Location: Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 17, Yr 76 of the Still Flame
POV: Aeryn Veyra
The shovels started before the light did.
There were a great many of them, biting into loose stone and throwing it, and under them ran the long complaint of a barrow wheel that wanted grease.
Aeryn lay on the cot and listened to it come down the slope.
She had not heard the face make that noise before the bank came down.
Now every man Torrin could spare was on the spoil above the third box, and she could have counted them by ear if she had known what one man sounded like.
Aeryn tried anyway.
Two shovels close together on the left kept time with each other, and a heavier one further off threw less often and threw more, and after a while she had a number and did not believe it.
It could as easily have been twice that many men, resting in turns.
She let it go.
Once a man’s voice came down over the top of them, calling somebody back from the edge.
The two shovels on the left stopped, and after a moment started again a little further along.
Then she tried her hands.
The right one closed on the edge of the blanket about halfway and stopped.
The left did not get as far.
Aeryn held the right at halfway until the tremor came into it, which did not take long, and then opened it and laid it down beside the other one.
So she would be doing nothing today, and she had not had to decide it.
Vaelith came in when there was enough light to show the seams in the wall plates.
He had the scanner out already, the dull casing of it in one hand, and he took her wrist without asking.
He had done that once before, yesterday.
This morning he did it as though it had always been the arrangement.
He held the scanner over her wrist for a while, then turned the casing so she could read it.
It read F, and nothing where there should have been a Core.
“You are doing nothing,” Vaelith said.
As ordered.
“Good.” He looked at her right hand, which had not quite finished opening.
“Keep doing it.”
For how long?
“Today.”
And tomorrow.
“Ask me tomorrow.”
What does it tell you?
“What it told me last time.”
Then why read it?
Vaelith considered that for longer than it deserved.
“Because I have a scanner,” he said, and put it back in its case.
For a while she listened to the spoil.
The barrow went up the slope, and stopped, and came back lighter and louder.
She had been up that path once.
On the fifteenth she had gone up it on her own and come down it with a girl’s weight on her shoulder, and then on Ashkar’s arm.
Yesterday she had managed eight paces on the flat.
The low end of the apron was a great deal further than eight paces, and uphill.
Then she got the band up.
Go and look at the low end for me.
Vaelith read it twice.
“Of the spoil.”
Where it lies over the stacks.
How it sits.
Whether it moves.
“I would not know what I was looking at.”
You would know more than I do from here.
“That is true of everybody on this face.” He closed the case.
“I am on the step.”
An hour.
“No.”
Then send somebody.
“Who?”
Aeryn had an answer ready, and it was Skarr, and Skarr could not walk.
After Skarr, she did not have one.
Vaelith went out.
He did not go far.
He sat down on the step with his back to the doorway, so that she could see one shoulder and the side of his head, and he stayed there.
Aeryn looked at the shoulder for some time.
Her jaw ached, and when she noticed it she found she had been holding it shut hard enough to make her teeth sore.
A pail rim knocked against the tank outside, and water went in.
“Long Count says nobody’s to come up to you today,” Nettik said to the wall.
“Said it at the fire.
Anybody wants you can want you tomorrow, and them with figures can bring their figures, and that’s all.”
Another pail.
“Ma says that’s the Long Count keeping you for herself.”
There was a wall plate between them, so the band was no use to either of them, and Nettik was the only person on this face who would have read it out loud anyway.
It made no difference to him.
He had never once needed an answer from her to keep talking.
“Skarr’s still off her leg.
It’s black right down the side, and she says it isn’t.” The third pail went in.
“My da’s on the barrow.
Torrin put him on it.
He says he’d sooner be down the hole; the hole doesn’t squeak.” A pause while the pail filled.
“He says since your rock, Torrin’s had them turning everything.
They turned the cart this morning, and it wasn’t meant to go over.”
The fourth pail went in, and he went away down the gravel barefoot, at a run.
Later Vaelith got up off the step and went down to the fire, and came back with a bowl and a spoon standing in it.
He set it on the floor by the cot where she could reach it and went back out without a word.
Aeryn got hold of the spoon, which was the easy part.
She could get her fingers around the handle and could not close them on it, and on the way up the spoon turned over and most of the broth went on the blanket.
Then she worked both wrists under the bowl and brought it up to her mouth that way, slowly, with the rim knocking once against her teeth.
It was hot and salty, with fat on the top from whatever had gone into the pot last night, and she drank it off the rim a mouthful at a time until the bowl was light enough to hold in one hand, and then put it down.
It took a long while.
Vaelith sat facing the gravel for the whole of it.
***
The headache from yesterday had not gone.
It sat behind her eyes, low and even, the only thing she had got out of reaching twice for a reserve that was not there.
It did not get worse if she lay still, so she lay still.
Across the room, under the lip, a drop was gathering.
Aeryn watched it.
There was nothing else in the pod worth watching, and she had the whole of the day to spend.
It hung from the lip and filled, slowly, until it was round and heavy and held there by nothing she could see, and then it let go and fell into the tin cup on its flat stone.
It made a small flat sound, and that was an hour.
With nothing else to do, she went back to the beginning of her figures and walked them through again, slowly, including the ones she was sure of.
Yesterday she had sat in this room and watched a man put the seasons against the wrong years, and correct some of them and not others, and she had let him run because stopping him would have cost more than it saved.
Eight boxes sealed.
The third box on the twenty-second.
Aeryn stopped on the twenty-second.
She had set that date on the fifteenth, with her legs gone and Vaelith telling her he had no idea how long any of it would take, and she had carried it for two days without once looking underneath it.
She looked now.
There was nothing there.
So she built it again, from the cup.
The cup had held fifty-eight drops on the fifteenth, when she stopped taking from it.
It had gone on filling since, a drop every hour, twenty a day.
That made ninety-eight this morning.
It would be a hundred and eighteen tomorrow and a hundred and thirty-eight the day after.
A bath took a hundred and twenty.
That put box three on the nineteenth, three days earlier than the date she had been carrying.
A figure found in an hour was not one she trusted, so she took it again from the other end.
The cup had gone empty into the second box on the twelfth.
Five days at twenty was a hundred.
She had taken two drops on herself since, one on the fourteenth and one on the fifteenth.
Ninety-eight.
The two ways agreed.
She lay and looked at the cup for a while anyway.
It took her longer to find where the twenty-second had come from, and when she found it she did not like it.
She had expected her reserve back on the eighteenth, and she had started the cup’s count from there, as though the cup had stopped to wait for her.
Fifty-eight on the eighteenth and sixty-two still wanted, which was four more days at twenty and landed her on the twenty-second.
The cup had not stopped.
It had been filling the whole time she lay here empty.
I counted it as standing still because I was.
Heat came up her throat and into her face.
There was nobody in the room to see it.
She tried to close her hands on the blanket and got about as far as she had that morning.
The cup would be ready on the nineteenth, then.
The question was her reserve.
She had called it for the eighteenth herself, two days if she was lucky and three if she was not, and she had not let herself call it lucky.
Nobody could check that figure.
Vaelith had said so, and his scanner said F, whatever she did.
More than anything, she wanted to reach for it and find out.
She did not.
She had reached twice yesterday and got nothing the first time and the headache the second, and a third try would tell her no more than the first two had.
If it was back, it would still be back in the morning.
If it was not, she did not know what reaching would cost, and yesterday it had cost a headache.
Orreth, Corvane and Sarn were due in off the Raw on the twenty-fifth.
A box on the nineteenth meant she would be through it and awake by the twentieth, five days before they walked in.
The twenty-second would have given her two.
There was one other thing.
From tomorrow, a drop taken on herself would not move the box.
If she took one on the eighteenth, the cup would still hold a hundred and thirty-seven on the nineteenth, and that was still a bath.
None of it went on the band.
Outside, somebody took the barrow up again.
***
Aeryn smelled him before she saw him.
Stone dust, the dry, flat smell of rock that had just been broken, and a man’s sweat over the top of it, coming in at the door a little ahead of the man.
Torrin stopped at the step.
He said something to Vaelith too low for her to catch, and Vaelith drew his legs in, and Torrin came as far as the doorway and no further.
He had his cap in his hand and gray dust to both elbows.
Aeryn got an elbow under herself and pushed until she was half sitting against the wall plate.
It took two tries and most of her breath, and he watched both.
“Long Count said, ‘ Bring you the number.”
Say it.
“Half.” He turned the cap in his hands.
“Half the men on the spoil.
Any more than that and the fires go out.”
Which fires.
“All of them.”
Who stays off it?
“Them that hunt.
The old ones.
The boys.”
And at half.
“At half we’re not near it.
Not by the turn.” He rubbed the back of his neck.
“Belloch’s still up the face counting what’s left in it.
He’ll bring his tomorrow.”
For a moment she lay with that, and then came at it from the other end.
Do not clear it.
Go in at the low end and dig to the stacks.
“First thing we tried.”
“Yesterday, after I’d been up here.
A few of us, at the low end where it’s thinnest.” He looked at the dust on his arm.
“It runs.
You take a shovel out, and the side comes in after it.
By dark we’d shifted a heap, and the hole was no deeper.”
Aeryn had seen that spoil once, from the path on the fifteenth, when the loose top of it poured off the edge of the apron in a single long sheet.
She had watched it do that and had not once thought about what it would do to anybody who put a shovel into it.
If they had not tried it already, men would have gone into that spoil because she said so.
The heat from the morning came back into her face.
She let it, and kept her eyes on him, because there was nothing to be done about it with him standing there.
He did not make anything of it.
He stood in the doorway with the dust drying on his arms and waited to see what she would ask next, which was worse.
Where does it come from?
The sides or the top.
“Sides first.
Then the top after.”
How far back does it lie before it stops?
Torrin did not answer that straight away.
He put his hand out flat, palm down, and tipped it, and looked at it, and tipped it a little further.
“About that.”
Aeryn looked at the hand for a while.
She could not get a slope off a man’s hand in a doorway.
How deep is it over the stacks?
“Man’s height at the low end.
More going up.”
Who is on the low end now?
“Nobody.
I pulled them off it this morning.” He said it to the cap.
“They’re taking it off the top.”
What timber have you?
“What came off the old apron.
What isn’t under it.
That’s what I came to ask you.”
Torrin took his time getting there.
“That rock of yours.
Turn it, don’t lift it.”
That is it.
“Could you turn a timber across the cut.
Get it bearing on something so it holds the side back, and dig in behind it.”
Why bring it to me?
“You’re the one who turned it.”
What would it bear against?
“Whatever’s under.
There’s rail left at the low end, what wasn’t robbed, and the beam’s under there somewhere.” He rubbed his neck again.
“Don’t know which you’d come to first.”
Aeryn thought about it properly, because he had walked up here to ask it and because it was a good question.
It turned on what the timber bore against, and how the spoil lay against the timber, and what it did when it moved.
She had none of that.
She had his word that it ran.
I would have to see it.
Torrin looked at her, and then down at the cot she was lying on, and did not say anything.
She started a line and cleared it.
When I can walk it.
“When’s that?”
Nobody knows.
From the step, Vaelith said, “Including me.”
Torrin put his cap on.
“Thread’s the same,” he said.
“In the channel.
Same as yesterday.”
Somebody went in.
“Nobody’s got the time to go in.
I looked on the way past.”
Torrin went back down the gravel.
She heard him stop at the bottom and say something to somebody, and then his boots went off under the noise from the spoil.
Aeryn held her right hand out over the blanket and tipped it as he had.
It would not hold still.
It was shaking before she had it at any angle at all, and she held it there anyway and tried to make it a slope of loose stone a man’s height deep with rail somewhere under the bottom of it.
It stayed a hand.
She put it down.
The shovels stopped at last light, all together, as though somebody had called it, and the barrow came down the slope one more time and did not go back up.
Vaelith came to the doorway when the light began to go.
He did not come in.
“You did nothing,” he said.
I found a mistake.
“Whose?”
Mine.
Vaelith stood in the doorway a while longer.
“Have you put it right?”
Yes.
He nodded once, and went back out to the step.
Aeryn lay and put it in order.
It did not take long.
To answer Torrin, she had to see the spoil.
To see it she needed legs, and the only thing that could buy her legs by tomorrow was a drop.
Nine paces on the morning of the fifteenth, and twenty-six by the afternoon.
Tomorrow, if her reserve had come back, she would take a drop for herself and pay for it with the morning.