mountain had written them on a wall a fortnight ago and put them on every return, and nobody on this route would ever again have to ask a stranger what to cut.

He wrote the sheet that night by a fire in the lee of the rocks, with the children asleep in a heap against the stone and the Corps on watch in threes, and it took him most of an hour because his hand was bad and because he wanted every line of it to be a thing he had seen.

Four. Off the upper slope. Three came at the lead team, and one stood off.

The three did not go for the side or the watcher. Two went for the front man together from two directions. He was down in under two seconds.

The watcher left the head to take the front. That is what Kira Desh did at Cold Shoulder.

The one that had been standing off came down at that moment into the place she had left.

He stopped there with the pen over the page for a long time.

Then he wrote the next line, which was the only line on the sheet that was not a thing he had seen, and he wrote it in the first column anyway, because it was not a guess about what the thing meant. It was a count.

This is the second time in thirty days the third position has left the head to replace a fallen front. Both times the head was not watched. Both times somebody died of it.

He left the fourth column empty. It was not hard. He had watched a woman with no name keep it empty for three failures and a death, and he had stopped finding it hard somewhere around the second pass.

***

They made the middle ford at the second hour of the fifth morning, with the forty-one and eight of the eleven adults, and the ice at the ford was already a hand thick at the edges and grinding in the middle, and they crossed it in a line with the girl counting out loud the whole way over.

Bjorn crossed last.

He stood on the south bank afterward and looked north up the valley toward the first pass and the second, and there was cloud on both of them, low and gray and not moving, and he knew what that meant, and so did every child on the bank behind him, because they were from there.

The pass was shut.

Somewhere on the far side of it, in the middle country, in a house he did not know the name of, his wife was walking toward a fire.

The girl came and stood beside him again, and did not look at him, and said, "Forty-one."

"Forty-one."

"And eight."

"And three who aren’t," she said, "and one who went in." She was quiet for a moment. "You need to cut them. You’ve got the bark."

"I know."

"Then do it here. On this side." She looked at the ford. "So they came over with us."

***

He cut them on the south bank of the middle ford with his wrapped hand, at the second hour of the morning, in the cold, with forty-one children sitting in the snow in a line waiting for him and not one of them complaining about it.

The day. The number. Three names, one under the other, above the count.

And then, under the count, where there was no form for it and never had been, one more line.

He had to think about how to write it. He did not have a way of writing a person who was not dead and not coming.

In the end he cut her name and then the words gone in, and then, because it was true and because the girl was watching and because he had learned this year from a great many people that you write down the part you can see and leave the rest alone, he cut one more word under it.

Standing.

He put the bark inside his coat, where she kept hers, and got up, and got them moving south.