Three Roads Inland

“You’d have said hm,” said Wren. “Wouldn’t you.”

The lamp did not answer. It lay inside her coat, against her ribs, where it had lain all morning, small and low and steady; and if you had put your hand flat on the outside of her coat, the way she kept doing, you would have felt it there like a cat that has gone to sleep on you and does not mean to get up.

“You’d have said hm,” Wren told it, “and then you’d have said mind the step, and then you’d have walked off up this hill on your two poles as if it was nothing, and I’d have had to wait for you at the top. That’s what you’d have done.”

The hill went on. It was the third hill since breakfast, though there had not been any breakfast, and it was very like the other two: a long grey slope of tussocky grass, with a cart-track worn into it and a broken wall running alongside, and at the top, when you got there, nothing but the next hill. Behind her, if she had turned round, she would have seen the sea for the last time — a flat dull sheet the colour of a knife, with Vaelport on its edge like a heap of white crockery. She did not turn round.

She had been walking since the mud-flats, three days ago now, or perhaps four. The coast road had gone east along the cliffs, and then grown tired of the cliffs and turned inland, and Wren had gone with it, because the lamp leaned that way. She had slept one night in a cow-shed with no cow in it, and the next under a haystack that turned out to be mostly rat. She had eaten one raw turnip.

She was hungry. That was the odd thing. For three whole days in Vaelport, after the mine, she had not been hungry at all, and it had frightened her more than she let on; because Wren Ashby had been hungry every day of her life since she was four, and a Wren who was not hungry did not feel like anybody she knew. But somewhere on the second morning, chewing the turnip, her stomach had woken up and growled at her like a dog behind a gate. And she had stood in the road with the turnip in her hand and felt something that was very nearly glad.

“Don’t you go thinking that’s on account of you,” she told the lamp. “That’s just turnip.”

She had Tobin’s scarf round her neck. It went twice round her and still had ends left over, and it smelt of ink and machine-oil, which was a smell she did not want to think about. Every so often she put her hand up to pull it off and throw it in a ditch. Every so often her hand came down again without doing it. It was cold, that was all. You did not throw away a perfectly good scarf in the cold just because of whose it was.

The singing-stone sat in her pocket, a smooth round weight against her leg. It had not hummed once since the harbour.

And all the way, up one grey hill and down the next, she talked.

She had never been a talker. In Soot Lane the girl who talked was the girl who got caught. But the hills were very wide and very quiet, and the silence pressed on her ears. So she talked to the lamp. And because the lamp was small and warm and steady, and had once been carried by somebody who was steady in exactly the same way, she found that she talked to it as if it were him.

“This road’s rubbish,” she said. “You’d have known a better one. You always knew a better one, and you never said till we’d gone the long way round.”

“You’d have made tea by now. Out of some leaf you found in a hedge. And it’d be awful, and you’d drink it anyway, and say it was bracing.”

She stopped in the road.

“I’d drink it,” she said. Her voice had gone small and strange. “If you made some. I’d drink the whole pot. I wouldn’t even say anything.”

The grey grass hissed in the wind. Far off, a crow said something rude and flew away.

Wren wiped her nose on the end of Tobin’s scarf, and was furious with herself for doing it, and walked on.

That same afternoon, on another road a good deal further north, Mira was carrying a baby.

It was not her baby. It belonged to a thin young woman called Jessamy, who had been walking since before dawn with the baby on one hip and a bundle on the other and a small boy hanging on the back of her skirt, and who had sat down at the edge of the road an hour ago, quite suddenly, as if her legs had decided it for her. Mira had stopped beside her. And then Mira had held out her arms without saying anything, the way you hold out your hands for a bowl, and after a moment Jessamy had given her the baby.

It was heavier than Mira had expected. It was warm, and damp in places, and it smelt of milk and wool, and it had gone to sleep almost at once with its fist wound tight in one of her braids. Every time she took a step, the beads at the end of the braid clicked softly against each other, and the baby’s fingers tightened, and its mouth moved.

“It likes the beads,” said Mira, delighted.

“It likes anything that makes a noise,” said Jessamy wearily. “Its name’s Robin. When it’s awake it’s the loudest thing in Vaelport.”

“Not any more,” said Mira. “Vaelport is very quiet now.”

Nobody answered that. There was not much to say.

There were twenty-three of them on the road — she had counted them by their footsteps the first night, with her eyes shut, and then again with her eyes open, to be sure. They had come out of Vaelport in ones and twos after the lights went out, and found each other the way drops of rain find each other on a window: an old cooper called Abner, with a handcart and a hip that clicked louder than Mira did; two sisters who still wore their good gloves, though the gloves were filthy now; a family with a goat; and more besides, all with the same pale, puzzled faces, like people who have been asleep a long time and are not sure yet whether they are awake.

They were going inland, to cousins, or to a sister in some Ring-town, or simply away, because Vaelport had been their home for a hundred years and it had turned out to be eating them.

Mira had fallen in with them on the first evening, and had not fallen out again. She had meant to walk alone. But the old cooper’s handcart had got its wheel stuck in a rut, and she had stopped to help; and then the glove-sisters could not get their fire to light, and she had shown them Mr Pellow’s way, with the tow and the gentle breathing; and then it was dark, and somebody had to keep the fire going.

She was not afraid of the dark. That was what they could not get over. When the hills turned to black shapes against a grey sky, the others huddled round their poor fire and jumped at every sound. Mira simply shut her eyes, and clicked her tongue, and listened.

“That is only a sheep,” she would say. “It is chewing. Sheep are very rude eaters.” Or: “No, nothing is following us. I would hear it.”

They had begun, she noticed, to sit closer to her than to the fire.

She had Mrs Pellow’s currant bread in the bundle on her back. On the first night she had broken off a piece for each of the children, and on the second a piece for each of the grown-ups. Now the half-loaf was a quarter, and she had not eaten any of it herself. She thought she probably ought to feel noble. Mostly she felt hungry.

“You’re a strange one,” said old Abner that evening, as she sat down beside him with Robin asleep against her shoulder. He said it kindly. “Where are you bound, then? A girl your age.”

“East,” said Mira. “To a hill.”

“What hill?”

Mira found that she did not want to say the name out loud. It was the darkest part of the story — the part where the tea-cosy went over the lamp. Wren had told it to her once in the Deeps, very fast and not looking at her, and Mira had known even then that Wren was frightened of it.

“Only a hill,” she said.

Abner nodded slowly. Then he said, in a lower voice, “You want to watch yourself, going east. Farms gone sour out there. My brother wrote once that the crops were coming up grey, and the folk with them. He never wrote again.” He poked the fire. “And there’s lights on the roads at night. Little shuttered lights, going about the fields where there’s no house. Folk say there’s people out there who’ll hide you, if you’re running, and ask nothing for it.” He shook his head. “Cranks, the Guild calls them. Nobody gives anything for nothing.”

Mira thought of a dark boat on a misty river, and a voice like mist on water, and a pair of warm thumbs laid on her eyes.

“Some people do,” she said.

I must tell you now about the fox, because none of the three of them ever knew the whole of it until afterwards.

Cinder had left the harbour wall at Vaelport with her nose to the ground and her mind made up. The trouble was that she had made it up three ways at once. Three roads went east, and on each of them was somebody she would not let go; and a fox, however clever, has only four legs and one nose and cannot be on three roads at a time.

So she did not try to be. She ran between them.

She ran across country, as foxes do, over the high bare backs of the hills where no road went; and every so often she came down onto one of the roads, and looked, and made sure, and went away again before anybody could catch her.

Wren saw her on the first evening.

She was sitting under the broken wall with her knees drawn up, trying not to think about supper, when she felt somebody looking at her. She turned her head. On the top of the wall, not ten feet away, sat a small grey fox with her tail curled round her feet, watching her with bright eyes.

“Cinder,” said Wren. She did not shout it. She was afraid to.

Cinder looked at her a long moment. Then she sneezed — one small, very nearly orange spark — and dropped down on the far side of the wall, and was gone.

Wren sat very still. The spark had landed on the coping-stone, and she watched it until it went out.

She came for me, she thought. Out of all of them. She came all this way. And she put her face down on her knees for a while, and when she lifted it again she felt stronger than she had for days.

Mira saw her on the third night, when old Abner had gone to sleep.

She was minding the fire, with the others asleep round her like puppies, when she heard a soft small sound that was not a sheep. She shut her eyes and clicked. There was something low and light on the far side of the fire, warm in a very particular, very familiar way. When she opened her eyes again, there was Cinder, sitting on the old cooper’s handcart, delicately eating the last of the currant bread out of Mira’s bundle.

“Oh, you thief,” said Mira, under her breath, and began to laugh, and could not stop. Cinder finished the bread, licked her lips, looked at Mira as if to say that she had been waiting all evening for somebody to offer, and jumped down into the dark.

She came to find me, thought Mira, with her hand pressed over her mouth so as not to wake the others. Of course she did. She knew I would be worried. And she did not mind about the bread at all.

And Tobin saw her on the fourth morning.

Tobin had not been on a road, exactly. He had been on one at first. He had walked out of Vaelport by the coast road with his burned hands held in front of him, and he had gone wherever it went; but on the second day it had forked, and he had stood at the fork for a long time without being able to choose, and in the end he had simply gone on walking straight ahead across the grass, because choosing was a thing that belonged to people who had a right to want anything, and he did not.

So he walked. That was all he did.

He had no coat. He had left it on the floor of the lighthouse at Vaelport, and he did not want it back. He had no food, and no money, and no plan. In the night the cold came up out of the ground and into his bones, and he lay in ditches with his knees pulled up to his chest and shook until the grey morning came. He did not mind very much. He thought, in a dull distant way, that whatever happened to him from now on would be what ought to happen, and that this was a sort of comfort, because it meant there was nothing he needed to decide.

Once a woman at a farm gate called out to ask if he wanted a bite of something. He said, “No, thank you,” very politely, and kept walking.

Once he caught himself thinking, Technically speaking, a person can go three weeks without food, provided he has water— and he stopped, because it was the kind of thing he used to think, and he was not that person any more.

He had the compass in his fist. He did not open it. Inside the lid were five words he could not bear to read; so he kept it shut, and held on to it the way you hold the rail of a ship in a storm, and walked east because that was where it had pointed the last time he looked.

A beggar on a dock had said his name, and said Go to the Hill; and Tobin had got up and gone. If anybody had asked him what he expected to find there, he could not have said. He was not sure there was anything he was allowed to expect.

On the fourth morning he woke in a hollow under a thorn bush with frost on his sleeves, and found a fox watching him.

She was sitting on the far side of a little frozen ditch, perhaps two yards off, very upright, with her tail round her feet. Her coat was grey with dust. Her tail-spark was so small that he would not have seen it at all if the morning had been any lighter.

Tobin did not move. He did not say her name. He thought that if he said it she would go.

They looked at each other across the ditch for a long time.

“You shouldn’t be here,” said Tobin at last. His voice came out cracked; he had not used it since the woman at the gate. “Go back. Go and find Wren. She needs you more than — she’s on her own. She hasn’t got anybody.” He swallowed. “And it was his, you know. You were his. You shouldn’t — you of all people shouldn’t come anywhere near me.”

Cinder put her head on one side.

“Go on,” said Tobin. “Please.”

And Cinder, after a moment, got up, and turned round, and trotted away over the frosty grass towards the south; and Tobin watched her go until she was a grey speck, and then not even that.

He lay back under the thorn bush and looked at the sky. He did not understand it. Of all of them — Wren, who had carried the lamp, and Mira, who had never done anything wrong in her life — the fox had come to him, as if she had come a long way on purpose.

He did not know what to do with that. But when he got up, a little while later, and went on walking, he found that he was walking a little faster than before; and he did not notice, because he was not looking, that his fist round the compass had loosened just enough to let the warmth of it into his palm.

Late on the fourth afternoon Wren came to the top of the last hill.

She did not know it was the last. She had stopped talking to the lamp at about noon, because the last thing she had said was Why did you have to go and do it?, and after that there did not seem to be anything else worth saying.

She climbed. And at the top, where she had expected one more grey hill, there was only a great width of air, and the land falling away below her in long dun slopes towards a flat country that went on until it disappeared into a brownish haze.

It was farmland. Even Wren, who had been born on cobbles, could see that. There were hedges cutting it into squares, and here and there a roof with no smoke above it; and in the squares there were crops — or there had been, once. They were the colour of dust. They lay over in long tired waves, as if something heavy had been laid on them and never taken off.

And standing in the fields, here and there, far off and very still, there were figures.

Scarecrows, she thought. They had scarecrows in the market-gardens outside Emberwick’s wall: old coats on a cross of sticks, with a turnip for a head. Rot. Scarecrows. Only she had never seen a scarecrow stand quite like that — not stuck up stiff and straight on a pole, but standing, the way a person stands when they have stopped in the middle of something and forgotten what it was.

Wren did not like it. She did not like it at all. The back of her neck had gone cold, the way it used to go cold on a roof when a slate shifted under her foot.

“Well, I’m not going down there,” she said to the lamp.

And the lamp moved.

She felt it before she understood it. Inside her coat, against her ribs, the little brass weight that had lain so still for so many days gave a kind of tug — the way a dog on a lead tugs when it has smelt something on the wind. She put her hand flat on her coat, startled. She could feel it there, through the cloth. It was not just warm. It was leaning. It was leaning so hard, out and away from her, that her coat was pulled crooked over her ribs, as if something on the far side of that grey flat country had called it by name, and it had heard.

It was leaning east. Straight east. Down the hill, and across the dead fields, and past the standing figures, towards the brown haze at the end of the world.

Wren stood on the top of the hill with her hand pressed over it, and her heart going very fast, and the wind tugging at the long ends of Tobin’s scarf.

“All right,” she whispered. “All right. I heard you. You don’t have to pull.”

But it did not stop pulling. And after a while, because there was nothing else to be done and nobody else to do it, Wren took a deep breath, and started down.