Episodul 134 · Where to Cut

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.