The frost came early that year. It came down off the Caul in the second week of the autumn’s fifth week, white and hard and silent, and it lay across the Hold’s yard in the mornings like a sheet thrown over a bed that someone had only just left. Tamsin woke to it. She woke with her breath standing in front of her face in the cold of her room above the goat pens, and she lay under her blanket for a while listening to the animals below, which were quiet in a way she did not like.
The goats were usually loud at dawn. They complained about the hay, and the rain, and the dog, and the cold, and the fact that the yard had been swept. This morning they were muffled, as if the frost had got into their throats, and when she came down the ladder with her shawl over her head and her hands in her sleeves, she saw that most of the herd had bunched together in the straw at the far end of the pen, shoulder to shoulder, facing the wall.
The old nanny was lying down in the middle of them.
Tamsin knew at once. She did not need to be told. She had known the old nanny since the Hollin Farm, when the goat had come across the river on the first crossing with her ears back and her eyes rolling, and she had named her, that same evening, for the dead man at the cottage gate whose name had been given to her in a whisper and who had not been able to be sung in front of the Chamber. She had been careful with the name. She had not written it down. She had sung it to the goat every night for a year, and the goat had listened.
Tamsin went into the pen and knelt in the straw beside her.
The nanny’s eyes were half open. Her breath came slow and shallow, and there was frost on the fine grey hair along her flank, and when Tamsin laid her hand on the goat’s neck the skin under it was cold and loose, like wet leather that has been left out all night. The goat did not move. She turned one ear, very slightly, toward the sound of Tamsin’s voice, and then the ear lay still again.
“Good morning,” said Tamsin. “I am here. It is cold, I know. The frost has come down off the Caul like a hard grey blanket, and it has got into the straw and the water-trough, and I have had to break the ice on the trough with a stone. You have been lying here a long time. I am sorry I did not come down sooner. I was dreaming of the wall, and I did not hear you.”
The goat’s eyes did not change. Tamsin kept talking.
She talked the way she always talked to animals, in full sentences, without hurry, as if the listener had all the time in the world and was entitled to every word. She told the nanny the Hold was a warm place, which was not quite true, because the Hold had been cold since the first morning, but which was true in the way that mattered. She told her the wall was a good wall. She told her the mason had counted every stone in it and had found, to his great annoyance, that the count had been right. She told her the dog had sat by the stool in the Hall for a whole night and had not once barked, and that the stool had been given a name, and that the name was the Waiting, and that the Waiting was a very patient thing to be called.
“You are a good goat,” said Tamsin. “You came across the river without a fuss. You carried the widow’s name over the water in your head, the way you carry everything, and you put it down in the pen where it could rest. I do not think anybody could have asked more of you. I think you have done all of it. You can rest now, if you like. You do not have to listen any more.”
The breath came again, slow and shallow. Then it stopped.
Tamsin waited. She sat with her hand on the goat’s neck and her eyes on the closed half-moon of the nanny’s eye, and she waited for the next breath, the way she had waited for every breath in the pens for a year, counting them without meaning to, because she had always counted them. The next breath did not come. The one after that did not come either. The frost lay on the straw, and the other goats shuffled in the cold, and the yard beyond the pen was silent.
She did not count.
She had never once in her life stopped counting a goat’s breaths before the last one. She found, to her surprise, that she could not do it now. She sat in the straw with her hand on the warm, cooling neck and her mouth shut tight, and she let the count go out of her like water out of a cracked bucket, and she did not go after it.
Sella came to the pens an hour later. She came with her ledger under her arm and her sleeves rolled, and she walked the length of the pen with the frost crunching under her boots and her face closed in a way that was not unkind. She looked at the goat in the straw. She knelt beside it and touched the grey hair and the cold skin, and then she opened her mouth, and Tamsin, watching from the far wall where she had been sitting for a long time with her shawl around her, knew at once what the diagnosis would be.
“Old age,” said Sella. “The cold, and a bad season. She was nine years old, I think, or ten. A goat of that age is a goat that has carried a great deal, and her heart is a heart that has been working very hard for a very long time, and this frost has simply asked her to stop. That is the diagnosis. I am sorry for it.”
Tamsin said nothing. She was looking at the goat’s face.
“The comfort is this,” said Sella, and she kept her eyes on the straw. Her voice had softened, which it rarely did. “She died with somebody talking to her. That is more than most builders in the Foundation’s rolls can say, and more than most of us could say in our own beds. She died in the warm straw with a Herder’s hand on her neck and a sentence in her ears. The bone will go into the bone-room, with its tag, and the tag will have a name on it. That is the other comfort. The name is in the Hold now. It has been carried over the water.”
“What name?” asked Tamsin, very quietly.
Sella looked up at last. Her face was pale and steady. “You will have to say it,” she said. “It is not mine to say. I have never once been given the name of a goat.”
Tamsin came across the pen. She knelt in the straw again, on the other side of the nanny’s body, and laid her hand on the goat’s flank, and then, slowly, she put her face down close to the grey, frost-tipped hair, and she sang.
It was not a long song. It had three notes in it, rising and falling, and it had been the only tune she had made up for herself in all her years with animals. She had made it for the first goat she ever lost, on her father’s farm, in a winter when she was a girl and the snow had come early and deep. It had no words. She had never needed words for it. But today she sang the dead man’s name into the tune, once, very softly, in the Hollin Farm’s own marsh way, the way the widow had said it at the gate. The name went into the notes as easily as a stone goes into a wall that has been waiting for it.
The other goats lay down.
They did it one by one, without fuss, as if they had been given leave to rest. The herd had been standing in the straw at the far end of the pen, shoulder to shoulder, facing the wall. Now the nearest goat folded its legs under itself, and then the next, and then the one beside that, until the whole herd had sunk down into the frost-white straw, round the old nanny’s body, with their heads low and their ears back and their eyes half closed, like a congregation kneeling at the end of a long service.
Tamsin sang the last note and let it go. She stayed where she was, with her face against the goat’s hair. The yard was silent. Sella, at the pen’s edge, had put her ledger down on the wall and had her hands folded over her chest, the way a Hand folded them when it was listening to a name it did not know.
“Say it aloud,” said Sella, very softly, after a long time. “The whole name. Once. So that the Hold can hear it.”
Tamsin lifted her head. She looked at the goats, lying round the nanny in the frost, and she looked at the grey wall beyond the pen, and the bright cold sky over the wall. Then she said the name. She said it quietly, without the tune, in her own voice, the voice she used for the Chamber and for the goats and for anybody who was frightened and needed to be spoken to in full sentences. It came out whole and clear, the first time she had ever said it to anyone who was not a widow or a dead man.
All across the pen, every goat that was still awake lifted its head at once, and turned, and looked at her.
Then the Hold, for the length of one long breath, was perfectly still.