Sect Year 0 · ninth month · night of day 28 · the first life: the Ghelt Bridge, his forty-first year
The refugees began to come down the steppe road in the autumn of Tavin’s forty-first year, and he counted them from the hut step because he didn’t know what else to do with his hands.
They came in carts first, piled high with bedding and cookpots and the one good chair a family could not bear to leave behind. Then they came on foot. Children rode the wagon tails with their legs hanging over the rims. Border families walked beside their goats, and an old man walked beside a mule with a brass lamp hung from its saddle and nothing else on its back.
“Thirty-six,” Tavin said under his breath. “Thirty-seven.”
He had kept the toll-book in his own hand since he was twenty-two, when his father’s fingers began to shake over the sums. He wrote the carts in it now, and then the families, and then he stopped writing, because the numbers had stopped meaning anything he could hold.
Dorrin had been dead nine years and Anhe six. They lay on the hill above the hut under two grey stones Tavin had cut himself, with their names in the old tongue and the sign for a bridge carved beneath each. On the first day of every month he climbed up and told them the toll. He had never once told them anything else.
A woman stopped her cart at the foot of the approach, a small wiry woman with a man beside her who kept his hand on the wheel as if it might leave. “Is it sound, keeper? The bridge. They say the crown means to burn it.”
“Every pin on the old piers was tapped this spring,” Tavin said. “Two of them were bad, and I drew them and reset them. You can cross on the middle span if you keep your wheel toward the rail.”
“And if the crown comes?”
“Then the crown can ask me about the pins.”
The man laughed, a short startled sound, and the woman did not. She looked at the water and then drove on, and her cart rolled out onto the planks with a sound like a drum being struck very softly.
The captain of the king’s guard rode up at dusk with thirty men behind him. He carried a written order in a leather case, and the seal on it was the colour of old wine. He broke the seal in the road in front of the hut and read the order aloud, in a voice pitched for the carts as much as for Tavin.
“Burn the Ghelt Bridge before the northern army reaches the river. By order of the crown.”
“The bridge belongs to the crown,” the captain said, when he had rolled the paper up again.
“It belongs to whoever is crossing it tonight,” Tavin said. “The crown can have it after.”
The captain looked past him, at the carts backed up along the steppe road and the children watching from the tails. “You’ll light it, keeper, or you’ll hang from it.”
“Then I’ll hang from it.”
Two of the guardsmen rolled oil barrels off a cart and set them against the stone of the approach. One bung came loose, and the smell of lamp oil climbed into the cold air, sharp enough to sting Tavin’s eyes. He walked out past the first barrel and then the second. At the middle span he climbed onto the rail and sat with his back to the drop and his right hand flat on the iron, beside the cut. The iron was colder than the air.
“I won’t light it,” he said.
“Get down off that rail,” the captain said.
“When the last cart is across, I’ll get down.”
The captain dismounted then, which Tavin had not expected. He walked to the foot of the approach and looked up at the rail, and at the keeper sitting on it with his back to the drop. “Are you mad, keeper?”
“I’m tired,” said Tavin. “That isn’t the same thing.”
“It looks the same from down there.”
“Then come up here and sit where I’m sitting, and tell me what you see.”
The captain did not answer. He stood with his hand on the handle knob for a long moment, and the oil smell came up between them, and then he turned and walked back to his horse without another word.
The night came on fast after that, and the carts did not stop coming. Somewhere in the first watch a cart with a split felloe jammed its near wheel between two loose planks on the approach, and the family behind it began to shout. Tavin was off the rail before he had decided to be. He went down the stone steps with a pry-pole from the hut and set its end under the rim while the father held the horse. The wood groaned. The wheel lifted a little, then more, and the cart came free with a crack that went out over the water like a shot.
“Thank you,” the father said, and he couldn’t look at him.
“Go on. Keep to the middle.”
Tavin went back up the steps. For the length of the climb his right hand was on the pole and not on the rail, and when he came to the middle span and sat again, he had to search for the cut with his thumb. He found it. The iron was still warm under the lip of the wound, but his hand had been away from it, and he felt the loss of that the way a man feels a step he has missed in the dark.
Two guardsmen came out along the planks with torches in their fists. They were halfway when they stopped, because a woman was coming the other way: a bundle under one arm, a child on her hip, her face set toward the far bank. Behind her the planks were full of families. Tavin could see their shapes in the lamplight, and the glint of pots, and the goats going nervously along the rail.
“The planks are sound,” Tavin said. “I tapped every pin on the north span this morning, and I’d know if one of them lied to me. There are women out here with children. If you want this bridge burned, burn them first, and then tell the king you did it with your own hands.”
The nearer guardsman looked at the woman, and at the child, and at the torch in his fist. He lowered it. The other man said something under his breath that Tavin did not catch, and then he lowered his own.
“Where’s your family?” the nearer guardsman asked. He was young, not much past twenty, with a mouth that had not yet decided what it was for.
“On the hill. Two stones.”
“I’ve a sister on the Hesk road. She’s got a baby.”
“Then you’ll want to go and see her when this is done.”
“They’ll hang me for coming back without the bridge.”
“They’ll hang you for the bridge if you burn it,” Tavin said. “Stand where you are. You’re standing on the best timber in the valley.”
The young guardsman looked down at the planks as if he had never noticed them before. Then he stamped once, hard, and the boards answered him with a clean, sound knock that went out across the water.
All night the refugees came across under Tavin’s eyes. They went over in a long uneven line, the old ones first and the sick ones carried, and the goats last of all because the goats would not be hurried. A boy of eight came by with a sack of seed corn on his back, as though it were the only thing left in his family worth saving. Tavin told him to set it down and carry his sister instead. The boy looked at the sack, then at the girl at his side, and then he did it.
He counted them aloud, because counting kept his voice steady and kept the carts moving. “Twelve. Thirteen. Keep to the middle, mother. Don’t look down at the water. Left wheel in toward the rail. That’s it. The rail will hold you.”
Past midnight a baby at the far end began to scream. The cry went up off the water and would not stop, and the carts behind it bunched on the approach, and the guardsmen stood about with their torches unlit. It looked at the sky the way men do when they are waiting to be told what to feel. Tavin began to sing. He sang the first verse, the one his mother had sung him in the cradle by the stove, and he sang it across the water in a voice that did not carry well and did not need to. The baby hiccupped, then hushed, and the carts rolled on.
Toward the small hours a woman stopped beside him on the middle span with a child asleep against her shoulder. She had a heel of brown bread wrapped in a cloth and a tin cup of water, and she held both up to him as though he were the one who needed feeding.
“You’ll be cold up there.”
“I’m used to the rail.”
“Nobody’s used to it.” She put the bread into his hand and waited until he ate some. It was stale and tasted of the road, and he chewed it slowly so that she would see he was grateful. “What’s your name?”
“Tavin.”
“Then count me across, Tavin, and don’t stop for anyone’s manners.”
He counted her across. Her child did not wake.
The other man in him had no words for any of this, and did not try to find them. The man who had grown up behind a woodshed, who had been told to sit down a thousand times and had never once been asked to hold anything that mattered, went quiet and watched. Tavin had the rail, and the rail had him, and for the length of the night that was enough.
At grey dawn the captain gave the order to pull back. The guardsmen rolled the barrels onto a cart without looking at the bridge. The captain sat his horse at the approach with the reins bunched in one fist. His face had the grey look of a man who has not slept and will not be able to explain why.
“You’ll answer for this, keeper.”
“Count them with me,” Tavin said.
The captain did not count. But the last cart came over the stones in the first light, its wheels loud on the boards, and Tavin counted it aloud. He stayed on the rail with his hand back on the mark, and he watched the steppe go pale.