Chapter 616: Roofs

Location: Wild Confederacy — Settlement Windbreak; Jessa’s lane; Jessa’s house

Date/Time: TC1858.03.18 – TC1858.03.19

Metal dropped on packed earth makes a flat sound, and Galen knew it before he knew where it came from.

He stopped. The four behind him stopped. They were halfway down Jessa’s lane on the packed snow in the middle of it, the five of them close together as the Speaker had ordered, a lamp shaded low in Ulla’s hand. It was past the second hour. The lane was dark on both sides, and every house in it was asleep on its own floor.

“Jessa’s,” Dace said.

It was. There was no light under the door, and then there was, a small one, somebody’s taper, and a woman’s voice said a name, not loud, the way you say a child’s name when you have woken and found them not where they were.

Galen went to the door. He did not run. Running on the lane was a thing the five did not do, and he had told them that himself.

“Agnet,” he said at the door. “It’s Galen. It’s the five.”

The door came open. Agnet stood in it with the taper, gray-haired and narrow in her nightdress with a blanket over her shoulders, and behind her the room was the size it had always been, one room, the table, the cold hearth pit in the middle under the smoke hole, the bed against the back wall, and above the bed the loft Jessa had built, boards on two beams let into the wall at the back and one post at the front.

The iron was on the floor under its nail.

Wend was sitting up in the bed with the blankets around her. She was looking at the iron. Agnet was looking at Wend.

“It fell,” Agnet said. “Off the nail. Nobody touched it.”

Galen turned to the floor.

It was earth, beaten smooth, like every floor in Windbreak except the long house, and it was rising. Not much. A low hump the length of a man had come up between the hearth pit and the bed, the beaten surface cracking across the top of it in a line, and as Galen watched the line opened a finger wider, and the hump moved, slowly, a hand’s width toward the bed.

“Up,” Galen said. “Everybody off the floor. Now.”

+++

Afterward he would go over it many times, and it was always the same.

He said up, and he looked for up, and there was the loft. Boards above the bed at the height of a tall man’s head, wide enough for two to lie on, where Jessa had kept onions and the winter blankets and where Wend had slept when she was small. He saw it, and he saw that it was off the ground, and he did not see anything else about it.

“The loft,” he said. “Ulla. Wend first.”

Ulla gave Dace the lamp and went past him into the room. She did not go around the hump. She went over the corner of the bed, one boot on the frame and one on the blankets, and took Wend under the arms.

Wend would not let go of the bedclothes. Then she let go of them and reached past Ulla’s shoulder toward the nail by the door where the iron had hung, and said, “It’s on the floor.”

“I’ll get it,” Ulla said.

“Get her up,” Galen said.

Ulla lifted her. Wend was light, all knees, and Ulla stood on the bed frame and set her up over the edge of the loft boards, and Wend went over on her stomach and turned around at once on her knees to look down.

The floor between the hearth pit and the bed opened.

It did not burst. It came apart along the crack, and the head-plate came up through it, black with earth, the hairs along its edge moving. It came up facing the door, and him in it.

Galen had his spear up. He planted his left foot on the worn plank laid across the door’s foot, kept his right on the lane snow behind him, and set the point at the plate between its forelimbs as they came up out of the earth and laid themselves on the floor either side of the hump. The point touched it and slid. He had known it would. He hadn’t set it there to go in. He had set it there so it would be looking at him.

“Keep it on me,” he said. “Agnet. The ladder.”

There was a ladder, four rungs, leaning at the end of the bed. Agnet had it already. She went up it slowly, the blanket off her shoulders and left behind on the floor, one hand on the rung and the other on the edge of the boards, and Ulla on the bed frame under her with both hands on her hips, pushing.

“Dace,” Galen said. “Get up there.”

Dace had the lamp. He went across the room, close along the wall, not on the hump, where the floor was still floor, and onto the bed frame, and handed the lamp up to Wend. Wend took it in both hands. The light swung over the room, over the beams and the onions hanging from them and the head-plate in the middle of the floor with the light running off it, and the animal did not move.

It lay half out of the earth with its forelimbs spread on the floor and its head toward the door and did nothing. Galen had seen that at the long house, the second one, the one that came up to the shoulders and looked. He had stood in front of it then and kept it looking at him while Mei went around behind. There was nobody to go around behind now. He didn’t want anybody behind.

Agnet was on the loft. Ulla went up after her, quick, the ladder bouncing. Dace came after Ulla.

The other two were in the doorway with Galen, spears up, on the plank.

“Off the floor,” Galen said to them. “You too. Table.”

The table was by the door, two paces in. They went up onto it, one and then the other, and it creaked and held.

That left Galen.

The animal turned its head.

Not much. A finger’s width. Away from the door. Toward the bed, and the loft, and the light.

“Galen,” Ulla said, from the loft.

He came in off the plank and went up onto the table beside the other two. It was not wide enough for three. He stood on its edge with his knees against one of theirs and his spear down, pointed at the floor, and all of them were off the earth, and nobody was standing on anything but wood.

The animal lay in its hole and looked at the loft.

Then its right forelimb went out across the floor, low along the earth, not toward any of them. It went past the end of the bed to the front of the loft, to the post. It curled around the foot of the post where the post went into the floor.

Galen saw it, and understood.

“Back!” he shouted. “Get to the wall! Get to the back—”

The post went down.

It didn’t break. It went straight down into the floor the way a stake goes into a soft field, a hand, two hands, the forelimb wrapped around its foot and drawing it down into the earth, and the front edge of the loft dropped with it. The boards tilted. The onions swung. The lamp in Wend’s hands went sideways, and Ulla caught Wend by the back of her shift and threw her toward the wall, and Agnet was already at the wall with both arms around one of the beam ends where it went into the plaster.

Dace was at the front edge. He had been lying on his stomach looking down, the way the long house watch lay at the edge of the raised floor, because that was what they did now. He was looking down when the boards went.

Dace slid. He grabbed the edge of a board, and it came with him. He went off the low end of the loft feet first onto the bed, and off the bed onto the floor, and he was on the earth for no longer than it took to get one knee under him.

The second forelimb was waiting there. It closed on him at the hips.

Galen jumped off the table.

He had no plan in it. He came down on the floor with both feet beside the hearth pit and drove his spear down two-handed at the joint where the limb that held Dace met the body, and the point skated off the plate and drove into the earth beside it a hand deep. He wrenched it out. The animal did not look at him. It was drawing Dace down into the floor, not fast, the earth opening around his hips and closing behind, and Dace had both hands on the bed frame, and the bed frame was coming with him.

“Let go of it,” Galen said. “Dace. Get your hands on mine.”

Dace looked at him. Then he let go of the bed frame, and he did not reach for Galen’s hands. He pressed both his hands to the floor on either side of him and pushed down, as if he could push himself up out of it, and the earth took his hands too, to the wrists, to the elbows.

“Get off the floor,” Dace said. “You’re on the floor.”

Then he went down, and the earth closed, and the floor was a crack across a low hump and nothing else.

Galen was on the floor.

He felt it then. Under his boots, all around him, the beaten earth of Jessa’s house, warm through the soles, and nothing on it but him and the iron under its nail and Agnet’s blanket.

The animal’s head was turned toward him now.

Backward. Not running. He set the butt of the spear against the table’s edge and vaulted on it, and came down on the tabletop on his knees between the other two, and one of them caught him by the coat.

The animal watched him go. Then it went down. Straight down, the head-plate sinking into the hump, and the earth closed over it, and the hump settled a little and was still.

The loft post stood in the floor, sunk to the depth of a forearm, leaning. The front of the loft hung from it at a slant. At the high end, against the wall, Ulla had Wend in her lap and Agnet beside her, the three of them pressed into the corner under the eave, and the lamp had gone out.

+++

“Roof,” Galen said.

Nobody answered him for a moment.

“There’s a smoke hole,” he said. “Over the pit. Ulla. Can you get to the beam from where you are?”

Ulla could. She went along the high end of the loft to where the nearest roof pole came down to the wall, and got up onto it, and Galen saw her shape against the smoke hole, a gray square of sky with a star in it. She pushed at the edge of the sod. It came away in her hands, frozen, in a lump, and fell, and hit the floor beside the hearth pit, and Galen watched the floor where it fell, and nothing came up through it.

She got her arms through the hole. Then her shoulders. Then she was gone, and her voice came down from above, thin in the cold, “It holds. It’s sod on poles. It’ll hold.”

Agnet went next. She could not get up to the pole on her own, and Ulla came back to the hole and reached down for her, and Galen, from the table, could not reach either of them, and had to watch. Agnet got one knee on the pole. Then the other. Then Ulla had her by the wrists and she went up through the hole with her nightdress caught on the sod and torn.

Wend went last of the three. She went up the slant of the loft on her own, to the wall, and then she stopped.

“The iron,” she said.

It was on the floor by the door, under the nail. Two paces of earth from the table.

“No,” Galen said.

“It’s hers.”

“I know whose it is.”

Two paces of earth between the table leg and the nail. He looked at the hump in the middle of the floor and the crack across it and the leaning post. Then he lay down on the table on his stomach with his feet against the other two, and pushed the butt of his spear out along the floor, and got it under the hook at the handle end of the iron, and drew it back toward the table across the earth a finger at a time, and nothing came up, and he reached down and took it by the hook and lifted it off the floor.

Ulla’s arm came down through the smoke hole. Galen stood on the table and reached up as far as he could reach, and Wend came down the loft to the pole, and Galen held the iron up, and Wend leaned out from the pole and took it from him, and went up through the hole with it.

They went across from the table to the loft one at a time, stepping from the table to the bed frame and from the bed frame to the ladder, which was still standing, because there was no other way and none of them would put a foot on the floor. Galen went last. On the pole, with his shoulders in the smoke hole and the cold of the sod on his neck, he looked down once into the dark room.

He could not see the floor. He could see where it was.

+++

On the roof the cold was very still. The sod was frozen hard and gray with old snow, and the five of them, the four of them, and Agnet and Wend lay on it with their arms out to spread the weight, as you lie on ice.

Windbreak lay all around them, roofs and roofs, dark, every one with somebody asleep under it on the floor.

Galen lifted his head.

Something moved in the snow of the lane. Not where they had walked. To the side of it, along the foot of the house opposite, a low hump moving at the pace of a person walking, and as he watched it reached the corner of the house and turned along the side of it, toward the back, where the beds would be.

Galen got up on his knees on the sod.

“Up!” he shouted. “Up! Off the floor!”

It was very loud in the cold. A dog started somewhere. A light came on under a door at the end of the lane.

“Off the floor! Get on your roof! Get up!”

Beside him Ulla was on her knees too, shouting the same thing, and then one of the two from the table, and the words went down the lane, and Galen heard a door bang, and somebody say what, and then, from the house opposite, a woman scream, short, and then a child, and then a great deal of noise all at once, furniture going over, and then a man’s head and shoulders came up through that house’s smoke hole, and he turned and reached down, and a child came up, and another.

At the gate somebody began beating on iron, over and over, and did not stop.

All across Windbreak, roofs began to fill.

Galen stayed on his knees. He had stopped shouting. He watched the lane. He watched the hump along the house opposite, which had stopped at the back corner, and while he watched it, it sank, slowly, until it was only a crack in the snow, and was gone.

Out past the last house of the lane, on the flats side, past the wall, something pale lay along the top of the snow in the starlight, long and still, its head toward the settlement. He looked at it until he was sure, and then he did not look at it again.

+++

The light came up gray.

Galen counted roofs. He did it because he was the head and the head counted, and because he could not do anything else. On the roofs he could see from Jessa’s, there were people on all but three. Two of the three were houses that had stood empty since the herders came in. One was not.

There was a list of who slept where. Everybody in the five had it; the Speaker had made it after the floor went up. He went down it in his head. He did not say the house out loud.

Ulla sat beside him with her knees up and her arms around them. Wend was asleep against Agnet with the iron across her lap, under the blanket Ulla had taken off her own back.

“Nell,” Ulla said. “Dace.”

She said it to nobody. She was not facing out to the flats, the way you did at the gate. She was facing the smoke hole, and the dark under it.

“That’s his mother?” Galen asked.

“She’s dead. Years. He always put her in front, at the gate. I heard him.” Her eyes were on the smoke hole. “There’s no gate here. I didn’t know where else to say it.”

Galen had no answer for that. He didn’t know either.

Down the lane, the Speaker was coming. He was walking in the middle of the packed snow on his own, slowly, in the gray light, and stopping at each house and looking up at its roof, and saying something to whoever was on it, and going on to the next. When he came to Jessa’s house, he stopped and looked up, and Galen looked down at him.

“Who?” the Speaker asked.

“Dace.”

The Speaker stood there.

“It took the post,” Galen said. “Of the loft. I put them on the loft, and it took the post down into the floor. It didn’t come for anybody on the boards. It came for the leg.”

“Silas said that.”

“I know.”

The Speaker’s eyes went along the roofs of the lane, every one of them with people lying flat on it in the cold, children between the adults, blankets, a dog on one.

“Stay up,” he said. “All of you. Till I’ve walked them all.”

The Speaker went on down the lane. Galen watched him go, stopping at every house, looking up, saying the same few words. At the end of the lane he stopped at the house with nobody on its roof, and stood there, and then went on.

Galen lay back down on the sod with his arms out. The sky was getting lighter. Under him, under the sod and the poles and the dark of Jessa’s house, there was a floor, and he could feel exactly where it was.