Location: The treeline edge, Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 6, Yr 76 of the Still Flame, after dark
POV: Vaelith Draveth
Sap and wet stone, and under both of them, the cold coming down off the mountain.
Vaelith walked out to the edge with nothing in his hands.
The gravel gave way to cut ground a good way short of the trees, and after that it was stumps and the smell of them, resin going stiff in the dark, the ground churned where the drag lines had come through.
Behind him the village had put its lamps out one at a time.
Ahead stood the wall the timber had bought, and past the wall four hundred paces of open ground, and past that the Raw.
Ashkar was at the last cut trunk with his back against it and the village behind him.
He stood in the open the way he stood in doorways, square to it, weight forward, as if the dark were a thing that would eventually have to come through him and could wait its turn.
What light there was found the pale gold of his hair and lost it again in the russet at the roots, and too much of it to have ever been arranged.
“You’ve no bag,” Ashkar said.
“No.”
“Then it’s talk.” He didn’t turn round.
“Talk’s cheaper up the hill.
Warmer.”
“She needs meat.”
“Then let her ask.”
Somebody had left a hand-axe standing in the cut face, and frost had already taken the blade.
Vaelith put a hand on the handle and took it away again.
Cold went into a body like his and stayed there, and the joints of that hand did the fine work.
“She will not ask you,” he said.
“She’s told me no four times.
I can count that high.”
Ashkar shifted his weight off the trunk.
“First one I could take.
Woman that sick doesn’t want a stranger’s hands on her.”
“And the second.”
“Put it down to the same.” His eyes went along the treeline, left to right and back, the way they always did, as if he’d left something out there and was checking it was still there.
“By the fourth you’re not a man being refused.
You’re a man who keeps turning up.”
“She refuses me as well.”
“She lets you carry her.”
“She lets me carry her because she cannot get to the fire without it, and she has made me aware of the difference.”
“Then it has to come from somewhere.”
“Aye.” Ashkar turned his head far enough to put one eye on him.
“And here’s the Snake, out in the cut at night, asking on her behalf.
That’s tidy.”
The wind came round the shoulder of the mountain and worked through the stumps, and the cut faces gave up their smell again, stronger in the cold.
“Vekka had two women at her tonight,” Ashkar said.
“I know.”
“They weren’t talking about the room.”
“No.”
“They were talking about us.” He put his hand flat on the cut face and took it off again, and the frost was gone where he’d touched it.
“Boy hauls her water.
Long Count feeds her.
Snake carries her about like a sack of stone in front of the whole face, and the other one stands at the treeline where he can’t be any use to anybody.”
He said it evenly, in somebody else’s voice, the way a man repeats a thing he’s already heard said properly.
“Nobody’s saying we hurt her.”
“No.”
“That’d be easier to answer.”
“They are saying we cannot keep her.”
“Aye.”
The heat was coming off him now.
Vaelith stood close enough to take it on the side of his face, a slow rise off the man like a stone an hour out of a fire, arriving well ahead of anything in his voice.
It always did.
Two hundred and forty-seven years, and Vaelith had never met an Ashkar whose temper didn’t announce itself to the air first and the face second.
He’d noticed a smaller thing three days ago and hadn’t mentioned it to anyone.
Coming down the line at the communal fire with the water for her, he’d walked into a group of men standing where they wanted to stand, and none of them had moved.
Not one had looked at him.
They’d simply gone on standing there, and he’d gone round, and it had cost him four paces.
There’d been a corridor once in the Draveth hall, and men had come off the wall of it when he came down it, and he’d been so young then that he’d assumed the wall was where they liked to stand.
“She walked to the fire tonight,” Vaelith said.
“Forty paces, and back.”
“I saw it.”
“She would not take my arm.”
“I saw that as well.
The whole face saw it.
That’s the trouble with forty paces.
Goes on long enough for everybody to get to a window.” Ashkar worked the axe out of the cut, weighed it, set it back in the same notch.
“Before the wall I’d not have been standing out here at all.”
Vaelith said nothing, because it was true, and because there was no way of agreeing with it that didn’t make it worse.
“She used to knock,” Ashkar said.
“Nights.
On the wall by the cot, and I slept the other side of that plate with my back against it, so it came through into my shoulder.
Twice, and then she’d wait.”
“I heard half of them through my own wall.”
“You’d give her a knock back, and she’d stop.
That’s all she was after.” He rubbed the frost off the cut face with the side of his hand.
“Somebody on the other side of the metal.”
“Four times a night, at the worst of it.”
“Told you then I’d not sit another season of it.”
“You did.”
“Well.” He put his hands under his arms against the cold.
“Wall’s quiet now.”
He’d complained about it from the landing to the night of the wall, and Vaelith had listened to the complaining all that time, and neither of them had once got up and moved his blanket further off.
“You complained that she would not let you out of hearing,” Vaelith said.
“I complained because she’d not let me out of hearing.”
“Yes.”
“How is it different?”
Ashkar didn’t answer.
The silence went on long enough to be its own answer, and then he came at it from somewhere else.
“She eats with the Long Count now.”
“Yes.”
“Says she’ll manage her own food.
Says it in writing, on that band, in front of the woman.” He put his boot up on the stump and left it there.
“One of them offered me his boy yesterday.”
“For what?”
“To sit with her nights.
Boy who’s never been past the wall in his life.” He shook his head once.
“He wasn’t being clever with me.
He’d have sent him.”
“Yes.”
“They don’t think she’s put us off.
That’d be her doing something.” He nodded down the slope at the dead lamps.
“They think we couldn’t get a place in that room.”
“And that she got on without us.”
“And now she’s out crossing gravel in front of fifty households on her own legs to show them.”
“She is not showing them anything.”
“Doesn’t matter what she’s doing.
Matters what it looks like from a window.”
They stood in it a while.
Below them the last of the lamps had gone, and the village was only a shape with a mountain behind it, and the mountain was only the place where the stars stopped.
He’d come out here with nothing in his hands, which he didn’t do.
He carried the case, or the roll, or a lamp, some object that gave a man a reason to be standing where he was standing, and he’d left all of it in the box because he’d come to ask and not to deliver.
Ashkar had read that off him in four words before he’d got within reach of the trunk.
So there was no sense dressing the rest of it either.
“She has lost her memory,” he said.
“All of it.
Everything that happened to her.”
Ashkar turned round.
“She has kept what she learned.
She has lost what she lived.
She knows what a shaft is and what a bearing is, and she cannot tell you one day she has ever spent in her life.”
“Since the wall.”
“Since before the wall.
The wall did not do it on its own.”
The heat went out of him.
A man who’d been standing there giving off warmth like a bank of coals simply stopped, and the night got a fraction colder on Vaelith’s cheek, and Ashkar said nothing for the length of about six breaths.
“How far back?”
“All of it.”
“Say it properly.”
“There is no properly.
She has nothing.” Vaelith kept his eyes on the dark past the wall.
“Not the crossing.
Not the sentence.
Not the hall, not the house, not her father, not one hour of the weeks she has spent in that box with the two of us outside the door of it.”
“Not the hall.”
“No.”
“Then she doesn’t know what she did in it.”
“She does not.”
Ashkar took the axe up and stood it against the stump, blade clear of the frost, the way a man does a small correct thing with his hands while the rest of him is somewhere else, and then he stayed bent over it and didn’t straighten for a while.
“They begged her,” he said.
“I know.”
“My mother went in front of that house.
Mine, Snake.” His voice had come down to almost nothing.
Anger made him loud.
Everything else made him small, and Vaelith had never once been able to decide which of the two was worse to stand beside.
“She’d never asked anybody for anything in her life.
She stood in a Veyra hall and asked a girl to take her hand off her son.”
Then: “Yours went too.”
“Mine went.”
“And what did yours want out of it?”
“I have never established that,” Vaelith said, which was as much of the truth as he had, and more than he usually gave.
“They all went.
Ten houses.” Ashkar straightened.
“One after the other, and they asked her to let us go.”
“Yes.”
“And she’d not.”
“No.”
“She could’ve.
It’s the only thing in this world that’s a woman’s alone.
No court to it, no clan, no writ.
Her hand, her wrist, her word.” He looked at Vaelith properly for the first time.
“Time it takes to draw breath, and every one of us walks out of that hall a free man with a clan still under him.”
“Yes.”
“She’s the only person alive who could open this.
And she said no, and got on the ship, and we got on it behind her.” A breath.
“Nowhere else for a marked man to be.”
Vaelith had nothing to put against that.
“There was a gate on the north wall at Serrath.
Mine.
Held it past the point where anybody was still counting days, and they wrote it down somewhere, and for a long while after that I could walk into any hall on Ossara, and somebody would find me a chair.” He turned his forearm over in the dark, and the old flat scar along it caught nothing, because there was no light out here to catch.
“Boy came past me this morning with two pails and told me to mind my feet.”
“He tells everybody to mind their feet.”
“Aye.
That’s it exactly.”
The Raw did what it did at night, which was very little a man could put a name to. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
Something moved a long way off and stopped moving.
Vaelith had been young enough to be told rather than asked, all those years ago, and he’d understood the arithmetic before his father finished the sentence.
Ten clans.
Ten divine lines.
One house, and one daughter of it, and a son of each of the ten bound to her.
No daughter of the ten would be marrying a son of the others while the arrangement held, and no son of the ten would be going anywhere at all.
Nobody had called it a cost.
It had been called foresight for as long as it held, and it had been foresight, and the whole empire had known the shape of it and approved.
Then the riot took them, all ten, and every one came out of it a great deal less than he’d gone in.
S rank down to C, and no ladder back.
And then she went into the dark of a sealed room, and ten houses found on the same morning that each of them had a spare heir standing in its hall with no woman attached to him and nothing above him but a branch that had spent a generation being second.
Nobody had needed to arrange that part.
It had arranged itself, and everybody who profited had been able to look at it and see nothing but weather.
“She doesn’t remember,” Ashkar said.
“No.”
“So there’s nobody to put it to.”
“No.”
“Rot.” He said it flatly, and then he laughed once, with nothing in it.
“All this time I’ve stood at that door hating a woman for a thing she can’t be made to answer for, because she doesn’t know she did it.
That’s a fine use of it.”
“How far along are you?” Vaelith asked.
“Don’t.”
“I am asking because I have to plan around it.”
“You can’t have it.”
“Then have mine.” He said it in the voice he kept for figures, because a number that arrives with a preamble is a number a man argues with.
“Sixty-nine.”
That brought Ashkar round off the trunk.
Every band kept one figure above the others: how far the beast in a man had come up through him.
Cultivating drew it in, and it went one way only.
At ninety-eight the state came for him.
Only a woman could ever strip any of it back out.
Vaelith let him look.
It wasn’t a thing men did.
A band reads one man and reports to one man, and the only party permitted to hold two readings side by side is the central brain, the Covenant’s own machine at the far end of every band, and every male in the Covenant grows up understanding that his figure is between himself and the state, and that the state has never once done anything with it that was in his interest.
“Sixty-nine,” Ashkar said.
“Yes.”
“You were the cleanest of the ten.”
“I was.”
Ashkar looked out at the trees and didn’t say his own, and Vaelith let that go, because a man who won’t give his figure to the only other man on this world who might have a use for it is either well under what you expected or a good way over, and Ashkar hadn’t been sleeping.
“Ninety-eight and they come and get you,” Ashkar said.
“That’s the whole of it.
Doesn’t matter what you were.
Doesn’t matter whose son.
There’s a ship and a list and a hole they put you in.”
“That is the whole of it.”
“So we’re not waiting on anything.” He said it to the trees.
“There’s no year where somebody looks at this again.
She’d have had to do it herself, and she’d not, and now she can’t even be told she wouldn’t.”
Vaelith put two fingers on his father’s earring, which he did without deciding to and had done since the day it was put into his hand, and took them away again.
“Tomorrow,” Ashkar said.
“Tomorrow?”
“You wanted meat.
There’s blackspine in the low ground under the mountain’s second shoulder, and the season’s brought them down.
Six days into the Growing and they’re fat already.” He picked up the axe and shouldered it.
“She’ll want the organ meat more than the muscle, if she’s mending.
That’s what my grandmother put into anybody who’d been down.”
“That is correct.”
“Course it’s correct.”
“Blackspine will not be enough,” Vaelith said.
Ashkar stopped.
“Whatever is being done to her is being done out of her own body, and a body cannot build out of nothing.
Ordinary meat will keep her alive at the weight she is.
It will not put anything back.” Vaelith let that stand.
“She needs a beast with something in it.”
“Then I’ll go under the third shoulder.”
“That is a day and a half in, and there is a reason nobody from this village goes in that far.”
“There’s two reasons, and I know both.”
“Then you know what a fight in there costs you.” Vaelith didn’t raise his voice; he’d never once found a use for raising it.
“You will not feel it, and it will not show, and it will sit on your band for the rest of your life.
A season of honest hunting is free.
One afternoon of nearly not coming back is not.”
Ashkar stood with the axe on his shoulder and considered the dark.
“Then it costs what it costs.
What am I saving it for?”
He started along the cut.
Four paces on, he stopped without turning.
“I’ll leave it at the fire.”
“You could bring it in.”
“I’ll leave it at the fire,” Ashkar said, “and the Long Count can hand it over, and nobody has to watch a woman not take a thing off me.
She’s said what she wants.
I’ll not turn up at her door and make her say it twice in front of the village.”
He went on into the dark with the axe on his shoulder and his back to Thinblood entirely.
+++
Vaelith went down the cut ground toward the boxes.
The frost had come up out of the churned earth while they talked, and it took his boots badly, and he put a hand out twice on the way down and didn’t need it either time.
Before the wall, a woman had knocked twice on a metal plate four times a night to be sure somebody was still against the other side of it, and every man near her had been necessary, and all of them had hated it.
He stopped at his own door with his palm against the metal.
Somewhere up the mountain, a man who’d lost a clan, a name, a rank and a hall over a woman’s refusal was walking into the Raw at night to find her something soft enough to eat.
Vaelith stood there a while longer, and then went in.