Episodul 202 · The Front Way

By ten the gym was closed, the shutters were down and the only light was the lamp over the office desk.

Not at the house, the message had said. So they had come here, to the one place none of them slept, and spent the evening pretending to do ordinary things in it. Tesa had swept a floor that did not need sweeping. Krista had read the same page twice. Soles had checked the back corridor once, found the fire door shut, and stopped thinking about it.

Tesa had locked the front doors herself and put the key in her pocket. Krista sat on the edge of the ring with her notebook closed on her knees. Soles stood where he could see both doors and the stairs, which meant he stood in the middle of the floor, which meant he felt like a man waiting for a bus in a field.

Maxim had taken the front window.

He had lifted one slat of the shutter with two fingers and stood with his eye to the gap and his other hand resting on the iron bar that ran across the frame. He had not moved for half an hour.

— Man with the dog, he said. Second time. Same side. He’s not watching. He’s just got a dog that wants to go around twice.

A minute later:

— Taxi. Empty. Driver’s eating.

— You remember all of them? Krista asked.

— Faces. Wheels. Walks, he said, without turning around. It’s not a gift. It’s a filing cabinet that won’t close.

The street went quiet. A tram somewhere. Maxim’s hand tightened on the bar, the way a man takes hold of a rail on a bridge when the wind gets up, and stayed there.

Soles saw him go still. Maxim’s free hand closed on the empty air beside him, the way a hand closes on a stem.

— Fire I —

The river had been rising for three days, and on the fourth it came over the low fields on the far bank, and the village there began to cross.

They came up the causeway with what they could carry: bedding, a crate of hens, a clock, a child asleep on a sack of flour. The water came behind them, brown and patient, taking the fences one at a time.

Ordric had kept the bridge gate for fifteen years. He knew every one of them. The miller’s widow with the two goats. The cooper and his apprentice, both carrying a barrel because neither would leave it. The family from the end of the lane, five children and a grandmother on a door laid across a handcart.

He knew what each of them had in their purse, too, because he had watched them pay for fifteen years. Most of them had nothing in it today.

The steward rode up at noon, wet to the knees and furious about it.

— The lord’s toll, he said. Every head. Every animal. The bridge is the lord’s, the flood is God’s, and God doesn’t pay for repairs.

Behind him, two of the lord’s men sat their horses with their hands on their belts.

Ordric looked at the line. It went back down the ramp and out along the causeway into water that was already up to the cart axles.

He had never let anyone cross without paying. Not the priest. Not the blacksmith, who was his wife’s brother. Not the steward himself, who cursed and paid.

He went into the hut and came back with his own purse, the one he kept for winter, and stood beside the iron-banded box.

The miller’s widow came first. She opened her mouth to explain. Ordric took a coin from his purse and dropped it in the box.

— Paid, he said, and raised the gate.

He cut a notch in the tally stick. He looked at her face, as he always did, so that he would know it.

The cooper. Coin. Notch. The apprentice. Coin. Notch. The barrel, which he decided was an animal. Coin.

The steward watched for six heads before he understood.

— That’s your money.

— It’s paid.

— The lord didn’t send you here to be generous.

— The lord sent me to see nobody crossed without paying. Nobody has.

— With what will you eat this winter?

— With what I always eat. Less of it.

The steward turned in his saddle and spoke to his men. They came down off their horses and walked to the gate and took hold of the beam, one on each side, to bring it down across the road.

Ordric put his shoulder under it.

He was not a big man. He did not have to be. The beam rested on its post, and his shoulder was between the beam and the post, and the only way down was through him. The two men leaned on it. Then they leaned harder. Ordric set his feet in the wet planks and held, and looked at each of them in turn, the way he looked at faces he meant to remember.

— I know your mother, he said to the younger one. She crosses on market day. She pays.

The young man let go first. The other one looked at the steward, and then at the line of people in the water, and let go too.

The handcart came up the ramp. Five children and a grandmother on a door.

Seven coins. Seven notches.

By dusk his purse was empty and the stick was so cut that he had to start another. Nobody crossed without paying. Nobody ever paid him back, and he never asked, and all that winter, whenever one of them came to the gate, he knew their faces, and they knew he did.

❦

Maxim let the slat drop.

The shutter clacked against the frame. He stood with his hand on the bar for a moment longer, then took it away and looked at the palm as if he expected something to be written on it.

— All right? Soles asked.

— Fine, he said, shaking the hand out. The man in my garden. Bridges. Don’t ask.

— The one who watches people pass?

— He opened the gate for them. Paid for them himself.

Maxim looked back at the shutter. Soles let the answer stand.

Krista was watching him. She didn’t ask either.

Maxim lifted the slat again.

— Nobody’s come the front way, he said. Ten thirty. If he’s coming, he’s late or he’s careful.

Behind them, at the far end of the gym, beyond the bags and the dark mouth of the corridor, something metal shifted, very softly, as if a door that ought to have been shut had been resting against its latch all evening, waiting for somebody to lean on it.