The Orc's Neighbour

The lawyer's letter listed ninety ewes, a stone lambing-shed and a summer hut on the tops, and said nothing at all about the orc.

The road up from Marrowvale did not so much climb as change its mind about who it belonged to. Down by the market it was everybody's road, rutted by carts and hemmed by hedges. Past the last of the lower farms it began to lean against the valley side, and the hedges gave way to drystone walls, and the walls grew older and greener and taller the higher she went, until by the time the lane forked Nesta was walking with orc work on her left hand and open hill on her right, and the only other soul on the road was a ewe watching her over a gate with the flat yellow eye of a creature that had never once been pleased to see anybody.

She had been walking since before midday. Her bag was one bag, and not a full one: two shifts, a bodice laced flat so it would not crease, her mother's shears, a hank of bell-cord, and the good knife. Everything else she owned she wore. Her crook was older than she was and had been four other people's before it was hers, which was the way of crooks, and the felt hat pinned down over her rope of hair had seen twenty years of weather and looked it. She was thirty-three years old and she had never in her life unlocked a gate that was hers to unlock.

She stopped where the lane forked and took her bearings off the lawyer's letter, which she had read so many times on the way up that the creases had gone soft as cloth. The Trevail run. Held of no steading household. The stone lambing-shed, the in-bye, the summer hut on the tops. Ninety ewes, with lambs at foot. Great-uncle Aled, whom she had met perhaps six times and who had nonetheless, out of whatever obscure arithmetic old men keep, left her the only thing he had.

Below her the valley lay in its late-spring green, Marrowvale a grey knot at the bottom of it with the market square empty now until Wednesday, and above her the tops went up into a long light that would not be gone before ten. The lambs were at foot everywhere on the lower ground, and the first flies were up, and the grass was coming the way it only comes in these few weeks, as though the hill had been holding its breath since the thaw and had finally let it out.

She went up the left fork, because the letter said the run lay on the orc side of the road, and there it was.

The in-bye came first: two walled fields of the kind of grass that made a shepherd's hands itch, and then the lambing-shed, low and long and built of stone the colour of oatcake, with a turf roof and a yard of beaten earth in front of it, and pens. Somebody was breaking the pens down. She could see the hurdles stacked against the shed's gable end, and a man — not a man — an orc, carrying a section of penning under one arm the way she might carry a stool, setting it down on the stack with a care that did not match the ease of it at all.

He straightened as she came through the gate, and she had been around orcs all her working life, on other people's hills and at other people's shearing gathers, and still she had to take him in piece by piece. Seven feet and then some. Broad through the shoulders and the waist both, long in the arm, his skin a moss-green with a yellow cast to it, like moss growing over limestone, gone ruddier across his forearms where the sleeves were rolled. His head was shaved down to dark stubble. His tusks swept up long off his lower jaw, and the left one had a notch near the tip, an old break, clean-edged. He had a tally-board under his other arm, and he was looking at her the way a man looks at weather coming over the tops: measuring it, without any opinion about it yet.

"Mistress Trevail," he said. Not a question.

"Nesta," she said. "Trevail, yes. You're —"

"Drogan Hask. Of the Hask steading." He shifted the tally-board into his other hand. "I am the run's guardian. I will tell you what that means, because nobody down the road will have."

She had walked three miles uphill with a bag on her shoulder to take up the first ground of her own she had ever held, and the first thing on it was a seven-foot orc telling her there was something nobody had mentioned. "Go on, then," she said.

He told it flatly, the way you would give the count of a flock, and she understood afterwards that this was kindness of a kind, that he gave it to her the way he'd want it given to him. A hill-run held by no steading household did not stand unkept. Custom — older than the guild, older than the market at the bottom of the valley — set a guardian over it from the nearest steading, and the nearest steading was Hask, whose march ran along the run's east side. The guardian answered for every ewe on the run and every march-stone around it until the shearing gather, when the run was walked in and its keeping settled for good. The post belonged to the run. It did not belong to him, and it had nothing to do with her except that she held the ground the post stood on.

"Your great-uncle was old, and the run was kept under his name while he lived," Drogan said. "He is ten days dead. The post has been empty ten days, and an empty post is a thing the whole valley side can see, so I was sent up. I did not ask for it." He said that plainly, without softening it and without apology, the same way he had said the rest. "I want it understood that I did not ask for it."

"Understood," Nesta said. She looked past him at the shed, the stacked hurdles, the ewes drifting across the in-bye with their lambs bucking and stotting at their heels. Ninety of them. Hers, if the letter was right, which was a thing her mind kept sliding off. "And what does the guardian do that the shepherd doesn't?"

"Nothing the shepherd does," he said. "The work is yours. I do not touch the work. I answer for the run — to the steading, and at the gather. If a ewe is lost, I am asked where she went. If a march-stone is down, I am asked why it is down. If the run is walked in sound, I am asked nothing at all, which is the outcome I am working toward."

"And when the gather's done?"

"The post ends. The run is walked in as held, and it is yours the way it was his."

She turned that over. It was, when she got to the bottom of it, not so strange a thing. She had worked for twenty years on ground where some man in a house somewhere answered for the flock while her own two hands did the keeping of it. The only difference here was that the house was an orc steading and the man was standing in front of her, and the ground, this time, was hers.

"Right," she said. "Then we'd best count."

Something crossed his face that she would not have called relief on anyone that size, and he held the tally-board out to her. It was an old thing, the wood gone dark and silky with handling, the tallies cut in rows and rows down its length in at least three different hands. The newest rows were cut deep and square.

"Aled's tally, brought up to his last week," Drogan said. "Ninety ewes. The last ewe on the run lambed four days before you came, and she and the lamb are doing well; she is the heavy-shouldered grey with the black face, in the near field. Lambing is over. The pens are coming down because they are coming down, and the hurdles go under the shed's lean-to until the gather."

They walked the in-bye together while the afternoon leaned over toward evening, and she counted the way you count on ground you don't yet know, by fives and by the dogless drift of them, and he walked a yard off her shoulder and said nothing while she did it, which she noted and approved of. A man who talks while you count is a man who has never counted. Twice a ewe with a lamb at heel made to wander off the count's edge and twice her crook turned the pair of them back, quick and quiet, and the second time she caught him watching her hands rather than the ewes, with the expression of a craftsman watching another craftsman use a tool he also owns.

Ninety. She made it ninety, and then made it ninety again going back, and said so.

"The tally agrees," Drogan said, and cut a small notch beside the last of the new rows with a knife from his belt, and that, apparently, was that: the run counted and the count witnessed, in front of the ewes and the sky.

Inside, the shed smelled of old lanolin and old hay and the sharp green smell of the turves on the roof breathing out the day's warmth. The far end, the loft end, had been Aled's quarters: a narrow bed built against the wall, a hearth no bigger than a platter, a table, a stool, a lantern hanging off a nail. A man's whole life fitted into twelve feet of shed-end, and it was tidy, which she had expected, and it was worn, which she had also expected, and there was a crook hanging on the back of the door that she had not expected to feel anything about and did. She set her bag on the bed and her own crook beside it and did not look at either of them for a moment.

"The summer hut is on the tops, past the high march-stones," Drogan said from the door. He did not come in. He filled the doorway and stayed exactly in it, one shoulder against the jamb, and gave her the run of the place with his eyes without moving his feet. "The ewes go up when the grass on the in-bye is eaten down enough to want resting. Aled left it later every year. The wall between this run and the Hask march wants seeing to. That is the truth of the run as I have it."

"And the neighbours?"

"The Hask march on the east. Open hill above. Below the in-bye, the lower commons, where you worked." He knew where she had worked. Of course he did; the whole valley side had had ten days to talk about the hired woman the run had fallen to. "The lane up is the only road. Market is Wednesday."

She came back out into the yard and leaned on the gate beside him, and below them the lane went down the hill in its long loops toward Marrowvale, and as she watched, a cart came up the first loop, Ganner's by the look of the plain brass bell she could just hear when the wind turned. Coming down the lane above the cart was a shepherd with two dogs, one of the Hask men by his build. The two of them passed below the run's gate, and Nesta saw the thing she was still turning over an hour later: the shepherd moved. Not hurried, not frightened exactly — he simply, smoothly, put himself and his dogs over onto the far side of the lane, off the crown of it, and let the cart have the middle, and then she realised the cart had moved too, Ganner's cob hugging the inside of the bend, both of them quietly clearing the road's best line.

For Drogan. He was not even on the lane. He was standing beside her in her own yard, a hundred yards above it, and the lane below was sidestepping the idea of him, the possibility that he might come down it.

She had heard things about the Hask steading's sons the way you hear things on twenty years of other people's hills. She had not heard anything specific about this one, except that the valley side stepped off the path for him, and now she had seen that it did, and she stood in the long light and wondered what a man did to make a whole road remember it.

"What did you do," she asked, not looking at him, "that the lane moves over for you when you aren't on it?"

He was quiet for long enough that she thought he might not answer, and then he said, "Something, when I was twenty, that I have not done since." No more than that. She had worked for men who would have told her the whole story with themselves at the centre of it, and she found she liked this better, though she could not have said it was reassuring.

The light went gold and then went long and thin. The ewes settled into their night corners of the in-bye with the lambs folded beside them like pocket-handkerchiefs. Nesta made up the hearth with the turf stacked under the lean-to and set a pot of water over it, more for the pleasure of doing it in her own place than out of any hunger, and when she straightened up he was still there at the shed door, and he had the key in his hand.

She had not seen the key yet. It was an iron key, big as her thumb, on a loop of leather that had gone grey with years of somebody else's fingers. He held it out to her across the threshold, and it was the way he did it that she would remember: flat on his palm, not dangling from the loop, held steady at the height of her hand so that she did not have to reach up or bend or take anything off him that he was still holding. His hand was enormous and square and scarred across the knuckles, a waller's hand, and it was doing the most careful thing she had ever seen a hand do, which was offering her the key to her own door as though the door might break.

"The key was Aled's," he said. "Now it is the run's holder's."

She took it off his palm. It was warm from being carried. "Thank you," she said, and the words came out smaller than she meant them.

And that was when it happened, over the shed door, at dusk, with the last of the light lying level across the in-bye and the first of the midges up in the still air above the yard. Something changed in his face. She could not have said what moved, because almost nothing did — he went very still, that was all, still in the way of a man who has heard a sound nobody else can hear, and his eyes, which were a dark amber she had not properly registered until they were suddenly fixed on her, went from measuring to something else. Something that did not look away.

He was quiet for three breaths. She counted them, because counting was what she did.

"There is a thing I must tell you once," Drogan Hask said, "and then I will not speak of it again." His voice had not changed at all. That was, she thought afterwards, the strangest part of it — the flat, exact, count-of-the-flock voice, saying this. "My people know when a bond wakes. It has woken. To you, here, just now. You will have heard that orcs simply know such things, and that it does not mean what songs say it means. It decides nothing. It asks nothing of you, and it will not be used to ask anything of you. It is a fact, like the tally, and I give it to you the way I gave you the count: because it is yours to know, and because a guardian who hid a fact about the run he keeps would not be keeping it."

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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