The Byre

The mud at the byre door had been walked on since the rain, and Orla saw it before she had set the case down.

She had come up the yard at Cauldkeld with the last of the lower valley in the field book, Nethergill chained to within half a mile of Sellick’s gate while a trooper on the fort wall watched her through a glass. The rain had come through at noon and gone east. It had left the ground at the byre door soft and grey, and in the grey there were prints, and their edges stood up sharp. The rain had not had them.

She crouched. She did it the way he had shown her at Hatch, hands on her knees and her weight back, so as not to put down a print of her own.

Three men. Boots with nails in a double row round the heel; she had seen that pattern once this summer, in the mud at the trough in the Bridge’s yard. One heavy, deep at the heel. One long in the stride. One who had stood a while at the jamb and turned his toe in and out, the way a man did when he was looking at a thing and did not like what it would cost him. They had come down off the hill behind the byre, looked in at the door, where Sela’s two cows and the heifer stood at night, and gone back up the way they came.

She counted the hours since the rain on her fingers. Five. No; the rain had stopped after noon, not at it. Four and a half.

Corin was at the wall. He was always at the wall at this hour; it was where Sela’s rule put him. She had not spoken to him for eleven days. Not on the road back from the Bridge, not at Todholes, where he had run the far end of the chain across the Rooks’ new yard and called chain and she had written it down. At night he had sat against Sela’s wall with the mules, and she had lain in Sela’s kitchen and listened to the wall.

She went to the wall.

“Three men,” she said. “Garrison boots, a double row of nails. They’ve been at the byre door since the rain and gone back up the hill toward the pass. Four and a half hours. One of them stood at the jamb a long time.”

He was on his feet before she had finished. He went and crouched where she had crouched and put his hand flat beside the prints without touching them, and was there a long while.

“Four and a half,” he said. “The long one’s lame. Not much. He favours the left when he turns.” He stood up. “You read it before I did.”

“You were at the wall.”

“I was at the wall.” He looked up the sheep track toward the pass. “Double row is the Bridge. Three men from a garrison don’t walk up a valley on their own at the back end of summer, not with leave. They’re going over.”

“Deserting.”

“And they’ll want something to sell at Stannock that walks there by itself.” He turned his head to the infield, where the two mules had stopped disagreeing to watch him. “Two cows, a heifer and a pair of mules. They’ve counted them. That’s what the one at the jamb was doing.”

· · ·Scene break

Sela heard it standing at her own hearth with her arms folded, and did not unfold them.

“Bridge men,” she said.

“Bridge boots,” Corin said. “I’d not swear to the men.”

“I would.” She looked at him. It was the look from the gate, the one that measured and did not like the first reading. “And you’ll be wanting to tell me what to do about it.”

“No.” He had stayed in the doorway. He had never once, in three weeks, come further into her house than the doorway, and he did not now. “I’ll ask. What do you want done?”

Sela was quiet a moment. Orla, at the table with her hand on the case, saw the question go into her like a nail into soft wood, and saw her not know what to do with it.

“I want my beasts in my byre in the morning,” Sela said.

“And the men?”

“I want them not in it.”

“Then that’s what I’ll try for.” He said it to the floor. “Effie can go down to Halket’s before it’s dark and stop there. If you want her to. You can go with her.”

“It’s my byre.”

“Yes.”

Effie went, with her shawl over her head. Sela watched her all the way down the road, and came back and took the hay fork off its pegs and sat with it across her knees, facing the door.

Corin was talking to the byre.

Orla heard him from the yard in the last of the light, low and continuous. The door opened inward. Stalls down the left, the cows at the far end. One way in for anything bigger than a cat. They’d come after the moon went, the second hour after midnight, over the hill wall and down the infield. If there were a light at the door behind them when they came in, he’d see their hands, and they’d see nothing past it into the byre—

He stopped.

“I’ll hold it,” Orla said.

He did not turn round. She watched him hear it, and watched the word no get as far as his mouth, and stop there. He stood in the byre door with his back to her and did not say it.

“You’d be the first thing they saw,” he said instead.

“Then I’ll stand still. It’s the change you see, not the thing.”

He turned then. The light had nearly gone and she could not read his face, and did not need to; she could hear, in the length of time before he answered, what it cost him to hold the door open.

“If I say down.”

“I go down,” Orla said. “Then I ask.”

· · ·Scene break

They brought the mules into the byre at dusk, and Bishop said what he thought of it and Marigold did not. Orla stood in the yard to the left of the door with her back to the wall and Sela’s horn lantern in both hands, shutter closed, and the cold of the stone came through her coat and stayed. He was inside. She had not heard him stop moving.

The moon went behind the hill at the time he had said. The valley made the noises it made at night, water, a sheep, the wind in the rowan over Sela’s gate, and none of them was a man.

Then one was.

A stone turned on the hill wall. Three shapes came down the infield, slow, to where the mules had been, and one of them swore, very low. Then they were at the byre door, a yard from her, and she could smell them, wet wool and a long day, and one of them lifted the bar out of its hooks and set it against the wall so near her foot she felt it touch the ground.

They went in.

“Light,” Corin said, inside.

She opened the shutter and lifted the lantern into the doorway at the full stretch of her arms.

It threw them across the byre floor in three long shadows. Three men in garrison brown with the Bridge’s flash cut off the shoulder, so that there was a pale square where it had been. The long one had a sword out. The heavy one had a cudgel and a rope. The third was nearest the door, nearest her, and he had nothing in his hands at all.

Corin came out of the dark by the stalls.

She had never seen him move fast. She had thought he was a slow man who had learned to be patient. He was not slow. He was across the floor before the long one had finished turning, inside the reach of the sword, and the sword came round and caught him along the left forearm and he did not stop for it. He had the knife in his right hand, the one she had cut the tail-rope with on the Wyre. He put it in under the long man’s ribs, once, and stepped back from him.

The long man sat down in the straw. He looked surprised. Then he lay down, and did not get up.

The heavy one swung the cudgel. Corin was not where it went. He took the man’s arm at the wrist as it came through and turned it, and cut, and the cudgel went into the straw, and the man went down on his knees holding the arm against him and making a sound like a gate.

The third had not moved. He stood between Orla and the byre with the light full on him, and he was young, younger than Davey Rook, and he looked at the man in the straw who was not getting up and at the man on his knees, and at Corin, standing in the middle of the floor with the knife down by his side and blood running off his left hand onto the stones.

Then he looked at her.

She was a yard away. She had the lantern up in both hands and nothing else, and she was the only thing between him and the dark. She did not move. She held the light where it was, so that it stayed on the floor and on Corin, and she looked back at him, and she did not know what was in her face, and did not change it.

He went past her. Close enough that his sleeve went across the lantern and the light jumped. He went out into the yard and over the hill wall, and she heard him go up the sheep track toward the pass, running, falling once, getting up, running, until the valley had him.

“Keep it up,” Corin said. His voice was the one for the ground. “Don’t move it. I need to see his arm.”

She kept it up.

He knelt on the heavy man, not hard, and took the man’s belt off him and put it round the cut arm above the elbow and pulled it tight, and the man stopped making the sound. Then Corin sat back on his heels. He looked at the long one in the straw for a long time.

“I didn’t know him,” he said.

She did not say anything. She had nothing that was a sentence.

“I knew every man at the Bridge once.” He wiped the knife on the straw, both sides, and put it away. His hands had begun to shake. She watched it start in the right, which had held the knife, and go into the left, and he looked at them the way he had looked at the prints by the door, and did not hide them.

She saw what he was. She had been told it by a fire on the Wyre, in order, and she had understood it the way she had understood the bluff at the drawn ford for six years before she stood on it. He was a man who could cross a floor and kill another man before the other man had finished turning round, and then sit on his heels in the straw and say I didn’t know him, and mean both.

She hung the lantern on the nail inside the door. She went and knelt in front of him in the straw and took his left arm in both her hands.

“Let me see,” she said.

· · ·Scene break

Sela came across the yard with the fork and stood in the door and looked at the long man, and the heavy one, and the cows at the far end, who had not woken up.

“Bridge?”

“Bridge,” Corin said.

“Then he’s Sellick’s. He can come for him.” She looked at Corin’s arm, and at Orla’s hands on it, dark to the wrist. “Bring him in. I’ll not have him bleed on my yard.” She took the lantern off the nail. “I’ll sit with this one. He’ll not run from me.”

The heavy man, with his arm against his chest, looked at the fork and did not argue.

· · ·Scene break

Sela’s needle was a sail-needle, too big, and her thread was waxed linen for harness, and Orla boiled both on the hearth and did not ask for better.

He sat on the bench with his left arm on the table, palm up, on a cloth. The cut ran from a hand’s width below the elbow nearly to the wrist, clean, and deep at the elbow end. When she poured the salt water into it he closed his eyes and said nothing.

“Talk,” she said. “It’s what you do.”

“There’s no ground in here.”

“Then talk about the byre.”

He talked about the byre, low, with his eyes shut, while she put the needle through: the door, the long one’s left leg, the heavy one holding the cudgel too near the end. Her hands were steady. She had lettered a whole valley that summer at a width a hair could cover, and a stitch was a line with an end pinned.

Eleven. She had thought it would be nine. It was eleven, because the deep end needed three close together, and she said the number aloud when she tied the last one, and then again, and he opened his eyes.

She did not let go of his arm. She had it in both hands on the cloth, her fingers round the wrist below the last stitch, and she could feel the beat in it, the one she had counted on the tower. It was not slow.

“You didn’t run,” he said.

“No.”

“I’d not have told you to.”

“I know.” She looked at the stitches. “That’s how I could stay.”

The fire settled. Outside, across the yard, a light moved in the byre door where Sela sat with a fork and a deserter.

“I called you a coward,” Orla said. “On the wall.”

“You did.”

“It was the wrong word.”

“It was the right word four years ago.”

“It isn’t four years ago.” She had been waiting eleven days to say it and she had thought, all eleven, that it would come out angry, and it did not. “You wouldn’t tell me what to draw. You stood on his wall and let me hate you for it, and I did, all the way down the valley. And tonight you stood in that door and wanted to say no to me, and I heard you want it, and you didn’t.”

“No.”

“I’m not afraid of you.”

He looked at her. The fire was on the side of his face, and his eyes were not guarded, and she had not known until she saw them that they always were.

“You should be,” he said. “A bit.”

“I’ve measured it.”

She did not know which of them moved. She thought afterward that it was both; that she had leaned in over the table with his wrist still in her hands and he had come the rest of the way, and that there had been, for the length of a breath, nothing between them but the width of her fingers and the smell of the salt water and his breath going out uneven against her mouth. He had his right hand up. It had stopped an inch from her face, the way it had stopped on the ridge, waiting to be told where.

She wanted to tell it. She had the words. She had had them since the last cairn on the Long Ridge, and there was nothing in her now that wished to stop, and she stopped.

So did he. She felt him do it, a half-breath before her or a half-breath after; she would never know which and would not try to find out.

“There’s a man in Sela’s byre,” he said, very low, “who was alive an hour ago.”

“I know.”

“And my arm’s in your hands with your thread in it.”

“I know.” She did not let go of the wrist. “Not tonight.”

“Not tonight,” he said.

He put his hand down on the table beside hers, flat, not touching. They sat like that, the two hands and the stitched arm between them on Sela’s cloth, until the fire needed wood and he got up and put it on, one-handed, and sat down again on the far end of the bench, where he could see the door.

She washed her hands in the last of the salt water and dried them. Then she opened the case.

She laid the field sheets on the table in order, Cauldkeld to Nethergill, and his sketch beside them in its grey tape. Under them in the lid were the five clean sheets of vellum she had carried from the city for the fair copies and not touched since the Wyre. She took the top one and weighted its corners with the salt, the candle, Sela’s thread box and the heel of her hand.

He did not ask her what she was doing. He sat at the end of the bench with his arm across his knees and watched her, still, the way he had at every station since the eastern gate.

She uncapped the ink. She drew a scale line at the foot of the sheet, ten chains to the inch, and put the pen to the vellum at the top left corner, where the water came out of the moss, and drew the water first.