Chapter 618: The Near Stirrup

Location: The Millford road — the Halbrook holding; the barn roof; the yard

Date/Time: TC1858.03.18

Tracks came down the road from the bend.

Edric saw them before he saw anything else, because the light was coming from that side and it laid a little blue shadow in each one. He had the loft door open and the rope in his hands and one knee on the sill, and he stopped there. They ran in a single line down the middle of the road, evenly spaced, unhurried, in where the road wall was broken for the floor stones, and out across the yard. Then they stopped.

At the end of them a saddled mount stood in the snow with nobody on it.

It was a bay, darker along the legs, and frost lay white on the seat of the saddle and along the blanket’s edge where it showed under the flap. It had been standing there long enough for that. Its head was down. A long leather bag hung buckled on the off side, the kind the Seven Peaks rider had handed down to Bett at the door six days ago, and on the near side the stirrup leather hung below the girth, longer than its fellow by a hand, with no iron on the end of it.

Edric got out of the door and up the slope to the ridge the way he did every morning, the rope around his waist and the knot at his back, and sat astride the ridge with his heels hooked under him. From there he had all of the yard. The fifteen flags of the path running off toward the byre, the seventh crooked, the tenth on its side where it had fallen four days ago. The ladder beyond them. The long hump that was Fenn Jarrow, that nobody had lifted. The woodpile. The house, no smoke. The road, north and south, as far as it ran before the bends took it.

The mount was out past the seventh flag, a body’s length off the path on the house side.

It lifted its off fore and set it down. It lifted a hind foot and set it down. It didn’t lift the near fore. He saw its shoulder go as if it meant to, and the leg stayed where it was, and the mount stood and shook.

He leaned down to the loft door.

“There’s a mount in the yard,” he called. His voice still wasn’t right. It came out half of what he’d put into it. “Saddled. Nobody on it.”

+++

He came down the ladder to say the rest, because they’d want to ask him things and he couldn’t shout all of it.

The barn smelled of cattle now and would for as long as they were in it. The three cows stood at the north end in their own warmth, on hay over the flags, and the mounts’ breath came through from the lean-to at the far end where the six of them had stood since the tenth. Hob’s pot was on its hearth-stone. Joss was asleep under Nissa’s coat against the west wall with Sedge across his feet, and the heifer lay where she’d lain all night, across the earth inside the threshold, chewing.

Everybody was up. Bett was at the door with her bad knuckles wrapped. Sera Vahn stood by the hearth with her strapped arm held inside her coat.

“It’s one of ours,” Edric said. “Seven Peaks. The bag’s on it.”

“The rider?” Sera Vahn asked.

“No rider. The near stirrup’s gone. The leather’s stretched.” He showed them with his hands how much longer. “It came down the road in the night. Straight down the middle, through the gap. It’s stood there since. There’s frost on the saddle.”

Crowe had come up from his place by the wall with the ink still on the side of his hand, and his eyes went to Edric’s hands, and he put his own into his coat, where Edric knew he kept the sheets he’d written.

“It isn’t moving,” Edric said. “It tries. The near fore won’t come.”

Ivo had his head up. “They let the heifer go,” he said.

“Not this one.”

Nissa was on her knees by Joss, and she didn’t get up. “They don’t touch the animals,” she said. “We’ve seen that.”

“I’ve seen it standing there for an hour trying to lift its foot.”

Sera Vahn looked at the door and at what she could see of the yard past the heifer’s back.

“Six in the lean-to,” she said. “Seven with that one. Seven Peaks has us to the third. It hasn’t got Ambrose, and it hasn’t got the cows. If that’s a sheet in the bag, it’s the first we’ve had in six days.” She stopped. “And whoever was on it.”

“Nobody on foot,” Bett said.

“No.”

Maude Quarry was already walking toward the lean-to.

She didn’t say she was going. She hadn’t said anything that morning that Edric had heard. She went down the length of the barn past the cattle with her gloves in one hand, and when she got to the lean-to she began to saddle the gray she’d ridden from Seven Peaks, and the others watched her do it. She did the girth and then did it again. Her hands were slow. They’d been slow since the haul, and the haul was a week ago.

Bett went down after her. Edric heard only the end of it.

“Keep your seat. Whatever it does.”

Maude nodded. She looped the rein twice around her right hand, because her fingers still wouldn’t hold it, and drew the knife from her belt, turned it over once, and slid it back.

Sera Vahn turned to him.

“Edric. Up. Call it.”

+++

He was back on the ridge with the rope tight before Maude came out.

The lean-to stood over a patch of old stone at the end of the barn, open on the yard side, and she rode out from under its roof at a walk and onto the snow without putting a foot down. The gray didn’t like it. It went sideways two steps, and she sat still and let it, and then it walked.

Edric looked at the yard. The crust lay smooth and gray-white from the barn to the byre with the low sun across it, every hump and footprint and old scar of the path showing in long shadow. Nothing moved in it. Nothing lifted.

“Nothing,” he called.

She rode out along the path’s house side, a body’s length off the flags, not on them. Past the third. Past the fifth. The gray’s breath went up white. The bay heard it coming and lifted its head and called, and the gray answered, and Maude kept it to a walk.

He called it again.

She brought the gray up on the bay’s near side, nose to tail, so the two of them stood side by side in the snow, and from the ridge Edric could see the two saddles and the two backs and Maude’s head and shoulders above them, and under them, in the gap between the bellies and the snow, he could see only legs. Eight of them, and the snow between them in shadow.

The snow he could see was quiet. He called it a third time.

“Nothing.”

Maude leaned out of the saddle and took the bay’s rein where it hung. She turned the gray’s head toward the barn and pressed with her legs. The gray took a step. The bay’s head came around after it, and its neck stretched, and its near fore stayed where it was.

She let the gray stand. She leaned down along its shoulder, far down, her weight on her left stirrup, and looked under the bay.

Edric saw her stop.

She came back up slowly. She drew the knife and couldn’t close her hand on it, and he saw her look at her hand and then turn the knife over and take it in her fist with the point down, her thumb across the pommel, the way you’d hold it to punch a hole in a hide. She leaned out again. Her left arm went down past the bay’s shoulder, out of his sight.

He saw her shoulder drop. Then again, harder, her whole back in it.

The bay went up.

It came off the snow on its hind legs with the near fore free and kicking, and dropped, and bolted. It went for the barn at a gallop with the rein streaming, straight across the path, and its feet rang on the flags and skidded on the fifth, and it came down on its knees and got up and kept going. At the door the heifer heaved herself up off the strip all at once with a grunt and Tamsin was there, shield on her arm, and caught the flying rein one-handed and was dragged two steps along the threshold stone before the bay stopped, blowing, its forefeet on the flags.

The gray had shied off a pace when the bay went up. Maude had it back. She was sitting up, the knife in her fist and the blade dark, turning the gray’s head toward the barn.

The gray stood with its legs spread.

Edric looked at the snow under it and could not see it. He could see the gray’s belly and its four legs, and shadow. The light was behind him. He was too high and too far along.

He stood up on the ridge.

The frost took both his feet. He went down on his hip on the slope and slid, the rope paying out behind him over the ridge, and the eave came up under him and hit him across the ribs, and the rope came tight at the knot in his back and stopped him with his chest over the edge and his face over the yard.

From there, lower, he could see under the gray.

The snow between its forelegs was opening in a crack, lifting on either side, and out of the crack a limb was rising, folded, and unfolding, straight up past the gray’s knee, past its elbow, toward the near stirrup and Maude’s boot in it.

“Under her,” he said. It didn’t carry. He filled his chest against the eave, and it hurt, and he got it out anyway. “Maude. Under you—”

The limb closed on her boot.

The gray went sideways. Maude’s leg went straight. The near leather stretched down along the gray’s side, and Edric watched it get longer, and Maude dropped the knife and grabbed the pommel with both hands, and her hands opened. They wouldn’t stay. He saw them open on the leather and close and open again, and the gray kept going sideways away from the thing that had her, drawing the rein out of its two loops around her hand, and she came out of the saddle over the near side and hung by the boot with her shoulders in the snow.

Then the leather tore through at the iron. The iron went with her boot still in it, and she dropped, and the gray was free and gone, running for the lean-to with the empty saddle and the near leather swinging long.

Maude was on her back on the crust with her left leg in the air and the limb around the boot. She didn’t call. She rolled onto her side and put out her right hand toward the knife, which was in the snow an arm’s length off, and her fingers touched it, and the second limb came up out of the crack beside her hip and closed across her body, and she went down into the yard with her hand still out. The snow ran in over the place. A little of it slid into the hole and stopped.

The knife stayed where it was.

Edric hung over the eave with the rope across his back and his ribs on the eave, his eyes on the knife.

Nobody had gone out. At the door Bett had her arm across the frame at chest height, and behind her Brisk stood with Innes’s spear, and Tamsin was on the threshold stone with both hands on the bay’s rein. Sera Vahn stood just inside, holding her arm.

Out past the road wall, beyond the gap, a pale one stood off in the snow beside the road, broadside to the barn. He hadn’t seen it come. He watched it until it went off up the road toward the bend the way the tracks had come down.

+++

They got him back over the ridge and in through the loft door by the rope, Ivo hauling and Crowe taking his collar. His ribs went every time he breathed. He sat on the loft floor and found the rope had burned across both palms through his gloves.

Downstairs, the bay stood just inside the door on the flags with its head low and its near fore held off the ground. Nissa was down beside it with her hands around the leg above the fetlock, feeling along it the way she felt along the cows’. She took her hands away and looked at them.

“It’s not broken,” she said. “It’s cut. Here. Clean through the hair, all the way around, a finger wide.”

“How long?” Sera Vahn asked.

“Since last night. The blood’s gone hard.” Nissa sat back on her heels. “It’ll walk.”

The heifer had gone back to the strip and lain down on it again. Nobody moved her.

Tamsin unbuckled the bag from the bay’s saddle and gave it to Crowe, and Crowe opened it standing up and took out one sheet, folded in four, and unfolded it and read the top of it.

“There’s a name at the head,” he said. “I don’t know it.”

“Read it.”

“Odo Pask.”

“Came over the border,” Sera Vahn said. “North camp.” She didn’t hold out her hand for the sheet. “Read the rest after.”

Crowe folded it back along its creases and tucked it inside his coat with the others. Edric watched him do it. Three in there now, two that had nowhere to go and one that had come all that road to get here.

The gray had come into the lean-to on its own and stood on the stone with its saddle still on and the near leather hanging, blowing. Tamsin went down and took the saddle off. Nobody asked her to.

Edric stood up because he couldn’t sit any longer and went to the door, and Bett moved over to let him have the frame.

The knife was still out there in the snow, an arm’s length from where the snow had closed.

“I called it nothing,” he said. “Three times.”

Bett didn’t answer.

“The snow I could see was nothing. I couldn’t see under them. I sat where I always sit. From there you can’t see under an animal.” He put his burned hand on the stone of the frame and took it off again. “Put that on the sheet. What I called, and how many times.”

Crowe looked at Bett. Bett nodded.

“Put where he was sitting,” she said. “And where he had to be to see it.”

Sera Vahn came and stood beside them, facing the yard.

“Maude Quarry,” she said. “Behind the front. Rode out.”

Then nobody said anything. Ivo was sitting by the hearth with his fingers moving, doing a sum, and Edric didn’t ask him what it was. He could guess. Three days from here to the north gate, more in this snow, on that road.

“Nobody rides,” Sera Vahn said.

Bett said, “Not from this yard.”

+++

Joss woke near noon and asked why there was a mount in the barn, and Nissa told him. He listened with his chin on Sedge’s head. Then he asked if he could give the bay some hay and she said yes and he did, standing well back, holding it out at arm’s length the way he’d been taught, and the bay took it.

In the afternoon Edric went up again. Somebody had to. He did it with the rope doubled and sat lower, not on the ridge but on the slope below it with his boots braced on the eave, where he could see less of the road and more under things. Nothing came up. He called it as he saw it, and once he called “Can’t see,” when smoke from the hearth came up out of the loft door across his eyes, and Bett answered from the door, “All right.”

The knife was still there at dusk. He watched the frost come over it and turn it gray. Nobody went for it, and nobody said they wouldn’t.

When he came in, Tamsin had both saddles on the harness rail inside the door, the gray’s and the bay’s, one beside the other. She’d taken them off and wiped them down and hung them up, and that was all. She’d left the leathers as they were.

Edric stood in front of the rail.

On the bay’s saddle the off leather hung to its length and the near one hung a hand below it, torn through at the end, no iron on it. On the gray’s saddle it was the same. He’d watched that one stretch. He’d watched it go down along the gray’s side in the yard, getting longer, with Maude’s boot in the iron at the end of it.

The two saddles hung side by side on the rail, and on each of them one leather was a hand longer than the other, and neither of the long ones had an iron.