A Gray Rider at the Bridge Inn

By the time the lamps were lit, half the valley had crammed into the Bridge Inn to see Cob Hedley's hand.

He sat at the end of the long table with his arm on a folded blanket and a basin of barely warm water in front of him. Dorrit kept testing it with her elbow and sending Hobb back to the kitchen for more cold. Cob's hand lay in it, dead white, with the black blisters standing up across the back of the wrist.

"It wants to be slow," Dorrit said to the room in general, because the room kept asking. "You warm it fast, it dies. You warm it slow, it might not."

"Might not," Cob said. He was very pale. "Did you hear that? Might not."

"I heard."

The feeling was coming back, and Wren could see it arriving in his face. At first he only frowned, as if somebody had said something he didn't care for. Then he began to breathe through his teeth, and then he gripped the edge of the table with his good hand and made a noise that brought the talk in the room to a stop.

"There it is," said Dorrit, gently. "That's the blood. That's good."

"It doesn't feel good."

"No. I'm sorry, Cob. Somebody get him the brandy."

Perrin Cole fetched it. The smith was seventy-odd and as bald as an egg, with huge forearms and a burn-scar on one cheek from a spark forty years ago, and he had come in with the rest to jeer. Wren had seen his face when he got close enough to see the hand. He put the brandy down beside Cob without a word and poured it himself, and held the cup for him while he drank.

"That's no frost-bite," Perrin said at last. "I've seen frost-bite."

"I told you," Cob said, between swallows. "I told you and told you."

"You told me it was a hat, once."

"That was a different thing entirely!"

"Drink your brandy, Cob," said Dorrit.

Everyone had come: the Hollins, and the Pikes from the mill, and Garret the drummer with his wife, and all the Hedley cousins from over the river. Tam Hollin stood on a bench to see over the heads. There were children underfoot who should have been in bed, and dogs under the tables, and more people outside in the dusk looking in at the windows.

Beyond Cob's table the room was not so quiet, for everyone had an opinion and was shouting it.

"A man doesn't walk after he's dead," said Garret. "I don't care whose coat he's got on."

"Then what bit Cob?"

"Something did. I'm not saying it didn't. I'm saying it was a man. Some tinker off the mountain, half-frozen, gone wild in the head."

"In August?"

"Stranger things."

"Name one."

"We should go up," said young Arn Pike from the mill. He was nineteen and had never been further than Marlford. "Take the dogs. Take the pitchforks. Go up in the morning and have a look."

"The dogs won't go," said somebody. "Cob's dog won't go past the wall."

"Then we'll go without the dogs."

"And what'll you do when you get there, Arn Pike? Poke it?"

Wren sat at the corner of the bar with the satchel on her knees and a mug of beer she had not touched. She was tired down to her bones. There was soot under her nails and in the creases of her knuckles, and she could smell burning in her hair. Every time she shut her eyes she saw the white eyes opening, so she kept them open and looked at the room.

Tansy sat in her corner by the hearth, where Hobb's boy had set a chair for her when he fetched her down in the trap. She had her stick propped against the chair and her mouth shut tight. She had listened to Wren's story once through, from the beginning, without a question, and then held out her hand for the satchel and turned the letter over and over before she gave it back.

"Keep it dry," was all she said.

Hobb Millson came along the bar with a jug and topped up Wren's mug, though it was full. He was a big soft man with a red face and a bald spot he combed his hair over. He had been crying earlier, when he heard. Hobb cried at weddings and funerals and lambing and the first frost, and nobody in Dall held it against him.

"Is it true," he said in a low voice, "that you set fire to him?"

"Yes."

"And that he screamed?"

"Yes."

Hobb looked at her. Then he put the jug down. "Right," he said, and went down the room, and climbed onto a table.

"Friends!" he shouted. Nobody listened. He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled, a shepherd's whistle, and the room jumped and turned round. "Friends. Neighbors. Garret. I've known Wren Fallowmere since she was a baby, and I've known Dorrit since she was a noisy baby, and neither one of them's a liar. Nor's Cob, whatever Perrin says."

"I've taken it back," said Perrin, from the end of the table.

"He's taken it back," said Hobb. "You all heard him. Mark the day." There was a laugh, a small one. "So I say we believe them. I say something's come down off the Stair that shouldn't have. And I say we don't go poking it with pitchforks till we know what it is."

"How do we find that out?" said Arn Pike.

Hobb opened his mouth and shut it again.

"Show them," said Tansy, from her corner.

Everyone looked at her, though she had not raised her voice. She never did.

"Dorrit," she said. "Show them what you brought down."

Dorrit wiped her hands on her apron, reached into the pack at her feet, and set the kerchief bundle on the bar. The room pressed in around her to look as she undid the knot.

Inside, on the dock leaf, lay the bones of a man's hand.

They were burned black, but most of the small bones had held together, and the fingers were curled. Among them lay the button she had fished out of the ashes. In the lamplight Wren could see the mark on it now: a device of some kind, a pair of crossed lines inside a ring.

The laughter had gone out of the room, and the talk of tinkers with it. Garret put out a finger toward the bones and stopped short of touching them. "That's cold," he said. "I can feel it from here. Why's it cold? You burned it."

"We did," said Dorrit. "It was cold then too."

Perrin came up the bar with Cob's empty cup in his hand and bent to look. He did not touch the bones, but he picked up the button between a thick thumb and finger and turned it to the lamp.

"That's cast," he said. "Not stamped. Nobody casts a button now. Too dear." He turned it over. "That's bronze under the black. And that's no mark I've ever seen, and I've seen buttons from Merrow and Marlford and the south coast. That's old work. That's old as the bridge."

"Older," said Wren.

Perrin looked at her and put the button back on the leaf.

And into that quiet, from outside, came the sound of a horse on the bridge.

It came fast. They heard it clatter over the stones and slow, and stop in the yard, and blow hard. Somebody at the window said, "It's a rider." Somebody else said, "At this hour?" The door opened. A tall old man stood on the threshold with the night behind him.

He was gray with the dust of the road from his boots to his white hair. It lay on his face and on the brown riding cloak gone dark with weather, and on the long staff of ash, as tall as himself, that he leaned on. He was stooped and bony, with a great hooked nose, and he looked as if he had not slept in a week and had been riding in the dust for all of it. Behind him, through the door, Wren could see his horse standing in the lamplight with its head down, its flanks black with sweat and white with lather.

The old man looked round the room, at all the faces, and at the bones on the bar.

"Forgive me," he said. His voice was dry and precise, a scholar's voice, with the smooth vowels of the east in it. "I have been nine days on the road from Merrow and I am not fit for company. I am looking for the house of the keeper Fallowmere. I was told at Marlford that it lies above this village. I wonder if someone might—"

"Alderin Marsh," said Tansy.

The old man turned. Tansy had not got up, but sat in her corner with both hands on her stick, and looked him up and down, and her face showed nothing at all.

"You've got old," she said.

He looked at her, and took a step into the room, and stopped. Then his face creased up all over under the dust, and he laughed, a short, astonished laugh that took years off him.

"So have you, my dear," he said. "It suits you less."

Somebody by the fire snorted into his beer. Tansy's mouth twitched at one corner.

"Fifty years," she said, "and you've learned to be rude. The College must be proud."

"The College has despaired of me for some time." He bowed to her, stiffly, one hand on his staff. It was an old-fashioned bow, and a real one. "Tansy Fallowmere. I did not think I would find you so quickly. I did not think, to be candid, that I would find you alive."

"I'm not dead yet. Sit down before you fall down. Hobb, get this man a drink, and somebody see to that poor horse before it dies in your yard."

Hobb went, and two of the Hedley boys went out to the horse. The old man did not sit down, for he had seen the bones on the bar again, and he crossed the room to them, and the crowd let him through.

"Who is he?" Dorrit whispered to Wren.

"I don't know."

"Granna knows him."

"I can see that."

"She laughed. Did you see? Near enough. She never laughs."

The old man bent close over the bones, with his hands folded on his staff, and looked at them and at the button without touching either. He held one long ink-stained finger an inch above the curled black fingers, and took it away again.

"Where?" he said.

"The high pasture," said Wren. "Under the Last Cairn. He was sitting in a hollow, frozen. He'd walked down in the night and touched a ewe, and she froze standing up. He had that." She held up the satchel. "He took hold of Cob's hand when Cob touched it. Then he got up."

"And you burned him."

"We didn't have a lot of choice."

"No. You did well." He looked at her properly for the first time. "You are the granddaughter."

"Wren."

"Wren." He held out his hand for the satchel. She gave it to him. He opened the clasp and looked at the letter inside, and turned it gently with one finger so that he could read the address. His mouth tightened.

"This is Survey writing," he said. "A common hand, not the script. A courier's letter, carried by a courier. He would have come over the Stair in the last days, before the road was closed." He closed the satchel very carefully. "I cannot open this without destroying it. In Merrow there are people who can lift frozen paper. Here there are not. With your leave, I will keep it dry and keep it safe."

"It's got keeper written on it," Wren said.

"It has. It was not written to anyone living." He did not give it back. He drew the letter out of the satchel and slid it into an inner pocket of his coat. Then, with a glance at Perrin, he took the button off the dock leaf. "A Survey courier's mark," he said, and put it in after the letter.

"Alder," said Tansy from the corner. "Tell them."

He told them standing by the fire, with a cup of Hobb's brandy in his hand that he did not drink. The room was so quiet that Wren could hear Cob breathing hard through his teeth over his basin.

"My name is Alderin Marsh," he said. "I am a Warden of the College of Wardens, in Merrow. The College has kept certain learning since before the Frost. We are, I suppose, scholars. Mostly we read." He looked down at the cup. "In the high chamber of the College there is a candle. Or there was. It was lit in the old days, when the West was lost and the Stair was shut. It has been tended ever since, by the Wardens, turn and turn about, and it has never gone out. It is not a candle as you would know one. It does not burn down. It is a sign. So long as it burned, we knew that something in the West which was bound, stayed bound."

"What something?" said Arn Pike.

Alder looked at him. "On the tenth of August," he said, "at about the fourth hour of the morning, it went out. I was in the chamber. There was no draught. It simply went out, and it would not light again."

Nobody spoke.

"It means," Alder said, "that what was bound in the West is loose. I do not know all of what that means. I know that it means the dead can walk. The faded, we call them. The dead the cold has kept. That cold is loose, and it is coming east. I rode to find the book and its keeper as fast as a horse could carry me. I see I am late already."

"How many dead?" said Hobb, from behind the bar.

"I don't know."

"More than one?"

Alder looked at the bones on the bar, and at Cob's white hand in the basin, and at Wren.

"We saw more," Wren said. "On the Stair, above the cairn. Standing on the road. Five or six."

"Then there are more," said Alder. "And there will be more than that."

The room broke, and everyone began talking at once. Garret said it was all nonsense and nobody listened to him. Mistress Pike began to cry, and Arn Pike said he'd been saying they should go up, and his father told him to shut his mouth. A dog under the table began to bark, and then another, and somebody kicked one of them, and it yelped.

In the middle of it all, in the corner under the stairs where the children had been put out of the way, a small girl was skipping.

She was Hobb's granddaughter, Posy, who was six. She had a length of rope and she was skipping on the flagstones by herself, in the gap between the benches, and chanting under her breath, bored, while the grown-ups shouted. Wren heard it only because she was nearest.

Chain, chain, the Chainman's coming,
Forty rods and never running,
Who's at the door and who's in bed?
Chain, chain, and now you're dead!

It was the oldest skipping rhyme in Dall, and Wren had skipped to it herself. On the last word you jumped out of the rope, and if you were too slow, you were out.

Posy jumped out, and landed, and looked pleased.

Wren glanced up and saw Alder's face.

He had heard it. He stood by the fire with the brandy in his hand, looking at the child with his mouth a little open, and under the road-dust he had gone the color of paper.

Then Tansy said something to him from her chair, and he turned and answered her, and the color came back into his face by slow degrees. Posy went back to skipping, and no one else had seen. Wren watched Alder after that, but he did not look at her.

In the end Tansy stopped the shouting by banging her stick on the flags three times, hard, until the room turned round.

"If you've all finished," she said, "the man's got more to say, and I'd like to hear it before I die of old age."

Alder bowed to her again. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Talk."

"They will come here," Alder said. He said it to the room, but he was looking at Tansy. "The dead. They will come down into this valley. And they will come to Fallowmere."

"Why my farm?" said Tansy.

"Because they are drawn to the book."

"What do you know about my book?"

"I have seen it, my dear. You showed it to me yourself, fifty years ago, at your kitchen table, and then you locked it up again and told me to mind my own business."

"And you should have."

"Very likely." He turned to the room. "I have already sent word to the Crown. Before I left Merrow, I went to the King's council and told them what the candle meant. They are sending someone. Riders will follow me, with authority and with arms. They may be some days behind." He paused. "The dead may not be."

"So what do we do?" said Hobb.

"Fire," said Alder. "Fire first. They burn, as this young woman has proven. Iron second. They do not love iron, and iron will cut them where other things will not. Oil, to make fire quickly. Every household in this valley should have fire, iron and oil ready tonight. Lamps lit. Torches ready. Doors shut. Nobody walks the lanes alone after dark."

"Tonight?" said Garret.

"Tonight."

"We've a harvest to get in."

"You will get it in more easily alive."

Hobb climbed down off his table and stood for a moment rubbing his big red hands together. Then he looked round the room and began to point.

"Arn, go round every house on the mill side and tell them. Tam, you do the river side. Garret, get your boys and go up to the Hollin place and the farms past the ford. Tell them fire and iron and oil. Tell them the Warden says so." He pointed at Perrin. "Perrin, what have you got at the forge?"

"Nails," said Perrin. "Bar iron. Horseshoes. Two dozen old scythe blades. A plowshare I never got paid for." He looked at Alder. "What good's a nail?"

"Drive it into your doorframe," said Alder. "It will do more good there than in your hand."

"Then I'll drive a nail into every doorframe in Dall," said Perrin, and put on his cap.

"Tonight?" said Garret again.

"Tonight," said Perrin, "you great soft pudding, or I'll drive one into you."

They went, and the inn emptied from the door inward in a rush of boots and voices. Hobb went round lighting more lamps while his wife brought out a crock of lamp-oil and began filling jugs. Dorrit wrapped Cob's hand in clean linen and told him he was sleeping at the inn tonight, and Hobb said of course he was, and Cob said he'd rather sleep in his bed, and they both told him to hush.

Alder crossed the room to Tansy's corner. "You should come down here," he said. "To the inn. You and the girls. Bring the book. There will be people round you, and walls, and fire."

"No," said Tansy.

"Tansy—"

"I've slept under my own thatch for seventy-nine years. I was born under it. I'm not moving out of it for a lot of dead men."

"They are coming to your door."

"Then they'll find me at it."

"My dear, be reasonable."

"I've never been reasonable in my life. You know that. You told me so, fifty years ago, on my doorstep, and then you went off east and never wrote." She got up, slowly, leaning on her stick, and Wren went to take her arm. "Hobb's boy is taking me home in the trap. You can come up tomorrow and tell me what else you know. Because you know more than you're saying. I can see it on you."

"I am saying all that is useful."

"That's what I mean." She looked up at him. She came about to his breastbone. "Sleep here tonight. You look like death. You can sleep in my barn tomorrow."

"Your barn," said Alder.

"It's a good barn."

He laughed again, a tired laugh. "I shall walk up with the girls," he said. "Tonight. I would rather be where the book is. If you will allow it."

Tansy looked at him a moment. "Please yourself," she said. "You always did."

The three of them walked up the lane in the dark. Alder led his horse, which had been rubbed down and watered and was walking better, and Dorrit carried a lantern, and Wren carried a lit torch, and nobody told her it was foolish.

Down in the valley behind them lights were coming on all over Dall, a lamp in every window. Here and there a torch moved along a lane as somebody went from house to house with the news. From the direction of the forge came a hard, bright ringing: Perrin at his anvil, late at night, cutting nails.

"I don't like it," said Dorrit. "The whole valley lit up. It looks like a wedding."

"Better a wedding than a wake," said Alder.

"That's the sort of thing people say at wakes."

He glanced at her. "I suppose it is."

They walked on up the lane between the hedges, dark and warm and smelling of dust and honeysuckle, and an owl went over. The stars were out, thick and white, and up ahead the mountains stood black against them, and the snowfields at the top gave off their faint gray light.

"Can I ask you something?" said Wren.

"You may ask."

"The rhyme. At the inn. The skipping rhyme."

Alder walked on a few steps, the horse's hooves clopping on the lane. "It is a very old rhyme," he said.

"I know it's old. I've been skipping to it since I was four. I asked why you looked like that when you heard it."

"Did I look like something?"

"You looked like you'd been hit."

"I am a tired old man who has been nine days in the saddle," said Alder. "I look like that a great deal." He was quiet a moment. "There are a great many old rhymes, Wren. Some of them are only rhymes. Some of them were once something else, and people have forgotten. I would not want to frighten you with a children's song."

"You're not frightening me with the song," Wren said. "You're frightening me by not talking about it."

"Hah," said Dorrit. "She's got you."

Alder did not answer. They came round the last bend of the lane to the gate of Fallowmere. Beyond it lay the long low shape of the house, with a lamp burning in the kitchen window to say that Tansy was home. Wren could see the white hives in the bee-yard behind, faint in the starlight.

At the gate Alder put his hand on the top bar and stood looking up at the mountains, as Tansy had stood the night before.

It was very quiet. Down in the valley Perrin's hammer had stopped, and the owl called somewhere in the orchard. And from far, far above, faint on the still air, came another sound that Wren had heard every summer night of her life without ever noticing it.

It was the bells of Cob's flock, left up on the high pasture with no shepherd and no dog. The ewes wore bells on their collars, flat copper bells with a low dull note, and on a still night the sound came down the mountain into the valley. You heard it when you were lying awake, a scattered, sleepy sound, a clonk here and a clonk there, as the sheep moved in the dark and grazed and lay down.

Wren listened to it now and found it comforting, the most ordinary sound in the world.

Then every bell on the mountain stopped at once.