Chương 53: The Reeds

The top of Prescot's wall was thirty feet up. There was a man standing on it who had not moved since Monday. Abe went around him. The guard had one hand up against the light. His coat was blown out stiff behind him, holding a shape the wind had put in it days ago and never taken back. Abe had spent fifteen of his own days on the floor of a school hall a mile inside that wall, because there was nothing left in his own yard that the sword had not already learned.

Past the guard's shoulder the ground went down and out and turned into water. The reeds started a quarter mile from the wall. They went on until Abe couldn't tell reeds from sky. Gray-green, higher than a person, standing in flat brown water. Sleet hung over the whole thing like somebody had thrown a handful of rice at a photograph. It was the biggest thing Abe had ever looked at. He stood on a stranger's wall in a stopped morning and let himself want the marsh for a minute.

Then he got the sword off his back and looked at that instead. It was the old guard blade out of Riddell's scrap. He had carried it as a drill blade since the week before Christmas with no edge on it at all, because a drill blade wants none. He had put the edge back on it that morning, and Sharpening had done that in about ten minutes. He had thought about a better one that morning, walking a stopped Prescot and reading it through glass.

One shop had nine swords on a rack behind the counter and a locked door he was never going to get through. Abe stood at that window and found out he could not tell one thing about any of them. He had owned a sword since the middle of December and he was bad at it, and there was nobody in that city to ask. His arms knew this exact weight of steel. A different blade would mean teaching them another one. Sharpening kept an edge on junk. Choosing was the part he could not do.

He'd swung that sword about eleven thousand times since the twenty-ninth of December. The bar had barely moved. DRILL HAND · Apprentice Lv 3 (196 / 1, 800) That bar had read twelve points on the Saturday before Christmas. Three weeks of his own time, most of every day of it, and the Weave had paid him under two hundred points for the lot. That had taken him a long time to believe. More hours did not fix it. The Weave paid for hard.

There was nothing hard left in a stopped yard with nobody in it, and there never would be. He could stack up ten years in there and come out the far end with a bar that had barely moved. He needed somebody standing in front of him, and fifty hours a day could not get him one. Out in the reeds there was something standing in the water that wasn't a person. It would do just as well. Getting down the outside of the wall took him most of an hour, and he enjoyed every minute of it.

The sleet held still while he climbed through it. He put a hand into a patch and the whole patch slid aside like beads on a string. It closed up behind him and none of it fell, because falling takes time and there wasn't any. He dropped the last eight feet into a foot of stopped brown water, and it went aside for him and closed up behind his knees, the same as the sleet had. Abe laughed out loud in a field where nobody had ever laughed. Then he waded out into the reeds to go shopping. He walked the whole field.

He had the time. The reeds went aside when he pushed and stood open behind him, so by the end there was a path through that dead marsh in the exact shape of everywhere he had been. It was going to shut the second he let go and never show a thing. He found nine animals in the first stretch. He stood in front of every one. Two were reed dogs. Low and gray, about the size of a big dog with none of the dog in it. Six legs folded under, flat heads down in the water where their ears would be if they had any.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. They hunted by feel. Cottle had told him about that at the shed in November, with his boots on the stove.

"Stand still in front of one all day and it'll never know you're there," Cottle said.

"Water's got to be flat, though. You breathe wrong, it's got you." Abe stood in front of one for a long time and looked into its mouth from a foot away. Nobody alive had ever gotten to do that. Further out there were three stilts. They stood in the deep part on legs like scaffolding poles, necks folded down. Purnell had described those in the punt, on Abe's second Sunday, and he had not believed a word of it. Then, right at the edge of what he could see, there was a thing in the channel.

Abe walked out toward it, because the world was off and he could. He got to about thirty feet and stopped, and then he did not go any closer, and he could not have told anybody why. It stood in the channel up to whatever it had instead of shoulders. It was longer than the boat Dobbs poled. One leg was folded up clear of the water with weed dried onto it, which meant it had been standing there long enough for weed to dry. He looked at it for a while.

Then he turned around and went back the way he had come, and he did not stop looking at it until the reeds closed. He read the field for two hours before he picked. He took the smallest reed dog, in the shallowest water, with nothing else inside two hundred yards of it. He'd walked around a whole marsh with the world switched off. He'd gotten the measure of every single thing in it. Then he'd chosen the cheapest one on the shelf. He put his feet where he wanted them. He got the sword up.

He picked the exact spot on the flat gray head. Then he let go. The world came on with a noise like a bucket of gravel going into a bathtub. Everything moved at once. The sleet came down. The reeds all leaned the same way, and the water shoved cold against his knees. The reed dog was already turning when Abe's arms did what he had made them do eleven thousand times. He didn't decide any of it. The first exchange went exactly the way he'd drilled it, because that was what the skill did.

His feet were where they should be. The point went in behind the flat of the head. Then the whole animal came up out of the water in a shape he had not planned for at all. It didn't fight like a person, but it got a leg over his shoulder and pushed, trying to get past him rather than through him. He had spent three weeks expecting to be frightened of how strong it would be, but it was not strong at all.

Abe got a fistful of the loose skin at the back of its neck and put it down in the water and held it there with his knee and all his weight, and worked the blade up and in until it stopped moving. His arms did that without any trouble whatsoever. In October he could not have carried a bag of coal up his own stairs. It took a while and it made a mess, and he knew the whole way through how it was going to finish.

Then he stood up in eight inches of freezing brown water and found that his breath was coming far too fast for something that had asked so little of him. He was still shaking when he read the screen, so he read it twice. DRILL HAND · Apprentice Lv 4 (312 / 3, 200) Abe stood in a marsh outside a city he had no business being in. There was somebody else's blood all over his coat and his knees were going. He laughed so hard he had to put a hand on his leg. Two thousand points.

Near enough two thousand, on a bar that had given him a hundred and eighty odd for three weeks. He worked it out standing up, out loud, twice. He could swing at air for the rest of the winter and not get near what one reed dog had just paid him. Then he stopped laughing, because the second part of it arrived. He couldn't get calm. The still would not come. He sat down on a hummock of dead grass with the sleet going into his collar. He counted. He got nowhere, and counted again.

His heart would not sit down, and the worse half of it was that he did not want it to. Every time he got near quiet his head was back up on the bank instead, picking the next one. He picked the stilt in the deep part twice, and then the second reed dog three hundred yards north, and then the thing in the channel he had told himself he was not looking at. The still had locked him out before, on a hall floor on Fenner Street with a man watching, and in a dark storeroom with a floorboard going over his head.

Both of those had been fear. He knew how to sit still with being frightened. He did not know how to sit still with wanting to go back out there. The sleet came down on him for a long time. Out in the deep part a stilt shifted its weight, and Abe's whole body went tight, and he started the count again from the beginning. The light was going by the time the world finally locked. He looked up at a sky that had stopped raining on him halfway down. He had gone over that wall at nine in the morning.

Seven hours of the actual world, to get his own heart to be quiet. He had spent fifteen days on that school hall floor and paid a few minutes for the lot. He was most of the way back to the wall before he worked out what else the afternoon had taken. The world had gone on the whole afternoon without him. It was past four o'clock in Calder now, and at six Peg put the plates out. So he ran the first mile, before he remembered that a stopped road does not care how fast you cross it.

The walk took a day of his own time, through country that did not move once. He came in through his own gate and let the world back in standing on the same dirt he had gone into the still from on Monday morning. Then he went upstairs and washed his hands and ate shepherd's pie with his aunt and his sister. June wanted to talk about a girl in her year who had gotten a dog for Christmas.

"They called it Trevor," she said.

"Trevor. It's a dog and they called it Trevor."

"You've said Trevor three times."

"Trevor," said June.

"She says I can walk it on Saturdays," June said.

"Ask Peg for me. She says yes to you."

"I'll ask her," Abe said.

"Say it like you mean it."

"I'll ask her Wednesday." He sat at that table with his forearms aching and marsh water in his boots, and the plates went in the sink at half past six the way they always did.

"You're quiet," Peg said.

"And your hair's wet."

"Cold out," Abe said. He waited until the house went quiet. Then he took his coat off the hook.