Chapter TwoTwelve Coming Up

The first woman had not finished her second bowl when the next two came up the south path.

Toll saw them from the window — a man and a woman, walking together but not close, the way people walked when they had met on the road and fallen into the same pace without deciding to. They were better dressed for the col than the first woman had been. The man carried a staff and used it. They came up the last switchback at the steady, head-down rhythm of people who had been told the climb was almost over and did not yet believe it.

He set the kettle back on its hook, where it swung a moment and steadied, the iron of it warm through the cloth he used to lift it, and went to the door before they knocked.

The first woman was watching him. She had her hands round the second bowl and her colour had come back, and she had the slightly stunned, settling look of someone who had stopped before they were ready to and found that stopping was allowed. She did not get up. He had not expected her to.

“More coming,” he said, to no one in particular, and opened the door.

He gave the two of them water first. He had learned this in his first year, not from Marga and not from being told but from watching: travellers arrived at the col more thirsty than they knew, the dry air pulling the water out of them on the climb without their feeling it go. So the first thing was a cup of water, before the fire and before the food, and most of them drank it down before they thought to be grateful, which was the proof that they had needed it.

The man drank his and held the cup out for more without speaking. The woman sipped hers and looked round the kitchen, taking it in — the hearth, the herbs in the rafters, the long table, the first woman in her place by the fire with her bowl. Then she looked at Toll.

“Is there a charge?” she said.

“No,” he said.

She kept looking at him, as if the answer needed more to it. He went to the bench and got two more bowls.

Marga, from her corner, said nothing. She had her mending in her lap. But Toll knew the shape of her attention by now — five years of it — and he could feel her watching him work, the particular quality of it this morning, which was not the watching of the empty weeks. Something in her had come up a little, the way his own had, at the change in the path.

He ladled stock into the two bowls and added bread, and they ate. The man ate fast and then slowed, the way the hungry did when the edge came off. The woman ate the bread first, breaking it small, and Toll saw her notice the bread — saw the small pause people made on the first mouthful, the bread being darker and denser than the lowland bread they knew, and better, though they could not always have said why. She did not say anything about it. She ate the rest more slowly.

He went back to the dough.

He had four loaves working from the morning and he had decided, watching the second pair come up, on four more. He turned the new batch out and began to work it on the floured bench, and the kitchen filled with the close active smell of it, under the stock and the pine smoke. The work was the same work it always was. His hands knew it. The dough was stiff at first and then gave, the way it always gave, coming slack and living under the heel of his hand as the work went into it; there was a point, every time, where it stopped resisting him and began to answer, and he had never lost the small satisfaction of reaching it. He could think about other things while his hands did the rest, and what he thought about was the cellar — the barley, the lentils, the dried beans, the salted fat, the onions going soft now at the end of winter — and how it would stretch, and against what.

He was not worried. It was early in the day and early in the year and the path could empty again as quickly as it had filled. But he had begun the accounting, and once begun it ran on quietly underneath everything else, the way it always did. He could see the cellar as clearly as if he stood in it — the cool coming off the stone, the sacks in their row, the level in each one that he kept without meaning to, the way another man might keep a tune.

By the time the bread was shaped and in, there were three more on the path.

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They came up through the morning in twos and threes, and by noon there had been eight.

Toll did not count them out loud, but he counted. Eight by noon was not a number the col had seen since the autumn before, when the last of the season’s travellers had pushed through ahead of the closing. Eight in a single morning, this early, with the north side not even open — that was new.

He did not stop moving. There was a rhythm to it once it started, and the rhythm was the thing that made it possible: water first, then a place by the fire, then stock and bread while the soup came on, then the soup. The soup had thickened through the morning as he fed it — more lentils, the last onions, a handful of barley to hold it together — so that the smell of it changed as the day went, deepening, the thin bright smell of the morning pot giving way to something browner and rounder that filled the room to the rafters and met each traveller at the door. Nothing in the col-house stayed the same through a day; it accumulated. By mid-morning his feet had found the ache they would keep till night, the particular ache of the stone floor that came back at the start of every season like an old acquaintance, and that he had stopped, years ago, expecting to be spared.

Some of them stayed an hour and went on. Some sat longer. A pair of older men, brothers by the look of them, ate and slept an hour on the bench by the wall and woke and ate again and then strapped their packs and went over the saddle toward the north, which was still half-closed, with the air of men who knew the path well enough to manage it half-open. One of them stopped at the door on the way out.

“Long time since there was someone up here in spring,” he said.

“There’s been someone up here a while,” Toll said.

“In spring, I mean. Used to be you’d come over and the house’d be cold till summer.” He looked back into the kitchen, at the fire, at Marga in her corner. “Good to see the smoke.”

He went. Toll watched him take the first turning down toward the trees and then went back inside.

Marga had moved to the bench at some point in the morning — he had not seen her do it — and was cutting bread, the loaf braced against her body and the long knife coming through it in even strokes. She did this sometimes, when the house was busy: came out of her corner and did the one thing, the bread or the stock or the washing, not the whole of it, just the one thing, and then went back. He did not tell her she didn’t need to. He had learned not to. She knew whether she needed to.

“Eight,” she said, without looking up from the bread.

“I had it at eight.”

“More behind them.” She set the cut bread on the board and squared it. “That last lot said there was a group at the lower water-stop. Resting up. Six or seven.”

He had not heard her ask them. She asked things the way she watched things — without seeming to, so that the answer arrived in her and stayed there until it was useful.

“Then it’ll be a day,” he said.

“It’ll be a day,” she said.

She finished the loaf and set the knife down and stood a moment with her hand flat on the bench, and then she went back to her corner. He watched her cross the worn path in the floor from the bench to the chair, the one she had walked into the stone over more years than he had been alive, and he thought, not for the first time, that he could not read her this spring the way he had read her last spring. Something had shifted in her over the winter. Not illness. Slowness, maybe. The bread had taken her longer than it would have taken him. She had braced the loaf against her body in a way he did not think she used to need to.

He did not say anything about it. He went back to the fire and added wood.

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In the middle of the afternoon a man came up the path who did not need to be told where to sit.

Toll saw it from the door — the way he came onto the terrace and stopped and looked at the house and let his shoulders down before he was even inside. He had crossed the col before. He came in, drank the water Toll gave him without being told it was the thing to do first, and went to the wood by the hearth and looked at it.

“You want this brought in?” he said. “Store’s low.”

Toll looked at him. He was middle-aged, broad, with the weathered look of a man who spent his life out of doors. A trader of some kind, by the pack.

“It can wait,” Toll said.

“It’s no trouble. I’m not in a rush.” He was already pulling on the gloves he’d half taken off. “I came over last year. You fed me and I slept and I never carried so much as a stick. Sat there like a lord.” He said it without rancour, the way a man states an account he means to settle. “I’ll bring the wood.”

He went out to the store and brought wood in, three loads of it, the cold of outside still coming off the split faces and the smell of the resin sharpening as the heat of the hearth reached it, and stacked it by the hearth in the way Toll stacked it, which meant he had watched last year how it was done. Then he ate his soup and sat by the fire and was quiet, and when he had rested he asked whether there was a bed, and Toll showed him one, and he slept.

This was the thing the col taught people, Toll had found, though it never taught it the same way twice. The ones who stayed longer than an hour began, without being asked, to carry the wood, or fetch the water, or take a turn at the washing. Not all of them. But enough of them that it had become a kind of weather in the house — the ones who had rested long enough to have something to give began to give it, and the giving was part of the resting, and no one had to say so. Toll never asked. Marga had never asked him, in his first weeks, and he had not understood at the time that the not-asking was itself a thing she was doing.

He had carried the wood eventually. It had been a long time before he had.

By the time the light began to drop toward the south ridge, the trader had slept and gone on, and the house had emptied to three: the first woman from the morning, who had decided to stay the night and go over fresh in the morning, and an older couple who had come up late and were too tired to go further. “We used to do it in a day,” the old man said, lowering himself onto the bench as if it were a long way down. “Up and over in a day. Now it’s up, and see.” “Up and stay the night,” his wife said, “like sensible people,” and put his bowl in his hands. Toll felt the day in his back now, and in the backs of his hands — the first long day after a season of short ones, the muscles remembering work they had half forgotten over the quiet weeks. The soup had been refilled twice. The fourth bread of the second batch was the last on the rack, and Toll set dough for the morning before he forgot, because the morning, he thought, would be the day Marga had named.

The first woman ate her supper at the end of the long table, and when Toll came for the bowl she held on to it a moment.

“I told the ones at the lower water-stop there’d be a house up here,” she said. “I didn’t know if there’d be anyone in it.”

“There’s someone in it.”

“I’ll tell them that, then.” She let go of the bowl. “Coming back down, in the autumn. That there’s someone in it.”

Then the dogs of someone’s bell sounded on the path — not dogs, a string of small bells, the kind a pack-pony carried — and Toll knew before he reached the window who it was, because there was only one person who came up the south path with bells on, and that was Hetty.

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Hetty came onto the terrace leading the pony, which was loaded high and walking with the flat patient resentment of an animal that had been loaded high for a long way. She did not come in. She tied the pony to the iron ring by the door and began unloading it onto the terrace, and Toll went out to help, and she nodded at him once and kept working.

“You’re early,” he said.

“Road’s early.” She swung a sack down and he took it. “South side cleared a week before it should. I came up while it was clear.” She handed him another. “There’s a lot of them coming.”

“I’ve had eight today.”

“You’ll have more than eight tomorrow.” She untied the last of it and stood back and looked at the load on the terrace, taking stock of it the way she took stock of everything, fast and complete. “I came up light because I didn’t know what I’d find. I should’ve come up heavy.”

They carried it in between them. Hetty was somewhere in her late forties, square-built and quick, with hands that did three things while she said one. She did not sit when they were done. She stood by the hearth with her back to it and warmed her legs and looked at the kitchen — at the soup, at the bread rack with its one loaf, at the dough Toll had set, at Marga in her corner — and Toll could see her doing the same accounting he had been doing all day, only faster, because it was her trade.

“Barley?” she said.

“Half a sack. Maybe less.”

“That’s nothing.” She frowned at the fire. “Lentils?”

“More of those. Beans. The fat’s good.”

“Barley’s the thing.” She turned and looked at him directly. “If they come the way I think they’re coming, you’ll go through barley before anything. It holds the soup. It holds them.” She said it the way she said weather — not as a worry but as a fact about the road that he would do well to act on. “I’ll come back in a fortnight. I’ll bring you barley if I have to leave the salt behind.”

“Bring both,” Toll said.

“I’ll bring both.” A corner of her mouth moved, which was as close as Hetty came to amusement. “You’ve got a face on you like the autumn rush already. It’s spring, Toll.”

“It’s a busy spring.”

“It’s a busy spring.” She pushed off from the hearth. She looked at Marga, and something passed over her face that Toll could not read, gone before he could hold it. Then she went to the pony.

She would not stay. She never stayed the first run; the first run was the run she made while the path was clear and before she trusted it to hold, and she wanted to be down the south side before the light went. Toll walked her out. The wind had turned while they worked, coming up the col now with the evening in it, thin and cold and carrying the smell of the snow still lying on the north side. The pony, lightened now, stamped and shook its bells. The south ridge had not yet gone into shadow; there was an hour of light left, maybe more.

She mounted the path and then stopped, the way she always stopped, three steps down, to say the last thing — the real thing — that she had been holding under the trade-talk the whole time.

“You’ll want more stores than usual,” she said. “Lay in for it. I’ll come back in a fortnight.” She looked at him a moment longer than she needed to. “Don’t run out of barley.”

She went down. The bells faded into the sound of the wind coming up the col, and Toll stood on the terrace until he could not hear them, the cold working through his shirt and the light going amber and then grey on the far ridges, and then he turned and looked at the south path below, which was empty now, in the last of the light, all the way down to the treeline.

It would not be empty in the morning.