Tansy's Gate

Tansy Fallowmere had not slept in a bed since the dead came back, and she did not intend to start now.

She slept in her chair by the kitchen fire, when she slept, with her stick across her knees and her boots on. It was a good chair. Her husband had made it when they were first married, and it had outlasted him by thirty years and would very likely outlast her too. She woke in it at first light on the thirteenth of September with a crick in her neck, the fire gone to ash, and the potboy from the Bridge Inn banging on the kitchen door.

"Mistress Tansy! Mistress Tansy!"

"I'm not deaf, child. I'm old. Come in."

The boy came in. His name was Nib, and he was eleven, and he had been running messages up and down the valley since the trouble began and had grown thin and important on it. He stood in front of her chair with his chest heaving, soot on his face and a kitchen knife in his belt.

"Hobb says to tell you," he said, "they come down the orchard at Hedley's again. Round about the middle of the night. Six of them. Seven."

"Six or seven?"

"Seven. One was little." The boy swallowed. "The fire-line held, Hobb says. They burned at it. Only one got round the end, by the ditch, where it was wet and the pitch wouldn't take. And it got Jem Lark."

Tansy closed her eyes for a moment and opened them again.

"Is he dead?"

"Yes, Mistress. They burned him after, like you said. Before he could get up." Nib's lip shook, and he stopped it. "His wife's at the inn. She's making a noise."

"She's entitled." Tansy reached for her stick. "Tell Hobb the ditch end's to be dug out and filled with dry brush before dark. Not wet. Dry. And tell him I want pitch on it, not oil, oil runs. And tell him to send someone to Nell Lark to sit with her, someone sensible, not that Sallow woman who cries louder than the widow. Can you remember all that?"

"Ditch dug out. Dry brush. Pitch not oil. Not Mistress Sallow."

"Good boy. Now eat something." She pointed her stick at the bread crock. "And wash your face. You look like you've been up a chimney."

"I have," said Nib, with some pride. "Mistress Cole's. There was a bird in it. We thought it was a dead one."

"Was it?"

"No. It was only a bird."

He ate two slices of bread and dripping standing up, drank a cup of milk, and ran off down the lane. Tansy sat and listened to his feet go away toward the village, and then she put both hands on the head of her stick, the good one and the bad one, and heaved herself up.

Her hip screamed. She told it to be quiet, and went to see to the fire.

The right hand was the worst of it.

The pain had been bad at first. Dorrit had seen to it before she left, cutting away the black skin and binding it up in salve and linen, swearing the whole time in a steady cheerful mutter. Now it had gone down to a dull ache, the kind Tansy's hip had long since taught her to live with.

The uselessness was worse. The fingers had healed curled in toward the palm, stiff and white and shiny, and they would not open. She could hold her stick with them, just, if she jammed it into the crook, but she could not hold a spoon, or a knife, or a needle, or do up a button. Yesterday she had tried to comb her hair left-handed and made such a bird's nest of it that she gave up and tied it back under a cap. It made her look old, which she supposed she was.

And she could not hold a pen.

She did not think about that. She had decided, on the morning after the night of the dead, sitting in the smoke with Perrin Cole lying in the yard, that she would not think about it, and so she did not. She built up the fire left-handed, badly, and put the kettle on, and did not look at the dresser, where the oak box sat with its lid shut and nothing inside it.

The key had gone with Wren on its cord, and Tansy's neck felt bare without it; she kept putting her hand up to find it.

By midmorning the kitchen was full, as it had been every day since the company went up the Stair. Tansy had not asked for it. When the dead began to come down into the valley again, the valley had come to Fallowmere to find out what to do. And Tansy, who had not wanted to be asked, had found that she knew.

"Fire at the lanes," she had said. "A line of it, across every lane that comes down from the hill, and across the orchards on the west side, and anywhere they could walk in. Dig a trench, fill it with brush and pitch, and light it at dusk. They'll not cross a burning line. The Warden showed us that. Iron in every door. Perrin started it; finish it. A nail in every doorframe in the valley, and a horseshoe if you've got one, and don't tell me you haven't, Walt Sallow, I've seen your barn. And everybody who can't hold a fork sleeps at the Bridge Inn. The old, the little ones, the sick. Hobb's got stone walls and a slate roof and a cellar, and it's in the middle of the valley, and we can hold it."

She had half expected them to argue, and instead they had gone and done it, and the valley had held. The dead came down most nights in threes and fours and sixes, out of the dark on the west side, across the high fields and down through the orchards toward the farms and the village. They burned at the fire-lines. The men of Dall stood behind the lines with forks and flails and Perrin Cole's iron, and put down the ones that got across, and burned them before they could rise again.

And people died, not many, but some. Old Ada Thorn died on the second night, because she would not leave her cottage by the ford. Then the Pratt boy, fourteen, who had gone out past the line after a dog, and Jem Lark last night. Tansy had named each one aloud at this table the morning after. She was beginning to lose the thread of them, and that frightened her more than anything.

So this morning the kitchen was full again. Hobb was there, huge and gray in the face, with a bandage round his head from a flail somebody had swung too wide. Walt Sallow was there, and Tam Hollin the piper with his arm in a sling, and young Ned Cole from the forge. Ned was Perrin's grandson, seventeen, and he had taken up his grandfather's hammer the morning after they buried him and had been making nails day and night since. His hands were raw with it.

"I'm out of iron," Ned said. "I've done every old gate-hinge and plowshare in the valley. There's nothing left to melt."

"There's pots," said Tansy.

"Folk want their pots, Mistress."

"Folk want their lives more. Take the pots. Tell them I said so. If they argue, tell them to come up here and argue with me." She shifted in her chair. "And the bridge bell."

The room went quiet. Even Hobb looked shocked.

"The bell," said Walt Sallow. "Tansy. That bell's hung on the bridge since before my grandfather."

"And it's done nothing but ring for weddings and funerals in all that time, and we've had more of the second than the first this month. Take it down. Melt it. Make nails." She looked round at them. "If the dead get into this valley in any numbers, Walt Sallow, there'll be nobody left to marry, and I'll bury you myself with the bell-rope round your neck. Take it down."

Nobody argued. Ned Cole nodded and went out. Tansy watched him go and thought that Perrin would have been proud of him. Then she thought that Perrin would have called her a wicked old woman for melting the bell, and she would have told him to hold his tongue. She missed him so much that she had to look at the fire for a while.

When they had gone, Hobb stayed. He sat down across the table from her and poured himself a cup of her tea without asking, as he had been doing for thirty years. He looked terrible. His big red face had gone slack and gray, and there was blood where it had soaked through the bandage round his head.

"You should sleep," he said.

"So should you."

"I've got a houseful of widows and children and old men, Tansy. I've not got time to sleep."

"And I've got a valley." She drank her tea. "I'll sleep when I'm dead. And at the rate things are going, I'll be up again in an hour and walking."

Hobb laughed. He could not help it. Then he put his face in his big hands and did not laugh.

"Any word?" he said, behind his hands.

"Of what?"

"You know of what."

She put her cup down. "No," she said. "There's been no word. There'll be no word. There's no road for a word to come by. They went up the Stair eleven days ago, and there's ice at the top of it, and faded all over it, and past that there's nobody. There's no word, Hobb, and there'll be none, so don't ask me again."

He took his hands down and looked at her, and she looked back, and at last he nodded and finished his tea and went.

When he had gone, Tansy took herself to the window.

She could see the Stair from here, as she had every day of her life, climbing the Cloudwall in its long zigzags above the high pasture and the Last Cairn and up into the snow. Every morning since the company left she told herself she would not look, and then she looked.

Where are you, child?

She did not let herself think any further than that. If she thought further, she would think about the book, and the cost of the book. She would think about a flood at Elmcross fifty years ago, and a cartload of screaming children in the brown water, and a pen in her hand. And after that she would think about her mother's voice, and how she had gone looking for it that night and found nothing there, not ever again.

Wren did not know about that yet. Wren had only been told.

Tansy stood at the window and looked at the Stair and thought about Alderin Marsh, the old heron.

She had been angry with him every morning at this window. She was angry with him for riding into Dall in his weathered brown cloak with his long face and his old-fashioned manners, and for being right about the fire and the iron. She was angry with him for taking her girls up that mountain, one to carry the book and one to carry the other, to places he knew nothing about.

Nothing I know, he had said, when she asked him. And she had told him that was not what she had asked.

If he brings them back, she thought, I'll forgive him. If he brings back one, I'll try. If he comes back alone, I'll kill him with this stick, and Hobb can bury me with the bell-rope.

Cob Hedley came down off the mountain in the middle of the afternoon.

She heard him before she saw him; everybody in the valley heard Cob before they saw him, which was his great gift. But today he was not talking. She heard his boots on the lane, running, and his breath, and the clatter of his crook, and nothing else. That was so strange that she was up out of her chair and at the door before he reached the gate.

He came through it at a stumble. His left hand was bound up in a great bundle of linen and slung across his chest, where it had been since the day on the high pasture. His face was red and wet, and his mouth was open. He had been on the lookout. Tansy had set a watch on the second day at the shoulder of the high pasture, above the Last Cairn, where you could see all the lower Stair. Men took it in turns, a day and a night each, with a horn to blow if the dead came down. Today had been Cob's turn, and he had not blown the horn.

"Tansy," he said. "Tansy."

"Sit down before you fall down."

He did not sit. He stood at her door holding himself up by the frame, and she saw that his good hand was shaking.

"There's something on the Stair," he said. "Coming down."

"Dead?"

"No. I don't know. Not like them. It's big." He swallowed. "It's walking down the Stair road from the top, down the switchbacks. I saw it at first light, way up on the switchbacks above the snow. It's white. All white, and taller than a man, taller than two men near enough, and it's got something round it, round and round, that shines."

Tansy did not say anything. She had gone cold all down her back.

"And there's the snow," said Cob.

"What snow?"

"It's snowing on the Stair. Behind it. It's snowing where it's been, Tansy. There's a cloud come down off the top with it, a gray cloud, low, and it's snowing under the cloud, and the cloud's coming down the mountain with it. As fast as it walks. The snow's following it." His voice cracked. "It's past the Last Cairn. The snow's on the high pasture. There's white on the grass all the way down to the top wall. And it's still coming."

She looked past him, up the lane, toward the mountains.

She could not see the Stair from the door, only the orchard and the high fields above it, and the sky over the high fields, blue and bright on a fine September afternoon. But under the blue, above the fields, where the mountain began, there lay a line of gray. It was a low gray cloud, lying along the slope of the Cloudwall like a sheep's fleece caught on a fence, and it had not been there this morning.

Chain, chain, the Chainman's coming, forty rods and never running. She had skipped to it herself in this lane seventy years ago. So had her mother, and her mother's mother, and every child in the valley since before anybody could remember, jumping clear of the rope on the last word.

She remembered Alderin Marsh's face at the Bridge Inn, when Posy Millson sang it.

"How long?" she said.

"An hour. Two. It's slow. It doesn't hurry." Cob wiped his face with his sleeve. "Tansy, what is it?"

"Go down to the village," said Tansy. "Go to Hobb. Tell him I said everybody's to come in to the inn. Everybody. Not just the old and the little ones. Every man on the fire-lines, every woman, every dog. Light every line in the valley now, not at dusk, now, and then get inside the inn and bar the doors and stay there. Tell him to light the fire-line round the inn itself, the big one, and keep it lit all night."

"Everybody?"

"You heard me."

"And you?"

"I'm stopping here."

They argued, of course. Hobb came up the lane himself within the half hour, puffing and red, with Walt Sallow and Tam Hollin behind him, and they stood in her yard and argued with her.

"You can't stop here on your own," said Hobb. "You can't. I won't let you."

"You won't let me? Since when have you let me or not let me anything, Hobb Millson?"

"Since now."

"Well, it's too late to start now. You should have started forty years ago." She was sitting on her chair, which she had made Walt carry out into the yard, because she did not trust her hip to stand for an argument. "I'm stopping. This is my house, and that's my gate, and I'm stopping at it."

"It's coming here," said Tam Hollin. "Cob says it's coming straight down the west road. Straight to your gate."

"I know."

"Then why...?"

"Because it's my gate," said Tansy.

They looked at her. They did not understand, and she was not going to explain it to them. She had worked it out while Cob was gasping at her door, and it was simple. Whatever it was, it was coming for the book, and the book was gone over the mountains. So then it would come for the keeper, because the keeper was what the book answered to, and there were two of those. One was over the mountains too, and the other was sitting in a chair in the yard of Fallowmere with her hand in a bandage.

If she went to the inn, it would follow her to the inn, and the inn was full of children.

"I'll stop with you," said Hobb.

"You'll do no such thing. You'll go and hold your inn." She pointed her stick at him. "You've got every soul in Dall under your roof tonight, Hobb, and a fire-line round it, and a cellar full of barrels. That's your gate. This is mine. Now go and hold it, and stop wasting my afternoon."

Hobb stood there with his big face working, and opened his mouth two or three times, and shut it.

Then he came across the yard and bent down and kissed her on the top of her head, on her cap. He had never done that in all the years she had known him, and she was so surprised that she let him.

"You're a hard old woman, Tansy Fallowmere," he said.

"And you're a soft old fool. Go on."

He went. They all went, down the lane toward the village, and at the bend Hobb turned round and looked back at her. She lifted her stick, and he lifted his hand, and then he was gone round the bend, and she was alone.

She did the things that needed doing, slowly because of the hip and one-handed because of the hand, and she took her time about them.

She fed the hens and shut them in, and gave the pig the end of the bread. She banked the kitchen fire and set the guard in front of it, because there was no sense in burning the house down on top of everything else. She lit the big lamp left-handed, which took several tries and a good deal of language. Then she put on her husband's old sheepskin coat, which still hung behind the door, because the night would be cold; she knew that much.

Then she went out to the bee-yard.

The hives stood in their two rows in the late gold light, with the three old skeps at the end of them. A few bees were out working the last of the ivy on the orchard wall, and the air over the hives was warm and full of their sound. Tansy stood at the end of the rows and leaned on her stick.

"There's something coming," she told them. "I don't know what it'll do. You stay in your boxes and keep warm. If I don't come in the morning, Wren will be back for you. Or Dorrit. One of them. They'll see you right."

The hives hummed as they had always hummed. It was only bees. She stood there a moment longer, and then she went round the house to the front gate.

There was a bench inside the gate of Fallowmere, against the wall, and it had always been there. It was where the keeper sat to wait for the challenge. Who crosses? Tansy had got up from it at dawn eleven days ago, with her hand in its bandage, to bar the gate with her stick and watch her granddaughter walk away up the Stair.

She sat on it now. She set the lamp beside her on the bench and planted her stick between her boots, with her good hand on the stick and her bad hand on top of it.

The sun was going down behind the Cloudwall. The shadow of the mountains came down across the high fields and the orchard and the lane, blue and cold, and the valley below her went gold and then gray. All across Dall the fire-lines were burning. She could see them from the gate, long bright lines of orange across the lanes and the orchards, and a great ring of fire round the Bridge Inn. The smoke went up straight in the windless air.

She thought: I did that. They'll hold.

Then she looked west, up the lane, and waited.

It came slowly, and first there was only the cold. It came down the lane from the west, and she felt it on her face and then on her hands. Her breath began to smoke, and the lamp flame shivered, and the air went from September to December between one breath and the next.

Then came the frost. She watched it come down the lane from the high fields, a pale edge moving over the ground, and where it passed, the world whitened. The grass in the verges turned blade by blade. The hedges on both sides of the lane went pale leaf by leaf, from the top down, as if somebody were drawing a brush along them. The last blackberries in the hedge froze hard, and she heard them crack, and heard the leaves tick as they froze. The puddle in the rut at the bend went white in a second, with a sharp crack.

Snow began to fall out of a sky that had been clear a moment before, a few flakes and then more, soft and gray in the lamplight.

And then she heard the chain.

It came down the lane toward her out of the dusk and the falling snow: a long rattle of iron on stone, and a hiss, and a rattle. It was not loud. Tansy sat on her bench with both hands on her stick and did not move.

It came round the bend of the lane.

It was taller than the gatepost, taller than the gate and the gatepost and the hedge beside them. It was white from head to foot, white as the hedges, rimed thick with frost that glittered in the lamplight, and it was wound round and round in chain. The chain went round its shoulders and chest and arms in great loops, and the end of it trailed on the stones of the lane behind it and hissed. Where its feet came down, the frost went out across the lane in a spreading white crust.

It came down the lane to the gate of Fallowmere and stopped.

Tansy looked up at it. She looked straight at its face, and saw it, and then she did not know what she had seen. She looked again, and it was the same. It was like trying to remember a dream.

The frost came in under the gate and across the flagstones to her feet, and up the legs of the bench. She felt the cold come up through the wood into her bad hip, worse than anything the hip had ever done to her, and she did not move.

The Chainman bent its head and looked down at her across the gate.

"Where is it."

The voice was young, hoarse and a little rough, as if it had not been used in years. It was the last thing she had expected, and it frightened her more than anything else.

Tansy held on to her stick. Her heart was going so hard she could feel it in her ruined hand.

She was a keeper of Fallowmere, and this was her gate, and there were words that were said at it. They had been said at it for as long as there had been a gate. She had said them to her granddaughter eleven days ago, and she had never in her life not said them.

"Who crosses?" said Tansy.

The Chainman did not answer.

It stood at the gate while the chain hissed on the stones. The snow came down between them, soft and gray, and settled on the white shoulders and did not melt. It looked down at her, and she looked up at it, and neither of them moved.

Then, far away to the west, beyond the Chainman, beyond the high fields and the Stair and the black wall of the mountains, the sky turned red.