Lusk

The north wall of the Lusk boneyard was a hundred and twelve rods from where the Register said it was, and the crack behind the dye-house was wide enough to put her arm in.

Oriel stood at the wall in the grey early light with her stick and her brace and the old theodolite on its tripod in the wet grass between the graves, the same place she’d set it six months ago, and looked at it.

The crack ran from the coping to the grass, straight as a ruled line, north to south. A finger’s width at the top, it had been, in Ninthmonth. Now it was a gap. A hand and a half across at the top, and below the grass it went on down, she knew — she’d lowered a weighted line into it at dawn — for more than forty rods into the dark before the line ran out. The two halves of the wall stood on either side of it, leaning very slightly away from each other, like two people who’d stopped speaking. On the eastern side, the dye-house behind it had cracked too. Its tall brick chimney had a lean on it you could see from the market square.

The ivy had torn. It hung down into the gap in long green ropes.

The Lusk dead lay under their small stones in their rows on the western side of the crack, and on the eastern side, and the crack ran between them. One row of headstones had been split right down the line, and the eastern halves stood a hand lower than the western.

She took the reading anyway. She couldn’t not. She sighted the gatepost true-mark, and read the angle, and wrote it down.

112 rods.

Bastian came and stood beside her. He’d brought the chain. Not the Standard — the Standard was at Grey Gate, in the Moot-house, in a glass case the Cantons had made for it out of their own window-glass, where four of Oriel’s students were proving every chain that came over the passes against it, one link at a time, all day. This was his own chain. His old one. He’d taken the splint off his right hand a month ago. The two fingers had set crooked and stiff and he couldn’t close them. He carried the chain-bag on his left shoulder now.

He looked at the crack.

“I said,” he said.

“You said.”

“Day before the north face came down.” He put his good hand flat on the coping of the western half of the wall. “This is the day before.”

Lusk had thirty-one thousand people in it at midwinter.

By the eleventh of Thirdmonth it had nine thousand.

They’d gone west all winter. In waves. The first, the ones who’d walked chains in Ninthmonth and Tenthmonth and seen their doors move, left before the snow. The second, after the relay brought the news of Esker Bay — that was the big wave, eleven thousand in a month, on every road, with carts. Then a steady trickle all winter, as the crack behind the dye-house widened and people came to look at it and went home and packed. Treddick had been on the Lusk road since Twelfthmonth with three hundred Chainguard and a warrant from Harrowgate, keeping it moving, keeping the inns from charging a crown a bed, keeping the bridges clear, keeping the grain coming east in empty carts and the people going west in full ones.

He’d done it well. Oriel had to admit that. He did everything well. He didn’t ask why.

The nine thousand who were left were the ones who wouldn’t go. Or couldn’t. The old. The sick. The ones with nobody to go to. The mill-owners who wouldn’t leave their wheels and the people who worked them for the mill-owners. And the ones who’d decided — Oriel had heard it in the market a dozen times, from people who’d read the map and seen the crack and walked the chain — that it would be years yet. The map says C.419. That’s six years. Plenty of time.

The map said C.419 in red, along a line through the middle of Lusk.

The map was six months old. The map had said C.415 for Esker Bay.

She’d stood in the market square every day for a week, on the steps of the old wool-hall, with the map nailed to the door behind her and the Lusk town-reeve beside her — the same frowning reeve from the Ram and Pillar in Ninthmonth, who’d been one of the first to walk the chain and one of the last to stop arguing — and told them. Go. Now. Not in six years. Now. Some of them had listened.

Nine thousand.

Sarn came to find her at noon.

She’d been walking the town since dawn. Not with her boots on. Barefoot, on the cobbles, slowly, with one hand trailing along the house-walls and the other held out a little from her side, palm down, as if she were feeling for heat off a stove. She’d been doing it for a week. Up every street. Down every lane. She’d stop, sometimes, in the middle of the road, and kneel, and put both palms flat on the cobbles, and stay there, with people walking round her, staring.

The town called her the Listener. Not her name. Some of them crossed the street when they saw her coming. Some of them followed her, at a distance, to see where she knelt.

She came across the market square to the wool-hall steps now, fast, barefoot, and Oriel saw her face and went cold.

“Today,” said Sarn.

Oriel didn’t say anything.

“Not days. Today. Before dark.” Sarn was breathing hard. “It’s not the crack. Not just the crack. It’s the whole line. North to south. Through the town. Through the mill-race. Under the Weaver Bridge. Under the Ledger House. It’s loading. All of it. Like the Bay. Like Strand’s north field.” She grabbed Oriel’s arm. Her hand was ice-cold. “Everything east of the boneyard wall. The dye-houses. Tanner Row. The east mills. The Ledger House. The Survey office. Half the market.” She looked round the square. At the people. At the stalls. At an old man selling eels from a barrow by the fountain. “Here. Where we’re standing. It’s on the line. Tash, it’s on the line —”

“How long?”

“Hours. Three. Four. I don’t know. It’s different every time. It came early at Strand’s. It came early at the Bay.” She was shaking. “It’s never come late.”

Oriel turned to the town-reeve.

He’d heard. He was looking at Sarn with his frown, the one from the Ram and Pillar, the frown of a man who’s just been told something he can’t make use of and doesn’t like the feel of.

Then the frown went away. Oriel watched it go. Like a crack closing.

“The bells,” said the reeve of Lusk. “I’ll ring the bells.”

The bells of Lusk rang for four hours.

All of them. The church, the wool-hall, the mills. Ringing and ringing over the town under a low grey sky, and under them the criers, the reeve’s men, running through every street shouting west, west, over the Weaver Bridge, now, leave everything, go — and Treddick’s Chainguard, three hundred of them, coming in at a run from the west road with Treddick on his horse at their head, forming up at the Weaver Bridge, keeping it clear, keeping it moving.

The Weaver Bridge was the only bridge. That was the thing. Lusk was built on both banks of the mill-race, a deep fast stone-walled channel that ran down out of the hills and through the town and turned the wheels of eleven mills, and the town’s west side — the side that wasn’t going — was across the race. The Weaver Bridge was old, stone, three arches, wide enough for two carts. Nine thousand people had to cross it.

Ilse Corran held it.

She’d come in from the Westerly road three days ago, at Oriel’s request, with forty of her own, because Oriel had wanted somebody at the bridge she trusted. She stood in the middle of the Weaver Bridge on the crown of its middle arch, broad and fair and bareheaded, with her forty in two lines along the parapets, and kept it moving. Not with guns. With her voice. Keep walking. Don’t stop on the bridge. Don’t look back. Keep walking. Carts to the left, people to the right. Keep walking. Over and over, for four hours, until it was a croak.

The people came. Out of every street on the east side, carrying what they could, carrying each other. The old. The sick, on doors and hurdles. The mill-hands. Down Tanner Row and across the market square and over the Weaver Bridge in a long thick slow river of people, west.

Sarn walked the line.

Oriel watched her from the steps of the wool-hall. Barefoot, on the cobbles, in the middle of the stream of people going the other way. Slowly. North to south, along the line she’d found. Down Tanner Row, behind the dye-houses. Across the corner of the market square. Past the Ledger House. Down to the mill-race. Kneeling every fifty paces, palms flat. Standing. Calling. Here. Not here, here. It’ll go here first. And Bastian walked behind her with the chain, and where she knelt and said here, he drove an arrow into the cracks between the cobbles, with a red rag on it, the way he did on a survey line. A line of red rags down the middle of Lusk.

People saw the red rags and walked faster.

It was nearly dusk when Oriel saw the light in the Ledger House.

The Lusk branch of the Ledger House of Aske was a small handsome stone building on the east side of the market square, three doors from the Survey office, with the scales and the key carved over its door. It had been shut since the second of Eleventhmonth. Shuttered. Barred. Its strongroom still full of whatever the people of Lusk had left in it when the doors closed. Nobody had opened it since. Nobody had the key.

There was a light moving behind the shutters.

And a cart outside it. A heavy cart, with two horses, and four men loading it. Grey coats. Chainguard. Carrying boxes out of the Ledger House door. Small boxes. Heavy ones, by the way they carried them.

One of them had his arm in a sling.

“Brack,” said Oriel.

She didn’t know she’d said it aloud until Bastian, coming back up the steps from the line of red rags, stopped dead beside her and looked where she was looking.

He didn’t say anything. He looked at the man with his arm in a sling carrying a box of Aske gold out of a shuttered bank on the east side of the line, in a town that was going to go over the edge in an hour. He looked at it for a long time.

Then he looked at his own right hand. The two crooked stiff fingers that wouldn’t close.

“Leave it,” said Oriel.

“I wasn’t going to do anything,” said Bastian.

“I know. Leave it anyway.”

But somebody else had seen.

Treddick came across the market square on foot. He’d left his horse at the bridge. He came at a walk, straight, the way he did everything, with his face like a nail, through the thinning stream of people, to the cart outside the Ledger House.

They heard him from the wool-hall steps.

“Brack.”

The man with the sling turned round.

“Put it down. All of it. Get on the cart and drive it west. Empty. Now.”

“Captain —“ Brack had a box in his good arm. He was grinning. Oriel could see it from the steps. “Captain, there’s thirty thousand crowns in here. Nobody’s coming back for it. It’s going in the hole anyway. Nobody’ll ever know. We can split it four ways. Five, with you —“

“Put it down.”

“It’s gold, Captain —“

The ground moved.

It wasn’t the groan. Not yet. It was a shudder. A single sharp jolt, like a cart going over a stone, that went through the whole town at once and stopped. Every bell in Lusk jangled out of time. Every window rattled. In the market square, people screamed and ran.

And down the line of red rags, through the middle of Lusk, the cobbles split.

Oriel saw it go. From the steps of the wool-hall. She’d seen it once before, in Hob Strand’s barley stubble, and she’d never thought she’d see it again, and she saw it now: a dark line racing across the market square from north to south, along the arrows, along Sarn’s line, the cobbles lifting and parting along it like the stitches coming out of a seam. Through the corner of the square. Under the fountain — the fountain split and its water went everywhere. Past the Ledger House steps. Down toward the mill-race.

And everything east of it dropped.

Not far. A hand. Two. Just enough. The whole east side of Lusk — the dye-houses and Tanner Row and the east mills and the Ledger House and the Survey office and the eastern half of the market square — sat down, all at once, a hand’s width lower than the west, with a sound like a great door closing. And began, very slowly, to lean.

East.

Treddick was on the east side. So was Brack. So was the cart.

Oriel saw Treddick turn and look at the line. At the gap. A pace wide now, and widening, the cobbles of the western side standing a hand higher than the eastern like a step. He could have jumped it. He was ten paces from it. He looked at it, and then he looked back at the cart, and at Brack, who was down on his knees on the tilting cobbles with a burst box of gold coins spilling round him, scrabbling for them with his one good hand.

Treddick went back.

He took Brack by the collar of his coat and hauled him up off the gold. Brack fought him. Treddick hit him once, flat, in the face, and dragged him, toward the gap, toward the step up, toward the west. The other three Chainguard were already running. Two of them made the jump. The third didn’t.

The east side tilted.

It went the way Hob Strand’s field had gone. Too slow to see. And then you looked again. The cobbles of the market square sloping away east now, as if the whole east side were a table with its far legs sinking. The cart rolling. The horses screaming. Gold coins sliding across the cobbles in a glittering stream. The gap at the line opening — two paces — three — and the western edge standing up higher and higher above it, a wall of torn cobble and earth.

Treddick got Brack to the gap. He got him to the foot of the step, the west side rising above them like a shelf, two men high now. He put his shoulder under Brack and heaved, and Brack went up, scrabbling, his good hand on the edge, and three of the townsmen on the western side who’d stopped to watch grabbed him by the coat and pulled him over.

Treddick reached up.

The edge was too high. He jumped for it. His hands caught the torn lip of cobbles. Held. A townsman reached down for his wrist.

The cobbles in his hands came away.

He went down the tilted slope of the east market on his back, sliding, with the gold, toward the dark.

Oriel didn’t see where. She couldn’t. There was too much falling.

The mill-race went into the gap.

That was what she’d remember most. The sound. The mill-race was a deep fast channel of hill-water running through the middle of Lusk under the Weaver Bridge, and the line ran across it, and when the east side dropped, the race’s eastern wall cracked and sheared, and the whole channel tipped — and the water found the gap. It went into it with a roar like a dam going. A long brown torrent pouring out of the broken race and into the crack and down along it, north and south, filling it, flooding through the cellars of every building on the east side of the line.

The Survey office was three doors from the Ledger House. On the east side.

The Lusk district clerk was in it.

Her name was Marta Ness. She was seventy-one. She’d kept the Lusk district records for forty years. She’d refused to leave when the bells rang because the records weren’t packed, and nobody else knew how to pack them properly, and she was halfway through. Oriel had been in to see her at noon and begged. Go. Leave them. I’ll come back for them. And Marta Ness had looked at her over her spectacles and said, Forty years, Surveyor. They don’t leave without me.

Penhallow had stayed with her to help.

He’d come to Lusk with Oriel because he’d asked to, and because there was nowhere else for a disgraced Survey-General under bond to be useful. He’d spent the winter at Grey Gate teaching star-fixing to Canton herders and leaf refugees on the bare rock at night, with the old Survey glass. He’d been good at it. Patient. Very clear. He’d come to Lusk to see the line. He’d said: I’d like to stand at the wall. Where she found it.

And when Marta Ness wouldn’t leave her records, he’d taken off his grey coat and rolled up his sleeves and started packing them with her.

The Survey office was flooding.

Oriel saw it from the wool-hall steps. The brown water coming up out of the cracked cellar-gratings in the east side of the square, and the street in front of the Survey office tilting, and the door of the office — a narrow door with a little brass Survey star on its lintel — open, and the water pouring in.

And Penhallow coming out of it.

Waist-deep. Then chest-deep, as the street tilted further and the water rose. His white hair loose, plastered to his head. In his shirtsleeves. Carrying Marta Ness.

She was small. He was very tall. He had her in his arms against his chest, held up high, out of the water, with her spectacles gone and her hands clutching his shoulders and a box of papers clutched in her lap, the records, forty years, she wouldn’t let go of them, and he waded with her up the tilting street toward the line. Toward the gap. Toward the western edge, standing above the water like a wall.

He was slow. The water was fast. It came round him brown and white and dragging. He leaned into it. He kept walking. One step. Another. The way a chain-man walks a long line. Never letting it sag.

He got to the foot of the western edge. The water was at his chest. At his shoulders. He held Marta Ness up over his head. Both arms. Straight up. Into the hands reaching down from the western side.

Bastian’s hands.

Bastian was lying flat on his belly on the western edge with half his body hanging over the gap and two townsmen holding his legs, and he took Marta Ness out of Penhallow’s hands, records and all, one-handed, and swung her up and back onto the cobbles of the west side as if she weighed nothing. And reached down again. For Penhallow.

Penhallow looked up at him.

Oriel would always remember that. From the wool-hall steps, through the falling and the noise and the roar of the water. The old man, chest-deep in the brown flood at the foot of the torn cobbles, looking up at the chain-man reaching down for him with his crooked hand. And his long gentle lined face, white and wet and calm.

He reached up.

The water took him.

It wasn’t fast. It was never fast. The east side tilted another hand, and the flood in the gap shifted with it, and the current swung, and he went. Sideways. Down. Under. His hand was up, reaching, for one moment, above the brown water.

Then it wasn’t.

The east side of Lusk went over at dusk.

Not over the Lip. Not yet. The Lip was still six leagues east. It went down. The whole slab of it, east of Sarn’s line, tilting slowly away and down into the dark of the opening rift between it and the rest of the leaf, a long wide crack in the world that ran north and south through the middle of the town as far as anyone could see. The dye-houses. Tanner Row. The east mills, their wheels still turning in the last of the water. The Ledger House of Aske, with its scales and its key. The Survey office, with its little brass star. Half the market square. Half the Lusk boneyard, its eastern rows sliding gently away, stones and all, into the dark.

The western half of the north wall stood on the edge of it. With its ivy hanging down into nothing.

Ilse Corran held the Weaver Bridge until the last of them were across. Then she held it ten minutes more, alone, in case. Then she walked off it, west, slowly, without looking back, and twenty minutes after that the eastern arch cracked and fell into the mill-race channel, which was dry now, all its water gone into the dark.

Nine thousand had been on the east side at noon.

The reeve counted them, that night, at the camp on the west road. Eight thousand eight hundred and some had crossed.

Not all of the rest were dead. Some had gone north or south along the line instead of west, and turned up days later. But some were. Oriel never knew the full number. The reeve made a list. She saw it. She didn’t read it all.

She knew three names on it.

Treddick, H., Captain, Chainguard. Lost going back for a man.

Brack. No. Brack had lived. Brack was in Ilse Corran’s custody, on the west road, with his good arm bound behind him and his face broken and a look on it, Corran said, like a man who’d been handed his life by someone he’d have robbed.

Penhallow, A. Formerly Survey-General. Lost in the flood at the Survey office, Lusk, carrying M. Ness, district clerk, who lived.

Marta Ness lived. And the records. Forty years of the Lusk district. She sat in a cart on the west road wrapped in three blankets with the box on her knees and her spectacles gone, and wouldn’t let anyone take it from her.

Sarn was sitting in the road.

Not by a fire. In the middle of the road, west of Lusk, in the dark, on the cold ground, with her bare feet flat on it and her hands in her lap. She’d been there since dusk. People walked round her.

Oriel sat down beside her. Her knee made her do it badly.

Neither of them said anything for a long time.

“I called it,” said Sarn at last. Hoarse. Nearly gone. “The line. I called every pace of it. Every arrow Coyle drove went in where I said. It went exactly where I said.” She looked at her hands. “And it didn’t matter. They still went down with it. The ones who went back. The ones who wouldn’t come.”

“It mattered to eight thousand eight hundred.”

“I know.” Sarn closed her eyes. “I know it did. I’m going to need to say that to myself for a long time before I believe it.”

Bastian came and sat down on Oriel’s other side. Slowly. All of him. He’d been at the edge for hours after, with the townsmen, lying on his belly, looking down into the dark with a lantern on a rope, in case. He hadn’t found anything.

He sat with his crooked right hand in his lap and looked at it.

“I had him,” he said. “His hand. I had his fingers. These two.” He held up the crooked ones. “They wouldn’t close.”

Oriel didn’t say anything. She put her hand on his. On the two fingers that wouldn’t close. And left it there.

After a while Bastian said, very low, to the road: “He was holding her up. Over his head. Both arms. Never let her touch the water.” He was quiet. “Chain doesn’t lie.”

“People hold it,” said Oriel.

“He held it,” said Bastian Coyle. “In the end. He held it.”

East, behind them, in the dark, there was no Lusk anymore. Half of one. And beyond it, under everything, faint, going on, the sound that Sarn had been hearing for eleven years and everybody else could hear now.

Going.

FIELD BOOK · O. TASH
LUSK, 11th Thirdmonth C.413
N. WALL: 112 RODS. CRACK: A HAND AND A HALF, >40 RODS DEEP.
S. IVO CALLED THE LINE AT NOON. “TODAY.” B.C. FLAGGED IT.
BELLS 4 HRS. I. CORRAN HELD THE WEAVER BRIDGE. 8,800+ CROSSED.
E. LUSK WENT DOWN AT DUSK. LIP STILL 6 LG E. THIS WAS THE LEAF TEARING.
TREDDICK, H.: LOST, GOING BACK FOR BRACK (WHO LIVED).
PENHALLOW, A.: LOST IN THE FLOOD, CARRYING M. NESS, WHO LIVED.
RECORDS: SAVED.
IT WENT EXACTLY WHERE SHE SAID.