The Voice Across the Gorge

Iyene chose the camp as she chose everything, fast and without asking anyone. It was a hollow among gray boulders a quarter mile back from the west rim, where a spring came out of the rock under a stand of rowans heavy with red berries. The grass was long and gold, and nobody had cut it since before the Frost.

From the edge of the hollow they could see across the scrub to the lip of the gorge, and beyond it to the far rim, where the stump of the bridge jutted out over nothing. Nothing stood on it now. They had all watched him fall with the last of the Kestrel Bridge into the white river. They had watched him rise out of the water with the river pouring off his chain, and walk away into the shadow under the east wall as if the fall were nothing. There had been no sign of him since.

"No fire," said Iyene.

Bracken had already started breaking up a dead juniper. He stopped with a branch in each hand. "Sir."

"It found the keeper across a mile of mountain. I'm not lighting it a lamp."

"Merritt's cold, Sir."

"Then put your coat on her, Sergeant."

He looked at the branches, then laid them down in the grass very carefully, as if they might go off, and went to take his coat off.

Wren sat on a rock at the edge of the hollow with her back to the gorge. She did not want to look at the rim, or at anything. Her right hand was cold to the wrist and would not warm however she rubbed it. She kept reaching for her mother's face, and every time there was nothing there, and every time it was a surprise.

Pip came and sat down beside her with Barrow's halter in his hand, though Barrow was hobbled and cropping the grass and going nowhere.

"You made a bridge," he said.

"I know."

"Out of nothing. Out of a river." He shook his head. "I seen a lot of things. I seen a man in Tanner's Lane swallow a knife and bring it back up again with a ribbon on it. That was the best thing I ever seen. That's gone now. That's second."

"It fell, though."

"His cold broke it. Frost in wet stone." He said it as if everybody knew. "My dad was a mason, before he wasn't. Water gets in the joints and freezes, and it'll split a wall clean down the middle. That's him, that is. You made it." He looked at her sideways. "What'd it cost? The Mistress says it costs."

"Leave it, Pip."

He left it, and sat with her a while longer, twisting the halter rope, until Iyene called him away.

Dorrit worked on Merritt's leg in the last of the daylight. They had laid Merritt on a blanket in the lee of the biggest boulder, with Bracken's coat over her and her rolled coat under her head. She was awake, very pale, her eyes too bright, and she kept wetting her lips.

Dorrit knelt beside her with the medicine roll open on the grass. She cut away the rest of the torn breeches with her little curved knife and looked at the leg, and Wren, holding the roll, looked too, and then made herself look at the rowans instead.

The marks of the two hands had darkened since the morning. The middle of each print was still white, hard and shiny, but the edges had begun to blister black, and the flesh around them was swollen and red and hot to look at.

"Hells," said Wren.

"Language," said Merritt, and tried to laugh.

"Hold still, my love." Dorrit laid two fingers on the red skin above the wound, then on the skin below it. Her face did not show anything. Wren had seen that face in a hundred Dall kitchens, over broken arms and bad births, and she knew what it cost. "Does that hurt?"

"Yes."

"Good. Hurting's good. It's the white bits that don't hurt that I don't like." She sat back on her heels. "I want to take the dead skin off. It'll go bad under there if I leave it. I want hot water to do it, and a hot knife, and I want to see what I'm doing."

"No fire," said Iyene, from behind the boulder.

"I heard you the first time." Dorrit did not turn her head. "Then I'll do it cold, in the dark, with spring water. And if she loses the leg because of it, Captain, you'll hold her down for the sawing."

Iyene came round the boulder and stood looking down at Merritt, and Merritt looked back at her.

"Do it cold, Mistress," Merritt said. "I've had worse."

"You have not," said Dorrit. "Nobody's had worse. Wren, the honey."

Wren dug in the satchel and found one of the small jars of dark heather honey from the third hive in the row. She had packed it at Fallowmere, a lifetime ago, with some idea of eating it on the mountain. When she unscrewed the lid the smell came out, heather and summer and wax, and for a moment she was standing in the kitchen with Tansy grumbling in her chair.

"Honey?" Merritt said. "Are you going to eat me?"

"It keeps a wound clean. Cleaner than anything I've got. Bite on this." Dorrit gave her a strap of leather to bite on. "Wren, hold her hand. Bracken, hold her other hand, and if she hits you, let her."

Bracken knelt and took Merritt's hand in his huge one. He had come back without his coat, and his torn forearm was bound in Dorrit's linen from the night of the hounds. "I'll let her," he said. "I've been hit by better."

"You have not," said Merritt, round the strap.

"I have. The Captain once hit me with a chair."

"Sergeant," said Iyene.

"Sir."

Dorrit bent over the leg with her knife, and the light went while she worked. The sky above the rowans turned from gold to green, and the dusk rose up out of the gorge and filled the hollow. By the end Dorrit was working by feel, with her face so close to the leg that her curls brushed it. Merritt did not scream. She bit the strap and breathed through her nose in long hard gasps, and crushed Wren's fingers until Wren thought they would break. Once she made a sound like a dog dreaming, and Bracken said, "There. There, now," over and over, in a voice Wren had never heard from him.

At last Dorrit laid the honey on thick, bound the leg in clean linen, and sat back.

"Done," she said. Her hands were shaking. She wiped them on the grass. "Done, my love. You were a hero."

Merritt spat out the strap. "I was a pig. I squealed."

"You were a hero pig."

Merritt laughed, and then began to cry quietly with her face turned away, and Bracken went on holding her hand.

Dorrit got up and went to the spring. Wren followed her, and they crouched by the water while Dorrit put her hands in it up to the wrists.

"Well?" Wren said.

"It's bad." Dorrit kept her voice low. "It's going up the leg. Not fast. But it's going. The honey will keep it clean, for now. But she needs a roof, and a fire, and a bed, and somebody to feed her broth for a week." She took her hands out of the water and looked at them. "Days, Wren. Not weeks. If she's lying on the ground a week from now, I'll lose the leg. And then I'll likely lose her."

"I'll tell Iyene."

"I'll tell Iyene. She'll only argue with you." Dorrit dried her hands on her skirt. Then she looked at Wren properly, for the first time since the bridge. "How's yours?"

"My what?"

"Don't. You know what."

Wren looked at the water. It was nearly dark. "Gone," she said.

Dorrit put her wet hand, still cold from the spring, on the back of Wren's neck and left it there, and neither of them said anything more about it.

The sun set far out over the West in a long red bar behind the hills. The country below went blue and then gray, and there was not one light anywhere in it.

They had all gone to the edge of the hollow to watch the far rim, even Merritt, who had made Bracken carry her, because none of them could help it. As the last of the red went out of the sky, Pip saw him first and pointed.

Something white was climbing the east wall of the gorge, up out of the shadow at the bottom. He came slowly, hand over hand, and where he touched the cliff the frost went out from him in a pale fan. The little waterfalls that came out of the rock froze solid as he passed them and hung there glittering. He came over the lip onto the broken stump of the bridge, where Wren had sat to write, and stood up to his full height. The river water had frozen white in every link of his chain.

He lifted his head. "You have my book."

It came across the gorge clear and close, over the sound of the river, and there was nothing strange in it. That was the worst of it. It was a young man's voice, a little hoarse, as if he had a cold or had not spoken in years: the voice of a lad calling across a field.

Nobody moved. Wren felt Dorrit's hand close on her arm, and at her other side Pip whispered, "He sounds like a lad. He sounds like a lad off the docks."

"Hush," said Bracken.

The white figure on the far rim was looking across at her, and she could feel it as she had on the mountain: a pressure on her face, cold as a draft under a door.

She stood up. Dorrit hissed her name.

"It's not yours," Wren shouted. Her voice went out across the gorge and came back off the far wall, thin and small. "It's ours. It's been ours since before the Frost. It's my grandmother's, and it was hers before that."

The echo died away, and the river roared softly at the bottom of the gorge.

The Chainman did not answer her. He stood with his head turned toward her across four hundred feet of air for so long that her legs began to shake, and still she would not sit down.

Then he spoke again. "Forty rods." A pause. "Chain."

He turned away north along the rim of the gorge and began to walk. The chain came off the stone and slid after him through the grass with its long dry hiss. They watched the pale track of his frost spread along the rim into the dusk until they could not see him anymore, and then they could only hear the chain.

"Where's he going?" said Dorrit.

"North," said Iyene. "The old maps show the gorge running shallower toward its head. Far enough up, it's a ditch a man can climb."

"Then he'll cross there," said Alder, "and come down this side after us."

"Then we'll be gone when he does."

Long after that, when it was full dark, his voice came back to them once more, very faint, from far up the gorge.

"Forty rods. Chain."

Iyene set the watches then in a low voice, two to a watch, and took the first herself with Bracken. Wren saw him stand close to the Captain at the edge of the hollow, looking north after the sound.

"Sir," he said. "Fenn."

"I know, Sergeant."

"He'd have wanted burning, Sir. After. We didn't burn him."

"There was no burning him. He was under a hundred of them."

"Aye, Sir. I know it." Bracken stood there a while. "Only, if he comes back up the road after us."

"Then we'll burn him," said Iyene. "Go and sit with Merritt." He went.

Nobody slept much. The cold came off the stones and up out of the ground, and without a fire there was nothing to do but lie close under every blanket they had and shiver. Bracken lay beside Merritt and gave her the warm side, and Dorrit lay on her other side. Pip crawled in against Barrow, who did not seem to mind, and slept with his head on the mule's flank.

Merritt's fever came up in the night. Wren could hear her, low and quick, talking. Mostly it was nonsense. Once she said, very clearly, "Fenn, you great fool, you've got my torch," and laughed. Once she sang a line of a marching song, off key, and stopped in the middle of it. Once she asked for her mother. Bracken said something to her in the dark, too low for Wren to hear, and after that she was quiet.

Wren lay on her back and looked at the stars, which were thicker here than over Dall, hard and bright in the cold. She tried not to think about her mother, and then she tried not to think about the voice saying You have my book, and thought about it anyway.

When at last she sat up, she saw a tall shape across the hollow, sitting on a rock with a staff across its knees. She wrapped her blanket around her shoulders and went and sat beside Alder.

He had not slept either, and his face was gray in the starlight; his hands still shook a little, though less than they had at the foot of the steps after the Word. He did not seem surprised to see her.

"You should sleep," he said.

"So should you."

"I am an old man. Old men do not sleep. It is one of the few privileges of the condition." He shifted the staff. "How is your hand?"

"Cold." She rubbed it. "It won't warm up."

"It will. Your grandmother's did, after Elmcross. She told me so, many years ago." He was quiet a moment. "She told me very little else about it."

"She told me less." Wren pulled the blanket tighter. "Alder. What is it?"

He did not pretend not to understand her, but looked out across the dark toward the gorge, where the rim was a paler line against the black.

"I will tell you what my order knows," he said. "It is not a great deal, and I am less sure of it tonight than I was this morning. The Wardens hold that when the White Winter fell on Meddan, the Survey made a great ward against it. The Seven made it, the First Surveyor and the Keeper of the Book and the rest. It saved the realm. And part of the ward was a binding. There was something the Seven bound in the Hall at Cael Meddan, something that belonged to the cold. The candle in Merrow was lit to show that the binding held."

"And it went out."

"On the tenth of August."

"So that's the thing they bound. Over there."

"I believe so."

"What is it, though? Is it a man? It talks like a man."

"The lore does not say what it is. Only that the Seven bound it." Alder turned the staff slowly in his hands. "The children's rhyme calls it the Chainman. I had always thought that was a nursery thing, a bogey to frighten children home at dusk. I have spent fifty years reading the Survey's records, Wren, and there is not one line in them about a thing wrapped in chain. I would have remembered."

"Then somebody took it out."

He looked at her, and she saw him think about it and not like it.

"Why does it want my book?" she said.

"I don't know."

"You must know something. You know everything. You told Pip the name of every star on the way up the Stair, and half of them were wrong, but you told him."

"The stars were correct. The boy was holding the chart upside down." But he did not smile. "I don't know, Wren. I have thought of nothing else since the gorge. The Waybook is the Survey's road-book. Wystan carried it over the mountains. It holds Wystan's last writing, and that is failing."

"Why is it failing? It held all this time."

"I think the ink has faded. He wrote those pages in the Hall and on the Stair, and the book has lived at the far end of the kingdom ever since, in a box on your grandmother's dresser." He was quiet a moment. "Ink is a promise. Promises wear thin at a distance."

"So he wants it finished off."

"Perhaps. Perhaps he wants it back. But he did not say 'the book', Wren. He said 'my book'."

"I heard him."

"So did I." Alder was quiet. "I do not know what that means. And I find I do not like to guess."

A small wind moved in the rowans, and far away to the north, so faint that it might have been the river, Wren thought she heard the chain.

"What's a rod?" she said.

"A measure. The Survey's measure, for roads. Five and a half yards." He answered as he always answered questions, promptly and a little proudly, and then he heard what she had asked, and his voice changed. "Forty rods is a furlong. Ten chains. It is what the chainman called out when the chain had been laid ten times along the road. The Survey measured every road in Meddan that way. One man went ahead with the rod. One man carried the chain behind him and called the lengths."

"So he's measuring."

"It seems so."

"Measuring what?"

Alder was slow to answer. "The distance to you, I imagine," he said.

Wren sat with that, and her cold hand ached. After a while Alder said gently, "What did the book take? You needn't tell me."

"My mother's face."

He let out a long breath. "Ah, Wren."

"I've still got her voice. I can hear her singing. And her shawl, and the way she..." She stopped. "I know she had a gap in her front teeth. Dorrit told me. I know that. I just can't see it."

"I am sorry."

"It was a good bridge, though," Wren said. She was surprised to find her voice was steady. "Wasn't it? It was a good bridge."

"It was a very good bridge," said Alder. "I have read of such things all my life. I never thought to see one."

"You broke a cliff for it. Back at the steps."

"Yes. That is one Word I shall not grieve for." He was silent a moment. "There are others I shall."

"How many others?"

He looked at her in the dark, and she thought for a moment that he was going to answer, but he shook his head.

"Go and sleep, Wren Fallowmere," he said. "We have a long way to go tomorrow, and I suspect the Captain will want to go it very fast."

She lay down again between Dorrit and the boulder, but she did not sleep; she watched the stars and listened for the chain.

A long time later, near the middle of the night, she saw a light.

It was very small, only a faint yellow glow on the underside of the rowan leaves. It came from behind a tumble of rocks at the far end of the hollow, where the ground dropped toward the spring, and somebody back there had a lantern shuttered almost closed.

Wren propped herself on one elbow. Pip was awake too, sitting up against Barrow's flank with his knees drawn up, watching the glow, which lit the edge of his cheek and one eye.

Behind the rocks Iyene sat on the ground with the lantern between her knees and its shutter open a crack toward her lap. She had a letter in her hands, folded thick, with a dark blot of wax on it, though Wren could not see the seal from there. She watched Iyene turn the letter over, break the wax with her thumb, unfold it, and hold it to the thin light.

Iyene read slowly, the first sheet and then the back of it, and then all of it again from the beginning. Wren could not see her face, only the top of her cropped gray head, bent over the page.

Then Iyene opened the lantern's little door and held the corner of the letter to the flame.

The paper caught. It burned quickly, curling black, with a small bright light that lit Iyene's face from below. There was nothing in her face at all. She held the burning sheets until the flame reached her fingers, then dropped them in the grass and ground the ashes in with her boot. Then the shutter closed, and the glow went out.

Wren looked at Pip, and found him already looking at her, his eyes very wide in the dark.

"Go back to sleep, Mistress," he whispered.

"She burned it."

"Then she's done reading it, ain't she." He slid down against Barrow's side and pulled his blanket over his head. His voice came out muffled. "I never saw nothing. I'm asleep. I'm snoring." He began to snore, very badly.

Wren lay back down. Her heart was going fast. She lay listening to Pip's snoring and Merritt's muttering and the river at the bottom of the gorge, until she heard footsteps in the grass.

Iyene came and sat down on the rock Alder had left at the edge of the hollow, facing west. She sat very straight, as she always did, with her sabre across her knees, and did not look toward the sleepers.

Wren took her blanket and went and sat beside her. Iyene did not seem surprised; nobody had been surprised to see her tonight.

"Keeper."

"Captain."

They sat. Out beyond the rowans the country of the West lay under the stars, huge and black and empty, going away forever, and the air smelled of cold grass and water.

"I saw you," Wren said.

"I know. You were propped on your elbow like a hare in a field. You should learn to lie flat."

"What did it say? The King's letter."

Iyene thought about it, and Wren could see her choosing what to say.

"It said that I am to see the keeper and the book safe to the Hall at Cael Meddan," she said, "and to see the binding made again there. Which I had assumed."

"Then why burn it?"

"Because it was addressed to me, and not to anyone who might take it off my body." Iyene looked at her. The scar through her eyebrow was a pale line in the dark. "I have been carrying sealed orders for thirty years, Keeper. I have burned most of them. It is what one does with orders once one has read them."

It was a good answer, and Wren could not see anything wrong with it. She thought about the face in the lantern light with nothing in it, and she could not see anything wrong with that either.

"Dorrit says Merritt needs a roof," she said. "In days. Not weeks."

"Mistress Fallowmere told me. At some length." Iyene turned her head and looked west again, out over the black country. "There's a town. Or there was."

"Out there? I thought there was nobody out there."

"There is nobody in the Crown's records. The Crown's records have been wrong a good deal today." Iyene drew something on the dark with one finger, quickly: a line, and a curve, and a point. "The old Survey maps show a beacon on a crag, five days west-southwest of here. A walled town under it, on the rock. It was called Scarrow. It was a hard place, and a long way from anywhere. If anyone lives in this country now, that is where they will be living."

"And if no one does?"

"Then we'll have walls," said Iyene.