Like You'd Understand, Anyway

After a few minutes I find I haven't the heart to make noise or clatter about. I untie the rawhide lead and pitch the sandals down below. I don't bother with the hearth and in a short time the lower story goes dark. The upper still has its two torches and is nicely dry, though a cold breeze comes through the windows. I alternate time inside with time on the Wall. It takes minutes to get used to seeing by starlight when I go back out.

Some rocks fall and roll somewhere off in the distance. I keep watch for any movement in that direction for some minutes, without success.

My father liked to refer to himself as stag-hearted. He was speaking principally of his stamina on foot and with women. “Do you miss your brother?” he asked me on one of those winter fort-nights he spent hanging about the place. It was only a few years after my brother's death. I still wasn't big enough to hold the weight of my father's sword at arm's length.

I remember I shook my head. I remember he was unsurprised. I remember that some time later my mother entered the room and asked us what was wrong now.

“We're mournful about his brother,” my father finally told her.

He was such a surprising brother, I always think, with his strange temper and his gifts for cruelty and whittling and his fascination with divination. He carved me an entire armored galley with a working anchor. He predicted his own death and told me I'd recognize the signs of mine when it was imminent. I was never greatly angered by his beatings but once became so enraged by something I can't fully remember now, involving a lie he told our mother, that I prayed for the sickness which later came and killed him.

“I prayed for you to get sick,” I told him on his deathbed. We were alone and his eyes were running so that he could barely see. The pallet beneath his head was yellow with the discharge. He returned my look with amusement, as if to say, Of course.

Halfway through the night a bird's shriek startles me. I chew a hard biscuit to keep myself alert. The rain's a light mist and I can smell something fresh. My mother's wool tunic is heavy and wet under the mail.

When I'm in the upper story taking a drink, a sound I thought was the water ladle continues for a moment when I hold the ladle still in its tin bucket. The sound's from outside. I wait a few seconds before easing out the door, crouching down behind the embrasure to listen and allow my eyes to adjust. I hold a hand out to see if it's steady. The closest milecastle is a point of light over a roll of hills. My heart's pitching around in its little cage.

Barely audible and musical clinks of metal on stone extend off to my left down below. No other sounds.

The watchfire bundle is inside to prevent its becoming damp. In the event of danger it's to be dumped into a roofed and perforated iron urn mounted on the outer turret wall and open-faced in the direction of the milecastle. The bundle's been soaked in tar to light instantly. The watchfire requires the certainty of an actual raid, not just a reconnaissance. You don't get a troop horse up in the middle of the night for a few boys playing about on dares.

There's the faint whiplike sound of a scaling rope off in the darkness away from the turret. I raise my head incrementally to see over the stone lip of the embrasure and have the impression that a series of moving objects have just stopped. I squint, then widen my eyes. I'm breathing into the stone. After a moment, pieces of the darkness detach and move forward.

When I wheel around and shove open the turret door a face, bulge-eyed, smash-toothed, smeared with black and brown and blue, lunges at me and misses, and a boy pitches off the Wall into the darkness below with a shriek.

Behind him in the turret, shadows sweep the cloak pegs between me and my watchfire bundle. A hand snatches up my sword.

So I jump, the impact rattling my teeth when I land. When I get to my feet, something hits me flush in the face. On the ground I hear two more muffled blows, though I don't seem to feel them. I'm facedown. Pain pierces inward from any mouth movement and teeth loll and slip atop my tongue. I'm kicked around. When my septum contacts the turf a drunkenness of agony flashes from ear to ear.

When it recedes there are harsh, muted sounds. One of my ears has filled with liquid. There's commotion for a while, and then it's gone. In the silence that follows I make out the agitated murmur of the detachment mustering and then setting out.

I test various aspects of the pain with various movements. Lifting my head causes spiralling shapes to arrive and depart. Fluids pour across my eyes. At some point, silently weeping, I stop registering sensations.

In the morning I discover they'd been pouring over the Wall on both sides of me, the knotted ropes trailing down like vines.