The Other Half of the Tune

They came for them in the morning with the burning arrows put away and iron at every belt.

"Up," said the man at the door. He was older than Madoc and much less pleased with himself, with a gray beard braided into two points and an iron ring through the end of each. "The moot's sitting. Bring nothing but yourselves."

"I'm bringing my fiddle," said Wren.

The man looked at the case on her back. "What for?"

"Because I don't leave it with strangers."

He thought about it. Then he shrugged. "Bring your fiddle, Gatewife. Nobody'll want to hear it."

They went up through the town in the gray early light. The lanes were empty, and every door they passed stood open on an empty house with its peat fire banked and left. Somewhere above them, deep in the rock, there was a noise like the sea. Wren had never heard the sea, but she had heard it described, and she thought it might sound like this, a great low murmur that rose and fell and never stopped.

"That's them," said Pip. "That's all of them. Listening to them breathe."

The lane ran into the crag through an opening in the black rock, wide and high, with no door and a pair of iron braziers burning on either side of it. They went through it and down a long sloping passage lit with more fire, while the noise grew louder, until the passage opened out and they were in the moot hall of Scarrow.

Wren stopped so suddenly that Bracken walked into her.

It was a cave, the biggest room she had ever been in, bigger than the corn-exchange at Marlford or any barn, and it had been cut out of the living rock by hand. The roof went up into darkness. Great pillars of black stone had been left standing to hold it, carved round and smooth, with iron bands at their tops. The floor went down in a bowl, in rings of benches cut from the rock, row below row, to a round flat space at the bottom where a fire burned in a pit. Every bench was full.

All of Scarrow was there: men and women, children on their parents' knees, old folk wrapped in sheepskin at the ends of the rows. Iron glinted everywhere in the firelight at their ears and throats. As the company came down the steps, the murmur stopped row by row, until there was nothing but the crackle of the fire and a baby crying somewhere high up at the back.

They went down to the floor of the bowl, where a space had been left for them by the fire. Across the pit, a little apart, stood Morag Tull, with Madoc behind her, his bow on his back and his arms folded. His dark eyes found Wren and moved on.

Beside Morag, on a low stool, sat the oldest woman Wren had ever seen.

She was smaller than Tansy, and so wrapped in shawls and sheepskins that she looked like a bundle of washing. A small brown creased face came out of the top of it, with two bright black eyes. On her knees, wrapped in a piece of oiled wool, lay something long and narrow. Wren knew the shape; she would have known it anywhere.

"Sit," said Morag.

They sat on the stone at the edge of the fire-pit. There was a scuffle at the top of the steps, and Dorrit came down them at a half run, with Hild behind her, and dropped down beside Wren.

"Merritt's sleeping," she whispered. "Fever's down. Hild's a marvel. She's got a salve made of goose-fat and something that smells like a dead badger, and it works. What's happening?"

"I don't know yet."

"Well, you look terrified."

"I'm not."

"Then stop looking it."

The old woman on the stool lifted her hand, and the hall, which had been silent, became more silent. Then she spoke, in a voice high and thin and cracked that carried to the top of the hall without trying.

"Morag, daughter of Una, daughter of Brenna, daughter of Cait," she said. "Una, daughter of Brenna. Brenna, daughter of Cait, who held the gate in the Long Winter, who was daughter of Mairi, who kept the beacon cup when it went cold..."

She went on and on. The names came out of her one after another, going back and back through mothers and fathers, war-chiefs and gate-keepers, all who had held Scarrow through every hard winter since the Frost. Nobody coughed. Wren listened to the names go past, dozens and dozens of them, a book with no pages kept in one old woman's head.

"...and Fergus, son of Drust, who stayed," said the old woman at last. "Who would not go through the gate. Who stayed." She let her hand fall. "The moot sits. Speak."

Iyene spoke first, and it did not go well.

She stood up by the fire in her riding coat, with her bruised face and her cropped gray hair, and spoke as she always spoke, crisply, as if to a troop. She told them her name and her office, and that she came under the King's warrant from Merrow, in the Kingdom of Esterland. She told them that something had been loosed in the West that threatened both kingdoms, and that the Crown was taking steps to deal with it.

"The Crown," said somebody, loudly, from high up in the benches.

Iyene did not stop. She said that the Crown recognized that the people of Scarrow had suffered. She said that the Crown would be glad of their help, and that in return...

"Which crown?" said somebody else.

"The Crown of Esterland."

"Never heard of it."

There was laughter, and it was not friendly.

"Esterland," said Iyene evenly, "is the kingdom east of the Cloudwall, where the people of Meddan went when they crossed the Stair..."

"Who ran," said a big man on the third row. He had a shepherd's shoulders and an iron collar round his neck. "Who ran away over the Stair, and sealed the ice behind them, and left us here. That's who founded it."

"That was three centuries ago."

"And where's your Crown been since? Where was it when the White took the high farms? Where was it when my brother's wife walked out of the snow dead and knocked on our door?"

The benches roared. Iyene stood in it, straight-backed, with her hands clasped behind her. Her face did not change. But Wren, who was close enough to see, saw a muscle jump in her jaw.

"The Crown did not know," she said, when she could be heard. "The Crown believed there was no one left alive in the West."

That was worse. The roar came back louder, and the big shepherd was on his feet shouting. Somebody threw a clod of peat that hit the stone by Iyene's boot and burst in a spray of brown crumbs. Morag lifted one hand, and the noise dropped, slowly, like a pot taken off the boil.

"Sit down, Crown's woman," said Morag.

Iyene sat down, and the benches jeered her all the way to the stone.

Alder stood up next, and that went worse.

He meant well. He stood by the fire with his arm in its sling and his white hair standing up, and looked round the great hall with real wonder in his face. Then he began to speak as he would have spoken to the College of Wardens in Merrow.

He told them who he was, and what the Wardens were, and what they kept. He told them, with feeling, that he had spent his whole life studying the Survey of Meddan, the greatest order of learning the world had known. He told them that when the White Winter struck, the Seven, the masters of the Survey, had worked a great ward in their Hall in the old capital to save the realm.

"Save it?" said a woman's voice. "Save who?"

"The people of Meddan, madam. Your forebears and mine."

"Ours froze," said the woman.

Alder faltered. Then he went on. He explained that the ward had not been perfect. That the Seven had done what they could. That Wystan Fallowmere, the Keeper of the Book, had led the survivors to safety over the Stair, and sealed it behind them against the cold, which was...

He got no further, for the hall came up off its benches.

This time they howled. They were on their feet, all of them, and the shouting came down on Alder from every side. In the middle of it Wren heard "Sealed!" thrown back at him in a dozen voices. The shepherd was coming down the steps, with two women holding him back by his arms. A turf of peat went past Alder's head, and another hit him in the chest, and he stood there in the storm with his mouth open.

"Oh, rot," said Dorrit. "Oh, rot and blast. He's done it now."

Bracken had got up and was standing in front of Alder with his arms folded, and he was big enough that the peat began to fly around him instead. Iyene was on her feet too, with her hand on the hilt of a sabre that was not there.

Wren looked up at Morag, who stood with her arms folded, watching it all and doing nothing. Behind her Madoc stood with his arms folded too, and a look on his face that Wren wanted to slap off it. Beside them the old woman sat on her stool with the long bundle on her knees, looking at Wren.

Wren thought of the Bridge Inn on a winter night, with the whole valley packed in and quarreling over a boundary wall, or a ram, or the mending of the mill-race. She thought of Hobb banging on the bar and shouting that nobody was going to settle anything with their fists in his house. And she thought of what they did in Dall when it got like that, what they had always done.

She stood up and unbuckled the case on her back.

"Wren," said Dorrit. "What are you doing?"

"What we always do."

"Here? Now? You'll get a turf in the ear."

"Then I'll play with a turf in my ear."

She took out the fiddle. Her hands were shaking, and she was glad no one could see it in the firelight. She put it under her chin and drew the bow across the strings once, quickly, and found them a little flat from the cold, and turned the pegs without looking up. Around her the shouting went on. Somebody near the bottom saw what she was doing and nudged his neighbor, and the neighbor stopped shouting to look.

Wren put the bow on the string and began to play the Old Reel.

It went out as it always went at the Bridge Inn, fast and clean and bright, with a good hard lift on the first beat, as Tansy had said it should go. The notes went up into the great dark roof of the cave and came back down off the rock, and they filled the hall.

The shouting stopped in patches. It stopped near the fire first, where people could hear her, and then the quiet spread outward and upward through the benches, row by row, as the tune reached them. The shepherd on the steps stopped with one foot in the air. The women holding his arms let go of him. Up at the top of the hall the baby stopped crying.

Wren played without looking at them. She looked at the fire and played the Old Reel as she had played it a thousand times. There was the first phrase, bright and quick, and the answer to it, and the turn in the middle that made the dancers stumble. She heard it go wrong somewhere up in the benches, a man's boot scuffing on the stone as he tried to dance and caught his foot on the turn. That had not happened in Dall since she was a little girl, because everyone in Dall knew the turn, and everyone here knew it too.

She went up into the last phrase. It climbed and gathered itself toward the place where it always stopped. Any other tune in the world would come round there to its second half, but in all her life it had simply ended.

She came to it, and lifted her bow off the string.

The hall was silent, the whole town, and not one of them breathing.

And on the stool beside Morag Tull, the old woman unwrapped the bundle on her knees.

It was a fiddle, black with age, the varnish worn off it, mended at the neck with a band of iron. The old woman lifted it to her chin with hands that shook, and set the bow to the string with hands that did not. She looked across the fire at Wren with her bright black eyes.

Then she played the second half of the Old Reel.

Wren had never heard it in her life, and she knew it at once. It came down from the high note where she had stopped; it came down where the first half had gone up. It took the turn from the middle and turned it the other way, back on itself, and answered it. It was darker than the first half, and sad underneath, and it stamped where the first half skipped. It went down and down, step by step, and gathered itself again, and came round at last to the note Wren had started on. It came home.

The old woman lifted her bow. The last note hung under the roof of the cave, and died.

For a moment the whole hall held still. Then the big shepherd on the steps put his head back and let out a yell that Wren felt in her feet, and the hall came apart.

This time they stamped. They were on their feet, all of them, stamping on the stone benches with their boots and roaring. Men thumped each other on the back, and two women by the fire had their arms round each other and were weeping. The children at the top of the hall were screaming for the joy of it without knowing why. Somebody was beating on an iron brazier with a ladle.

Wren stood by the fire with her fiddle hanging from her hand, and could not move or think.

Dorrit had her by the arm. Dorrit was crying and did not seem to know it. "That's it," she kept saying. "That's the rest of it. Wren. That's the rest of it."

The old woman beckoned, and Wren went round the fire-pit to her as if she were walking in a dream. Close to, the old woman was even smaller, and smelled of sheep and smoke. She looked up at Wren, and her face creased into a thousand lines.

"Where'd you get the front of it?" she said. "Girl. Where'd you get it?"

"Dall," said Wren. "Over the mountains. It's the Old Reel. It's the oldest tune we have. It's always stopped there. We don't have the end of it. We never had it."

"Hah." The old woman's eyes shone. "And we've never had the start. Three hundred years, we've been starting it in the middle. Always wondered what came before. Always wondered." She reached up and took Wren's wrist in a small dry hand. "Rudge's Reel. That's what it's called. Rudge's Reel."

"Who's Rudge?" said Pip, at Wren's elbow.

The old woman shrugged. "Somebody who could play. The song doesn't say more." She let go of Wren's wrist. "I'm Senna. I keep the songs here. And I'll have that again, all of it. Front and back."

"Now?"

"Now, girl. I'm ninety-four. I've waited long enough."

So they played it whole. Wren played the first half and Senna the second, and then, the second time round, they played it together, both fiddles, all the way through from front to back. When Wren came to the old stopping place, Senna's fiddle came in under her and carried the tune over the edge where it had always stopped, and Wren nearly dropped her bow.

And the Stayers danced. They came down off the benches in a flood, pushed the front rows back, cleared the floor around the fire-pit, and danced. It was a Dall dance, or near enough, with the same stamp on the first beat and the same stumble on the turn, in long sets that went down the lines in pairs, whirling. When the tune went over into the back half, the whole hall sang as they stamped on the turn.

Ten and ten and the chain laid down,
and the lad goes over the hill;
he's measured the road from the Hall to the town,
and his girl at the door waits still.

Ten and ten and the frost comes in,
and his fiddle hangs on the wall;
and who'll play the rest of the tune again,
if the lad don't come home at all?

The big shepherd was dancing with Hild. Two little girls were dancing with each other and falling over. Pip had been grabbed by a Stayer girl with iron in her ears and a face full of freckles, and was being hauled round the floor with an expression of pure terror.

A stout woman in a sheepskin tried to pull Bracken into a set. He shook his head, and she insisted, and he looked over at Dorrit, who laughed at him through her tears. He gave up and let himself be pulled, and danced like a bear on hot stones, and the whole hall cheered him.

Even Iyene was on her feet, clapping in time, with the side of her mouth that was not bruised turned up.

Alder sat by the fire with his arm in its sling, watching Wren and Senna with his mouth a little open. There were tears running down his long face into his collar, and he was not wiping them away.

Wren played it through again, and again, and did not want to stop. Her arm ached and her fingers were raw, and she did not care. She thought of Hobb behind his bar at the Bridge Inn, shouting the same old joke every harvest about the tune waiting for the rest of itself. She thought: I've found it, Hobb. It was here all along, on the wrong side of the mountains. She wanted to laugh, and she wanted to cry, and she played instead.

Once, going round into the second half, she looked up.

Madoc Tull was standing alone by one of the great black pillars with his arms at his sides, watching her play, and there was no sneer anywhere in his face. He stood as though the music had caught him by the collar. He saw her looking, and he did not look away.

When at last they stopped, Morag Tull lifted her hand.

She had stood through all of it, watching, with her scarred face showing nothing. Now she stepped forward, and the hall quieted to hear her, and people stood where they were, breathing hard, red-faced, their arms round each other. Morag looked down at the company by the fire: at Iyene, and at Alder, and at Wren with the fiddle in her hand.

"A tune's a lineage," said Morag. "Everyone here knows that. You don't get a tune from nowhere. Somebody gives it you, and somebody gave it them." She turned her dark eyes on Wren. "You had the front half. We had the back. Somebody split it, a long time ago, and one half went east over the Stair, and one half stayed. You're kin, it seems. Distant." She raised her voice. "The Gatefolk have shelter in Scarrow. Food and fire and iron. Till the moot says otherwise."

The cheer went up to the roof. Wren sat down very suddenly on the edge of the fire-pit, because her legs would not hold her up any longer. Dorrit sat down beside her and put an arm round her and squeezed until her ribs creaked.

"You mad thing," said Dorrit into her hair. "You mad, mad thing. A tune. You got us in with a tune."

"It was all I could think of."

"It was the best thing anybody's thought of since we left home."

Somebody stood over them. Wren looked up, and it was Madoc Tull, with his bow on his back and his thumbs in his belt. He looked down at her fiddle, and then at her.

"Who taught you that?" he said. "The front of it."

"My grandmother." Wren wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "By the kitchen fire, the winter I was eight. She can't play a note. She sang it at me, and banged the beat on the hearth with her stick, and every time I got the turn wrong she hit my ankle with it."

"Hard?"

"Hard enough. I got the turn right."

Madoc looked at her, and something had changed in the set of his shoulders.

"You play it too fast," he said.

"You play it too slow, I expect."

"We play it how it goes."

"So do we."

The corner of his mouth moved. This time she was sure of it. "Aye, well," he said. "Senna liked it. And Senna likes nothing." He turned to go, and turned back. "Welcome to Scarrow, Gatewife."

He went off up the steps. Dorrit watched him go with her eyebrows halfway up her forehead.

"Well," she said. "Well, well, well."

"Don't."

"I never said a word."

The runner came in while the hall was still emptying.

He came down the steps two at a time, a boy of fifteen or so, wet with mist and breathing hard. He pushed his way through the crowd to Morag and bent and spoke in her ear. Wren, sitting on the edge of the pit, saw Morag's mouth tighten.

Morag turned. "Madoc," she said. "The Gatefolk. Here."

They came round the pit to her. Madoc was already there at his mother's shoulder, and the runner stood beside them, still breathing hard, his eyes going from one stranger to another.

"We keep cairns," said Morag, to Iyene. "Lookouts. On the high tops, east of here, and north along the old road, as far as the gorge. There's a man or a woman on every one, and when they see a thing, they make smoke. The next cairn sees it and makes smoke too. It comes to us in half a day from the far end."

"A signal chain," said Iyene. "Yes."

"The smokes came this morning. From the far cairns. From the gorge." Morag looked at the runner. "Say it, Jory. Say it as they sent it."

The boy swallowed. "Walker out of the gorge," he said. "North end, where it's shallow. Yesterday, first light. The river froze under him, and he walked over on the ice, and climbed out west." He took a breath. "Then he turned. Went back over. Walker on the Stair, last light yesterday. Going up. Going east."

"East," said Morag. She sounded almost relieved. "Not west. Not here. East, over the Stair. Back the way you came."

Pip let out his breath. "So he's not coming for us?"

"He's not coming for Scarrow," said Morag.

Wren looked at Alder. He had gone whiter than any Word had left him, and he stood very straight by the fire with his good hand clenched on the folds of his sling, staring at nothing.

"Alder," Wren said. "What is it? He's going back. He's giving up. Isn't he?"

"No," said Alder.

"Then what?"

He turned his head and looked at her, and she saw in his eyes that he had already done the sum, and did not want to give her the answer.

"He's going to Dall," said Alder. "He follows the keeper's blood. There are two keepers, Wren, and he has chosen the one who can't run."