Scarrow

Merritt stopped being able to sit on the mule an hour out from the barn.

She did not say so; by then she never said anything. She simply began to slide, slowly, sideways off Barrow's back, and Bracken caught her before she hit the ground. After that they carried her. Bracken took her on his back for an hour at a time, with her arms round his neck and her bad leg sticking out stiff. Then Iyene and Wren took her between them with her arms over their shoulders and her feet dragging, and then Bracken again. Barrow carried the packs. Alder walked with his arm strapped across his chest and his face gray, and never mentioned the pain, and nobody talked much.

They went south-west all that day across rough country, off any road, and the land changed as they went. The orchards thinned and then stopped. The hills grew higher and barer, with heather on them and gray rock breaking through, and the wind came from the west now, cold. It was a new cold, with a smell to it, clean and sharp, like the air when you open a door on a snowy morning.

"Is it going to snow?" said Pip.

"Not here," said Iyene. "Not yet."

They slept that night in the open, in a fold of the hills, with a small fire and the wolves singing far off. Merritt was quiet. Dorrit sat up with her all night, and in the morning her face was puffed and gray, and she caught Wren's eye over the ashes and shook her head once.

"Today," she said. "It has to be today."

They came over the last ridge in the middle of the morning, and there it was.

The land fell away in front of them into a wide valley, with a broad brown river running down the middle of it in long loops. Out of the valley floor beside the river rose a crag.

It was black. Wren had never seen rock that color. It went up out of the green valley in sheer cliffs, dark as a wet slate roof, like a fist punched up through the earth. Along its top, following the edge of the cliffs all the way round, ran a wall of the same dark stone. Behind the wall a great many roofs crowded together, climbing the slope of the crag to its highest point. On that highest point, black against the sky, stood a huge round cup of stone.

"The beacon," said Iyene quietly. "That's the Survey beacon. That's Scarrow."

"Look," said Pip. "Look. Look!"

He was pointing at the roofs. There was smoke. It came up from among them in thin brown threads, a dozen of them, twenty, drifting away east on the wind. Wren could smell it even from the ridge, a thick earthy smell, not woodsmoke.

"Peat," said Bracken. "Somebody's burning peat."

"There's people," said Pip. "There's people in it. Sir, there's people!"

Wren found that her eyes had gone hot. She had not known how much the emptiness had been pressing on her until it lifted. Somebody down there had got up this morning and lit a fire and put a pot on it.

Then she looked past the crag, and her heart dropped.

To the west, beyond the valley, the hills went on for a few miles, green and brown, and then went white all at once along a line. On one side of it the hills were autumn, and on the other side they were deep winter, white from top to bottom under a low hard gray sky. The line ran north and south as far as Wren could see, with a thin mist hanging along it, and the cold wind that had been in their faces for two days came off it.

"Is that it?" she said. "The White?"

"That's it," said Alder. His voice was low. "The White Country. I had read that it came this far east. I had not believed it."

"How far does it go?"

"All the way to Cael Meddan."

They stood on the ridge and looked at it. Then Merritt, on Bracken's back, groaned, and Iyene turned and said, "Down. Quickly," and they went down.

The Stayers took them at the river.

The track down from the ridge came to a ford at the foot of the crag, where the river spread wide and shallow over gravel. There was a stand of alders on the near bank, and a heap of gray boulders. On the far side the switchback road began and went up the face of the black rock in long zigzags to a gate in the wall, small and dark and very high up.

They were halfway to the water when the boulders stood up.

That was how it seemed. One moment there were gray boulders by the ford, and the next the boulders had heads and arms and bows. A dozen people stood among them, and a dozen more among the alders behind, in long gray-brown cloaks with the hoods pulled up, and every one of them had a bow drawn. Every arrow was burning. The heads had been dipped in something black and set alight, and the flames stood up off them, yellow and smoking, pointing at Wren's chest.

"Nobody move," said Iyene.

One of the hooded people stepped forward out of the alders. He was tall and lean, with a longbow at full draw and a burning arrow on the string. He pushed his hood back with his bow-hand without letting the string go, which Wren would not have believed anybody could do. He was a young man, perhaps twenty-five, with a weathered brown face and black hair tied back at his neck, and there were iron rings in both his ears. He looked at them one by one, taking his time: at Iyene's coat, at Bracken's spear, at Alder's strapped arm, at Pip, at Merritt hanging off Bracken's back. At Wren. His lip curled.

"Gatefolk," he said.

He said it as another man might say rats, and let them hear it.

Iyene stepped forward. "My name is Iyene Sath. I am Cartographer-Royal of Esterland, and I travel under the King's warrant. We have come from the east over the Stair. We have a wounded woman who needs a healer. We've no quarrel with you."

"Is that so."

"It is so."

"Over the Stair." The young man looked at her along the burning arrow. "Stair's shut. Your lot shut it."

"It is open now."

"Is it." He did not sound impressed. He did not sound as if anything could impress him. He looked past Iyene at Wren. "And what's this one? Your servant?"

"I'm nobody's servant," said Wren.

"Nay? A wife, then. Whose are you? The big one's?" He jerked his chin at Bracken. "A Gatewife."

"I'm nobody's wife either."

"Gatewife's what we call a Gatefolk woman," said the young man. "Don't flatter yourself." He looked at her a moment longer. His eyes were very dark. "Put your weapons on the ground. All of them. The big one first."

Bracken looked at Iyene, and Iyene nodded. Bracken lowered Merritt carefully onto the grass and laid his spear down beside her, and Iyene unbuckled her sabre and laid it on the grass too. Pip took out his knife, and then another knife from his boot, and a third from somewhere in his coat, and the young man watched the third knife come out and raised his eyebrows.

"And you," he said to Wren.

She pulled the sling out of her belt and dropped it. He looked at it.

"What's that?"

"A sling."

"I know what a sling is. What's it for?"

"Crows. Rabbits." She lifted her chin. "Dead men."

Something twitched in his face. It was gone before she could be sure of it.

"And the bag."

Her hand closed on the satchel. "Not the bag."

"The bag, Gatewife."

"No."

The burning arrow swung round to point at her face, so close that she could feel the heat of it, and the pitch dripped off it and hissed on the gravel.

"Keeper," said Iyene quietly. "Let him look."

Wren did not let go. She stared at the young man along the arrow, and he stared back, and neither of them moved. Then, very slowly, she unbuckled the satchel and held it open.

He came forward, still holding the bow drawn, and looked in. He saw the book, and the pen and the ink, and looked at them for a moment, and then he laughed, a short hard sound with no fun in it.

"Scratchings," he said. "Gatefolk and their scratchings. Keep it. There's naught in there to hurt anybody." He stepped back. "What's on your hand?"

She looked down. He was looking at Tansy's ring.

"Iron," she said.

"Aye. I can see that." For the first time he let the bowstring down, slowly, and took the burning arrow off it and held it pointing at the ground. "Well. Somebody taught you one thing, then." He turned his head and called over his shoulder. "Hild's to come down. Tell her there's a woman with a frost-bite gone bad. Bring a litter. Bring the rest of them up to the gate, and put them in the salt-store, and tell my mother."

"Who's your mother?" said Pip.

The young man looked at him as though a dog had spoken.

"Morag Tull," he said. "War-chief of Scarrow. And I'm Madoc, her son, and you're my prisoners, and if you run I'll put one of these through your leg, and it'll burn going in. Walk."

They walked up the switchback road to Scarrow with the Stayers in front and behind, and the burning arrows never once pointed anywhere else.

The road was cut into the south face of the crag and went up it in long zigzags, with low stone breastworks at the turns for archers to shoot from. The drop beside it got deeper and deeper; Pip looked down once, went green, and did not look again.

Wren looked up. The wall ran along the top of the cliffs above her, black and smooth, and there were faces along it, children's faces mostly, peering over the parapet. They did not wave or shout. They only stared, round-eyed, at the strangers coming up the road.

The gate at the top was set in a squat gatehouse tower, smaller than she had expected: a deep narrow arch with two great doors of black oak inside it. The doors were studded all over with iron nail-heads as big as a thumb, hammered in so thick that you could hardly see the wood between them. Over the arch, on chains, hung a horn longer than a man, a great twisted thing of pale horn bound in iron bands.

"Fire-horn," said Madoc, catching her looking. "We blow it when the dead come. You'll hear it."

"How often do they come?"

"Oftener than they did."

Beyond the gate was a bare stone yard with long fire-pits along both walls, and beyond that a second gate, older and smaller, and then they were through it and into Scarrow.

It was a town built on a rock, and it did not pretend to be anything else. The streets were steep and narrow and cut into the stone, with steps where it was too steep for a street. The houses were of the same dark stone as the crag, low and thick-walled, with roofs of heavy slate and turf, and there were no gardens and no trees. Peat smoke hung in the lanes, brown and sweet and choking, with the smell of sheep and wet wool and hot iron.

And there was iron everywhere. It was on every door, in nails and straps and hinges, and it hung over the lintels in strings of little iron rings that clinked in the wind. Every one of the people wore it too: iron rings in their ears, iron pins in their cloaks, iron bands on their wrists. An old woman sitting on a doorstep with a spindle had an iron nail threaded on a thong around her neck. A little girl in the gutter, playing with stones, had an iron ring on every finger of both hands, far too big for her, bound on with thread.

They all stopped when the company came through, and put down what they were doing, and stood up and stared. Nobody said anything to them. A man at a forge stopped hammering and watched them all the way up the street with the hammer in his hand.

"Friendly," muttered Bracken.

"They're not friendly," said Madoc, ahead of him. "Don't make that mistake, big man."

The litter came for Merritt at the top of the first street.

Four Stayers carried it, and a woman walked beside it, fifty or so, square and short, with her gray hair cropped and her sleeves rolled up and her arms brown and scarred to the elbow. She looked at Merritt on Bracken's back, and then at the leg, and her mouth went thin.

"Put her down," she said. "Gently. Gently, you great lump, she's not a sack of peat."

Bracken put her down gently on the litter. The woman bent and lifted the linen from the leg and looked, and sniffed. She sniffed again.

"Is that honey?"

"Heather honey," said Dorrit. She had pushed through to the front. "From our hives. I've been dressing it night and morning since the fifth. I cut the dead skin off with a cold knife on the first night, and I'd do it again but I'd want a hot one. It's gone up past the hip since yesterday, and she's burning up, and she's not known where she is since the barn."

The woman looked up at her. "Who are you?"

"Dorrit Fallowmere. I'm a healer, in Dall."

"Where's Dall?"

"Over the mountains. East." Dorrit put her chin out. "And I'm coming with her."

"You're not," said Madoc.

"I am."

"You're a prisoner, Gatewife, the same as the rest. You're going in the salt-store."

"I'm going with my patient." Dorrit turned round and faced him. She was nearly as tall as he was, and a good deal broader, and she had not slept, and she looked as if she would bite him. "She's mine. I've kept her alive for six days on a mountain with honey and spring water and no fire. I've dug the dead meat out of her leg in the dark by feel. And if you think you're going to put me in a cupboard while somebody I don't know cuts her leg off without me, you can think again, you jumped-up rot-headed..."

"Dor," said Wren.

"...earring-wearing..."

"Dorrit."

The healer was laughing. It was a short bark of a laugh, and it surprised everyone, including, by the look of him, Madoc.

"Let her come," the woman said. "I'll have her. She's used honey. She's got more sense than half my girls." She looked at Dorrit. "I'm Hild. You'll do as I say in my house."

"I'll do as you say if it's right," said Dorrit.

"Then we'll get on." Hild straightened. "Lift her. Carefully. Madoc, I'm taking your prisoner, and if your mother wants her, she knows where I am."

Madoc opened his mouth, looked at Hild, and shut it again.

The litter went off up the steep street toward the heart of the crag, with Hild beside it and Dorrit striding after. At the corner Dorrit looked back once, at Wren and then at Bracken, and then she was gone. Bracken watched the corner for some time after she had gone round it.

"Walk, big man," said Madoc.

The salt-store was a long cave cut into the rock under the town, cold and dry and smelling of brine. There were barrels along one wall, sacks of something along the other, and stacks of peat cut into bricks, and at the far end a trickle of water came down the rock into a stone trough. The only light came through a grating in the door, which was oak and iron with a bar on the outside. Somebody brought a lamp and a heap of sheepskins and a pot of mutton stew, set them down without a word, and went out, and the bar dropped.

Pip went and put his face to the grating. "They've took Barrow," he said. "Where've they took Barrow?"

"Stable, I should think," said Bracken, lowering himself onto a sack.

"What if they eat him?"

"Then they'll have a sore jaw."

Iyene sat down on a barrel with her back against the rock. The Stayers had not taken her dispatch case, any more than they had taken the Waybook. She opened it and took out the red book of the officer rolls and began to turn the pages slowly in the lamplight, reading. Her face was swollen and purple down one side from the Huntress's blow.

Alder lay back on the heap of sheepskins and closed his eyes.

Wren went and sat by the water trough and put her hand in it, and took it out again. Her right hand had ached since the bridge. She pressed it against the satchel and felt the hard corners of the book inside.

They waited while the light through the grating went from white to gold, and nobody came.

Then, late in the afternoon, the bar lifted, and the door opened, and a woman came in.

She was short, about sixty, broad in the shoulder, in a long coat of gray sheepskin with iron at the throat. Her hair was gray and cut short. Her face was brown and hard and marked down one side with a long pale scar, from the temple to the corner of her jaw, that pulled her mouth a little crooked. She had Madoc's dark eyes. Madoc came in behind her and stood by the door with his arms folded.

The woman looked at each one of them in turn, slowly, as Madoc had at the ford, and then she spoke.

"I'm Morag Tull."

Iyene stood. She closed the red book and set it on the barrel. "Iyene Sath. Cartographer-Royal of Esterland."

"I heard." Morag did not sit. "Why are you here?"

"We are going to Cael Meddan."

Morag's face did not change. Her eyes went a little narrower.

"Why?"

Iyene hesitated.

"Something that was bound in the Hall there has got loose," said Alder, from the sheepskins. He had opened his eyes. "It has raised the dead, and it has walked east. We believe it can be bound again, in the Hall, by..."

"The Walker," said Morag.

Alder stopped. "I beg your pardon?"

"The Walker. You mean the Walker." Morag looked down at him. "He came out of the Hall in the summer. Five weeks gone. We saw the cold come out of the city after him. We felt it. The White's been still for longer than any song, and in the summer it moved. It's come ten miles east since. It's at the foot of the valley now. You saw it."

"We saw it," said Wren.

Morag looked at her. "The dead came with it. Out of the White. We'd always had dead in the White, standing. You'd meet them hunting. They'd not trouble you if you kept your fire. Now they walk." She was quiet a moment. "We've lost four farms. The outlying ones, west up the valley. Two families got up here to the town. Two didn't."

The lamp hissed.

"So you'll forgive me," said Morag, "if I'm not glad to see you."

"We didn't bring it," said Wren.

"Nay. You didn't." Morag turned the dark eyes on her. "Your kind sealed the gate. When the Frost came down. They went east over the Stair, the ones that could, and they shut it behind them with a wall of ice, and they left the rest of us here in the cold. My folk. Our folk. Everyone who stayed." She said it without heat, like somebody reading from a list. "That's the song. We sing it every Midwinter. Three hundred years we've been singing it."

"That wasn't us," said Wren. "That was a long time ago."

"Aye. And we're still here." Morag looked round at all of them. "Your kind sealed the gate on us. Why should we open ours?"

Iyene began to speak. Morag held up one hand, and Iyene stopped.

"Not to me," said Morag. "Scarrow doesn't do what I say. Scarrow does what the moot says. The moot sits tomorrow, in the hall. You'll say it there, all of it, and the town'll decide." She turned toward the door. "Your wounded woman's with Hild. Hild says she'll likely live. She says your loud one knows her business."

"And the leg?" said Bracken.

"Hild says she'll likely keep it," said Morag. "If the loud one stops shouting at her long enough to let her work."

She went out, and the bar dropped.

Bracken sat on his sack with his head down, and after a while Wren saw that his shoulders were shaking, and that he was laughing, very quietly, into his beard.

It was full dark when she heard somebody at the grating.

The others were asleep. Pip was curled up on a sack with his coat over his head, Alder was snoring, and Bracken slept sitting up with his back to the rock. Iyene lay on the sheepskins with the red book open face-down on her chest and her eyes shut, though Wren was not sure she was asleep.

Wren had not slept. She was sitting by the trough with her back to the wall and the satchel on her knees, looking at the lamp, and when the sound came at the door she looked up.

Madoc Tull was on the other side of the grating, his face striped with shadow from the bars. He had a lantern down by his knee, and in its light she could see the rings in his ears.

"Gatewife," he said.

She crossed to the grating. She had to look up at him.

"What do you want?"

"Nothing. Walking past." He looked at her through the bars. "Your loud woman's asleep on Hild's floor. The rider's sleeping too. Fever's down."

"Thank you."

"I didn't do it. Hild did it." He was quiet a moment. "Is it true? You came over the Stair?"

"Yes."

"Through the ice?"

"Through a crack in it. There were people in it. Frozen. Walking." She looked at him. "Walking east. They didn't get out."

He did not answer, but he did not go away, either.

"What's in the book?" he said at last. "Truly."

"Roads."

"Roads." He snorted. "You carried a book of roads over the Cloudwall."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because it's mine to carry." She did not know why she said it like that. "And because the thing you call the Walker wants it."

That did something to his face. It was quick and it was gone. He looked down at the satchel, and back at her.

"Then you'd best hope the moot likes you," he said. "They'll likely put you back out the gate." He picked up his lantern. The light swung up across his face, and she saw him look at her, properly, the way he had at the ford. His mouth moved at one corner.

"Pity," said Madoc Tull. "You've a good face for a Gatewife."

He went off up the dark passage, and the light went with him, and she heard him whistling as he went. It was a dance tune, quick, with an odd lift in it that she nearly knew, and it was gone round the corner before she could catch more than a phrase.