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Chapter 128: The Pass
The Provost of the Field kept his office in a harness-room, and he kept it in a ledger. Ser Eadric Wystan was a thin, clerkly knight with ink on his cuffs and the look of a man who has not been to bed in a week because the sums would not let him."Pallbearers," he said. He did not look up at the eyes, or at Marta Flint in the doorway. He ran his pen down a column. "I am told that you fetch. Good. I have eleven hundred dead between this rock and the Throat, and four hundred spades, and half the spades are wanted for the ditch." The pen stopped. "I have also two assaults' worth lying out in front of the wall where no burial party will go. We call that ground the Strip. It is three hundred paces of nothing, with their bowmen at one end and ours at the other. I don't order you onto it. I haven't the right, and I have never had a company that would go. I mention that it's there.""We'll go and look at it," said Ravel."Then you'll want a pass for the upper road." He wrote one. He sanded it
Chapter 127: Not Alone
Mistress Merewen was sixty, with forearms like a baker's and an unlit pipe clamped in her teeth. She looked at his eyes once, on the threshold of the east chamber, and that was all the notice she took of them."I'm told you can see where folk are going," she said. "I can't. I can mend what's torn and I can't find anything torn. Tell me where she's going, and I'll not ask what else you do."Then she stood aside, and he saw the bed.He had been afraid of this for thirteen days and for a good deal longer than that. In another life he had wrapped her without looking. He looked now. She lay on her back under a grey blanket with her boots off, and she was too long for the bed. Somebody had washed her face. The copper braid had been singed short on one side. Both arms were bare to the shoulder and lay outside the blanket, and from the fingers to above the elbow they were marked with a red branching pattern, like ferns pressed in a book. Her right hand was shut on the hilt of her sword. The b
Chapter 126: Stormhold
Stormhold filled the valley from one cliff to the other. He had carried past it in another life, in the dark, with the place on fire, and had kept no notion of its size. It was a grey town built in steps up a rock where two rivers met. Round the foot of the rock ran a curtain wall, with a gate in it that would have taken four carts abreast. There was a camp on every scrap of level ground below. He stopped counting the cooking fires at about the number where Maren had.Nine thousand, the post-serjeant had said. The Prince had had two thousand when she wrote. The hill levies had come down since, with their own bows and their fathers' helmets. So had the League swords she had bought, and anybody else who would sooner fight in the Pass than at his own door. Perhaps three thousand of them had ever stood in a line.Three days in the valley had told him what kind of war it was. He had met the wounded coming down in ox-carts, twenty to a cart, with their feet hanging over the tailboards. He h
Chapter 125: The Road North
By the second night the Company of Pallbearers had learned that it could not march.It could carry. It could dig and haul, and stand in a doorway. But it had never walked eight leagues in a day and then got up and done it again. When they made camp under a beech hanger on the Dunmarch road, there were thirty living men and women sitting in a row with their boots off, looking at their feet as if their feet had informed on them. Tobiah had a blister the size of a crown piece. Pell's mule had eaten part of the featherbed. Rusk Tolland walked down the line with his hands behind him and said that he had seen a better column made by ducks.It was Marta Flint who mended it. She had been twenty years a serjeant, and she had noticed something that the living were too sore to see."We don't tire, lad," she said to Ravel, at the fire. "Thirty-seven of us. We don't sleep and we don't blister. And we're walking along beside that cart with our hands empty, like gentry."So on the third day the dead
Chapter 124: The Vote
He could have ordered it. Halvard Reem told him so that night on the roof, where Ravel had gone to think and found that he could only count."The fourth article gives the captain the direction of the company in the field," said the Magister. He had climbed the ladder with some dignity for a man made largely of bog-oak. "A lawyer would argue that a road is a field. I drafted it. I'd argue it for you, if you asked.""And the contract with the Ninth Gate?""Obliges us to carry their dead out of Khar Morn after the autumn, under truce. It says nothing of where we may stand before. I was careful about that. I thought you might be glad of it one day." The bark face turned toward him. "You have the law. You don't want it. May I ask why?"Ravel looked at the lamps of the bay for a while."Half of them joined to carry," he said. "The other half joined because the Church burned their street. Dob Carey can't tell his left foot from his right. I'm not marching him at a legion on the strength of a
Chapter 123: Retuned
He had taken a rubbing of the plate with a heel of charcoal and one of Edda's pillow-slips, there being no paper in a salt mine. Four days later it lay on the mangle table on Tarpaulin Row, held flat by a smoothing-iron at each corner, and the council of the company stood round it and tried not to drip.It was a wash-day. The loft was full of steam and wet linen. In the corner by the stove Wren Tibb was weaving a ribcage out of withies while her mistress told her what was wrong with it. Josse Pike had no body at present and a good deal to say, and he was telling Ravel what was wrong with both of them.Taller, said the old ferryman, on his palm. I was always short. All my days I looked up people's noses. Tell the maid I'll have another hand's breadth in the leg, if it's all the same to her."He wants to be taller," said Ravel."He'll get what the withy gives," said Mother Tibb, without turning round.Dagna had not taken her eyes from the pillow-slip."It's plumber's work," she said. "T
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