Grandex Walks the Eastern Downs

Major Raven was on a ridge.

It was not the ridge above the cathedral. It was a smaller, longer ridge twelve miles south of the cathedral, on the western shoulder of the downs that S14's fire had burned, and Major Raven had been there for two days. He had been there because he had been, in the second week after the cathedral, working a small private survey of the country — the survey he had, since S5, been conducting in the careful patient way a Major surveys a country he has begun to suspect is about to do something the kingdom has not been told about. He had not, in the two days, found anything in particular. He had been watching the long quiet country of the downs with the small held attention of a soldier who had been a Major long enough to know that when one survey did not yield, the work was to keep surveying until it did.

On the night the keeper rode east from Vextar, Raven had been on the ridge for the third time.

He had a small fire of his own. He had a small folding camp-chair. He had two horses tied at the lee of the ridge — one was his own gelding, the other belonged to the boy who was his runner — and he had, in his coat, the small folded copy of the Council of Five's final disposition order, which had not been the order he had wanted to read.

The boy was sixteen. He had been with Raven since S17, since the morning after the wall at Darklume, and he had spent the first three months in Raven's column being the chatty, anxious, fast-talking kind of boy who could not, in any of his prior trades, hold his place in a room without filling it. The cathedral had quieted him. He had been at the gate of the cathedral on the night of the spending. He had not, after that night, been chatty.

He was, on this evening, awake at the small fire. He had been asked, by Raven, to keep the second watch.

"Sir."

Raven did not turn from the country south-east.

The boy lay down at the gelding's lee. He did not, in the lying, immediately sleep. He had, in the months since the cathedral, learned the small careful trick of lying down without sleeping that Raven had been doing for thirty years. He lay. He did not sleep. He was, in the small careful unhurried way of his post, with the Major.

Raven did not turn.

The boy, after the count, slept.

Raven was sitting in the small folding chair at the small fire on the long ridge, with the boy who was his runner asleep beside the gelding, and he was looking at the country south-east of his position, where the country dropped off toward the long burned slope of S14.

A figure came over the slope.

It came over at the angle of a man who had been walking, who was walking, who would continue walking past the slope as if the slope had not, in fact, registered him. It came over at the slow patient pace of a being whose every step took the kind of measured weight that did not, by any of the small private rules of mortal walking, leave the surface of the country it was on quite the way it had been before the step landed. The figure was tall. The figure was not, in the dark, glowing. The figure was, in the dark, visible — the way an idea is visible in a room, by some quality of it that does not require the eye's adjustment.

Raven did not, at first, move.

He had been on the ridge long enough that his body had cooled to the temperature of the country around him, and his body, at the figure's arrival on the slope, was not in any hurry to warm again. He sat in the chair with his hands on his knees and he watched the figure walk.

The figure came up the slope at the pace it had come over.

It did not, in the coming up, turn. It did not, in the coming up, raise its head. It did not, in the coming up, register Raven on the ridge — which the chronicler will set down with care, because the figure also did not, in the coming up, fail to register him. The figure was not blind to the ridge. The figure was simply not, on this evening, attending to the small private fact that the ridge had a Major on it.

The grass under the figure's feet did the small unmistakable thing the chronicler will, after this account, name as the signature of the figure's walking on Celesterra.

It burned.

It did not burn the way grass burns in fire. It burned in a perfect circle directly under the figure's foot at the moment the foot landed — a small clean circle, the diameter of the foot, that for the half-instant of the foot's weight was not grass but ash — and then, in the half-instant after the foot lifted, the circle of ash was not ash but grass, and the grass that came back was not the burned grass of S14 that had, in the autumn, only half-recovered. It was new grass. It was the small bright green of a thing that had been grown in the moment of being grown, and the figure's next foot was already past it, on a different patch of the ridge, where the same circle was happening.

Raven, in the chair, did not breathe.

He had been a Major for many years. He had read patterns. He had read columns. He had read tents that had been opened by men who had not opened them. He had not, in any of his training, been given the apparatus to read what he was now looking at. The apparatus was not the kind of apparatus a Major was given. The apparatus was the kind a chronicler kept for the chapters at altitude, and Raven, on the ridge in this hour, was not at altitude.

He was on a ridge.

He slid out of the chair.

He did not, in the sliding, make any sound. He had been a soldier long enough that his sliding out of a chair was, by reflex, silent. He set his knees on the ground at the small fire's side. He bent his head. He did not, in the bending, ask himself why he was bending. The bending was — and he would later, in the careful private letter he wrote to Aelinna in the third week of the new year, explain it without explaining it — what his body had done.

He knelt.

The figure walked past the ridge at twenty paces.

It did not, in the passing, turn its head. It did not, in the passing, look at him. The grass under its feet burned and grew and burned and grew, and the small clean circles moved at the steady pace of a being whose business that night was a different ridge than the one Raven had been surveying for two days. The figure passed. The passing took, by Raven's later careful reconstruction, one minute and twelve seconds; the figure had been walking at four miles an hour, and the line of the ridge had been a hundred and twenty paces of clear sight from south to north.

In one minute and twelve seconds, Raven did not look up.

He looked at the small fire in front of him. He looked at the ground in front of him. He looked at the small folded copy of the Council's order in his coat. He did not look at the figure. He had, in the half-second after his knees had hit the ground, understood — without having been told — that the looking was not, in this hour, a thing he was free to do. It was not that he was forbidden. The figure had not forbidden him anything; the figure had not, by any visible motion, registered him. It was that the looking, for a Major of Krypton, was not the appropriate use of a Major of Krypton's eyes at the moment a being of a different order walked past his ridge.

He kept his eyes on the fire.

The figure passed.

He did not, after the figure had passed, immediately rise. He stayed at the fire's side for some minutes, with the small held weight of his hands on his knees and the small careful unhurried adjustment of his body to the country around him. He did not, in those minutes, turn to see whether the figure had left a track on the long slope to the north of his ridge. He had been told, by his body, what tracks the figure had left. He did not need to see them.

He rose.

He rose, eventually, with the small clean rolling motion of an old soldier who had spent two days on a ridge and had, in the final hour of the second day, been told a thing by his country he had not, in any of the prior thirty-one years, been told by it.

He looked, at last, north.

The figure was small in the distance.

The figure was walking, at the steady pace it had been walking on the slope, toward the deeper country east of the cathedral. It did not, in the distance, look like a man. It did not, in the distance, look like a being of the order Raven had now decided it was. It looked like a small bright moving point on the country.

Behind the figure, the long line of grass it had walked across was grown.

The line was visible from the ridge. It was a long thin line of new bright green, in the dark autumn of the long burned country, and it ran from the slope at which the figure had come over the burned country up onto the ridge and past the ridge and along the country to the north. The line was the figure's signature on the country. It would, by the chronicler's later record, take seventeen years to fade.

Raven stood at his fire.

He looked at the line.

He looked, after the line, at the boy who was his runner — who had, at some point during the figure's passing, woken — and the boy was sitting up in the gelding's lee, with his back against the gelding's flank, and the boy's eyes were open and the boy was not, on his face, registering any of the things a runner of Raven's column had been trained to register. The boy was, on his face, quiet.

Raven walked to the boy.

He sat down beside him.

He did not, on the ridge, give him an order.

After a long count, the boy said — quietly, in the small soft voice he had been using since the cathedral:

The boy closed his eyes.

Raven looked, after the question, at the long thin line of new grass on the slope. He did not, on the looking, immediately answer. He had been in his post twenty-one years. He had not, in any of them, been asked the question the boy had asked. He answered, in the small dry voice of a Major who had decided that the answer he gave on this ridge would be the answer he would write into the letter he would write to the heir in the third week of the new year.

The boy did not sleep. The Major did not sleep either. The two of them, in the dark, with the small fire behind them and the line of new grass cooling on the country to the north and the Major's gelding standing patient in the small lee, sat for the rest of the night without speaking. Raven did not, that night, write the reply to the Council's disposition order. He did not, that night, send a runner to Aelinna. He did not, that night, send anything anywhere.

He sat at the boy's side.

He had been, by the small private courtroom of his own discipline, passed.

He had been a Major of Krypton long enough to know, by morning, what to do with the passing.

But the night was not yet morning.

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A mortal who had built his career on calling patterns had, that night, been passed by the pattern itself.