The Night of the Dead

Perrin Cole drove the first nail into the gatepost of Fallowmere at nine in the morning, and after that he did not stop until dark.

He drove nails into the gate and the gateposts and the doorframes of the house. He drove them into the barn door and the byre door and the lintel of the dairy. He walked the hedge that ran round the yard and the house and hammered a horseshoe onto every post he could find in it, grumbling the whole way. When he ran out of horseshoes he used bent scythe blades, and when he ran out of those he sent a boy down to the forge for more nails.

"Does it work?" Wren asked him.

"The Warden says it does."

"Do you believe him?"

Perrin stopped with his hammer raised and looked at her. His scarred cheek was red with sun. "I believe that hand of Cob's," he said. "And I'd rather be hammering than sitting."

Half of Dallbridge came up the lane that day, in carts and on foot, with pitchforks and billhooks and hay-rakes and flails. They brought jugs of lamp-oil and bundles of rushes and every torch they could make. Arn Pike brought his father's old boar-knife. Tam Hollin brought his pipes, and when someone asked him why, he said he didn't know, he just felt better with them. Garret brought his two big sons and a sack of apples.

"Apples?" said Dorrit.

"A man has to eat," said Garret.

Hobb stayed at the inn with Cob and the old folk and the children and turned it into a fort, but he sent up a cart of oil and a message. The carter recited it at the gate: "Tell Mistress Fallowmere she's a stubborn old goat and I'll come up in the morning to see she's not dead."

"Tell him I'll be here," said Tansy. "Tell him to bring bread."

Alder walked the hedge all afternoon. He had slept in the barn, as promised, and looked a little better for it, though his brown cloak still hung dusty and travel-dark from his shoulders. He went slowly along the line of the hedge with his staff, stopping now and then to look at the ground, or at the fields beyond, or up at the mountains. He did not say what he was looking for. Once Wren saw him stop at the corner of the bee-yard and stand with his eyes shut and his lips moving, and when he saw her watching, he smiled at her and went on.

In the kitchen, Tansy sat at the table with the oak box open in front of her and the Waybook out of it.

She had been there since noon with the book open at the last page, the one with the fading lines, her chin on her good fist. Now and then she turned back a few pages to the maps of the Stair and studied those, and then went back to the last page. When Wren brought her tea she drank it without looking up or speaking.

In the late afternoon she said, "Child. The good ink. In the dresser drawer, at the back, behind the candle-ends."

Wren found it behind the candle-ends, a small squat bottle of black glass with a cork sealed in wax, which she had never seen before.

"What's it for?"

"Letters," said Tansy.

"Who are you writing to?"

"Nobody you know." Tansy took the bottle and set it by the book. She laid a pen beside it, a steel nib in an old bone holder. Then she looked up at Wren, and her eyes were sharp and bright and very tired. "Go and help your cousin. She's filling jugs and spilling half of them."

The sun went down behind the Cloudwall, and the shadow of the mountains came down across the valley.

They lit the torches at dusk. There were nearly thirty people at Fallowmere by then, every one of them with a torch or a lamp. They stood along the hedge in twos and threes, with their pitchforks and their billhooks, and talked in low voices. The Hedley cousins had the corner by the barn, Garret and his sons the length of hedge along the orchard side, and Arn Pike and Tam Hollin the bee-yard at the back. Tam kept looking over his shoulder at the hives.

Perrin had the gate. Nobody gave it to him; he simply walked to it with his hammer over his shoulder and stood there, and after that it was his. It was a stout gate, oak, five-barred, as high as a man's chest, and he had put iron nails into every bar. He leaned on it and looked up the road.

Wren had chosen the barn roof for herself. From up there, lying on the thatch at the ridge, she could see the yard and the hedge and the fields beyond, and the pale thread of the road going up toward the mountains. She had her sling and two bags of stones, good heavy river stones the size of hen's eggs, and a torch jammed into the thatch beside her, unlit, with a lantern to light it from. Dorrit was below her in the yard with a hay-fork whose iron tines were long and sharp, and Dorrit had spent an hour at Perrin's grindstone making them sharper.

"You'll fall off," Dorrit called up.

"I won't."

"You'll fall off, and land on your head, and it'll be the first sensible thing that's happened to it."

"Go and stand somewhere."

"I am standing somewhere. I'm standing under you, so you'll land on me. That's love, that is."

There was no moon. The stars came out thick over the valley, and high above, the snowfields at the top of the Cloudwall gave off their faint gray light. The night was warm, and an owl called. From the valley below, very faint, came the sound of a dog barking, and then another, and then all the dogs in Dall, one after another, until the whole valley was barking, and then they stopped.

Along the hedge the talk had died. Wren lay on the thatch and watched the road until her eyes watered. At some point she heard the kitchen clock strike eleven through the open window. Some time after that she found she was shivering, though the thatch held the warmth of the day, and that her breath was smoking.

"Dorrit," she said, not loudly.

"What?"

"It's getting cold."

Below her, Dorrit breathed out, and Wren saw her breath smoke too, pale in the torchlight. Along the hedge, one by one, people were noticing. Someone said, "Is it me, or—" Someone else said, "Hush."

The frost came first, down the road from the mountains. Wren saw it before she understood it: a whiteness spreading on the fields beyond the hedge, creeping over the grass, running along the ruts of the road as fast as a man walks. It reached the stubble of the barley field and turned it white. It reached the orchard, and the leaves on the nearest apple trees crackled and curled, and then it reached the hedge, and Wren heard the hawthorn leaves ticking as they froze.

Then she saw them, coming down the road and across the fields on either side of it, out of the dark under the mountains. They kept no line, but spread out wide across the white fields, each one alone, and they all walked at the same pace, slowly, steadily, toward Fallowmere, with their pale faces showing against the dark. Wren tried to see how many, and gave up at twenty, for there were more behind.

"Mother of mercy," said Dorrit below her.

They were close enough now to see: men in long coats like the one on the high pasture, and women in heavy skirts that dragged in the frost. There was a man with no coat at all, only a shirt, his arms bare and blue, and a tall woman with her hair loose to her waist. There was one small one, walking between two big ones, no taller than Posy Millson, and Wren stopped looking at that one.

Someone on the hedge began to pray aloud, and someone else was being sick. Perrin Cole at the gate said, in a voice that carried across the whole yard, "Light up. Light them all. Now."

Torches flared along the hedge. Wren leaned over, opened the lantern and thrust her torch into it, and when it caught she jammed it back into the thatch. The light made the dark beyond the hedge darker, and in that dark, fifty yards off, the white faces came on.

At forty yards they began to run.

It happened all at once, when they smelled the warmth, the fire and the breath and the blood of thirty living people, and they came for it, and they were fast. They ran with their arms out and their mouths open, and they made no sound except the crunch of the frost under their feet.

Wren fitted a stone to her sling and stood up on the ridge of the barn.

The first one to reach the hedge was the man in the shirt.

He hit it at the corner by the barn, where the Hedley cousins were. He did not try to climb it, but went into the thorns and tore his way through, and they ripped his bare blue arms and he did not care. Davey Hedley thrust at him with a pitchfork, and the tines went into his chest, and he kept coming, pushing himself along the shaft, reaching for Davey's hands.

Wren slung, and the stone hit him in the side of the head with a crack she heard from the roof. He staggered sideways with his head the wrong shape now. Davey's brother shoved a torch into his face and he went up with a hiss of steam and a crackle, and that scream came out of him, the breathless one, the one from the hollow.

Then they were all along the hedge.

Wren slung and slung, at knees and heads. A stone to the knee brought them down, and when they were down, the men on the hedge could get at them with fire. She hit a woman in a long skirt on the kneecap and saw her fold. She hit a man in the face and he did not even slow, and missed one, and the stone went away into the dark. Her arm burned. She reached into the bag and found stones and slung them, and reached and slung.

Below her in the yard, everything was noise and fire.

Garret's sons were at the orchard hedge, back to back, with a torch each and a flail. A faded got through between them and took hold of the elder one's arm, and he screamed. Garret hit it on the back of the head with a billhook, again and again, until it let go. Arn Pike was shouting. Tam Hollin had dropped his pitchfork and was beating at a faded with his torch, and the faded caught fire, and Tam's sleeve caught fire, and he rolled on the ground yelling. A dog had come from somewhere and was barking madly in the middle of the yard.

Dorrit was at the barn door with her hay-fork.

A faded came through the hedge by the barn and straight at her, one of the women. Dorrit set her feet and took it on the fork, square in the chest, and the iron tines went in and out of its back. It did not stop, but reached along the shaft for her. Dorrit roared something Wren couldn't hear and shoved, all her weight behind it, and ran it backward across the yard and pinned it against the water-trough. It thrashed, its hands clawing at the air a foot from her face.

"Somebody!" Dorrit yelled. "Somebody burn this cow!"

Davey Hedley came with his torch, and the faded went up. Dorrit wrenched her fork out of it and turned round, panting, looking for the next.

At the gate, Perrin Cole stood firm.

They came at the gate thickest, because the road led to it and the frost ran straight up the road. Perrin stood inside it with his hammer, and when they reached over the top bar, he broke them. A faded got its arms over the bar, and he brought the hammer down on its forearm, and the arm snapped, and the iron head seemed to hurt it worse than the break. It fell back. He took the next on the side of the head, and at the next he swung and missed and swung again. He was seventy-odd years old, and he swung a smith's hammer one-handed and bellowed at them.

"Come on, then! Come on! I've been waiting all day!"

Wren reached into her stone-bag, and her fingers met cloth. She grabbed the second bag and found it half empty already, though she hadn't known she'd used so many. She slung three more, fast, and the third missed, and she looked into the bag and there were two stones left.

"Dorrit!" she shouted. "Stones! I need stones!"

"I haven't got any stones!"

"By the kitchen door! The bucket by the kitchen door!"

"I'm busy!"

Dorrit was pinning another one with the fork, and there was nobody else free. Wren slid down the thatch on her backside, caught the edge of the roof, and dropped into the yard. She landed hard and rolled, and her ankle twisted under her, and held. She got up and ran across the yard toward the house.

The kitchen door was open, and the bucket of river stones stood beside it where she had left it at dusk. She grabbed it, and through the open door she saw her grandmother.

Tansy was at the kitchen table, with the lamp moved to the far end and turned low. The west window was open, both shutters flung back, and the night air came in cold across the table and the book. Beyond the window, framed in it, the Cloudwall stood up black against the stars. The Stair zigzagged up it, a pale thread, white with the frost the dead had brought down.

Tansy had the pen in her hand and the black bottle open, and the Waybook lay in front of her, open at a blank space below the last faded lines.

She was writing. Wren stood in the doorway with the bucket in her hands and watched Tansy's hand move slowly across the page, her face bent close to it, white and set, with sweat on her lip. The ink came out of the pen black, and then, as Wren watched, it ran silver along the line, a bright quick silver.

The air in the kitchen went cold, a clean sharp cold with no frost in it. The hair stood up on Wren's arms.

Tansy was writing in the old script, which Wren could not read. But she had seen the last page by lamplight, and she had heard Tansy say what it said. She knew what the words were. The Stair is—

"Granna," Wren said.

"Go away, child."

"What are you doing?"

"What I should have done yesterday." Tansy did not look up. Her hand was shaking. She steadied it with her other hand round the wrist and moved the pen on. "Go and fight. Leave me be."

Something moved at the window. A hand came over the sill, gray-blue in the lamplight, and then another hand, and then a man's head with white eyes and frost in its hair, hauling itself up out of the dark outside. It had come round the back of the house, through the bee-yard, and seen the light or felt the warmth, and it had come to the one window in the house that was open.

"Granna!"

Tansy looked up as the faded came in over the sill in one heave and fell across the end of the table. The lamp went over. Its hand shot out and closed on Tansy's right hand, on the pen, on the page.

Tansy did not scream, but hissed through her teeth, and Wren saw her hand go white under its fingers.

Wren dropped the bucket. The fire-iron stood in the hearth, a heavy iron poker as long as her arm, and she had it before she knew she had moved. She swung it two-handed and brought it down on the faded's arm above the elbow, and felt the bone go.

It did not let go.

She hit it again, on the same place, and the iron bit, and the thing jerked and turned its open mouth toward her. She hit it in the face with the poker, as hard as she had ever hit anything. It went over backward off the table onto the flags, and its hand came away from Tansy's.

It started to get up. The lamp lay on its side on the floor, the glass cracked, oil pooling out round the wick, the flame burning on, small and blue. Wren kicked the lamp across the floor into the faded's chest, and the oil splashed over its coat and caught.

It went up with a hiss and the breathless scream, and thrashed on the floor. Wren stood over it with the poker and hit it every time it tried to rise, until it stopped trying, and the kitchen stank of burning, and the smoke rolled up to the beams.

Then she turned round. Tansy sat at the table with her right hand held up in front of her, white from the fingertips to the wrist, the fingers bent into claws round a pen that lay on the floor. On the page, where the line had been going, there was a long smear of ink from where the hand had been dragged across it.

They both looked at the line, still silver. As they watched, the silver dimmed and went gray, the gray of the last lines on the page above. Then the gray faded, fast, until there was nothing on the page but a clean brown space, and a smear, and a little smoke from the fire on the floor drifting across it.

"Granna," Wren said. "Your hand."

"I know about my hand." Tansy's voice was quite steady. "Get the shutters. Then get Dorrit. Then get back out there. Go."

Wren slammed the west shutters and dropped the bar across them, and picked up the bucket of stones. At the door she turned and looked back. Tansy sat straight in her chair with her ruined hand held up, her left hand flat on the Waybook, and her eyes on the shutters.

"Go," said Tansy.

The yard was worse. The faded were through the hedge in three places now, and there were fires everywhere, torches on the ground and burning bodies and a patch of hedge alight by the orchard. People were shouting names. Wren saw Arn Pike on his knees, holding his arm, and Garret dragging one of his sons back from the hedge by his collar.

"Dorrit!" Wren shouted. "Granna's hurt! Kitchen! Go!"

Dorrit looked round, her face black with smoke. She looked at the house, and at the hedge, and back at Wren, and Wren saw her tear herself in half. Then she threw the hay-fork to Davey Hedley and ran for the kitchen.

The gate was going. The faded had stopped reaching over it and were pushing against it now, eight or ten of them heaped against the bars. The gate bowed inward, and the iron nails in it smoked with frost where their hands touched. Perrin Cole stood with his shoulder against it from the inside and his feet dug into the dirt, hitting at the hands and faces on the other side with his hammer.

Wren ran toward him, getting a stone into the sling as she ran, and slung it over his shoulder into a white face.

The top hinge of the gate tore out of the post.

The whole gate lurched inward and down, and Perrin went with it. It swung on the bottom hinge and slammed him back against the gatepost, and Wren heard the crack of it from ten yards away. Faded came over the fallen gate, and one of them fell on Perrin.

He got up. She did not know how he got up, with the thing on his back, but he threw it off and hit it with the hammer, and hit the next one. He stood swaying in the gap where the gate had been with blood coming out of his mouth.

"Warden!" someone was screaming. "Warden!"

Alder was in the middle of the yard.

Wren had not seen him in the fight at all. He was standing near the well with his staff planted in the ground in front of him and both hands on it, his head bowed, his brown cloak hanging from his shoulders like folded wings. Very tall and very thin, he stood among the burning and the running with his lips moving, and then he lifted his head.

The air went cold. It was the same cold Wren had felt in the kitchen, but a hundred times stronger, and bright. The starlight and the torchlight and the fires all seemed to sharpen, every edge drawn in ink. The noise of the fight went away, and Wren's ears rang.

Alder spoke. She heard it, and she could never afterward say what she heard: one word, one sound, short and hard. It did not seem to come from him at all, but from very far away, from the other side of the mountains, from under the ground. It arrived in the yard at the moment it left his mouth.

Fire came up out of the ground.

It came up along the line of the hedge, all the way round, in a single roaring sheet, out of the bare earth where there was nothing to burn. It ran along the bee-yard fence and across the gap where the gate had been. It was a wall of yellow-white flame higher than a man, so hot that Wren threw her arm across her face and fell back a step. It ran round all of Fallowmere, yard and house and barn and hedge, in one ring, and closed.

The faded on the line burned, not slowly, like the ones they had lit with torches, but all at once. They were in the fire, and then they were the fire, and the breathless screaming came from all round the ring at once, dozens of voices, and then stopped. The ones still in the fields outside came on, because they did not know how to do anything else, and walked into the ring and burned. Wren watched a tall woman with her hair to her waist walk into it, and go up, and fall.

Inside the ring, eight or nine faded were loose in the yard, and the villagers fell on them. With the fire at their backs they were not frightened any more but furious. They drove the faded back into the flames with pitchforks and flails and billhooks and bare hands, and the flames took them.

Wren stood in the middle of the yard with her sling hanging from her fingers.

Alder was on his knees by the well with his staff fallen beside him, holding himself up with both hands on the stone rim, his head hanging, shaking all over. His face, when she knelt by him, was the gray of ash, and his lips were blue.

"Alder."

"I am quite well," he said. His voice was a thread. "Quite well. Help me sit, if you would."

She helped him to sit with his back against the well, and he shut his eyes.

"What was that?" she said. "What did you do?"

"Later," said Alder. "I will tell you later. See to your people."

The fire burned for about an hour.

It burned without fuel, on bare earth and on the stones of the lane, a steady waist-high wall of flame that did not spread and did not die down. After the first rush nothing tried to come through it, and beyond it, on the white fields, nothing moved.

Inside the ring, they found Perrin Cole sitting against the gatepost.

He had his hammer across his knees and his chin on his chest, his face gray and blood in his beard. His chest was the wrong shape under his shirt, stove in where the gate had crushed him against the post, and his half-open eyes looked out through the fire at the road.

Wren crouched in front of him and put her fingers on his neck, as Dorrit had taught her, and felt nothing.

His skin was warm, and that was the thing she would remember afterward. The cold had never got into him. The dead had put their hands on him and he had thrown them off, every time, and he had died warm, of the gate.

Davey Hedley came and stood behind her. Then came Garret, with his arm round his son, and then more of them, one after another, until half the people in the yard stood round the gatepost in the firelight looking at the smith.

"He said he'd been waiting all day," Davey said.

Nobody laughed. But Garret nodded.

The fire went down all at once, long before first light. One moment it was a wall, and the next there was only bare scorched earth in a ring round the farm, smoking, and the smell. Nobody went home. They sat along the broken hedge with their torches until the sky grayed, and nothing more came down the road. By then the frost had gone from the fields and left them black where the dead had burned. When the sun came up behind the eastern hills, the light came across the valley and lay on the yard and the burned hedge and the fallen gate, and on the black heaps in the black ring. The smoke went straight up in the still air.

Wren went into the kitchen. Dorrit had cleaned it, dragged the body out and scrubbed the flags, and opened the east shutters to let the gray dawn in. Tansy sat at the table where she had sat all night, her right hand on a folded cloth in front of her, bound up in linen to the wrist and spotted dark where the blisters had broken. Dorrit stood behind her chair with her arms folded and her face swollen from crying and her mouth set.

The Waybook lay in front of Tansy, shut. The black bottle of ink stood beside it with the cork in.

Tansy did not look up when Wren came in. She was looking at her hand, and she moved the fingers, or tried to, and they moved a very little, stiffly, and stopped.

She looked at them a while longer, and then she looked up at Wren, standing in the doorway with smoke in her hair and a sling in her hand.

"Well," said Tansy. "It's you, then."

With her left hand, she pushed the Waybook across the table.