Chapter 5
Nobody said anything for a while.
The wind came across the grass in the south gap and moved the man's open coat, and he stood there with his hands loose and his face pleasant and let them all look at him.
Burner did not walk any closer.
He stopped where he was, twenty feet behind Halloran and a little to the left, which put a granite spur between himself and the treeline eight hundred yards south, because a man standing alone in the open with no weapon is not a man alone, he is bait or he is a distraction or he is a range marker.
"Who are you," Halloran said.
"I'm the one who talks." The man spread his hands slightly. "That's actually my job. There's four of us who do things and there's one of me who talks, and Halstead says that makes me the most valuable man he's got, which I think is him being kind."
"Name."
"Sparrow."
"That's not a name."
"It's the one I use." He smiled a little wider. "You don't need the other one. You'd only worry it."
Burner ran his eyes along the treeline south without moving his head.
Nothing. Which meant nothing.
"You came in on foot," he said.
Sparrow's eyes came to him again and stayed there. He had the look of a man enjoying himself.
"I did."
"How far?"
"Oh, a good way." He rocked back on his heels. "You're wondering where the truck is. That's the right thing to wonder and I'd wonder it too. The answer is it's somewhere, and it isn't here, and if it were here we wouldn't be standing around in the grass talking about it."
"Say what you came to say," Halloran said.
"All right." Sparrow's hands dropped to his sides. "Here it is. Halstead's coming for the harvest. You knew that. Everybody standing here knew that in July, whatever you've been telling the children."
Somebody in the half circle shifted.
"He was going to come in the third week of October. That was always the plan, and I'll tell you why, because there's no harm in it now. Because by the third week of October you'd have hauled everything in, sorted it, dried it, canned what needed canning,
and done all the miserable work that we'd rather not do. That's the arrangement. You're good at growing and we're good at collecting."
"You call that an arrangement," Halloran said.
"I call it what it is. You've been living under it for two years and you're all still breathing, which is more than you can say for most of this state." Sparrow shrugged. "But that's changed. He's moved it up. He'll be here in nine days."
The half circle went very still.
"Nine days," Halloran said.
"The twenty-eighth. Sunrise or a little after. He wanted you to know the date because he wants it done without a fuss, and a fuss is what happens when people are surprised."
"Why."
"Why nine days?" Sparrow tilted his head. "Because of him."
He pointed at Burner. Just a finger, lifted and dropped, casual.
"Because four days ago there was a man in the grass above the road with a rifle and a child and a dog, and Halstead let him walk, and then two days later he hears from a party out east that there's a stranger up at the Kettle moving sacks around at night."
The smile stayed put. "That's the part he minded. Not the rifle. The sacks."
Burner did not react.
"He's a patient man, Halstead. Genuinely. I've watched him wait eight months for a thing. But the one thing he won't do is wait while somebody gets ready. So he's moved it up, and he's told me to tell you the terms,
and the terms are better than you deserve and I'd like you to actually hear them before you do the thing where you spit on the ground."
"Say them."
"Everything in the container. Everything in the greenhouses that's cut. Half your seed stock, which is generous, because half means you plant again in spring and we come back and do this in a year like civilized people."
He ticked them off on his fingers without hurry.
"All the fuel. Any working vehicle, which is none, I know. And four people."
The sound that went through the half circle was not a word.
"Four adults," Sparrow said, "of working age, chosen by you, walking out on their own feet. Not children. He's specific about that and I'll say it twice because it matters to you people. Not children."
"You took a nineteen year old girl in July," Halloran said. His voice had gone strange.
"We did."
"She's not nineteen anymore. She was nineteen."
"I'm not going to discuss her," Sparrow said, and for the first time the pleasantness slipped a half inch, and what was under it was not anger but a kind of boredom, which was worse. "That's not on the table and it's not what I came about."
"Is she alive."
"I'm not going to discuss her."
Burner watched Halloran's shoulders and thought, for about three seconds, that he was going to have to physically stop the man.
Halloran did not move.
"And if we say no," he said.
"Then he comes anyway and takes all of it instead of most of it, and there's no four people walking out on their own feet, there's however many are left standing when it's done."
Sparrow's hands opened again. "And I want to be clear, because this is the part people always misunderstand. He doesn't want that. That's a bad outcome for him. He'd have to burn a working settlement and then next year he's short. Halstead's not a lunatic. He's just early."
"That's your pitch," Burner said.
Sparrow turned to him, delighted.
"That's my pitch."
"Nine days is a long time to give somebody."
"It is."
"So why give it."
"Because of what I said. He wants it without a fuss."
Sparrow took one step closer, and every man in the half circle went tight, and he stopped and raised his palms in mock surrender and grinned.
"But you're asking a better question than you think you are, so I'll answer the one underneath it. He gave you nine days because nine days is exactly long enough for the people here to argue with each other about it."
Nobody said anything.
"That's the mechanism," Sparrow said comfortably.
"You've got, what, fifty of you? Nine days from now, about a third of these people will have decided that giving up the container is obviously correct because you can't eat a principle. Another third will want to fight and won't be able to say how.
And the last third will have started wondering whether the whole problem walked in here five days ago with a rifle and a little girl."
He let that sit.
"I've done this eleven times," he said. "It's always the same. The only thing that ever changes is how long it takes."
"Get off my ground," Halloran said.
"Sure." Sparrow buttoned his coat, unhurried. "Twenty-eighth. Sunrise. Container open, greenhouses cut, four volunteers in the yard."
He turned and walked ten steps and then stopped and looked back over his shoulder, and this time he looked only at Burner.
"He also said to tell you something just for you. He said: tell him I left the kid alone once, as a favor, and I'd appreciate it if he understood what that cost me."
Then he walked south into the grass and did not hurry and did not look back again.
Burner watched him until he was a dot and then watched the dot until the timber took it.
Halloran was still standing where he had been.
"Everybody go back to work," he said, and his voice was almost normal, which cost him something. "Go on. Now. Priest, get up on the north rock and stay there till you're relieved."
They went, slowly, in ones and twos, and every single one of them looked at Burner on the way past.
Sparrow had been right about that much, and it had taken about ninety seconds.
They sat in Halloran's room in the second building with the door shut. There was a table, two chairs, a bunk, a shelf with nine books on it. The stove was out and neither of them lit it.
"Tell me why he really came," Halloran said.
"Three reasons." Burner had been putting them in order the whole walk up. "Two he told you and one he didn't."
"Go."
"First, everything he said about the argument. That's real and it's already started and it's going to get worse every day. He wasn't bragging, he was doing the job. He walked in here and dropped nine days on a table and now the nine days does the work for him.
He can sit on his hands and let this place come apart from the inside and then walk in on the twenty-eighth and pick it up."
"And the second?"
"He wanted to see it." Burner leaned forward.
"He came in on foot through the south gap, which is the one I left open, and he walked past the greenhouses and he stood in a spot where he could see six buildings, the water line, the fence, the container, and every adult who came out to look at him. He was here eight minutes.
I'd have paid a hundred rounds for eight minutes like that at their place."
Halloran rubbed his face with both hands.
"And the third?"
"The third is the one that matters." Burner sat back. "He told us the date."
"You said that's so we'd argue."
"That's what he wants you to think it's for, and it's true, and it's also not the whole thing."
Burner shook his head slowly. "Halloran, nobody tells you when. Nobody. In eleven months I have never once seen a bad man announce himself. You come at dawn and you come without a word, that's the entire advantage and it's free. He gave it away."
"So he's arrogant."
"Maybe. Or he's giving us a date because he's not coming on that date."
Halloran looked up.
"Say that again."
"He's telling us the twenty-eighth so that on the twenty-eighth we're all standing in the yard looking south at sunrise," Burner said.
"And every day between now and then, we're building toward one morning. We'll pull people off the ridges to work on defenses. We'll put everything we have into one shape. And then he comes on the twenty-third, or the twenty-fifth, at three in the afternoon, from the north,
and finds a settlement that's spent a week getting ready for a different fight."
The room was quiet.
"That's speculation," Halloran said.
"Yes."
"You're asking me to plan around a guess."