Episode 135 · Out of the Ruins

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.