Chapter 13
Stuart looked at her for a long moment.
"Say the rest of it," he said.
"There is no rest of it yet. That is the whole of what I have got."
"Then we build it here on this ridge in the next ten minutes," Stuart said, "and everybody talks, and nobody is polite."
Camille said, "It is not one row short. It is one row short at the right time."
"Say that."
"If a person leaves that yard now, the count is wrong at the gate at four o'clock and they stand them at the gate for two hours in the dark and then they find out and they do something about it."
She had the glass up. "That does not help anybody. That is a punishment and it is eleven miles from here."
"Then when."
"At the narrow place," Camille said.
Stuart went very still.
"Four miles below the wall," he said.
"Seven miles above the yard." She put the glass down.
"They walk into it at two. If a row goes short in that place, then the count is wrong four miles from a gate they cannot get to fast, and eleven men have to stop a hundred and eleven people in a canyon forty feet wide where there is no room to put them."
"And then?"
"And then they are standing still," Camille said, "in exactly the place where in three days there is going to be eight hundred pounds of powder over their heads."
"That does not help us today."
"No," Camille agreed. "It does not help us today. I am telling you what it does, not that it is enough."
Josiah Tarp said, "It does one thing today."
Everybody turned.
"Say it," Stuart said.
"If they are stopped in the narrow at two o'clock with a bad count, they do not go up," Josiah said. "They cannot. You cannot walk a hundred and eleven people through a forty foot gap in the dark with a row short, because the whole system is that you always know where everybody is."
"So what happens."
"They turn them around," Josiah said, "and they walk them back down to the yard, and they do the count again in the gravel where they can see, and they start over in the morning."
Stuart sat back on his heels.
"Another day."
"Another day," Josiah Tarp said, "and I have seen it happen once, in October of the third year, when a woman was sick and lay down in a ditch and nobody said anything for an hour."
"What did they do to her."
"Nothing," Josiah said. "That is the part nobody ever believes. They put her on a cart. It is not that kind of cruelty, sir. It is the other kind."
Pierre Aubert had not said one word for four minutes.
"Old man."
"I am thinking about my son."
"Think out loud."
"He will not turn them around," Pierre Aubert said.
The ridge went quiet.
"Say why."
"Because he is not the man who ran that place in the third year," the old man said.
"In the third year he had a system and no doubts in it. He has had a page torn out of his book in November and a copyist run in December and twenty-two men up a throat full of stakes in January,
and he has spent four days burning his own outer ring and standing a hundred and eleven people in a yard for eighteen hours in February."
"So?"
"So a man like that does not turn around," Pierre Aubert said. "A man like that stands in a forty foot gap with a bad count and decides that the count is a thing being done to him, and he does something he has never done before, and none of us on this ridge know what it is."
Nobody said anything.
"That is not an argument against it," the old man said. "I want to be clear. I am not arguing against it. I am saying that if we do this, we are not pulling a lever on a machine. We are poking a man who has had a bad winter."
Stuart looked down at the yard.
The rows were moving now. They had come around and were forming up into a column along the creek road and it was happening slowly and without noise, and the eleven men had strung themselves out along it, and at the head of it a man in a coat with a book under his arm had started to walk.
"How long before they are in the narrow."
"They will be in the narrow at two," Pierre Aubert said, "and at two it will be dark in there, because the sun does not get into that gap after noon at this time of year."
"Dark."
"Shadow. Deep shadow with light at both ends."
Stuart stood up below the crest.
"All right," he said. "Here is what I have got and everybody is going to tear at it."
"Go."
"We do not take a person out of a row," he said. "We put one in."
Nobody said anything for about three seconds.
Then Kestrel said, "Say that again."
"You have all been thinking about taking somebody out because that is what a rescue is," Stuart said.
"But a count that comes up one short is a search. A count that comes up one long is a different animal entirely, and I have been standing here trying to work out what it is and I cannot, and neither can they."
Camille said, slowly, "It is a person who is not in the book."
"It is a person who is not in the book," Stuart said, "standing in a row, in the dark, in a gap forty feet wide, and the man with the book is a hundred yards up the line."
"How does that help those people."
"It does not help those people," Stuart said.
"Not today. It does one thing and one thing only and I want to say it plain. It gets somebody of ours inside that column, and that column is going behind that wall tonight, and in three days there is going to be a rock come off a hill four miles below them."
"And then?"
"And then there are a hundred and eleven people behind a wall with no men in it," Stuart said, "and a barred gate that bars from the outside, and somebody on the inside who knows we are coming."
Nell Fairweather said, "Fenna Oyelaran."
Kestrel's head came up.
"Say that name again," Stuart said.
"He said it in the Hall," Nell said. "He said there is a woman who has been counting the gate bar for two years and she will not come out of it for anybody unless somebody says his name to her first."
"That's right."
"Then that is what the person inside is for," Nell said. "Not to fight anybody. To walk up that column in the dark and find a woman and say a name."
Bride Kelsall spoke for the first time since the draw.
"Who goes," she said.
Everybody stopped.
It was the question, and everybody on that ridge knew it, and they had all been walking around it for four minutes.
"Not you," Stuart said. "You are the only person here who can do the thing you do, and there are nineteen children in that column and in three days somebody is going to need you very badly."
"I was not volunteering," Bride Kelsall said. "I was asking."
"Not me," Stuart said. "I want that said first and I want everybody to know I have thought about it. I am fifty-one with a hip and a face that a man on a horse has been reading about in a book for two years, and I do not walk like anybody who has been standing in gravel for eighteen hours."
"Not me," Camille said. "I have one arm."
"Not you," Stuart agreed.
Kestrel said, "Me."
"You cannot walk."
"I know."
"Then why did you say it."
"Because somebody has to say the wrong answers out loud fast so that we get to the right one," Kestrel said, "and because I wanted it on the record that I asked."
"It's on the record."
Josiah Tarp said, "It has to be me."
Nobody answered him for a moment.
"Say why," Stuart said.
"Because I am the only one of us who has stood in that column," he said.
"Four musters. I know how they walk and I know where the men put themselves and I know that the third and eighth rows are the slow ones and get strung out, and I know what a person looks like when they have been in that yard eighteen hours, because I have been the man watching them."
"You are also the one man in this country whose face every single one of those eleven men knows."
"Yes," Josiah Tarp said.
"Then that is the end of it."
"No sir," he said. "That is the middle of it, and I would like to finish."
Stuart looked at him.
"Finish."
"They know my face," Josiah said, "and that is the whole reason it works, because on the twenty-third of January Mathis Aubert sent me out of a camp with a bedsheet on a stick and did not send anybody behind me."
The ridge went silent.
"He threw me away," Josiah said. "He knows it and I know it. And if I come back, then I am a boy who got frightened and ran and came crawling home, and that is a story every single one of those eleven men has been telling each other about somebody for five years,
and it is the easiest story in that valley to believe."
Pierre Aubert said, quietly, "That is true."
"It is true and it is disgusting and it is the only door I have got," Josiah Tarp said. "Nobody in that column is going to raise an alarm about me. They are going to look at me and think, there is Tarp, and somebody is going to make a joke about it at the gate."
"And when they put you in front of the man with the book?"
"Then I am in front of the man with the book," Josiah said, "and I will be inside that wall tonight either way, and that is the whole of what we need."
"They could kill you."
"They could."
"Son."
"Mr. Redman, they could kill me, and I have thought about it since about eleven minutes after we heard the bell, and I have got one thing to say about it and then I would like to stop talking."
"Say it."
"I have been in the book since I was seventeen," Josiah Tarp said.
"I have written stock columns in it since October. I have got a hundred and eleven people's names in my own hand in a ledger four hundred miles from here, and I am twenty-two years old, and there is not one thing I can ever do about that."
He stopped.
"Except this," he said. "This I can do. So I would take it kindly if nobody argued with me, because if anybody argues with me I am going to lose my nerve, and I have only got about four hours of it."
Nobody argued with him.
They had until noon and they used all of it.
Kestrel did most of the talking and he did it lying on his side on the ridge with his wrapped hands in front of him and he did not stop for an hour and ten minutes.
"The column goes in a certain order and it has gone in that order for five years."
"Say it."