Sect Year 6 · second month · night of day 2 · the fifty-seventh life: Varrow Pass, his thirty-second year
Halden let himself down against the doorstep one joint at a time. He had meant to rest for the length of one bell and then stand again. The stone was cold through his coat. The cold went on through the wool and settled in the small of his back, and after a while he could no longer say where his body stopped and the step began. The loaf lay in his lap. The widow had given it to him when she came up the road, still warm enough to steam in the cold, and he hadn’t eaten any of it. He would eat it when the door opened. There was no sense in eating it before. The work was to stand, and he had stood all night, and standing had turned his feet into two things that belonged to someone else.
The snow had thinned to a few slow flakes, and the lamp at the foot of the switchback had gone out. Above the house he could see the flat grey sky over the pass and the dark shoulders of rock on either side of the track. Below him the sledges stood in a line, their shafts raised like the arms of people who had given up asking for something. Nobody was climbing the track now. The late payers had come and gone, and the ones still in the valley…
