Chapter 615: Fill

Location: Seven Peaks — the Medicine Hall; the north gate paving

Date/Time: TC1858.03.17

Willow bark tasted like a fence post left out in the rain.

Raven drank it anyway, all of it, because Mira was standing over her and would stand there until the cup was empty. It went down bitter and stayed bitter at the back of her tongue, and she set the cup on the bench beside her with her left hand, because the right one was in her lap in clean wool and Mira had told her twice not to use it for anything, cups included.

“Three weeks,” Mira said.

“You said two.”

“I said two before you opened it.” Mira sat down on the stool across from her and took the right hand in both of hers, not unwrapping it, just holding it at the wrist and turning it a little toward the window light. “Before, it was a burn. Now it’s a burn that’s been opened to the meat and closed again with my thread. Three weeks before it closes. Then a while before you use it. I’ll tell you how long a while when I see what it closes into.”

“And if I draw before that?”

“Then I don’t know that it closes at all.”

Raven kept her eyes on the wool.

“I’m not saying that to frighten you,” Mira said. “I’m saying it because I don’t know, and I’d rather you heard me not know than heard me guess.”

“I know.”

Mira set the hand back in her lap, carefully, and stood up. “Taron’s in the bed by the window. Two ribs. He’s going to try to get up today, and I’m going to let him, because if I don’t, he’ll do it when I’m not looking.”

“Where’s he going?”

“Where do you think?”

+++

The paving looked smaller in daylight.

Raven came out of the gate passage with her coat buttoned over the bound hand and stopped on the third slab, where Taron had stood. The light was flat and gray and showed everything. The second slab, sunk a little more than a coin’s width on its outer edge now, tilted toward the pit. The pit itself, open now inside the curb, with the dead animal sprawled over its near lip, its head-plate on the second slab and the rest of it down in the dark. And standing up out of its back, at a lean, through a patch of burned crust, Tilda Rudd’s spear.

Beyond that, the curb. Every stone of it standing in its line. Beyond that, the peg.

Hanne was there already, with the slate. Two of the gate watch stood at the ends of the third slab, facing the field. One of them was the young one from last night, who had told Taron She told me. Raven had heard about that from Mira, who had heard it from Taron, who had said it the way he said everything, as if it were a report on the state of a wall.

“Has anything moved?” Raven asked.

“Edge came up a finger at the fourth hour,” Hanne said. “Down by the fifth. Nothing since.”

“Lin Yue?”

“Coming. She wants it out of the pit.”

“So do I,” Raven said. “I want the spear back.”

Hanne’s eyes went to the spear and stayed there.

Lin Yue came out of the gate passage a little after that, carrying her book, and three Corps behind her carrying rope, and behind them, slowly, holding himself very straight, one hand pressed to his left side under his robe, Taron.

“Mira let you up,” Raven said.

“She did.”

“She said you’d do it anyway.”

“I would have.”

He took his place beside her on the third slab, eyes on the pit. He said nothing about the night. He looked at the spear standing up out of the dead animal’s back, and then at the curb, and then at her bound hand, in that order, and then back at the pit.

“From the stone,” he said.

Raven nodded.

+++

They roped it from the third slab. Two loops over the head-plate and drawn tight behind it, where the second plate had been burned away, and the neck was bare, and a third rope around one of the slack forelimbs, and six of the Corps on the ropes with their boots braced on the flags and nobody, not one of them, with a foot on the second slab.

Raven stood back by the gate passage, because she couldn’t pull and there was no sense standing where she’d be in the way of people who could. She found that hard. She found it harder than she’d expected to, standing idle while other people’s backs bent.

“Together,” Taron said. “Now.”

It came up out of the pit slowly. It was heavier than it looked, which she would have guessed, and stiffer, which she wouldn’t have. It had frozen in the night lying half in the earth, and the earth kept hold of it. When it came free it came all at once, and the six on the ropes went back a step together and kept their feet, and the carcass slid up over the lip of the second slab and lay on the paving with its legs in the air, the crust on its underside gray and thick and the plates of its back black where the line had gone through them.

Tilda’s spear was still in it.

Hanne went to it. She set her boot on the dead thing’s flank and took the shaft in both hands and heaved, and it held, and she set her feet and heaved again, and it came out with a wet, sucking sound. She stood holding it. The point was bent a little to one side where it had met the plate under the crust and stopped.

Nobody spoke.

Then Hanne turned around and held it out, butt first, to the young watch at the end of the slab.

He looked at it.

“You were on the gate when she set the peg,” Hanne said. “You were on the gate last night. You knew what to say. Take it.”

He took it. He held it the way people hold a thing they’ve been handed in front of everybody, a little away from his body, and then he seemed to remember it was a spear and brought it in to his side.

“What’s your name?” Raven asked him.

“Wynn Hartley.”

“I’ll remember it.”

He nodded, and went back to the end of the slab, and faced the field.

+++

Lin Yue was on her knees at the edge of the third slab with her book open, looking down into the pit.

It was a plain enough hole now that the animal was out of it. The last slab lay at the bottom, tilted, a forearm down, dark earth showing at its sides. On the fourth side, the north side, under the curb, the earth was not earth any longer. It was a hole. Black, round at the top, going down and in under the foot of the curb, and from where Raven stood she couldn’t see where it went after that.

“It goes under,” Lin Yue said.

“Under the curb.”

“Under the curb. The curb is a forearm and a half. This goes down past the foot of it.” Lin Yue held her pencil out over the hole, sighting along it. “I can’t tell you how far without going in, and nobody’s going in.”

“No,” Raven said.

“So I’ll write that it goes under the curb, and that I don’t know how far.”

Raven stood looking at the black hole under her curb.

She had built it a hand out from the last slab. She had left the hole where it was under the last slab because it was easier than lifting the slab again. She had said that last night to Taron, and he had said Yes.

“I built it over the hole,” she said.

“You built it beside the hole,” Taron said. “The hole went under it.”

“That’s the same thing.”

“No. If you’d built it over the hole, it would have fallen in.” He was looking at the curb, not at her. “It didn’t fall in. It’s standing on the earth on both sides. There’s a hole under it.”

“Then it’s a curb with a hole under it.”

“Then fill the hole.”

+++

They filled it with stone.

There was a great deal of broken coping in the forge yard still, from the east wall, the pieces too short to set on end, and they brought it out by the cartload to the gate passage and carried it from there by hand along the paving to the third slab. Nobody stepped onto the second. They stood on the third and threw the stone down into the pit.

The first of it went down into the black hole under the curb and didn’t make much of a sound. Raven listened for it to land, and it did land, somewhere, a dull knock a long way in. The next went after it. After twenty or so, the knocks got closer. After forty, the stone was going into the hole and staying at its mouth. After that they were filling the pit itself, over the tilted slab, the broken coping going in by the armful, rough and gray and edged, and the pile coming up.

It took the morning. Raven carried nothing. She stood at the gate passage and counted the loads in her head because counting was all she was allowed, and hated it, and said nothing about hating it.

At noon Kairos came out with bread and stood beside her.

He tore the round in half and gave her the half with more crust on it, because he knew she liked the crust, and she took it in her left hand and ate. He didn’t ask about the hand. He looked at the pile of rubble in the pit, which was nearly up to the level of the slabs now, and at the black mouth under the curb, which was gone, buried, and at the line of Corps passing stone along the paving.

“A good deal of stone,” he said.

“Most of the east wall.”

“There is a certain justice in that. The east wall was never much use as a wall.”

She almost answered him.

The pile in the pit went down.

It went down a hand’s width, all at once, all of it, the rough top of the rubble dropping as if a floor had gone out from under it, and then it was still. The nearest Corps on the slab took a step back without being told. Then another. Somebody said a word Raven didn’t hear.

She had a mouthful of bread. She stopped chewing it. She stood with it in her mouth and her jaw still and her eyes on the stone.

Nothing else happened. The pile lay where it had dropped to, a hand below where it had been, and the dust of it lifted a little in the cold air and settled again.

“It’s going somewhere,” Lin Yue said, from her knees on the third slab.

“Then we keep putting it in,” Taron said.

They kept putting it in.

Raven became aware that she hadn’t swallowed. She didn’t know how long she hadn’t. Kairos was standing beside her with his half of the round in his hand, not eating it either, and when she looked at him, he was looking at her mouth, and then at her face, and then he looked away at the pit and took a bite of his bread and chewed it, slowly, like a man who wants to be seen chewing.

She swallowed.

“There is plenty of stone,” Kairos said, to nobody.

+++

The pile went down twice more in the afternoon. Each time a hand’s width. Each time all at once. Each time the people on the slab stepped back, and then stepped forward again, and went on throwing stone. Lin Yue wrote each one down in her book with the hour.

The third time, it didn’t go back down after they filled it. They filled it, and it stayed. They put another layer on it until it stood higher than the slabs around it, a rough gray hump of broken coping where the last slab had been, and then they waited, and it stayed.

By the light going, the frost had started on it. Raven watched the frost come up white over the gray edges of the stone, the same as it did on every other stone on the mountain, and thought that she had never in her life been so glad to see frost on something.

Lin Yue closed her book.

“Three times,” she said. “A hand each time. Then nothing. That’s what I’ve got.”

“Write that it stopped.”

“I’ll write that it stopped going down while we were watching it.” Lin Yue stood up off her knees, slowly, the cold in her joints. “That’s not the same as stopped.”

“No,” Raven said. “It isn’t.”

+++

At dusk the watch changed. Hanne came out with her slate and stood two slabs back. Wynn Hartley stood at the end of the third slab with Tilda’s spear, facing the field. Taron had gone back in when Mira came to the gate passage and stood in it without saying anything, which was all she’d needed to do.

Raven stayed.

She knew she shouldn’t. She knew what Mira would say, and what Kairos wouldn’t. She stayed anyway, in the gate passage, because this was where she stood at dusk, and she had stood here at dusk every night since the squares, and she didn’t know how to be anywhere else at this hour.

The light went blue on the field. The struck squares darkened in their rows. Beyond the curb, Edge stood up out of the snow where Tilda had driven it.

“Edge,” Wynn Hartley said.

Raven’s hands came up.

Both of them, the wool-wrapped one first, the way they always came up. She didn’t decide it. They were up before she knew they were moving, and her breath was in and held, and her shoulders had started the turn.

From two slabs back: “Nobody on the field.”

Her hands stayed up.

“And you can’t,” Hanne said.

It was not loud. It was in the same voice as the first thing. Raven heard it, and stood with her hands up in the cold and her breath held and the wool on her right palm drawn tight across the stitches, and felt the line start to gather at the back of her, and the stitches pull, and did not let it go.

She let the breath go. She put her hands down.

“No,” she said. “I can’t.”

Beyond the curb, Edge sank back to where it had stood.

Hanne’s chalk moved. Raven’s right hand throbbed against the lining of her coat.

“Hanne.”

“Yes.”

“Put me on the slate.”

Hanne turned her head.

“Not as the line,” Raven said. “As somebody standing in the gate who can’t do anything. So whoever’s on tomorrow knows. So they don’t look at me when it comes up.”

Hanne thought about it. Then she wrote it, and turned the slate so Raven could read it.

“Done,” Hanne said.

+++

Kairos found her in the Hall later, sitting on the end of a bench near the hearth with the Corps asleep in their rows under the Wall and the bare floor under every struck name. Tilda Rudd’s name had a line through it now, in Hanne’s hand, and the floor under it was bare.

He sat down beside her. He had the end of the half she’d stopped eating at noon, wrapped in a cloth. He unwrapped it and broke it in two and gave her the piece with the crust.

She ate it. All of it, this time. It was stale, and tasted of the cloth, and under that, of nothing much, and she chewed it and swallowed it and held out her left hand for the other piece.

He gave her that too.