Chapter 556 - 555: What the Passes Cost

Chapter 556: Chapter 555: What the Passes Cost

Location:Seven Peaks — Bjorn’s forge; the yard outside it

Date/Time:TC1857.03.24

Coal smoke, quench steam, and the flat mineral stink that comes off hot scale — Bjorn had smelled the same three things every working day of his life in two countries, and it was the only part of the world that had not changed on him.

He was making neck tools.

That was what the sheet from the north road came down to when you took the words off it. One method left, behind the head-plate, into the joint, and be right the first time. So: a straight edge, short, heavy in the spine and thin at the point, on a haft long enough to reach and short enough to drive. He had made a dozen of them since the sheet came and had thrown four of those back in the fire because the temper had gone wrong at the shoulder, and he was aware that he was throwing back more than he usually would, and he was aware of why, and he kept doing it.

He was on the next one when Freya came to the forge door and said, "They’re at the gate."

***

They would not come inside.

That was the first thing, and Bjorn had known it would be, and had told the gate people in advance, and they had not believed him until the two of them stopped at the line where the flagging started and simply stopped being willing to go further.

A man of about his own age with a face like the north side of a rock, and a woman younger, with a burn scar across the back of one hand and a way of standing that put her weight on the outside edges of her feet, which is what you get after enough years of ice.

They looked at Bjorn for a long time.

Then the man said, in Old Northern, "Frostborn’s boy. You’re bigger."

"You’re smaller."

"Yes."

That was the greeting. That was all of it. There is a version of the northern manner that people from the south think is coldness, and it is not coldness; it is a rule about wasting things, and words are a thing.

Freya brought them food out to the flagging, and they ate it standing, and Bjorn watched them do it and saw two things at once. They ate the way people eat who have been careful with food for years — nothing left, nothing hurried, the bread turned over once to check it before it went in. And they ate exactly half of what was given them and set the rest down on the stone, the way a northerner does when he has not decided yet whether he is staying.

Behind him the forge was still going, and the smell of it came out into the cold, and the older one’s eyes went to the door twice while he was eating and came back both times without comment.

Then the man said, "We’ll say it now."

"Say it."

"Not to you." He looked past Bjorn’s shoulder at the yard. "To whoever answers for this place. We’ll say it once, and we’ll say it properly, and we’ll not say it twice, and you’ll put it into their words as we go, because we haven’t got the words and we don’t write."

***

Raven came down and did not bring anybody, which Bjorn noticed and thought was correct.

She stopped at a distance that let them decide, and did not put a hand out, and did not say anything about the journey, and waited.

The man began.

It is called speaking-for, and Bjorn had heard it done twice as a boy and never expected to hear it again. It has a shape. The speaker gives the clan, then the count, then the thing, then the ask, and he does not stop in the middle, and he does not answer questions until he is finished, because a clan speaking through a mouth is not a conversation.

Bjorn put it into her language as it came, and he had to stop three times, and none of the three times was because he could not find a word.

The clan. Not named to a southerner. The middle country between two ranges, five day-marches wide, nine hundred people at the last full count, which was two winters ago.

The count. Since the deep winter: four settlements gone. Not raided. Gone — the people in them dead or scattered and the buildings standing untouched. Between two hundred and three hundred dead, and the reason it was a range and not a number was that nobody had been back to two of the settlements.

The thing. He described it without a name for it, because they had no name for it. Long and low and quiet on rock. Four legs and two more folded up in front that came out longer than the legs. It went for the shoulder, and the neck and the bite left almost no blood, and the limb went cold from the inside and never came back. Their spears did nothing to the back. Their spears did nothing to the belly, and no man of theirs had ever been under one with anything but a spear. Two men had opened one at the side of the throat, behind the head, in the first month, and it had worked, and other men had tried the same thing since, and it had worked five more times.

Bjorn stopped there for the first time.

Raven said, quietly, "Say it exactly as he says it."

"He said it exactly," Bjorn answered. "They worked it out themselves. In the first month. With spears, in the snow, with nobody’s sheet."

***

The ask came last, and it was two things, and the second was the one Bjorn had known was coming since the gate.

The first was that the clans had no way to be told anything. No writing. No riders that could cross the passes in winter. Nine hundred people in the middle country and four other clans behind them, and a message took a season, and by the time a thing was known everywhere it had stopped being true. They knew about the throat. They did not know whether there was anything else to know, and they had been assuming for four months that there was.

The second was the children.

The man said it the way he had said the count, without any change in the way he stood.

"Send us nothing," Bjorn translated. "We can’t feed a southerner, and we can’t house one, and a man who does not know the ice will die in a week, and we’ll have to carry him. Send us nothing and come for nothing." He heard his own voice do something and did not stop. "Take the children. Two hundred and six under twelve in the middle country. Take them south until the thing is finished. We will give them, and we will not ask for them back on any terms, because a thing given back is a thing owed, and we can’t pay."

Raven did not move.

"That’s the whole ask?"

"That’s the whole ask."

"Then I’d like to ask him something, and I’d like you to tell me first whether I’m allowed to."

"You’re allowed. He’s finished." Bjorn said it and then added, because she would not know, "He’ll answer once. He won’t argue."

***

She was quiet for long enough that the woman with the burned hand shifted her weight.

"Ask him whether his clan has ever done this before."

Bjorn asked it.

The man answered flatly and at some length, and Bjorn stood in the cold with it for a moment before he turned it around, because he had spent his whole time at Seven Peaks not saying this to anybody and had assumed he would go to his end not saying it.

"He says no. He says the clans have never sent children out." He kept his eyes on Raven. "He says what the clans have always done, when the ground stops giving, and the births stop, is give something back to the ground. He says everybody in the north knows this and nobody in the north talks about it, and he is saying it now because he wants her to understand that the ask is not a small thing dressed up. He says they are asking to send the children away instead, and there are people at home who would rather do the old thing, and the argument is not settled, and he was sent because he lost it."

Freya had put her hand on the doorframe.

Raven said, "He lost it."

"He lost it, and they sent him across two ranges and the whole of the winter to ask a foreigner, which is what you do with a man who lost." Bjorn’s jaw had gone tight, and he let it. "That’s not cruelty. An exile is already dead to a clan. Sending the dead is cheap. If she says no, nobody at home has lost anything, and if she says yes, it wasn’t the clan that asked."

***

He had expected her to say yes.

He had thought about it the whole way down from the wall two days ago and had arrived at the certainty that she would say yes immediately and without consulting anybody, because he had watched her do exactly that once before with a Federation cell full of children and it had cost her the Empire’s good opinion, and she had never once looked like she regretted it.

She did not say yes.

She stood there in the cold and did not say anything for a long time, and when she did speak she spoke to the man directly and waited for Bjorn to carry it, sentence by sentence, which is not a thing southerners usually have the patience for.

"The number is not a difficulty. I want that said first, and I want it said plainly, so that nothing after it can be heard, as we cannot. We can feed them. We have the room, and if we did not have the room, we would build it. That is not the problem, and it is not going to become the problem."

The man waited.

"Here is the problem, and I am going to give it to you as it actually is, because I have spent this whole year learning what it costs to give people three quarters of a thing." She had her hands at her sides. "If I take them, some of them will not go home. Not because I will keep them — because in four years, or eight, they will have grown up somewhere else, with a language they read and a place they belong, and a proportion of them will simply not go north again. I do not know the proportion. Nobody does. It might be one in ten, and it might be half. And your clans are nine hundred people who are already not having enough children."

Bjorn heard the shape of it about a beat before he finished translating it.

"So the honest sentence," Raven went on, "is that I can save two hundred and six children and take an unknown amount of your future while I do it, and that neither you nor I can say how much, and that anybody who tells you otherwise this afternoon is selling you something."

***

The man was quiet for a while after that. It was the first time he had been.

Then he said something short, and Bjorn had to ask him to say it again, and he said it again the same way.

"He says: you’re the first one who has counted us."

"Say that again."

"He says every southerner who has ever come north counted the dead, and none of them ever counted what was left." Bjorn had to stop and start over. "He says the Empire sent a man once about the passes, and the man wrote down how many died in the winter and did not write down how many were born. He says that’s why nobody in the north believes anything from the south. He says she’s the first one who did the second number in front of him."

Raven let that sit and did not take it as a compliment, which Bjorn noted.

"Then here’s what I’ll do, and it isn’t the ask." She turned so she was speaking to both of them. "I’ll take any child whose family sends them, one at a time, for as long as this lasts, and there is no number on it and no limit and no arrangement — I am not doing an agreement with a clan about a fixed number of children, because an agreement is a thing that can be argued about at home by people who would rather do the old thing. I am taking whoever arrives. Anybody who comes to a Seven Peaks gate with a child gets fed, and the child stays as long as they want and goes home the day anybody comes for them, and I will write that down, and Bjorn will say it out loud in the north because your people don’t read.

"And the second half, which is the half I actually want." She looked at the man. "Your two men opened one at the throat in the first month. Nobody told them. They found it in the snow with spears, and it has worked six times in all since, and that is the single most useful thing anybody has said to me this year, and I have a continent full of people who cannot be told anything either." She did not raise her voice. "I want the six. And the five that failed, and why they failed, if anybody watched. That’s not an exchange for the children. The children happen either way. I’m asking separately, and you can say no separately."

Bjorn finished carrying it and then stood in his own yard feeling something he had not expected, which was that he had watched her decline to be the person everybody at Seven Peaks was certain she was.

He had been in the Hall the year she came back from the Federation with the children. He had heard what the Empire said about it afterward, and had heard what she said back, which was nothing, and had drawn his own conclusions about a person who could take that and keep going. Everybody in this settlement believed that if you put a child in front of her, the answer was already written.

It was. She had just refused to let it be written cheaply, in front of the only two people on the continent who would have accepted it cheaply and gone home relieved.

***

The woman with the burned hand spoke for the first time.

She spoke for about a minute, fast and low, and the man did not stop her, which Bjorn understood to be significant and did not explain.

"She’s the one who watched," Bjorn reported. "She was at three of them. She says she can tell you the five that failed. She says four of the five failed because the man went in from the front and got the folded arms, and the fifth failed because the head came around further than a head should, and she wants it understood that she has said this to her own people a great many times and been told that it is not a woman’s business to say how men die."

"Ask her whether she’ll say it to a room."

Bjorn asked.

The answer was one word, and he did not need to translate it, and Raven did not need him to.

***

Aren had been standing at the corner of the forge for most of it.

Bjorn had known he was there for a while and had made a decision not to send him away, and he was not sure it had been the right one and would be turning it over for some time. The boy had his mother’s stillness and his own face, and he had not moved and had not made a sound, and he had understood every word of it in both directions, because Bjorn and Freya had taught him Old Northern the way it is taught, out loud, on the assumption he would never need it.

When the exiles had gone up to the guest ground, and Raven had gone back to the Hall, Aren came over and stood beside the anvil.

"The old thing," he said. "That’s me."

"That was going to be you."

"Two hundred and six." Aren was looking at the tools laid out on the bench, the finished ones with the neck edges. "That’s a lot of children for a clan that’s not having any."

"It is."

"Then they’re not sending them because they love them." He said it evenly, in the flat way he had, and Bjorn felt it go into him under the ribs. "They’re sending them because if the children are gone, there’s nothing left to give the ground. They’re taking the choice away from the people who’d make it."

Bjorn put down the hammer.

"Say that to her," he told him. "Not to me. Tomorrow, in the room, in front of the woman who watched, and say it exactly the way you said it just now."

"She’ll think I’m a child."

"She’ll think you’re the only person in the room who was on the list."