Chapter 619: The High Side

Location: Wild Confederacy — Settlement Windbreak; the roofs; the long house; the south gate

Date/Time: TC1858.03.19

Voices carried from roof to roof across the lanes, and nobody was in the lanes to hear them.

Naida lay on the Speaker’s roof with her cheek on the sod and listened. A child two houses down was asking for water in the voice children use when they’ve asked already. Somebody on the roof behind answered him. Farther off, a man was coughing, the long dry cough of somebody who’d slept with his mouth open in the cold, and a woman told him to put his scarf over it. The talk went over the lanes the way it went over a table. Nobody raised their voice. In the gray light everybody could see everybody else, and that seemed to be enough to make them quiet.

Below the eaves the lanes lay white and trodden and empty. Nothing moved on them. The snow in Jessa’s lane still held the marks of last night’s feet, Galen’s five going up and down it in the dark, and the marks had frozen hard, and nobody had made any new ones.

She sat up. Her hips had gone stiff from the cold coming up through the sod, and she let them stay stiff and kept her hands still on her knees until they were warm enough to use.

One night. Naida counted in days, and this was the first day on the roofs.

The Speaker was sitting at the other side of the smoke hole with his list on his knee, and his coat buttoned to the throat. Silas was beside him, his strapped arm across his chest and his good hand in his armpit. The Speaker had been up before the light. He was always up before the light.

“How many roofs?” Naida asked.

“Every house that had people in it last night.” He turned the list toward her without looking up. “Less one.”

She didn’t need to look at the list. She’d watched him walk the lane at first gray, stopping at each roof, and stop longest at one.

“Their names go to the gate,” she said.

“This morning. Nye’s asked.”

+++

Across the lane, on Jessa’s roof, Agnet sat with Wend inside her coat. Ulla had given Agnet her own blanket in the night, and Agnet had put it around the girl instead, and the two of them were wrapped in it together like one bundle with two heads. Galen lay on his front at the eave with his chin on his folded arms, looking down at the foot of the wall. He’d been looking at it since he came up.

Jessa’s iron lay on the sod beside Wend’s knee. Wend had one hand on it and the other pulled up inside her sleeve.

“Agnet,” Naida called across. “Your hands.”

The old woman held them up. The ends of the fingers on the right were white to the first knuckle, white the way tallow is white, and she looked at them as if she’d been told about them and didn’t believe it.

“I can’t feel them,” she called back. “It’s nothing.”

“Put them under your arms.”

“They’re on the girl.”

“Then under the girl.”

Agnet did as she was told. Wend shifted to let the hands in and said nothing.

Nobody had a fire. That was the trouble, and it had been the trouble since they came up. The fires had been banked in every house when the shouting started, and every one of them had gone out under the people sitting around the smoke holes, because a fire below a smoke hole with a family over it smoked the family. Some had let them go out. Some had put them out. Either way, every hearth in Windbreak was cold, and the stove in the long house was at the door end on the bare earth behind the stakes, where nobody went after dark, and nobody had gone in the dark.

The long house was the only place in the settlement where anybody had slept on wood off the ground, and the forty on the raised floor had come through the night without a sound under them. Galen’s watch hadn’t seen a line in the frost. Naida knew that because somebody in the long house had called it across to the Speaker’s roof at first light, and the Speaker had said, “Good,” and then, “Stay on the planks.”

“We need the stove lit,” Naida said.

“Not with one person on the ground,” the Speaker said.

+++

He made the rule before the sun was a hand up, and Galen called it down the lanes roof by roof so it went around the settlement and came back.

Nobody down alone. One down, one at the eave above them looking at the foot of the wall and nowhere else, one at the smoke hole to take what was handed up. Down by the wall, along the wall, up by the wall. No walking out into a lane. If the one at the eave said ground, whoever was down came up the way they’d gone, and dropped whatever they had.

“And daylight’s nothing,” Galen called after it. “Don’t think it’s anything.”

The first one down was at the long house, because the stove was there. Mei went, with Galen’s two at the door watching the earth inside the stakes and Ulla on the long house eave watching the foot of the wall. Naida watched from the Speaker’s roof. She saw Mei go in at the door end and heard the stove door, iron on iron, and the scrape of the strike-a-light, and then nothing, and then smoke came out of the long house chimney, thin and gray and then thicker.

When Mei came out, she was carrying a pot by the bail with a lid on it and a rag around the bail, and her face was black down one side from blowing on the fire.

They took the embers out to the roofs in pots. Somebody had worked out by the second pot that a pot set straight on the sod would scorch the sod and then go through it, so they cut three sods off the roof’s own edge and laid them grass side down for the pot to sit on. On the Speaker’s roof Silas held the lid with his good hand while Naida tipped the embers in, and they set an iron pan of snow on top of it and watched the snow go gray and sink.

She drank the first of it before it was warm. It tasted of the pan and of smoke. She passed it to the Speaker and he passed it to Silas.

By the fourth hour every roof in Windbreak had a pot on it, and smoke went up all over the settlement in thin lines, and from the Speaker’s roof it looked as if the settlement had been set on fire very carefully in every lane at once.

+++

Nye said the names at the north gate a little before noon.

She went down from her own roof by the wall, with a five around her, and walked the last of the lane to the gate along the gate-house wall with one hand on it. From the Speaker’s roof Naida could see her small and dark against the gate timbers, and the five standing around her facing out, and Nye with her back to the settlement and her face to the snow.

She said each mother’s name, and then a name, and then the next mother’s name. Four times. Naida couldn’t hear the words at that distance. She counted them by the way Nye’s head moved.

The roofs had gone quiet for it. All across the settlement, people had turned on the sod to face the north gate. When Nye stepped back from the gate and the five turned with her, the talk came back up from roof to roof, low, and the child two houses down asked again for water, and this time somebody gave it to him.

+++

“It goes south today,” the Speaker said.

He’d had the board across his knees since the names. Naida took it from him, and the ink, and he gave her the clean sheet he’d kept inside his coat, and she wrote it on the sod with the inkhorn wedged between two cut sods so it wouldn’t tip.

She wrote it the way she always wrote them. Who was where. Jessa’s iron on the floor. The hump between the hearth and the bed. The loft on its one post, and the post going down into the floor, and Dace sliding off the boards onto the earth. Nell. Dace. at the head, the way Ulla had said it on the roof with no gate to say it at. The house opposite Jessa’s, and the one that had come along the foot of its wall toward the beds. The roofs. Four names said at the gate this morning, facing out, and the house they’d slept in.

The Speaker read each line over her shoulder as she finished it, which he didn’t usually do.

At the foot, before his name, she wrote: They have not come onto the roofs.

Silas had been watching her write. He leaned in to read it, holding his strapped arm still with the other.

“The roofs are on the walls,” he said.

“Yes.”

“The walls are on the ground.”

“Nothing’s come through a wall.” She didn’t look up. “Not here. Not in any sheet I’ve read. It came up through the floor, and it came for a post.”

“It went along the foot of one.” Silas nodded at the house next door. “That one. Galen saw it last night. And the hole under the long house ran off under the north wall.”

“Along it. Under it. Not through it.” Naida blotted the line with the edge of her sleeve. “It’s true, what I’ve written. It hasn’t come onto a roof.”

“It’s true today.”

“Then it goes.”

The Speaker took the board from her. He put one finger on her last line and left it there while he read it again. Then he took the finger away and signed under it without saying anything, and Naida folded the sheet and sealed it and put it in the oilcloth.

The rider went from the pens at noon. Naida watched him from the roof: a young herder’s son on one of the herders’ mounts from the pens on the drying ground, the bag across his chest under his coat. Nobody walked him to the gate. The mount went down the long lane to the south gate at a walk, and somebody on the wall above the south gate drew it open by the rope, and he went out onto the white country and turned south along the track toward the hills.

Nine days. Seven Peaks would have it on the twenty-eighth, and the Millford road three days after.

She watched until he was a dark mark going over the first rise, and then he wasn’t.

+++

It came in the middle of the afternoon, with the sun already low enough to lay the shadows of the roofs across the lanes.

Galen heard it first. He’d been at the eave all day, and he lifted his head off his arms and said, “Wait,” to nobody, and the roofs near him went quiet.

Naida heard it then. A crack, low and short, like a frozen branch going in the cold, and close. Then a long creak, and dust coming off the face of the house next door in a little falling sheet, white on the white snow.

The corner of that house nearest the lane had dropped. The line of its eave ran level along the front and then, at the last stride before the corner, it bent down, a hand’s width, as if the corner post under it had sat down into the earth. The sod above the corner sagged with it. Frost broke off the edge of the sod and fell into the lane.

The family on that roof were up on their knees. A man and three children. The man had the smallest under one arm.

“Off the corner,” Galen called across the lane. “Get to the high side.”

The man went up the slope of the sod on his knees with the child under his arm, and the two others crawled after him to the side of the roof nearest the Speaker’s, where the eave still ran level.

The corner dropped again. Not much. A finger. The creak ran the length of the roof poles.

The Speaker was on his feet.

“Hand them across,” Galen called. “Children first. Don’t jump with them.”

The two eaves came within an arm and a half of each other across the gap between the houses. Naida went along the Speaker’s roof to that side and lay down on her front on the sod with her arms out over the edge. The Speaker came down beside her. Silas knelt behind them with his good hand open.

The man leaned out over his own eave with the smallest child held out at arm’s length by the back of its coat and its legs kicking over the gap. It weighed nothing. Naida got it by the arm and the collar and drew it across and put it behind her, and didn’t let go until Silas had it against his chest under his one arm.

The second child was older and wouldn’t be held. She crawled out to the edge of her own roof and reached, and Naida reached, and their hands met over the gap. The girl’s hand was bare and colder than Naida’s. Naida pulled, and the girl came across on her stomach, and her boots went over the edge of the Speaker’s eave and scraped on the wall below, and the Speaker got her by the belt. She lay on the sod behind them and cried, once, and then stopped.

The third was a boy who could jump and did, and landed on his hands and knees, and Silas took the back of his collar and held it.

The man came last. He stood up on his roof, which was the wrong thing, and the corner under him dropped a third time while he stood, and the whole front of his roof tipped toward the lane, and he went for the gap in one stride and landed half on the Speaker’s eave with his chest and his arms on the sod and his legs over the edge. He was sliding before he’d finished landing. Naida got her fist into his coat at the shoulder, and the Speaker got both his cracked hands into the back of it, and they hauled. He came up onto the sod and lay there with his face in it.

Across the gap the empty roof sat on its broken corner, the smoke from its pot still going up straight from the high side where the man had left it.

Nothing came out of the house. Nothing moved in the lane. Across it Galen had gone back to the eave of Jessa’s roof on his front, looking down at the foot of the wall where the corner had gone.

“It’s at the wall,” he called. “The foot of it, on the lane side. There’s earth thrown up along the bottom, a hand high. Like a mole run.”

“Fresh?” the Speaker asked.

“Steaming.”

+++

The Speaker didn’t sit down again. He stood on his roof with his list in his hand and looked across the settlement at every roof he could see, and the people on the roofs looked back at him.

“Everybody to the middle,” he called. “Away from the corners. Away from the edges. Galen, pass it around.”

Galen passed it. It went across the lanes and came back, the way the morning rule had. All over Windbreak, people got up on their knees and moved their pots and their children and their blankets in from the edges of their roofs to the middle, around the smoke holes, and sat down again closer together than they’d been.

Silas had moved without being told. He was sitting by the smoke hole with the boy’s collar still in his good hand, and he didn’t look at Naida.

She sat down beside him.

The rider had been out of the south gate for most of the afternoon. On a mount, he’d be past the first of the hills by now, with the sheet against his chest under his coat and her last line at the foot of it, above the Speaker’s name. They have not come onto the roofs.

Nine days. She’d have been able to call him back for about the first hour, and in the first hour nothing had happened yet.

Her hands had come up off her knees. She put them back down.

“I’ll write it for the next one,” she said.

The Speaker had heard. “Write the corner.”

“I’ll write the corner.”

The sun went down behind the long house. The pots on the roofs were the only warmth anywhere, and the smoke lines stood up straight in the still air and leaned a little east as the cold came on. Across the lane Agnet had her white fingers under Wend’s arms, and Wend had the iron in her lap. On the Speaker’s roof the man from next door sat in the middle with his three children against him and the smallest inside his coat. He hadn’t brought anything across.

Next door the broken roof settled once more after dark. A finger, maybe. The creak ran the length of its poles, close enough that Naida heard the sod tear at the corner. Nobody on the Speaker’s roof turned to look. They were all in the middle already.