The Road Home

The apple trees of the Empty Kingdom were in flower from Scarrow to the Kestrel Gorge.

Nobody had pruned them since before the Frost, and they had grown into great wild tangles, leaning over the field-walls and filling the lanes. In September they had been heavy with fruit that nobody picked, and now every one of them was white and pink from the ground to the top. The petals came down in drifts whenever the wind blew and lay on the old road like snow that smelled of honey.

"Is it always like this?" Madoc said. "In the Gatefolk country?"

"In spring," Wren said.

"Every spring?"

"If there's no late frost."

He walked with his head tipped back, looking up into the branches, because he had never seen an orchard in flower. The Stayers kept a few crabapples in the lee of the crag, which flowered thin and late, and Madoc said a good year was one where you could find the blossom without looking for it. He walked into a low branch and got a faceful of petals, spat them out, and went on looking up.

"You'll fall in a ditch," Dorrit told him.

"Aye, likely."

"There's bees in those," Wren said.

Madoc stopped dead in the road. He looked up at the tree over his head, at the small brown shapes moving among the flowers, and watched them. A bee came down past his face, and he flinched and then made himself hold his ground, and it went on to the next blossom and crawled into it.

"That's one," he said.

"That's one."

"It's small."

"I said it was small."

"You never said it'd be so busy about it," Madoc said, and stood in the road and watched them until Bracken walked into the back of him.

They had left Scarrow on the twelfth of April with the sun rising in their faces, and every morning since it had come up ahead of them over the far gray line of the Cloudwall. There were six of them and the mule. Merritt had stayed; she said someone had to be the Crown in Scarrow until the Crown sent someone better, and Morag had said the Crown could try. Madoc had come with his mother's leave, given at the gate in one word, and then, after a moment, in two more. "Go," she had said. "Come back." Wren had heard Tansy say it at a gate once, in September, and it had gone into her like a splinter.

Pip walked at the front with the map.

It was a real map now, drawn on four sheets of Iyene's good paper pasted together, and he had worked on it all winter by the fire in the moot hall. It showed the West from the Cloudwall to Cael Meddan. There were the Kestrel Gorge and the old road, the way-houses and the milestones, Scarrow on its crag, and the White Country with Coldharbour and the Ice-Bridge and the Hall. The little square on the hill was in the corner of it. Pip checked the map at every milestone, and argued with it, and made small corrections with Iyene's pen.

"It's wrong," he said on the third day, at a milestone half buried in blossom. "This says four leagues to the gorge. It's more like five. The old Survey was rotten at distances."

"They were the best surveyors in the history of the world," Alder said, from Barrow's back. He rode most of the time now, and pretended he did it to keep Barrow company.

"They were rotten at distances, Grandad."

"I have asked you not to call me that."

"You've asked about a hundred times."

"And have I ever once been attended to?"

"No," Pip said, and grinned at him, and Alder sighed and looked up at the blossom and did not seem displeased.

They came to the Kestrel Gorge on the fifth day, in the afternoon, and stood on the west rim where the bridge had been.

The last time Wren stood there was at dusk in September. The Chainman had stood across the gap on the east rim, a white shape against the dark, and spoke to her in a young man's voice. The gap was empty now, and the east rim was bare rock and heather with nobody on it.

She looked down. The gorge fell away four hundred feet to the river, which was in spate with snowmelt, white from wall to wall and roaring. At the bottom the rubble of the Kestrel Bridge lay in the water, broken twice. She had written the bridge up out of that rubble, and it had cost her her mother's face, and the same day his frost had burst it and brought it down with him on it. Now the white water poured over the stones and threw up spray that drifted halfway up the walls.

She could feel the Waybook in her pack. She hadn't opened it since the Hall.

"Well," said Bracken.

Everyone was looking at her. She could feel them doing it: Dorrit, and Alder from Barrow's back, and Madoc, and Pip, who had his map out but wasn't looking at it.

"No," Wren said.

"Nobody asked you to," Dorrit said.

"You were all thinking it."

"I wasn't thinking it. I was thinking if you so much as open that pack I'll push you in the gorge myself." Dorrit folded her arms. "The book stays shut."

"The book stays shut."

"Good."

"Grandad," Pip said. "You've got a Word left."

"I have," said Alder. "And it is not a bridge."

"What is it, then?"

"Mine," Alder said, with great dignity, and got down off the mule.

Madoc was looking north along the rim.

"There's the herders' crossing," he said. "My granda talked of it. It's eighteen miles up. The gorge goes narrow there, where the rock comes together. The herders had a rope span over it in the old days. It's rotted, but the posts will be there. They set them in the rock with iron."

"How narrow?" said Bracken.

"Narrow enough for a rope."

"And how deep?"

"Same as here." Madoc looked down at the white water, a long way below. "About that."

"Grand," said Bracken. "That's grand, that is."

Madoc stared at him. Bracken looked back with no expression at all, and after a moment Madoc began to laugh.

They reached the herders' crossing at noon the next day. For eighteen miles the gorge had run north through the hills, sheer and deep. Here the two walls leaned in toward each other until the gap was no wider than the Bridge Inn's long room. On each rim stood the anchor of the old span, two oak posts as thick as a man's body with a beam across the top, set into the rock and wedged with iron. The oak had gone silver with weather, and tatters of rotten rope hung off the beams.

Madoc put his shoulder to one of the west posts and shoved, and it didn't move.

"Sound," he said.

"And the other side?" said Bracken.

"Looks the same."

"Looks," said Bracken.

Morag had given them two hundred feet of tarred Stayer rope, with a coil of light line and a three-pronged iron grapnel. Madoc had spent the winter teaching them knots, and Bracken had learned them one-handed, with his teeth.

Wren threw the grapnel. Her first throw fell short, and her second slipped off the far beam into the gorge. The third time she aimed low, between the two far posts, and when Madoc drew the line in, the grapnel bit into the inside of the left-hand post and held.

They drew the heavy rope across on the light line. Someone had to go over and make it fast, and it had to be the lightest, and they all looked at Pip. He had gone the color of whey on the high switchbacks of the Stair in September.

"You hate heights," Wren said.

"I hate turnips," Pip said. "I've ate plenty." He swallowed. "Tell me the knot again, Madoc."

He went over the Stayer way, hanging under the rope by his hands with his legs crossed over it, looking up at the sky and swearing steadily in proper Merrow. It took him a long time. On the far side he made the rope fast round both posts and tied a second knot on top of the first. Then he stood up on the rim, skinny and small against the sky, with both arms over his head.

"That's sharp!" he screamed across the gap. "Did you see me?"

After that it was work. Madoc went over next, fast and easy, and they rigged a sling from Barrow's pack-saddle straps on an iron ring that ran along the rope, with a hauling line looped across and back. Alder went over very upright, lecturing on the Master of Bridges. He got as far as Cador Wyle's name before the sling dropped a foot, and then he said only, "Pip, would you be so good as to pull a little faster," and Pip did. Dorrit swore the whole way. Bracken went with his good hand on the strap and his stump held to his chest, and on the far side he climbed out onto the heather and looked back across the gap.

"Worst thing I ever did," he said. "Can't think why."

Then it was Barrow. Wren tied Madoc's scarf over his eyes and rigged the straps under his belly and chest, doubled, and on the far side the other five took the hauling rope. Barrow went off the edge and dropped a yard before the rope took him, and the whole span sagged until he hung far below where any of them had. His bray echoed off both walls. On the far rim they hauled, and he came out over the white water a foot at a time.

Then Wren heard the far post crack.

It was the left-hand post, where the grapnel had bitten. A long pale split opened in the silver wood, and the whole post leaned toward the gorge under the weight of the rope and the mule.

"The post!" she shouted. "Madoc!"

Madoc let go of the hauling rope and threw himself at the post from behind, his shoulder against it and his feet braced on the rock. The post stopped leaning. The split went on opening, slowly, a finger's width, then two.

"Pull!" Bracken roared. "Pull, rot you!"

Wren stood alone on the west rim with her hands empty. She could feel the book on her back, the corner of it pressing into her spine through the pack. She knew what she would write, and it would take one breath.

She put her hands behind her back and held them there, one in the other.

Barrow's front hooves struck the far rock and scrabbled. Pip grabbed his head-collar, and Dorrit a strap, and the mule heaved himself over the edge and stood on the east rim with the scarf over his eyes, shaking all over. Madoc let go of the post. It stayed where it was, leaning and split, and it held.

Then Barrow shook the scarf off, looked round, and bit Madoc on the arm.

Wren crossed last, hand over hand under the rope, light and steady, and didn't look down. They hauled her up over the edge and dropped her on the heather, and she lay there on her back in the sun, looking at the sky.

"Never again," Dorrit said, somewhere above her. "I'm going to live in Dall till I die. I'm never going to cross anything bigger than the millpond—" She stopped.

Wren laughed until it hurt, with the sun on her face and her palms bleeding from the tar. After a moment Dorrit sat down next to her and laughed too, and hit her on the arm.

"I'll take your word about the millpond," Wren said.

Bracken was lying farther up the heather with his stump on his chest and his eyes shut. "And the sea?" he said.

"The sea can come and find me," said Dorrit.

A herders' track ran up from the crossing through the hills, and on the second day it brought them onto the old road below the summit of the Stair.

They came up the last switchbacks in the afternoon, with spring snow soft and wet and slushing under their boots. The two peaks rose on either side, gray and white, and between them lay the saddle, and on the saddle stood the Doors of Cloud.

The carvings on the two pillars were worn almost smooth, but in the low light she could see their shapes: roads, and bridges, and a figure with a chain. Between the pillars there was no ice. There was only the saddle of the pass and a pool of snowmelt lying flat and blue across it, and beyond it the road going on and down, east.

In September there had been a wall of ice there a hundred feet high, split top to bottom, with the shapes of people frozen inside it.

The ice was gone, and the people in it had gone to water with it, and the pool lay where they had been. Wren walked to its edge and looked in. It was clear and very cold. On the bottom, among the stones, lay a shoe, a cooking pot, a child's wooden spoon, and a handful of coins with a king's head on them that no one living would know, clean under the water and catching the light.

They stood at the edge of the pool, the six of them and the mule, with the wind coming over the pass, and for a while none of them spoke.

Pip took something out of his pocket. It was the wooden horse he had found in a farmhouse in the Empty Kingdom in September, and Wren had forgotten about it. He had carried it through the White and the Hall and the winter, and the paint had worn off it, and one leg was chipped. He went to the foot of the nearer pillar and set it on the plinth there, facing east, down the road the refugees had gone.

Then he came back and unrolled his map on Barrow's pack and weighted the corners with stones. The pass was in the top right corner of the first sheet, where he had drawn it all winter from memory, with the two pillars marked in and the road going over, and no name. He took out Iyene's pen and wrote one in.

Sath's Stair.

He looked up at them with his chin out and his face ready for an argument. Nobody argued.

"She'd have hated that," Bracken said at last.

"Tough," said Pip.

Bracken looked at him, and the corner of his beard moved. "Aye," he said. "Tough. Good lad."

It took them two more days to come down the Stair.

On the evening of the second day they came round the last high switchback above the Last Cairn, and the mountain fell away in front of them, and there was the valley.

It was green. Wren had forgotten how green it was. It lay below them in the evening light from hill to hill, with green barley and green pasture, and the orchards along the river white with blossom, and the river running east through the middle of it and catching the sun. There were sheep on the high pasture below the cairn, small and white, and the roofs of Dallbridge, and the mill, and the bridge. At the near end of the village a thread of blue smoke went straight up into the still air from the chimney of the Bridge Inn.

Wren stood at the Last Cairn and looked down at it.

She knew every field of it. She knew the lane and the orchard and the long gray house under its thatch, far below at the very foot of the road. She knew the name of every farm and every family, and the name of the innkeeper, and the name of the dog that barked all night by the river.

"Is that home?" she said.

Dorrit was standing beside her with Bracken's arm round her. Her face was red and her mouth was working, and she was trying very hard not to cry.

"That's home," Dorrit said.