Chapter 145: Every Cloth on the Wall

Strange things started happening inside the Wall while the fighting went on outside it.

Berra was a woman who ran one of the three laundries in the Shambles. Her place was small, but it had survived six winters because soldiers always needed clean clothes, blankets always needed washing, and officers somehow produced twice as much dirty linen as ordinary men.

At the second hour of the afternoon, six men from the Works arrived at her door with a hand-cart.

She looked at the cart, then at the men.

"What do you need?"

"We’re here for the cloth."

"What cloth?"

"All of it."

Berra stared at them.

For a moment, she thought they were joking.

They were not.

The six men spent the next quarter of an hour emptying her premises. Sheets went first, followed by blankets, drying cloths, heavy canvas used for the winter frames, and four bolts of sacking she had been saving for two years because she had never been able to afford to replace them.

By the time they were finished, the laundry looked as though someone had stripped it bare.

Berra stood in the middle of the room with both hands on her hips.

"That’s my stock!"

"Yes, madam."

"You can’t just take everything I own!"

The oldest of the six men looked uncomfortable.

"I am afraid we can."

He handed her a slip of paper.

It was a proper requisition order, correctly written and sealed, with the Quartermastery’s mark at the top. It promised full replacement value after the emergency ended.

At the bottom was a signature.

Encrid Gannon.

The Strategist’s Office.

Berra stared at it.

"What does the Watcher want with my bedsheets?"

The men looked at one another.

Nobody knew.

✧ ✧ ✧

It was happening across the whole Wall.

Every tent in the Works yard came down.

The tarpaulins covering timber stacks were pulled off, folded, and carried away. The screens from the healers’ hall disappeared. Old grain sacks were emptied and stacked in bundles. The oilcloth that had covered the siege machines for nine days was gathered the moment the machines were uncovered.

At the seventh mile, men climbed into the rafters of an old magazine and cut down forty-year-old sailcloth that nobody had remembered existed.

Two tavern keepers lost their awnings.

Three drapers lost nearly everything they had.

A carpenter surrendered the canvas walls of a storage shelter. The Lampwrights gave up several heavy curtains they had used to block winter drafts. Even the Quartermastery’s own reserve stores were opened and stripped of every usable piece of cloth.

The complaints reached Vess within an hour.

By the second hour, they were loud enough that the Steward finally had to leave his office.

"Steward!" shouted one tavern keeper. "They’ve taken my awnings!"

"I know."

"I have a business to run!"

Vess looked toward the northern Wall, where the sound of the battle had become a constant distant roar.

"Your business is four miles from thousands of Roamers," he said. "Take it up with them if you are upset."

The tavern keeper opened his mouth.

Vess walked back inside and shut the door.

He sat down heavily behind his desk and looked at the requisition order he had signed at the fourth hour of the morning without being told what it was for.

He read the quantities again.

Then he leaned back.

"What does he need with fifty thousand square feet of cloth?"

Vess had no answer.

He had worked out months ago that there were questions worth asking the Watcher and questions that were better left alone.

The second list was considerably longer.

✧ ✧ ✧

The cloth went to the inner yards behind the Fourth and Fifth Bastions.

Several hundred people were waiting there with needles.

None of them were soldiers.

They were wives, mothers, and daughters of soldiers. There were two dozen old men, a great many children, and nearly everyone the Quartermastery had been unable to find another useful task for. Some had spent the last several days carrying stones, sorting nails, or hauling water, while others had simply been waiting for someone to tell them where they were needed.

Now they sat or stood around long wooden tables, surrounded by piles of cloth. Needles moved constantly through the material, and several women had already pricked their fingers badly enough to wrap them in strips of linen. Nobody complained. The noise of conversation had almost disappeared beneath the steady sound of thread being pulled through canvas.

A Works officer stood in the middle of the yard holding a diagram.

"Sew them edge to edge," he ordered. "Flat. I don’t care how ugly it is as long as it holds."

One of the women raised her hand.

"How big?"

The officer looked down at the diagram.

He had asked the same question that morning to the Watcher of the Wall and he still had not grown comfortable with the answer.

"Forty paces by thirty."

The yard went quiet.

"That isn’t a sheet," an old woman said.

Everyone looked at the officer in the same way, waiting for him to explain why anyone would need something that large.

"I know," the officer said, and there was a trace of understanding in his voice. He knew exactly what they were thinking because he had thought the same thing when he had first received the orders.

"But that is the measurement given in the orders."

The crowd fell silent again.

Nobody had the courage to argue after hearing that the order had come from higher up, especially when the person who had given it was the Watcher.

More importantly, they were glad that they could at least do something.

The men and the able-bodied had gone to the Wall. They were standing on the parapets, carrying spears, loading machines, and preparing to face the calamity horde outside.

These people could not stand beside them.

So if sewing cloth was what they could do, they would sew.

If carrying supplies was what they could do, they would carry.

For the first time since the fighting had begun, they had been given something that made them feel as though they were helping protect the Wall rather than simply waiting behind it.

"How many do you want?"

The officer looked toward the growing pile of cloth. It seemed smaller now that he knew how much would be needed.

"As many as you can finish before dark."

A few people exchanged confused looks. Someone quietly measured the nearest pile with a length of cord, then looked at the diagram again as if hoping the numbers might have changed.

Then the second cart arrived.

The yard understood that the sewing was not the strange part.

The second cart was carrying oil.

Not cooking oil.

Not lamp oil.

Thick oil in sealed barrels, the kind normally used to preserve timber and protect leather from water. The smell alone was enough to make several people wrinkle their noses as the barrels were unloaded.

One of the workers pointed.

"What are those for?"

The Works officer folded the diagram.

"You’ll find out."