Tobin’s Long Walk

The grass at the edge of the Greywaste is the colour of a dish-cloth that has been used for a very long time and then left out in the rain. It grows in tussocks as high as your knee, and it hisses when the wind goes through it, and if you walk through it all day you begin to feel that it has got into your thoughts.

Tobin had been walking through it for five days.

It might have been six. Somewhere along the road he had stopped counting, which had never happened to him before in his life. At home in the Warden’s Hall he had once counted the rivets on the attic stove, for something to do. There were three hundred and twelve.

He did not count anything now.

He walked. When the pale sun came up ahead of him, he walked towards it, and when it had gone down behind him he went on until he could not see the road, and then he sat down wherever he was. He had no coat. He had left it lying on the floor of the lighthouse in Vaelport, and the wind off the Greywaste found that out on the first morning and never forgot it. He had a shirt, a thin grey waistcoat with two buttons missing, and his spectacles, with one lens cracked right across.

And he had the compass.

He kept it shut in his fist, with the little hinge pressing into the round scar on his palm. He did not open it, because he knew what it said inside the lid, and he could not bear to read it. Home is where the light is. There was no home. There was hardly any light. And whose fault was that?

If you have ever been hungry for days — not hungry the way you are when supper is late — you will know that after a while it stops feeling like hunger. It feels like being made of paper. Tobin felt as if the wind might pick him up and post him somewhere. He drank from ditches. Once he found a crab-apple tree, dead and grey, with three small wrinkled apples still hanging on it, and ate all three, cores and all, and they were so sour that his eyes watered.

The old Tobin would have known the proper name for that tree, and which of the grey plants by the road could be eaten, and why, and he would have explained it to anybody who stood still long enough, with diagrams. He could feel the place in his head where all that used to live. But he could not make himself go into it. It was like a room in a house where something dreadful has happened, and you walk past the door and do not open it.

The Hollows came on the fifth evening, or the sixth.

He saw them first as a thickening in the dusk, low over the grass to the north. Then the wind dropped, and the cold came rolling ahead of them, and his breath began to smoke.

Tobin stopped in the middle of the road.

He had met Hollows before: in Soot Lane, and on the Beacon stair, and out on the open Greywaste, where they hunted low and fast across the grass. And every single time he had been so frightened of them that he could not move his legs.

He waited to be frightened now.

There were seven of them, in a long loose line, with the shape of people and no faces at all. The grass went silent where they passed. They crossed the road a stone’s throw ahead of him, and the nearest one turned — slowly, the way a head turns that has heard its name — and came towards him.

Tobin did not run. He did not even step back.

The Hollow came right up to him, so close that he could have touched the grey nothing of it. Its cold went straight through his shirt and settled in his bones. It hung there in front of him, where a face should have been, and it seemed to look at him: up and down, slowly, the way Silas Grubb in Crookback Market used to look at a coat somebody had brought in to pawn, feeling the cloth and turning out the pockets and working out what it was worth.

Then it turned away.

It drifted off after the others into the grass, and the cold went with it. Not one of them had touched him.

I would like to be able to tell you that he was glad.

But Tobin had always been good at working things out. That was the trouble. Even with the room in his head shut up, some small cold part of him went on working, the way a clock goes on ticking in an empty house. And it worked this out.

Hollows drink. That is what they are for. They drink colour, and memory, and most of all they drink hope — the warm part of a person that wakes up in the morning thinking that today might be better. That is the only thing they come for.

And the Hollow had looked him over, and turned out his pockets, and found that there was nothing in him worth taking.

He sat down on the road, because his legs stopped. He sat in the dust with his arms round his knees, and the night came down over the Greywaste, black and enormous and quiet; and the strangest thing of all, the thing that frightened him more than any Hollow ever had, was that he was not afraid of it.

All his life he had been afraid of the dark. Now he sat in the middle of the biggest dark he had ever seen, with no lamp and no fire and nobody for twenty miles, and he felt nothing at all. It was as if the part of him that used to be frightened had been the same part that used to hope, and they had both gone out together, like two candles on one draught.

The voice came that night, as it had come every night since Vaelport.

It never came in the day. It waited until the dark had closed in round him; and then it was there, close behind his ear, soft and warm and reasonable, like somebody who had known him all his life.

Poor Tobin, it said. Poor boy. You’re so tired.

He did not answer. He never answered.

You’re just like your father, you know, said the voice, very kindly, the way you might tell somebody they have their mother’s eyes. He had a city, and people who trusted him, and he sold them for a crown. You had friends, and a lamp, and an old man who loved you, and you sold them for a letter. It’s the same thing, really. It runs in families. It isn’t your fault.

Tobin put his forehead down on his knees.

And they’ll never forgive you, the voice went on, so gently. Why should they? You heard her. You heard what she said on the harbour wall. And she was right, wasn’t she? You said so yourself. There was a little pause, a sorrowful one. You told the man with the crab-pot you didn’t know him. Do you remember? And the landlady. Twice. He was lying in a cell, and you said you didn’t know him. You can’t take that back. Nobody can take a thing like that back.

“I know,” said Tobin into his knees.

Then why keep walking? To a hill in an old man’s story, where it all went dark? And what will you do when you get there, Tobin? Say sorry to a heap of cinders? It laughed, very softly, not unkindly. Lie down. Lie down in the grass. Nobody’s looking for you. Nobody will come. It is easier in the grey.

That was the worst of the voice. It was not that it was cruel. It was that it was right. Everything it said, Tobin had already said to himself, and said worse.

He did not lie down. Not that night. In the iron-grey morning he got up, stiff as an old gate, and walked on east, because he could not think of a reason to stop.

The voice came the next night, and the next, the way the sea says the same thing over and over on the same shore. You’re just like your father. They’ll never forgive you. Why should they? And each night, Tobin found, it was a little harder to think of anything to say back.

On the morning of the eighth day — or the ninth — he found the pole.

The road had dipped down that morning into a shallow valley, where a stream had once run and run no longer, and a little stone bridge crossed the dry bed of it with grey weeds growing out of the cracks. On the far side the road went up again between two dead hawthorns. And between the hawthorns, lying right across the road from one rut to the other, as neatly as a bar across a gate, there was a long pole.

Tobin stopped on the bridge.

He knew it at once. He would have known it anywhere. It was as long as a tall man and a half, of dark wood gone almost black with handling, and at one end there was a brass hook, curved like the neck of a swan, for lifting the little doors of Ring-lamps. The brass was not dull. It gleamed in that grey morning as though somebody had just finished polishing it with the corner of a coat.

And round the other end, where a hand would go, there was a strip of cloth wound round and round and tied off, to make a grip. It had been blue once. It had been torn, long ago, off the hem of an old coat that had been the Lamplighters’ blue before Tobin was born. It had faded to the colour of a winter sky, and it was worn shiny and dark along one side, in the exact shape of the inside of a large, bony, old man’s hand.

It was Ash’s pole. It was the right-hand one: the one he hung the lamp on.

Tobin walked off the bridge and up the slope and stood over it. He did not touch it.

It could not be here. That was the first thing his mind said, very clearly, the way it used to say actually. He knew how it had been. He had heard it on the harbour wall in Vaelport, in the dark, in Mira’s sobbing and in every word Wren had flung at him: Ash at the forge-door, holding it, with the dark coming. The tunnel coming down, the whole roof of the mine, and the door under it, and the poles under it — Ash never let those poles out of his hands — and everything else under it. A hundred miles behind him to the west.

And here it was, lying across the road in the Greywaste. Dry. Whole. Not a scratch on it. Not a speck of dust on the brass.

Tobin looked round. The valley was empty; there was not even a bird. In the dust between the ruts there were no footprints at all, except his own, coming up from the bridge and stopping where he stood.

He tried to explain it.

He went into the shut-up room in his head, for the first time in days, and pulled open drawers. Somebody had dug it out. But nobody could have; the whole mine had fallen. Somebody had carried it here. But who, and why lay it across the road like a thing put out for somebody to find? It was another pole, then. But it was not. He knew that faded blue, and the shiny place where the thumb went. He had watched it every day for months, swinging along in front of him, tock and tock, up a mountain, along a beach, across a white square in Vaelport with everybody laughing.

There was no explanation. He had looked in every drawer, and there was not one.

And Tobin Harrowgate, who had explained the Orrery of the Ring to anyone who would listen and plenty who would not, who had explained flame-pipes and clockwork locks and the reason shadows are bigger when your hand is near the light, sat down in the road beside Ash’s pole and put his face in his scarred hands and cried.

He had not cried in Vaelport, or on the long road east. He had thought that perhaps the part of a person that cries had been burned out of him along with everything else. It had not. It had only been waiting. It came up out of him in great sobs that hurt his chest, so that his cracked spectacles fogged and he had to take them off.

He cried for Ash. He cried for the tea, which had been terrible, and the list of hms he had once tried to make, and got to eleven, and never finished. He cried for the dry stream-bed on the Greywaste, where an old man had stepped in front of him and taken the blow that was meant for him and said afterwards that being afraid was not the same thing as being a coward. He cried for a harbour wall in Vaelport, and a man mending a crab-pot, and his own voice saying, quite clearly, I don’t know him. And he cried, though he did not understand why, because the pole was lying there whole, with its hook shining, when everything else in the world was broken.

I will not tell you any more about it. It was his, and it went on for a long time. But I will tell you that the valley was very quiet while it did, as if it were listening; and that when it was over, the brass hook of the pole was lying just beside his hand, the only bright thing in that whole grey place.

He did not pick it up. He did not think it was his to pick up.

He sat there all that day. He meant to get up and go on, and somehow he did not. The pale sun went over. Once, far off, a long grey shape drifted along a ridge, and he watched it without interest until it was gone.

When the dusk came, he lay down.

He lay on his back in the grey grass at the side of the road, with the pole beside him and the compass in his fist on his chest. The grass closed round him. It was softer than anything had been for days.

There, said the voice. It sounded pleased, and tender, and very close. There. That’s better, isn’t it? You’ve walked so far. You don’t have to walk any more.

“No,” said Tobin.

Close your eyes. Nobody will come. Nobody is looking for you, Tobin. Let go of that silly compass. Let it all go. It is so much easier in the grey.

His fingers loosened round the compass. His eyes closed. The cold was coming up out of the ground into his back, and it did not feel cold any more; it felt like a heavy quilt being drawn up over him. He thought, a long way off, that this was what Mrs Fenn must have felt, sitting down on her doorstep in Soot Lane. It was not so bad. It was only like being very tired, and being allowed to stop.

Something landed on his chest.

It landed hard, with four sharp feet, so that all the breath went out of him in a whoof. Tobin opened his eyes. A pair of yellow eyes were glaring down into his own from three inches away, and two grey ears were laid flat with fury.

“Cinder,” he said. His voice was a croak.

Cinder said nothing. Cinder never said anything. She simply turned round once on his chest, the way a dog turns before it lies down, and lay down on it — heavily, deliberately, the whole of her, with her chin on his collarbone and her tail across his face.

“Go away,” said Tobin. “Go to Wren.” He tried to push her off, but his arms felt full of sand. “Just let me sleep.”

Cinder sneezed in his face.

It was a large, cross, deliberate sneeze, and a shower of sparks came out of it — orange and gold, the brightest thing Tobin had seen since Vaelport — and they stung his nose and made him yelp.

“Ow — Cinder—“

He shut his eyes again, and turned his head away. Cinder leaned down and nipped his ear.

It was not a hard nip. But it was a sharp one, and it was exactly on the soft part at the bottom, and it was so like being told off by Ash — so exactly like a dry old voice saying Hm. None of that, lad — that Tobin’s eyes flew open of their own accord.

“All right,” he said. “All right.”

He could not sit up; she was sitting on him. And every time his eyes began to close she shifted her weight, or put a cold nose in his ear, or sneezed again, smaller, just enough to sting. The voice tried to speak to him once more — lie still, poor boy, she’s only a fox, she doesn’t understand — and Cinder’s ears went up, and she growled. It was a low growl, deep in her chest, the growl she used to save for Hollows; and she was not growling at Tobin. She was growling at the dark just behind his ear, where the voice was.

The voice stopped.

It did not go away, quite. But it stopped.

And it was then, lying there with a fox on his chest in the black grass, that Tobin noticed the end of Cinder’s tail, which was lying across his chin. The spark was there. On the harbour wall at Vaelport it had been the faintest pin-prick, and he had thought it was going out, the way everything was going out. It was not a pin-prick now. It was small still, as small as a coal on a hearth; but it was steady, and orange, and alive, and when he breathed out it glowed a little brighter, and when he breathed in it seemed to lean towards him.

He did not know what it meant. But some small part of him — not the clock-part, that worked things out, but another part, further in, that he had thought was gone — sat up and took notice.

At last, when the sky in the east had gone the colour of old pewter, Cinder got off him. She shook herself, and went and stood beside Ash’s pole. Then she put her nose under the end of it — under the faded blue grip — and pushed, so that it rolled, a quarter-turn, across the dust towards his hand.

Tobin sat up.

He looked at the pole for a long time. Then, slowly, as if it might burn him, he put out his hand and took hold of the grip.

It did not burn him. It was warmer than he expected, as if somebody had been holding it only a moment before. His scarred palm closed round the faded cloth, and found the shiny place, and fitted into it — not well, because Ash’s hand had been much bigger than his, and the shape was worn for long old fingers. But it fitted well enough.

He stood up, leaning on it. His legs shook, and he waited until they stopped. Then he put the compass in his waistcoat pocket, still shut, and turned his face to the east, where the sky was greying up over a low dark line of hills that looked, in that light, almost as if they had been burned.

He walked. Tock, went the pole on the road. Step. Tock.

Cinder trotted ahead of him, with her tail held high, and did not look back to see whether he was following. She did not need to. She knew the sound.