What the Brigade Carries
Ves Karrow — Day Twelve, continued
The big man with the shaved head did not come alone up the ramp of rubble.
He came with two others carrying a folded stretcher and a bag that clinked, and Ana Ferro, lying with her palm still flat on the black plaster, watched them come and could not make herself move away from the gap, though every instinct she owned told her that a man with a rifle who said step back in that gentle carrying voice was a man used to being obeyed by force when he was not obeyed by words.
“There’s someone under here,” she said.
“My brother. He’s answering.”
The big man crouched beside her without hesitation, and up close she saw he was younger than his voice, thirty perhaps, with pale eyes and a scar through one eyebrow, and he put his own ear to the plaster the way she had, and waited, and when the knock came again — three, faint, but steady — something in his face changed, briefly, into something that was not part of the performance.
“Marek. Cutting gear, now.” He looked at Ana.
“What’s your name?”
“Ana Ferro.”
“I’m Tomas.” He did not give a surname.
Later she would learn none of them used surnames, that it was a rule of the Brigade the way shoot to kill was a rule of the army, and that the rule existed for reasons that had nothing to do with courtesy.
“Fourteen.”
“Fourteen.” Tomas said it like a fact he was filing away.
“All right. We’re going to get him out. I need you to keep talking to him. Don’t stop, whatever you hear.”
They worked for forty minutes with a hydraulic spreader and hand tools, in a widening pool of lantern light, while Ana lay with her cheek against the cooling plaster and talked to her brother about nothing — the calf that had gone lame in the autumn, the teacher he hated, the girl two streets over he pretended not to like — and every few minutes his knuckles answered against the slab, weaker each time, but answering.
When they finally lifted the last beam clear, Iven Ferro was unconscious, his right leg bent in a way a leg should not bend, and alive.
It was past three in the morning before Ana understood what she had watched happen around her while she knelt by her brother’s stretcher.
The Halshire Brigade had come to Ves Karrow with trucks, with lanterns, with a field surgeon who worked out of the back of a converted grain lorry, and with crates that were unloaded at the customs house two streets from the ruined school — the same customs house that would, in the weeks to come, be pointed to by men who had never set foot in the town as proof that Ves Karrow had deserved what came to it.
They gave out bread.
They gave out blankets.
A woman in Brigade colors sat with old Odalys Brenn for two hours and said nothing at all, only held her hand while she rocked, and that, more than anything else Ana saw that night, was what made her trust them, because it asked for nothing back.
She would learn much later, from a broker she would never meet in a city she would never see, that the crates unloaded at the customs house that night had been paid for from two directions at once, by two governments who each believed they alone had bought the Brigade’s loyalty.
She did not know it yet.
She knew only that when the shelling had stopped and the army that was supposed to protect Ves Karrow had not come, the Brigade had.
“You’ll want to stay close to the surgeon’s truck,” Tomas told her, near dawn, crouching beside her where she sat with Iven’s hand in both of hers.
“Why are you helping us?”
He considered the question with what looked, in the grey pre-dawn light, like genuine thought.
“Because nobody else did,” he said finally.
“Make of that what you like. It’s the truest answer I’ve got.”
“And if I ask what you want in return?”
“Nothing, tonight.” He stood, brushing dust from his knees.
“Tomorrow, maybe, we’ll ask something of this town. Everyone who feeds a town eventually asks something of it. I won’t lie to you about that.” He looked down at her, and at Iven, and at the wreckage of the house behind her, cooling now into the ordinary grey of morning rubble.
“But tonight, it’s just bread. Take the bread.”
She rode south in the back of the grain lorry with her brother’s head in her lap and eleven other wounded around her, and watched Ves Karrow fall away behind them, a smear of black timber and standing chimneys under a sky just beginning to lighten, and understood, with a clarity that felt older than her nineteen years, that she had been given a debt she had not asked for and could not yet see the shape of.
Iven’s knuckles, when she checked them, were raw and bloodied from three hours of knocking through a slab of plaster, and she held his hand the whole way to Drennig, and did not let go even after the surgeon told her, gently, that he was sleeping now, and would go on sleeping, and did not need her to hold on quite so hard.
She held on anyway.
It was the only arithmetic she had left: a boy who had knocked three times because that was the signal for come, and a sister who had come, and a militia that had come after both of them for reasons that were not, she suspected even then, half as simple as bread.