Page 2 of Hard Home

Denny's chest was tight and he told himself it was the running.

"Sir. What does it cost?"

"Everything you put in." They had come to the mill-race, and Harding stopped, and in the starlight his face was perfectly ordinary. "The line was made of the old blood. It can only be mended with the same. You will give what you have to the ground, and the ground will take it, and it will not give it back. Whatever your gift was, it will be less. If you are generous, it will be nothing."

"For ever?"

"For ever is a long word. Yes. For ever." Harding drew his sword, and looked at it, and did not seem to be thinking of it at all. "I had a good gift once. I could find water anywhere in England — three hundred feet down, under chalk, in a drought. My father had it. My grandfather could bring it up. I have mended this line four times." He put his thumb against the flat of the blade. "I can find a bucket now, if the bucket is in the room."

Denny said nothing. There was nothing that would not have been an insult.

"Do not look tragic, Lieutenant. It is a trade, and I made it, and I would make it again, and there is a village behind us of four hundred souls who have never once thought about it and never shall." Harding's mouth moved in something that was not a smile. "That is rather the point of us."

---

The thing came down the brook at half past three.

Denny kept his eyes on the water, as he had been told, and so what he saw was this: the brook running black and ordinary, and then the brook runningbackward, a long clean reversal of every ripple for thirty yards, without sound, without spray, as though the water had remembered a different route and taken it. The cold that came with it was not weather. It went in at the ears.

Amberley's men were shouting somewhere behind it — genuinely shouting, panicked and loud, which Denny understood now had been the entire object of the order.

He did not look up. He heard Harding move past him into the water, and heard the water not splash, and heard, for rather a long time, nothing whatever. Then a sound like a held breath let go by something that had no chest, and a shock through the ground that Denny felt in his back teeth, and then the ordinary noise of a brook running the correct way, and a man breathing hard.

"Sir?"

"Here. Give me your arm — no, the left. Yes."

Harding's sleeve was wet and his face in the starlight had aged some years since the stile. He had gone into the brook with a sword and come out with a sword and there was not a mark upon him, and Denny understood that whatever had happened had not been fought with iron.

"Is it dead?"

"It is put back. It is not the same thing, and you will oblige me by not writing 'killed' in the return." Harding spat into the grass. "Now the line. Both of us. It is two hundred yards and I have not enough left for it alone."

---

They knelt at the ninth stake at a quarter to five, in the hour when the frost sets hardest, and Harding showed him whereto put his hands — flat on the cold ground, fingers spread, as though holding down a sheet of paper in a wind.

"It will not hurt," he said. "That is the difficulty. If it hurt, men would stop in time."

Denny gave what he had.

He could not afterwards describe it to anyone who had not done it, and he did not try. The nearest he came, years later and in drink, was this: that it was like listening to a piece of music one has known all one's life, and hearing it get quieter, and understanding after some while that it is not the music growing quieter but oneself moving away from it, and that one is not able to stop moving, and that the last of it goes not with any crash but the way a room goes silent when the last person in it stops speaking.

At the end of it he was lying on his side in the frozen grass with his cheek in the pale green, and the line was there again under his palm — thin, and cold, andthere— and he could feel it, which meant something of his gift remained.

Not much. He reached for it the way one reaches for a coin in an empty pocket.

"You gave more than you were asked," said Harding, from somewhere above him.

"Yes, sir."

"Everybody does, the first time." A hand under his arm, hauling. "Stand up. The men will be along and you will want to be standing."

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The orders came from Horse Guards nine days later, and Denny read them twice standing in the doorway of the officers' hut before he carried them in to the Captain.

Harding read them once.