The Orc's Winter Guest

The thing about a man built to block out weather is that you do not notice you have stopped being able to see the storm until he is already standing between you and it.

Ffion Rannick had known for the better part of an hour that the sky meant to have the hill, and she had spent that hour politely declining to agree with it. She was down to her last station of the day, chained twice because the ground fell away and she trusted nothing she could not check, when the wind changed its manners. It had come up the valley all afternoon, mild and wet and smelling of the low ground; now it came down off the tops instead, and it did not smell of anything at all, which was how you knew it was bringing snow and had not troubled to consult you. The snow stopped skating past and started arriving — flakes, deliberate, unhurried, the way a thing arrives when it has already decided.

The sky had come down the hill to meet her while she worked — the ridge gone first, then the high crags, and now the far side of the beck, so that the Nyver ran through its little clough below her as a sound more than a sight. She had the sheet off the table and into its oilcloth roll before she would admit the day was done — she had done that ten thousand times, in rain, in wind, once with a sleeve on fire from a knocked-over spirit lamp — and the table folded after it stiffly, the brass wing-catches too cold to turn under her bare thumb. So she was crouched over the instrument case in six inches of snow she did not remember arriving, wedging the lid shut with her knee and both thumbs, when she heard him.

That was the thing she turned over later, on and off, for days: she heard him, in all that wind, from a good way off. Not footsteps exactly. A change in the weather's manners. The snow seemed to be making room for something.

He came up out of the dark eastward, along the line of the road, and he did not so much appear as assemble — a height first, taller than the standing stones by the ford, then a breadth, then the snow catching on the shoulders of a greatcoat and on black hair tied back off a face she could not yet read, and then the whole of him at once, near enough that she had to lift her chin. Seven feet and a half of him, if he was an inch, and broad with it, and green — a deep bottle green that went near-black where the coat collar met his jaw. Small tusks, blunt and thick, pushing the lower lip up a little at rest. A heavy face, built forward out of the jaw and brow, with a broad nose gone flat across the bridge, and eyes that looked down at her out of all that architecture with an expression she could only call patient.

Ffion rose, with the case lid still unclosed, and put herself between him and the plane-table. She was not frightened. She registered that about herself with mild interest, the way she registered most things — she had been alone on hillsides with strangers before, and the rule she had was the one she used on animals: you watched the movement, not the size. This one had come up the road at a pace a man could have matched, and had stopped at a distance a man might have chosen to be civil, and was standing now with his hands where she could see them.

"You are the surveyor," he said. It was not a question. His voice was slow and very deep, and he gave each word its full length, as though words cost him something and he intended to get the value.

"I am," Ffion said. "Ffion Rannick, sworn to the guild, retained by the Pentre Cadd road-trust." She heard herself say it the way she said it at farm gates, the whole credential, because credentials were what you had when you were short and female and standing on somebody's ground. "And you are on my traverse."

"Brakkun Uzhrag." He did not step off her traverse. "This is my ground you are standing on. My mother's below it and my ground above, and the road through the middle of it." He said it without heat, the way a man said his own name. "You have been up here four days. I have watched you walk your chain back and forth past my gate and never once come to the house." There was no complaint in it. He was laying out facts, patiently, the way she laid out chain. "The Corran gate will be shut inside two days. The drift is over the wall at the second gate already and the wind is still building. You are not walking down tonight."

Ffion looked at the sky, which was now mostly snow, and then back at him.

"I have walked off worse hills in worse weather," she said, which was not quite true and which she said anyway.

"No," he said. "You have not."

Behind her the plane-table stood folded in the snow, and the thing that stung was not the walk down. It was the line. The road traverse itself had closed on the ford stone days ago and would stand whatever the weather did; it was the old road-stones — plotted where they actually stood, leaning, half-sunk, some of them a good stone's throw north of the line the road ran now, every one of them on her sheet to within a hand's breadth — that she was one station short of tying in. Nobody had ever put them on paper before. She had checked. There were sheets in the trust's book at Pentre Cadd going back sixty years, and every one of them had copied the one before, line for line, like a recipe nobody had cooked in a generation. Hers was walked. Hers was measured. And she had never in ten years walked off a hill leaving a line half-drawn.

And that was the shape of the whole conversation that followed, down the hill in the dark — she laid out, at length and with professional clarity, every reason she would be going down to the valley tonight or at first light, and he answered each one with a flat and unanswerable fact, and took no pleasure in it that she could see.

She had lodgings in Pentre Cadd, she told him. A rented back room over the chandler's, paid to the end of the month, and she did not abandon paid lodgings on a stranger's say-so.

"You cannot reach Pentre Cadd," he said. "It is eleven miles and the light goes at four. You would be off the road in the dark inside half an hour, and I would have to come and find you, and I would rather not."

"You would rather not."

"I would find you," he said, in the same level tone, "but you would be colder than you would like, and it would annoy my mother."

She told him she had a week of work left up here and a fee riding on it — the trust paid on delivery, and her sheets for the eastern half were drawn and fair-copied and wanted nothing but a rider, and she meant to send them down with the post-rider when he came through on the sixth, and after that she had the west half to run and no time in the calendar for being snowed into anyone's house.

"You will be snowed into mine," he said. "The post-rider will not come through tomorrow either, whatever the calendar says. The drifts will have the gate inside two days and they will keep it until the thaw. Emlyn Maddow knows the road better than any man in the valley, and he will run it once more and not after." A pause, while the snow came down between them. "I can tell you that to the hour, but you would not believe me, and it does not matter, because you will see."

She told him — this was the one she had been holding back, the one she thought would end it — that she was not in the habit of taking shelter in the houses of enormous men she had met once, in the dark, in a snowstorm, whatever the weather was doing.

He considered that with the same patience he had given the rest of it.

"No," he said at last. "I do not suppose you are. But you have walked past my house four days running and you are on my ground, and the house takes you in. That is all. It is not a thing I am doing to you. It is a thing the house does." He said it the way another man might have said it is raining — a fact about the world, mildly regrettable, not his fault. "You may refuse, of course. People do. They come up the hill later, colder, and the house takes them in then."

Ffion, who had been about to refuse, found the refusal had gone somewhere. She stood there with the wind going through her coat and thought about her rented back room eleven miles off, and her dead fire, and the week of work, and the fact that this man had been watching her walk her chain past his gate for four days and had come up now, in the dark, in weather, to tell her a thing about his gate that he was plainly right about.

"Most people do not argue with me," Brakkun said, into the silence. He sounded neither offended nor amused. He sounded as though he were noting it for a ledger. "On a dark road. In the snow."

"Most people," Ffion said, "have not spent four days measuring a road and do not want to lose the light on it."

"Mm," he said, which was not agreement, and bent and picked up her instrument case out of the snow.

He did it one-handed, and he did it carefully — she saw him steady the open lid with the flat of his other hand so nothing shifted inside — and then he stood there a moment with the case against his chest, holding it, looking at her. Or at her hands. It was hard to tell, in the dark, with the snow. It lasted a breath longer than the thing warranted, whatever it was, and then it was over, and he tucked the case under his arm as though it weighed nothing, which it very much did not, and picked up the folded plane-table and carried that under the other arm, flat, like a tray.

"My table," Ffion said, sharply.

"I am carrying it," he said, mildly, as though that answered her, and it occurred to her that in a sense it did. "You will fall over it in the dark and break it, and then where will your traverse be."

It was the first thing he had said that was not a flat fact, and it was, she had to concede — alone among the opinions she had been offered that evening — also a flat fact.

They went down the hill with the wind at their backs. She argued, because she had decided to argue, and because the arguing kept her warm: about the fee, about the calendar, about the west half of the road and the stones that wanted plotting above the steading, about the trust and its book and its sixty years of copied lines, about the principle of the thing, whatever the principle of the thing was. He walked beside her on the downhill side, enormous and unhurried, shortening his stride to hers without being asked, and he answered perhaps one argument in four, and the ones he did not answer he heard — she could tell he heard them, because twice he came back to one ten minutes later, with the fact that finished it, as though he had been turning it over the whole time and had only now got it ready.

"You said the second gate," he said, somewhere above the steading, when she had been silent long enough for him to decide she was done. "You asked why I knew the drift was over it. I was at the second gate this afternoon. I go, in weather, before it closes, to look." A pause. "A man on a hill either knows his ground in winter or he does not keep it long."

"And your ground," Ffion said, "goes up as far as it goes up."

"It goes up," he said, "as far as my grandmother's fence. Which is further than the road-trust believes." He said it without emphasis, and she let it go past her, because she was cold and tired and it was only afterwards — much afterwards — that she remembered he had said it at all.

The steading came up out of the dark below them: the byre first, a long low shoulder of stone with its own warm animal smell reaching out into the snow, and two dogs throwing themselves against the noise of themselves until Brakkun said one word and they sat, abashed, in the drifts. Then the house. Stone, deep-set, small-windowed, built low to the hill the way things were built up here when the person building them intended them to be standing in a hundred years. Smoke at the chimney. A light in one window, gold on the snow of the yard.

He held the door for her. He had to stoop to go through it himself — she watched him do it, the whole architecture of him folding itself under his own lintel with the practised economy of a man who had been doing it all his life — and then he straightened on the inside and stood there holding the door wide, with her instrument case under one arm and her plane-table under the other, waiting, patient, in his own doorway, while the warmth came out of the house around him and took her by the face.

Ffion counted the paces from the byre to the threshold without meaning to. Twenty-two. She filed it away with the rest of the day, and went in out of the snow, still arguing.

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

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