Scarrow

Corin stood at the well in the middle of Scarrow with his hands on the rim of it, where every door on the green could see them, and let the village look.

It was the only trade he had left that he was any good at. Fourteen houses, a smithy, an inn with a bench outside it and nobody on the bench; a green with the well in the middle and a stone trough beside it that the mule was drinking from as if he had been promised it. Every door was open, because it was the seventh week after the thaw and the first warm day, and nobody was in any of them. They were behind them. He could feel where they were the way he could feel where a patrol was on a road, by what had gone quiet.

He had come into Scarrow four times in his life and been served in the inn three of them. The fourth was now.

Orla had gone with the headwoman to see about a mule. He had watched them go up the lane between the smithy and the last house, the headwoman in front, a broad woman in a brown apron with her sleeves rolled and a walk that said the lane was hers, and Orla behind with the case on her hip, on the side toward the wall, and neither of them had looked back at him. He had not expected them to. He had been told at the edge of the green, by the headwoman, without her voice rising, that the guild’s surveyor was welcome to trade in Scarrow and the guild’s surveyor’s escort was welcome to wait.

So he waited. Hands on the rim. The smith’s door had shut when he came onto the green, and it was the only door that had, and that told him the smith was a man who had once been in a line, and the rest were not.

He thought about what he had told her by the fire at the Sallow. How long before someone who doesn’t like me knows I’m here. He had put it at the pass, or the Bridge. He had never once put it at Scarrow, and he stood by the well and worked out why, and did not like the answer, which was that he had never once, in four years, thought about where the people had gone.

· · ·Scene break

Berta Innes came back down the lane alone.

She came straight across the green to him, not fast, the way a woman crosses her own yard to see to a thing that has got into it. She stopped on the far side of the well. She was fifty, or near it; grey under the cap, forearms like a smith’s, and eyes that had done their looking at him already, from a doorway, and did not need to do it again.

“She’s bought a mule,” Berta said. “Seven years old, sound, carries, doesn’t argue. Marigold. I told her she’d miss the arguing. She’s paying in the guild’s silver, and I’ve taken it, and I’d not have taken yours.”

“No.”

“The old one’s bruised the sole. He’ll go sound in a fortnight if nobody puts a load on him, and never if you do. Take him light or leave him here; I’d keep him, but he bites.” She put her hand on the rim of the well, on her side, the way he had his on his. “That’s the trade. Now the other thing.”

He waited.

“I’ve told her the Brack’s got people in it again.” Berta said it to his face and watched it. “Told her, not you. That was mine to choose. Twelve of them came over that ridge to me four years back in the autumn with what they could carry and I fed them a winter, in that house, and the smithy, and the inn. Twelve. In the spring they went back over. Three houses are up and there’s a fourth going up this summer, and Sela Brand’s at the top of it with her husband under a stone, and that’s what you’re walking that woman into with her chain and her circle and her seal.”

The mule lifted his head from the trough and water ran off his chin.

“If you’re taking her in there,” Berta Innes said, “know they’re back.”

He had a great many answers that were true and did not answer. He had been collecting them since he was thirty. He looked at the woman across the well and found that not one of them would come, and that what came instead was the thing itself, short, in the plain voice.

“I didn’t know.”

“No.” She had known he would say that. “You never asked.”

“No.”

“Four years. You’ve been through this country twice a year on that road with your silver and your coat, and you never once came up that lane and asked an old woman what was in the valley.” She took her hand off the well. “You’ll not get a bed in Scarrow, Captain. You’ll not get a word, and after this you’ll not get one from me. But you’ll get that, because she’s going in there whatever you do, and I’d sooner the man behind her knew what he was behind.”

She went back up the lane. The smith’s door stayed shut.

· · ·Scene break

He had drawn it for her with nine squares and not one of them had a roof.

He stood by the well after Berta had gone and looked at that, because there was nothing else on the green to look at. A week ago, by a fire on the Wyre, with her pen, he had put the Brack on vellum in order, the water first, and nine houses along it, and he had drawn every one of them the way he had last seen it, which was black, and empty, and his. He had drawn a valley with nobody in it. He had drawn the Chancellery’s map.

Not yet, he had said at Hatch, with his back to the wall, when she asked to go to the Brack while the weather held, and he had not looked at why. He looked now. He had said it because he had been walking her toward a place that was ash in his head, nine black squares by the water, and he had not been able to stand the thought of her chaining ash, and he had been wrong about the ash. It was not ash. It was three roofs and a fourth going up, and Ewan Brand’s widow at the top of the water with the wall rebuilt, and a woman with a seal on her way over the ridge to draw it, true, with the names.

He knew what a map with names on it was. He had been handed one.

· · ·Scene break

She came down the lane with the new mule on a rope, and the new mule was dun and short in the leg and walked as though she had never had a thought in her life and did not intend to start, and Bishop looked at her over the trough with the loathing of the old for the competent.

“Marigold,” Orla said.

“I heard.”

“She told you?”

“She told me the trade.” He took the rope, and the mule let him, and stood for him, the way Bishop had at the gate, and he found he did not want that today from anything. “And the other.”

Orla looked at him. Her face was the one from the pen, steady, and he could not read it, and he had stopped, some weeks ago, pretending to himself that he could.

“Not here,” she said.

· · ·Scene break

He would not take a roof in Scarrow, and Scarrow would not have given him one, so they camped a mile east where the track began to climb, in the lee of the last wall before the ridge, with the two mules picketed together and disagreeing about it. He made the fire small. He did not know who was on the ridge tonight. He knew who was over it.

She loaded the case off Marigold herself and set it by her, and sat with her back to it, and did not open the field book.

“Twelve came back,” she said. “The spring after. Three steadings up; Cauldkeld, Blackshiel, Crossgill. A fourth going up now at Todholes. Sela Brand at the top. The Rennies’ sister with her. A family called Halket at Blackshiel, a widow called Weir at Crossgill with two sons, and a couple at Todholes.” She had it in order, the way she had everything; she had made Berta give it to her as a list. “She told me you burned four of those on your first day and your lieutenant burned the rest, and I said I knew, and she looked at me the way she’d looked at you.”

“She’d have earned it.”

“I’m not asking whether she earned it.” She was looking at the fire. “You drew nine squares. You didn’t put a roof on any of them.”

“No.”

“Did you know?”

“No.” He said it plainly, and it was the second time today, and it did not get easier. “I never asked. Berta said that too. It’s true. I’ve been through this country every year since and never once gone up that lane to hear what was in the valley, because I didn’t want to hear it, and I’m a man who can go a long way round a thing he doesn’t want to hear.”

The fire ticked. Above them the ridge was a black line with the last of the light behind it, and the cairns along it were not visible yet, and would be, and she was going to walk every one.

He had come to Scarrow with a thing he had not said since Hatch, and at Hatch he had not known its shape. He knew it now. He sat with his back to the wall and his coat over his knees and turned it over, the way he had turned the stick in the fire at Hob’s, and found it had only the one side.

“Tallis,” he said.

She waited.

“You go over that ridge and down into the Brack and you’ll chain it, and you’ll cairn it, and you’ll draw what’s there. You’ll draw Cauldkeld with a roof on it, because it has one. You’ll letter the name. And then you’ll do the thing you did to my sketch, and you’ll put the people’s names under the steadings, because that’s what a legend’s for; because a map that doesn’t say who’s there is the map I was handed.” He said it to the fire, in order. “And that sheet goes to Stannock, and a copy to the Chancellery, and the Chancellery sends its copy to the Bridge with the next line it wants held, and Sellick reads it. With the names. That’s what a map with names on it is, in a garrison. It’s a list. I’ve been handed one.”

“And if I draw it empty.”

“Then you’ve drawn the empty valley.” He looked at her. “And you’d know it. And so would I.”

She did not say anything. She sat with her hand on the case and her face to the fire, and he watched her look at the thing he had put on the ground between them, and he saw that she had already seen it, on the green, in the lane, with Berta’s list in her hand; that she had walked down the lane with a mule on a rope and the whole of it behind her eyes and had said not here, and had carried it a mile up a hill to put it down where he could see it.

“That’s not what you came to say,” she said.

“No.”

He put his hands together between his knees. He had thought, at Hatch, that the thing he would not say was a reason, and that he would find it, and give it to her, and she would weigh it. It was not a reason. It was the other thing, the thing under reasons, that he had spent four years arranging his life so that he would never have to say aloud to anyone who could act on it.

“I want to turn round,” Corin said.

It came out as short and plain as he had known it would, and it was the first time in four years he had said what he wanted to a person who could give it to him, and he sat and felt it out of his mouth and in the air between them, and did not take it back.

She turned her head and looked at him for a long moment, with the firelight on the side of her face.

“Then walk behind me,” Orla said, “and pretend.”

· · ·Scene break

He did not ask what she meant. He worked it out in the night, sitting against the wall with the ridge going pale above him, and by the time she got up he had it, and was not sure he would have been able to say it aloud.

She loaded Marigold. She had the chain on and the tent under it and the food low and split before he had the water, and she lashed the case on the inside, hill side, and checked it twice, and then she took the new mule’s headstall and turned her up the track, and Bishop, light, went after with his ears back because nobody had asked him.

She did not look round to see if he was coming.

He picked up his pack and came. He walked behind the old mule, and the old mule walked behind the new one, and the new one walked behind her, and she picked the ground. She picked it well, better than he had thought she would, off the wet and onto the stones, and he watched her boots choose the line he would have chosen and said nothing, because that was the term now, and she had not said it and did not need to.

A hundred yards up he understood the rest of it. She had not told him to walk behind her because she wanted to be in front. She had told him because he had said the true thing, and she had heard it, and she was not going to let him carry it in front where it would pick the ground for both of them. He could carry it behind. Behind her, he could want to turn round with every step, and she would not have to look at it, and he would not have to pretend to her that he did not, and the survey would go up the ridge at the same pace it had come over the Ashfall, with the case on the inside.

Pretend. She had meant: to the ridge. To the valley. To whoever was watching from a cairn. Not to her.

The track went up. Below, Scarrow’s fourteen roofs went small, and the smith’s door was open now, and a man stood in it with his arms folded, watching the guild’s surveyor and her escort go up toward the line of cairns with two mules, one of them lame, and one of them new.

Corin walked behind her, and wanted to turn round, and did not, and for the first time in four years did not put the wanting anywhere. He let it walk with him. It was heavier than the chain had been, and she had told him where to carry it, and he found, halfway to the first cairn, with her step on the stones in front of him at the interval it had kept for six weeks, that he would carry it where she said.