The Keeper's Hand

They buried Perrin Cole in the afternoon, in the burying-ground above the mill, where the Coles had been buried since there were Coles in Dall.

Half the valley came, and the other half was asleep, or sitting in the inn with bandaged arms, or too frightened to leave the house. The ones who came stood in the long grass among the leaning stones with their hats in their hands. Some of them had burns on their faces, and all of them looked as if they had not slept. The sun was hot, and bees were working the clover between the graves. Down below, the mill-wheel turned and turned, because nobody had thought to stop it.

Perrin left a grandson, Ned Cole, who was seventeen and stood white to the lips beside his widowed mother at the graveside. The men who had stood the hedge with Perrin carried him. Ned took the head, with Davey Hedley and Garret and Garret's two sons, and Arn Pike with his arm in a sling, and they bore that heavy man up the path from the lane as best they could. They put him in the ground with his hammer, because Ned said he would want it.

Then there was nobody to speak. The parson had gone to Marlford for the fair and would not be back until the end of the week, and people looked at each other. Hobb Millson, who had cried all the way up the hill, tried to say something, and cried harder, and gave up. Wren stood at the back with Dorrit and Alder, and wished she had words.

Cob Hedley stepped up to the grave.

His left arm was strapped across his chest in a clean sling, with the hand wrapped in linen to the size of a loaf. His face was yellow-gray under its brown. He had not been able to shave, and he had not been able to button his coat, and someone had buttoned it for him wrong. He stood at the foot of the grave and looked down into it.

"Perrin Cole," he said. "Fifty years." He stopped, and everybody waited, and then he went on. "Fifty years I've known him. Fifty years he told everyone in this valley about that hat. The hat I saw on the high pasture, that I thought was a sheep with the rot." He swallowed. "And I've always said it wasn't mine. Every time. Every time he told it, I said, it wasn't mine, Perrin, mine was brown."

He looked round at them all. "It was mine," he said. "It was my hat. I lied. I lied for fifty years to that man, because I couldn't stand him being right." He looked back into the grave. "You were right, Perrin, you old sod. It was my hat. And you were wrong about the frost, and you took it back in front of everyone, which was more than I ever did. So there."

He stood there a moment more. Then he turned and walked away down the hill, holding his arm, with his shoulders shaking.

For a moment the only sound was the mill-wheel. Then, somewhere at the back, somebody laughed, a wet, choked laugh, and somebody else did too, and Hobb Millson put his face in his big red hands and laughed and cried together. And Wren found she was laughing as well, with the tears running down her face, and Dorrit had hold of her arm hard enough to bruise.

They filled the grave in, and Garret's sons cut a slab of turf to lay on top, and Ned set a horseshoe at its head.

The pit for the others was on the far side of the barley field, well away from the house. The men had dug it that morning and dragged the black remains into it with hay-rakes, because nobody would touch them. They covered them with lime from the mill and then with earth, and no one said words over them, because no one knew what words to say.

Cob and Hobb came up to Fallowmere at dusk, in Hobb's trap, with a loaf and a crock of dripping and the news.

"We went up the lane as far as the last wall," Hobb said. "Me and Cob and the Hedley boys. Took the trap as far as it'd go and walked the rest. Had a good look."

"And?" said Tansy.

"Nothing," said Cob. "Nothing on the road. Nothing on the switchbacks. I looked till my eyes ached. Nobody standing up there now. Not a soul." He shook his head. "Not a sheep, neither. Not one of my sheep. Brindle's gone from the hollow. There's just the burned patch where the heather went."

"Is the frost gone?"

"All gone. Green as you like."

"For now," said Alder.

They all looked at him, sitting by the hearth in Tansy's second-best chair with a shawl round his shoulders in the heat and a cup of tea he held in both hands. He had been gray all day, and he moved stiffly and slowly, and when he held the cup his hands shook enough to make the tea shiver.

"For now," he said again. "I would not trust it."

"Nobody's trusting anything," said Tansy. "Hobb, thank you for the bread. Go home. Cob, go home, and do what Dorrit tells you with that hand, or I'll come down and do it myself."

"Yes, Mistress Fallowmere."

"And Cob."

He turned at the door. "That was well said," Tansy said. "At the grave. He'd have liked that."

Cob went red to the ears and went out.

When they had gone, Tansy said, "Shut the door. Sit down. All of you."

Wren shut the door and sat, and Dorrit pulled out the bench and sat beside her. Alder came from the hearth with his tea and lowered himself into the chair at the table's foot, carefully, joint by joint.

The Waybook lay on the table between them, where it had lain all day, for nobody had put it back in the box.

Tansy sat in her chair at the head of the table with her right hand in her lap. Dorrit had dressed it again that afternoon, with a salve of comfrey and honey, and bound it in clean linen. Wren had watched her do it. She had seen the hand: the fingers swollen and dark at the tips, the palm blistered black, the skin across the back of it hard and white and shiny as old wax. Tansy had watched her own hand being dressed without a sound.

"Will it mend?" Wren had asked afterward, outside, by the pump.

Dorrit had pumped water over her arms a good while before she answered. "Some," she said. "It'll heal over. She'll keep the fingers, I think. Most of them." She shook the water off her hands. "It'll never close properly again. She'll not grip a spoon with it. Or a pen."

Now Tansy sat at the head of the table and looked at the three of them, at Dorrit, and at Alder, and last of all at Wren.

"You'll want to know what I was doing last night," she said.

"Yes," said Wren.

"I was writing."

"I saw that."

"I was writing the Stair shut. And I didn't finish, and it didn't take, and I've lost my hand for it." Tansy said it quite calmly, as if she were telling them the price of wool. "So now I'll tell you what the book is. I should have told you years ago. I didn't. That's my fault and nobody else's, and you can shout at me afterward."

"I will," said Wren.

"I know you will. Be quiet and listen."

She put her left hand flat on the cover of the Waybook. "It's a road-book," she said. "You know that much. The old Survey made it, in the West, before the Frost. The maps are their maps. The roads are their roads. And the man who carried it over the mountains was a Fallowmere, and it's been in this house ever since, and one of us has always been its keeper. My grandmother. My mother. Me."

"Why not my mother?" said Wren.

"Because I was still alive. It's the hand that holds the pen, child, not the one that's waiting. Your mother would have had it after me. She died first." Tansy did not look away. "Now listen. What a keeper writes in this book comes true."

"Anything?" said Dorrit.

"Not anything," said Tansy. "Not what you'd like. You can't write my hand is mended and have it mend. You can't write gold, or rain, or a man's heart. It won't take a name. Not out here. My grandmother said only the Roll takes names, and the Roll's in the Hall. It's a road-book, and it'll only write about the road. A bridge. A ford. A wall, a gate, a door. A beacon. A stretch of road. What a road needs. You write it, in this book, in your own hand, with the thing in front of your eyes where you can see it, and it's so."

"That's why the window," Wren said.

"That's why the window. I had to see the Stair." Tansy's mouth twisted. "Much good it did me."

"And if anyone else writes in it?"

"Then it fades. Nobody else can do it. You could write in it, Dorrit, and he could, and the King himself could, and the ink would go off the page in a minute like it was never there. It has to be the keeper's hand."

Dorrit was staring at the book. "Gods' teeth," she said softly. "You could build a bridge. With a pen."

"You could."

"Then why don't you? Why haven't you? The ford at Marlford's been bad for years, and there's the bridge at Hobb's that floods every spring, and—"

"Because it costs," said Tansy.

She said it sharp, and Dorrit stopped.

"Everything you write," Tansy said, "the book takes something back. It takes a memory. One thing you remember. Not any old thing, either. Something you love. Something you'd keep if you could only keep one. And you don't choose it. The book chooses. You write your line, and you feel it go." She was quiet for a moment. "It's cold. Like a tooth pulled. There's a gap where it was, and you go looking for it, and there's nothing there. You know you had it. You know what it was. You just can't find it any more. And you never will."

The kitchen was so quiet that they could hear the clock ticking on the dresser.

"It takes what it wants," Tansy said. "Bigger work, dearer, mostly. It's never been fair about it. Write a big thing—" She stopped. "Well. You'd better not."

"Have you done it?" Wren said. "Before last night?"

Tansy looked at her, and for the first time that evening she looked old. "Once," she said.

"I was twenty-nine," said Tansy. "It was the spring your great-uncle Robin was drowned, the year of the big flood. You'll have heard about the flood."

"The Elmcross flood," said Dorrit.

"The Elmcross flood. The river came up in the night, all the way down the valley, and took the bridge at Elmcross, and half the town with it. And there was a cart." Tansy's voice did not change. "There was a cart on the east bank, from the charity school, taking the children up to higher ground. A cartload of children, and a schoolmistress, and a carter. And the water had cut the road behind them and it was coming up round the wheels, and the ford was gone. It was just water. Brown water, and the whole river going down it, trees and dead sheep and roofs. And no way across."

"You were there," said Wren.

"I'd gone down to Elmcross with the book, to have the clasp mended. I was on the west bank. I was standing on the hill above the ford, with a hundred other people, watching those children scream." She looked down at the book. "So I wrote the ford back up."

"I wrote the ford at Elmcross is firm and shallow. Sitting on a wet stone in the rain, with the book on my knees. And I felt my hand go cold, and I saw the ink go silver, and I heard the stones come up under the water. Grinding. Like the river was grinding its teeth. And the water went down over the ford, all at once, knee-deep, and the carter whipped up his horse and brought them across. Every one of them."

"Granna," said Dorrit.

"And then I went looking," said Tansy, "for my mother's voice."

She stopped, and sat with her good hand flat on the book, looking at the lamp. "My mother died when I was twenty," she said. "She used to sing in the dairy, when she was making the cheese. She had a low voice, lower than you'd think. She used to call me in from the orchard. Tansy. Tansy Fallowmere, I'll not call you twice." Her mouth twitched. "I know she said that. I know the words. I can tell you what she looked like, and what she wore, and how she did her hair. But I can't hear it. I sat on that stone in the rain and I went looking for her voice, and it was gone. There was nothing there. Fifty years, and there's still nothing there."

"I've never told anyone that," Tansy said. "Your granddad knew. He's dead. Nobody else."

Wren was on her feet, and did not remember standing up. "You never told me," she said.

"No."

"Twenty-three years. You never told me. You let me oil the leather. You let me carry it to the table every spring. You locked it up and told me it was a book about roads and said keep it in the box, and you never told me what it could do, or what it would do to me—"

"Wren," said Dorrit.

"No. I'm going to shout. She said I could." Wren's voice was shaking. She hated that it was shaking. "What if I'd opened it? What if I'd got the key some night when I was ten and written something in it for a lark? The pond's frozen. The gate's fixed. What if I'd done that and lost Mam? Lost something of her? You'd have let me."

"You'd never have got the key off me."

"That's not the point!"

"I know it's not." Tansy looked up at her. "I know. Sit down, child. You're right, and I was wrong, and I'm sorry. Sit down."

Wren stood there a moment longer with her face hot. Then she sat, hard, on the bench, and Dorrit put an arm round her shoulders, and Wren shrugged it off, and Dorrit put it back.

Alder had not spoken all this while, but sat with his cold tea, listening, his long ink-stained fingers laced together. Now he cleared his throat. "If I may," he said.

"You may," said Tansy. "Keep it short."

"I will try. I have never kept anything short in my life, but I will try." He set down the cup. "There is a saying in your family. I heard it fifty years ago at this table. Keep it against the thaw; and when the road opens, the book goes home."

"Every child in this house knows it," said Tansy.

"Just so. And I have thought about it, on and off, for fifty years. I thought about it a great deal on the road from Merrow." He leaned forward. "The College of Wardens is descended from the Survey of Meddan. Or so we believe. We have their learning, some of it, and fragments of their records. And we know this much. When the White Winter came down on the West, the Survey saved what could be saved. The Seven, the masters of the Survey, made a great work in their Hall at Cael Meddan. A binding. They bound something there, something at the root of the Winter, and that binding held the cold back from the rest of the world, and let our forefathers flee east over the Stair and live. The candle in the College was lit from that work. As long as it burned, the binding held."

"And now it doesn't," said Dorrit.

"And now it doesn't. The binding has failed. I do not know why. Time, perhaps. Distance." He looked at the Waybook. "But the binding was made in the Hall, and this book was the Survey's book, and it was carried away from the Hall on the day the work was done. And your family has been told, for three centuries, that when the road opens, the book goes home."

"The road's opening," Wren said.

"It seems so."

"So you think the book goes back to this Hall. And binds it again. Whatever it is."

"I think," Alder said, "that if the keeper of this book were to carry it to the Hall of the Survey, she might restore the work the Seven made. She might set right what was set right once before. It would be—" He spread his long hands. "It would be a great thing. A restoration. It would be the finest thing done by any living person in either kingdom. The Seven were the greatest makers the world has known, and Oriel Vance, their First Surveyor, was the wisest of the Seven. His likeness hangs in every hall of our order. We honor him above them all. To be allowed to finish their—"

"Alder," said Tansy.

"Yes, my dear?"

"You said you'd keep it short."

He closed his mouth. He looked at her, and then down at his hands, and then he smiled a little, ruefully. "So I did," he said. "Forgive me. I have waited fifty years to give that lecture and I find it has grown in the keeping."

"What did you do last night?" said Dorrit.

Alder blinked at her. "The fire," Dorrit said. "Out of nothing. Out of bare dirt. I saw you. You said something and the whole hedge went up. What was it?"

"A word," said Alder.

"What word?"

"One of the old ones. The Wardens keep a few. They are not for everyday use." He picked up his cup and found it empty and set it down again. "One day, when I have the strength for it, I will explain the Words to you in full. It will take some hours. There will be a great deal of history."

"I'll pass," said Dorrit.

"Most people do."

Wren pulled the Waybook toward her. Nobody stopped her. She undid the brass clasp and opened the cover on the first page, soft and brown under the lamp. At the top, in the clear old hand, was the word she had seen a hundred times.

For

And after it, a line drawn in ink, running to the edge of the page, and nothing on it.

"Who's it for?" Wren said.

"Nobody knows," said Tansy. "It's always been blank. My grandmother said her grandmother said it fills in when it gets home."

"When the book goes home."

"So they said."

Wren looked at the empty line, and then she turned the pages: past the maps of Dall and the Cloudwall, and the long pages of the Stair with every switchback drawn, to the country beyond. There were roads and rivers and way-houses, and a gorge drawn deep and narrow with a bridge across it, and a town on a crag with a flame drawn above it. Most of the names were in the Survey script, but here and there was one she could read in the ordinary hand, Scarrow or Coldharbour. At the end of the maps, across two whole pages, lay a city on a river, with a great round building on a hill in the middle of it. The name written over it was Cael Meddan.

She put her finger on the round building.

"I'll take it," she said.

Tansy looked at her. "What?"

"I'll take it home. To the Hall. I'll go."

"You will not."

"Somebody has to. You can't. Alder can't write in it, you just said so. There's nobody else." Wren closed the book. "So I'll go."

"You'll do no such thing," said Tansy. "You're twenty-three years old and you've been as far as Marlford. You don't know what's up there. None of us knows what's up there. There are dead men walking out of the mountains, child, and you want to walk up into them with a book and a fiddle and a sling?"

"Yes."

"No."

"Then who?" Wren said. "Tell me who, Granna. Tell me who else, and I'll stay home and keep bees."

Tansy opened her mouth, and shut it again. She looked at Wren across the table, and Wren looked back and did not look away, while the clock ticked and a moth battered at the lamp glass.

"There's nobody," said Tansy at last. Her voice had gone quiet. "Is there."

"No."

"Damn it," said Tansy, who never swore. She put her good hand over her eyes. "Damn it all."

"The Crown's riders will come," said Alder gently. "In a few days. They will bring arms and supplies, and men who know the mountains better than I do. She would not go alone. I would go with her myself."

"You?" said Tansy, not moving her hand. "You couldn't walk up my lane this morning without stopping for breath."

"I will be better tomorrow. And I have walked further on worse legs."

"I'm coming too," said Dorrit.

Everyone turned and looked at her. "What?" said Dorrit. "Don't look at me like that. Somebody's got to. Somebody's got to carry the salve and stitch her up when she falls off something, and it won't be him." She jerked her head at Alder. "No offense."

"None taken."

"Dorrit," said Wren, "you can't—"

"Can't what? Can't come?" Dorrit folded her arms. "I'd like to see you stop me. Go on. Try. I'm bigger than you and I've got a hay-fork." She looked at Tansy. "I said I wanted to see the world, Granna. I said it at this table three days ago. I meant the sea, and a quince, and Merrow. I'll take what's going."

"You'll get yourself killed," said Tansy.

"Very likely. So will she. I'd rather be there when she does it."

Tansy took her hand from her eyes and looked at the two of them, side by side on the bench. Then she looked at Alder. "Look at them," she said. "Look at what I raised."

"I am looking, my dear," said Alder. "I think you did well."

"I think I did it wrong from start to finish." Tansy pushed herself up out of her chair, slowly, on her stick. She stood for a moment with her ruined hand held against her chest. "I'm going to bed. Don't any of you talk to me until the morning."

She went out, and they heard her stick on the stairs, and her door close.

Dorrit let out a breath. "Well," she said. "That went better than I thought."

Wren could not sleep. A little after midnight she got up and dressed in the dark. She took the Waybook from the kitchen table, where it lay, and her mother's fiddle from its peg by the hearth, and went out through the back door into the bee-yard.

The night was warm and clear, without frost. There was no moon, but the stars were thick, and the white hives stood pale in their two rows. At the end of the yard, the three old straw skeps squatted on their bench like old women in bonnets.

She sat down on the grass between the rows with the book in her lap.

There was a custom in Dall that when anything happened in a house that kept bees, a birth or a wedding or a death or somebody going away, you told them. You went out to the hives and knocked on each one and told them the news, and if you didn't, the bees took offense and left, or sickened and died. Wren had done it when she was seven, when her mother died. Tansy had taken her out by the hand and stood with her while she knocked on every hive and said, My mam is dead.

She could remember her mother very clearly, out here. She could see her now, if she shut her eyes: bent over a hive with her sleeves rolled up and no veil, as she always worked, laughing at something. She had a wide freckled face and a gap between her front teeth, and hair the same dark as Wren's, coming loose from its pins.

Wren opened her eyes. She got up and went to the first hive and knocked on the lid with her knuckles.

"Perrin Cole is dead," she said. "He died at our gate. He was brave."

She went down the row and knocked on each hive in turn and told it, and when she came to the end of the row she stood a moment, and started again from the beginning.

"I'm going away," she said to the first hive. "I'm going over the mountains. I'm taking the book home. I don't know when I'll be back." She knocked on the next. "I'm going away. Dorrit's coming with me. Granna's staying. Look after her." And the next. "I'm going away."

When she had told them all, she went back and sat down on the grass, and took the fiddle out of its bag, and tucked it under her chin.

She played the Old Reel, slow and quiet, as nobody ever played it at a dance, so that it was almost a lament. She played it up to the high place where it always stopped, and she stopped with it, and let the bow rest on the string.

The hives hummed. At night they were usually quiet, a low drowsy murmur if you put your ear to the wood, but now, all along both rows, they hummed together, loud enough to hear from where she sat. It was a deep, even note, and it went on and on, and she felt it in her chest.

"All right," Wren said softly. "All right. I know."

She sat there with the fiddle in her lap and the book beside her and listened to the bees.

Then, under the humming, she heard something else.

It came from very far away, from up the valley, from the mountains, from somewhere high on the Cloudwall where the Stair went up into the dark. It was so faint that at first she thought it was her own blood in her ears.

It was a long, slow, grating sound, metal on stone, and then a pause. Then it came again, closer to her ear than the first time, though it was miles off yet: heavy, and rhythmic, and patient. She had never heard anything like it in her life, but she knew what it was. Anyone would have known.

It was the sound of an iron chain being dragged over rock.

The bees stopped humming.