Sallow Ferry

Corin had the track before she had the wall. Two horses, a day old, going east on the drove road; one shod, and the shod one dragging its near hind. He put the toe of his boot beside the print and looked at the ridge, and by the time he looked back she had stopped again.

Fourth day out, and she had stopped at every ruin between the eastern gate and here. A sheep-fold with one course of stone left. A cairn nobody had tended in his lifetime. A lintel in the heather with no house under it. She did not look at them the way people looked at ruins. She unshipped the circle from the case, set the legs, levelled it, took a bearing to something he could not see, and wrote in the field book: the date, the wind, the light, and a number.

The number took her a long time. She said it under her breath first, and then again with a different ending, and then wrote.

He had said nothing about it on the first day and nothing on the second. On the third he had worked out that she was building the whole survey out of these, one fixed point to the next, and that a ruin was a thing that did not move, and that she would rather stand ten minutes at a wall that was going to be there next year than take a bearing off a tree. After that he found it easier to stand still.

He watched her hands, because he watched everybody’s. Small, chapped at the knuckle, ink under the nail of the second finger. They did not shake on the screws. They had shaken, a little, at the gate, when the sergeant read her age off her own seal, and he had filed that with the rest.

“There’s a man on the far ridge,” she said, without looking up from the book.

“Shepherd. He’s been there since we came over the rise. His dog’s lying down.”

She wrote her number. “How long does a dog lie down for?”

“Till the sheep move.” He took Bishop’s headstall. “Or till we do.”

· · ·Scene break

He took them off the drove road a mile short of the river, down a mill track that had not seen a mill in forty years, and told her why at the bottom.

“The road runs along the shoulder. You can see it from the far bank for two miles, and from the ridge behind us for four. This runs in the gully. Same place, twenty minutes slower, and nobody’s counted us.”

“You could have said that at the top.”

“I could.”

“You didn’t ask.”

“No.” Bishop put a foot in the burn and thought about it. “You’d have wanted the reasons, and then you’d have wanted to argue the reasons, and by then we’d have been standing on the shoulder of the road having the argument, in view of two banks and a ridge. It’s quicker this way.”

“Quicker for you.”

“Quicker.” He led the mule through the water. “You get the reasons after. That was the term.”

She did not say anything to that. He had begun to learn what her silences were made of. This one was not agreement.

He heard the Sallow before the gully opened. He always had. Every river had its own noise and the Sallow’s was low and wide and did not change with the wind, a sound like a cart on a good road a long way off, and the first time he had heard it he had been nineteen and marching the other way. Nothing about it had changed. That was the thing about ground. You could burn a whole valley and the river would say the same thing about it next spring.

The ferry was where it had always been, on the far side, a flat-bottomed scow on a chain, and the bell on the near bank was the same bell, and he rang it twice and then stood back from the water and put the mule between himself and the landing, and waited.

· · ·Scene break

Hob came over standing up, hand over hand on the chain, the way he had done it fifteen years ago when Corin first saw him do it. He was older by that fifteen, and no smaller, and he brought the scow into the landing without looking at it, the way a man walks into his own kitchen in the dark.

“Two and a mule,” Hob said. “Going east.” He said it as a fact, not a question, and looked at Orla first, then the case, then Corin, then Corin’s hands. “Guild.”

“Crown’s survey,” she said. “The guild’s surveyor.”

“That’s two things.” Hob got a plank across to the bank and stood on it to prove it. “Guild’s paid me before. Crown pays in paper. Which is it?”

Corin took the coin out before she could answer, four silver bits on his palm, and held them out. Hob looked at them and did not take them yet.

“Crown’s escort,” he said, “paying in silver.”

“I’m not the Crown.”

“No. You’re not.” Hob took the coin then, and weighed it in his fist without looking, and put it away somewhere in his coat that had been put away in before. “Scrip’s what a man pays when he wants it written down who sent him. Silver’s what he pays when he’d sooner it wasn’t. I don’t mind either. Bring the mule.”

The scow took the mule badly and then well. Bishop came aboard with his ears flat and his opinion of the whole business plain, and Corin took him by the headstall and turned him, and put the mule’s shoulder against his own chest, so the animal stood between him and the far landing, and set his feet, and looked at the far bank.

Not the water. The bank. Where the path came down to it, and the two places a man could stand above the path and not be seen from the boat, and the alder scrub to the left that a horse could not get through and a man could.

Hob poled them off the shingle and took up the chain, and was quiet for a third of the river, and then said, to nobody, “Garrison.”

Corin did not turn his head.

“Everybody else on this boat,” Hob said, hand over hand, “stands between the mule and the water. Because the water’s what frightens them. Garrison man stands the mule between himself and the bank he’s going to. Faces the bank. Never seen one do otherwise. Never seen one know he was doing it.” He pulled. The chain came up out of the river dripping and went down into it again behind them. “You’ve stood a mule on my boat before.”

“Once or twice.”

“Once or twice.” The far bank came on. “I don’t carry news across this water, Captain. I carry what’s on the boat. But both crowns ask me, and a man who’s asked wants to have seen something.”

“What’ll you have seen?”

“A surveyor and a mule,” Hob said. “And whatever else I’m paid in silver not to.” He looked at Orla then, the first time since the bank, and the old face turned toward her, not toward Corin. “You’re not the first, mistress. There was a woman across here in the back end of last year. From the other side. Chain and a level, like yours. Cairning the ridge above Dunnock, she said. Paid in Hallam silver and asked me the depth of the river at the summer low, which nobody’s asked me in thirty years.”

Orla’s head came up. “Did she give a name?”

“I didn’t ask it.” The scow grounded. “I told you. I carry what’s on the boat.”

He walked the plank ashore with the mule and Hob stood on the landing behind them with his hands in his coat, where the silver was.

“There’s a room,” Hob said. “Up at the house. Dry bed, a door that shuts. I let it to whoever the river’s stopped, and it’s stopped nobody tonight, so it’s yours for the asking.”

“We’ll take the bank.”

“Thought you might.” Hob was already on the chain. “Garrison man never sleeps under a roof he didn’t pick himself. Mistress, if you ever come back this way without him, the room’s still there.”

· · ·Scene break

He made the fire in the lee of the bank where the light of it would go up into the alders and nowhere else, small, and fed it with what would not smoke. She sat across it from him with the field book on her knee and did not write anything in it for a long time.

He knew what she was doing. She was working out what she had seen.

He let her. He rubbed down the mule, and checked the case lashings, which did not need it, and walked the fifty yards up the bank to where the path met the drove road on this side and stood in the dark listening to what the road had to say, which was nothing, and came back. She had a flask out of her pack. She held it across the fire without a word.

“No.”

“It’s brandy. It’s for cold.”

“I don’t, on the road.” He sat down against the bank with his back to the earth and his coat over his knees, where he could see the path, the water and her. “Nothing in it. I’d sooner be awake.”

“You slept sitting up last night. And the night before.”

“I slept.”

“That isn’t sleeping. That’s waiting with your eyes shut.”

“I’ve been told I do it very convincingly,” he said. “I’ve fooled sergeants.”

It got a look from her, not a smile, but a look, the kind you gave a reading that had come out different from what you expected and might, if you took it again, be right. She put the flask away. She closed the book.

“How did Hob know you?”

“He didn’t. He knew what I was. It’s not the same.”

“He called you Captain.”

“He’d have called me Captain if I’d never been one. It’s a thing ferrymen say to men with a certain kind of coat.” He turned a stick in the fire until the burnt end was under. “Wrong question.”

“Then what’s the right one?”

“How long before someone who doesn’t like me knows I’m here.”

She was quiet. Not the silence from the mill track. A different one; she was measuring it.

“How long?” she said.

“Hob’ll tell nobody, because he’s paid, and because he’s Hob. But he’s not the only man on this river, and I’ve been over it more than once or twice, and not always with a surveyor and a mule.” He looked at the water going past in the dark. “There’s a woman on the Hallam side who was cairning the ridge above Dunnock before the snow, which means she’ll be back on it after, which means there’s a Hallam patrol somewhere that’s been told to keep her fed. And there’s the Bridge.”

“Brack Bridge.”

“The garrison at it. Which is at the far end of your survey, so we’ve months yet, and I’d sooner it stayed that way.”

“And who’s at the Bridge that doesn’t like you?”

He put the stick down.

There was a way of answering that which was true and did not answer it. He had a great many of those; he had been collecting them since he was thirty. He looked at her across the fire and saw that she was not going to write anything in the book tonight whatever he said, and that she was going to remember whatever he said as if she had, and that she was not asking for a name. She was asking for the size of the thing. It was how she asked everything. She wanted to know how many chains long it was before she decided whether to walk it.

“Enough,” he said. “Go to sleep, Tallis. I’ll wake you at the change.”

“You won’t.”

“No.” He put his head back against the bank and closed his eyes, which was not the same as not watching. “But I’ll have meant to.”

She lay down with her back to the case and her face to the fire, and he listened to her breathing go long, and slow, and stop pretending, and he counted the ways into the camp, which were three, and the ways out, which were two, and thought about a courteous man in a garrison at the far end of a valley, holding a line, who had never in four years needed to send a message to know where Corin Stroud was.

He would know by the pass. He might know now.

Corin sat up, and waited with his eyes shut, and did it very convincingly.