Chapter 398
A loop of a thousand and four knotted ropes on the near side of the floor, every rope a different colour, and inside it the freed dead in rows, the wounded, lamp-bearer children asleep in a heap, Lärka sitting with her hands over her ears, Emma at the knot. At the Ring's far edge, the white, welling up through the bark and lying against the rope.
Three lengths knotted end to end: a Lumen lamp-boat's thin painter, a Tidekant smack's tarred line, a Brygdar troll's braided cable as thick as a leg. And all three not there. Not cut, not burned: the knot before them, then nothing, then the knot after. A gap in the Ring the width of a man. And the thin gold line that runs round the whole loop ending at either side of it, the light going out of it like a fuse burning backwards.
at the knot, feeling it in her staff before she sees it. The white-iron ring at the staff's tip dimming. Everything inside the rope, which was drawn a shade calmer than the rest of the world, losing the shade: the wind back in hair, the shadows hard again.
one boot on the line, looking along the rope at the gap.
(Inside the Ring, Lärka's hands pressing harder over her ears, her heartbeat in the border stumbling, no longer kept.)
The white beyond the gap gathering, pouring toward the hole in the Ring the way water finds the one crack in a dyke. Inside, the wounded, the sleeping children, the freed dead turning to look.
coming down off the broken stands onto the floor, Isa walking beside him with his hand under her elbow, slowly, the Backlog still shaking her. Kvar stepping up onto the rope itself, both boots on the knotted line, and turning round to face the Arena.
grass springing up round her bare feet on the bark, the names on her arms glowing faintly emerald.
Everyone stepping up onto the rope. Krydog lifting his outside boot and setting it down on the line beside the inside one, both feet on the knot. Roffe. Tihi. Daniel. Flexsnus with his tin. Jeppson. Drekk. Svala dropping from the air. Öde. Levla. A small girl in a coat of a hundred stolen pockets with marbles round her neck: Pyssel. Trolls, fishers, lamp-bearer mothers. Standing on the knotted ropes all the way round the loop, shoulder to shoulder, facing out.
And from inside the Ring, the freed dead getting up off the bark and stepping onto the rope too, grey and silent, taking places between the living: the drowned crew in black-sail coats, the old bosun with the ring in his ear, the Gråtrut's thirty-one, a ship's boy of fourteen with a bucket hooked on his arm. And a broad weathered woman with two grey braids and a scar through one eyebrow, stepping up onto the rope like a captain stepping up onto her own rail: Hild.
shuffling on his patch of bark inside the cord's ring, seeing it across the floor in the gold light. His voice breaking.
the white eating its way up through the lower seats. And coming down the aisle, grey, unhurried, in old birch-bark armour, fifty soldiers: a grey-moustached sergeant with a birch-green scarf, a big man, a boy of sixteen with a drum on his hip. The Birch Company. Picking their way down over the bark islands and across the broken floor toward the Ring.
on the rope, seeing them come. The thousand-year-old look going out of his brown eyes for a moment. Twelve years old again, a cook's boy on a smoking field.
(Sergeant Holt, grey, unsmiling, touches two fingers to his brow. And his company step up onto the rope at the Ring's far side, beside the gap.)
on the rope, lifting her chin, the emerald names on her arms lighting one by one.
each balloon passing to the next like a bucket down a chain:
A circle of people standing on a circle of rope, living and dead, facing out, every mouth moving, names running round the ring in a chain of small balloons that never stops. And the white coming up against them from outside stopping: pressing at their boots, at the knotted rope under their feet, and not taking. A name being heard can't be taken. The white piling up against the ring like a sea against a wall.
Except here. Where the three ropes were eaten, the ring of people has an end on each side of a man-wide hole: on one side Pyssel, ten, holding the hand of the troll beside her and saying his name over and over with her chin up; on the other side Sergeant Holt, grey, dead, silent, holding the hand of the dead man beside him. Nobody can name across the gap. And through it, the white pouring toward the inside of the Ring, toward the sleeping children.
at his place in the ring. The grey script drifting to his ear from the centre of the floor, gentle, close, kind.
Kvar letting go of Isa's hand and putting it into the hand of the man on his other side, so the ring closes up behind him without a gap. Isa's frost-blue eyes going to his face, a beat late, understanding a beat late.
(He's already walking round the inside of the ring toward the gap. Not hurrying. He's never hurried.)
Kvar stepping into it, onto the place where the rope was. Both boots on the last knot. The white at his back. Pyssel on his right, looking up at him: an ordinary tired man with ash in his hair.
Sergeant Holt, grey, holding out a grey hand to the cook's boy he left on a field a thousand years ago. Kvar taking it. The dead man's grip.
(Holt says nothing. The dead don't, here. But his grip tightens, once.)
standing in the gap with a dead hand in his left. Lifting his right hand toward Pyssel's. To close the ring. To be in it: not at its edge, not after it, not the one left standing at the end. To decide it.
And all round his silhouette, the long smooth curving speed-lines that have parted round him all his life, bending every blade and stone and arrow away from him, going straight.
Kvar's right hand closing round Pyssel's small one. The ring closed. Every person on the rope, living and dead, holding the hand of someone beside them. Nobody in front. Nobody behind.
The Great Ring in the gold Beam of a lighthouse at the end of the world, seen from just above: a thousand people standing on a loop of rope, living and dead shoulder to shoulder, trolls and fishers and lamp-bearers and the drowned and the forgiven and a company of grey soldiers in birch-bark armour, all of them facing out, holding hands, every mouth open on a name.
Outside them, the white, a sea of bare page piled up against the ring on every side, held back by names.
And at one place in the ring, an ordinary man in a patched coat with a scarf of a hundred armies round his neck, both arms out, holding a pickpocket child's hand and a dead sergeant's, the white pouring in at his back through the only place left for it: through him. His boots, his knees, the hem of his burned coat going white from the ground up, the drawing of him simply stopping, the way the floor stopped.
And round the whole ring, in a hundred hands of lettering, the same word in every balloon:
at the ring's near side, leading it, every name on her arms blazing, her voice already going hoarse.
(The white reaching Kvar's chest. Stopping at his name. Taking everything round it.)
white to the chest, holding both hands. His face calm. His eyes, which age when he's tired, looking for once like a forty-five-year-old man's. Looking round the ring at a thousand people shouting his name.
The old soldier turning his head to the grey sergeant beside him, the man who once told him he could stop staying now and go somewhere.
Kvar dying on his feet. The white reaching his throat and stopping at his name, and the rest of him simply going still, the way a tired man goes still at the end of a long march: his knees giving, his body tipping forward, falling face-down across the rope. And over his fallen back, Pyssel's hand and Holt's meeting, the living child's and the dead sergeant's, gripping. The ring closed over him.
(No SFX. Just the names still going round.)
kneeling on the rope beside him, gently unwinding the scarf of a hundred armies from Kvar's neck: dozens of regimental scarves knotted end to end, in the colours of armies that don't exist any more, a birch-green one on top. Knotting one end to the rope on Pyssel's side of the gap. The other to the rope on Holt's side. His bandaged hands shaking. A hundred armies, lying across the gap where three ropes were eaten.
at the knot, her staff in both hands, feeling it: the gold line running round the loop again, through a thousand and three ropes and a hundred dead armies' scarves, and meeting itself.
(Everything inside the rope drawn a shade calmer again.)
Kvar, grey now, colourless like the rest of the dead, climbing the aisle beside Sergeant Holt with the Birch Company round him, a boy with a drum, a big man. Coming to their old row. Holt moving along the bench to make room. And Kvar, who has slept standing up for a thousand years, sitting down. His hands in his lap. His eyes closing. At last.
(Below on the floor, on the rope, a small girl in a navy jacket three sizes too big, her bells tied silent with a ribbon round her wrist because she's sad. Untying the ribbon. Walking to the edge of the white beyond the ring. And laughing at it, on purpose, at the saddest thing she has ever seen: ti— · ti— · ti—, every laugh cut in half. Not stopping.)
And the white letting go of the Ring. All of it at once, every patch in the Arena: off the rope, out of the stands, back across the floor, drawing in like a tide going out, raw pale new bark creeping in behind it. Pouring inward toward the centre. Toward five small figures and a dog in a ring of light round a stooped old man, whose door is swinging wide.