The Chainman at the Gate

The horn woke the town, though most of it had not slept, and the people came out of their doors into the gray dawn as if they had only been waiting to be called.

Wren watched them climb out of the storerooms and the rock-cut houses with their eyes red from smoke and their hands wrapped in rags. They carried bows and spears and hay-forks and pots of coals, and they went up the wall stairs with hardly a word between them to take their places along the parapet. Below them, on the valley road, the tall white figure was walking up out of the smoke.

Morag was sending the children down. "Into the deep stores," she was saying. "All of them. The old ones too. Senna, you'll take them. Keep the doors shut and sing to them, and don't open for anybody but me."

"I'm not a nursemaid," Senna said.

"You are today."

Brin and Hal went past Wren on the stair, holding hands, Hal crying and trying not to. Brin looked back up at the gate tower where his father stood with his hammer over his shoulder. Ewan saw him looking and lifted the hammer and grinned, and waved them on down.

"Go on," he shouted. "Mind Senna. I'll come for you at supper."

The company gathered on the wall walk over the gate-court.

It looked worse by daylight. The fire-pits were black smoking trenches, and the court between them was a floor of ash and bone, ankle-deep, gray and white, with here and there a buckle or a hand. The outer gate lay in two pieces in the tunnel where it had fallen, and through the empty arch Wren could see the top of the road and the valley beyond it.

The inner gate was shut again. The Stayers had got its bar across at dawn, when the Warding line faded, and piled carts against the back of it. Beside it on the town side the gate stair ran up from the street to the wall walk, steep and narrow and without a rail, and Wren stood at the top of it.

Alder sat on the top step with his back to the parapet and his brown cloak pulled round him. He had come round an hour after dawn, but he was the color of the ash in the court. His hands shook so much that Dorrit had to hold the cup for him when he drank.

"You can't," Dorrit said. "You can't even hold a cup."

"I need not hold a cup. I need to say one word." Alder closed his eyes. "I have Words enough, my good woman—"

"Don't my-good-woman me. I'm not a fishwife."

"I should never have taken you for one. A fishwife would have let me finish." He opened one eye. "I shall do it sitting down, if I must."

Iyene came along the wall walk. She had washed the blood off her face and bound her head, and her left arm was strapped across her body under her coat. She looked at Wren.

"He wants the book," she said. "And he wants you. So you'll stay back."

"Back where?"

"Behind the second line of houses. With the book. Out of his sight."

"He won't have to see me. He can hear the book from a hundred miles."

"Then he can hear it from behind a house," Iyene said. "That's an order, Fallowmere."

"I'm not one of your soldiers."

"No. My soldiers do what they're told, and some of them are still alive." Iyene looked down into the court. "Sergeant. The gate."

Bracken was at the foot of the gate stair with his boar-spear in his hands. He had not slept. He looked up.

"Sir," he said. "What do you want me to do with him?"

"Nothing. Stand at the inner gate. If he comes through, get the keeper away."

"Fair enough." Bracken looked at his spear, and at the tall white shape far down on the valley road. "I'll poke him a bit, first. For the look of it."

Dorrit leaned over the parapet above him. "You'll do no such thing, Sergeant. You'll stand there and look big and let him walk past you."

"Mistress Fallowmere." Bracken did not look up. "Stay on the wall."

"Why should I?"

"Because I'm asking."

Dorrit had an answer ready, and she swallowed it. Her cousin straightened up from the parapet with her face very red and her blistered hands in their wet linen, and looked at Wren, and looked away.

"Don't," Dorrit said.

"I never opened my mouth."

"You were going to." Dorrit took Wren's arm and held it. "Listen to me. If he takes you, I'm coming after you. Get that into your thick head. I'll come after you, and I'll be very, very annoyed about it the whole way."

"He's not taking anybody."

"Good," Dorrit said. "Then I won't have to."

The Chainman came up the switchback road at a walk.

He never hurried. He climbed out of the smoke onto the first switchback and walked along it, and frost ran out ahead of him over the black pitch and the heaps of the burned dead. Where he passed, the road whitened under his feet and the smoke rising from it died.

At the second switchback he stopped and lifted his head.

"Forty rods," he said. "Chain."

His voice came up the crag clear and hoarse and quite young, and every Stayer on the wall heard it. Wren saw a man near her make the sign against evil with his fingers, and Gwen, the archer from last night, take an iron pin from her collar and hold it in her fist.

"What does that mean?" Pip whispered. "Forty rods?"

"It's a measure," Iyene said. "Surveyors' chain. He's measuring the road."

"What for?"

"I don't know, Sandover. Be quiet."

The Chainman walked on past the third switchback and the fourth, until he was near enough for Wren to make out the chain. It was a long iron surveyor's chain of heavy links, white with rime, wound round him from shoulder to knee. A loose length of it hung from his right hand and dragged on the road behind him. It made the sound she had heard from the bee-yard at Fallowmere on the night she told the bees she was going.

"Loose," said Morag.

The arrows went down burning all round him, and a dozen struck. They glanced off the chain, or stuck in the white rime of him and hung there burning, and he did not look at them but walked on until the frost put them out.

"Pitch," said Morag.

Two Stayers tipped a pot over the gate tower. It fell in a black rope and splashed across the road in front of him, and a boy threw coals after it, and a wall of fire stood up across the road.

The Chainman stopped in front of the fire and looked at it. Then he took one step back, a small careful step, like a man who has come to a stream and does not want wet feet, and waited. The frost ran out from his feet toward the burning pitch, and where it touched, the fire sank and hissed and turned blue. It went out a yard at a time, until there was a black smoking gap across the road.

He stepped through the gap and came on.

"Mother of mercy," Dorrit said. She was holding Wren's arm so tight it hurt. "Nothing touches him."

"Fire does," Alder said from the step, with his eyes closed. "It moves him back. It does not stop him."

"Then what does?"

Alder did not answer. The Chainman reached the last switchback below the gate tower. Wren could see the top of his white head now, and the long shoulders wound in chain, with the arrows hanging on him like burnt twigs. He did not look up at the tower.

On the tower Ewan Tull lifted the biggest pitch-pot on the wall over the parapet in both arms, braced it on the stone, and grinned down over it.

"Here," he shouted. "Walker! Have a hot bath!"

The Chainman looked up. His right hand flicked, and the loose length of chain came up off the road and up the face of the gate tower like a thrown rope. It was white and glittering, and faster than anything so heavy should have been. It did not hit the pot. It wrapped once around Ewan's arm and once around his chest, and fell away.

Ewan stood there holding the pot. Frost came up over him from where the chain had touched, across his chest and over his face and beard in the time it took Wren to draw a breath. He stood white as salt, his mouth still open on the end of a laugh. Then the pot tipped over the parapet and fell, and he fell backward away from it, all of a piece, onto the tower floor.

Morag cried out once, high and wordless, and then not again.

Down below, the Chainman walked into the gate tunnel.

Wren heard the chain drag on the stones in there, and the broken gate-leaves crack as he walked over them, and then he came out into the gate-court. The ash of the dead lay deep, and where his feet came down it whitened, and the bones in it with it. He crossed slowly toward the inner gate with the frost spreading out from him in a ring, and the Stayers on the wall above him loosed nothing, because there seemed no point.

"Morag," someone was saying on the gate tower. "Morag. Come away. Come away from him."

Wren looked up. Morag was on her knees on the tower with her brother's head in her hands, and Madoc stood behind her with his bow half drawn and his face like chalk.

"Mother," Madoc said. "Come away."

Morag did not move. On the tower floor, Ewan's eyes opened.

They were clouded white all through, like milk in water. His frosted face did not move and his mouth did not close, but his arm came up off the stones, stiff, and his gray hand closed on Morag's wrist.

Morag screamed. She wrenched back and the hand held on, and Wren saw the frost start to crawl from Ewan's fingers onto her skin.

Madoc put the fire-arrow into his uncle's chest from three feet away.

The pitch-head burst into flame, and Ewan's body caught at once with a roar, and the hand opened. Morag fell back. Madoc lit another arrow from the coal-pot at his feet and put that one in too. Then he stood over the burning thing that had been his uncle, with the bow in his hand, and did not draw again. Two Stayers dragged Morag back while she fought them, a white burn across her wrist.

The fire on the tower went up yellow and loud.

Madoc turned his back on it and looked down into the gate-court at the Chainman. He took another arrow from his quiver without a word, and lit it and drew and loosed, and it struck the Chainman in the back and burned there, and the Chainman did not turn round.

The Chainman reached the inner gate and put his hands on it.

Wren was on the gate stair, and did not remember coming down. One moment she had been at the top with Dorrit holding her arm, and the next she was halfway down with her sling in her fist and Dorrit shouting behind her. Below her on the street side Bracken stood with his spear and Iyene beside him with her sabre, and behind the piled carts a crowd of Stayers waited with spears and torches.

Frost came through the cracks between the planks and round the edges of the bar. It spread over the oak and the iron bands in a white fur, until the whole gate was rimed from the top down. The bar groaned and cracked across.

The Chainman pulled. This gate did not break as the outer one had. Both leaves tore out of the stone with their hinges and fell forward onto the carts, with a crash that shook the stair under Wren's feet. The carts went over, and the Stayers behind them scattered back, and dust and frost went up in a cloud.

And the Chainman stepped through into the town.

He was much taller than Wren had remembered. He had to stoop to come under the arch, and when he straightened among the broken carts he stood as high as the eaves of the houses. The rime on him steamed faintly in the morning sun. His cold rolled up the street ahead of him, and every torch in it shrank down small and blue.

Bracken put his spear into him. He did it very fast and without a word, stepping in low and driving the broad iron head up into the Chainman's side with his whole weight behind it, deep, to the crossbar. The Chainman looked down at it, and frost ran up the ash shaft toward Bracken's hands.

"Let go!" Iyene shouted. "Sergeant, let go of it!"

Bracken let go and stepped back with his hands open. The Chainman took hold of the spear and drew it out, as a man draws a thorn from his thumb, and dropped it ringing on the stones, frosted from end to end.

He paid no heed to Bracken, or to Iyene, or to the Stayers with their torches. He had turned his head, and he was looking up the gate stair at Wren.

"Where is it," he said.

She had the book inside her coat, against her ribs, and she could feel her heart beating against it. She stood on the gate stair with the sling in her hand and could not move.

He came toward the stair slowly, stepping over the broken gate, with the frost running out ahead of him over the stones. Iyene cut at him as he passed and the blade rang on the chain, and he did not notice. Two Stayers threw torches, and he stepped a little sideways from them and came on, until he reached the foot of the stair and put out his hand toward her.

"Now," Wren heard Alder say, from far above her. "Now, I think."

Alder spoke Holding, and the air went cold.

The Chainman stopped in the middle of a movement, with his hand out and one foot on the lowest step. He was so tall that his face was level with hers, no more than an arm's length away. The chain on him did not sway, the rime on his shoulders stopped steaming, and even the frost at his feet stopped spreading and lay on the step below him in a white fan.

Wren's heart beat. She looked into his face, or tried to. There were eyes there, and a mouth, and a jaw. She saw them, and they slid away from her like a word on the tip of the tongue, and she could not keep them. It was a young face; that was all she could hold. Under the rime and the dirt of three hundred years, it was very young.

Her heart beat again. Nothing else in him moved, but his mouth did, and his voice came out low and hoarse, straight into her face, on a breath colder than a well.

"Bring it to me," he said. "My book." Her heart beat. "Bring it home."

"Why?" It came out in a whisper. "What is it to you? What are you?"

He did not answer. His eyes were on her face, seeming to look for something there. Her heart beat, and beat, and somebody went past her on the stair.

Dorrit came down the gate stair at a run with a great pitch torch from the wall burning high and yellow in her fist. She did not slow. She jumped the last two steps between Wren and the Chainman and shoved the torch into his face with both hands, and held it there.

"Get away from her!" Dorrit screamed. "You get away from her, you filthy great—"

The fire flared round his head in a yellow burst.

And the Holding broke. Wren felt it go like a cord snapping. The Chainman jerked back from the fire and threw up his arm. The loose chain came off his hand and whipped round Dorrit's body, once and twice, and pinned her arms to her sides.

Wren screamed her name.

The chain that had turned Ewan Tull to frost in a breath was round her arms and her chest, white with rime, and Dorrit did not freeze. Wren saw her face, red and furious and terrified and alive. The torch had fallen onto the stair and was burning there.

The Chainman lifted her off the stair in his chain as easily as you would lift a child out of a ditch, and held her against his chest in the crook of his arm. She kicked and twisted and swore, and he did not seem to notice any of it, and did not look at her.

"Dorrit!" Wren came down the stair. "Put her down! Put her down!"

"Wren," Dorrit said. Her voice was high and strange. "Wren, it's cold. It's cold but it's not—he's not—"

"Put her down!"

The Chainman looked at Wren. He had Dorrit in one arm, with the chain looped round them both, and the other hand hung at his side.

"At the Hall," he said.

"No—"

"Bring my name."

He turned and stepped down off the stair and walked back across the street, over the fallen gate, while the Stayers scattered from him. He stooped under the arch and went out into the gate-court with Dorrit in his arms, and the frost went with him.

Bracken went after him with his bare hands, running out through the arch into the court, straight at the tall white back. Wren saw his face as he went past her, and never wanted to see a face like that again.

"Sergeant!" Iyene's voice cracked across the court. "Sergeant! Stand fast!"

Bracken kept running.

"Bracken!"

He stopped in the middle of the gate-court, in the ash, with the Chainman a few strides ahead of him going into the tunnel. He stood there with his great hands open at his sides and his whole body leaning forward after her, and Wren saw his shoulders shake.

"He'll kill you," Iyene said. She had come out into the court behind him, and she said it quietly now. "He'll touch you and you'll be dead, and then you'll get up, and I'll have to burn you. Stand fast, Sergeant. That's an order."

Bracken did not turn round, and he did not go on. He stood in the ash with his back to her. He watched the Chainman go into the dark of the gate tunnel with Dorrit in his arms, and out through the far arch into the sunlight.

Wren went up to the wall without knowing how she got there, and stood at the parapet above the broken outer gate and looked down.

The Chainman was walking down the switchback road as he had walked up it, not fast and not slow. She could see Dorrit's brown curly hair, and one arm that had got loose from the chain hitting at his shoulder, over and over, and faintly she could hear her. Dorrit was still swearing.

At the bottom of the road he did not turn back east along the valley road, the way he had come. He turned west, across the burned fields and the river meadows, toward the long white line on the edge of the world. The frost went out on either side of him in a white road across the brown.

Nobody on the wall loosed an arrow. All Scarrow stood on its wall and watched him go.

Wren watched the white shape grow smaller. At the river the water froze round him, and he crossed on the ice he made and went up the far bank onto the flat land beyond. There the ground rose toward the White, and the morning haze lay low and silver over the snow, and he walked into it.

For a long while she could see him, a tall pale shape in the haze with a dark speck in its arms, until the haze took him.

She did not cry. She stood with her hands flat on the cold stone of the parapet and looked at the place where he had been, with the Waybook against her ribs and her heart beating against it.

Behind her, on the gate tower, the fire had burned down, and Madoc was kneeling by his mother. Down in the town Bracken had come back through the arch and sat on the broken gate with his hands hanging between his knees, looking at no one. Alder lay at the top of the gate stair where he had fallen, with Pip bent over him calling for water.

"Did it hold?" Wren heard Alder say, very faint.

"It held," said Pip. "Hush, Grandad. Hush."

Iyene came up onto the wall and stood beside her.

She was silent, standing with her strapped arm under her coat and looking west, where Wren was looking, at the haze. Her face was gray and her mouth was set.

Wren turned to her. "How far is the Hall?" she said.

Iyene did not ask which Hall. "A hundred and twenty miles," she said. "Across the White."

Wren looked back to the west, where the haze lay silver over the snow with nothing in it now.

"Then we'd better start," she said.