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Chapter 38: The Mark a Blade Leaves

Chapter 38: The Mark a Blade Leaves

Pel came in the next morning, sixteen hours late, walking normally.

That was the part Kharun noticed first. A man who is late because something went wrong comes in fast or comes in hurt. Pel came up the landing path at the pace of somebody who had spent two days deciding not to hurry, and he went straight past the water and past his mother and stood in front of Kharun and started talking before he had finished stopping.

Leon caught perhaps a fifth of it.

He caught north and high and the verb ending Luma had taught him for seen with my own eyes, and then a construction he did not know at all, three times, and Kharun asking for it twice more each time.

What he could read without any words at all was Kharun’s face, which did nothing, and then went on doing nothing for slightly too long.

***

They went out at midday: Kharun, Tala, Pel, and two others.

Leon was not invited and went anyway, and the reason he went was that Pel, describing whatever he had found, had made a specific gesture. Two fingers of one hand drawn flat and straight across the palm of the other, twice, in the same line.

Leon had seen that sign used exactly once, for the mark a blade leaves.

It was five hours north-east at Tala’s pace, which meant it was six at his. They went up out of the river ground onto the long dry slope, past the bean plot, past the second ridge, and onto a spur of limestone with thorn scrub along its shoulder, and Pel took them into the scrub about forty metres and then stopped and pointed at the ground and did not step on it.

Somebody had lain here.

Leon would have walked over it. The grass was flattened in a shallow oval a little longer than a person, and the flattening had gone brown and dry and had begun to spring back at the edges, and to him it looked like a place a large animal had rested.

Tala crouched at the head of it and did not touch anything for a long moment.

Then she found the second one, three metres east, and the third under a thorn on the shoulder, and stood up and held up three fingers.

"Three," she said. "Not together."

Not one visit. Three, at different times.

She showed him how she knew. In the first oval the grass had recovered and re-flattened; you could see two lines of crushing at different angles under the same patch. In the third the stems were still green at the base. Weeks apart. The most recent inside the last four days.

Pel had found a fourth position further along the spur where the thorn had been cut back at knee height for a sightline, and it was that cut he had made the sign about.

Kharun went and looked at the fire first.

It was small, a hand’s width across, screened on three sides by stones that had been carried up from somewhere else. Cold. Somebody had put the ash back in and covered it with grass, and had done it carefully enough that Leon, standing directly over it, needed Tala to point twice before he saw anything but ground.

There was nothing else on the spur.

No food waste. No cordage. No broken tool, no hide scrap, no discarded anything. Leon walked the whole shoulder twice looking for the sort of debris that four visits leave and found grass, thorn, stone and the four ovals.

"Nothing," Kharun said, on the third pass, to nobody in particular. "Four times, and nothing."

That absence was what he kept coming back to. He went over the fire site three separate times, and the third time Leon understood that Kharun was not looking for what had been left. He was measuring how thoroughly it had been removed.

The sightline was the reason for all of it.

Leon crouched where the thorn had been cut and looked down the slope, and there was the river, and the terrace, and the landing, and the pale line of the palisade with nine metres of black in the eastern face of it.

He estimated the range at three and a half kilometres. A standing adult at that distance subtends about two minutes of arc, which is roughly the finest separation an eye can make, so a person down there was a moving speck that sometimes stopped being two specks. Not faces. Not counting. But the shape of the place, the traffic on the landing path, when the boats went out, how many, and where people were not.

He was still working through the arithmetic of it when Tala said his name.

She was standing at the cut thorn with her hand on the stub.

The cut was clean.

Not a chop. Not the crushed, feathered, half-torn face that a good stone edge leaves in green wood, which Leon had seen every day for four weeks and had stopped registering as anything other than normal. This was a flat plane through a two-centimetre stem, slightly ridged, with a kerf about a millimetre and a half wide and a faint regular scoring along the cut face.

He put his thumb on it and something went cold in the back of his neck.

Teeth. Set teeth, alternating, cutting on the pull.

"Kharun."

He did not have the words for any of it. He had made thing, and not stone, and he had the number one, and he had a pencil and the back page of the register, and so he drew it: the stem, the cut, the kerf, and then the blade, folded and open, with the pivot and the eleven teeth per span that he had counted a hundred times because counting things was what he did instead of worrying.

Tala looked at the drawing and then at Leon and then at the drawing again.

Then she said the word for the thing Leon had put into Boro Nightcall’s hands on the eleventh day, in front of the whole council, in exchange for salt and a route and a promise about the winter, with everybody watching and everybody agreeing that it was a good trade.

Leon had traded a folding saw east.

This spur was north.

Kharun took the news standing very still, which Leon had learned by now was the most alarming thing he did.

He asked one question. Tala answered it. He asked it again with a different ending and she answered it the same way, and then he said a name.

Leon had heard it twice before. Once in a council in the dark when the conversation had stopped for four seconds, and once from Boro, who had said it the way you say the name of weather.

Nobody explained it this time either.

***

They went back down the slope in the last hour of light and nobody spoke, and Leon spent the whole descent building and discarding versions of the same argument. Boro was a trader. Traders trade. A saw that goes east on the eleventh day can be four owners further on by the twenty-eighth and none of them need mean anything.

He got all the way to the second ridge on that before the other thing caught up with him.

Three of the four positions were older than the saw.

Somebody had been on that spur before Boro ever came up the river. Somebody had lain in the thorn at three and a half kilometres, more than once, weeks apart, and watched a hundred and seventy-odd people go about a bad season, and had taken away every trace of themselves each time except one stem they had cut for a better view.

Leon stopped walking.

Tala noticed and came back for him.

He stood on the second ridge in the dark with his hand still on the register and worked out the thing he had not worked out on the spur, which was that the lamp came out on the low bench three or four evenings out of seven, and had been doing so since the third day, and that it was the only source of white light on this continent, and that at three and a half kilometres on a clear night it would be visible to the naked eye from the exact patch of thorn he had just been standing in.

He had been holding it steady for Nayra two nights ago.

Somebody had almost certainly been watching him do it.