Emerson · Cainwatch / Felsberg, Mercer State
1723-1724
The wind at Cainwatch never seemed to stop. On his first night Emerson lay under two blankets with his coat on top and waited for the shutters to go quiet. At home a gust would batter the house and move on. Here the pressure barely let up and the wind leaned on the building. Every twenty seconds or so it found the same loose board and worried at it like a splinter that would not come free.
Cainwatch stood where the coastal plain finally broke against the mountains. Felsberg lay the breadth of the country behind him somewhere beyond the descending ridges and long gray roads. Up there the air changed. Pine sap and resins clung sharp in the cold, and the wind moved through the high branches like a broom over stone. Frost lingered in the shaded cuts long after sunrise.
Emerson could see the slopes dropping away beneath him in dark folds of forest. The sea vanished entirely. No gulls and no salt in the air. The only sound they could hear was timber creaking in the cold. A faint smell of smoke had caught on the rafters.
They arrived at dusk on the fourth day. Their boots had frozen despite the doubled socks inside them. Smoke streamed sideways from the stone garrison’s three chimneys, and forty faces watched the newcomers from the windows and the doorway. A warrant officer came out first with a lieutenant behind her. Emerson took her for the lesser of the two but he changed his mind before either of them had finished speaking. The lieutenant was still explaining the billets when the warrant officer started assigning them. He waited for an acknowledgment that never came and then went back inside. Nobody looked as if they expected him back.
Her name was Gwyneth. She was a short, broad woman with a face weathered to the color of saddle leather and a squint that never went away. Her brown braid stopped at her collar. She had served at Cainwatch longer than any of its sergeants.
“Rule one,” she said, looking over the eleven newcomers. “Nothing up here is trying to kill you on purpose.”
She waited until one of the recruits looked relieved.
“That’s mostly rule two as well. The wind doesn’t care whose side it’s on and neither does the ice.”
She pushed a ledger of watch rotations into Emerson’s hands.
“So keep your fingers moving. Blaming the weather won’t do you any good.”
The lieutenant sent for the ledger on the evening before Emerson’s first patrol. His room was warmer than the barracks. He kept Emerson standing while he turned the sheets one at a time under the lamp. Then he laid a fingernail along the first column.
“These are wrong.”
Emerson looked. The sheets that had come from Gwyneth were already checked. The lines ran straight and even down every page and he could not find the fault. “Sir?”
“The hours go before the names. That’s the regimental pattern.” The lieutenant squared the sheets and held them out. “Copy them correctly. I want them on this table before the patrol goes out.”
Emerson took them and thought of Gwyneth. She would settle it in one sentence, probably in the yard. The lieutenant would remember who had brought it to her. He copied the sheets at the end of the barracks table by a stub of candle. The ink thickened in the cold and he warmed the bottle in his palm until it ran. Twice his lines wandered and he started again. When he blotted the last page, the hours were written before the names on every one. He lay down in his coat and listened to the wind blow at the loose board. He was still counting the gusts when the shutters went gray.
His first patrol went out the next morning with two of Cainwatch’s regulars. They followed the pass road north six hours, there and back. The waystations along it needed dry wood and an inspection after every storm. At the stations where people lived, the patrol asked travelers of any trouble that might have occurred. The third station was empty.
Emerson listened at the door before he pushed it open. Inside, the stove was cold beside its stack of dry wood. A note was pinned where the trapper’s family knew a patrol would find it. They had gone down to lower ground early to get ahead of the next storm. He read it twice before the tightness under his ribs let go.
“You get used to it,” Corporal Hesk said.
Hesk was the older of their two guides. He watched Emerson fold the note and pin it back in the same place.
“An empty shelter usually means nothing,” Hesk said. “You check because sometimes it means trouble.”
“Has there ever been trouble here?”
“Not in my time.” Hesk looked up the pass road. “Last time they came down this road was a long time ago, back when Ignis had to break them.”
He hitched his pack higher on his shoulder.
“Before that the old kingdoms barely admitted Mercer existed. At least that’s what the old tales used to tell.”
“That was nearly four hundred years ago.”
Hesk had served eleven years. The way he moved made him seem younger until Emerson looked closely at his face. He knew exactly how much effort a job needed and hated spending any more. He made no attempt to befriend the new intake and yet every one of them would approach him for any questions before the second week was out. His answers were short enough to remember.
In the same fortnight the watchfires became Emerson’s responsibility. Four fires at the corners of the walk had to be lit at dusk and kept burning until dawn. In that wind a man with flint and tinder could spend twenty minutes trying to light one. Emerson could light one in four seconds. He held a hand near the kindling until a flame lit up and then he sheltered it while the wood caught.
Gwyneth watched him once and said nothing. The next evening she stopped beside him. “You’ll be doing them, then.”
It added a quarter of an hour to his evening and saved somebody else an hour’s work. After the first week the thanks stopped. He liked the duty more than he would have admitted. For the first time his affinity had a use that somebody depended on.
Twice a week the mail cart went down to Hollowmere, the last Mercer hamlet before the border markers. The ring of its smithy carried up the road before the roofs came into sight. Emerson knew its dozen households before he knew the names of half the garrison. Tessa was an old woman who traded dried apples for gossip. She always kept a few back for “the serious one.” Those apples caused more trouble than he expected.
At Stonemarch Kira had once gone four days on hard bread and cold water without a word of complaint. A hot meal barely interested her. For reasons that baffled Emerson, Tessa’s apples did. Twice she traded away half a ration of salt pork to a man who knew exactly how much she wanted them. She kept the apples in a tin deep in her kit and offered none of them around.
Brice found the tin and got several days of amusement out of it. “I hadn’t taken you for a saver.”
“It’s dried fruit.”
“Then why are you guarding it like the pay chest?”
“I’m not guarding it.” She snapped the lid on before he could see inside. “You’ve had your share from Tessa. Leave mine alone.”
Her ears went red. Emerson had never seen that happen to her before and his attempt to hide his interest only earned him a sharp look.
“Both of you.”
He found something else to look at. Her appetite for those apples lasted the whole posting.
The blacksmith’s son at Hollowmere wanted to hold a soldier’s sword for thirty seconds. Emerson let him once and regretted it for the rest of the visit because the boy followed him around the cart asking questions while everyone else tried to unload. By the third week Brice was going down with the mail cart. When Gwyneth drew up the fourth week’s duties she wrote his name beside the trip.
The cart came back sooner when he went. It also came back with things nobody had asked for. One week it was a crock of preserves and another week a coat someone had found the time to mend. One time Brice returned with a chicken. Emerson met him in the yard.
“They like you.”
“They like being asked things.” Brice shifted his grip as the bird struggled. “Hold still, you ungrateful supper!”
The chicken settled under his arm and looked at Emerson with one bright offended eye.
“Nobody’s asked Tessa about anything but apples in years,” Brice said. “I asked about her husband and she talked for forty minutes.”
“And gave you a chicken.”
“She knew I was listening.”
He crouched and let the bird go. It shook itself out and started pecking at the yard. “She also told me the trapper’s daughter has been sick since autumn. Hesk didn’t know.”
Emerson looked up.
“Next time the third station’s empty,” Brice said, “we’ll know why they might have left.”
Frozen letters needed an hour by the fire before they could be unfolded without tearing. His mother wrote three times that winter, mostly about work. She never put anything on paper she would not have said across her own kitchen table. The second letter reached him in the fifth week.
Orders for the spring rotation came in early and kept me busy. Twelve breastplates and forty-one straps in nine days with your father offering to help whenever he could. I let him do the buckles. Putting them right had cost me most of the evening.
Kira’s brother asked about you and I told him you were in the mountains. He said that sounded cold which is the most sensible thing anyone has said about it.
At the bottom she had added a line in the same plain hand.
Did the repair hold?
Only her name came after it. Emerson read the letter four times before he went looking for paper. He wrote a few lines about the food and about the wind, which had already cost a boy from Iron Port a toe. Underneath he added:
The repair held.
Twice he lifted the pen to write something more. Both times the ink dried on the nib while he thought about it. He sent the letter as it was.
The two-in-the-morning watch was the least wanted duty at Cainwatch. Kira took more than her share of it and never asked anyone to notice. Emerson often drew it beside her. They got used to a silence that spared them opening their mouths to the cold.
“You could ask to change watches,” he told her once. “No one would think less of you.”
His breath clouded across the stars. Frost clung to his eyelashes and he no longer found that alarming.
“I’d think less of me,” she said. “Someone has to stand it. It might as well be someone who doesn’t mind.”
“Do you mind?”
Kira thought about it. He had never known her to take a pause.
“Less than most things.”
After a while Emerson cupped his hands around a small flame. Its light barely reached past his knuckles but the warmth kept his fingers moving. Kira could not warm her hands that way. He shifted closer and held the flame out between them.
“Need to warm your hands?”
“I’m fine.”
“You said that on the eleventh. Right before you tried the shutter latch.”
“I opened it.”
“Hesk opened it. You stood beside him looking furious.”
She snorted but kept her hands to herself. Eventually Emerson closed his palms and put out the flame. The refusal stung more than it should have. She turned down every offer that winter. He told himself it was pride, although that excuse satisfied him a little less each time he watched her fingers stiffen.
During midwinter Gwyneth rang the bell at two in the morning. Emerson had been relieved off the wall at midnight. It had taken him an hour under two blankets to stop shaking and he had been warm for maybe ten minutes. He lay still and counted the strokes to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. By then Kira’s bunk across the room was empty.
He found his boots in the dark and his musket in the rack by the door. Nobody spoke on the stair. The wind struck Emerson the moment he reached the wall. The watchfires had burned low at the four corners of the walk, and their smoke lay flat along the stones. It smelled of pine. Gwyneth waited by the fire above the gate. A sandglass sat on the parapet beside her and the sand was already running.
“Load!”
He took off his mittens. His fingers could not feel the musket. He reached for a cartridge and bit down on empty air. The ramrod stuck under the barrel. When it came free it nearly went over the parapet. Flints snapped along the wall in a ragged succession of dry clicks.
Kira had her musket presented over the parapet before he had his ramrod back. Her knuckles stood out white on the stock, and he put it down to the cold. The last of the sand ran through while two men remained somewhere below the stair. Gwyneth watched them stumble onto the wall. Then she laid the glass on its side.
“There’s nothing on that road but snow, ma’am,” someone said down the walk.
“Nothing up here is trying to kill you on purpose.” She looked along the line of faces. “That’s no reason to be slow.”
Hesk stood beside Emerson blowing into his cupped hands.
“Why the glass, Corporal?”
“Every post has to be ready at a certain time. The free companies lost the contract if they couldn’t march inside the hour.”
“There’s no contract up here.”
“There’s an hourglass.”
The lieutenant came up the stairs last with his collar buttoned to the chin. He looked at the glass on its side and then at Gwyneth.
“Write it in the ledger. ‘Stand-to at the second hour,’ and note that the post missed the regulation time. That is the regiment standard.”
“It was a drill, sir. A drill isn’t a remark.”
The lieutenant stood a moment in the wind. Then he went back down the stair.
Emerson knew he would be the one writing in that ledger. Before he lay down again he wrote Stand-to at the second hour under the night’s watches and left the space for remarks empty. The lieutenant did not send for the ledger again. His blankets had gone cold while he was on the wall, and he lay under them until the shutters went gray.
The worst storm arrived midwinter. It came down off the peaks with so little warning that the pass road disappeared under two feet of snow overnight. For six hours it took everyone inside the garrison to keep it whole. They counted heads twice an hour and lashed shutters as fast as the wind tore them loose. Every hearth ate more wood than it should have. Nobody resented it because every soldier at Cainwatch knew of someone who had stepped out into weather like this and never come back.
Brice kept ranking everyone’s misery out loud and changed the order whenever someone came in from outside. “Hesk moves to first,” he announced when the corporal came in white to the eyebrows. “Sorry, Iron Port. Your toe was a strong entry.”
The boy from Iron Port threw a mitten at him. Brice’s solemn insistence on being fair drew more complaints and the complaints only encouraged him. Kira covered one watch after another until she had stood three in a row. Emerson doubted she could have rested while any duty was left open.
He spent the night relighting fires. A hearth would fail where they were sleeping and someone would come for him. He would crouch beside the cooling wood until the flames rose again and then he would go back to whatever he had been called away from. It happened so often that the men stopped remarking on it. Each fire left him a little hungrier than the last. By the fourth summons he barely looked up before he followed the man who came for him.
The storeroom hearth had been cold for an hour. Beside it the garrison’s firewood lay damp under a leak. Emerson picked up a log and felt the wet on his palm. They were burning through their stores too fast. They could not afford to lose the one room where the next armful ought to be drying.
He knelt an arm’s length from the hearth and fed heat into the wood with both hands. Water hissed out of the grain but the first weak flame died the moment he tried to ease off. He leaned closer. It took several minutes to raise a fire that would hold. By then his arms were shaking so badly that he had to rest his hands on his knees.
Gwyneth came in as he finished. “How long would that have taken with a flint?”
“I don’t know, ma’am.”
“Neither do I. That’s the useful part.”
She warmed her hands for a few seconds and went back into the corridor. Emerson sat on the woodpile and watched the fire keep itself alive. His affinity had been enough. He stayed there until his hands stopped shaking. For weeks afterward the memory of that hearth made him happy in a way he could not have explained.
At dawn the wind eased enough for the garrison to eat together. Spoons scraped bowls in silence. Emerson sat among the people who had kept coming for him and he found that their company warmed him more than the food did. The ledger recorded none of it.
They kept the watch rotation for eleven weeks and entered each name beside its hours of duty. Another column was headed relieved at, and it told him whether the next soldier had arrived on time. His own name appeared seventy-odd times. There were no remarks beside it.
Near the end of the posting he studied the empty space beside those entries. Nothing had gone wrong that needed an account and the blank paper hid all the work that had kept it blank. He began to suspect that this was what a good winter looked like.
Word of their relief came in the eleventh week. The rotating unit would go home and men who had hardly smiled since midwinter started talking about the parade.
They gathered at the gate on a gray morning. The pass road was still half frozen and the wind pushed at their packs as if it meant to follow them. Gwyneth came out and shook every soldier’s hand who was leaving. At most, Emerson had expected an order not to block the gate. She held his hand a moment longer than the others.
“You lit my fires all winter without asking me for anything,” she said. “I’ve had men up here for years who couldn’t manage the second half of that.”
“It wasn’t difficult, ma’am.”
“No. And still nobody does it.”
She let go.
“Go and let a crowd look at you. Try not to enjoy it too much.”
Hesk stayed away from the gate. Before they marched out, Emerson found him stacking logs on a woodpile that was already in perfect order.
“Corporal.”
“Soldier.”
Hesk fit another log into place without looking up. Emerson stopped beside him.
“You’ll be back here in two years,” Hesk said. “They’ll send you somewhere pleasant until someone remembers you know the pass road.”
“Is that a warning, Corporal?”
“A schedule.”
Emerson waited while he tested the stack with his palm.
“Bring better boots.”
A mile down the road Emerson looked back. Smoke still streamed sideways from Cainwatch’s three chimneys and he could not decide whether he was glad to be leaving. Kira turned to look as well. She watched the gate until the road bent away from it and Emerson supposed she would miss the cold.
Felsberg held its parade every spring. Emerson had watched it from the wall all his life without once wondering what the soldiers did before they reached the harbor road. This year he gathered with them outside the eastern gate at dawn. Sixteen days of marching down the northern road had brought his unit home to be arranged for inspection. A captain Emerson did not know walked the formation with a list. He put the senior companies at the front and then looked over the eleven soldiers from Cainwatch.
“You’ll do.”
He put them in the middle. Emerson waited for a reason but the captain had already moved on to the next unit.
“Third and fourth ranks!” he called back. “Chins up, the crowd will see you.”
Brice watched him go.
“I feel like we’re being sold at auction.”
“He’s arranging the formation.”
“He inspected us, Em.”
At eight Emerson had counted seven companies from a stone wall. Now he stood inside one and the attention he used to hand out so freely would soon land on his own face. He listened to the drummers testing their drumheads. The thought of being looked at made his ears burn.
“A point of order,” Brice murmured without turning his head. “If anyone in that crowd calls your name you are not to wave. It sets a precedent. Then they’ll expect it from all of us and my arm isn’t up to it.”
“Nobody out there knows my name.”
“Which brings me to my second point. You’d like them to.”
Emerson kept his mouth shut. Denying it would only encourage him.
A horn sounded from the harbor road. Children rose above the crowd on their parents’ shoulders while people leaned forward from places their families had claimed for years. The formation moved. The drums came up through the soles of his boots. He knew the beat but he had never heard it from this side. For once he was helping to make the sound that had drawn him to the wall.
Applause gathered around the leading companies. Farther ahead a rank disappeared under a swell of shouting and he had time to watch the noise roll back toward him. Then the faces along the road turned his way. From the wall the cheering had belonged to the whole procession. Down here he could pick out one woman laughing after a shout she had barely meant to give. Her eyes were on his rank. A man lifted a child higher and pointed. The child searched the soldiers’ faces and Emerson remembered doing the same from above the road.
Flowers fell around him. One caught under Brice’s strap and stayed there for the next six streets though Brice could easily have reached it. An old woman held out her hand and Emerson touched it as he passed. Her fingers closed around his for a moment before the march carried him on. Four paces later he realized he was grinning. So was everyone beside him. The sergeants allowed it and for once Emerson did not stop to ask why.
Near the fish market the crowd thinned before the second harbor bend. The familiar reek of the stalls reached him through the salt air and past them he saw his father standing under the muster field wall. It was the same stretch of packed earth his father had chosen nine years earlier. Emerson remembered looking down at him from the wall. Back then he had been sure his father knew exactly where a boy would want to watch from.
His father had already found him. He had marched this road himself, and he knew where the new soldiers would be placed when the city wanted them seen. There was no wave and no call. That stillness held Emerson more firmly than all the shouting. The distance blurred his father’s face, but Emerson understood enough of it to make swallowing hard.
He kept marching while his hand went to his belt. His thumb found the buckle’s tongue and the narrow brace his mother had riveted there six months before. At eight he had watched a soldier march past wearing a piece of work from his own house. Maybe a child was studying him just as closely now. Emerson remembered how sure he had been when he explained the unsmiling soldiers to himself. Nothing had backed up that explanation except what he wanted to believe. He could not decide what he wanted this child to see.
Kira drew more attention than the rest of the rank and heads kept turning after she passed. A little girl tugged her mother’s sleeve and pointed. At the corner of the fish market an old man stopped working to watch her. Emerson looked from him to Kira. Her uniform was no different from anyone else’s.
“They’re looking at you.”
“They’re looking at all of us.”
“Mostly at you.”
“Then they’ve got good taste.”
She did not smile but her shoulders settled a fraction farther back. Emerson saw how calmly she met the attention and became uncomfortably aware of his own grin. For the rest of the march she held herself that way. Nothing in her manner invited the eyes on her and nothing avoided them either.
She doesn’t want this, he thought.
A street later he wondered whether anyone would remember the rest of them after seeing her. They passed the harbor bend and the cheering increased as they neared the square. Somewhere in the noise his mind went back to the winter and stayed there. The memory leaned on him like the wind against Cainwatch’s shutters.
We did nothing they could have seen.
He thought of the eleven weeks of entries without a single remark.
That’s what they’re cheering.
For a few seconds it all seemed plain. These people had gone about their lives without ever needing to think about Cainwatch. Their relief would have gone to any soldiers who came home with so little to report. Since he was eight Emerson had mistaken that gratitude for something personal.
Then a girl of about six shouted at him from her father’s shoulders. She called him by a rank he had not earned and looked delighted. Emerson laughed and the thought slipped away. He had four more streets to march. Flowers were caught among the packs around him and his father was somewhere behind him in the crowd. He enjoyed every step that was left. He would not have traded that hour for anything.
The next day the old city garrison marched out to take the posts and the unit got orders to take its place in the city. None of them had served a year yet they were ready for the task. Emerson looked forward to a quiet season.
The day after that at seven on a wet morning, a runner came down the barracks row with a list of names.