Chapter I · His Men

Varren sat down in the strip of light after the six o’clock count, as he did every morning. It was the only thing in the cell no one had issued him. It lay a little to the left of where it had been the day before. He crossed his legs and closed his eyes. Behind him the hatch opened and shut. He did not turn around.

The garden was smaller than it used to be. The gray ground ended sooner now, and the pale outlines of plants stood closer together, like a crowd after half of it has gone home. Two plants still glowed. One was low and red at the heart.

The commander was standing beside it. He used to talk, once, whole nights of it. Now he had a word at a time, and he spent them carefully. He looked at Varren, and the cord at his left wrist moved under his thumb.

Sit.

Varren sat.

It was quiet. The garden had never been quiet. Someone in the garden had always been pressing forward, a laugh too loud, a hunger that was not his. The fifth was gone. While it was there it had fed on the others, and on what he remembered of them. He did not know how much. That was the trouble with what had been taken. You could not count it.

— Do you remember the dormitory?

Cold.

— The stove went out. There were eleven beds.

The thumb stopped on a knot.

Twelve.

It was true. The bed by the door had been empty that night. The boy who slept in it had been carried upstairs with a fever, and Varren had lain awake counting the breathing of the rest, eleven, again and again, because the count was wrong. He had been five. No one had told him yet that you were allowed to stop.

He had gone into the garden to get away from the number. One plant shone brighter than the rest, red at the heart, like a coal someone had blown on. A flat stone lay at its foot with a name cut into it. He did not know his letters yet. He learned the shapes instead, one by one, and later they were the first word he read by himself. He had never said it aloud. He did not say it now.

He had touched the leaves because he was cold and they were warm. That night he dreamed the end first: snow, a hill, a man sitting down against a wall. The rest came over the next winters, a night at a time, and he put it in order himself.

— There were other nights after that. Some I still have. The rest I can’t find.

Where they should have been, there was only a smooth place, like a stone the river has had for a long time.

— But I kept the hill.

Tell.

So he told it from the beginning, the way you tell a thing you are afraid of losing. On the floor of the cell, the light moved. He did not move with it.

— Voices I —

The stones on the hill had been laid without mortar. Each one sat on the ones below it as if it had grown there, and in three days of siege the commander had not found a gap wide enough for a knife blade. They were too large and too smooth for any hands he knew of, older than the road and older than the names the shepherds gave the hills.

The shepherds never brought their sheep up here. They said the place drank. Pour a bucket of water on the slabs, they said, and it was gone before you could set the bucket down. The commander had taken it for a story told to children. Then, on the first night, he had watched the snow fall on the ruins and settle everywhere except on a single slab by the eastern wall. That slab was cracked across the middle, and the snow melted on it as soon as it touched the stone.

They had laid the dying there. Only one was left. The slab was the only warm place on the hill.

To the north, the hill ended in a cliff. Below, the fires had closed into a ring. The commander counted them every night, without fail. Forty-two. On the first night there had been thirty, on the second thirty-eight. Now the ring had no gaps. Between the fires, men walked back and forth with torches, slowly. They did not need to hurry.

He had thirty-one men left.

He counted them too. His thumb moved over the cord tied around his left wrist, knot by knot. He did it whenever he counted anything. He had learned it from a man he did not want to think about, and the knots had never been meant for counting the living, but his thumb no longer knew the difference.

Most of them slept against the walls, wrapped in whatever they had left. No one stood watch anymore. When the enemy came, it would come at dawn, from every side.

The boy lay on the cracked slab with a strap pulled tight above his knee. A spear had gone through his thigh on the first day, during the climb, and the strap was the only thing that had kept him from bleeding out. It could not keep him much longer. The commander had seen enough legs like that one. The smell had started the night before.

He crouched beside him. The boy opened his eyes.

— Are they coming again?

— At dawn.

The boy nodded. He did not seem surprised. He was seventeen, maybe. He had joined the column two villages back, with his father’s old spear and boots that were too big for him, and the commander had let him stay because he had not had the heart to send him home down a road full of the enemy. Now he wondered whether that had been mercy.

— Is it warm? the commander asked.

— The stone is. The rest of me isn’t.

The commander pulled the boy’s cloak higher and tucked it under his shoulder. The boy closed his eyes again. After a while his lips began to move, and the commander realized he was calling for his mother. Quietly, so the others would not hear. The commander stayed until the boy fell asleep, and then a little longer.

His second-in-command, Crux, found him by the eastern wall. He was a broad man with a beard gone white with frost and a bandage wrapped around his ribs under his coat. He had been the commander’s right hand for eleven years. He had a wife in the hills to the north and a daughter whose name the commander knew as well as his own, because on bad evenings he made the second talk about her instead of the war.

— We won’t hold another night, the second said.

— I know.

— There are twelve arrows left. No bread for anyone. If they come at dawn, we kill a few of them, and then they kill us. If we go down to them, they kill us faster.

He looked at the fires for a while.

— I’d rather go faster.

— Not yet.

Crux studied him. He did not ask what the commander was waiting for. That was the thing about him: he never asked a question when he thought the answer would make things worse. He went back to the wall and was asleep in minutes, his chin on his chest.

The commander waited until the whole hill was quiet. Then he sat on the edge of the warm slab, beside the boy, and took out the thing he carried.

It was wrapped in an old cloth, and it was heavier than it looked. Two long, narrow blades, joined in the middle by a round rivet on one side, so that they could open and close against each other. One blade was dark and matte and swallowed the firelight. The other was pale, almost white, and however long he held it, it never warmed. He had carried them for years. He had never used them to cut anything.

They did not work like a tool. They worked like a guide. Sometimes, when he held them, he saw things that were not there. A shadow falling the wrong way. A path through a forest that was clear only to him. A sound like a word, spoken by no one. He had learned to read these signs. Not with certainty, but well enough to stay alive.

Three days ago, when the battle in the valley broke and his men scattered in every direction, the blades had shown him the hill. A line of pale light running up the slope, through the snow, to the ruins. He had followed it because there was nowhere else to go, and forty men had followed him. Now he sat at the top of that line with thirty-one of them and a ring of fires, and he did not know what the hill was for.

He laid the blades across his knees and waited.

At first, nothing. The fires below. The breathing of the men. The cold, working its way into his hands. Then, slowly, the way the eyes get used to the dark, he began to see the threads.

They came out of the men. One from each chest, thin as a hair, pale against the night. They did not hang loose. They pulled, gently, all in the same direction, across the snow and over the stones, toward the slab he was sitting on. They gathered at the crack. He counted them without meaning to, his thumb on the knots. Thirty-one.

And one more, which came from no man.

It came from below. Out of the crack, from somewhere deep under the hill, rose a thread as thick as a root, darker than the others and warm. The thin threads ran down into it and wound around it, the way the roots of small plants wind around the root of a tree.

The commander did not move. He had seen strange things through the blades before, but never this. Never anything that came out of his own men.

Then the threads leaned.

Not all of them, and not by much. But they leaned toward the blades on his knees, and where they met above the crack, one spot stood out. A small knot of light, where the thin threads touched the thick one. The pale blade was cold under his fingers. He felt it more than he saw it: the place where the threads met was the place to cut.

There.

He looked at the boy. At the strap on his leg. At the men asleep against the walls, at the second with his chin on his chest. At the fires below. Forty-two.

He did not know what cutting would do. He told himself the blades had never lied to him. That they had brought him up the hill for this. That if he did nothing, the boy would be dead before noon and the rest of them by evening, and there would be no one left to know what he had or had not done.

He opened the blades. The rivet scraped, a small, dry sound, the first in all those years. He knelt over the crack, set the blades on either side of the knot of light and closed them.

He expected resistance. There was none. The blades closed as if on air.

The thread did not break.

It widened. The knot of light opened like a mouth, and the thick thread beneath it swelled and rose, and warm air came up out of the crack. Not warm like a fire. A soft, stale warmth. It carried a smell he could not name at first, and then he could: an apple forgotten in a drawer. Sweet, old, a little rotten.

The snow on the slab melted. Then the snow around it. The bare circle spread slowly across the ruins until it reached the walls, and the men sleeping there sighed and let go of their own arms. The thin threads thickened. They were no longer hairs. They were string, then cord, and they pulsed softly, all together.

The boy opened his eyes.

He sat up. He looked at his leg, at the strap, at the commander kneeling in front of him with the blades in his hands. Then he got up, slowly, one hand against the wall, and stood. He shifted his weight onto the bad leg. Nothing. He leaned his shoulder against the stones to steady himself.

His shoulder went into the wall.

Not through it. Into it, the way a hand goes into water. The stone closed around him without a sound and without a crack, and the boy stood there, half inside the wall, and looked at the commander.

And he smiled.

The commander smiled too. For the first time in three days, he believed he had saved his men.

Down below, the fires burned on, all forty-two, as if nothing on the hill had changed.

The boy pulled his shoulder back. It came out of the stone clean, without dust and without a scratch, and his cloak was still dry. He looked at the slab, then at his hand, and laid it against the wall again. The hand sank in to the wrist, as if into thick water.

— It doesn’t hurt anymore, he said. My leg. I can’t feel it at all.

The commander looked at the strap above his knee. It was as tight as it had been at sunset, and the cloth beneath it was still black with blood. Yet the boy stood straight, with all his weight on that leg, and did not even wince.

The others woke one by one, not from the noise but from the warmth. One leaned on the wall to pull on his boot, fell halfway into it and came out laughing.

Crux was the last to get up. He felt his ribs, where he had been struck two days before, and gave the commander a long look.

— What did you do?

— What had to be done.

It was not an answer, and they both knew it. The second did not ask again. He went to the crack, crouched and held his palm above it, to feel the warmth.

The commander no longer had to guess at the threads. They ran from every man’s chest down to the crack, thick and warm now, pulsing slowly, all together.

— On the north side there’s the cliff, he said. They don’t guard it.

— They don’t guard it because nobody can climb down there.

— We’re not climbing down. We’re going through it.

The second looked at the boy, whose whole forearm was in the wall now, then at the fires.

— Their captains sleep in the stone sheepfold at the foot of the hill, he said quietly. They put two men on the door.

— The captains first, the commander said. Before they can sound the horns.

Crux nodded and went to wake them.

They set out a little before midnight. The commander counted them as they filed past him, and the cord moved between his fingers with every man. Thirty-one. The boy was among them, the strap still tight on his leg, walking faster than any of them.

The commander did not touch the stone. He had thought about it several times in the last hour, and each time his hand had stopped before it reached the wall. He told himself someone had to stay up top and watch the fires. It was true. It was not the whole truth.

From the edge of the cliff he watched the first man step into the rock with a short, careful stride. The rest followed without looking back. The threads stretched after them, down through the stone, thinning but holding, and turned along the foot of the hill toward the biggest fire in the ring. It burned beside a low, square shadow. The sheepfold.

Away from the crack, the cold came back twice as hard. He tucked his hands under his arms and waited. Then the fire by the sheepfold moved, as if someone had walked through it. There was a single shout, cut off halfway, and after it a silence so long that the commander thought it was all over, one way or the other.

The threads jerked at the same moment, pulled tight from the other end. At the crack, the knot of light he had cut opened a little wider with every pull. The commander told himself it was the cold. He ran his thumb over the knots and started counting again, from the beginning.

Then the horns began.

They sounded from the sheepfold, then from everywhere, with no order at all. Torches ran between the tents. Someone set a wagon on fire, probably by mistake. The men in the valley were shouting names, and the names did not answer.

He heard them before he saw them, on the south path, where nothing should have been climbing: boots breaking the crust, two men breathing as if they had run the whole slope.

They stopped at the edge of the bare circle, where the melt had frozen again into a rim of gray ice. Soldiers from the ring, without helmets, one with a spear, one with a short axe. They had run from the horns, uphill, because uphill was the only place without fire. They looked at the wet slabs, at the warm air over the crack, at the one man on dry stone, and decided what he was.

— He’s one of them, the axeman said.

Two. The spear first. The axe waits for me to turn.

His hands were not hands anymore. He knelt by the crack, the way the second had at midnight, and held them over the warm air. It cost him the distance. The spear came across the circle while the blood came back into his fingers like needles.

The eastern wall was an arm’s length behind him. He had seen the boy’s shoulder go into it like water. His heel was already lifting toward it. He did not take the step, and did not know why, only that his hand had stopped an inch from that wall an hour before.

He wound the cloak around his left forearm and took the spear on it. The point went through the cloth anyway, a hot line along the bone. The spearman leaned in after it, and the commander stepped inside the shaft, found his knife on the second try and cut across the knuckles on the wood. The spear dropped.

The axe had not waited. It came around the wall on his blind side, and the flat of it put him on his knees on the wet slab. The knife skidded toward the crack. The axe rose again, and the man holding it would not come one step closer to the stone.

He’s afraid of the wall.

The commander got up toward the wall, not the axe, his back to the warm stone, and felt it give behind him the way thick water gives, felt how little it would take, one lean, and the blade would come down on nothing, and he pushed off it instead, with all his weight and both ruined hands, into the axeman’s chest, and carried him over the rim of ice.

They landed in the snow. The axe went under it. The commander lay across the man with his forearm on his throat, and the man’s eyes were on the wall behind him, white all the way around. The commander’s thumb had found the cord at his wrist. He had not put it there.

— Go, he said.

They went down the way they had come. The commander sat in the snow, not on the warm slab, and tied the torn sleeve with his teeth. He did not go near the wall again that night.

The ring broke before dawn, fire by fire. By first light the valley held only empty tents and the wide track of an army gone south without its baggage.

His men came up the path, not through the cliff, some laughing, some silent. They brought a single prisoner, a young soldier with his hands tied and his face white, one of the two from the sheepfold door. The door, the second said, had stayed bolted from the inside all night.

The prisoner looked at their hands, their dry clothes, the walls behind them, and then at the commander.

— You came out of the ruins, he said. It was not a question.

The commander let him go that day, with a horse and a piece of bread, knowing exactly what he would tell his own people.

Only in daylight did he see what he had brought them.

One of the men, who had never once slept before a battle, had sat down by the eastern wall and leaned back into the stone, up to his ears. When the commander called him by name, he opened his eyes without hurry.

— It’s quiet in there, he said. In there I don’t think about anything.

The boy sat by the fire someone had lit again and told his story. He had come out of the sheepfold wall right beside a captain’s bed, half his body still in the stone, and the captain had woken and tried to decide, in his nightshirt, whether to reach for his sword or his boots. The captain had chosen the boots. The boy laughed until he had to wipe his eyes, and the others laughed with him. The evening before, the same boy had cried for his mother until he fell asleep. Now he walked on the broken leg as if it were whole.

The second brought the commander a cup of warm water. He looked at the sleeve, stiff with blood, and did not ask. He was the only one not laughing. They sat side by side on the slabs.

— What’s your daughter’s name? the commander asked.

He had asked it on many evenings, to keep him off the war. He knew the name. He wanted to hear it.

The second opened his mouth and kept it open for a while, his eyes somewhere in the snow. Then he closed it.

— It’ll come to me, he said.

He did not look frightened. That frightened the commander more than anything he had seen that night. The second sipped from the cup and looked at the wall, with a hunger the commander had only ever seen on him in front of a full table.

The commander went to the crack. The threads did not just run down to the slab. They were tied there. When a man walked away, his thread drew taut and he slowed, turned his head, and after a while came back. None of them seemed to notice.

The shepherds said the place drank.

He had thought they meant water. Along the walls the frost had gone gray and soft, as if the stones were being emptied from inside, and the crack beneath the slab was wider than it had been at midnight.

He looked at the blades. The threads no longer leaned toward them the way they had in the night. Only two still leaned, and not toward the same blade: the boy’s toward one, the thread of the man in the wall toward the other. For the first time, the signs did not point in one direction.

He closed the blades and wrapped them in their cloth. He ran his thumb over the rivet once, the way he ran it over the knots of the cord. Then he turned to his men and counted them.

Thirty-one. They were all there.

He was not sure they were still themselves.

Nine winters later, the commander climbed the hill alone.

It took him most of a day. He was old now in the way the cold could tell, and he stopped often, one hand on his knee. The slope had not changed. Only his legs had. The light was turning yellow when he reached the ruins.

He had come to close it.

The cloth on his back held only one blade now. He had taken the rivet out the spring after the siege, with a nail and a stone, and the two halves had come apart as easily as if they had been waiting for it. The pale one he had left two winters ago, in a place far older than these walls, and he had walked away without marking the path. The dark one could close what he had opened. Every winter he had climbed up with bread and gone down again with the blade still wrapped. This winter the climb had taken everything his legs had. There would not be another.

The ruins had changed. Snow lay on the path and the walls and the slabs, everywhere except the eastern wall, where the stone was bare and dark, as if wet. The slab beneath it was no longer warm. The crack ran its whole length now and climbed into the wall the way a root climbs into a tree. He poured a little water from his skin onto the stone. It was gone before he could put the cork back.

Only one thread was left. It came out of the eastern wall at the height of a sitting man’s chest and ran down into the crack, thick as a rope and darker than any of them had ever been. The rest of his men had gone down the hill over the years, until one spring the threads had let them go and they had not come back. On the plain, people now said there were men who walked out of walls. They said it the way the prisoner had, as if it were not a question.

Crux had not gone anywhere.

The commander knelt by the wall. Under the dark, wet surface there was a shape, the way there is a shape under ice: a forehead, the line of a beard, closed eyes.

— I brought bread, the commander said.

The eyes opened. They took a long time to find him.

— You’re late, the second said. His voice came through the stone small and close, like a voice in the next room. Or I’m early. In here it’s hard to say.

— I’m old. Old men are late.

— You were old last time.

— Then I’m later.

He unwrapped the blade.

He saw the knot at once. Where the rope-thick thread went into the crack, the light gathered in a small, hard knot, the place where the second ended and the hill began. Lay the dark blade across it, and the crack would close. The slab would be a slab again. The wall would be only a wall.

With the second inside it.

The hill would stop drinking. Whatever the men on the plain were becoming, he told himself, the place that was making them would be shut. And the man who had stood beside him for twenty years, who had a wife in the hills to the north and a daughter whose name he no longer knew, would end in the dark, in the quiet he had asked for.

— Come out, the commander said. Just once. Sit with me out here.

— It’s cold out there.

— It’s cold everywhere. That’s what winter is.

— Not in here.

The face moved under the stone, the way a face moves when it is trying to remember something and failing.

— I tried, the second said. Once. I couldn’t remember which way was out.

The commander looked for another way, as he had on every hill and in every forest of his life. There had always been one, even when it was only a line of pale light in the snow. Here there were two. One went down the hill and left the second alone in the stone. The other went through him.

He held the blade over the knot. His thumb found the cord at his wrist, the old knots that had never been meant for counting the living. He knew what the man who had tied them would have done. That man had taught him that it was the same gesture in the end, the hand that holds you and the hand that lets you go into the snow. He had believed it for most of his life, and once he had acted on it.

One more knot. That was all it would be.

He laid the blade down. Not across the knot. Beside it, on the cold slab, unwrapped, the dark metal swallowing what was left of the light. He did not reach for it again. Whoever found it here would have to decide for themselves. He had carried it long enough.

Then he sat down with his back against the eastern wall, where the shape of the second’s shoulder pressed faintly against his own through the stone, and broke the bread in two.

He did not go down. He told himself he would rest first. It was true. It was not the whole truth. He had always been good at waiting. Most of hunting was waiting, staying still until the other thing moved. The second would not move. The cold would.

The light went from yellow to gray. The cold came into his hands, then his feet, and then it stopped coming in from anywhere and was simply there. He counted his men for the second, by name, his thumb moving over the knots for each one, and with every name he said who the man had been before the hill. He started with the boy. The boy had gone down the hill in the third spring, laughing, and had never once limped again, and for a whole year the commander had told himself that was a good thing. Then he had stopped telling himself anything about it. The boy had never come back up the hill to say where he had gone. The second did not know any of the names. He listened anyway, and once or twice he laughed at something the commander said about one of them, a small laugh through the stone, like a man who remembers a joke without remembering who told it.

At twenty-six the commander’s thumb stopped.

He waited for it to move again. It did not. He thought he should mind that more than he did.

— You’ve stopped, Crux said from inside the wall.

Then, slowly, as if he were lifting it from somewhere very deep, he said the only name he had kept.

— Dace.

The commander smiled. It was a poor trade, a commander for a daughter. He would have liked to hear the other name once more. But his mouth was slow now, and the second had always understood him without being told.

Snow began to fall on the ruins. It fell on the walls and the path, on the dark blade beside him and on his hands, and he did not brush it off. It fell on the slab that had once been the only warm place on the hill.

This time it stayed.

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