Page 1 of Hard Home

Chapter One

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a line of warding left long enough unattended must be in want of blood.

Lieutenant Denny had been told this on his first night at Selsey by a sergeant with no fingers on his left hand, and had thought it a joke of the sort soldiers tell to frighten new men. He had been at the line eleven months now. He no longer thought it a joke, and he no longer thought it a figure of speech.

The wardline ran east from the Selsey shingle for nine miles before it turned inland, and it was not a wall, and it was not a ditch, and there was nothing whatever to see of it in daylight except that the grass grew a different color along its length — a paler, colder green, as though the ground beneath had been asked a question some centuries ago and was still considering its answer. The old courts had laid it. Nobody living knew how. What the Crown maintained now was not the line itself but the men who stood along it, and the men were maintained by their blood, and their blood, as Denny had come to understand, was a finite substance in a way that no one had thought to explain to him at Winchester.

He walked the eastern mile at the second hour after midnight with Corporal Amberley three paces behind, and he counted the stakes as he passed them, and at the ninth stake he stopped.

"Sir."

"I see it."

The stake was iron, and the iron was cold, and this was not remarkable in December. What was remarkable was that the grass around its foot had gone the ordinary green of the field beyond. Not withered. Not scorched. Simply — ordinary. As though the ground had at last decided upon its answer, and the answer wasno.

Denny put his bare palm against the stake and felt for the line, and the line was not there.

It is difficult to describe the sensation of reaching for a thing that has been present every hour of eleven months and finding, instead of resistance, an absence with an edge to it. Denny had a small gift, the smallest in his family and much lamented by his mother: he could feel worked magic the way another man feels a draft under a door. It had made him useless in every profession but this one. It made him, at that moment, the only man in Sussex who knew that the Selsey line had opened.

"Fetch the Captain," he said. "Do not run. If you run the men will see you run."

Amberley did not run for the first forty yards, which Denny thought creditable of him.

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Captain Thomas Harding came up the field without his coat, which told Denny how he had been woken, and with his sword, which told him nothing, since Harding was never anywhere without it. He was a lean, unhurried, disagreeable man of forty who had been twenty-two years on the lines and had the particular temper of a person who has watched a great many people learn something he learned long ago.

He set his hand to the ninth stake, and then to the eighth, and then he stood a while with his palm flat against the tenth and his head bowed, listening in the way that men of his line listened.

"Nine to eleven," he said. "Two hundred yards of it. When did you last walk this?"

"The tenth hour, sir. It was sound."

"It was thin. It has been thin since Michaelmas and I have written to say so four times." Harding wiped his hand on his shirt, as though he had touched something and wished not to have. "How much of yours have you?"

Denny hesitated. It is not a question one asks. It is like asking a man how much money is in his strongbox, except that a strongbox may be refilled.

"All of it, sir. I have never spent any."

"You are about to." Harding turned and looked out over the black field toward the sea he could hear and not see. "Something has come through. Perhaps an hour ago, perhaps three. It will have gone inland, because they always go inland, and it will be following water, because they always follow water. Amberley — the Willow brook runs north-east from the mill. Take six men and go up it and do not go quietly. I want it to know you are there."

"Sir," said Amberley, in the voice of a man being handed something heavy.

"You are not to engage it. You are to be loud, and to be behind it, and to keep it moving toward the mill, where the water narrows and I shall be standing." Harding said this in the flat manner of a man ordering breakfast. "Denny. With me."

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They went down the field at a pace Denny would not have called running and could not have called anything else, and while they went, Harding talked, which surprised him. Harding had spoken perhaps two hundred words to him in eleven months.

"You will not have seen one."

"No, sir."

"You will want to look at it. Do not. It is not that the sight is dreadful — it is not, particularly, it is only wrong, which is worse. It is that a thing which has been on the far side of a wardline for four hundred years has spent four hundred years with nothing to look at, and it ishungry to be seen. Attention is food. Do you understand me?"

"No, sir."

"Good. Men who understand me at the first telling are generally lying." Harding vaulted a stile without slowing. "The breach must be closed before dawn. A line that is open one night may be shut. A line that is open two is not a line, it is a door, and the whole of Sussex becomes the far side of it. That is why I asked what you had."