Chapter 18 #2
and the truth was that most of it came down to about nine principles that he could have written on one sheet of paper and that took four months to get into a person properly.
Cover is not concealment. Rocks stop bullets and walls do not.
Move in the three seconds after you're seen and never in the two before.
Don't stand up. Practice not standing up until your body does it without asking.
Never take the same route twice.
Count everything. Sweeps, rotations, rounds, days.
Shout what you see, not look out.
The man who tells you he isn't threatening you is threatening you.
Anybody who gives you a date is telling you something, and it is almost never the date.
And the last one, which he added in the fourth year and which was the only one that had not come out of the first winter:
The thing that beats a bad man is not a better man. It's that everybody talks to everybody.
He wrote that one on the board in the school and Neve made the children copy it and it was still on the wall of that building forty years later, in a different hand, having been rewritten eleven times.
In the spring of the fifth year, Shyla turned thirteen, or was declared to have.
She was tall. She had her mother's face, which she did not know and nobody could tell her. She read everything Neve put in front of her and argued with half of it.
And she came to Burner in April and said she wanted to run the west route.
It was a nineteen day circuit to four camps with a pack of seed and salt and news, and it was done in pairs, and it went through the country where Stale's people had been three years before and where nobody had seen anything since.
"No," Burner said.
"Why?"
"Because you're thirteen."
"Priest was sixteen in the shutter slot."
"Priest was sixteen in a shutter slot because I had nobody else and I have regretted it every single day since and I have said so to his face twice."
Shyla did not shout. She never shouted. She sat down on the drum opposite him and waited about four seconds.
"Say the real one," she said.
Burner put the stick across his knees.
"The real one is that I'm frightened," he said.
"I know."
"That's not a reason and it's not a good enough one and I'm going to say no anyway, this year," he said. "And next year I'll say yes, and I'll hate it, and I'll do it, because you'll be fourteen and you'll be right."
Shyla considered that.
"That's fair," she said.
"Is it?"
"It's honest, which is nearly the same." She stood up. "You didn't pretend it was about the route."
She went four steps and stopped.
"Did you ever go back?" she said.
"Where?"
"The clearing."
Burner sat very still.
"No," he said.
"Do you know where it is?"
"To within about eighty feet."
Shyla nodded slowly.
"I'd like to go," she said. "Not this year. Sometime. I'd like to put a stone there, and I can't do it on my own because I don't know the country and I was nine."
Burner looked at her for a long moment.
"All right," he said.
They went in September of that year.
It was eleven days of walking and they took Sable, because she knew that ground better than anyone alive and because she asked to come, and Burner's hip made it into something closer to fourteen days.
He found the clearing on the second attempt.
It was four years grown over and it had been a bad camp to begin with, a stand of big old spruce with a fire ring, and there was almost nothing left to see. A rusted cook kit half buried in duff. A collapsed dome of fabric that had been a tent and was now a shape in the ground.
The deadfall was still there.
That was the thing that stopped Shyla. She stood and looked at the tangle of down timber and young spruce grown together into a wall, and she looked at the gap at the bottom of it, the one a grown man could not have fit through.
"It's so small," she said.
"You were nine."
"No, I mean it's small." She crouched and put her hand into the gap. "I remember it being a room. I remember thinking about it as a room. I've been remembering a room for four years."
She knelt there a long time.
Burner stayed twelve feet back and did not go to her, which was the hardest thing he did that year.
Pike had cut the stone before they left and they had carried it eleven days, forty pounds of it, and Burner had carried most of it because he was not going to let her do that.
It had two names on it that Shyla had given Pike in the spring, and a date she was not certain of, and one line underneath that she had written herself and shown to nobody until the stone was cut.
They set it at the edge of the clearing where the light came through.
Shyla sat down in front of it and Sable and Burner went and stood forty yards off among the trees and stayed there for about an hour.
When she came to find them her face was wet and she did not care.
"What does the line say?" Sable asked, later, at the fire.
"He said get in the hole," Shyla said. "That's all. That's what's on it."
Nobody said anything.
"Because that was the whole thing he had," she said. "Four seconds and a hole. And it worked. I want somebody in a hundred years to walk through there and read that and not understand it, and I want that to be because they've never needed to."
They came home in October.
And that would have been the end of it, and Burner would have lived out a long quiet life running trails and teaching sixteen people a winter, except that on the nineteenth of November a runner came in from the northwest with a message from a camp that had been in contact for two years.
There was a man staying with them.
He had come in from the north in September, half dead, and they had taken him in and fed him through the autumn, and he had worked hard and said almost nothing and never once caused any trouble.
And about a week ago one of the older women had heard him say a name in his sleep, and the name had frightened her badly enough that she had walked four days to say it out loud to somebody.
The message had been written down by a man who could barely write, and it had been carried ninety miles, and it had three words on it that did not make sense to the runner and made perfect sense to Burner.
It said: HE SAYS CUTTER.
Burner read it four times.
Then he sat down on a drum in the shop frame with the strip of paper in his hand and stayed there long enough that the runner asked Neve if he was all right.
"He's fine," Neve said. "He's counting."
They had the meeting that night and Burner said almost nothing for the first hour, which had become his habit and which people had stopped finding strange.
"Somebody explain to me what we're deciding," Neve said.
She ran meetings differently from Halloran. She started by making everybody say what the question actually was, and about a third of the time it turned out that nobody agreed, and that was the meeting.
"Whether to go up there," Ferris said.
"That's not it," Sparrow said. "We know somebody's going up there. It's ninety miles and a camp we've had contact with for two years and a woman who walked four days to tell us something. Somebody goes."
"Then what?"
"What we're deciding," Burner said, "is what we're for."
Ninety-six people looked at him.
"Say more," Neve said.
Burner stood up with the stick.
"There's a man in a camp ninety miles northwest," he said. "He's been there three months. He's worked hard and caused no trouble and said nothing about himself, and one woman heard a word in his sleep and it frightened her."
He let that sit.
"If we send people up there, and it's him, what are we doing?" he said. "That's the actual question. We're not defending anything. He hasn't done anything. There's no raid and no schedule and no truck. There's a man splitting wood in somebody else's camp."
"He killed Oates," Ferris said.
"He killed Oates and Prentice and Hobbes, and he did it six years ago, and he sat in a chain in this yard for two years and worked and never once raised a hand to anybody, and we voted to take the chain off and then we voted to let him walk."
Burner looked around. "All of that is also true and I'd like it in the same sentence as the first part, because if we start telling this story with only half of it in, we'll have a different answer."
"So you want to leave him."
"No," Burner said. "I want to be very honest about what I want, because I've learned the hard way that it's the most dangerous thing in any room."
He shifted on the stick.
"What I want is to know that he's all right," he said.
The shop frame went very quiet.
"That's it. That's the whole of it. I've thought about that man every week for three years and what I have wanted, every single time, is to find out that he sat down somewhere and split wood for a living and that it held."
Burner shook his head slowly. "And that's not a reason to send four people ninety miles in November, and I want everybody to weigh it as exactly what it is."
Sparrow got up.
"There's a second thing," he said, "and it's uglier and I'm the one who has to say it because I'm the one who knows him."
"Say it."
"That camp has forty people in it and they don't know," Sparrow said. "They've fed a man for three months and they've got no idea what he is. And one of them found out something by accident and was frightened enough to walk four days."
"So we tell them."
"We tell them," Sparrow agreed. "And then what? They've got a man in their camp who's worked beside them since September and forty people are going to have to decide what to do about him in about an hour, with no warning, with nothing to go on but our word."
"That's their business," somebody said.
"It is entirely their business," Sparrow said, "and that's my point. If we go up there and tell them and walk away, we've dropped the worst decision in this valley on forty people and left, and that's about the most cowardly thing I can think of."
"Then what?"
"Then we go up there and we tell them everything," Sparrow said, "and we stay."
The vote was to send four people and Neve did something with it that nobody had done before.
"I want the four to go with no instructions," she said.