Emerson · Millhollow District, Mercer State
1724
Emerson’s unit received a requisition three days after the Head Marshal showed Mercer’s new weapon to six hundred strangers. It was stamped by the Works Office. In Mercer that meant everything nobody would ever write a song about. Brice read it aloud twice, the second time slowly.
Routine boundary presence, Millhollow District, for as long as required. Nature of posting: preventative.
“Preventative,” Brice said. “Preventative of what?”
“Farmers,” said Sergeant Mosley without looking up from the boot he was greasing.
Nobody laughed. Nobody was sure yet that it was a joke. It was not.
The march took a day and a half. It led south and inland, out of the salt air and into the green hill country that covered most of Mercer’s south. The coast let go of them in stages. The smell went first. Emerson had breathed the harbor’s salt and tar most of his life before Stonemarch and never once thought of it as a smell. Four hours out he could tell that the air was different. It took him another mile to name what was missing. In its place came wet grass and the sharp scent of blackthorn in flower.
By midday the black stone of the coast road gave way to packed dirt with a ditch on each side. The road was plain and well kept, like most things in Mercer. Nothing on it was for show. Somebody would be back in a month to mend it again.
Then the country opened. Hedges grown thick and cut low ran in every direction. The hills rolled west in long soft folds that had been under the plow for four hundred years. Sheep grazed the high ground and cattle the bottoms. Rooks burst from the freshly turned field as the soldiers marched past, then settled back into their furrows cawing their complaints. Twice the formation stood aside for post riders going the other way at a canter. The second man’s satchel slapped against his horse’s flank as he passed. A spatter of mud reached Emerson’s knees.
Brice watched the rider gallop toward Felsberg. “That,” he said.
“What?”
“That’s the posting I want. Whatever it’s called.” He turned back to the road with visible regret. “He’ll sleep indoors tonight.”
It was the first time Emerson had walked the country around Felsberg as a soldier rather than as a boy who happened to live in it. Nobody cheered them. He was surprised to find that he minded. A woman pegging washing along her hedge watched every one of them go by. Her lips moved as she counted. Then she went back to her basket.
“Feels different from the parade,” Emerson said.
“Feels honest,” Kira said.
Millhollow turned out to be a hillside with a wandering stream down the middle of it. The stream had moved its bed four times in living memory. The whole valley smelled of sheep. Two families had been arguing over which bed counted since before Emerson’s grandfather was born.
The Alders held the west slope and the Furrows held the east. Their two farmhouses faced each other across the water, near enough that each family could watch the other’s chimney smoke. Old Alder insisted that the boundary lay wherever the water had first run, back before his own father’s time. Young Furrow was still called that, though his hair had gone gray years ago. He insisted that a line drawn along a stream moved with the stream, or else it was not much of a boundary.
“They are not going to fight us,” Mosley told the unit on the first evening. He stood in the drizzle with a map that was useless for the task and held it up anyway.
“They are going to try to fight each other, in front of us. A magistrate is six days out with a ruling, and both sides have decided that the last week before a decision is the proper time to make their point with sticks.”
Rain ran off the brim of his hat. “Your job is to see that nobody draws blood before the magistrate arrives. That is the whole job. Anyone who tries to improve on it answers to me.”
Over the next few days Emerson found the job deeply boring. The mornings stayed cold enough that his breath smoked until noon. The ground never dried between one rain and the next. The damp seeped into his boots and into the wool under his collar. It stopped bothering him once he stopped expecting anything better.
He stood his post beside the stream from dawn until someone relieved him. All that time he watched two elderly men glare at each other across running water that legally belonged to neither man yet. Twice a day he walked the disputed ground from end to end. That was apparently what a preventative presence meant.
By the second day he had memorized the stream. He did not set out to. It happened on its own, the way numbers always did with him. Nine bends lay between the ford and the lower hedge, and four stones were broad enough to stand on. Below the old willow a root split the current. It left a slack pool behind it where the water went dark and slow.
Forty yards below the disputed marker the water was running under the bank. He judged that the bank would collapse within two seasons and move the stream a fifth time. Then somebody’s grandchildren would inherit the argument. He mentioned that to no one. It was not in his orders and the magistrate would hardly thank a private for it.
On the fourth morning Brice walked beside him on the way down to the post. “I’ve had you under observation for three days, and I’m ready to give my findings. You’re disappointed.” He turned up his collar against the drizzle. “You keep looking at that stream as if it let you down personally.”
“I’m not disappointed.”
“Over a week ago we watched a woman take a post apart from the inside with a metal club. Now you’re watching two grandfathers argue over a creek.” He shrugged. “I’d be disappointed too. I’m only better at hiding it, because unlike you I never expected any of this to be interesting.”
“You could try expecting something.”
“Absolutely not!” Brice sounded appalled. “Expecting things is how a man ends up standing in a field, feeling betrayed and disappointed. I go in expecting mud and misery, and when there’s soup, I’m delighted. It’s a superior system, Em. You ought to adopt it.”
They walked on. The stream gurgled over its stones on their left.
Then Brice spoke in a different voice. “Do you think they’ll make more of them?”
“Mercer spent eleven years making one.”
“That was the first. Nobody spends eleven years on the second one. The yard says they offered this one to Oliver Stark first, and he told them he had hands.”
Emerson thought of the woman on the stage. She was an ordinary soldier with no affinity. “I think they will,” he said.
“So do I.” Brice fussed with his collar again. “I’ve spent a week trying to decide whether that’s good. The answer keeps changing. It depends on whether I picture us holding one, or somebody else.”
They said no more about it. At his post that morning Emerson could not hold both pictures in his head at once.
Meanwhile Kira had made a friend. Within the first hour on the first day, she found out that old Alder answered real questions about his sheep enthusiastically. She asked him which lines bred true and which ewe gave him the most grief last lambing. After that she asked him a question every day and he answered it at length.
By the third afternoon the old man was walking down to her post instead of waiting for her to come up to his. On the fourth he led a ewe down the hill just to show her the right way to check a hoof for rot. She had the ewe’s foreleg folded back across her knee before the animal decided to object. Her sleeves were rolled to the elbow. The small scars on the backs of her hands stood out white with cold while she worked the old man’s hoof knife around the edge.
“You realize he’s a party to a legal dispute we’re meant to be neutral about,” Emerson said.
“No opinion about his creek.” Kira did not look up from the hoof, which smelled powerfully of wet wool and dung. “Plenty about his sheep though.”
“Mosley’s going to say something.”
“Mosley,” said Mosley from about eight feet behind them, “is going to say that the old man hasn’t picked up a hay fork in three days. That’s more than the rest of you have managed. Carry on.”
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He walked off. Kira’s laugh went up the slope after he left. It was big and unembarrassed, and the ewe flicked an ear at it. Then she went back to working the hoof again, entirely unbothered. She liked the sheep, and old Alder liked anybody who liked his sheep.
Emerson thought of her in the hall at the unveiling, with her hand pressed flat against her thigh and a look on her face that took him a moment to name. Now she had a ewe’s leg across her knee and muck to the wrists. He searched her face for that look and could not find it anywhere. He had decided years ago to stop being surprised by her, yet she still managed to surprise him anyway.
Something else happened on the fourth day. A neighbor had claimed that Alder’s tally of two hundred and fifteen was incorrect. Nine of those ewes existed only on paper. Alder swore that every one of them was real and his, so the unit counted them out of the fold.
Emerson stood at the gate and counted as they came through. The ewes jostled past his knees, bleating and steaming in the cold. The fold stank of wool grease and trampled muck. Two hundred and six. Alder’s tally said two hundred and fifteen.
“You’re missing nine,” Emerson said. “The neighbor’s right. They aren’t here.” He was pleased with himself in a way he was not proud of.
It took Mosley about ninety seconds to find the other nine in the lower pen. Alder’s son had put them there a fortnight earlier because a ewe was lambing and the pen was closer. He never told anyone. Nobody was unkind about it. Mosley wrote down two hundred and fifteen and moved on. Alder accepted the neighbor’s apology graciously. He was right and he meant to enjoy it quietly. Emerson stood in the mud with a perfectly accurate number in his head.
He had counted the thing in front of him, as he always did. The number was never the question. The question was where the rest of them were. He had not thought to ask it. For an hour he went over that in his head. Then he let it go. There was a stream to walk before dark and it was only sheep.
The trouble came on the fifth day just as Mosley had predicted. Young Furrow’s dog slipped its rope before dawn. By midmorning it had turned up on the wrong side of the stream’s four old beds. It was digging in the Alder hedgerow after what might have been a chicken.
Old Alder reached the boundary first. He was carrying a hay fork he had plainly grabbed without thinking. It had three iron tines, and at chest height it was no longer a farm tool. Young Furrow arrived a moment later, red in the face. The dog had done nothing wrong, he shouted. Nobody had told the dog where the line fell this year.
Both men were shouting. The dog kept digging and the hedge bottom gave up a rank smell of turned earth and old feathers. Up the slope a woman was calling for somebody to go and fetch somebody. Two of Furrow’s sons were jogging down the hill with the eagerness of young men who had been waiting three weeks for a reason. Emerson got there before Mosley did.
He observed faster than he could have said it aloud. Three tines, perhaps fourteen inches of iron each. The old man was past seventy. His hands were in the wrong place on the shaft. They were high up near the head, so the weight was all forward. If his grip failed the fork would drop rather than drive. That was the useful observation. The second arrived a beat later and was less encouraging.
If he goes forward instead of down, that’s my thigh.
Four feet of open ground lay between the tines and the dog. One stumble from the old man would close it. He stepped into the gap. “Nobody’s fork is going anywhere near that dog,” he said.
“That’s not your land to stand on, soldier,” Alder snapped.
“I’m not standing on land. I’m standing between a hay fork and a dog, and I plan to keep doing that no matter whose stream this technically is.”
His eyes moved between the two men without settling on either. He kept his hands open where they could see them, well away from his own weapon. “Sir. The magistrate’s two days out. You’ve both waited ten years for this ruling already.”
“Ten years he’s—”
“I know. I’ve heard all of it for four days. It’s all I kept hearing about and I’m not the man who decides which of you is right.”
His mouth had gone dry, and he kept his voice low. “But I’d hate to see anyone lose a hand over a dog, or a grandson’s good opinion two days before someone official finally tells you which of you gets to be right.”
Silence followed. In that beat rain ran cold down the back of Emerson’s neck. It had been falling for four days and he noticed it only now. The dog was still digging. Then the last thought arrived as flat and clear as a line read off a page.
I’m inside the reach of a three-tined iron fork held by a man old enough to startle. I walked here on purpose without anyone telling me to.
His face did not change. At Stonemarch he had learned that it showed nothing if he left it alone. Old Alder muttered something. He lowered the fork and stabbed it into the mud to make his point. Young Furrow whistled the dog off the hedgerow. Mosley arrived and by then it was over. Two old men were glaring at each other from a safe distance.
Mosley got his breath back and checked that nobody was bleeding. “That’s the job,” he said. “Well done.”
Then he went to reposition the rest of the line. Emerson waited briefly for something more and it embarrassed him. He wanted a sign that this mattered. It did not come.
He walked back toward his post by the ford. Halfway there his hands began to shake. He folded his arms and pinned them against his ribs so that anyone watching would put it down to the cold. He stood at the water like that until his hands were warm.
Nobody wrote anything down. Nobody asked what he had been thinking. That was just as well, because the honest answer was three tines, fourteen inches. High grip, weight forward. As far as the Mercer army was concerned it had been an ordinary Tuesday morning in which nothing of note had occurred.
The magistrate arrived on the seventh day. She was a small harried woman with a satchel of old rulings. She looked like somebody who had ruled on nine of these that season and expected to rule on nine more. She heard four hours of testimony and walked the disputed ground for about fifteen minutes.
Then she ruled that the boundary followed the stream’s present course and always legally had, wherever it had run before. Both parties were to consider the matter closed. Any further trouble would be handled at the district’s expense rather than hers. Old Alder looked like a man who had been robbed. Young Furrow was the winner and he looked surprised that it did not feel better. The magistrate’s cart rattled away by early afternoon.
The unit marched out the next morning. “Four days,” Brice said once Millhollow was behind them. “Four days. One dog and one hay fork. One argument about sheep that I won’t mention, and a ruling that pleased nobody.”
“Seven days.”
“I’ve decided the first three don’t count. I was still hopeful for the first three.” He hitched up his pack. “Do you think they’ll go back to it? Once we’re gone?”
“Yes.” Emerson did not need to think. “Not the stream. There’ll be a hedge or a gate or a strayed cow. Or somebody’s dog again, and it’ll be about that instead.”
“That’s bleak.”
“I don’t think it is, really.” He was not yet sure he agreed with himself.
“I think that’s most of it. The job, I mean. Not the parts anyone tells stories about afterward. Just turning up and standing somewhere, so that nothing worse happens than what was going to happen anyway.”
“That’s a deeply unglamorous way to think about being a soldier.”
“Maybe.”
He thought about the hall and the light standing perfectly still above a woman’s hand. Then he thought about a week of cold drizzle and the space he had held between an old man’s temper and Young Furrow’s dog. He tried to weigh the two fairly and could not say that one mattered more than the other. “I don’t know that it’s wrong, though,” he said.
Kira was walking a few paces ahead as always. She did not turn around, but from behind he saw her cheek lift. It might have been agreement. “Old Alder is naming a ewe after me,” she announced proudly. “Said if I’m ever back this way, he’ll show her to me. That’s worth more than the parade, if you’re asking me.”
“Nobody was asking you.”
“You should have. It’s the best story I’ve got out of it.”
She spent most of the march back telling them about the ewe anyway. There was the lambing history, though Kira considered that secondary. What mattered was the animal’s temper. The ewe was notorious for refusing gates and the direction of the flock. That was apparently why Alder had thought of Kira. Somewhere between the mud and Kira’s boundless enthusiasm for a stranger’s livestock, Emerson found that he minded the unglamorous part a good deal less than he had expected to.
A letter addressed to all three of them was waiting when they got back to Felsberg. The barracks stove was drying a row of wet coats and they smelled like boiled sheep. Brice read the letter aloud beside the stove because in his professional judgment Caleb’s handwriting was an act of hostility. Four lines concerned Iron Port. Eleven concerned a dispute between two fishing families at Sarema village that Caleb’s section had been dragged into and could not get out of.
Most of the Iron Port lines were about Marta. Last winter, a fight between the garrison and the dockhands turned into knives on the wharf. Marta got between them before anyone got stabbed and shouted both sides down until their blades were put away. Salt had ruined nearly every strap at the post exchange except the ones Marta repaired. The captain noticed and gave her a stripe.
A month ago a magistrate had seized the disputed net and set a fine on it that was twice what the net was worth. Marta found out that half of the fine was meant for his own purse. She told him to his face that she would carry it to the district court and to the captain, and that she knew the way to both. He gave the net back and dropped the fine. The captain made her a corporal for it, because a garrison the village trusted was worth more to him than one magistrate’s good opinion. The entire village had heard of it.
The whole village calls her “The Corporal” now, Caleb wrote. The grandmothers say it to her face. The two families have laid a keel on the strand. One boat between them. If no one kills anybody before summer, the boat should be ready to sail. Some of the villagers have already begun arguing about what to name the ship.
They’ve got us settling arguments about nets, the letter finished. Actual nets! I have opinions about them now. When they told us at Stonemarch that we’d be defending the State, I want you to know that I pictured something else.
Brice folded it. “He’s happy.”
“That doesn’t sound like a happy letter.”
“It’s four hundred words about nets, Em. He’s delighted. Nobody writes that much about nets to people he isn’t glad to be writing to.”
Emerson held out his hand for it and read the part about the fishing families again. Somewhere down the coast Caleb was standing between two angry households and a heap of tarred rope. He was keeping a small quarrel from turning into something worse.
Nobody was writing that down either.