Episodul 133 · A Place That Drinks

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.