The Pass

The last station of the Crown’s survey of the western Ashfall stood on the col of the pass, and Orla took it at the second hour after dawn with snow in the joints of the cairn.

The trooper had turned back at the snowline the afternoon before. He had sat his grey at the edge of the white and watched them go on into it, and when they were two hundred yards above him he had taken his cap off, once, and put it back, and turned the horse’s head down the hill. Corin had watched him all the way to the moss. Then he had said, “That’s the Bridge done,” and turned his back on the valley.

They had slept below the col in the lee of a rock the size of a byre, and in the morning the sky was clear from edge to edge and the whole of the east side of the pass lay below her like a sheet unrolled on a table.

She set the legs on the cairn. The wind came over the col from the west, hard and steady, with ice in it.

“Stand behind me,” she said.

He came. He stood in the way he had on the tower, his chest to her shoulder blades and his arms past her on either side, not holding her, only there; and the wind went off her back, and the bubble held.

She took Stannock first. Ten miles off and four thousand feet down, a grey smudge where two valleys met, with a thread of smoke going up from it that was every chimney in the town at once. She took the far ridge, the corrie under the col, the long spur that ran down south of east from the corrie’s lip toward the Stannock road. She read each one aloud, the number and then the number again, and wrote it in the book at her hip, and each time she straightened her back came up against him and stopped there.

Then she drew it.

Not on vellum. In the field book, with the pencil, standing, with the book braced on the top stone of the cairn and his arm past her on the left keeping the pages down. The corrie, the spur, the gully that went down north of the spur like a finger into the corrie floor, the steep ground under the spur’s north edge where the lines crowded together, the place two hundred yards along where they opened out again. Contours, one line through everything the same height, twenty of them from the col to the road. It took her an hour. He did not move for any of it.

“That’s the way down,” she said. “The spur. It’s the only one that doesn’t drop.”

“I see it.”

“You see it on the page.”

“I see it on the page,” he said, behind her, low. “I’m learning.”

She wrote the light. Col of the pass, the last station. Second hour after dawn. Wind W, strong, with ice. Light good, clear to Stannock.

She shut the book. When she looked west, the way they had come, the sky over the Brack had gone the colour of the slate on Sela’s roof, and it was coming.

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It came over the col at noon, when they were a mile down the spur, and it took everything.

She had seen snow. She had not seen this. It came out of the west over the pass in a wall, and the wall reached them and went past them, and the world went white on every side and above and below, and the spur under her boots was white, and the air a foot from her face was white, and there was no ridge, no corrie, no Stannock, no track. Corin was three paces in front of her with the case on his back. He was a shape. Then he was less of one.

He stopped. She came up to him and he put a hand out behind him without looking and found her sleeve and held it.

“I can’t see the ground,” he said.

It was the first time she had heard him say that. He said it in the voice for the ground, level, and it was worse for being level.

“There’s no track. There’s nothing to read. I don’t know where the edge is.” He turned his head and she saw his face, close, with snow in his brows. “Give me the book.”

She gave him the book.

He opened it inside his coat, out of the snow, at the page she had drawn on the col, and bent his head over it, and she watched him read it. She watched him do the thing she had done on the hearthstone at Hatch with a burnt stick and he had done after her, wrong in the gully; she watched his finger go along the lines.

“Close here,” he said. “That’s steep. That’s the north edge, under the spur. Wide here, that’s the crest, that’s us. Where it goes up into the corrie like a finger, that’s the gully; we don’t want that. Where the line goes out and down and keeps going, that’s the spur, and that’s the way.” He looked up, into the white, at nothing. “South of east. The ground falls off to the left, steep, and to the right, easy. Keep the easy side on the right and the fall on the left and we’re on it.”

“You’re reading it.”

“It’s a shape,” he said. “I’ve just never walked one blind.”

He gave her back the book. He shifted the case on his back, to the right, toward the easy side, the side that was hill. He went on.

She followed with her hand on his coat. She did not let go of it. They went down the spur in the white a step at a time, and he talked, low, continuous, about the lines on the page: they’re wide here, we’re fine, it’s easing, it’ll steepen at the next shoulder and then open, and it steepened at the next shoulder and then opened, and she felt him feel it under his boots and heard his breath go out.

“It’s right,” he said. “Your page. It’s all right.”

“It was drawn this morning.”

“I know when it was drawn.”

· · ·Scene break

The cornice went at the third shoulder.

She had drawn it. She would think about that afterward, for a long time. She had drawn the lines crowding under the north edge of the spur, and she had not drawn what the wind did to the snow on a north edge, which was to build it out over the drop in a lip like the brim of a hat, with nothing under it; because there had been no snow on it at the second hour after dawn, and she drew what she saw.

He was a pace to the left of where the page put the crest. The white was the same on both sides. He put his weight on his left boot and she heard the snow under it make a sound she had never heard snow make, a low crack, like a beam in a roof.

He knew. She saw him know it, in the half-second before it went. He did not try to step back. He took the case off his shoulder in one movement, the strap over his head, and threw it, not at her, to the right, uphill, onto the easy side, and it landed in the snow at her feet with the brass corners down.

Then the edge went, and he went with it, and there was nothing to the left of her but white.

She did not hear him land. She heard snow go down a long way, and stop, and then nothing, and the wind.

“Corin.”

Nothing.

She stood with the case at her feet and his name gone out of her into the white, and she did not go to the edge. She knew what the edge was now. She went down on her knees in the snow on the easy side with her back to the fall and opened the book inside her coat.

Forty feet. The lines under the north edge crowded together for forty feet, give or take, and then opened into the bed of the gully, the finger that went up into the corrie. If he had gone off here, he was in the gully bed, forty feet down. There was no getting down forty feet of steep under a broken cornice. But two hundred yards on along the spur the lines opened out again on the north side; the edge came down to meet the gully in a slope she could walk; and the gully bed ran back up to the foot of the drop.

No, her father said. Not two hundred. A hundred and eighty. Count them.

“Corin.”

“Here.” From below. Thin, through the wind, and then again, steadier. “Here. I’m down. I’m in snow. I’m—“ A pause, and the sound of a man moving and not liking it. “The knee’s gone. Not broken. Gone.”

She shut her eyes, once.

“Go on down the spur,” he called. “Take the case. Keep the fall on your left, it’s all on the page, you’ll be at the road by dark and I’ll—“

He stopped.

She waited. She did not know what she was waiting for, in the white, on her knees, with her hands on her father’s case. Then she heard it. The wind dropped for a moment and she heard him, forty feet down, breathe out, and say, to himself as much as to her, and in the plain voice:

“No. That’s not mine to say.”

She stood up. She lifted the case and put the strap over her shoulder and settled it on her right hip, on the hill side, the easy side, and she stood a moment feeling the weight of it on the bone she had bruised on the road to Scarrow.

“I’m coming down,” she said. “There’s a place a hundred and eighty yards on where the edge meets the gully. I’ll come down there and walk back up the bed to you. It’s on the page. Stay where you are.”

A long pause.

“Yes,” he said.

· · ·Scene break

She counted the hundred and eighty with her left hand out toward the fall and her right on the case. At a hundred and eighty the snow under her left boot did not stop being snow; it sloped, and went on sloping, and she went down it on her heels and her hands with the case held into her side, and came into the bed of the gully, where the snow was deep and soft and the wind could not get at it.

She walked back up it. It was further than a hundred and eighty yards; the gully bent. She had drawn the bend. She came round it and he was there, at the foot of the drop, sitting in the snow with his back to a boulder and his left leg out straight in front of him, and snow down his collar and in his hair and blood on his left sleeve where three of Sela’s stitches had gone.

He looked up at her. His face was the one from the byre, after, with nothing guarded in it.

“You drew the bend,” he said.

“I drew the bend.”

She put the case down in the snow beside him, on his right, uphill. She knelt. She put her hands on the knee through the cloth, the way he had put his hand on Bishop’s hoof, and felt it, and he shut his eyes and did not say anything.

“It’s not broken,” she said.

“I said.”

“I know you said. I’ve felt it now.” She took his left arm and looked at the stitches: eight holding, three gone, and the cut open a little at the deep end and bleeding slow. She tied it with the strip off her own shirt, tight, and he let her. Then she looked at him, close, in the white.

“I’m going to hold on to you now,” she said. “Till we’re down. Say if you don’t want that.”

He opened his eyes.

For a moment he did not say anything at all. She watched him hear the words and know where he had last heard them, on a shingle bar on the Wyre with a river running off both of them; and she watched his face do a thing she had not seen it do, and then stop doing it, and settle.

“Don’t let go,” Corin said.

· · ·Scene break

She got him down.

The gully ran out into the corrie floor after half a mile, and the corrie floor ran out to the foot of the spur, and the foot of the spur came down to the Stannock road; it was all on the page, and she had the page by heart after the first reading, the way she had had his list. He had his right arm over her shoulders and the case on her right hip, and they went down in step, because there was no other way to go down, her boot and his, slower than ninety to the minute. He talked. Low, continuous, about the ground, which he could not see: what the snow would be doing on the far side of the corrie, where the road would come in, how the wind would drop when the cloud lifted off the lip. She let him. She knew what it was the sound of now.

The cloud lifted off the lip at dusk.

It went up all at once, like a sheet taken off a table, and the corrie was below them, grey and white, and the road below that, a dark line in the snow, and at the end of the road, where two valleys met, in the blue of the evening, the lights of Stannock.

They stopped. He was breathing hard. So was she.

Between them and the road the last of the spur fell away steep for twenty feet onto a bank of snow, and there was a longer way round it to the left, and she looked at the long way and at the bank and at his knee, and at the lights.

“Down,” Orla said.

He looked at her.

Then he went down, the twenty feet, on his back and his good leg and his hands, into the bank of snow, and lay in it at the bottom, and she heard him laugh. She had not heard him laugh before. It was not a large laugh.

“Why?” he said, from the snow.

“You’ll get the reasons after,” she said, and came down after him.