The Shrine

Bishop went lame on the second morning out from the Wyre, and Orla heard it before she saw it.

She had walked behind the mule for five weeks, and his feet had made the same sound on every road: four beats, near fore, off hind, off fore, near hind, at an interval she could have set a clock by, and had, on days when there was nothing else to set one by. On the stony ground going up out of the river valley one of the four came short. Not every stride. One in six, and then one in four, and she counted it for a quarter of a mile before she said anything, because a thing counted once was a guess.

“Corin.”

“Near fore.” He had stopped already. “He’s been putting it down short since the top of the bank. I thought it was the stones.”

“It isn’t.”

“No.”

He went to the mule’s shoulder and ran his hand down the leg, and Bishop, who bit clerks, let him, which was the worst sign she had seen yet. He lifted the foot and looked at the sole and put it down and put his palm flat against the wall of the hoof and held it there.

“Warm. He’s bruised the sole. He’ll have done it at the ford, on the stone that turned, and hidden it for a day because that’s what mules do.” He straightened. “He’ll walk. He won’t carry. Not to Scarrow, and not after, if we want him back.”

“How far is Scarrow?”

“Five days, loaded. Four, light.”

She looked at the mule, who was looking at the heather, and at the load on his back, which she had put there herself that morning, in the right places, and at the case on the inside, against his ribs, with the new strap through the handle.

“Then he goes light,” she said.

· · ·Scene break

They unloaded him on the verge, in order, and she found she knew the order now: the chain, the tent, the level in its box, the food off the off side in its two bags, the water, the pole, her pack, his. The case last. He unlashed it with the four movements and set it on the grass with the lid toward her and the brass corners down, and stood back from it, as he had at the gate.

Then he began to pack himself.

He did it the way he had packed the mule, and she watched him do it and understood that he had never in his life carried a load any other way. The chain went low and across, so its weight sat on his hips. The tent above it. The level’s box under the tent, wedged, where it could not swing. The food split and hung either side. The pole through the whole of it like a spit. He tightened each strap a hole, put his hand flat on it, breathed out, and tightened another.

“You’ll not walk far like that.”

“I’ve walked further with worse.” He stooped for her pack and added it. “I had a sergeant who said a man should carry what he’d want if he lost everything else. I’ve never lost everything else. I’d like to have the choice.”

She picked up the case.

It was heavier than it had any right to be. She had carried it across a hundred rooms and up a hundred stairs and up the stair at Dunnock with her shoulder to the wall, and never a whole day on a road, and she had known all her life that it weighed what a small child weighed and had never once had to hold it long enough to mind. She put the strap over her shoulder. She settled the case against her hip, and it went, without her deciding, to the side of her that was toward the hill.

He saw. He looked at the case, and at the slope above the track, and at her, and did not say anything about it, and took the mule’s headstall.

“You’re in front,” she said.

“He’s in front.” Bishop, unburdened, had already gone on ten paces up the track with his ears forward and his head up, like an animal who had been given a holiday and meant to spend it. “I’m what’s behind him. You’re what’s behind me. That’s the only order there is today.”

· · ·Scene break

She had thought the days to Scarrow would be slow. They were not slow. They were something she had no word for and spent the first day looking for one.

He walked slower under the load and she walked slower under the case, and the mule between them walked at whatever pace he liked, and by the second mile the three of them had found an interval and kept it. She heard it before she understood it. Her step, and his. The same beat. She had walked behind him for five weeks and never once had they been in step, because he picked the ground and she followed at the mule’s length, and now the ground picked itself and there was nothing between them but a lame mule with opinions, and her boot came down when his did.

She did not remark on it. She counted it. Ninety to the minute on the flat, eighty on the rise. He talked about the ground the way he always did, low, without turning his head: a hare’s form in the bent grass; a place where a burn had moved its bed since he last saw it; a cairn on the skyline that was not one of hers and not one of the treaty’s either, that somebody had built for the pleasure of building it. She took two stations on the first day and three on the second. He stopped when she stopped and stood the way he had learned to stand, still, while she set the legs.

At the second station on the third day she said, “I need the level.”

He stopped. He did not say anything. He turned, on the track, the way he had turned Bishop across the road at the gate, so that the side of him with the level lashed to it was toward her and the slope was at his back; and stood with his hands away from his sides, where she could see them, and looked at the road behind them.

The level was on the hill side. He had lashed it there that morning, under the tent, without thinking, because that was where a thing that mattered rode.

She laughed.

It came out of her before she had measured it. It was not a large laugh; she had not made one of those in some years and did not know if she still had it; but it was a laugh, at him, on a track in the middle of the Ashfall with a case on her hip and a mule eating the verge, and it went on longer than she meant it to, because he did not move.

He let her. That was what she noticed, after. He stood there with her level on his hill side and her food hanging off him and the pole through the middle of him, and he did not turn it into anything, did not say a dry thing to close it, did not look at her to see what it meant. He looked at the road behind them, and waited, and when she had finished he said, “Four movements. You’ll want to see them twice,” and she unlashed her own level off a man’s back with her hands not quite steady, and did not know whether it was the laughing.

· · ·Scene break

The shrine stood where the track crossed a burn, on the fourth evening, with Scarrow a day off over the shoulder.

It was a stone cell the size of a byre stall, from the older war, with a niche in the back wall for whoever the older war had prayed to, and nobody in it now. Half the roof was on. The half that was on was the half over the niche, and he put her under it and the fire in the doorway and the mule in the lee of the wall, and sat down against the jamb with his back to the stone and his coat over his knees.

She took the case off and set it by her, and put her hand to her hip, and stopped.

There was a bruise. She had known there would be. Four days of the corner against the same bone would do that, and she had felt it start on the second day and had not moved the case to the other side, because the other side was the drop. She did not say anything. She looked at the corner that had made it: front left, brass, with the dent in it that put a small crooked shadow on the wall when the fire moved.

He was looking at it too.

“It fell,” she said.

He said nothing. He did not ask. It was the not-asking that let her go on, and she thought that he knew that, and that he had learned it from her at the ford, giving him the pause; and she did not know which of them had taught the other.

“The report says he raised it. The case. When the patrol called, he lifted it in both hands, to show them what it was. A sergeant wrote that. It’s the one true thing in the report, I think; a surveyor would do that; I’d do that.” She turned the case an inch so the dent was to the fire. “It was in his hands when they fired. It came down on the stones on that corner. The field book was inside. Not a mark on it. The last station’s in his hand, the light logged, and then the next page is empty, and then the report’s been folded in at the back by somebody else. The guild gave me the case with the book still in it. I was eighteen. I’ve never had the dent taken out.”

“You could have.”

“There’s a man in the city who’d do it in an hour.” She put her hand flat on the lid. “Then it would be a case. It’s not a case. It’s the last thing that was in his hands.”

The burn went by under the doorway. The fire settled and he put wood on it, and did not put his hand to the left side of his coat, and she saw him not do it.

“On the tower,” he said, “you said the phrase. Poor light. I had a thing to say and didn’t.”

“I saw.”

“I’ve written it.”

She did not move.

“Once. In a report. Four years ago, the night of the second day, at the Bridge, with a lamp, in my own hand.” He was looking at the fire, not at her, and his voice was the one he used for the ground. “The section fired at the second hour after dawn. Midsummer. From the north bank, across the ford, at people coming down the south side of the hill with nothing in their hands but ropes. The sun was up. It was behind the section and in the faces of the people coming down, and every man in that section could have counted the buttons on them. I was a quarter-mile off and I could.” He stopped. “I wrote: in poor light the section took an approaching party for armed men. That was the sentence.”

“Why.”

“Because it was the sentence that was needed.” He said it without any weight on it, the way he had said I never looked at the map. “The sergeant was mine. The section was mine. Without that sentence there’s a sergeant on a rope and a company’s name read out at a trial and an order read out with it, and a map. With it there’s nobody to blame and no reason to read anything aloud. I knew that when I wrote it. I’m good at knowing what people need written. It’s the thing the garrison taught me that I’d pay to give back.” A breath. “Sellick copied it fair. He has a good hand. I signed the copy.”

She did not say anything. She had a great many things and none of them was a sentence.

“So when you said on the tower that you don’t use the phrase,” he said, “I’d used it. Over three people. And I sat there with the wind going over us and I knew what the man who wrote it over your father was doing when he wrote it. He wasn’t lying about the light. He’d not have thought of it as the light. He was writing the sentence that was needed, and I’ve stood where he stood, with the pen. That’s the thing I didn’t say.”

He turned his head then and looked at her, and she saw that he was waiting for her to send him back; that he had been waiting since the tower, and had thought it would be a river, and it had turned out to be this.

She found she was holding the case.

She had not decided to. Her hand had gone to the strap, and the strap was in her fist, the way it had been on the shingle when he had had to open her fingers to take it. She looked at her hand. She made it let go.

“What was the light,” she said. Her voice came out flat, the way it had at the gate. “At the ford. Say it the way you’d log it.”

He did not look away from her.

“Good,” he said. “From the east. Clear across the ford.”

“Then that’s what it was.”

She said it in her father’s voice, the one for corrections, and heard herself say it, and it did not undo anything. It did not forgive anything either. It was a number, taken, and written down whatever it came to, and it sat between them in the doorway of a cell to a god nobody had a name for, and neither of them touched it.

“I’ll take it myself,” she said. “At the ford. At the second hour after dawn, when we get there, with the circle, from the north bank. I’ll log what I see. If the light’s good I’ll write that it was good.”

“It’ll be good.”

“Then I’ll write it.” She lay down with her back to the case and her face to the fire, and put her arm over the lid, over the corner, over the dent. “That’s the only thing I know how to do with any of it. Nobody’s ever taken the light at that ford. Somebody should.”

He did not say she was right. He did not say she was wrong. He put his head back against the jamb and closed his eyes, which was not sleeping, and she listened to him not sleep, and to the burn, and to the mule shifting on three good feet and a bad one.

In the morning she picked up the case and put it on the hill side, on the bruise, and kept it there. Scarrow was a day off. After that there was the ridge, and after the ridge, the valley, and a ford she meant to stand on at the second hour after dawn with a man who had already written down what the light was, and she carried the corner against the bone all the way over the shoulder and did not once move it.