Chapter 617: The West End

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

Date/Time: TC1858.03.18

Sickness smelled sweet before it smelled of anything else.

Mira knew it before she was through the Hall door. Under the wet wool and the hearth smoke and the slop buckets standing by the step, under more than three hundred people who had slept in their clothes for ten nights on stone, there was a smell like fruit going over in a closed cupboard. It was faint. It was enough. She stood in the doorway with her bag on her shoulder and let her eyes get used to the gray light coming in at the high windows, and then she went looking for it.

The Corps lay along the Wall by Sera Vahn’s roll, one row against the stone and a second inside it, boots at their feet. Under every struck name, the floor was bare. Mira stepped around those places without looking at them. She had learned to in ten days, the same as everybody.

The smell was stronger toward the west end. She followed it with her nose the way she would have followed a smell of burning in her own rooms, and found a man lying on his back in the inside line with his blanket pushed down to his waist and his shirt dark through.

She knelt. He was awake. His eyes went to her bag and then to her face.

“Bertil Drover,” he said. “You’ll want the name.”

“I want your wrist.”

She took it. The skin was dry and hot, and the beat under her fingers was too quick, and when she laid her palm on his forehead, he shut his eyes as if the cool of it hurt.

“Since when?”

“Last night. I thought it was the fire. It wasn’t the fire.”

“Cough?”

He coughed for her, to show her, and then couldn’t stop, and turned on his side to finish. Two people in the outside line woke and lay still and listened. Mira waited until he was done.

“Has anybody near you got it?”

“Don’t know. I’ve been asleep. Or not.”

She let go of his wrist and stood and looked along the row both ways.

+++

By the third hour of the morning there were three.

Bertil Drover. A woman two places along from him, Sabine Kettle, who said she was fine and had a forehead like a stove lid. And a boy from the outside line near the door who had been on the north gate watch the night before, which meant he’d shared the passage with half the others on that rota, and Mira did not like to think about the half.

She stood at the hearth with Hanne Lowther and kept her voice low.

“In the tents they were spread out over a field,” Mira said. “Now they’re shoulder to shoulder on one floor, breathing on each other all night. Something like this was always coming. I should have said it on the eighth.”

“You’d have said it, and we’d have come in anyway.”

“I know. I’d still like to have said it.”

Hanne had her slate under her arm. She didn’t take it out. “What do you want?”

“I want them apart.”

“Your hall?”

“No.” Mira had thought of that first and given it up. “I’ve got Taron in there with two ribs and Raven with a hand opened to the meat, and four others with wounds that aren’t closed. A fever in a room full of open wounds is the last thing I want. They can’t come to me. I have to go to them.”

“Then where?”

Mira looked down the length of the Hall. There was no floor in it that didn’t have someone lying on it, or a name over it.

“Here,” she said. “The west end. Clear me eight paces of it, the full width, and I’ll hang blankets across.”

Hanne looked at the west end. It was the tail of the line, where the last names on the Wall ran out, and the newest of the Corps slept, the ones who had come over in the autumn.

“That’s forty people,” Hanne said.

“I know how many it is.”

“Where do they go?”

“Closer.”

Hanne took her time. Her eyes went along the Wall, over the long run of names in chalk and the struck ones among them, and down to the bare floor under each. Mira saw what she was looking at and didn’t help her.

“If everybody moves east a body’s width,” Hanne said, “the bare places don’t sit under the names anymore.”

“No.”

“I’m not moving those.”

“I haven’t asked you to.”

“Then they double up,” Hanne said. “Two to a place where there was one. The bare places stay where they are.” She took the slate out now and looked at it as if it would argue with her. “I’ll ask them.”

“You’ll ask them,” Mira said. It was not quite a question.

“I asked them to come in. I’ll ask them to lie closer.” Hanne tucked the slate back under her arm. “Nobody’s going to say no to you.”

“They might.”

“Not to you,” Hanne said, and went to start at the west end.

+++

Raven was on the bench by the window in the Medicine Hall where Mira had left her at first light, with her right hand on a folded towel on her knee and her left hand holding a cup she hadn’t drunk from.

Mira washed her own hands twice in vinegar water at the basin before she came near her. Raven watched her do it.

“Somebody’s sick,” Raven said.

“Three. In the Hall.”

“Badly?”

“Not yet.” Mira sat on the stool and took Raven’s right wrist and began to unwind the wool. “Ask me tonight.”

The wool came off the way it always did, the last turn sticking. Under it the stitched line ran from the heel of the palm toward the second finger, dark thread in swollen skin. Mira turned it to the window.

Two of the stitches nearest the fingers had pulled through. Not broken. Pulled, the skin around them torn a little in two small notches, so that the edges of the wound had drawn apart there by the width of a barley grain, and there was fresh blood dried in it.

Mira looked at it without saying anything.

“I didn’t draw,” Raven said.

“I know you didn’t. Hanne told me.”

“Then how—”

“Your hand didn’t know you weren’t going to.” Mira touched the skin beside the notches with one fingertip. “Your hands came up at dusk. You held your breath. You started. Hanne says you were already turning. Did your fingers spread?”

Raven didn’t answer.

“They spread,” Mira said. “They always spread. I’ve watched you do it a hundred times. The palm opens out flat, and the fingers go back, and that’s what pulled these. You didn’t have to let anything go. You only had to get ready to.”

“I stopped.”

“You stopped after. The hand doesn’t wait for after.”

Raven looked at her own palm on the towel. Her face did nothing. Then she said, “So holding it costs as much as drawing.”

“No. Drawing would have opened it to the meat again, and I’d be telling you something worse. Holding it cost two stitches.” Mira reached for her needle case. “But it isn’t free. You’ve been treating it as free. Standing in the gate every dusk with your hands ready, because you’re not drawing, so where’s the harm? That’s the harm.”

“I’m on the slate.”

“You are. And then you stood in the gate anyway with your hands ready.”

Raven let her breath go through her nose. “Yes,” she said. “I did.”

Mira cut the two pulled stitches out and set two new ones a little further from the edge where the skin was sound. Raven didn’t move. When it was done, Mira went to the shelf by the door and came back with a thin board of planed ash a little longer than Raven’s hand, padded along one side with felt, the kind she used for a broken finger.

“Lay your hand on that.”

Raven laid it there. Mira slid the board under her palm and bound her fingers to it with linen, not tight, each finger to the wood, so that the hand lay along the board straight and could not open any further than it was.

“I can’t close it either,” Raven said.

“You don’t need to close it. You need it not to open.” Mira tied off the linen. “Three weeks. You can wear that, or you can sit in here every dusk where I can see you. I’d prefer the board.”

Raven held the hand up and looked at it, the wood showing past the ends of her fingers.

“If it comes up,” she said, “and somebody’s on the field—”

“Then you’ll stand there with a board on your hand,” Mira said. “Like you asked to be written down.”

Raven nodded. She picked up her cup in her left hand and drank what was in it, which had gone cold.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Don’t thank me. Keep it on.”

+++

By noon the west end was clear.

Mira had not watched it done. She had been at the basin and then at Taron’s bed, where he lay propped on his good side and asked her what she was doing, and she told him, and he said Good and closed his eyes again. When she came back to the Hall, the eight paces at the west end were bare floor, swept, and the forty who had slept there were lying in the rows further east, two to a place, shoulder against shoulder, boots at their feet.

The bare floor under the struck names was where it had been.

She stood in the doorway and looked down the length of it. Under every struck name the floor was empty, and on either side of each empty place people lay closer than they had that morning, close enough to touch, and nobody was touching the bare stone.

Hanne was at the west end with two of the Corps and a coil of cord. They were hanging blankets from it, the cord run from a lamp hook on the north wall to one on the south, the blankets pinned over it with whatever came to hand. A child’s mitten. A tent peg.

“Did anybody say no?” Mira asked.

“One,” Hanne said. “He wanted to stay where he was because it’s where he’s slept since the eighth.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That he could. Then he moved anyway, about an hour after.” Hanne pushed a peg through the last blanket. “He didn’t say why.”

They brought Bertil Drover and Sabine Kettle and the boy from the gate watch behind the blankets on their own bedding, carried by four who tied cloth over their mouths without being told and took it off again on the other side of the curtain and went and washed in the snow at the door. Mira laid the three along the west wall, two paces apart, with a lamp on the floor between them and a pail of snowmelt beside it.

The boy from the gate watch was called Rook Penrose. He told her his name without being asked, the way the Corps did now, and then he said, “It’s not one of them, is it? Doing this?”

Mira had her hand on his forehead.

“No,” she said. “It’s a fever.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve seen a hundred of them.”

He shut his eyes. Mira stayed where she was until she felt his face stop working against her hand.

+++

Before dusk she went out to the north gate because there was a fourth she wanted to see, one of the gate watch who had coughed twice that afternoon in the Medicine Hall doorway and said it was the cold.

He was standing out by the coping, coughing into his sleeve. Wynn Hartley was at the other end with Tilda Rudd’s spear. Hanne stood two slabs back with her slate. And in the gate passage, against the stone of the wall where she stood every evening, was Raven, with her right hand in its linen and its board held across her body in her left.

Mira didn’t go to her. She went to the coughing man and laid the back of her hand on his neck, and it was hot, and she said, “When you come off, you come to me first. Not the Hall.”

“Yes.”

“I mean first.”

“I heard you.”

The light left the field. The struck squares lost their edges. The heap of broken coping stood up white with frost at the end of the paving, and out beyond the coping stones Tilda Rudd’s peg stood in the snow.

Mira didn’t see it move. She heard Wynn Hartley say, “Edge.”

She looked at Raven.

Raven’s left hand tightened on the board. That was all. Her right hand stayed where it was, along the wood, bound straight, and her shoulders didn’t move, and Mira could see from where she stood that her breath went in and stayed in. Nothing else happened in her.

Hanne, two slabs back, had her chalk up. She waited. There was nothing for her to say. Raven’s hands hadn’t come up. She lowered the chalk.

Beyond the curb, Edge went back down to where it had been.

Raven let her breath go. She didn’t look at Mira or at anybody. She stayed against the wall with the board held across her, looking out at the field.

Mira went back in.

+++

That night she sat behind the blankets with the three of them and the lamp, and the fourth, who had come off the watch and come to her first, which made four.

On the other side of the curtain, three hundred people slept two to a place. She could hear them, the long sound of it, breathing, someone turning over, someone talking in their sleep, and now and then a cough, not one of hers. She listened to each cough and tried to tell where in the Hall it was.

Sabine Kettle woke near midnight and asked for water and drank half a cup and said, “I’m fine,” and went back to sleep.

Bertil Drover’s fever went up. Mira bathed his face and his neck and his wrists, and when the cloth came away warm she wet it again from the pail. The snowmelt had a skin of ice on it by the second hour and she broke it with the cup.

Late in the night Kairos came to the edge of the blankets. He didn’t come behind them. He said, from the other side, “Is there anything you need carried?”

“Snow,” Mira said. “Clean. From the gate side, not the yard.”

He went and got it. When he came back, he passed the pail around the edge of a blanket without looking in, and she took it.

“Raven’s asleep,” he said. “In the Medicine Hall. With the board on.”

“Good.”

“She asked me to tell you she kept it on.”

Mira looked at Bertil Drover’s face in the lamplight. The cloth was warm again in her hand.

“Tell her I know,” she said.

Kairos went. Mira wet the cloth in the clean snow, which was colder than the old, and laid it on the man’s forehead, and he turned his face into it with his eyes shut.

“Is it them?” he asked her.

“No,” she said. “It’s ours.”