Chapter 9 #3
That was the other thing Stuart carried away from that day. Eleven minutes of shooting inside the wall and an old man sat at a table with his hands flat on the wood in a room with two people watching him, and he did not get up and he did not go to a window.
"You knew they'd come back," Stuart said.
"I did not."
"Then why are you not surprised."
"Because I have been sitting here for six hours working out why last night was so badly done," Pierre Aubert said, "and I have got there, and I am afraid I have got there about four hours too late."
"Say it."
"Last night was not an attack."
Davey came in from the door with blood on his sleeve.
"Say that again."
"A hundred and six men did not come to your wall to take eleven of you through a throat," the old man said.
"That is not how that place works. They do not fight. They arrive at four in the morning with numbers so large that nobody fights, and they say the thing about nobody has to be hurt, and in two years it has worked every single time except here."
"Then what was last night."
"Last night was the price of finding out," Pierre Aubert said.
"He shouted at your wall and you did not answer. That told him you had a man running you who would not talk. He put twenty-two men up a throat and lost eleven to stakes and you shot the rest off a wall in the dark.
That told him your ground and your numbers and your discipline and what you have got for guns, and it cost him about a fifth of what he brought, and he went away and sat down and thought about it all day."
"And this afternoon?"
"This afternoon he bought the north gate for the price of three men," the old man said, "and he now knows that your north wall is sound, that you keep six on it, that you have got a platform with a clear field,
and that there is somebody in this valley who can put a man down at ninety feet with a small rifle."
Stuart sat down slowly on the bench.
"He's surveying us."
"He is surveying you," Pierre Aubert said.
"He has been surveying you since December with a book, and since last night with men, and he has spent fourteen lives on it and he does not care, because there are a hundred and eleven people behind that wall at the Ninemile and about sixty of them are men and none of them have ever had a choice
about anything."
"Then what's he waiting for."
"He is not waiting," the old man said. "He is finishing. He will hit you once more tonight, somewhere you have not thought about, and it will be small, and he will not press it, and then he will have the whole of you on paper, and then he will do the thing he actually came to do."
"Which is what."
Pierre Aubert looked up.
"Which is to go around you," he said.
Stuart went cold from the neck down.
"Say that."
"You are eighty-three people in a valley with a wall and a man who will not talk," the old man said. "You are expensive. You are the most expensive thing on his page and he has known it since December, which is why there was no word beside you for two years."
"There's a word beside us now."
"There is a word beside you now," Pierre Aubert agreed, "and it was written in the last two weeks, and I want you to think very carefully about what changed in the last two weeks, because it was not your wall and it was not your numbers."
Kestrel said, from the table, "Me."
"You," the old man said.
Stuart stood up.
"He wants the book back."
"He wants the book back, and he wants the boy, and he wants the woman with the rifle whose brother tore a page out in November," Pierre Aubert said. "And he has told you so, out loud, at three hundred yards, in front of your whole wall, which I promise you he does not normally do."
"Because he wants us to hand them over."
"Because he wants you to think about handing them over," the old man said. "That is not the same thing and it is much worse. He does not need you to do it. He needs you to sit in that long room tonight with four people dead and argue about it."
Davey said, quietly, "That is exactly what is going to happen at noon tomorrow."
"Yes."
"And if we do not do it?"
"Then he goes around you," Pierre Aubert said, "with eighty men, south and east, and he is at the Ninemile in nine days, and there are a hundred and eleven people there who have just become worth a great deal more to him than they were in December."
"Why."
The old man's hands went flat on the table again.
"Because a place that has had a page torn out of its book," he said, "and a copyist run for nineteen days, and a survey turn into a fight, is a place that has stopped being secret. And when a thing like that stops being secret, the men who run it do not sit still and wait to be found."
"They move it," Stuart said.
"They move it."
"A hundred and eleven people."
"A hundred and eleven people, in February, over the breaks," Pierre Aubert said, "and they will not all arrive, and the ones who do not arrive will not be buried, and it will be done inside three weeks of him deciding, and he decided the day your boy walked in off that field."
The Hall was silent.
"Then we do not have until spring," Stuart said.
"You do not have until spring."
"How long."
"I do not know."
"Old man."
"I do not know," Pierre Aubert said, "and I will not invent a number for you. But I will tell you the thing I do know, and it is the only reason I came down off that rise into a town where I expected to be shot."
"Say it."
"There is one road out of the Ninemile that will take wagons in February," he said, "and it runs eleven miles down the creek to the mouth, and there is a place four miles down where the rock comes in on both sides and the creek is under it, and it is forty feet wide."
Stuart put both hands on the table.
"And?"
"And I have been sitting above that place with a glass for two years working out how a man would close it," Pierre Aubert said, "and I have got it worked out, and it needs eleven people and four days and about two hundred pounds of something I have not got."
Nell Fairweather said, from the door, "I know where there is two hundred pounds of it."
Everyone turned around.
She was standing with the 10/22 slung and mud to her thigh and her hair cut off close with a knife.
"There is a highway department shed on the Greer grade," she said. "It has been padlocked since the lights went out and there is a man in Greer named Halloran who has got the key and has been sitting on it for five years because he is frightened of it."
"How far."
"Four days," she said. "Three if the crust comes back tonight."
And out in the lane, in the last of the light, the bell went four times.