The Ice-Bridge

They left Coldharbour at first light on the twenty-eighth, and for three days nobody said anything that mattered.

That was the strangest part of it. Iyene led them as she always had, choosing the line across each white valley, reading the old Survey milestones where they stuck up out of the drifts, and setting the watches at night. She said "Sergeant" and "Sandover" and "Master Tull" in the same clipped voice. On the second morning Wren's snowshoe binding broke, and Iyene knelt in the snow and mended it with a strip of rawhide from her pocket. Then she stood up and walked on without a word.

And everyone did as she said, which was strange too. Bracken took the rear where she put him, and Madoc scouted ahead where she sent him. They were all too cold and tired to do anything else, and there was only one road west.

But at night Wren slept with the Waybook in her pack and the pack strap wound twice round her wrist. And she noticed that Bracken, who had slept across the doorway of every shelter since the Stair, now slept across it facing in.

The White went on and on. The snow lay in long smooth swells like a frozen sea, under a sky the same color as the snow. Sometimes the only way to tell up from down was to drop a mitten and see which way it fell. Madoc went ahead on his snowshoes with his bow and her fiddle case on his back, a dark mark in all that white, following the Chainman's frost trail west. The cold got into the oatcake and made it crack between their teeth, and into Alder's knees so that he walked like a heron. It got into the fiddle case too, and Wren lay awake at night and worried about the glue in the old crack.

Faded stood in the snow along the way, as they had since Scarrow, alone or in twos and threes with their heads bowed, in the long coats and hoods of the old kingdom. The company learned to give them a wide berth. At a hundred yards they did not stir, but at fifty, sometimes, a head would turn.

Pip was the worst of it. He walked alone in the middle of the line, leading Barrow, with his head down. He had always talked, when he was frightened on the Stair and when he was happy in the Empty Kingdom, and at Scarrow he had talked the Stayer children half to death. Now when Iyene spoke to him he answered "Yes, Sir," and nothing else, and when Wren fell in beside him he talked to Barrow.

On the second evening she found him sitting on an upturned pack in the lee of a drift, feeding Barrow a handful of the last oats from his own ration.

"You'll starve," Wren said.

"He's bigger than me. He needs more." Pip rubbed the mule's nose, and Barrow leaned his long brown head against Pip's chest and shut his eyes. "Anyway, I'm not hungry."

"You're always hungry."

"Not any more." He was quiet a while. Then he said, "She's not bad, you know."

"I know she's not."

"She's not. She took me off the street. I nicked three of her maps in the Merrow market and she caught me by the wrist and I thought she'd hand me to the watch, and she didn't. She said, You've got good hands and a bad plan. Come and learn a better one." He scowled at Barrow's ears. "Nobody else ever said anything like that to me. Nobody."

"I know."

"And you're not bad either."

"Thank you."

"And the Sergeant's not bad, and Grandad's not bad, and even Madoc's not bad, though he talks about fish too much." Pip's voice cracked, and he let it. "So whose side am I meant to be on?"

Wren sat down on the snow beside him.

"I don't know, Pip," she said. "I'm not going to tell you."

"Well, that's no bloody use."

"No."

He laughed, a small wet sound, and wiped his nose on his sleeve. Barrow blew into his hair.

When Wren went back to the fire, Iyene was sitting with the Minute open on her knee and the dispatch case beside her. She wasn't reading down the sheet. Her finger lay on one line above the signatures and stayed there while the fire burned low, and Wren watched her across the flames and couldn't think what she was looking for.

On the third day, the last day of September, they came down into a valley where a stream ran under the snow, and found the mill.

It stood by itself at the bottom of the slope, a squat building of gray stone with a steep roof buried in drift. The stream had frozen round the great wheel, which stood up out of the ice black and locked and furred with rime, with icicles as long as spears hanging from every paddle. In front of the mill was a walled yard, and the gate of the yard stood open.

"Shelter," Madoc said. He had come back to meet them. "For noon. There's a hearth inside. I saw the chimney."

"Anyone home?" Bracken said.

"Didn't look."

"Look," said Iyene.

Madoc looked at her, and then he unslung his bow and went.

They waited on the slope in the wind while he went carefully in at the gate and across the yard, and put his head in at the mill door and stood there for a while. Then he backed out very slowly, and backed across the yard, and came up the slope to them fast.

"Aye," he said. "Someone's home."

"How many?"

"Eight I saw. Maybe more in the back. They're stood around the millstones, like they were waiting on their flour." He was already pulling fire-arrows from his quiver. "Old ones. The miller's in his apron. They didn't stir."

"Then we go round," Wren said.

"We go round," Iyene said, and turned to lead the way along the slope.

It was the right decision and it came too late. Pip, leading Barrow, stepped off the track Madoc had made into soft snow, and Barrow floundered. The mule hated losing his feet, and he threw up his head and brayed, loud and long and furious, and the sound bounced off the walls of the valley.

Down in the mill, something knocked against a door.

"Oh, hells," Pip said.

They came out of the mill door one after another, slowly at first, stiff in the cold, with their heads turning. Then they caught the warmth. The first of them, a tall man in a long floury coat, lifted his face toward the slope and opened his mouth, and all the stiffness went out of him and he began to run. The others ran behind him across the yard and through the gate and up the slope, not floundering as the living did but running on top of the snow, light and horribly fast.

"Fire," Iyene said. "Madoc. Now."

Madoc had a fire-arrow on the string. Bracken struck the flint for him, and the pitch caught, and Madoc drew and loosed in one movement. The arrow went down the slope in a line of smoke and took the miller in the chest. He caught with a crackle, and screamed with no breath, and ran on burning for three more strides before he fell.

The rest came on. Wren whirled her sling and hit a woman in a shawl full in the face, and the woman's head snapped back, and she kept coming. Madoc loosed again, and again, and a boy in a leather apron went down burning. Bracken set himself in the snow with his spear low and his feet wide.

"Torches," Iyene said. "Pip. Torches, and get behind the mule."

Pip was fumbling at Barrow's pack. Wren dropped the sling and ran to help him. She found the bundle of pitch-torches under the ropes and pulled two free, shoved one at Pip, and struck the other on the flint in his hand. It caught. She turned with it.

A faded was right in front of her.

It had been a woman, gray-blue now, with white boiled eyes and flour caught in the frost on her sleeves. She reached for Wren's face. Wren shoved the torch into her chest, and the woman went up roaring and fell back into the snow, and burned there.

Beside her, Bracken took a man on the spear. The iron head went in under the ribs and out the back until the crossbar stopped it, and Bracken heaved him off his feet and threw him down the slope. The man got up. Bracken went down after him and put the spear through his neck and pinned him to the ground, and stood on the shaft.

"Torch," he said. Pip ran down with one, shaking, and set it to the thing, and jumped back as it caught.

Wren turned to look for Iyene, and something took hold of her ankle.

It rose from the snow at her feet. It must have been lying under the crust at the edge of the millrace, where the snow had drifted over the frozen channel, and the fight had woken it. A gray hand closed on her boot, and the cold went through the leather and the fur and into the bone so fiercely that she screamed. Then it pulled. Her feet went out from under her, the snow crust broke, and she went down through it into the millrace.

She fell four or five feet and landed hard on her side on black ice, and the torch flew out of her hand and hissed in the snow above. It was dim down in the channel. The frozen wheel loomed over her, huge and black with its hanging icicles, and the thing that had her ankle was dragging her under it.

It was a man lying on his back in the channel, pulling her toward him hand over hand up her leg in long slow heaves. She kicked at his face with her other foot. His head rocked and came back. His other hand closed on her knee, and the cold came up through her leg in a wave, and she clawed at the ice with her mittens and found nothing to hold.

"Madoc!" she screamed.

A shadow came over the edge of the millrace.

Iyene dropped into the channel beside her. She landed on her feet on the ice, bent-kneed, with her sabre already moving. It came down on the dead man's arm at the elbow like an axe into frozen wood. The arm came off. The hand stayed clamped on Wren's knee.

The man sat up. Iyene cut again, backhand, at his neck, and the sabre went in a hand's breadth and stuck. She put her boot on his chest and wrenched it free, and he fell back, and she cut a third time, and the head rolled away across the black ice under the wheel.

The body kept moving. Its other hand was locked on Wren's ankle, and it went on pulling.

Iyene got down on one knee on the ice and put the sabre point under the gray fingers one by one, and levered them off Wren's boot until they came away with a crack. Then she dropped the sabre, took a fistful of Wren's coat in her right hand and hauled her up bodily against the side of the channel.

"Climb," she said.

Wren climbed. Madoc's hands came down and got her under the arms and dragged her out onto the snow, and she lay there on her back, gasping, watching the gray sky turn. Behind her she heard Iyene call for a torch and Pip answer, and then the crackle of fire catching down in the millrace.

After a while Iyene climbed out too.

She stood over Wren with the sabre back in her hand, the blade smeared gray to the hilt. Her face was white with cold, and there was frost in her cropped hair, and she was breathing hard.

"Can you stand?" she said.

Wren sat up and pulled off her boot. The leather was white and hard as bone where the hand had been, but the ankle underneath was only red and aching, the skin whole. The fur had saved it.

"Yes," she said.

"Then stand. We're going round."

Wren stood, and her ankle held. "Thank you," she said.

Iyene was wiping her sabre on the snow. She did not look up.

"Don't," she said.

They came to the Ice-Bridge at the end of the next day, the first of October, in the last of the light.

For hours the country had been changing. The swells of snow flattened into wide low plains. Here and there things that had been made stuck up out of the drifts: a gatepost, the top of a milestone, the black stumps of an orchard. Then there were roofs, and then a straggle of roofless buildings along a road with the snow in their windows. The road ran down between them, and they came around the end of a long ruined wall, and Madoc stopped in front of them and said, "There."

Wren looked, and forgot for a moment that she was cold.

The river Meddan lay across their way, frozen from bank to bank, flat and white and very wide. Beyond it stood Cael Meddan.

It rose from the far bank in terraces, a city of pale stone under snow. Along the river ran a gray-white wall with towers in it. Behind the wall the roofs went up and up, street above street, steep and white and silent, with spires among them. On its hill in the middle of the city stood a great dome the color of old pearl. It caught the last of the western light and held it after everything else had gone gray.

Nothing moved. There was no smoke from any chimney and no light in any window, and there was no sound at all, not a dog or a bell or a door. Wren had never heard a silence that big. It filled the river valley and pressed against her ears.

"The Hall," Alder said beside her, very softly. "The Hall of the Survey."

Nobody answered him. And across the river, in front of them, stood the Ice-Bridge.

It went from the near bank to the far one in a long shallow curve. Whatever it had been once, winter after winter of spray and rime had sealed it inside a single hump of ice. Deep inside were dark shapes that might have been stone, or old wreckage, or nothing. It was blue at the bottom and white at the top, and smooth as the inside of a shell. There was no rail or parapet that Wren could see. Its top was a narrow rounded spine higher than a barn roof, and its sides fell away on both hands in long glassy curves to the river ice below.

Pip said, "We're not walking over that."

"Aye, we are," said Madoc. "Tomorrow. Not tonight."

They camped in a ruined posting-house at the bridge foot. It had lost most of its roof, but the stable at the back kept half of one. They put Barrow there with his hay and made their fire in the old taproom behind a wall. Iyene set the watches: Bracken first, then Madoc, then herself.

Before the light went, Madoc went out onto the Ice-Bridge.

Wren watched him from the stable door. He carried a coil of Stayer rope, a bag of iron pins and a hammer. He went up the curve of the ice on his knees, hammering in a pin every few yards and threading the rope through the eye of each. Where the ice was steepest he lay flat on his belly. It took him until dark, and when he came back down his face was raw with cold and his mittens were frozen stiff.

"That's how we cross glare ice at home," he said. "You keep a hand on the rope. You don't let go of it. Not to scratch your nose. Not for anything."

"What if the rope breaks?"

"It won't. It's Stayer rope." He grinned at her through the frost in his beard. "I made it myself."

"That's what I'm afraid of."

"Gatewife," he said, "you wound me."

Late in the evening, when the others had lain down, Wren went out to the foot of the bridge and held the frozen rope and looked at the city.

A moon came up behind her over the plain and laid a white road down the bridge and across the river, and the dome on its hill shone. In the moonlight she could see what she had not seen at dusk: figures in the streets, on the river wall and the quays under it, and in the mouths of lanes. They stood in hoods and long coats and aprons where they had stopped three hundred years ago, and none of them moved.

She heard a step on the snow behind her and knew it without turning.

Iyene came and stood beside her at the rope, while the river ice ticked and settled in the cold.

"You saved my life," Wren said at last. "At the mill."

"I told you not to thank me for it."

"I'm not thanking you. I'm saying it."

"All right." Iyene looked across the river. The moon lit the scar through her eyebrow, silver on the brown. "You should know what I mean to do. I've never lied to you. I don't intend to start at the end."

"Go on."

"I'm going to be the keystone."

Wren turned and looked at her.

"There's no one else," Iyene said. "Not the girl in that Hall. Not you. Not the Sergeant, and he would, if I let him. Not Pip." Her voice caught very briefly on the name and went on past it. "I'm fifty-two. I've served the Crown for thirty years. I've been shot once and stabbed twice and I've buried more of my people than I can remember names for. It's my kingdom. It's my Crown's doctrine. It's mine to pay for."

"It's not your kingdom's," Wren said. "It was his."

"It was the whole realm's, and he paid for it. I know. I read the Minute too."

"Then you know they didn't ask him."

"I'm asking me."

"That's not the same."

"No," Iyene said. "It's better. I'm volunteering. He wasn't given the choice, and that was a crime. I'm taking it. That's the difference between us and them." She turned her head and looked at Wren, and her eyes were very steady. "You want to write his name and see what happens. I can't let the kingdom ride on what happens. Two kingdoms. Every farm in the East. Your grandmother."

"Don't," Wren said.

"Your grandmother, at her gate, with the snow coming down the Stair for good this time. I'm sorry. It's true."

Wren's hand was tight on the rope. She could feel the iron pin under her mitten, and the cold coming up through it.

"It was his," she said. "And they didn't ask him. I don't care what the sums say. I don't care about the doctrine. It was his and they took it. You can't put that right by taking it off somebody else, even if it's you. It's still taking."

Iyene turned her head and studied her, as she studied a map she didn't trust.

"You're very like him, I think," she said. "The boy on that sheet."

"You don't know anything about him."

"I know he made a tune that's lasted three hundred years. I know you play it." Iyene let go of the rope. "Get some sleep. We cross at first light."

She walked back toward the posting-house. Halfway there she stopped, without turning.

"If it goes badly in there," she said, "whatever happens, Pip is not to be a hero. He thinks he is. He's sixteen. Hold him back."

"Hold him back yourself."

Iyene didn't answer. She went in and lay down by the fire with her back to the room, and Wren stayed out at the rope until her hands hurt.

Bracken getting up woke her. It was very dark, and the fire had burned down to red. Bracken never made a sound when he moved, for all his size. He made one now, a grunt and the scrape of the spear butt on the stone floor, and a boot knocking a pot. Then came the cold air from the doorway, and he was gone.

Wren sat up. Her pack was beside her head where she always kept it, and the strap was still wound round her wrist, but the flap was open. She put her hand inside and felt spare socks, and the flint, and the tin of Dorrit's salve, and the bottom of the pack. She felt again. The Waybook was gone.

She was on her feet and running barefoot before she knew it, with Madoc up behind her grabbing his bow, and somebody shouting. She went through the doorway into the bitter dark and around the wall and out onto the snow at the bridge foot. The moon was down, and the sky behind her in the east was the faintest gray.

There were two figures on the Ice-Bridge.

Iyene was on her knees halfway up the near slope, with one hand on Madoc's rope and the other arm clamped round something square against her chest. Above her, on the top of the spine, stood Bracken. He must have gone straight out of the door and up the rope while she went the long way round through the ruins. Now he stood on the rounded crown with his feet apart and the spear in his hand, blocking her way.

"Stand aside, Sergeant," Iyene said.

Her voice came down clear and quiet across the ice.

"No, Sir."

"That's an order."

"I know it is, Sir."

"Bracken. Stand aside."

"Can't do it, Sir." He didn't move. He was a huge black shape against the gray sky. "Not this one. You'll have to go through me. You'll not manage it, on this."

Madoc came past Wren at a run and stopped at the foot of the bridge with an arrow on the string. It wasn't lit, and the iron head caught the gray light as he drew it to his ear and held it there, and the bow creaked.

"Put the book down, Gatefolk," he said. "On the ice. Then come back down."

Iyene turned her head and looked at him along the arrow.

"You won't," she said.

"Aye, I might."

"You'll hit the book."

"I'll not."

Wren was at the foot of the bridge beside him now, her bare feet burning in the snow. "Iyene," she said. "Don't."

Iyene looked at her. Then she looked up at Bracken on the crown, and then she did a thing so fast that Wren barely saw it.

She let go of the rope. Her sabre came out of its sheath, and she cut the rope above her hand, where it ran up the ice to Bracken.

The rope parted with a crack.

Bracken's weight had been on it. He was leaning into it as Madoc had told them all to, and it went slack in his hand. His boots went out from under him on the glassy crown, and he fell hard on his side and began to slide. The spear went clattering away down the far side. Bracken went down the near side, sideways, toward the long blue curve of ice that fell away to the river fifty feet below.

Madoc dropped his bow and threw himself up the bridge on his belly, one hand on the loose end of the rope where it was pinned below the cut. Bracken's hands scrabbled at the ice. He caught an iron pin with his fingertips and hung there, his legs already over the edge and his whole great weight on four fingers.

"Bracken!" Wren screamed.

Madoc got him by the wrist.

Iyene went past them both. She went up over the top with the Waybook clamped under her arm, sliding and catching herself. She slid down the far side on her heels onto the frozen river at the city end. She stood up and didn't look back. She walked away across the white river ice toward a dark gap in the city wall that might once have been a gate, fast, but without running.

Pip went past Wren at a dead run. He hit the bridge, grabbed the rope below the cut, and went up it hand over hand, screaming, "Sir! Sir! Wait for me! Sir!"

Bracken came up over the edge of the ice with Madoc hauling on his wrist, swung his free arm, and caught Pip by the collar as he went past. Pip's legs went out from under him, and Bracken dragged him down and held him on the ice while Pip kicked and screamed and punched his arm.

"Let me go! Let go of me! She's going in there on her own! Sir!"

Far off on the river ice, the small dark figure reached the city wall.

"Stay with the Sergeant, Pip," Iyene called. Her voice came back across the ice very small. Then she went in through the gap in the wall, and there was nothing left in the gray light but the white river and the silent walls and the dome on its hill.

Pip stopped kicking. He lay on the ice with Bracken's fist in his collar, and cried.

Wren stood at the bottom of the ice with her feet gone numb, and looked down at her empty hands.

Alder had come out behind her. He had his brown cloak around him and his staff in his hand, and he was looking at the city.

"She can't write in it," Wren said. "She can't. It fades. She tried. At the gate, at home, she tried."

"No," Alder said. "She cannot. But you can." He turned from the city and looked at her. His face was gray and tired and very calm. "And now you'll have to go to her."