第5章 The Shepherd and the Line

"Nancarrow," said Wilby, "will tell you about the line, and he will tell you eleven versions of it, and only one of them is true." "I'd like the true one first, if it's not too much trouble." "It's the last one he tells you. Make him earn it." The shepherd came up on the sixteenth day with a dog he did not need, because it was a dog that needed him, and he was a lean man of fifty with the colour of the weather already in his face. "It's the ewes," he said. "Nine of them over the top byre wall. Stone's come down at the corner since the last thaw, and I found the wall short when I did the rounds this morning." "What harm? They're ewes." "They're not over into the valley. They're over onto the other side of the line." He pulled his glove off and spat. "Miss Danby, I have walked that hill thirty years and I have never seen a beast past the posts. Not in a bad winter, not in 'ninety-nine when the snow came to the eaves. They don't go over. Things stop at the posts." Pippa got her coat. "Then we shall go and see." "Willow," he said. "No, the dog. She's called Willow and she'll come." * * * They went up the track behind the fold and along the shoulder of the hill, and the ground Pippa had thought was merely white turned out underfoot to be blue-grey ice with snow lying on it like a rumpled cloth, and she took the hill slowly and was glad of the dog, who kept coming back to check on her. The line was marked by iron posts driven at intervals of about forty paces along the old boundary of the inn's land: a run of them going up from the beck, over the shoulder, and away east toward the crags. "How far does it go?" "Mind your left," said Nancarrow, and stopped. "There's no more of it." They stood. Below them lay Selborne, a valley of forty houses and a church with a crooked spire, and a white road up it that went out of sight. Above and to the left, the ground rose to nothing in particular, a white field with no name and no end to it that Pippa's eye wanted very much to call a field and could not. "It's not a wall," Nancarrow said. "People think it's a wall. It's a bound." "What's a bound?" "It's a line you agree to. Every house on a mountain has one. Ours runs from the beck over the shoulder to the standing stones and down to the tarn. We graze inside it. We fell inside it. We take our dead up to the stones, because the stones are the far mark and the dead go as far as we do." "And beyond it?" "Beyond it there's more mountain, and the snow on the more mountain is all the same snow, and it does not stop because you asked it to." He spat again. "There's a phrase. *The snow has no master but the keeper.* My grandfather used to say it and laugh, and I never knew if he was laughing at me." "Did anything ever come over?" Nancarrow looked at her for a moment. "Once," he said. "In the winter of 'sixty-one, when the register was kept by the Danby before your Cressida — there was a Thawkeeper then too, a man, they had a man in those days — and he let the lamp on the seventh go out for one night because he'd been drinking. Next morning the snow was over the posts as far as the elbow of the hill. Not blowing. It hadn't come over the hill, it had come up under it. Like something breathing out." "What did he do?" "He got it back. It took him four days and it took him never sleep, and nobody in the village spoke to him after, and the inn was empty by spring." Nancarrow crouched and put a gloved hand flat on the snow on the near side of a post. "Since then the house has kept it back. Sixty-one years. My father's ewes never went over. Mine never went. And I would like it to stay that way, miss, because if it goes over, it comes for the barns first." Pippa knelt in the snow beside him. The snow inside the line was dry and granular and blue where the light got into it. She dug her fingers in. There was grit under the crust, and grit was strange, because nothing that size lay on this hill. "What's this?" "That's the ground. That's just the ground." Nancarrow took a handful, rubbed it, and put it in his pocket. "It's a marker. They put iron filings in when they set the bound, that's what the posts are for, they're set in the same stuff, so the line knows where it is. Aye, and when I was a lad I could go out to the posts on a clear night and see a faint seam in the frost, like a scuff in a floor. Can't any more. Too much traffic. Too many boots." "Too many boots?" "Your boots, miss. Yours and the kitchen's and Wilby's and that sort. The old saying is the bound's not found by looking. It's found by walking." She walked it with him then, all two hundred paces, up to the shoulder and back down to the beck, at a pace that let an old man and a city woman keep up with each other. He told her about the ground the whole way, and about a kiln on the Selborne side that had fired a bad pot in 1848 and never been right since, and about the time a whole flock had gone over the top near the crags in 'ninety-eight and come back themselves in the morning, all of them, and would not be herded. "You didn't believe her, your Cressida," he said, as they came down to the beck. "About which part?" "The lamps. She said they made a smoke go up a chimney and the smoke made the air, and the air was the house's, and the house was the bound's, and the bound held the mountain off." He laughed. "Ninety-one, the year Mowbray put the bracket crooked. I've not seen smoke from that lamp since, and I've watched it close enough to read by." Pippa walked the last of the way in silence. The lamps did not make smoke. She had lit them eleven times now and not one had smoked, and she had decided that this was because Wilby's wicks were good. At the beck she stopped and looked back up at the hill, and the light was going, and the posts went up the shoulder in a line of thin black iron, and in one place in the middle of the line there was a hole where the snow lay deep and smooth and did not lie like the rest. She went up to it and knelt. The snow there was gone. Underneath was bare, dark, damp ground, and it was warm, and it smelled of bread. She put her bare hand flat on it and looked up the hill with the light going orange behind her. * * * She did not tell Wilby about the bare ground. She told herself it was because a thing like that wanted to be kept until it was understood, and that was true, and it was also convenient, and Pippa Danby was old enough to notice the shape of a convenient thing when she met one. Down at the fold she found a note pushed through the door, in a child's pencil, huge and careful: *44.* ---