The Keeper Without a Name

"Wren," Dorrit said. "Wren. Wren!"

Wren was sitting on the floor of a little stone room off the Roll Chamber, with her back against the wall and the Waybook in her lap, watching the rain come down past the window. It had rained all night and it was raining yet, softer now, a gray morning rain that hissed on the roofs of Cael Meddan and ran off them in sheets. She heard Dorrit's voice and she heard the word, and only slowly understood that the word was for her.

She looked up. Dorrit was standing in the doorway with a pan of water in her hands and her face all crumpled. "Three times," she said. "I said it three times."

"I heard you."

"You heard somebody being called. You didn't know it was you."

"No," Wren said. There didn't seem any point in lying about it. "I didn't."

Dorrit put the pan down so hard it slopped. She came and sat next to Wren against the wall, shoulder to shoulder, as they had sat on the millpond bank when they were girls, though only one of them remembered it.

"It's your name," she said. "You've had it twenty-three years. Granna chose it. She said you came out small and brown and cross, and there was only one thing to call you."

"I know that. I remember her telling it. I remember the story." Wren turned the Waybook over in her hands. "I just don't remember that it's mine. When you say it, it's a word. It's like somebody saying bucket."

"Well, that's a rotten thing to say to a person."

"Sorry."

"You'd better be." Dorrit took her hand and held it hard. Her own hands were scrubbed pink, with dried blood still under the nails. "I'll keep saying it. Every day. Till you're sick of it."

"I know you will."

"Wren."

"Yes, all right."

"Wren Fallowmere. Wren Fallowmere. Wren—"

"Dor," Wren said, "I'm going to hit you."

"Good," said Dorrit, and put her head on Wren's shoulder and cried a little, and then got up and went to change Bracken's dressing.

Alder came in a little later, walking carefully with one hand on the wall. His brown cloak was dark with wet and his white hair plastered to his skull. He had been standing at an open window in the next room with the rain coming in on him. He had something in his other hand: the courier's letter from the high pasture, with the cast button still tied to it by its thread, two crossed lines in a ring. It was soaked through, and for the first time since August the paper had gone soft.

"It has thawed," he said, "like everything else."

He let himself down onto the floor beside her, which took some time, and worked the fold open with his ink-stained fingers. The old seal gave, and the paper came apart without tearing. He read it to himself first, and then he read it aloud. It said:

To whoever keeps the Book at the Hall.

I wrote the Stair shut with the last of them still climbing. I heard them. There was a man a turn below me with a child on his shoulders, and the ink was already running.

When the Ice gives them back, bury them. Then write his name, and let it be finished.

W. F.

"Wystan," Wren said.

She thought of the woman in the Ice with the basket on her hip, so close to the face of it that Wren had seen the stitching on her sleeve.

"Written on the Stair, I should think, in the flight," Alder said, and folded it along its old creases.

Wren opened the Waybook and held it out, and Alder laid the letter inside the front cover, against the dedication, and she closed the book on it.

Pip wanted to fetch Barrow. He had wanted to since first light, and Bracken, lying on a pallet with his face the color of tallow, had told him to wait until someone could go with him. Pip had waited about as long as Pip ever waited for anything, so Wren went, and Madoc, and the three of them walked out of the Hall of the Survey into the drowned city.

It was a different place. Wren had come into it two days before through streets of packed snow and standing dead, holding her breath, and now the snow was going. It came off the roofs in great wet slabs that slid and fell into the streets with a noise like a cartload of flour going over. Every gutter ran and every drain-mouth in the paving gurgled and spat. The water ran down the hill from the Hall in brown streams, carrying rubbish and dead leaves from autumns nobody had seen, and down in the lower town it was over the doorsteps.

The dead lay where they had stood, all through the streets, in doorways and on steps and out in the squares, men and women and children in the clothes of the old days. The rain had washed the frost off them, and they were not gray-blue any more but the brown of old bones.

Pip walked through them without looking left or right, with Iyene's map-case slung across his back and her compass on a cord round his neck.

"Drains are working," he said, over his shoulder. "Hear that? That's the Survey's drains, that is. Blocked up with ice since the Frost and they're running like the day they were cut. Sir always said. Drains are the only honest map of a city."

"She did say that," said Madoc.

"She said it about four hundred times."

At the east gate they stopped to watch the Ice-Bridge coming apart. Its sheath of ice was cracking off in plates and falling into a river gone black and fast and roaring, full of floes knocking together. Under the ice the bridge turned out to be stone: five low arches of gray Survey work with a parapet on either side. Madoc's guide-rope, the one Iyene had cut, hung from one of its iron pins, trailing in the water.

"Didn't know there was a bridge under it," Madoc said.

"Nobody did," Pip said. "It's not on the drain plans. Drains don't go over rivers." He looked at the trailing rope, and then looked away and went on toward the ruined stable outside the wall.

The stable had lost half its roof in the night to a slab of snow off the city wall, but the other half had held. Under it, standing in a puddle with his ears back and a mouthful of old thatch hanging out of his jaws, was Barrow. He looked at them and chewed.

Pip made a noise and ran across the yard through the mud, and threw both arms round Barrow's neck, and put his face in the mule's mane. Barrow put up with it, chewing thatch over the boy's shoulder with a patience that had lasted from Dall to the end of the world.

"He's eaten all the fodder we left him," Madoc said, looking into the manger. "And the manger. And a good part of the roof."

Pip didn't answer. His shoulders were shaking. Wren and Madoc stood in the stable yard in the rain and looked at the city wall, and let him.

They buried Iyene that afternoon, on the south slope of the Hall's hill, where the snow had gone first.

There was grass under it, flattened and yellow and very old, and under the grass the ground was soft enough to dig. Madoc found spades with rotten handles and good iron blades in a gardener's shed behind the Hall, and he and Pip and Wren dug. Bracken tried to dig with one hand, and Dorrit took the spade away from him, and he let her, which frightened Wren more than anything else about him that day.

They wrapped Iyene in a Survey banner from the Hall, blue and gray, with the old mark of the Survey on it, a road running between two mountains. Alder had found it. He carried it out over his arm and laid it on the grass without a word, and nobody asked him whether it was right.

Pip wanted to bury her with her sabre. Bracken said no.

"It's yours, Sandover."

"I can't use it. You saw me. I'm rotten with it."

"You'll learn."

"I don't want to learn. I want her to have it."

"She had it thirty years," Bracken said. "She's done. You're not." He looked at Pip. "Her orders. She'd have given them if she'd had the breath."

Pip stared at the grave. Then he took the sabre off his belt and held it out to Bracken, flat across both hands. Bracken took it with his one hand and held it for a moment, and gave it back.

They laid her in the grave. The rain had stopped at last, and the clouds were breaking up over the west, and a thin cold sun came through and lay across the hill.

Bracken stood at the head of the grave with his left arm in its sling against his chest, very straight, looking down at the banner in the bottom of the hole.

"Iyene Sath," he said. "Cartographer-Royal of Esterland. Thirty years in the Crown's service. I served under her eighteen." He stopped, and was quiet so long that Dorrit took half a step toward him, and then he went on. "Best officer I ever had. Worst to play cards with. She was shot once by a man who later apologized. He sends a ham every Midwinter. She never apologized for anything in her life. She was wrong once that I know of. She put it right. It killed her." He looked up at the sky. "That's the report, Sir." Then he stepped back.

Pip didn't cry; he had done his crying in the stable. He sat on the grass beside the grave with his knees drawn up and Iyene's map-case open beside him, and took out a clean sheet of her good paper and her pen. While the others filled the grave, he drew the hill of the Hall of the Survey, with the broken dome and the city round it, and the river and the Ice-Bridge. On the south slope of the hill he drew a small square, very careful and very exact, and wrote beside it in his cramped street-boy's hand, I. S.

It was the first thing on his first map.

They left Cael Meddan on the sixth of October and went east.

The White Country was dying. Wren had crossed it in September on snowshoes through a cold that could kill a man in an hour. Now there was no White Country at all, only mud to the knee and mud to the thigh, and brown streams full of rotten ice where there had been snowfields, and a pond in every hollow. They left the useless snowshoes in a heap in a way-house on the second day. They walked and slithered and waded, and on the third day Barrow sank to his belly in a bog, and it took all of them but Bracken to haul him out.

Wherever they went across that country, the faded lay in the mud where they had stood. Madoc said the Stayers would come out in the summer and bury the ones near the farms, and the grass would have the rest.

On the fifth day they came to Coldharbour, and Bracken fell over in the doorway.

He had been gray since Cael Meddan. He had not complained once, and Dorrit had watched him every hour of every day. On the fifth day he walked into the tower where they had sheltered in the blizzard, put his hand out to the wall, and missed it. Madoc caught him before his head hit the floor.

The stump had gone bad. Dorrit unwrapped it by the fire and made a face Wren had never seen on her, and sent Madoc out into the dusk for willow bark and Pip for snow. There was old snow in the lee of the tower, gray and rotten, and she packed it round the arm to bring the heat down, and then she sat up with him all night.

Wren sat up too. She kept the fire going and fetched what Dorrit asked for, and asked no questions. Near midnight Bracken began to talk in his fever to people who weren't there. He gave orders to Fenn, who was dead, and told somebody called Hollis to keep his head down. Once he said, quite clearly, "Sir, the girl's right," and Dorrit put her hand over her eyes.

Then he turned his head on the blanket and found her.

"Mistress Fallowmere," he said.

"Don't you Mistress Fallowmere me," Dorrit said. "Not now. Not tonight."

"Dor, then." His eyes were open, but he wasn't seeing her; he was seeing somewhere a long way back. "Sat up with a man before. On the border. Held his hand. He went anyway."

"Well, you're not going anyway. You hear me, Bracken Hale? You're not." She held his good hand against her cheek. "You've to come home and face Granna. She'll want a look at you. She'll poke you with her stick and say you'll do."

"Will I do?"

"You'll do," Dorrit said, and her voice broke on it. "Gods help me, you'll do."

He said something else, too low to hear, and went back to muttering at Fenn.

"He'll die," Dorrit said, very low. "I can't stop it. The frost's in the blood. It went up his arm before I took it off. I was too slow. I stood there arguing with you and I was too slow."

"You weren't slow."

"I was. I was, Wren."

Wren heard the name, and knew it for hers only because it was Dorrit saying it, in that voice, to her.

"He's not dead yet," she said. "You told me that about Cob, the first night, when I was crying over his hand. You said, don't you dare, he's breathing and he can hear you."

"Did I?"

"You did. You were very rude about it."

Dorrit laughed, a wet laugh, and bent over Bracken's hand and talked to him after that, low and steady, all through the small hours. She told him about the bee-yard and the dresser in the kitchen and the bench at the gate. She told him which of Hobb's ales to drink and which to leave. She told him Cob Hedley would talk his ear off, and if he let Cob sell him a ewe she'd never forgive him. Wren fed the fire and listened, and somewhere in it she fell asleep sitting up.

Toward dawn the fever broke. Wren woke and felt it before she saw it; the room changed. Bracken had stopped muttering and started to sweat, great drops of it running off his bald head onto the blanket, and his breathing had gone long and slow. Dorrit put her hand on his forehead and kept it there, and then bent over with her face on his chest.

After a while Bracken opened his eyes. He looked up at the roof of Coldharbour, and then down at the top of Dorrit's head.

"Dor," he said.

She sat up. Her face was a mess.

"You've got my father's ring," Bracken said. "On that string round your neck. I saw it."

"You told me to keep it."

"I did. I'd take it back, but I've nowhere to put it now." He lifted the stump a little in its bandages and looked at it with mild interest, as though it belonged to someone else. "Best you wear it yourself. Proper finger. If you're minded."

Dorrit stared at him. "Is that it?" she said. "Is that you asking? You nearly die in the night, and I sit up with you, and I weep all over you like a fool, and you wake up and say proper finger, if you're minded?"

"Said it, didn't I."

"You great—you stupid—yes, you idiot. Yes. Of course yes."

"Good," said Bracken, and closed his eyes and went to sleep.

Dorrit turned round and looked at Wren, with the ring on its string clutched in her fist and her face on fire.

"Did you hear that?" she said. "Did you hear him?"

"I heard it."

"Proper finger."

"He means it, though."

"I know he means it." Dorrit wiped her face with the heel of her hand, laughing and crying at once. "Granna's going to kill him. She's going to take one look at him and kill him with her stick."

When Bracken woke again at noon, Dorrit was sitting beside him with the string gone from her neck. The ring was on her hand, on the proper finger, too big for it and wound round with thread to make it stay.

He looked at it for some time.

"Did I say something?" he said. "In the night?"

"You did. You're not taking it back."

"Wasn't going to." He shut his eyes. "Just wanted to know if I'd said it well."

"You said it terribly," Dorrit said, and kissed his forehead, and went to see about some broth.

They reached Scarrow on the twentieth of October in a thin cold rain.

The Stayers had seen them coming from the lookout cairns, and the whole town lined the walls. Children ran down the road and stopped short and stared at Bracken's arm, and at Alder, who was riding the last mile on Barrow because he refused to be carried by anyone else.

Merritt was at the gate in her Crown riding coat, patched now with Stayer leather, leaning on a crossbow. She had lost weight, and her face had the tight look of someone who has been ill a long time and got up anyway. She watched them come up the last turn of the road, and Wren saw her eyes go over them one by one, and stop.

"Where's the Captain?" Merritt said.

Pip went to her. He took the map out of Iyene's map-case and unrolled it there in the gateway, in the rain. He held it up for her to see, with his finger on the little square on the hill.

"There," he said. "I drew it. I minded the scale."

Merritt looked at it while the rain fell on the paper and on Pip's hand. Then she nodded, once, and put her own hand on Pip's shoulder and kept it there.

Morag Tull came down from the gatehouse stair. She walked straight past Wren and Alder and Dorrit and stopped in front of her son. She looked up at him, a head taller than she was, and he looked down at her, and neither of them spoke.

"Ewan's gone," Madoc said at last. "I know. I was there."

"Aye."

"I went anyway. When you said not."

"Aye," Morag said. "You did." She reached up, took hold of one of the iron rings in his ear, pulled his head down, and put her forehead against his. The rings clinked. She held him there in the gateway while the rain came down, and then let him go and went back up the stair without another word.

Madoc stood rubbing his ear. "That's her glad," he said to Wren. "You'll not see it often."

It was a hard winter, and an honest one. Snow came down on Scarrow in November and lay there, and melted in the next warm wind, and came down again, and the wind off the crag could take the skin off your face. But it was winter, and it came and went. On the first warm day the Stayers climbed onto their walls and stood looking west, where the White had lain on the hills all their lives, and the hills were brown.

Alder spent the winter by the fire in the moot hall with his feet in a sheepskin, recovering, and being gently pompous at the Stayers. He offered to write down Old Senna's lineages for her, so that nothing would ever be lost. Senna asked him what good a name was on a wall, when you could have it in a mouth, and Alder thought about the Roll Chamber, and went red, and didn't offer again.

At Midwinter they sang the dead. The whole town packed into the moot hall, as it had packed in for the dance in September, with a peat fire burning on the hearth-stone at its heart. Old Senna sat by it on a stool with her fiddle across her knees and sang the lineages of every Stayer who had died in the year, with a line of tune for each. It took most of the night. The Stayers stood with their heads bowed, and when a name came that was theirs they said it after her, all together, under their breath.

Near the end of the night Senna set down her fiddle and sang without it. She sang:

Hew Brannock, who held the tower,
the stones of it will keep his name.

Ewan Tull, son of Rhun and Una,
who stood in the gate when the cold came through.

Iyene Sath, of the Gatefolk,
who named the Huntress on our wall,
who went into the Hall and proved true,
who held the door.

Will Rudge, chainman, of Cael Meddan,
who carried the winter for all of us,
who made the reel.

Say them, and they are not lost.

The hall said each name after her. Madoc and Morag said Ewan's, and Pip, beside Wren on the bench, said Iyene's and then put his hands over his face. When the last name came, all Scarrow said Will Rudge together, and the roof gave it back. Morag sat on the bench across the fire with her burned wrist in her lap. She said it last of all, when the roof had gone quiet.

In the quiet after it, Senna held out her fiddle across the fire. "You'll play it now, Keeper," she said.

The Stayers had called her Keeper since she came back. Wren didn't know who had started it, but it had gone round the town in a day. Now the children said it, and the old women, and Morag: good morning, Keeper, mind the ice, Keeper. She found she liked it. When they said it, she turned round.

She played Rudge's Reel on Senna's fiddle, the whole tune, and the Stayers danced it by the fire until the roof rang.

In January Senna lent Madoc her fiddle, and Wren taught him the Dall half.

They sat on the hearth-stone in the moot hall after the others had gone to bed, with the peat fire sunk to a red glow. He had big hands for it and held the bow as if it might bite him. The first time through he got to the turn and stopped dead.

"It goes up," he said. "Ours goes down."

"Ours goes up. That's why it's ours." She took the fiddle, played him the turn, and gave it back. "Again."

He played it again. He played it so slowly that she could have gone out for peat between two notes and been back before the third.

"You play it too slow," she said.

"I play it how it goes."

"It goes like this." She sang it at him quick, and beat the time on the hearth-stone with her heel. He tried again and fumbled the turn, and she rapped his ankle with the end of her bow.

"Gatewife," he said, rubbing it.

"Again."

In the end he had it. He came up through the first half, too slow still, but true, and reached the old stopping place. He went straight over into the Stayers' half without a pause, and played it down to the end at his own pace.

He looked at her over the fiddle. "Better?"

"Worse," Wren said. "Do it again."

He did it again, and again after that, until the fire was ash and Senna came shuffling in with a blanket round her shoulders to take her fiddle back. She looked from one of them to the other.

"Too slow," she said to Madoc, and to Wren, "Too fast," and went off to bed with it under her arm.

"What's a bee?" Madoc said.

It was February, and they were up on the crag top beside the old beacon, where nobody came in winter, the only place in Scarrow you could be alone. The stone cup of the beacon was black inside with soot from the fire she had written there in September. Below them the valley lay white under new snow, and far away to the west, where the White Country had been, the hills were brown and bare.

"You know what a bee is."

"I know the word. I've heard Gatefolk say it. Dorrit said it to him, in the Hall." He didn't say the name; none of them said it much. "I've never seen one. There's none at Scarrow. Too cold, my granda said. Too cold for three hundred years."

Wren thought about how to put it. "It's small," she said. "About as long as the top of your thumb. Brown and gold, with stripes. It's got wings, but you can't see them when it's flying. It lives in a box with fifty thousand of its sisters. They make honey out of flowers and wax out of themselves, and they'll sting you if you're a fool about it, and sometimes if you aren't."

"Fifty thousand."

"In a good hive."

"And you take their honey."

"Some of it."

"And they let you."

"They don't let me. They argue. I win." She thought about it. "Mostly."

Madoc was grinning at her. He had a wide grin, with one tooth crooked, and she had noticed it about three weeks after she noticed she was looking for it.

"I'll show you," she said.

"Will you, now."

"When we go home. In the spring. I'll give you a veil and you can stand at the gate and watch."

"I'll not want a veil. I'm a Stayer."

"You'll want a veil."

"Wren," he said.

She turned her head without thinking. He'd said it, and she'd turned, as she turned when the Stayers said Keeper. She looked at him, surprised, and he looked back at her, and he wasn't grinning any more.

"I've been saying it every day since the Hall," he said. "Every chance I get. Your cousin says it and I say it. Somebody's got to."

"It still doesn't feel like mine."

"I know. You turned, though."

"I did."

"Then I'll keep on," Madoc said, and looked away down the valley. After a while she found his hand on the cold stone of the beacon's rim between them, and put hers over it, and they sat there until the light went.

The news came in March, up the switchback road on a pony in a lather, with Madoc's cousin Ailsa on its back. She had been three weeks at the Kestrel lookout on the west rim of the gorge. It was the farthest east of the Stayers' cairns, and from it on a clear day you could see up the road to the summit of the Stair.

She came into the moot hall with snow on her boots and her face red from the wind. Morag was there, and Old Senna, and the company, sitting by the fire over their supper. Dorrit was in the middle of telling Bracken he was not to try splitting wood again with the hook on his stump, and Bracken was in the middle of not listening.

Ailsa stood in front of the fire and got her breath.

"I've come from the gorge," she said. "It's clear. The whole road's clear, up to the top. There's snow on the switchbacks but it's soft, it's spring snow. And the pillars. The two big ones at the top that the Gatefolk call the Doors."

"What about them?" Wren said.

"There's nothing between them," Ailsa said. "I looked a whole day to be sure. There's no ice. It's gone. You can see the sky through."

Dorrit stood up, and her supper went on the floor. She turned to Wren, and her face was already starting to go.

"Oh, rot it," Dorrit said. "Oh, rot it, don't look at me, I'm not crying. Bracken, pack your things. We're going to see Granna."