Chapter 107: The Rally Point

Theo put the poker down on the stones he could no longer see and heard it land.

"Nobody move."

Forty-one people did as they were told, which he would think about later.

He counted three seconds off, and in those three seconds he had the whole of it. The arithmetic had been sitting in him since the ninth stake, waiting on permission.

’Four hundred yards in a day, two miles in an evening... It’s coming at us.’

He got his voice up and out into a black room and made it the voice he used in a kitchen at capacity.

"On the line. Now. Order of march, wrist loops, you’ve practised this, do it in the dark. Dark’s all there is. Wick, bells to the front with me. Berrin, back of the column, you shout me a number every hundred paces and I don’t care what the number is, you shout it."

Ordis, three feet away and invisible:

"They’ll not find the door."

"Then put your hand on the shoulder in front of you and walk. Talk the whole way. All of you talk, sing, argue, I don’t care, the person behind you needs to know where your mouth is."

They came out of Harrowgate in three minutes and forty seconds and Theo counted every one of them out with his hand on the frame.

Outside was the same as inside.

That was the part he had failed to prepare anyone for. He had walked out of a dark building expecting the difference between a room and a mountain, and there was no difference, and eleven paces from the north door he understood that Harrowgate was already a mile inside the thing and had been for some while.

The rope came up hard in his hands.

’Right. Road’s under my boots, road goes north and rises, and I know the camber.’

Theo hooked his boot sideways until he found the rut, put the rut on his left, and started walking.

Behind him, a hundred and ten yards of line and forty people, and somebody’s child two-thirds of the way back singing the shrine song badly and being joined by two more.

Wick’s bells went along beside him in the dark.

They made four hundred paces before anything happened, and in those four hundred paces Theo learned three things and would have paid a great deal for a fourth.

Sound arrived early and left early. Everything close, nothing far, no echo off a valley that he knew for a fact had a wall on the left of it.

The cold came in patches and not out of the air, like walking through a house with a cellar door open somewhere, and the patches moved.

And the snow crust told him things his eyes would not. Trodden, untrodden, wind-packed, the rut, the shoulder, the place where the road bent.

’Fourth thing I want is where it is, and that’s the one I’m not getting.’

Berrin’s voice came up the line, flat and carrying.

"Forty-one!"

The line parted at the six hundredth pace.

Theo felt it in his hands before he heard anything, the whole weight of the column going out of the rope in one motion, and the rope going light in a way rope should never go, and he had both fists on it and was hauling before his mind had produced a single word.

Then the sound came up the road behind him.

He would try for a long time to say what it was and never manage better than this: it was the noise of a heavy thing being taken off a road. The struggle was all on the human side and it was very short.

Yesh had been on the second sledge with his arm strapped, at the place in the column where a man who could not walk two miles goes.

Theo got the rope into his armpit and both hands free and put everything he had left through his throat.

"BELLS. BELLS, WICK—"

Wick was already shaking them. Four store bells going flat and stupid in a dark that did not carry, and the front half of the column stopped dead, and the back half did not, because the back half no longer had a line in its hands.

Then everything came apart at once.

He got the eyes open in the middle of it.

He knew what they would give him. He opened them anyway, and the ache came up behind his sockets, and the panel put up a clean empty field where a mountain and a road and thirty-nine human beings ought to have been.

’Two years of never once needing to guess, and you pick tonight.’

Theo shut them and stopped trying to see, and started being a man with a rope in his hands.

He hauled. He got eleven wrist loops in against him and shouted them past his shoulder up the road toward the spur, and he put Wick and the bells at the head of them with Ordis’s voice doing the counting. He went back down his own line by feel with the cord running through his fist. He found the parted end at forty yards, cut and not frayed, and he did not stop to think about what cuts a carter’s line.

At fifty yards there was a child in the snow, on her back, with her wrist loop still on and eight feet of rope attached to nothing, and he put her over his shoulder and kept going.

He found Rill at seventy yards, standing still in the middle of the road with a fistful of line in each hand.

She had not run. She had done the thing he told her in a kitchen nine hours earlier, and she had gathered up two loose ends and knotted them while the world went to pieces around her.

Theo put his hand on her arm and found her.

"Rill."

"I’ve got four behind me. I don’t know if they’re—"

"Walk. Shrine. Sing it."

She sang it.

Half a mile, in the black, uphill, with the crust breaking under them and the cold coming and going in patches.

He was the last one round the spur.

Ordis had got there first with the front group. Theo came up the last twenty yards with a child on his shoulder and Rill’s four behind him and he heard the bells stop, and he heard Wick say something, and it was the tone of it that put his hand out for the rock.

’That’s not a shout... that’s the noise a man makes when he doesn’t want the others to hear.’

Theo put the child down in the snow.

He got under the stone lip with his hand on the wall, four feet of dry rock, exactly where he had walked them that afternoon and made them say it three times.

There were people under there.

There were nine people under there, on the dry ground with their backs against the rock, in the place he had chosen for them and described to them and made them sing.

He put his hand on the nearest shoulder and it went over sideways.

It had been there first.

That was the whole of it and it took him one second.

’It came here before we did. It cut the rope in the middle so the back half would run, and it knew where they’d run to, because I told them. Out loud. In daylight.’

’I sang it with the children.’

Berrin came round the spur with the rear of the column, four people, and started shouting his number the way he had been told, because he was nineteen and it was the only thing he had left to do properly.

"FOURTEEN—"

Then he stopped.

Theo heard him find her. It took him about six seconds, going along the row under the stone with his hands, and Theo stood in the dark two feet away and let him do it.

Ordis had been sitting with her back to the rock and her legs out in front of her.

Fourteen.

Theo stood at the mouth of the shrine with his shoulder on the stone and made himself have the number.

Forty-one out of the door. Fourteen under the rock. Yesh on the road at six hundred paces and nine here and the rest of them somewhere in two miles of mountain that he could not see and could not search and could not shout across.

Nobody spoke for a while. Somebody’s teeth were going. The wind had got up, which he only knew because it was pushing at his coat, and it made no noise at all coming round the spur.

Then Berrin’s voice, from the ground, thick and level:

"You picked this place."

"I did."

"Say the rest of it."

Theo turned his head toward where the boy was.

"I picked it, I told everyone in daylight where it was, and it heard me."

Berrin made a sound that was almost a laugh and had nothing in it.

Theo let it stand, because it was true, and because he had already moved on to the piece underneath it that was going to matter in about four minutes, and he was still turning it over when the bells rang.

Four store bells, flat and stupid, from thirty yards down the road behind them.

Wick was standing at Theo’s left elbow.

The bell-cord was in Wick’s hand.