Chapter 558 - 557: The Second Group

Chapter 558: Chapter 557: The Second Group

Location:Seven Peaks — East Barracks; The North Road

Date/Time:TC1857.04.03 – TC1857.04.12

The smallest one would not let go of Mei’s sleeve, and after the first day she stopped trying to make him.

He had a grip like a bird’s foot, two fingers and a thumb closed on the cuff seam, and he did not pull, did not ask for anything, and did not appear to be frightened in any way she could name. He simply attached himself at about hip height on the first morning and stayed there, and walked when she walked, and stood when she stood, and by the second afternoon she had learned to open doors left-handed and to carry a bucket with the wrong arm and to turn a corner slightly wider than she needed to.

Nobody had told her what to do about it. That was the general condition of the east barracks.

She was fifteen, and she had been given a building, three Northern children, four Seven Peaks women who knew more about children than she did, and kept saying whatever you think, and a note from Raven that said You can say no and had been signed, which meant somebody had made a point of signing it.

She had not said no. She had also worked out on the second day that this was not entirely a compliment.

The building had been a barracks and then a store and then nothing for two years, and it smelled of the nothing. She had it swept out in a day and beds in it by the second and had discovered on the third that she had put the beds along the walls, in two rows facing each other, which is how you lay out a barracks, and that all three children had immediately pushed theirs into a corner and slept in a heap.

She moved every bed. Nobody told her to. She stood in the middle of the empty floor for a while first, working out what she had been doing without noticing, and then she moved them all into one end and left the other end empty, because the girl kept going to the far door and looking at how much space was between her and it.

***

The three settled in a way that unsettled everybody who watched it.

They ate everything. They slept properly. They asked for nothing and offered nothing and answered questions accurately, and the girl — Mei had her age at about ten and had learned not to ask — organized the two boys every morning without being asked, and washed, and folded, and stood the three of them in a line at the door at exactly the same time each day waiting to be told what the work was.

On the third morning Mei told her there wasn’t any work.

The girl looked at her for a moment with an expression that Mei would think about for years afterward, and then said, in accented but entirely competent common tongue, "Then what are we for?"

Mei went and found Bjorn about that.

"Give them work," Bjorn answered. He was at the forge, on the neck tools, and he did not look up. "Not to be kind. Because a northern child who isn’t for anything is a child that’s about to be a problem, and because she’s been for something since she could stand and you’ve just taken it off her."

"She’s ten."

"She’s ten, and she carried a list over a pass in her head for a fortnight and did not drop one word of it." He turned the piece. "Give her the youngest ones and the linen and a time to have it done by, and stop looking at her as though she’s had something happen to her. She has. She’d rather you didn’t watch her about it."

***

Raven asked Bjorn about the message on the fourth day, in the barracks yard, in front of Mei, which Mei understood afterward had been deliberate.

Bjorn put down what he was carrying.

"My clan’s gone." He said it the way he said everything. "That’s the message. Not the middle country — mine. The one that put me out. The girl was told to tell me because there’s nobody left who’s obliged to."

Raven did not say she was sorry, which Mei noticed.

"When?"

"Second month. She doesn’t know the day. She knows it because her own people went past it on the way south and there was nothing to go past." He wiped his hands on the leather. "It’s a long way east of the middle country. That’s the part I’ve been sitting on for three days and the part I’d have been better saying out loud on the first one."

"East."

"East and high, and it isn’t on the road between anything." He looked at her. "They didn’t come through my clan on their way to somewhere. There’s nothing past it. Somebody went out of their way."

Nobody said anything for a bit. Mei stood there with the small one’s fingers in her cuff and understood roughly half of it and got cold about the other half anyway.

"Say the rest," Raven said.

"Freya’s people were in that clan." Bjorn picked his load back up. "She’s known since the girl arrived. She asked me not to tell you until I’d stopped being angry about it, and I have not stopped, and I’m telling you anyway because three days is enough."

***

The second group was four days overdue on the seventh of the fourth month.

The girl had given the interval at the gate — the two groups were to leave a day apart and travel the same road, and the first group had made the crossing in nineteen days, and she had said all of this standing with her hands behind her back and had not been wrong about anything yet.

Mei was in the Hall when the decision got made, because she had walked in and sat down at the back and nobody had asked her to leave.

"Half a dozen up and back," Taron was saying. "Small, fast, and it doesn’t stop for anything on the way out. If they’ve broken an axle or lost the road, we find them in a day and a half, and we’re home inside the week."

"And if they haven’t broken an axle," Thorne put in.

"Then it’s a party of people who can all do the neck strike, which is more than anybody in the north has, and I want that said in this room so nobody gets sentimental about the arithmetic later."

Bjorn was going. That had not been discussed; he had simply been standing by the door with a pack when the meeting started.

The woman who watched was going, and had made it clear through Bjorn that this was not a request, and had also made it clear that she considered the whole party inadequate and would be saying so at intervals.

Jace came in halfway through, off the southern circuit, still dusty, and listened for two minutes and said, "I’ll take the front," and Taron said "Good," and that was the whole of that conversation.

Mei stood up.

"You’ve said six," she said. "I’ve counted five."

The room looked at her.

"I’m the one they’ll go to." She had her hands at her sides, and she did not put them behind her back. "If they’re hurt, or if they’ve scattered off the road, or if there’s one of them sitting somewhere who’s stopped talking — they’re not going to come out for Commander Taron. They’re small and they’ve been walking for nineteen days, and the last three of them came out for me because I was the one at the door."

"You’re fifteen," Taron told her.

"I’m a Direct Disciple, and I’ve been in three tournaments, and I can do the strike, and you can test me on the frame in the yard in the next hour if you want to, and I’d rather you did than take my word." She did not look at Raven. "And I’m not asking to fight. I’m asking to be the person who’s standing there when a child comes out of a ditch."

Raven let the silence run for longer than was comfortable.

"Test her on the frame," Raven ruled. "If she passes, she goes, and Jace has her. If she doesn’t, she stays and nobody in this room mentions it again."

The yard was full for it, which she had not wanted and had not been able to prevent, and the two people on the ropes were Corps and did not go easy.

She got hit on the first pass and on the second, hard enough on the second that her whole left side went numb from the shoulder, and she had to stand still for a moment and let her arm stop being useful. She had gone too early both times. She had known she was going too early while she was doing it, which was the part that made her angry, and being angry made the third pass worse.

On the fourth she made herself count. Not to be sure — the Northern woman had been very clear at the fence about waiting to be sure — but to have something to do with the part of her that wanted to move, so that her feet could stay where they were half a second longer than her body wanted. The frame came. The arms stayed folded. She went in under the head-plate on the inside line and the oak took the gap.

It was one worse than Raven had managed and two better than Taron, and nobody said anything about that either.

***

They went north on the eighth and the road was worse than anybody had told her.

Mei had been on the north road as far as the Millford fork twice and had thought she knew it. Past the fork it stopped being a road and became a decision that people had made about where to walk, and after the second day it did not even have that. The land came up in long shoulders of dead grass with the wind coming down them, and there was nothing at the top of any of them, and you went over one, and there was another one.

The Northern woman walked at the back and made them change formation four times on the first day.

She would not let them string out. She would not let them walk a ridge line with the sky behind them. On the second evening she made them move a camp that was already made, three hundred paces, off a flat place and into a fold, and when Jace asked why through Bjorn she said something short, and Bjorn said, "Because you can see that flat place from a long way and so can everything else," and Jace moved the camp.

Mei watched her the whole way and learned more in five days than she had learned in the yard in a month.

She did not carry a weapon on her back. She carried it in her hand, all the time, walking for hours, and when Mei finally asked about it, Bjorn translated the answer without comment: "She says a thing on your back is a thing you own. A thing in your hand is a thing you have."

On the fourth night Jace made her go through the strike again by the fire, with a stick, on him, slowly, six times, and then made her do the part she had described in the Hall — the head coming around further than a head should.

She did it with her own head and her own shoulder, and it was worse to watch than anything she had said about it.

"So if that’s real," Jace said, when she had straightened up, "then the two-man version has a hole in it. The one in front takes the arms. The one at the side goes in behind the plate. And if the head can come back along the body, then the man at the side is the one it reaches, and he’s the one who can’t see it coming, because he’s under it."

Bjorn put that into Old Northern.

The answer was short, and Bjorn took a moment with it.

"She says yes. She says she has known that since she watched it happen, and she has not said it in a room because she was not asked that question, and because a person who says the only thing that works has a hole in it had better be certain, and she is not certain, and she watched it once."

"What do you do about it?"

"She says you put a third one in. Behind. Doing nothing except watching the head. She says that is not doctrine. She says that is what she would do."

Mei got out the small book she had been given for the barracks accounts and wrote it down by firelight, on a blank page at the back, in her own words, with the date.

She was not sure it was hers to write down. She wrote it down anyway.

***

They found the second group’s last camp on the fifth day out.

It was in a fold, which meant somebody in that group had known what the woman who watched knew, and it was tidy, and the tidiness was the part she could not get past afterward. The fire was banked properly and covered. The packs were stacked. Somebody had strung a line between two rocks, and there were three small shirts on it, dry, still pegged.

No people.

No blood that anybody could find, and Jace looked, and the Northern woman looked, and they looked in different ways, and neither of them found any.

Mei went along the line of packs and made herself open them, because somebody had to, and because she had decided on the walk in that she was going to be useful rather than upset, and that she would find out later which of those she had actually managed.

Food in all of them. Spare boots in two. A wooden horse in the third, cut rough and rubbed smooth at the neck by a thumb over a long time, and Mei put it back exactly where it had been and then took it out again and put it in her coat.

Nothing had been rummaged. Nothing had been taken. Whatever had happened in that fold had not wanted anything a person carries.

Bjorn walked the ground twice and then went and stood at the north edge of the fold for a while and came back with his face doing nothing at all.

"Seven sets going out," he said. "Seven children. They walked out of here on their own feet, in a line, north." He waited a moment before he gave her the other half of it. "And no woman. There’s a grown boot all over this camp. There isn’t one going out."

"North." Jace had gone down on one knee.

"North. Back the way they came." He crouched and put two fingers beside a print without touching it. "Not running. The stride’s short and even. That’s a child walking, on flat ground, not hurrying."

She had gone to the north edge as well and was standing where Bjorn had stood, and after a while she said one word, and then a whole sentence, fast, and then stopped and waited for him to catch up.

"She says there’s a second set," Bjorn reported. "Alongside. Off to the left, on the soft ground, in the grass." He did not straighten up. "She says it isn’t a person and she isn’t going to say what it is until somebody who writes has looked at it."

Mei got there before Jace did.

It was a single line of impressions in the flattened grass, running parallel to the children’s line, twenty paces off and holding that distance exactly, for as far as she could see it. Nothing was broken. The grass was not torn or scattered. Whatever had made it had put its weight down and taken it up again and had not once come closer than twenty paces, and had gone north with them, at their pace, for the whole length of the fold and out the other side.

Herding.

Nobody said that word. Mei thought it and did not say it and was fairly sure from the way Jace’s jaw moved that he had thought it too.

"How long?" Jace asked.

Bjorn asked. The answer took a while.

"Yesterday. Maybe the night before." He stood up at last. "She says the grass is still coming back up and it does that for about two days in this cold."

The small one’s fingers were not in Mei’s cuff, because the small one was eight days south in a warm building learning to fold linen, and Mei found that she had put her hand down to about hip height anyway and had closed it on nothing.

She straightened up and kept her eyes on the grass while she did it.

"Then they’re a day ahead," she said. "And they’re walking."

And four more behind them, nine days back, coming south into whatever this was, with nobody on the road to turn them around.