The Road West

Once upon a time, there was a road west. There were other roads, but this was the one we needed.

Vara did not like it. She told me this before sunrise, while I was still rolling the blankets and trying to decide whether the dried meat smelled bad enough to throw away. I decided it did not. Meat has to smell much worse than people think before it becomes useless.

“The road is faster,” I told her. Vara remained unconvinced. “It goes directly through the hills.” Nothing. “We are not going around them.” That settled nothing either.

My younger sister could make an argument last a very long time without helping with any of the packing. I tied the blankets behind my saddle. Vara watched me do it incorrectly, so I untied them and did it again. She was satisfied with this.

I had wanted a brother or sister for years. Then there was Vara, and Mother told me I must be patient because she was little. Later I had to be patient because I was older. I could not remember a time when this arrangement had required any patience from Vara.

There had been four of us when we left the winter ground that spring. My mother. My father. Vara. Me. Now there were two.

This is the sort of arithmetic I understand.

The men we followed had eleven days’ start. There had been rain since then, which was bad. Wind too, which was worse. Horses leave good tracks when the earth is soft. Men leave good tracks when they are frightened. These men had not been frightened when they left us. They had no reason to be.

They had burned our tents, taken the horses that could still walk, and left the rest where they fell. My father was beside the fire pit. My mother was farther away. I will not tell you where. Vara found her first.

For three days after, Vara ate very little. I ate because someone had to think properly, and thinking is difficult when hungry. We buried what we could. The ground was hard.

People say grief makes men strong. These people have never dug a grave.

When we finished, I took my father’s knife. The good one was gone, so I took the small skinning blade he kept inside his boot. It was not a weapon made for revenge. I decided revenge would have to become smaller.

Vara approved. At least, I think she did. Sometimes Vara approved of something and sometimes she had simply become tired of explaining why I was wrong. These can look similar.

Before we left, Vara went back to the place where Mother’s bed had been. I had everything packed. I put it down again and sat with her.

We followed the riders west.

The steppe changed slowly at first. Grass became shorter. The hills rose higher. Trees appeared one at a time, then in groups, as though they had discovered courage in numbers.

Vara disliked the trees. I did too. On the steppe you can see trouble coming. Trees allow trouble to wait.

On our ninth day of following them, we found a stone marker beside the trail with writing carved into it. I knew it was writing because the marks were too ugly to be decoration.

Vara inspected it.

“Can you read that?”

She could not. Neither could I.

This seemed like poor planning by whoever had made the sign.

We continued west. By noon, the trail had become a road. By evening, the road had become stone.

I stood looking at it for some time. Thousands of rocks, flattened and fitted together so strangers would know where to walk. I had never seen anything so expensive built for people too stupid to follow the horizon.

Vara stepped onto it first.

“I thought you hated the road.”

She kept walking.

This was Vara. She could disagree with an idea for half a day and then use it before I did.

The stone was hard on the mare. By the next afternoon I was leading her along the grass beside it, which Vara had already been doing for some time. I did not discuss this with her.

We had one horse because I had been riding her when the soldiers came. Vara and I had gone looking for a ewe that had wandered away to give birth. We found her in a hollow, with two lambs instead of one. I remember being pleased. Two lambs were better than one, and I was going to have something good to tell my father.

From the ridge we saw the smoke. By the time we reached the camp, the riders were already small in the west. An old man called Bort was still alive. He had heard their captain shouting orders. He gave us a name and made me say it back to him twice, because he was dying and did not want to have wasted the trouble.

Edric Vale.

I asked him to say it once more. Bort became angry with me. He had a bad wound under his arm, and helping him sit up made it worse. We stayed until there was nobody left who needed water. Then we stayed because there was more digging.

I had expected to find the riders still together. Instead, their tracks thinned. Some went north. Some went through a valley where we could see roofs smoking. On the stone road I lost them altogether.

At the next marker, a carter came along, driving two oxen and a load of empty barrels. I asked him what it said.

“Dunmere, two hundred miles.”

“Is Edric Vale there?”

He put his hand on the brake. He looked at me, then at Vara. “Sir Edric?”

“How many are there?”

“One, far as I know.”

“Then him.”

The carter told us to follow the road to Dunmere and ask there. Then he asked whether we meant to walk behind his cart. I said the road seemed to require it. He said he could wait until we had gone ahead. He was very willing to wait.

I had met humans at our summer ground. They came for wool and horses, and did not mind an orc standing beside them while they counted their money. Here they looked at my teeth before they looked at anything else.

For a while we met people like that. They remembered things they needed to do somewhere else. Men who had been resting discovered their horses were rested too. One woman stood in a ditch while we passed, holding a basket above her head. I thought perhaps she wanted help, but when I went toward her she held it higher.

Vara was interested in the basket. We went on.

It rained for two days. Water ran down the road in the cart grooves, and the mare began putting her feet down carefully. I found a good place beneath an overhang, with dry ground and enough room for a fire. Vara found a better one farther up the slope. I told her we were staying where we were. After dark the water came through our camp and took most of the fire with it.

I carried everything up to her place. She had left me very little room.

“You could have insisted.”

She gave me Mother’s look. Mother could stop Father halfway through an explanation without saying anything. Vara had learned to do it to me. I generally finished explaining anyway, in case that was the part she needed.

I had to lie on my side all night. In the morning my hip hurt, the meat was wet, and Vara was pleased with the world.

We stayed there another day because the mare needed it. I dried the saddle and scraped the mud from the blanket. Vara slept through most of this. Toward evening she came and settled so close that I could no longer pull the blanket straight.

“There is a whole hill.”

She knew about the hill. She stayed where she was.

My mother used to complain about the same thing. She would spread something out to work on it and Vara would immediately find that exact piece of ground necessary. When Vara was little, Mother could move her. Later she had to move the work. She complained then too, but she put aside the better pieces when she cooked. If I mentioned this, she said Vara was still growing. She continued saying it long after Vara had grown enough.

I had to wash before supper. Vara could arrive looking as though she had rolled down the bank, and Mother would ask whether she was hungry. I had been hungry before washing, but this had not interested anyone.

We had left our winter ground together that spring. Mother had spent the morning looking for a wooden spoon that was inside the rolled tent. Father had said we could make another. This had not helped. Eventually we unpacked the tent. It took until noon to get going, and she brought up the spoon for the rest of the day.

I thought about telling Vara this while she lay on the blanket. Then I remembered she had been there.

On the fifth morning after the stone marker, we reached a farm with six little houses fastened together in a row. Each had its own door. I thought the family must quarrel often. A woman came out and told me they were pigsties.

She was carrying a pail in each hand. She put them down when she saw Vara.

“Keep her away from those.”

“She knows.”

“Make sure she knows twice.”

I kept Vara with me while the woman finished feeding the pigs. Then I asked about Edric Vale. She said he had a house near Dunmere, but he was often away. She had seen him at the midsummer fair the year before. He had judged the horses.

“Was he good at it?”

“Bought the wrong one.”

This was useful. Until then I had not known anything about him except the one thing.

The woman let us sleep behind her empty hay barn. In return I helped her shift a fallen gate and reset the post. She gave us bread and a pot of boiled peas with fat in them. Vara liked the fat. She was less certain about the peas. I had eaten worse things that morning, and said so. She did not care to compare them.

The woman watched us from the gate for a while. “You won’t like the next pot any better,” she told Vara. Then she went away and brought it anyway.

Her name was Mara. She asked my name and whether all orcs were as tall as I was. I told her I was Orin, and some were taller. She had a son away with the soldiers and a daughter who had married a man with land so wet that Mara could not mention him without mentioning the land. Her husband had died during a siege. I asked whether Edric Vale had killed him.

She stared at me. “No. He brought him home.”

I was holding a piece of bread. I remember turning it over because there was grit on the bottom.

“Shouldn’t have moved him, by rights,” she said. “The wound was too bad. But he asked to come home, so Sir Edric brought him. Carried him in himself. We had the afternoon.”

She took the pot when we finished. Before she went inside she reminded me about the pigs.

I did not sleep well. The mare shifted against her tether. Vara was already asleep, taking up the dry part beside the barn, and I wanted to wake her. I wanted to explain that carrying a man into a house was something anybody strong enough could do.

In the morning I fixed the other gate, although Mara had not asked. Then we left.

We travelled with a charcoal burner for three days. His cart moved at the mare’s pace. The man wore the same black shirt all three days. It may once have been another colour. He knew which streams were good and where the road climbed. I learned more from him than from all the stones.

He had served under Vale when he was young. He said the songs made too much of the fighting at a place called White Ford. It had mostly been men standing in cold water, waiting for other men to move.

“Were you frightened?” I asked.

“Couldn’t stop shitting.”

“What about him?”

“He went upstream.”

The man laughed until he coughed. I laughed too. It was a good answer. I disliked that I would remember it.

At the fork where he turned south, he gave me two bent nails and a strip of soft leather for the mare’s loose shoe. I had not asked. He pointed out a village where the smith would fix it properly. He told me the smith would ask six coppers and take four.

I offered four. He showed me the split in her hoof. I paid six.

While the smith worked, Vara and I went behind the market stalls. A boy there sold small folded things with apples inside. They were warm, and the outside broke into flakes when I bit it. I bought one for Vara. She finished before I did, then took an interest in mine.

“You had yours.”

She stayed interested.

I gave her the corner without much apple. She knew what I had done.

We sat beneath a cart while the boy’s mother carried out another tray. I was thinking about whether I could learn to make them. We had flour at home. Sometimes we had apples. It seemed we had been putting them together incorrectly.

Then somebody began singing at the other end of the market.

He had a stringed instrument and a red coat worn white at the elbows. People gathered while he tuned it. Two soldiers stood beside the well. One called out a name, and the singer shook his head until the other soldier held up a coin.

I heard Vale’s name in the first verse. In the second he crossed a river. By the third he had killed so many men that I knew the song was foolish. I went back to eating.

Then the singer came to the red tents at the eastern spring.

I stopped with the last piece in my hand. There were other red tents. There were other springs. I waited for him to tell me something that was wrong.

He sang about the split stone where the raiders gathered. He sang about the horses taken back from thieves. The tents burned in the last two lines. People joined in because they knew how it ended.

The split stone had been just outside our camp. My mother hung washing between it and a pole. Once, when I was small, she made me stand beside it while she measured a piece of cloth against my shoulders. I had wanted to go. She held me by the ear until she finished.

I had never heard my mother die in a song before.

The soldier threw his coin. It missed the singer’s hat and rolled toward us. I watched it come to rest against a wheel.

Vara was already up. I had dropped the apple crust, and she had left it where it fell. She wanted us out from beneath the cart. I thought she was frightened by the crowd. I told her we were not leaving yet.

The singer began another song. I could still hear the first one. I got up too quickly and struck my head against the cart. One of the soldiers laughed. I went toward him, and then Vara was in my way, making it difficult to get past without pushing her.

“Move.”

She did not.

The smith called from across the square. He had finished with the mare. I remember that too: how annoyed I was that somebody expected me to fetch a horse.

We left by the back of the market. I walked fast until the fields ended. Vara kept beside me. When I stopped, she stopped. I said several things to her that had nothing to do with anything she had done. She went farther up the bank and waited there.

After a while I followed. She made room for me. I did not sit down.

That night I tried to remember the whole verse. I could remember the stone and the stolen horses, but the words between them kept changing. I was angry about that as well. I did not want the song, and I did not want to have forgotten any of it.

We walked for another eight days. The road divided often now. Fields had hedges, and there were gates where a man could see perfectly good ground continuing on the other side. We were sent away from an orchard where I had hoped to camp. At an inn they wanted more for the stable than I had paid to shoe the mare. We slept in a gravel pit. The next morning I had us moving before we had properly eaten. I told myself we were losing time, although I no longer knew where Vale was or when he meant to leave it.

The mare grew thin. There was plenty of grass, but I kept moving her before she had eaten enough. One evening she turned her head when I went to put the saddle on again. Her ears told me to leave her alone. Vara agreed. I left the saddle on the ground.

We stayed beside that stream for two nights. I patched a strap, washed my shirt and cut a thorn from the mare’s leg. Vara went down to the water. By the time I finished, she had settled in the sun where I meant to dry the shirt. I spread it on the stones beside her.

“Try not to get that dirty.”

She looked at me. I had been wearing it for weeks. I moved it farther away.

I was in a better temper when we left. We had food, the mare was walking properly, and a shepherd had told us Vale was home. His house stood beyond Dunmere, on the river. There was an old mill below it. We would know the place by the white gate.

That afternoon we reached a bridge where three soldiers were collecting money. Their little shelter stood on our side. Two horses were tethered behind it. One soldier had taken his boots off and was picking at his heel. Another sat with a crossbow across his knees.

The third came out to meet us. He had a red face and a beard trimmed square at the bottom. At his waist was my father’s belt.

I knew the buckle. I had made the brass tongue for it because the old one broke. Mine was too long, and Father had said it would have to do until somebody in the family learned to measure.

The soldier told me the price of crossing. I was looking at the buckle. He said it again.

“Where did you get that?” I asked.

He followed my eyes. His thumb hooked beneath the leather. “You buying a belt or crossing a bridge?”

Vara had stopped beside me. The mare pulled toward the verge. I let her have the rein.

“It was my father’s.”

The man looked at my face properly then. He glanced toward the other two. The one without boots put his foot down.

“Plenty of belts.”

“I made the tongue.”

He took his hand away from it. “Move on.”

I had spent weeks wondering what I would say to one of them. I had imagined asking questions. In some of these thoughts the man would beg. In others I would do something clever with my father’s knife. What I did was take hold of the belt.

He struck me in the mouth. I pulled him toward me. We hit the side of the shelter, and something inside fell. He was trying to draw his sword, but I had him too close. I put my other hand around his throat.

The crossbowman stood up. I saw him lifting the bow past the shoulder of the man I was holding. Vara went towards him. The soldier’s legs struck mine as I tried to keep my feet. I heard the bow go off, then wood break.

The man under my hand stopped trying to draw. He began trying to remove my fingers. I held him against the boards until he stopped that too.

When I turned, the barefoot soldier was running across the bridge. The crossbowman lay near the ditch. Vara stood over him, very angry. There was a short shaft sticking out behind her left shoulder.

I went toward her. She warned me away. I had never ignored that warning before. This time I did, and she let me come close enough to see.

The shaft moved when she breathed. I took out my father’s knife, but there was very little of the shaft to cut.

“We will get it out,” I said.

There was blood on her side, but less than I expected. That seemed good. I knew about cuts and broken bones. I knew how to stop blood coming out. I did not know what to do when it stayed inside.

I took the mare and led Vara off the road. She came willingly at first. Then she wanted to stop. I told her there would be a better place farther on. We crossed a field, went through a gap in a hedge, and came to a ditch with water running in the bottom. She lay down beside it.

I said the ground was wet. She knew about the ground. She stayed where she was.

There was a house across the next field. I could see a woman bending over a row of plants. I shouted. She straightened, waited, then went inside. I shouted again. A man came out with a long-handled billhook.

“My sister is hurt.”

He did not come closer until I put the knife on the ground. I had forgotten I was holding it. Then he crossed the field with the woman behind him.

He stopped at the ditch. “That’s a bear.”

“Yes. Here. Behind the shoulder.”

The woman caught his sleeve. He stood looking down at Vara. I wanted him to stop looking and do something. Vara wanted him farther away. I kept my hand against her neck.

“Can you get it out?”

“I butcher pigs,” he said.

“Then you know where things are.”

He crouched, though not very close. The woman asked what had happened. I told her about the bridge. She looked at the knife on the ground, then at my mouth. I could feel it swelling.

The man said the bolt was deep. He said it might be better not to pull it. I asked whether he knew somebody who would know for certain. There was a horse doctor in Dunmere. There was also a woman upriver who sometimes treated cattle, but he did not know whether she was home. He began explaining which road reached her house.

“Go,” his wife told him.

He looked at her.

“I’ll stay here. Take the horse.”

I gave him the mare. He had to shorten the stirrups. It took him some time because one buckle was stiff. I wanted to put him on the horse without them.

His wife brought water and a folded cloth. Vara did not want the water. I wet the cloth and wiped around the shaft. Her fur was stuck together. When I touched the wound, she turned her head sharply. I stopped.

The woman sat on the bank. She was frightened. Her hands were clasped so tightly that the fingers had gone pale. I told her Vara would not hurt her.

“She’s hurting now,” the woman said. “That can make a difference.”

I knew this. I had needed someone to tell me.

We waited. Once Vara tried to get up. I moved back to give her room, but she lay down again before she had quite managed it. I put my hand where it had been. I could feel her breathing beneath the fur.

My mother had carried her home inside a coat. I remembered the coat because it was my father’s, and because she had cut up the lining to make a place for Vara to sleep. He had objected for three evenings. On the fourth I found him feeding her from his fingers. She had been hungry enough to take some finger too.

Later, when her belly was full, I had lain down beside her. She pushed against me in her sleep until I was nearly out of the tent. Mother said I had done the same thing as a baby. This was supposed to explain why I must let her do it.

The woman asked whether Vara had been with me long.

“Since she was little.”

“Ah.”

She did not ask anything else.

The light left the bottom of the ditch. I wanted another cloth because this one was dirty. I wanted the horse to come back. I wanted Vara to stop making the small sound at the end of each breath. I had both hands against her now, one on her neck and one farther down, as though there was something I could hold in place.

The woman went to fetch a blanket. While she was gone, Vara moved her head against my knee. I shifted to make it easier for her. I told her we were staying here. We did not have to go any farther tonight.

Her next breath took a long time.

I waited for another until the woman came back.

The man returned after dark. The cattle woman was away. He had gone farther upriver looking for her, then turned back because he thought I would be wondering where he was. He explained this twice. I thanked him twice. Neither of us seemed to know when the conversation was finished.

His wife brought a lantern. He had brought a spade from the house. We stood beside Vara until I understood why he was holding it.

“Not here,” I said. “The water.”

He nodded. There was higher ground near the far hedge, with a beech growing out of it. He said we could use that ground. He said nobody ploughed there because of the roots.

The roots made digging difficult. I cut some with the knife. The man worked beside me with another spade, taking out what I loosened. After a while he went to the house and came back with a mattock. We should have begun with that. I was angry that we had not begun with it. Then I was angry with him for knowing how much ground we would need.

We moved her on a hurdle from his sheep pen. It took both of us and his wife, and then the mare as well. Vara’s head slipped off the edge once. I stopped everything to put it back. The man waited with the rope in his hands.

I put my blanket beneath her head. It was folded badly. I reached down and straightened it.

The woman asked her name. I told her. She said it once before we began putting the earth back.

Toward morning the husband told me I should be gone before people came looking. He had been deciding how to say this for some time. I could see that. I offered him the mare because I had no money worth giving. He said she was my horse and I would need her. He gave me bread, a little salt and directions that kept me away from the bridge.

His wife made me wash my face before I left. She warmed the water. I had blood down the front of my shirt, but she could do nothing about that without keeping me longer.

I asked their names. They were Hedd and Annet. I have remembered them.

For most of that day I walked beside the mare. Twice I looked back because I thought Vara was taking too long. The second time I stayed looking. There was only the track, bent grass and a magpie moving along the hedge.

I reached the river below Vale’s house in the afternoon. The old mill had no wheel. Water came through the empty channel and made a noise inside it. There was enough of a roof to sleep under, and grass for the mare on the bank. I tethered her where she could not be seen from the house.

Then I went to look at the white gate.

It was smaller than I had expected. Beyond it stood a long house with pale walls and a roof that needed work at one end. Somebody had put buckets beneath the scaffolding. There was a kitchen garden, an orchard and a path leading down toward the river. I could see two men lifting a wooden frame out of a drainage ditch. An older man stood with them, holding his coat over one arm.

One of the workers said something. The older man put down his coat and helped them lift. He had difficulty bending one knee. They got the frame up between them and laid it on the grass.

When he straightened, I saw the white hawk fastened at his shoulder. I had seen it on the men at the bridge, and above the singer’s hat, and cut into the stone over a town gate. This one was small enough to cover with my thumb.

I stayed in the mill that night. I could have reached him before dark. I knew where he was, and I knew how to come up through the orchard without crossing the open grass. Instead I sat on a broken step with my father’s knife across my knees.

There was dirt packed beside the blade, where I had cut the roots. I scraped it out with a splinter. Then I sharpened the knife. It did not need much. My father had kept it well.

I thought about the belt still lying at the bridge. I had left it there. I had killed the man wearing it and left it there. I could remember the crossbowman standing up. I had seen him before Vara went towards him. I had kept hold of the other man.

In the morning I watched Vale come down the path. He wore a plain coat and carried a stick. He stopped beside the drainage ditch, prodded something with the stick, then went on toward the orchard. A boy came out of the house and called after him. Vale turned back. I stayed where I was until they had both gone inside.

I had no good reason for waiting another day. I fed the mare and tightened a loose strap. I found myself doing it again an hour later.

On the third morning I waited inside the orchard.

He came alone. I heard the stick before I saw him. He was older than my father, with grey hair cut close and a thickening around the middle. His left boot had been altered to fit his foot. There was a sword at his hip. He looked up when I stepped onto the path and stopped well short of me.

“Can I help you?”

“You are Edric Vale.”

“Yes.”

I had wondered whether I would recognize his voice. There was no reason I should. I had never heard it.

“You went east this summer.”

His hand moved on the stick. “I did.”

“There was a spring below a split stone. Red tents. A dead tree with rope around it.”

He looked at my coat, my boots, then at my face again. He took a breath through his nose.

“Yes.”

“Did you tell them to burn it?”

“Yes.”

I waited. He did not give the order to somebody else in the telling. He did not ask which captain. I had prepared for both of those things.

“My father was there. My mother.”

He lowered the end of his stick to the ground. “Were you?”

“After.”

A shutter opened at the house. We both looked toward it. A woman shook a cloth out of an upstairs window. Then she went back inside.

“The riders using that camp had burned three settlements,” he said. “We followed them from the last one.”

“I was looking for a sheep.”

He waited for me to say something else. I had meant to. There had been more to it when I was thinking about this in the mill.

“Your people took them in,” he said.

“We took people in.”

“Armed men. With stolen horses.”

“Then take the horses.”

He looked past me toward the gap in the trees. I moved a little so he would have to look at me again.

“There was fighting,” he said. “Your people were armed too.”

“You have a sword.”

“Yes.”

“Can I burn your house?”

His mouth tightened. He looked old then, but I did not care for his age. My father would have been older if somebody had let him.

“I should have sent men ahead to speak,” he said at last.

I nodded. That was true.

“I thought the riders would leave if they knew we were coming.”

He said this as though we were still there, and he still had to decide.

“I believed we had found the camp we were looking for.”

“You found it.”

He rubbed his thumb along the top of the stick. There was a worn place there. He did not tell me that war was difficult. I was grateful for that, though not enough to matter.

“Were there others left?” he asked.

“Some. For a while.”

He shut his eyes briefly. When he opened them, he looked straight at me.

“What were your parents’ names?”

I had wanted him to ask something he could not bear to hear. But he asked their names as though he meant to remember them, and I did not want to hand them over. He had everything else. His men had taken my father’s good knife. People sang about our spring. I had walked all this way to speak to him, and now there were things I would not say.

“I came with my sister.”

His eyes went to the trees again.

“She is not here,” I said.

He waited. I did not tell him where she was.

For the first time since Bort had given me the name, I had nothing left to ask. Vale stood with both hands on his stick. Behind him I could see apples in the grass. Some had split when they fell. Wasps moved over the pale parts.

I took out the knife.

He dropped the stick and drew his sword. He was quick. I had made him old in my head because of the boot and the way he bent, but his hands were quick. He stepped back and put the point between us.

“Don’t,” he said.

I went forward.

The sword cut along the outside of my arm. It did not stop me coming close. I caught his wrist, and he struck me in the face with his free hand, hard enough to open my mouth where the other man had struck it. We went against a tree. He was shouting now. I could smell his breakfast.

I put the small knife beneath his ribs. The first time it caught on something. I pulled it back and tried again.

He held the front of my coat. I kept his sword hand against the trunk until his knees bent. Then I lowered him because he was pulling me down with him.

There was nothing he wanted to tell me. He wanted air. I stayed beside him until I heard somebody running on the path.

I took the knife and went through the gap in the trees. A man shouted from the house. I heard another shout behind me, nearer. I ran down the bank and through the shallow channel beneath the mill. My arm hurt when I untied the mare. I could not fasten the saddle with one hand, so I left it, took the food bag and got onto her from the broken step.

We went downstream in the water until the banks became steep. Then I took her up through a stand of alder and into a field where cattle had churned the ground. There were more shouts behind us. I could no longer tell what they were saying.

That evening I washed my arm in a stream. The cut was long but not deep enough to kill me. I tore the bottom of my shirt into strips and bound it. My hands shook when I tried to knot them. I had to use my teeth.

I found a place beneath an overhang. The ground was dry. I put the mare where she could reach grass and sat with my back against the stone. After a while I remembered to move our things farther up the slope.

I did not make a fire.

Men rode the roads for days. I stayed away from them. Once I lay in a wet hollow while two passed close enough for me to hear one complaining about his horse. They called Vale a good man. I stayed still until they were gone.

The mare and I moved at night. I let her stop when she needed to. By the fourth evening there were fewer fields, and by the sixth I could stand on a ridge and see a long way without seeing a house. I had been trying to reach ground I understood. Now I stood on it and did not know where to go.

Home was east. So was the beech tree, though farther south. There were soldiers between us and both places. I led the mare down into a hollow where the grass was good.

I had a little of Annet’s bread left. It had gone hard at the edges. I cut it into two pieces and put the larger one beside me while I ate the other.

I knew what I had done. I left it there anyway.

When it grew dark, I wrapped it in the cloth and put it away. The mare tore at the grass. I lay down in my coat, with my boots still on because I had no blanket.

There was room to turn over. I lay on my side all night.