56. The Cairn
The Cairn
The next few days went by quickly. Kain slept the way he had been sleeping since the gryphon first came down off the ridge, neither poor nor heavy, the sleep of a man whose work was past the door of the bedroom by night and waiting at the door at first light.
The work answered the not-sleeping when the not-sleeping showed up at all.
The work answered the chewing, too, and he turned the problem over.
The village couldn’t pay for the contract.
The village couldn’t pay for it for the better part of two years even if it turned every coin in every chest at every farm.
The dungeon would mature in six months. None of it worked the way the village needed it to work, and a piece of country couldn’t be poisoned the way a single bird could be poisoned, and a piece of country couldn’t be set against itself.
The dungeon was a piece of country and the country couldn’t be tricked.
The country had to be paid or walked into. Neither sat well in Kain’s head.
The third morning came on cool and clear. Kain split a piece of cord against the wall, fed the smokehouse, looked the stone wall over for frost-heave that hadn’t come yet, saddled Roan, and rode out the lane.
The Martinson place was the last farm on the way out of the village to the north. Kain rode past the Kettle and waved at Sasha through the porch glass. The boy was up at the porch rail and Sasha lifted Matthew’s small hand and waved back with the boy’s arm, and Kain rode on.
At the Martinson farm Carol was at the trough with a feed bucket pouring out the morning ration for the pigs. The pigs were at her boot. She set the bucket on the rail and turned and waved.
Will Martinson came out the door of the barn with a halter in his hands.
Will didn’t wave. Will set his shoulders against the barn door and watched the morning take place at his fence.
He watched Carol saddle her mare. The mounting-up came next under his eye.
The two horses turned and started up the road north out of the gate while Will held his place at the barn door.
A beat past the horses going around the corner, the road still had Will’s eyes on it. The halter sat in his hand.
Carol rode at Kain’s right stirrup once they were a stretch past the gate.
“Your father isn’t fond of me this morning.”
“My father is fond of his daughter going up a road with a man toward a country with a dungeon at the end of it the way my father is fond of pulling a tooth without a string. He’s pulling the tooth. He isn’t enjoying it.”
“I don’t blame him.”
“He has a notion about a man that he hasn’t walked the road of yet.
In the cities there’s a saying that a man is taken for honest until a court calls him otherwise.
My father’s rule on a man is the saying turned around.
My father holds the man as he found him until the man has had a stretch of being something other. ”
“A long stretch.”
“A long stretch. You haven’t cleared the stretch. You’re closer than the stretch normally allows. You’re not at the end of it.”
“Fair.”
“Where do we ride.”
“Two roads up. Past John Marge’s and into the country the way I rode it the first time. Or across the ridge by way of the gryphon’s nest, the way I rode it the second time when I went up to the marker.”
“Take me past the gryphon.”
“You sure.”
“I want to see the country in the order I should see it. The thing you killed. Then the thing that came up out of the ground that drew the thing you killed.”
“Right.”
They turned off the road at the dead tree Kain knew now without looking at the trunk for the mark.
The dead tree was a landmark the country had taken on for him after the kill, and the route past it into the trees and along the cut that led up to the gryphon’s nest had been ridden enough by Kain and by salvagers and by the curious that the route was a path now, narrow and beaten down to dirt under the leaf-fall.
They came up through the trees and into the small clearing where the bird had built and where Kain had taken it down.
The husk was what the husk had become. Bones, mostly.
A piece of dried hide on one shoulder. The skull had been carried off, by salvagers or by other animals or by both.
The wing-bones along one side had been pulled.
What was left was the ribs in the shape of a half-cage on the ground, the hip set in the grass at an angle the bird couldn’t walk on now, two of the leg bones tucked under, and a piece of the spine in the grass alongside.
Carol stopped her mare at the edge of the clearing.
“It was bigger than I have a picture of in my head.”
“It was bigger than the picture I had in mine when I came up the ridge after it.”
“You killed it.”
“I did.”
“You’re something more than a farmer was today.”
“I don’t mean to be.”
“I believe it. The meaning doesn’t change the being.”
Kain looked at the husk and didn’t say a thing for a beat. Carol turned her mare and went on past the clearing without dismounting.
They rode up out of the gryphon’s country into the country past the ridge.
The country past the ridge had been ridden by Kain on the day of the kill and not since.
The path Kain had taken bait on hadn’t held a man’s walk through it since the bird came down off the trees that morning.
The leaves had filled the path. The brush had thickened along the edges. The country had taken its country back.
Carol rode the mare easy along Kain’s right.
“I’ve not been this far north of the gate.”
“I’d have taken you for a woman who’d been everywhere.”
“I’d have taken me for one too. My father had me on the fence and the barn and the foaling box from the year I could carry a bucket.
I had the country up to the gate and the country down to the village and the country east to my grandmother’s on the third Sunday and that was the country I had.
By the time the farm could spare me, I didn’t want to go far. ”
“I’d have taken you for an adventurer.”
“I’d have made a poor one. I don’t want to walk into a country I don’t come back out of. I’d rather walk a fence line every morning and know every fence post by the angle.”
“Fair.”
Carol looked ahead through a gap in the trees and pulled the mare up.
“Kain.”
“I see it.”
The gap in the trees gave them a stretch of the country ahead.
The ground rose where the ground hadn’t risen on any of the rides Kain had taken across the country before the dungeon.
The rise wasn’t a hill. The rise was a shape forced up out of the dirt.
The growth on the rise was the wrong color for the season.
The green of the trees was a green at the edge of yellow that wasn’t the yellow of autumn.
The brush was green at the edge of grey.
The cover on the slope had the look of a thing that had been told to grow in a hurry by a hand that didn’t care if the growth came out right.
Through the green the granite came up. Blue-grey stones the size of a wagon. Some of them set. Some of them still settling.
“How high does it go.”
“A piece higher. Fifteen floors of dungeon under the ground will push the country over the dungeon up by fifteen floors’ worth of height.
Each floor is ten feet at the rough. Fifteen floors makes a hundred and fifty feet of rise off the country that used to be there. Most of it goes up around the mouth.”
“A hundred and fifty feet.”
“A hundred and fifty feet.”
“You can’t see this from town.”
“You can’t. The country between the village and the rise has higher ground in pieces.
The trees fill the rest. Dungeon-country pushes the eye away from it.
A man can ride right up to the edge of a young Natural and not see the rise until the rise is at the man’s boot.
The country wants its dungeon to itself a while longer. ”
“That’s a piece of magic I’d rather not know.”
“It’s the piece of magic the country uses to be left alone with the work it’s doing.”
They went on until the slope wouldn’t take the horses.
At the foot of the rise Kain swung down and tied Roan to a tree that hadn’t taken the wrong color yet.
Carol dismounted and tied the mare at the same tree.
The two of them went up on foot, picking the way across stones and around a deep cut where the ground had split itself across a fault line that hadn’t been a fault line before the dungeon started its work.
The vines along the slope were vines Kain didn’t know.
The leaves on the vines were the dark green of an evergreen with a wash of grey through the underside, and the shrubs had small pale flowers on them that opened at the wrong angle and held the petals back like teeth.
Some of the flowers had a faint glow in the center where a stamen ought to have been.
The light had the look of a flame held behind a sheet of paper, faint enough that Kain wouldn’t have caught it if the day had been brighter.
The air was warm. The air had no business being warm.
The morning had been cool when they came up out of the village, and the morning had stayed cool through the ride.
The country on the slope of the rise was the temperature of a kitchen after a stove had been burning for a stretch.
The warmth had no source a man could point to.
Behind the warmth the smell of copper sat on the air heavy. It was the smell of coin in a damp pocket. It was the smell of blood without the wet.
“This is awful,” Carol said. “I want it off me already and we haven’t even got close.”
“It’s a piece of the country the dungeon is making for itself. The vines and the warmth and the air. The country won’t go back.”
“And there are warriors who pay coin to walk into this.”
“There are warriors who pay coin to walk into worse. The trade looks past the country at the loot at the end of it.”
Carol shook her head and went on up the slope.