Burned Bloodline

CHAPTER THREE: Seven Gates

One bag, the man had said, and I want to tell you that I spent that night lying awake with grief and terror, but what I actually did was spend it arguing with a bag.

It was a good bag. I'd had it nine years. It held, if you were sensible about it, rather more than one bag ought to: two shifts, the brown thing, stockings, a comb with four teeth missing, soap, a needle-case, and a stone I have carried since I was eleven years old and about which I will say nothing.

It did not hold a knife.

I put one in twice. Odd's second paring knife, the one with the blade worn to a whisper, which is a knife that will open a boil or a letter and nothing else in this world. Both times I took it out again, because I could hear Ivo's voice saying bring one bag in the tone of a man who has watched four hundred years of people bring one bag, and because whatever else was going to happen to me on those terraces, it was not going to begin with a Torr wolf holding up a paring knife and asking what I meant to do with it.

I put in the tin instead.

It was empty. I want to be clear that I knew it was empty; I had scraped it with my thumbnail twice that evening and got nothing but a grey line under the nail. But it had held greyroot for nine years and the inside of it was stained the colour of a storm, and I could not make myself leave it on the shelf, and at about the fourth hour of the morning I stopped pretending I was going to.

Odd came down at dawn in his coat, which he had not worn indoors in the whole time I'd known him.

"Right," he said.

"Right."

He put a roll of grey cloth on the table and pushed it at me with two fingers, the way you push something you don't want to be seen giving.

I knew the weight of it before I touched it. Twelve years of his hands and fifty of his father's: the splints, the linen, the little iron hook, the pincers, the four-inch blade for cutting linen and nothing else, which is a blade, which is a blade, and which no wolf alive would look at twice in the hands of a bone-setter.

"That's your working roll," I said. "That's the shop's roll."

"I've another."

"You have not."

"I have most of another," said Odd, "and I'll have the whole of one by winter, and if you say one more word about it I shall have a coughing fit on purpose and you'll feel dreadful."

So I didn't say one more word about it.

At the door he took my chin in his hand — he had never touched my face before, not once, not in nine years — and turned it up to the grey light and looked at my teeth, and let go.

"Keep your mouth shut," he said.

Which was the only question he had ever asked me, given back the other way round.

There were thirteen of us at the Bell House, which everybody noticed and nobody said.

We stood in the yard in the cold with our bags and were counted by Ivo, twice, because the first count came out at thirteen and Ivo did not believe it.

I made myself look at the others, because I had spent nine years making sure I did not know my neighbours' names and I could feel that habit coming with me up the hill like a dog I hadn't fed.

There was a girl about sixteen called Bel, small and pointed, who had clearly been crying and had clearly decided that the crying was over now and had put her face away somewhere. There was a very large young man called Ruck who kept apologising to people for the size of his bag. There was a woman of fifty in a good shawl, Sabe, who had volunteered — you can volunteer, they let you, it counts against the twelve — and who was in tremendously high spirits about the coin, and who talked without pause for the first mile and was, I came to understand later, more frightened than any of us.

And there was me, at the back, with my teeth the colour of a rain-cloud and an empty tin in my bag.

The wagon took the luggage. We walked. That's also the Treaty: the Tithe walks up under its own legs, so that everyone on the terraces can see it coming, and so that everyone doing the walking has four hours to think about it.

Vaur is built on the inside of a river bend in seven steps, like something left half-finished by a giant with a trowel. The Low Quarter is the mud at the bottom. Then the tanneries and the barge yards, then the market terrace, then the two residential terraces where the merchants live and pretend the terrace above doesn't exist, then the pack terraces, then Torr Hall on the shoulder of the hill with the whole city arranged beneath it like something on a plate.

Between each step there is a gate.

I started counting them at the second one. I have counted exits in every room I have entered since I was thirteen years old; it is not a decision, it is a thing my body does, like flinching at a raised hand. The trouble was that the number went the wrong way. Two gates behind me. Then three. Then four, and the fourth had a wolf on either side of it, and by the fifth I had understood something about the architecture of Vaur that I had lived beneath for nine years without once looking up at properly.

Every gate opens downhill.

They're not built to keep the Low Quarter out. Four thousand of us and forty of them; we could have come up that hill on any night of any year and buried them. They're built to slow something coming down. Four hundred years ago somebody stood on that shoulder of hill and thought: one day these people will find out, and they will come up, and I want seven gates between me and it.

It should have been a comfort. It wasn't, particularly. But I noted it, and I have never stopped noting it, and it is the reason any of us are alive now.

The wind came down off the north about halfway up.

I had my head down and my hand on the strap and I walked straight into it, and it went through the brown wool and through the shift and through everything under the shift, and it smelled of wet stone and cold pine and the particular green rot of a marsh in autumn, and it smelled of home, and I stopped dead in the middle of the road with my mouth open like a fool.

That wind comes three days down the valley. It comes over the ford and the marsh and the bend, and before any of that, it comes over a place with nothing standing in it.

Sabe walked into the back of me and apologised for a while.

"Do you know what they do at the top?" said Bel.

We were on the fifth terrace by then. She'd worked her way back down the line to me over about an hour, in stages, the way a cat crosses a room.

"Ledger," I said. "Names, ages, trades."

"That's Ivo's bit. That's downstairs." She had a way of talking out of the side of her mouth that I liked immediately and resented. "My aunt did the Tithe. Thirty-two, she went up. She said before you go in the house they take you through the last gate one at a time and they scent you."

The road went on going up. I went on walking on it. That is, on reflection, the single most impressive thing I have ever done.

"Scent you," I said.

"For the book. Everybody's got a line, my aunt says — like a family smell, only they can read it. They write it down beside your name so if you run off they know what they're smelling for." Bel shrugged. "Or if you steal. Mostly if you steal, my aunt says."

"How long does it take?"

"Not long. Aunt said it's over in a breath and the worst part's how close they get." She glanced sideways. "You've gone a funny colour."

"It's the hill."

"It's not much of a hill."

"It's a hill to me. I've been three doors down from a flat street for nine years and it's ruined me for hills."

Bel laughed. I found that my hands had gone entirely numb, and that the strap of the bag was cutting a groove into my shoulder, and that I could not feel it at all.

Everybody's got a line.

Nine years. Nine years of a bitter root and a false name and a beetle on a cracked stone, and it was going to end at a gate, in a breath, because of a clerical procedure four hundred years old that I had never once heard of — because the only people who could have told me about it were people who had been up this hill, and I had spent nine years making very sure that I did not know my neighbours.

The seventh gate is not a gate. It is a hole in a wall eleven feet thick with an iron grille above it, and you go through it in single file with your bag held against your chest, because you cannot get through it with your bag on your back. That is not an accident either.

There was a table on the other side and a lamp on the table and the ledger open on the lamp side, and Ivo behind it with his pen already wet.

And beside him, out of the wind, in a very good coat, stood the woman with the grey streak in her hair.

They went through in the order they had been written. Sabe first, chattering — and I watched the woman take her by the jaw, gently, two fingers, the way you check a horse's teeth, and tilt her head, and breathe in once at the side of her throat, and let go, and say a word to Ivo, and Ivo wrote it down. It took, as Bel had promised, no time at all.

Ruck. Bel. A boy from the barge yards. A man who wept and was not mocked for it.

Eleven. Twelve.

I had my hand in the bag by then. I had had it in there since the sixth gate, and my fingers had found the tin and worked the lid off inside the canvas, and I was running my thumb around the inside seam and finding what nine years of greyroot leaves behind in a tin — which is a grey dust, which is nothing, which is not enough, and which was all there was in the world.

I put my thumb in my mouth.

It tasted like licking a floorboard that had once, some years ago, been in a room with a bitter thing.

"Thirteen," said Ivo. He did not read the line out. And I understood, from the particular way in which he did not read it out, that he had been told not to.

The woman in the good coat turned round.

"Sena of no house," she said warmly, and took my jaw in two fingers, and tilted my face up into the lamplight, and breathed in.