The Man on the High Pasture

Cob Hedley came to the gate of Fallowmere at first light, dragging a hurdle-sledge behind him on a rope. He had shaved and put on a clean shirt, and he looked like a man going to a funeral who expected to be asked to speak.

"I've brought the sledge for the ewe," he said. "And I've brought bread, and cheese, and a bit of the mutton Hobb said I could have. And my good knife, and my other knife. The dog's staying home, because she won't go up there now. Won't go past the wall. I whistled and whistled. She just lay down in the yard with her ears flat. Thirteen years that dog's worked the high pasture and she lay down in the yard."

"Morning, Cob," said Wren.

"Morning."

Dorrit came out of the house behind her with a pack on her back, a pruning knife stuck through her belt and her hair tied up in a red cloth. She looked at Cob, and at the sledge, and at the sun just clearing the eastern hills.

"Is he going to talk the whole way?" she said.

"I expect so," said Wren.

"It's six miles."

"Uphill."

Dorrit sighed. "Right," she said. "If I push him off something, you didn't see it."

Tansy came as far as the doorstep. She had not slept; Wren had heard her moving about in the night, and the lamp had been burning under her door at two in the morning. She held out two torches, pitch-headed, wrapped in sacking, and a tinderbox on a thong.

"Two," she said. "Keep the box dry."

Wren hung the tinderbox round her neck and pushed the torches through the straps of her pack. Her sling was already in her pocket with a pouch of good round stones from the river, for she carried it everywhere, out of habit, as she wore the braid.

"Come back by dark," Tansy said.

"We will."

"All of you." Tansy looked at Cob. "Even him."

"Thank you, Mistress Fallowmere," Cob said, pleased.

"It wasn't a kindness," said Tansy, and went back inside.

The west road ran out past the gate and climbed. For the first mile it was a lane between hedges, with the orchard on one side and the barley stubble on the other. Then the hedges gave out, and the road became a track across the sheep-pastures, rising in long green folds toward the foot of the Cloudwall. Stone walls ran up the slopes and stopped, and above the last wall there was only heather, and scree, and sky.

Cob talked the whole way. He talked about the ewe, and about the dog, and about the price he'd got for his wool at Marlford, which was a scandal. He talked about Perrin Cole the smith. After Wren and Tansy left the inn, Perrin had stood up in front of everyone and said that Cob Hedley couldn't tell frost from sheep-dip. He said the last time Cob saw something strange on the high pasture, it had turned out to be his hat.

"Which it wasn't," Cob said. "It was a hat, I'll grant him. But it wasn't mine. Mine was brown."

"Cob," said Dorrit.

"I'm only saying. Fifty years I've known Perrin Cole. Fifty years he's been telling people about that hat. You'd think a man would find something else to say in fifty years."

"You would," Dorrit said. "You would think that."

They climbed, and the sun came up behind them and laid their shadows out long on the track ahead, pointing west, up at the mountains. By mid-morning it was hot enough that grasshoppers went off like sparks in the heather. Wren took her jacket off and tied it round her waist. Dorrit's face went from red to purple, and Cob talked about the time his brother had fallen in the Dall at Elmcross and come out with an eel in his boot.

"Was the eel alive?" said Wren, who could not help herself.

"It was, and it bit him, and he kept it in a bucket for a week and called it Parson."

Dorrit stopped walking, put her hands on her hips and looked out over the valley. From here all of Dall lay spread out below them: the gold of the barley and the dark green of the orchards, and the silver line of the river running east. The roofs of Dallbridge clustered round the bridge, and the smoke from the inn chimney went straight up. Fallowmere was a gray speck with a white fleck behind it that was the bee-yard.

"I've thought of a new rule," Dorrit said. "Anyone who says the word eel between here and the top gets left for the crows."

"That's hard," Cob said.

"I'm a hard woman."

"You are," Cob said. "You get it from your granna." He took a drink from his water-skin and wiped his mouth and looked up the slope. His face changed. "Not much further. It's past the next rise, in the hollow under the scree. You'll feel it before you see it."

He was right. They came over the rise at noon, where the ground dipped into a shallow bowl of turf, with a spill of gray scree above it and the track running along its northern side. Wren was sweating, her shirt stuck to her back, and she stepped down into the bowl, and the air went cold.

It came on in a single stride. One moment the sun was hot on her neck, and the next it was a winter sun, bright and useless, and her breath smoked in front of her face. The sweat on her back turned icy. Dorrit, coming down behind her, said, "Gods' teeth," and wrapped her arms round herself.

The grass was white in a patch as wide as the inn's long room, where every blade was stiff with rime and crunched underfoot. At its edges the rime thinned and faded into green, and at its heart, in the middle of the white, stood the ewe.

Wren had seen dead sheep all her life, drowned and blown and torn by dogs, but none like this.

The ewe stood square on her four legs with her head up, as if something at the top of the pass had caught her attention. Her fleece was furred with frost, every curl of wool white and glittering. Her open eyes had gone a thick milky gray. There was frost on her eyelashes, and frost in her nostrils, and a little frozen trail of spit hanging from her lip. The sun shone full on her, and nothing melted. Wren could feel the cold coming off her from ten feet away, as you feel heat coming off a forge.

"That's her," Cob said. His voice had gone small. "That's my Brindle. She had twins in April."

Dorrit went forward. She did it slowly, but she did it, and Wren loved her for it. She crouched by the ewe and looked her over, the way she looked over anyone brought to her with a gash or a fever. She touched the eye with one fingertip and snatched the finger back, then pushed at the lip with the back of her knuckle and looked at the teeth. She put her palm flat on the ewe's side and held it there until she hissed and took it away and shoved it into her armpit.

"She froze standing up," Dorrit said. "Sheep lie down when they're cold. They huddle. She didn't. She didn't even get her head down." She stood up. "It happened all at once. Like she was dropped in a well in January."

"There's a mark on her," said Wren.

She had seen it from where she stood. On the ewe's neck, just behind the jaw, the frost on the wool was thicker in one place, white and raised, in a shape Wren knew. There was a broad patch, and four long marks running from it, and a shorter one off to the side.

Someone had laid a hand on the ewe's neck to steady her, and the frost had grown out from it.

Dorrit looked at it and her mouth went thin, and she wiped her palm hard on her skirt.

"Here's the prints," Cob said.

They were where he had said. They came across the white grass from the west and went on past the ewe toward the east, down the slope toward the valley: a man's boot-prints, long and narrow, with a square heel. Each one was filled with a crust of frost thicker than the rime around it, so that they stood out white on white, very clear. They went down across the bowl and out at its lower edge, onto the green turf, and there they stopped. On the warm grass there was nothing to see.

"Went on down," Cob said. "I followed them to here yesterday. Then there was nothing, and I came back and looked at Brindle again and I didn't like it, and I went home." He cleared his throat. "Quick."

"Nobody blames you," said Dorrit.

Wren was looking at the ground. "Cob. Was there only one line yesterday?"

"One line. Going east."

"There's two now."

He came and looked, and so did Dorrit. Beside the first line of prints, and sometimes on top of it, ran a second, made by the same boots with the same long narrow sole and square heel. But these came up out of the green at the bottom of the bowl, where the first line vanished, and went back past the ewe and on up the slope, west, toward the scree.

"Whoever it was went down," Wren said. "And then came back."

"In the night," said Cob. "Rot me. In the night, while I was at the inn."

"You don't say rot me," Dorrit said. "I say rot me. You say bless my soul."

"Bless my soul, then," Cob said miserably.

Wren followed the second line with her eyes. It went up out of the bowl and along under the scree, and round the flank of the hill toward a fold in the ground a quarter-mile off. Above the fold, on the skyline, she could see the Last Cairn. It was a heap of gray stones as tall as a man, with a pole stuck in the top that had once had a flag on it. Every shepherd who went up to the cairn put a stone on it, and none went past it.

"We should go and look," she said.

"Should we," said Dorrit. It wasn't a question.

"That's what Granna sent us for."

"Granna's sitting in her chair eating honey."

"She's not. She's sitting in her chair wishing she could come."

Dorrit looked at her, and then at the ewe, and then up at the fold in the hill. "Fine," she said. "But you light one of those torches first."

"It's broad day."

"I know it's broad day. I've got eyes. Light it."

Wren looked at the white grass, and the white ewe, and the handprint of frost on its neck. She knelt and took out the tinderbox.

She did not light the torch, but got out the flint and the steel and the charred cloth and held them ready in one hand, with the torch unwrapped under her arm. It was a dry August, and a lit torch in dry heather was a fool's errand. Dall had lost the Hobson farm that way when she was twelve, she told Dorrit. Dorrit said something rude about the Hobsons and let it go.

The fold under the cairn was deeper than it looked from below. It was a hollow scooped out of the hillside, with rock on three sides and the mouth of it facing east, down the valley. Heather grew thick along its rim, brown and dry, and inside the rim everything was white.

The cold here was worse, the cold of the ice-house under the inn, that got into the teeth and the joints. Wren's fingers ached round the flint, and Cob's breath came out of him in clouds. The prints went down into the hollow ahead of them, very white, and across the frozen grass to a great gray boulder at the back.

A man sat with his back against the boulder.

For a moment Wren thought he was a traveler resting. He sat with his legs out in front of him and his hands in his lap and his chin down on his chest, a man stopped for a nap on a long walk. Then she saw his color.

His skin was gray, and blue under the gray, the color of an old bruise. There was frost in his hair and frost in his short beard. His coat was long and dark and cut close at the waist, with a high collar and a row of flat buttons down the front, more buttons than any coat needed. No one wore such a coat at Marlford, nor had any pedlar out of the east. Its hem was crusted white, and on his feet were long boots with square heels.

Across his chest ran a strap, and on the strap, lying against his hip, was a leather satchel with a brass clasp. The leather was dark and stiff with ice.

"Mother of mercy," Dorrit said, very quietly.

The cold soaked up through Wren's boots, and somewhere below, a curlew called, and the sound came into the hollow thin and far off.

"He's dead," Cob said. "Isn't he dead?"

"Stay there," said Dorrit.

She went forward a few steps, and no further, and crouched down with her forearms on her knees to look at him. Wren watched her face. Dorrit had laid out half the dead in Dall, sat up with the dying and washed the bodies and sewn the shrouds, and she had never looked at one of them like this.

"He's dead," Dorrit said. "He's been dead a good long while."

"How long?"

"I don't know. Longer than I've got a word for. Look at his hands." Wren looked. They lay in his lap, gray-blue, with the nails gone dark. "There's no rot. There's no smell. There's nothing. He's froze through, same as Brindle. But look at that coat, Wren. Nobody's worn a coat like that since Granna's granna was a girl. Before that."

"Then how did he get here?"

"He walked," said Wren.

They all looked at the prints. "No," Cob said. "No. Bless my soul. No."

"Frost in the prints," Wren said. "Colder than the ground. He walked down to your ewe in the night, Cob. And he put his hand on her. And then he walked back up here and sat down."

"Dead men don't walk."

"Then you tell me who did."

Cob had no answer. He stood with his crook in both hands, and his mouth working, and then he did what Cob always did when he was frightened, which was to find something practical to fuss about.

"That's a courier's bag," he said. "That is. My grandad had one like it. He carried the post to Marlford for the old lord, and he had a bag like that, with a brass clasp. There'll be letters in it. There'll be a name. There'll be his people's name, and we can send word, and they can come and fetch him." He took a step toward the boulder. "That's what you do. You send to his people."

"Cob," Wren said. "Don't."

"I'm only looking."

"Cob, leave it."

"It's only a bag," Cob said, and bent, and put out his left hand to the satchel.

The dead man's hand came up out of his lap and closed on Cob's wrist.

It did not move quickly. It moved heavily and surely, and it closed. Cob made a small surprised grunt, and then he screamed. Wren saw the color go out of his hand from the wrist down, and the skin went hard and shiny and white as candle wax.

Then the dead man stood up in one movement, without using his hands or his knees, and frost cracked off his coat and fell. He was taller than Cob. His head came up, and his open eyes were white, a thick clouded white with no color in them anywhere. He lifted Cob's arm by the wrist, and Cob's heels came off the ground.

"Wren!" Dorrit shouted. "Light it! Light it!"

Wren's hands were shaking. She struck the steel on the flint, and the spark jumped and died. She struck again, and got nothing.

Dorrit went past her at a run with the pruning knife in her fist. She did not stop and she did not shout. She took the dead man's forearm in her left hand, the arm that held Cob, and hacked at it with the knife.

The blade went in with a hard chunk, and stuck. There was no blood, only a split in the gray skin and white under it. Dorrit wrenched the knife free and hacked again, at the same place, grunting. The dead man did not look at her. He turned his head toward Cob, very close, and opened his mouth.

Wren struck the steel, and a spark caught on the charred cloth and glowed. She bent and breathed on it, and it glowed brighter, and she held the pitch-head of the torch to it and blew until her head swam.

The pitch caught with a soft thump. Flame ran round the torch-head, yellow and smoky.

"Dorrit, get back!"

Dorrit threw herself sideways. Wren ran in and shoved the torch into the dead man's face.

He caught.

He went up with a hiss and a crackle and a gout of white steam. The frost on his beard went up first, and then his hair, and then the skin of his face began to blister and blacken. His mouth opened wide, and out of it came a scream, high and long and furious, with no breath behind it, from a chest that did not move.

His hand opened. Cob fell backward onto the frozen grass, clutching his wrist, and rolled away.

The dead man came at Wren. He came with his arms out and his face on fire, and she backed away from him with the torch held out in front of her. He was strong and he was not quick. When the torch came near him he flinched from it and came on again. She backed up the slope of the hollow, toward the rim, and her heel caught on something and she nearly fell.

It was heather, a whole bank of it, waist-high and dry as tinder after a month without rain.

Wren stepped sideways, round the edge of it, and swung the torch into the heather behind her as she went.

It went up with a roar. August heather burns fast, and this caught all at once, a wall of yellow flame and black smoke that leaped as high as Wren's head. The dead man came after her with his arms out, and walked straight into it.

He did not stop, or seem to understand that he should. The heather took him, and he went up in a sheet of flame, and the screaming went on without any breath in it. He fell to his knees and tried to get up. Dorrit came round the other side of the fire with Cob's crook, set the hook of it against his chest and pushed him back down into the flames. She held him there with her teeth gritted and her face red in the heat.

"Stay down," she said. "Stay down, stay down, rot you, stay down."

He stayed down.

The screaming stopped, but the burning went on until there was nothing in the heather but a black shape, and then less than that. The smoke stank of hot fat and of something worse, something sharp that caught at the back of Wren's throat.

Then they had to put the heather out.

It was already spreading. It had caught along the rim of the hollow and was running uphill toward the scree in a crackling line. Wren and Dorrit beat at it with their jackets and stamped on it and threw handfuls of dirt, coughing, their eyes streaming. Where the fire reached the white grass of the hollow it sputtered and hissed and went out on its own. The rest they fought for an ugly quarter of an hour. By the end Wren's arms were black to the elbow and her jacket was a charred rag, and the last of it died under Dorrit's boots.

Wren sat down on the scorched ground, shaking all over.

"Well," said Dorrit, breathing hard. "I'm not doing that again."

Cob was sitting on the white grass with his left hand held against his chest, crying without any noise.

Dorrit went to him and knelt down and made him show her. Wren came and looked, and her stomach turned over.

His hand was a dead white from the wrist to the fingertips, hard and waxy, and the fingers were curled a little and would not straighten. Across the back of the wrist, where the dead man's grip had been, there were four long marks already going dark. As they watched, a blister rose on the ball of his thumb, and it was black.

"It doesn't hurt," Cob said. "That's the worst. It ought to hurt. I can't feel it."

"It'll hurt," Dorrit said. "When it warms, it'll hurt like the pit. I'm sorry, Cob." Her voice was gentle and her hands were quick. "Don't rub it. Don't put it to the fire. Open your shirt."

"What?"

"Open your shirt, you old fool, I'm not after your virtue."

She took off her red head-cloth and wrapped his hand in it loosely, and then she made him put the hand inside his shirt, against his own belly, and buttoned the shirt over it. Cob yelped at the cold of it on his skin. Dorrit took his belt and strapped his arm to his side so he couldn't move it.

"Keep it there. It'll come back slow, if it comes back."

"If," Cob said.

"If." Dorrit looked at Wren over his head. Her face was white under the soot. "We need to get him down."

Wren nodded, but first she went back into the hollow.

The satchel lay on the white grass where it had fallen when the strap burned through. The leather was scorched along one side and still stiff with frost on the other. She picked it up by the strap, and it was so cold that it hurt to hold even so. She set it down on a rock in the sun and opened the brass clasp with the end of the burned torch.

There was one thing inside, a letter folded small and sealed with dark wax, and it was frozen solid. When she tried the corner with her fingernail, the paper crackled and began to tear, and she stopped.

But the outside of the letter was addressed in writing faded brown and very old, with long looping letters and a long-tailed s, and it was not the Survey script, so she could read it. She turned the letter to the light and read it aloud.

"The Keeper," she said. "At the Hall."

Dorrit came and looked over her shoulder.

"What hall?" she said. "What keeper?"

"I don't know."

"Granna's the keeper," Dorrit said. "Of the book. That's what the old folk call her. Keeper."

"I know."

"So is that for Granna?"

"It's older than Granna. It's older than anybody." Wren put the letter back in the satchel very carefully and closed the clasp. "Granna will know. Or she'll know who to ask."

Dorrit stood looking at the black heap in the burned heather. Then she went over to it, took a deep breath, crouched, and began picking through it with the end of Cob's crook.

"What are you doing?"

"Nobody's going to believe us," Dorrit said. "Not Hobb. Not Perrin Cole. Not a soul in that inn. They'll say we were at the cider, all three of us, and Cob fell in a fire." She pulled something out of the ashes and looked at it. It was a coat button, flat and blackened, with a mark on it that might have been a device. She put it in her apron pocket. Then she hooked out something else, long and thin and black, and Wren saw what it was and looked away.

"I'm not carrying his head," Dorrit said. "I've got some standards. But they can have his hand."

She wrapped the bones of the hand in a dock leaf and then in her kerchief and knotted it tight. She held the bundle out at arm's length, looked at it, and shoved it to the bottom of her pack.

"Right," she said. "Home."

They went down fast. Cob could walk, but he was gray in the face and kept stopping, and every time he stopped he began to talk. He talked about Brindle and her twins, and about his hand, and whether he'd be able to hold a crook, and what his dog would think. He talked about Perrin Cole, and how Perrin would have to eat his words now, every one, with salt on.

"He will," said Dorrit. "I'll hold his nose while he eats them."

They left the ewe where she stood, and no one mentioned the sledge.

The sun was well past noon now and going down the western sky behind them, and the heat came back as soon as they climbed out of the bowl. Wren had never been so glad to sweat. She had the satchel over her shoulder and the second torch in her hand, unlit, and she did not put it back in the pack.

They were a mile below the bowl, on the long green slope above the last stone wall, when Dorrit stopped.

"Wren," she said.

"What?"

"Look up."

Wren turned round. Behind them the high pasture rose to the scree, and the scree to the Last Cairn on its skyline, and above the cairn the mountain went on up, and the old road with it. She saw it as she had always seen it from the valley, a pale thread zigzagging back and forth up the gray face of the Cloudwall until it went into the clouds: the Stair.

On the Stair, far up, there were people.

They stood on the switchbacks, a long way above the cairn where nobody went, small with distance and dark against the gray scree. One stood on a bend of the road, and two more stood together further up. Another was below them, and another, and one on the highest turn Wren could see, just under the edge of the cloud: five of them, or six.

None of them walked or did anything at all. They stood on the road in the full afternoon sun, facing east, down toward the valley, and they did not move.

"Shepherds," Cob said. "Lost sheep. Somebody's lost sheep, and they've gone up looking."

"Nobody goes up there," said Dorrit.

"Travelers, then."

"From where?"

Wren did not answer. She was looking at the nearest of them, the one on the lowest bend, perhaps half a mile above the cairn. The sun was on it. She could see that it was a man, or had been, and that it wore something long and dark that came to its knees. It stood with its arms at its sides, and its face was a pale blur turned down toward the valley, toward Dall, toward Fallowmere.

She looked at it, and it stood there, and the hot wind moved in the heather between them.

Then, slowly, it turned its head, and looked at her.