Chapter 146: — "The Bend"

Week one, he waited at the gate.

Week two, Daren stopped him — not physically. He arrived at sixth bell on the eighth morning, sat on the wall opposite, and said, “You’ve done seven days and the road hasn’t cleared. What are you doing on the twenty-second morning if she isn’t on it.”

Kael didn’t answer.

“Then come to the storehouse.”

“There’s nothing left to teach.”

“Then come and be useless in a storehouse instead of useless at a gate,” said Daren. “At least in the storehouse I can see you.”

The news kept changing shape.

Not the disaster — the reporting of it. It came down the road in pieces, each contradicting the last, which Rowan said was the normal behaviour of bad news and should be trusted less than the first version and more than the fifth.

Week two: the shoulder came down and took the relay.

Week three: it had taken a length of road and half a village.

Week three, later: it had taken nothing but road, the village was fine, and a man at Marrow Cross had counted four hundred people waiting at the north end.

Week four: there were no four hundred people. There never had been. A merchant train had got through on a track a local knew, and the man who said so had not seen it himself.

“So which is it.”

“All of them,” said Rowan. “None of them. A shut road isn’t a fact, it’s an absence of facts, and people fill an absence with whatever’s nearest to hand.”

By the fifth week he had stopped asking.

That was the part Daren found hardest to watch. The questions had been manageable. It was the morning Kael came down and did not ask what the crossing inn had heard — and did not ask the next morning either — and by the third morning Daren understood he had stopped because the answers had stopped being worth the hope it cost to hear them.

He still went to the gate.

Sixth bell. Every day. The wall opposite, and four hundred feet of road up to where it came out from behind the hedge.

Things came round the bend.

That was the cruelty of it. Things came round the bend constantly. A road is not empty — a road has carts and riders and men walking with tools and a woman with a dog, and every single one of them appeared first at four hundred feet as a shape with no detail on it.

He learned to tell in about a second.

That was the worst thing he learned all year. In the first week it had taken until two hundred feet. By the fifth he could look at a shape at four hundred feet and know immediately, in the space of a breath, that it wasn’t her — and the knowing arrived faster than the hope did, so the hope had to be assembled and taken apart again between one step and the next, forty or fifty times a day.

Daren watched him do it eleven times on the thirty-fourth morning, then went home early and didn’t explain why.

The track opened on the thirty-eighth day and shut again in four. Weather.

It opened again on the fifty-first and a train came through and Kael was at the gate within ten minutes of hearing it, and nothing came that day or the next or the one after.

On the sixty-third a rider came south who had actually been at Tallen. He said the north end was clearing. He said there had been students among the people waiting. He couldn’t say how many, or from where, or whether any of them were girls.

Kael thanked him.

Kael went back to the wall.

After that the days ran together and he stopped separating them.

He knew he had gone to the gate every morning. He knew Daren had come every morning. He knew that at some point the weather turned and he’d started wearing the heavier coat, and that Tax had stopped commenting on anything at all.

He knew he hadn’t stopped.

He couldn’t have said why. He’d run out of reasons somewhere around the fortieth day and gone on going anyway, because the alternative was being somewhere else at sixth bell — and he’d tried that once, for one morning, and it had been considerably worse.

And then it was a year.

A year.

I’ve checked the number twice.

Three hundred and sixty-one days since a man came up the road on a tired horse and said the passes had come down. I have that morning in a great deal of detail. I know exactly where I was standing. I know what I was doing with my hands.

Nothing since. No letter. No word. No name on any list I’ve been able to reach.

I don’t know if she’s alive.

I’m writing that down once, plainly, because I’ve spent a year not writing it down and it hasn’t made it less true.

I want to explain what this is, because I’ve had a year to find the words and I think I finally have them.

It isn’t grief. I know grief — I had it at eleven. Grief sits down. Grief comes into the room and takes a chair and stays, and you learn the shape of it, and eventually you can carry a conversation with it in the corner.

This doesn’t sit down.

This has been standing up for a year.

It’s that she is somewhere. That’s the whole of it. Somewhere, right now, this morning, while I am writing this — she is either alive or she isn’t. It has already been decided. It was decided weeks or months ago and I am simply the last man in the world to be told.

And in the meantime I go on setting a place for her at every hour of the day.

I’ll give an example because otherwise this is only a feeling.

There is a bakery at the crossing that opens at fifth bell. I have walked past it every morning for a year on my way to the gate. And every morning — every single one — I have thought about the animal breads.

She used to get up before dawn and go the long way round the east wall so nobody would see her, and come back with a paper bag of small bread bears and birds and hedgehogs, and eat them in a corridor pretending she hadn’t.

Tax exposed her in a dining hall in front of eighty people.

I laughed. I don’t laugh. I laughed for about four seconds and she looked at me like I’d betrayed her.

I think about that in a bakery doorway at fifth bell in the morning, six years later, at twenty-two, and I do not go in, because there is nobody to bring them to.

That is what this is. Not one enormous absence. Several thousand small ones, arriving on schedule, all day, every day, for a year.

Other examples, since I’ve started.

I still don’t take the corner seat at the inn. There is no reason for this. She sat there twice, six years ago, and I have not sat in it since and I have never explained why to anybody and I am not going to.

I read things and stop halfway through and think she would hate this, and then I think I don’t know that, because I have not spoken to her in years and I am guessing at a woman I have never met.

I hear people argue badly and I want to hand it to her. Nobody else takes an argument apart the way she does. Daren argues from the heart and Rowan argues from the ledger and Tax argues to win, and none of them do the thing she does, which is to find the one wrong stone at the bottom of it and take it out and watch the whole thing fall down and then look pleased about it.

I have not had a proper argument in six years.

I miss losing them.

I know what she was wearing when she left, because I asked Daren once, and he told me, and I have never told him why I asked.

I know she took a bag, and a note off a gate post.

I know she was sixteen.

I’ve been maintaining a face for six years and I know by now it’s wrong. She has been becoming somebody for six years four hundred miles away, in a place I cannot picture, with people whose names I only learned from one letter — and I’ve been standing at the bottom of a road holding a picture of a child.

And I would still know her.

That’s what I keep arriving at. Six years, a face I’ve got wrong, and a road that’s been empty for a year — and if she came round that bend at four hundred feet I would know in less than a second.

I’ve tested it. Involuntarily. Forty or fifty times a day for a year.

It is the one thing I am certain of.

I have thought about what I would do.

I’ve thought about it more than I am going to write down. I have thought about it at three in the morning with the ceiling four feet away, and in the middle of sentences other people were saying to me, and once for an entire afternoon in a storehouse while Daren talked.

I have never got past the first four seconds.

I get to the bend, and the shape, and the knowing — and then it stops, every time, and I cannot make it go any further.

I think that’s because I don’t know what she’d do.

And I think, if I’m honest, that’s the thing I’m actually afraid of. Not the mountain. Not the road. I have been afraid for a year that she will come round that bend alive and well and entirely herself — and stop, four hundred feet away, and not walk any faster.

Tax says she’s alive.

He said it four years ago on a windowsill and again in a field last spring. Twice, in six years, and he will not explain, and I have stopped asking.

I don’t know whether I believe him.

I know that in a year I have not once considered the possibility that he’s wrong.

I know those are different things.

And I know that the day I can no longer hold both of them at once is the day I stop going to the gate.

So I go to the gate.

Sixth bell.

Most mornings.

And I watch four hundred feet of road, and I wait for a shape to come round a bend, and I am twenty-two years old and I have been doing this, in one form or another, since I was three.