Chapter 627: Forty Paces

Location: North Kessig — the survey camp on the dead ground

Date: 9 Emberwane 9943 AZI, Temperday, dusk

Realm: Lower Realm

Wind worked at the canvas all along the tent row, a slack flap and a crack, a slack flap and a crack, and under it there was no other sound at all.

Eden stood at the place where the grass started again and listened to it. North Kessig had been dead ground since the twenty-third of Cinderfall, and the gray still ran away from her up the long rise, flat and fine and fired-looking, but at the edge the grass had come back in a ragged band about a stride wide, and she stood on the near side of it in the last of the light with a bundle under one arm and the instrument flat inside her sleeve.

Isha had opened the door for her in the lee of the rise and shut it behind her without a word. Nine had logged the instrument out at the fourth bell, by name, and would log it back in by name before first light. Six rules. She’d written them herself.

On her wrist, Zhi had gone from blue to the color of skimmed milk somewhere between the door and the grass, and he wasn’t getting any bluer.

[I don’t want to go in,] he said.

You’ve said.

[You said ten days. You didn’t say I had to come.]

I didn’t. You can stay out here with the horses.

He thought about the horses. Eden felt him think about them, and felt him decide, and felt his coils tighten a fraction around the bone of her wrist.

[No,] he said. [I’ll come. I’m not looking at her.]

That’s fine.

The camp lay below the rise where the wind came over it high: two long tents, the picket line, a fire banked under its ash for the night. Further off, by themselves, were the six small tents in their row, a lamp hung at each flap. The lamps had just been lit. That would be the change of watch.

It changed at the east tent in silence, two fingers to a brow, and the man going off walked out past the last tent, on past the place where a voice might carry, and kept walking until he reached her.

He was older than most of First Company, gray in his stubble, with a healed cut along the line of his jaw. He didn’t salute her. He looked at the bundle.

“Doctor.”

“How far is it?” Eden asked.

“Forty paces to the row. I’ve walked it.” He turned so his back was to the tents. “Commander’s orders, through the Captain. Nothing said in front of them since the night of the third. We set the bread down and the water down, and we walk off.”

“Have they asked for anything?”

“Not one of them.” He rubbed his thumb along the cut on his jaw. “They eat. They sleep. When the lamps change, some of them sit up and look at the flap. Then they lie down again.”

“And the east tent?”

“Six. The one who smiles is the near end.” He paused. “They all smile, doctor. She’s the one who does it first.”

Eden nodded. The four numbers from ten days ago were in her head, in the order she’d taken them; she’d said them over twice coming through the door. No slate was going in with her.

Nobody knew whether the far end of that thread could see what a mouth saw. Isha didn’t know. Yinxin didn’t know. A word said in front of those women went up; that much the shed at the Hessen fork had settled. A word written on a slate held up in front of them might not. Might not was not a thing she was going to stake a valley on. So no slate, no chalk, no hand signs, nothing a person with eyes could read. She’d go in and come out with the numbers in her head, like a junior on her first ward round who’s been told the consultant will ask.

“Is there a rule about touching them?” she asked.

The man thought about it honestly. “Not that I’ve been given.”

“Good.”

“Doctor.” He glanced at the bundle again. “What’s in that?”

“Boots,” Eden said.

+++

The east tent smelled of nothing.

Not of nothing at all. There was canvas, and lamp oil, and old wool, and bread, and six women who had not washed in a basin for some days. But under all of it, where a person ought to smell like a person, there was the same flat absence she had smelled in the room at the back of a valley and in a jar on a workshop bench, and her body knew it before her head did and wanted very badly to step back out through the flap.

Instead, she let the flap fall behind her and stood still while her eyes caught up with the lamp.

Six pallets, three to a side, a narrow gangway between. A bench at the far end with a water jug on it and a stack of corps blankets. The women in white were sitting up, all of them, because the flap had moved, and all six of them were looking at her, and all six of them were smiling.

It was not a menacing thing. That was what she could never get anybody to understand who hadn’t stood in front of it. It was warm. It was a good smile, the kind a ward sister gives a frightened student on her first night. It came on in each face the moment her face came into the light, and it stayed.

Corra’s came on first.

Corra sat on the near pallet on the left, with her hair down and a corps blanket over her shoulders, and her hands lay in her lap with the cord gone off her wrists. Somebody had taken the cords off. Eden filed that for later. Below the hem of the blanket, her feet were in the corps boots she’d been given on the night, too big by a good two fingers, and above the boot tops her ankles were bare.

Zhi had shut his eyes against Eden’s skin. He was very carefully not looking.

Eden crossed the gangway and knelt.

Ten days ago she’d knelt in exactly this place, below Corra’s eye line, the way you get down to a frightened child’s bed so you aren’t a shape standing over them, and she’d asked her where she came from. Tonight she knelt the same way and said nothing at all, and it was the hardest thing she had done with her mouth in two lives.

The instrument came out of her sleeve into her cupped palm, the pane turned in toward her own wrist, and she held it a span over Corra’s breastbone, as a doctor holds a hand over a fever. Corra saw a hand. Ten days ago she had seen the thing itself, before anybody knew what a mouth might see, and Eden had thought about that all the way through the door.

The pane woke under Eden’s thumb. The readout could wait. A minute, counted in her head as on a thousand wards and in six valleys, one long breath to every four seconds, and Corra breathed with her, slowly, not because she’d been asked to, because a calm body near another calm body does that.

At the end of the minute she looked down.

The ring was there. Eleven nodes, clear as a line ruled in ink, and the hook on the eleventh, plain. In the children at Hearthwell four days ago, and ten days before that, it had been a whisper under the noise, going quieter every time she put the instrument over them, a hundred small breastbones all saying the same thing a little more softly. In Corra it said it at the top of its voice.

And the figure was the figure.

A second minute. Then a third. Then a fourth, because four was what she had taken ten days ago, an hour apart that time; she couldn’t stay four hours tonight, and she wasn’t going to compare four numbers against three.

Every one of them was the figure she had in her head. Not near it. The same, to the last place, four times over, as if she’d taken one reading and the instrument had simply gone on showing it to her.

Eden sat back on her heels with the pane dark in her hand and let herself think it properly, since thinking was the one thing in this tent nobody could hear.

The children’s patterns were fading because the wall was gone. That had been the whole argument for the last fifteen days. Take away the mouth, and there was nothing to keep the pattern fed, and it starved. Every child at Hearthwell said so.

Corra had had no wall for fifteen days. She had worn no pendant on the night and had not needed one for a long time before it. And for five days nobody in this camp had said one word in front of her. No food for the pattern from the wall, nothing from a stone at her throat, nothing from the world around her.

It hadn’t moved by a hair.

So whatever kept it fed wasn’t here. Either it was being held from the far end of that thread, by somebody who had not let go when the six mouths shut, or there was no longer anything to hold. It wasn’t something being done to her anymore. It was what she was.

Eden turned the two of them over and couldn’t choose between them, and refused to. One woman. Four readings in one evening. No way to tell a held thing from a finished one with an instrument built to find out whether people could breathe on a new world. A guess, she told herself. Say it’s a guess. Treat it as if it’s true.

[Cool-dim,] Zhi said, very small. [All the way in. Same as last time.]

I know.

[Can we go?]

In a minute.

The instrument went back into her sleeve, and she looked down at the boots.

+++

On a transport out of a colony fire, a long time ago and a long way from anywhere these women had ever heard of, there had been forty patients in a cargo bay and not one of them had spoken a word of Standard. The translator had died on the second day. Eden had been newly qualified, and she’d learned in that bay that there is a great deal you can do with your hands that a patient understands perfectly well without being told.

You show them what you’re going to do before you do it. You do it slowly. You don’t stop halfway.

The bundle went down on the floor beside her knee, and she undid the cord.

Six pairs of wool socks off the needles of the ropewalk women, thick and undyed. Six pairs of soft-soled village boots off a cobbler on the slip at Kaelport who hadn’t asked what they were for. She’d judged the sizes by eye from ten days ago and from the gangway just now. A doctor’s eye was good for that and not much else.

Corra’s smile didn’t change, but her eyes went to the socks.

Eden took hold of the heel of the near boot and drew it off. It came easily. That was the trouble with it. Under it Corra’s foot was cold and narrow, with a ridge of old callus along the outside edge, and on the back of the ankle where the loose leather had worked for fifteen days, the skin had rubbed raw. It wasn’t infected. It was going to be if somebody didn’t do something about it.

For a moment she held the bare foot in her palm, as you hold any foot you’re about to dress, so its owner can feel there’s no hurry in the hand. Corra let her. Then Eden put the sock on, working it over the toes and up past the sore place without dragging, and drew the new boot on after it, and laced it. Not tight. Firm enough to stop the heel lifting.

Then the other foot. The same. Heel in her palm, sock, boot, lace.

Corra watched her do it, with the warm open interest of somebody being shown how a thing worked. The smile stayed where it was. Nothing in her face asked what this was for, or who had sent it, or whether it would be taken away again.

At the far end of the gangway, one of the other women had put her own feet flat on the floor and was looking at them.

Eden stood. The other five pairs went to the bench at the end, set down beside the water jug in a row, socks folded on top of boots, and she stepped back from them. No pointing. No look at anybody. Back at the near pallet she knelt again, and picked up the two big corps boots by their heels, to take out with her.

“Are the children warm?” Corra asked.

Her voice was perfectly ordinary. It was low and pleasant and interested, the voice of a woman asking after somebody’s family over a fence.

Eden kept her face exactly where it was. Her hands were still on the old boots. Looking up quickly would be an answer. Looking away would be an answer too.

Nobody could tell her who was asking.

That was the whole of it, and it went through her like cold water. It might be a woman who had knelt in a yard every Grindday for twenty years and named every child off the cart, and who had wondered for fifteen days where they’d gone and whether anybody had thought to put a blanket over them. Or it might be the other thing, using that woman’s mouth to ask the one question the far end of the thread most wanted answered. Or it might be both, the same words meaning two things at once, and nobody in three realms could tell her which.

There was no answer she could give that wasn’t a door. Yes was a door. No was a door. Even a nod was a door.

So she gave her nothing. Kneeling with the old boots in her hands, she looked at Corra kindly and steadily, as she’d looked at forty people in a cargo bay who’d asked her things she couldn’t understand, and she let the question stand in the tent with nothing to land on.

Corra waited. The smile stayed on. After a while she looked down at her own feet.

[Eden,] Zhi said. [Eden, I want to go.]

Now. We’re going now.

She got up. Corra got up too.

Up off the pallet in the new boots, Corra took three steps along the gangway toward the lamp, slowly, a woman on a floor she didn’t trust yet, and stopped, and looked down at them.

Eden waited by the flap without knowing what she was waiting for.

Corra lifted her right hand and pressed the thumb of it, hard, into the middle of her left palm. Ten days ago it had gone there for one breath, when Eden asked whether she’d ever asked to go home. Her eyes stayed down. The smile was still on her face, and her thumb was still pressed into her palm, and neither one of them seemed to know about the other.

It stayed there. Eden held the flap open with her shoulder, watching it stay, until she understood that it was going to go on staying whether she watched it or not. Then she went out.

+++

The wind had dropped while she was inside. The canvas hung still.

Back up the row she went, past the five other lamps and the five other tents, not hurrying, and on past the last one, and counted it. Forty paces. The man with the cut on his jaw had walked it and so had she now. On the forty-first she stopped where the grass started, and only then did she breathe all the way down.

Zhi came up off her wrist onto her shoulder and pushed his whole head against her neck. He was still white. He was shaking a little. Her free hand came up and held him there.

[She asked you a question,] he said.

Yes.

[You didn’t answer it.]

No.

He was quiet for a moment. [Was that right?]

I don’t know, Eden told him. Ask me again when I do.

The new watch was standing at the head of the row with his lamp. He had seen her come out with a pair of boots in her hand and nothing else. He didn’t ask. Eden was grateful to First Company for a great many things that week, and that was one of them.

By the picket line, the man with the cut on his jaw was still where she’d left him. He’d sat down on an upturned bucket with his hands between his knees, and he stood up as she came.

“Doctor.”

Eden held the old corps boots out to him. “These can go back in the store,” she said. “They’ll need a good wipe. And somebody should take the cords off the store’s list, if they’re not on the women anymore.”

“They’re not. Captain’s orders. Said there wasn’t anywhere for them to run to that we’d not see them get there.” He took the boots and turned them over and looked at the rubbed heel of the right one, and then at her. “Too big, were they?”

“By two fingers.”

He nodded slowly. He didn’t ask anything else either.

Eden took her slate out of the bag at her hip, and the chalk, and stood at the edge of the gray with her back to the tents, a long way past where anything could see what she wrote. The date went down first. Under the date, the figure, once, in the small, level hand she used for things she was sure of.

Then she stood with the chalk over the slate for a long time.

There was a great deal she could have put under it. Unchanged. Held, or finished: guess. Ankles excoriated, both, posterior; dressed by boot. Five pairs left on the bench. Asked about the children.

None of it went down. Chalk back in the bag, slate on top of it, she stood with her hand over Zhi on her shoulder, looking down at the one figure in the last of the light, until the man with the lamp at the head of the row came to the end of his first round and turned back.