Chapter 106: The Fortnight

After that, they had roughly eight hours and they used them.

Theo ran that afternoon the way he ran a kitchen at capacity, which meant loudly, on his feet, and with a list.

Rope first. Every line in the post and every line off Yesh’s wagon knotted into one lead line, a hundred and ten yards of it, measured out along the front of the store in twelve-pace lengths and chalked as they went, with a wrist loop spliced in every four feet.

Wick did the splicing at the end of the long table, laying the strands out three at a time. Rill did nine of them once he had shown her twice, and she did them tighter than the old sisters and faster than her hands should have allowed.

Afterwards Theo walked the finished line out into the yard and back through his hands, putting his weight on every splice as he came to it.

Sledges next. Two doors off their hinges and the top off the long table, with runners of tin stripped from the store roof, for the six who could not walk two miles through snow at night. The hinge pins came out under the back of a knife, and the tin came off the roof in long sheets that rang the whole way down into the yard. T

hey loaded the first sledge with four sacks and dragged it the length of the yard and back, and the runners held, and left two clean lines behind them in the snow.

Then the order of march, which took the longest and mattered most.

Theo at the head on the lead line. Wick second with the toolroll and the bell-cord, which was thirty feet of twine with four store bells on it that would tell the whole column when the front had stopped. Children in the middle, roped at the wrist, an adult between every two. The sledges behind them. Berrin at the back, with orders to count heads at every halt and shout the number up the line whatever it was.

Wick stood out in the yard and shook the cord, and the four bells came out thin and flat in the cold and carried anyway.

Theo stood them all in it twice, once empty and once with the sledges loaded, and the second time he went down the line and back with his hands on the rope, moving wrists along it until the spacing was right.

And the rally point.

Half a mile up, where the road bent hard round a spur, there was a shrine cut into the rock face with a stone lip over it, four feet deep and dry, and a man could stand under it out of the wind.

He walked them all out to see it in daylight, and made every one of them put a hand on the stone.

The walk took twice as long as it should have, at the pace of the slowest of them. The wind came round the spur hard enough to lean into, and four feet in under the lip it stopped dead. The stone was cold enough to feel through a glove, and two of the smallest had to be lifted to reach it.

Then he put his own hand on it.

"If the line parts, you don’t run back to the post. You come here. You get under the stone, you get your back on the rock, and wait for the bells. Say it."

They said it.

He made the children say it twice, and then a third time as a song. By the third go two of them were laughing at him, which he took.

They ate at four, and it was the best meal Harrowgate had seen in a fortnight. There was no longer any reason on this earth to ration salt pork.

Theo cooked all of it. Every wheel of cheese, the whole barrel, the last of the grain, hot bread on the stones and dripping.

The fat went in the pans and the pans went on the fire and the smell was through the whole post inside twenty minutes, and forty-one people ate until it hurt them and Yesh cried into a bowl and apologised for it and nobody looked at him.

Rill worked the whole service beside him and did not sit down once.

She wiped the sweat out of her eyes with her forearm, the way she had watched him do it all afternoon, and came out with it:

"Teach me something real."

"You’ve learned four things today."

She gave him a look that he had last received from Estea.

Theo took the pan off the heat and set it down and thought about the two hundred miles and the nobody authorised, and the six days that were now nine hours.

"When it’s dark, everyone will want to hold on to the person in front. Don’t. Hold the line. People let go. A rope will not."

Rill nodded slowly, and filed it, and he watched her file it.

’She’ll remember that, and she’ll be standing at the top of the pass road in three days telling her father about the man who taught it to her.’

They were to go at first light.

Theo had chosen first light and defended it twice. The black would not care about the sun. Forty-one people would.

At half past nine that night he was in the kitchen banking the fire for the last time, with Ordis counting bread into cloth beside him and Wick asleep sitting up in the corner with the toolroll still open.

The post had gone down around them room by room over the last hour, and somebody in the long room was still coughing.

Rill was on the bench by the north window with the smallest of the children against her shoulder, and the window had held a grey square of yard behind her all evening.

She kept the child where it was, and said it the way you mention weather:

"The window’s gone black."

Theo turned round with the poker in his hand.

Every lamp in Harrowgate went out at once. The fire in front of him died with them, all of it, mid-flame and without a sound, and the last thing his eyes reported before they stopped reporting anything was the shape of Ordis’s hands on a loaf.