Chapter ThreeThe Col-Path Clears

He knew the north side had opened before he saw it, because the wind changed.

It came down off the saddle in the morning the way it only came when the path was clear of snow on the far side — a thinner wind, a travelling wind, carrying the cold of the north valley instead of the dead still cold that pooled in the col when both sides were shut. Toll felt it at the door when he went out for wood. It found the gap between his collar and his neck and went down his back, and it did not have the weight in it that the shut-in cold had, the wet-stone smell of a col closed on both sides; it moved, and moving it carried the far valley up to him. He stood a moment with the split wood cold against his forearm and the light not yet up over the east ridge, and he knew, the way he knew the bread by the smell of it, that the north was open.

He had the bread on its first prove. The soup was banked low on the hook from the night, ready to come up. Marga was in her corner with her cup, awake before him as always, the fire built up from the coals.

“North’s clear,” he said.

“I felt it in the night,” she said. “The wind turned.”

He nodded. He had felt it too, half-asleep, and had thought he had felt it, and now the morning had told him he was right.

“I’ll walk out,” he said. “Before the day starts.”

She did not say anything to this, which was her way of saying it was a good idea. He drank a cup standing at the window, both hands round it for the warmth of it, looking at the south path, which was empty in the grey but would not be for long. Then he pulled on the felted cloak that still carried the winter’s woodsmoke in its weave and the wool-lined boots, stiff at first from the cold of the flags, and took the staff from beside the door. “The long one,” Marga said without looking up, “the short one’s split,” and he put the short one back and took the long one — the grip worn smooth and a little hollowed where his hand had gone, the ferrule blunted flat on years of stone — and went out onto the saddle for the first time since the col shut.

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The cold took the breath out of him at the door and then gave it back, sharper.

He went up the path that led from the terrace to the saddle proper — a short climb, fifty paces, but it was the first climb he had made since the autumn, and he felt it in his legs and his chest in a way he would not have felt it in summer. The breath came short and dry at the top of each pull, and the muscle above his knees remembered, by the third rest, that it had spent a winter at the hearth and not on the road. He stopped at the top, not because he needed to but because he always did, here, at the place where the path crested the saddle and both valleys opened at once.

The light was just coming. The east ridge held the first of it, a hard clean gold along the top edge of the rock, and below that the two valleys lay in shadow still, north and south, dropping away on either side in their long blue depths. The cold up here had a different taste than the cold at the door — thinner, and it carried nothing on it, no smoke and no bread and no stone, only itself and the far-off mineral edge of the snow. He could see further than he had been able to see all winter. The air at this hour, at this height, was the clearest air in the realm — he had decided this years ago and had never had cause to change his mind — and on a morning like this one the far ranges stood up on both horizons, north and south, blue going to grey going to nothing, range behind range, further than a man could walk in a season. A bird went over, high, one call and then nothing, going north over the open path ahead of the day.

He stood and let it be what it was for a moment.

There was a thing growing in the lee of the rock by his foot, and he crouched to look at it, because it was the first of the year and he always looked. A small tight rosette of leaves pressed flat to the ground out of the wind, and from the middle of it one stalk, no longer than his thumb, with a knot of buds on it not yet open — the saxifrage that came up first on the col, before anything, before the snow was all gone, flowering in the cold against all sense, the earliest growing thing on the mountain. It would be a week yet before the buds opened. But they were there, set and ready, in the lee of the rock, in the last of the snow.

He looked at it longer than the morning needed. It pleased him, the way it pleased him every year — a small clean pleasure with nothing owed on it, the first of the saxifrage, set to flower in a place where flowering made no sense. He had noticed, somewhere in these years, that this was a thing he could still feel: the plain pleasure of the first flower, the bread risen right, Hetty’s timing on a clear day. Whatever had been worn out of him on the road, it had not worn out that. The small good things still came through. He had been afraid, once, that they would stop coming through. They had not stopped.

He straightened, his knees complaining, and left the saxifrage to its slow business in the cold. There was a cairn at the crest, knee-high, older than Marga’s keeping, and he took a stone off the path and set it on the top, as he did on the first open morning of every year, and the cairn took it. The stone had come up out of the frozen grit with a skin of ice on its underside, and the ice stuck to his glove, and he knocked it off against his thigh.

He was not a man given to standing and looking. Most mornings he did not come up here at all; the work was inside, at the hearth, and the view was the same view, and he had learned years ago that a place you live in stops being a view and becomes the walls of your day. But the first morning of the open road was different. The first morning he came up and looked, every year, because the looking reminded him of the thing it was easy to forget in the middle of a day’s work — that the col was a real place, on a real mountain, at the highest point of a road that men and women walked because they had somewhere they had to be, and that the house behind him with the smoke coming off it was the only warm thing for half a day’s walk in either direction. The smoke stood up straight off the roof-hole in the still air below the wind, a thin grey line against the dark of the rock, and he looked at it the way a traveller coming up the last of the path would look at it, and tried to remember what it was to come up cold and see that line and know there was a fire under it.

The north path dropped away below him, clear. Snow still lay in the hollows where the sun would not reach until midday, the old grey late-winter snow, but the path itself was open — he could follow it with his eye down through the rock-scrub to where it bent out of sight toward the trees. Nothing moved on it. Nothing moved on the south path either, yet.

He was five years into this. He had walked up here on the first morning of the road five times now, and the fifth time felt different from the first, though he could not have said the first time that it would. The first year he had come up here and looked at the path and felt something he had no name for — a kind of vertigo that was not about the height. He had been six months off the road then, six months since his own body had stopped on a climb that was not this one, and standing at the top of the col looking down at the path he had felt the old pull of it, the road, the going-on, and underneath the pull the thing that had stopped him, which had not been the road’s fault and was not gone.

He did not feel that this morning. This morning he felt the cold in his legs and the bread on its prove behind him and a man’s plain pleasure in a clear path and a clear sky. The pull was not there. He noticed its not being there the way you notice a sound has stopped — only after, and only because the quiet was different.

Most of it was habit now. That was the thing he had not expected and had come, slowly, to be glad of. The first year nothing had been habit; everything had been a decision, and every decision had cost him, and there had been mornings he had stood at the hearth and not known whether he could do the day. Now the days did themselves through his hands. The bread, the fire, the water, the soup, the walk up to the saddle on the first clear morning. He had thought once that habit was a lesser thing than choosing — that a life that ran on habit had stopped being chosen. He did not think that anymore. The habit was not the absence of the choosing. The habit was the choosing, made so many times that it had gone down into the hands, where it was safe.

He turned to go back. And on the north path, coming up out of the rock-scrub where it bent toward the trees, were three figures.

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He watched them come.

They were a long way down still — a quarter of an hour, maybe more, at the pace they were making. Three of them, in a line, and the line was uneven in a way that told him something before he could see their faces. He stood out of the wind in the lee of the crest-rock, the staff planted, and watched, and the cold worked its slow way in through the felted cloak the way it always did once a man stopped moving. The first two walked steadily, close together. The third was behind, and falling further behind, and there was something wrong in the way the third one walked.

He waited until they were close enough to be sure. The third one was limping — favouring the left leg, planting the staff hard on that side, the whole body listing into the work of it. Young, by the build, though Toll could not see the face under the hood. The other two waited for him at each turning and then went on when he caught up, the way you waited for someone you did not want to leave behind but could not slow yourself enough to truly walk with.

He had seen it before. The mountain made this shape out of people — the group that set out together and arrived strung out, the strong ahead and the spent behind, and the spent one’s particular silence, which was not the silence of a man saving his breath but the silence of a man who has stopped having anything to say. He could not see the young one’s face. But he knew the walk, and the walk was enough.

He did not go down to them. There was nothing he could do on the path that he could not do better at the hearth, and a man limping up the last of the north side did not need a stranger coming down to look at him; he needed to arrive somewhere warm and be given water and a place to sit. So Toll turned and went back down to the terrace and into the house, and the warm of the kitchen came up around him at the door and he registered it the way he always did when he came in from the cold, as a fact about the house rather than a feeling — the stone walls had held the night’s fire and the morning’s, and they gave it back. The room smelled of the first loaf and the banked soup, and after the clean nothing of the col-top the smell of it was almost a weight, something a man walked into.

“Three coming up the north,” he said. “One of them’s hurt. Limping.”

Marga looked up from her mending. “Together?”

“Two of them are. The third’s not with them the way they’re with each other.”

“Far off?”

“Quarter-hour. Maybe less.” He was already at the hearth, bringing the soup up off its banked low, feeding the fire under it — a handful of the dry kindling first to wake it, then two of the split lengths he had carried in at first light, and the flame came up round them and took. “I’ll have the soup hot for them.”

Marga went back to her mending. After a moment she said, without looking up, “Is it up yet? The yellow.”

“In the lee of the crest-rock. Set, not open. A week.”

“Early.”

“Everything’s early this year.”

“Hm.” The needle went in and out. “Then Hetty will be early too. Mind the barley.”

“Splints are in the chest under the stair,” she said, as he reached for the ladle.

“I know where the splints are.”

“I’m telling you anyway.”

He took three bowls down off the shelf and set them by the pot. Then he took down a fourth.

“Four?” Marga said.

“Two big men off the north side.”

“They’ll eat for three between them. They always do off the north. It’s the climb back up out of the trees.” She bit off the thread and looked at the end of it against the fire. “Cut yesterday’s big loaf. Not the heels. A man who’s limped up that path wants a slice he can see.”

He left the fourth bowl where it was.

He took the bread off its second prove and looked at it and decided it would hold a few minutes longer, the dough gone slack and full under the cloth, and he ladled stock into the soup pot to stretch it and set it to come up to heat. The smell of it changed as it warmed — the fat rising, the barley and the root of it coming up into the room. He put bread on the board to cut — yesterday’s, firm, the kind that held — and the knife went through the crust with the small tearing sound that meant it had been baked right. He set out three cups and filled the small pot from the kettle for the tea, the water off the boil clouding as it took the dried mountain herbs and the flower he kept in the crock. He worked fast, but it was the ordinary fast of a busy morning; he had done it since his first season here; his hands did it while the rest of him watched the window.

A limp was not much. A turned ankle, most likely, or a knee gone on the long descent into the north valley and then the climb back up to the col. He had splints in the store and the roll of clean linen for binding, and he knew how to strap an ankle so a man could stand on it, and if it was worse than that the man would have to rest a day or two before going on, which the house could give him. There was the bed by the far wall, and food enough, and time; the house held all three, and asked nothing back. It was not the limp that stayed with Toll as he worked. It was the silence of the walk, which a limp did not explain.

He went to the window when the soup was nearly up. The three of them were on the last switchback below the saddle now, and as he watched, the first two came up over the crest onto the level of the terrace and stood there, breathing hard, the breath smoking off them in the cold, looking at the house. They had the look of men near the end of a long push — the shoulders down, the packs pulling at them. Then they saw the smoke, and something in the way they stood changed. They were brothers or close enough — a family resemblance in the build. They saw Toll at the window, and one of them lifted a hand.

The third one came up over the crest behind them a half-minute later.

He stopped at the top, the way they all stopped, where the house first came full into view. But he did not lift his shoulders the way the others had, the way the trader had yesterday. He stood and looked at the col-house — at the low stone of it, the smoke, the small south window where the kettle hung — and he did not move for a moment, and his stillness was not the stillness of a man getting his breath.

Toll could see his face now. Young, as he’d thought — early twenties, maybe. And the face had an expression on it that Toll knew, that he had seen before and could not place, that he had perhaps worn himself once, on a path, looking at a thing he could not yet let himself want.

He could not name it. But it stopped him at the window for a second longer than the soup allowed.

Then he set the ladle down and went to open the door.