Chapter 6 · Chapter 6

The scroll stayed shut against the scribe's chest, and the ash came over the wall in one long grey breath and lay down on his shoulders like a second mantle. I counted the men at the back of the square without turning my head. Eleven, and two of them holding their cloaks shut at the throat with both hands, because the wind had already taken the corners once and would take them again.

The shout came down from the ridge in pieces, hand to hand along the line of the watch, and by the time it reached the wall it had lost its shape. Then it came again, nearer, and this time I heard the words whole.

"The elders have sat. The sword is loosed."

The square below us emptied the way a bowl empties when it is turned over — quickly, and then not at all. The women went back behind the hide screens. The men went forward, and among them the boys who were not yet men, and the old ones who should not have gone forward, and no one stopped either.

I did not go forward. I stood where the stone wall met the first of the screens, in the seam of it, which is where a woman may stand if she stands still and says nothing and keeps her hands where they can be counted.

The scribe had not moved. He had the scroll and no instruction for it, and his hand kept going to the seal and coming away again. An hour before, at this same wall, he had told the watch that the column under his hand had no heading over it yet. Eleven men had heard him. I had been the twelfth, and had not been counted, which is the whole advantage of the seam.

The men of the sword came in three files through the north gate, and they did not run and did not shout, which was worse than either. Their blades were already clear. They halted at the well and turned to face the square, and the square was silent in a way that had a grain to it, like water just before it freezes.

The men of Zakhari's house stood in the third rank. I looked along the rank for the new cord on a shoulder and did not find it. I did not know whose shoulder I was looking for, only that whoever wore it would be young, and that the young are the ones read out.

The names were read. Not all of them. The elders had chosen, and the choosing was read out in columns, house by house, and each house answered for its own, which is the way it had always been done and the way it would be done after us. When the column with Zakhari's house over it was read, the name that house had been afraid of was not in it. Behind me one of the women put her hand flat against the screen and left it there.

Then the swords went in.

I will not set down here what the square looked like. I will say only that it did not look like anything I had imagined in the years I had heard the word judgment used at the evening fire, and that the sound of it was small and wooden and did not carry, and that afterward there was a great deal of ash in the air that had nothing to do with the wind.

It was in the middle of it that he moved.

He was not in any rank. He was at the supply carts, where the water skins were stacked, and he had his arms under the shoulders of a man of his own house and was dragging him backward, boot heel first, so that the heels ploughed two lines in the dust. The man's leg was wet from the knee down and he was saying something over and over that I have not been able to hear since.

He got him behind the carts. Then he got him under the axle, into the black gap between the wheel and the cart bed, and pushed the water skins over him one by one, and did it without hurrying, which is how I knew he was afraid.

The captain of the file turned his head.

He came across the square with two men behind him, and he stopped at the carts and looked at the two lines in the dust. He was a patient man. I had seen patience in him before that morning and had thought it a good quality.

"There is a man under there," the captain said.

"There is," the other said.

"He is named."

"He is named."

"Then he is mine."

The young man straightened. There was ash in his hair and one sleeve was torn at the wrist and had come half away, and he did not put it right.

"He is named in a column," he said. "The column has a heading over it, and the heading is a house, and a house answers at the tent and not at the cart. Read the column. If his name stands under a heading, then let the tent send for him, and he will come to the tent on his own feet or he will be carried and it will be written which.

But you will not take him out from under an axle like a sack of lentils, and I will not stand here and watch you do it, because I have already had a long night and I am not inclined to have a longer one."

The captain considered this. I have thought since that what saved the man was not the argument but the length of it — a man who speaks at that length in a square where the swords are out is either a fool or a man with something behind him, and the captain could not yet tell which.

"The scroll is with the scribe," the young man said. "It is a fresh skin. It is wet. Ask him."

The captain looked toward the wall. He looked past me, through the seam, to the scribe, and did not see me at all.

And because the scribe had heard the whole of it, and had a reed in his hand already wet, and a skin across his knees already ruled, he answered before he was asked.

"The column is open," the scribe said. "I have watched it. There is no heading over it yet — I said as much at this wall an hour ago, and eleven men heard me. If there is no heading, then no house answers, and the man under the axle answers to the elders and to no file. Send to the tent. Let it be written which way he comes."

The captain looked at the young man for as long as it takes to draw three breaths.

"Write it," he said to the scribe. "Write that he was taken at the carts and given to the tent, and write who spoke for him."

"No," the young man said. "Write that he was taken at the carts and given to the tent. The rest is not a column. The rest is a man who kept his hands where they could be counted, and it will not be read out at the assembly."

The scribe's reed stopped. He looked from the young man to the captain and back, and then he wrote the shorter thing, because it was the easier thing, and because he had been shown a way to write less.

They carried the man out from under the cart. He was alive. The young man walked beside him as far as the corner of the square and then stopped, and did not go on to the tent, because the tent was not his to enter.

The captain did not look back at him. That was the whole of it — no word, no hand lifted, nothing that would be written. A man who is thanked aloud in that square has a mark put on him, and the captain knew it, and so he gave nothing at all except the not looking, and I have thought since that it was the more careful thing.

I put my wrap straight and went back along the wall.

By dusk the wind had dropped and the ash had settled and the camp had begun to do the thing camps do, which is to eat and to mend and to speak of the dead in the past tense. The scribe sat at the wall with his skin across his knees, and the ink had dried well.

He let me hold the lamp for him while he ruled the lines. Nobody counts a woman standing still with a lamp.

The column still had no heading. By full dark it held forty-one names, and the man pulled out from under the axle was the thirty-ninth, and the fortieth was written in a smaller hand because the scribe had reached the curve of the skin and was being careful.

The forty-first he wrote without being asked, and he wrote it because the captain had told him to write who spoke, and because a man who has asked for the shorter thing once does not ask for it twice.

It was his name. Shimon, son of Zakhari, son of Aropin, standing in a column with no heading over it.

I read it a long while. Then I went to the fire and ate my bread and said nothing to anyone, and let them talk.