Chapter 557 - 556: People Who Cannot Be Told

Chapter 557: Chapter 556: People Who Cannot Be Told

Location:Seven Peaks — The Hall; The Lower Drill Yard; The North Gate

Date/Time:TC1857.03.25 – TC1857.04.03

The room was too bright for what happened in it, and Raven noticed that afterward rather than at the time.

Somebody had opened the shutters on the east side because the morning was clear for the first time in a fortnight, and the light came in low and flat across the table and made everything look scrubbed and ordinary — the water jug, the ink, Ostrek’s hands, the two Northerners standing rather than sitting because they had been offered chairs and had looked at them the way you look at a thing somebody has left in your way.

Bjorn stood at the end of the table to carry it. Freya had come and had not been asked to, and nobody had said anything about it.

Aren came in behind them and sat down on the bench against the wall with his hands on his knees.

Raven had been told he was going to say something and had not been told what, and had made a decision on the way down not to protect him from it, which she was going to have to think about later.

***

The woman went first, and she did not do speaking-for, because that had been done and this was something else.

She talked for a little over an hour, and Bjorn carried it, and Ostrek wrote, and Lin Yue did not write anything at all and simply watched her hands.

The six that worked. All six were done by two people, not one — one man in front to take the folded arms, one from the side. All six were done when the animal was moving forward rather than turning. Four of the six were on hard ground; two were in snow deep enough to slow it, and the woman was careful to say she did not know whether the snow mattered and had not seen it enough times to say. The edge went in behind the plate at the base of the skull, angled down and forward. Angled down. She said that twice and made Bjorn say it twice.

The five that failed. Twelve men had gone at a throat since the deep winter. Six had done it and lived. Five had failed in front of somebody who came home. The twelfth was a man on his own on the high shoulder above one of the emptied settlements, and nobody had seen what he did or how it went wrong, and the woman would not put him in either column and had walked two ranges partly so that somebody would write that down.

Four of the five, the man went in from the front alone and got the folded arms. She described what that looks like in a way that Raven did not need and did not stop her from giving, because Ostrek had a column for it.

The fifth was the one she had walked two ranges to say.

"The head came around further than a head should," Bjorn translated. "She says the man was at the correct place, and he was behind the plate, and it turned its head back along its own body and took him. She says she has thought about it every day since. She says she has never seen a thing with a neck do that, and she wants it written down that she is not certain what she saw, only that the man did everything correctly and the head reached him."

Ostrek’s pen had stopped.

"How far around," she said.

Bjorn asked. The woman put her hand up at her own shoulder and rotated it back past her spine and held it there, and the room got very quiet.

"That is not a joint doing that," Lin Yue answered.

"No."

"Write it as observed," Ostrek told her. "Not as a finding. Observed, once, by one person, at distance, in poor light." She was already ruling her column. "And leave the answer blank."

***

Aren said his piece at the end, and it took him about forty seconds.

He stood up to do it, which nobody had told him to do, and he said it in Old Northern first and then again in the common tongue, because he had worked out on his own that the exiles should hear it in their own words and the room should hear it in its.

"Two hundred and six children is a lot of children for a clan that isn’t having any." He had his hands at his sides. "You’re not sending them because you love them. You’re sending them because if the children are gone, there’s nothing left to give the ground, and then the people at home who want to do the old thing can’t do it. You’re not asking her to save them. You’re asking her to take them out of reach."

The older Northerner looked at him for a long moment.

Then he said something short.

"He says: yes," Bjorn said. His voice had gone flat in the way it did. "He says that is exactly the ask and nobody in the north would have said it out loud in a room, and he is glad it was a child who did, because a child saying it means nobody has to be blamed for saying it."

"Ask him whether it changes anything," Raven put in.

Bjorn asked. The answer was longer.

"He says it changes nothing about what he wants and everything about what she should know she is doing. He says if she takes the children, she is not helping his clan; she is taking a side in an argument inside it, and the side she is taking will lose the argument at home for a generation, and the people on the other side will remember who made them lose." Bjorn stopped, and then went on. "He says he is telling her this because she counted the second number."

Raven turned to Aren, who had sat back down.

"Thank you," Raven told him. "That was the most useful thing anybody said this morning and you’re going to have to keep doing it."

***

The frame went up in the lower yard the next day, and it was a horrible thing to look at.

Silas’s people built it from the measurements he had brought back and from Ostrek’s older sheets: a body-length of banded timber on a wheeled trestle, the height right, the width right, the head-plate mocked in strapped oak with a gap behind it at the base where a blade could go. Two arms of ash on long pivots, weighted, folded up against the front.

You could not train against it standing still. That was the point. Two people ran it on ropes from the sides and made it come forward at you, and the arms were on releases, and if you were in the wrong place, the ash came around and hit you.

They padded the ends. It still hit you.

Raven took her turn on the first morning with everybody else and got it wrong twice, which she had expected and had wanted the yard to see. The frame came at her faster than a thing that size should move because two strong people on ropes can do a great deal in three paces, and the trick was not the strike at all. The trick was that you had to give up the space you wanted to keep. Everything she had built across a very long time said do not close with something whose reach is longer than yours. The whole of the measure was closing with it anyway, on purpose, in the half second before the arms came around, and standing in the one place where an animal built entirely out of reach could not use any of it.

She got it on the third pass and the oak took the gap behind the strapped head-plate with a sound like a door shutting, and she stood there afterward with the frame rolling past her shoulder and understood exactly why six out of twelve.

"It’s obscene," Mira observed, on the first afternoon, from the fence.

"It is."

"How many am I going to get out of this?"

Raven watched the line. "Two or three a day for the first week, I’d think. Fingers and forearms mostly. Then it’ll drop."

"And how many would I get if we didn’t build it?"

"That’s why it’s there."

***

Kairos went through it on the fourth morning like a man being taught to dance by somebody he had personally offended.

He got it wrong in an entirely different way from everybody else, which the woman who watched found interesting enough to come to the fence for. Everybody else went too early. Kairos went too late — he stood in a place where nothing could reach him and waited to be certain, and by the time he was certain, the frame had gone past and the moment was over, and he would have been standing behind a thing that was already killing somebody else.

She said something. Bjorn, at the fence, did not soften it.

"She says he is fighting it like it might change its mind."

"Tell her that is an accurate description of everything I have done for a very long time," Kairos said.

"She says: go now. Not when you’re sure. Now."

He went on the next pass, too early, and took the ash arm across the ribs on the left side, and sat down in the dirt with his eyes shut and his mouth in a line, and did not say anything for a while.

Mira came over the fence, and Raven got there first, and he put his good hand up before either of them arrived.

"I am aware," he reported, without opening his eyes.

"You’re going to be aware for another month."

"Yes." He got his breath. "It went in behind the plate on that pass. I felt it go in. I would like that recorded next to the ribs, because I have been in this world a long time and I have not been taught anything since — " he stopped, and started again, and it was the most careful thing she had seen him do all year. "In a long time. And a woman from a country that doesn’t write has just taught me something in three days."

The woman said something else.

"She says he should stop talking and do it again while the arm is still hurting, because that is when it goes in."

***

The first children came up the north road on the second of the fourth month, and there were three of them, and nobody had expected them to be alone.

A girl of about ten and two smaller boys, one of whom was her brother and one of whom was not, and they had come the last stage with a Confederacy carter who had picked them up on the Windbreak fork and brought them the rest of the way and would not take anything for it and left before anybody got his name.

They were fed at the gate before anybody asked them a single question, which was a Confederacy custom and not a Seven Peaks one, and which Naida had put into the gate orders after Windbreak, and which Raven had signed without thinking hard about it and now stood watching and was glad of.

They were thin in the way children get when the food has been adequate and dull for a long time rather than absent, and the smaller boy had frostbite scars on both ears, old ones, from a winter that was not this one. None of the three cried. The girl watched everybody’s hands.

The girl had a list.

It was not written. She had it in her head, and she gave it out at the gate, standing, with her hands behind her back the way she had obviously been drilled: eleven more coming behind them, in two groups, and the names of the settlements they were from, and the number of days between the groups, and the name of the woman at the head of the second group, and a message for Bjorn Frostborn which she declined to give to anybody except Bjorn Frostborn.

Bjorn came down. She gave it to him. He listened without any expression at all and then said, "Thank you," and did not translate it, and Raven did not ask him to and made a note to ask him in three days.

"Eleven more," Freya repeated.

"Then two hundred and six was the ask and the arithmetic is going to be different." Raven was watching the two boys eat. "Get the east barracks opened and get Mei to organize it, and tell her she’s allowed to say no."

"She won’t say no."

"I know. Tell her anyway."

***

Sera Vahn came to find her that evening and did not sit down.

"The list."

Raven had been waiting for it for two weeks and had been aware every day that she was waiting rather than doing.

"I know."

"You said end of the week. That was six weeks ago." Sera Vahn did not raise her voice, and Raven had learned by now that this was the most serious version of her. "I have not asked once, and I want you to notice that I have not asked once, because I have been telling people it’s coming, and I have been trading on your name to do it. That was a choice I made. It’s running out."

"It’s written."

"Then it isn’t the writing."

"No." Raven had been carrying it in her coat for nine days. She took it out. "It’s that I read it back and it’s short. Four things. That’s all there is. Everything else I can put in front of the Federation is something they don’t want, and the four things they do want are on this page, and I keep looking at it and thinking there ought to be more."

"Let me see it."

Raven gave it to her.

Sera Vahn read it standing, in the corridor, in the failing light, and read it twice, and gave it back.

"It’s four things."

"Then it goes up tonight." She allowed nothing into it at all. "Not because it’s good. Because my people have spent six weeks deciding what they think is on it, and every single version they’ve invented is worse than four things, and the longest anybody has ever been able to live standing next to a blank is about a fortnight."

***

It went up on the wall in the north camp that night, next to nothing, on its own, in Raven’s hand.

Four lines. What she would put on the table with the Unified Federation, in order.

Nobody came to look at it in the dark, which Raven had half expected and had prepared herself for. They came in the morning, in ones and twos, on their way to other things, and stopped, and read it, and went on to the other things.

By the middle of the day somebody had written underneath it, in charcoal, in a hand nobody claimed.

Where’s the fifth?

Raven looked at that for a while.

Then she borrowed the charcoal off the fence post where it had been left, and wrote under it, and did not sign it because it did not need signing.

There isn’t one yet. When there is, it goes here.