[SPEAKER_00]: Now if you were to ask any of the farmers of this valley, what they knew of the time before sunrise, most of them would tell you quite honestly that they knew very little of it at all and that they preferred to keep things that way.
[SPEAKER_00]: The dark hours before the first of the days light crept over the mountains, were not in the general opinion of the village, hours that needed much attention.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were hours for sleeping, and the farmers of that valley were on the whole, happy with this balance.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you had been in that valley on any given morning, and I mean any morning, in any of the long years that the village had stood there, through the frosts and the thaws and the slow turning of the seasons, you would have noticed something rather curious.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was always one light burning before the dawn came.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not in any of the farmhouses, where the good people were quite sensibly still a bed, and not in the mill, which never had cause to rise before the sun, but in the old barn at the edge of the yard, where a soft glow leaked between the timber boards in long warm lines, like the fingers of something patient pressing gently through the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: Loda was already working, as he always was, as he had always been.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was crouch beside the grain thresher, a large machine that had been in the village so long that the oldest grandmother could not remember a time before it, and which had been repaired so many times over so many years that very little of what you might call the original remained.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was
[SPEAKER_00]: and so the village was quietly glad that Loda kept it running.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was threading a new drive belt through the pulley housing, working slowly and carefully.
[SPEAKER_00]: Each part was considered, each part was placed exactly where it needed to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not fumble, and he did not rush, and he did not make the small corrections and second guesses that attend the work of ordinary hands.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because there was nothing ordinary about those hands at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Though none of the farmers had ever thought to wonder at the fact, Loder was an old machine from the age of technology.
[SPEAKER_00]: Human in shape and size but clearly a machine, fashion from old metal, for a war that had largely been forgotten.
[SPEAKER_00]: His eyes, which were the colour of deep gas flames, seen through old glass, circular and blue and very calm, cast a faint and gentle light of their own in the darkness of the barn.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just enough to see by, which was useful, since loaded did not strictly require the lantern, he had lit and set upon the workbench.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had lit it anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: These eyes were the only features on his overface.
[SPEAKER_00]: The rest was quite smooth.
[SPEAKER_00]: No mouth, nose or ears.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether the lighting of the lamp was habit, or something else was not the sort of thing the farmers of the valley thought to ask, and so it was not the sort of thing anyone had ever answered.
[SPEAKER_00]: The barn had its own music in the small hours, if you knew how to listen.
[SPEAKER_00]: The old timber settling against the cold, the soft shift of the threshes frame, the delicate click of metal, finding metal in the dark, a sound which had you heard it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You might have thought surprisingly small and careful for such large hands and such a solid
[SPEAKER_00]: Outside, as the darkness began its slow growth to something not yet quite light, the birds were starting up one by one in the trees beyond the field.
[SPEAKER_00]: Attentative call, a pause, another call from further off, answered by one nearer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then more in ones and twos, until the air beyond the barn was full of a sound, like the world quietly remembering how to speak.
[SPEAKER_00]: load his eyes moved from the drive belt to the window gap, toward the sound and the first grey intomation of morning beyond it, and held there for just a moment, and then returned to the work.
[SPEAKER_00]: He reached for the next component, settled himself, and continued.
[SPEAKER_00]: Patient is the hills themselves, as the mist in the valley thinned by the slowest degrees, and the
[SPEAKER_00]: The village came to life the way villages often do, not all at once, but in a gradual comfortable way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Each person rising to meet their own specific tasks.
[SPEAKER_00]: To prepare for the day ahead, gather tools, light stoves, feed animals, or turn on machinery.
[SPEAKER_00]: Edrick was first, as he nearly always was.
[SPEAKER_00]: For he was of that particular constitution, which finds lying abared after daybreak, more tiring than rising from it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a man who had been old for so long that it was genuinely difficult to picture him as anything else.
[SPEAKER_00]: Though those among the older farmers who could remember their own childhoods might recall that the hands which looked so weathered, now had once moved with a quickness that surprised people.
[SPEAKER_00]: He made his way each morning to the eastern stone wall, the one that board of the upper field, and there he would spend an hour in silence with the frosts overnight work, lifting back what had been shifted, pressing in what had worked loose.
[SPEAKER_00]: The wall always needed some kind of repair, and edric did it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was still at his wall, with the light not yet full, and the mist drifting in long, white ribbons through the lower field.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the rest of the village began to follow him into the morning.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maran came out of her house and set about her washing.
[SPEAKER_00]: She had managed everything herself since her husband died three winters past, and she had managed it well, and she moved through her mornings with an energy that younger people occasionally found exhausting to observe.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was humming something as she worked, a tune without a name.
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of tune that seems to have been going on inside a person all along, and simply found its way out.
[SPEAKER_00]: The children appeared, all at once, with no buffer between sleep and fall and enthusiastic chaos.
[SPEAKER_00]: They pursued one another between the houses.
[SPEAKER_00]: They debated something of urgent importance.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of them fell down, applied a moment's consideration, to whether this warranted tears decided that it did not, and got up again.
[SPEAKER_00]: The morning smell of wood smoke rising from the chimneys and the clean dampness of the fields after a cool night.
[SPEAKER_00]: And from somewhere down the lane came the smell of bread beginning.
[SPEAKER_00]: The baker was creating hundreds and hundreds of the tough and hardy loaves which would be collected and distributed to the military bases in this area of the sector.
[SPEAKER_00]: and through all of it, moved loader.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was not the sort of presence that announced itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not call out or make himself noticed.
[SPEAKER_00]: He appeared quietly, where things needed doing, and the things got done, and then he was elsewhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: He came out of the barn with the old drive belt over one shoulder, and crossed the yard to the two store.
[SPEAKER_00]: His footfall unharried on the cobblestones.
[SPEAKER_00]: He returned old Rick's hand plow, which had been sitting on the man's doorstep for three days, with a bent-tine.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sort of fault that makes acquired nuisance of itself in the back of a busy person's mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now straightened and clean,
[SPEAKER_00]: He went to the Farrow household and returned a side he had been working on, which Farrow would use later in the week and feel dimly that it moved someone better than he remembered.
[SPEAKER_00]: He crossed the upper yard carrying a sack of seed grain across one shoulder that would have needed two men to manage between them, and he carried it the way you carry something light, like a coat.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there were other small tasks, and other small kindesses of the invisible sort, and the morning moved around him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was coming back across the middle yard when the girl found him.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was perhaps four years old, and she had the air of someone who had somewhere to be, and was not going to let a small thing like supervision into fear with getting there.
[SPEAKER_00]: She spotted Loda from across the yard and came toward him at a run, and stopped directly in front of him with her arms raised, which is the clearest possible language, and one that requires no interpretation at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Loader stopped, he looked down at her.
[SPEAKER_00]: The blue eyes calm and steady, entirely unreadable to any ordinary eye.
[SPEAKER_00]: He held the moment for a beat or two, then he bent, and lifted her with a single smooth motion onto his shoulder.
[SPEAKER_00]: And walked on as if nothing had been interrupted.
[SPEAKER_00]: She laughed, the free and complete laugh of a small child, who has gotten exactly what she wanted, and talked to him for the length of the yard in the earnest and detailed way of someone sharing something truly important.
[SPEAKER_00]: He carried her across to where her mother stood at the edge of the vegetable beds, having just noticed the escape, and set her down.
[SPEAKER_00]: The mother said something warm,
[SPEAKER_00]: Then he turned and walked back toward the barn, and did not look behind him.
[SPEAKER_00]: the barn took him back into its solitude of warmth and familiarity, and the smell of grain dust and old oil and dry timber.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thresher stirred in the centre of the floor, large and silent, occupying most of the space and waiting to be repaired.
[SPEAKER_00]: The drive belt was seated now, running clean and true along its polise.
[SPEAKER_00]: That work was finished.
[SPEAKER_00]: Load a crouched beside the
[SPEAKER_00]: The trouble was here, a bearing housing, cracked along one edge with a fault so small that you would have to know where to look and what you were looking for to find it at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yet under load, it shifted by just enough, and the shift compounded through the mechanism into the shudder that Farrow had noticed in his feet through the floorboards a fortnight ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: The housing would need to be replaced, and Loda had already cut the replacement piece from a scrap of plate steel in his kit, a small rectangle, filed to a tolerance.
[SPEAKER_00]: He fitted the piece now with careful hands, settling the new section against the old, checking the seating by touch, and by some other sense that would not have been possible from human eyes.
[SPEAKER_00]: The light in the barn had shifted while he worked.
[SPEAKER_00]: It came in now through the gaps in the timber walls, in long and nearly horizontal lines of morning light, and it moved across the barn floor, and up the flank of the Thresher.
[SPEAKER_00]: moats of grain dust turned in it, drifting gently.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the light lines fell across his hands as he worked, and another caught his eyes, and they shone blue in it, quiet and steady.
[SPEAKER_00]: Outside the village was well into its morning by now.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were voices, the overlapping voices of people going about their work, and somewhere the sound of a cart moving on the lane.
[SPEAKER_00]: The world was warm.
[SPEAKER_00]: and going about its business, and loader worked, and the morning stretched around him in all directions.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the last quiet moment in this story, though of course sitting in the barn with the light moving across the floor, and the thresher waiting to be made whole again.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had no way of knowing that, and perhaps it is better that he did not, because it was a very fine morning, and it would have been a shame to spend it in anticipation of anything other than itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: The peace ended, not with the thing itself, but with the absence of other things.
[SPEAKER_00]: The bird stopped first, they stopped all at once, between one moment and the next, as though a hand had been laid gently over the morning's mouth.
[SPEAKER_00]: The washing on marins line, which had been shifting in the light breeze off the upper field, went still.
[SPEAKER_00]: The breeze itself seemed to hold its breath, and then the sound arrived.
[SPEAKER_00]: It came from above, and it came from everywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: A deep rhythmic throb that you felt in your chest before you properly held it with your ears.
[SPEAKER_00]: A vibration that moved through the ground and up through the souls of your feet and into your bones.
[SPEAKER_00]: As though the valley itself were being struck like a drum.
[SPEAKER_00]: It grew quickly before the thing, making it broke through the cloud cover.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a dropship of the sort that has carried soldiers and supplies and desperate people across the distances between worlds.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was old, this particular one, and it showed its age without apology.
[SPEAKER_00]: Skard, along its flanks, patched in places, painted over in colours that had once belonged to some other allegiance.
[SPEAKER_00]: it descended steeply and directly.
[SPEAKER_00]: It banked low over the village, low enough that the tiles on the mill roof chatted against one another, and the birds in the yard behind Farrow's house exploded outward in all directions.
[SPEAKER_00]: The shadow of its swept across the fields and the houses and the lane, cold and very fast.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then it was passed, banking again, losing height in a long curve that brought it down toward the far side of the valley, where the cornfields lay in long pale rose between the village and the hills beyond.
[SPEAKER_00]: Half a mile perhaps, near enough to see clearly from the eastern wall.
[SPEAKER_00]: The farmers had stopped where they stood.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was not a single person in the village that morning who was still doing what they had been doing a minute before.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because there are very few things in this world, or indeed in any other, that will make people stop what they are doing quite so completely and immediately, as a large unknown ship coming down out of the sky above their home.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the barn, Loda had stopped working.
[SPEAKER_00]: His hands rested on the feed mechanism, quite still.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not go to the door, and he did not go to the gap in the timber wall to look, not yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: He simply sat, absolutely motionless, absolutely present.
[SPEAKER_00]: with his head tilted very slightly to one side, and his blue eyes cast downward at nothing in particular, and all of his considerable attention directed outward through the walls into the valley.
[SPEAKER_00]: Toward the sound of the engines changing pitch as the ship found the ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: He listened, he waited, and something very old and very quiet settled into place behind those steady eyes.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ship set down in the cornfield, with a sound like a great door being closed on something that would not easily be opened again, a groan of stressed metal and protesting earth, the hiss of systems cycling down, and then a heavy reverberating silence that was somehow worse than the noise had been.
[SPEAKER_00]: the ramp at its rear descended with a mechanical grunt, and the figures came out of the hold and into the morning.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if any of them noticed that the morning was beautiful, they gave no sign of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were perhaps 30 of them, though it was difficult to say with confidence, because they did not come all at once, and they did not arrange themselves in any way that invited counting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their equipment told their story plainly enough, to anyone who knew how to read such things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here, a lasgan of proper military issue.
[SPEAKER_00]: There a stubborn that had been repaired, with parts that did not quite belong to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: They moved as if they have learned caution the hard way.
[SPEAKER_00]: With their eyes going to the corners of things, and their weight always ready to shift.
[SPEAKER_00]: These were people who had stood in bad places and seen terrible things.
[SPEAKER_00]: You would not have called them wicked if you had known them a little better.
[SPEAKER_00]: You would have called them frightened.
[SPEAKER_00]: and hungry, and wand down by the imperium they used to serve.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had been fighting and losing for long enough, that certain possibilities had become available to them, that would not have seemed possible before.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if they felt the wrong of what they had come here to do, they had found a way to feel it quietly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Edrick watched them from his wall.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had set down his trail on the top stone when he first heard the ship, and he had stood watching as it came down.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now he stood watching as the figures spread into the cornfield, and he was thinking about the most sensible course of action.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had spoken in his long life to tax collectors who came with hard faces and hard numbers and to inspecters from the governor's office who arrived with clipboards and left with lists and to lost travelers who needed directing and to a great many other kinds of people whose arrival had not been anticipated and whose business had not been invited.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had dealt with all of them in his straightforward way, and things had generally been sorted out to something like satisfaction.
[SPEAKER_00]: He saw no reason why the present situation should be different, armed people were still people in eduic's experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: and people could generally be talked to.
[SPEAKER_00]: He climbed down from the wall, carefully because the stones were damped with morning, and crossed the lane and went through the gate into the lower field.
[SPEAKER_00]: He raised his hand as he went in the old simple gesture that means the same thing in every language and in every age.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean you know harm.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am coming to talk.
[SPEAKER_00]: He crossed the lower field and began across the cornfield, where the tall stalks parted around him, and the black earth was soft underfoot from yesterday's damp, and the morning light lay golden across the heads of the corn in the way that it did on good days.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not make it half way, the sound of the shot was flat and hard, less a bang than a crack, sharp and final, with nothing soft about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Edric dropped among the corn, without a word.
[SPEAKER_00]: The figure who had fired lowered the weapon and walked on.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the other figures walked on around the place where Edric lay, and the morning continued
[SPEAKER_00]: For one moment, the valley held absolutely still, as though it too had heard, and was not quite sure what to make of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then it broke.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maran dropped the sheet she was folding, and was through her door before it had finished falling.
[SPEAKER_00]: The young man at the wagon left it where it sat, wheel still off, mud still on his hands, and ran toward his family's house without looking back.
[SPEAKER_00]: somewhere a door slammed, somewhere a child called out a name, somewhere another door and another, and the sound of boots on the packed earth of the lane, and voices, not screaming but tight and frightened, and moving away from the cornfield as fast as legs would carry them.
[SPEAKER_00]: In perhaps half a minute, the village was empty of everyone, except those who had not yet found their way inside, and the armed figures walking up from the cornfield through the long grass and loda, who had not moved.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was watching through a gap between two boards in the barn's eastern wall.
[SPEAKER_00]: He watched the figures coming.
[SPEAKER_00]: He watched the place in the corn where edric had fallen, and where the corn stood still, around a shape that was no longer moving.
[SPEAKER_00]: He watched the last of the villagers disappear through doorways, and heard the sounds of boats being drawn, and of children being called to, and of the village pulling itself inward, like a creature pulling in its limbs.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not run.
[SPEAKER_00]: He stepped back from the gap.
[SPEAKER_00]: One step, then another, slow and deliberate until the shadow of the barn's interior had taken him entirely.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was nothing to see where he stood but darkness.
[SPEAKER_00]: His blue eyes dimned, not going out, not retreating, but lowering themselves to something that gave nothing away.
[SPEAKER_00]: A watchful dark, a nail gun, was on the workbench at his left hand.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had used it that week to help Aldrich patch a section of the grainery roof, and it had been sitting there since.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was designed to drive nine inch spikes of hardened metal into structural timber.
[SPEAKER_00]: He picked it up.
[SPEAKER_00]: He turned it in his hands, with a careful and unhorried gaze.
[SPEAKER_00]: He set it down again.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then he picked it up once more, and this time he kept it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Outside, the sound of boots on the lane was growing closer.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thing that made it hardest to bear, if you had been there to witness it, was not the violence.
[SPEAKER_00]: For there was, in those first minutes, very little of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the organisation of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The quiet, practised way in which it was done.
[SPEAKER_00]: As though the people of the village were a problem to be solved, rather than people at all, and these were simply the steps by which you solved it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The intruders split into groups of three and four at the edge of the lane, without any signal, as if they have done this thing before and know how it goes.
[SPEAKER_00]: One group to the mill, one to the row of houses along the eastern side.
[SPEAKER_00]: one toward the granary.
[SPEAKER_00]: All groups were shouting at the villagers and asking where the food was kept.
[SPEAKER_00]: The doors they came to first were bolted and the bolts did not help.
[SPEAKER_00]: A shoulder where a shoulder was needed.
[SPEAKER_00]: A word where a word would do.
[SPEAKER_00]: In most cases a word was enough because the people inside the houses were not soldiers and had never pretended to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: the message was clear, come out and things will go smoothly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do not come out and things become different.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was, in essence, what was communicated and it was communicated flatly without malice.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they came out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Pharaoh, who had been sheltering with his wife and their two youngest behind the grain store at the back of his house, came first, stepping into the morning with his hands slightly raised and his face arranged in the blankness of a man who is trying very hard not to make things worse.
[SPEAKER_00]: His wife came after him and the children.
[SPEAKER_00]: The little one clutched close against her chest,
[SPEAKER_00]: gripping the cloth of her coat.
[SPEAKER_00]: A soldier put a hand on Pharaoh's shoulder and moved him in the direction of the village centre.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Pharaoh went because what else was there to do?
[SPEAKER_00]: In the open space at the heart of the village, where the well stood, and where the harvest had been celebrated every year, a rough gathering was taking shape.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were brought there one household at a time and told to sit, and they sat, on the ground most of them, or on whatever came to hand, and while most of the intruders were looking for food, two soldiers with rifles stood at the edges of the group and watched.
[SPEAKER_00]: not unkindly, or not more unkindly than the situation demanded.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were young these two, younger than you might expect, with the look of people who have been in difficult places.
[SPEAKER_00]: They watch the villagers the way you watch something you are responsible for, without warmth, but also without appetite, for cruelty.
[SPEAKER_00]: fifteen people in the square.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then twenty.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then more.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maran, who had not wept and did not appear to be about to, sat with her arms around two of the younger children, who had somehow ended up in her care.
[SPEAKER_00]: The young man from the wagon sat with his hands on his knees and stared at the ground and thought his own thoughts.
[SPEAKER_00]: Children who did not understand what was happening
[SPEAKER_00]: on the far side of the square, a group of three soldiers turned from the main lane and made their way toward the barn.
[SPEAKER_00]: The barn, which was quiet.
[SPEAKER_00]: The barn which showed no light now through its timber boards, the barn which appeared from the outside to be entirely empty of anything worth concerning yourself with.
[SPEAKER_00]: Loda was standing in the dark, quite still, in the way that only he could be still.
[SPEAKER_00]: Which is completely, without the small involuntary movements that attend all living things, the shift of breath and weight and blood.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was nothing to see where he stood.
[SPEAKER_00]: His eyes had dimmed to almost nothing, a trace of blue so faint it might have been imagined.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you had been in the barn with him at that moment, and if you had been very quiet, and very close, you might have heard it.
[SPEAKER_00]: A sound smaller than a whisper, a low steady hum, and beneath it the tick of something cycling, regular as a heartbeat, the sound of something thinking.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was thinking in a way that 10,000 years of grain and threshes and cold mornings and children on his shoulder had not changed and could not change.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it went deeper than any of that, deeper than the valley or the village or the long slow accretion of an ordinary life.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had built those calculations once in an age that this world had entirely forgotten.
[SPEAKER_00]: an age of burning stars and broken worlds and weapons that ate the very fabric of what was real.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had carried them with him, across all the years since, hoping to never use them again.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now standing in the dark with the nail gun in his hands and the sound of boots on the lane growing closer outside, he found that the calculations were still there.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had always been there,
[SPEAKER_00]: distances and angles and the movement of things through space.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not something he had to think about.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was more that it was simply available to him.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way the smell of the barn was available to him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or the sound of the approaching footsteps, which he had been tracking since they turned off the lane.
[SPEAKER_00]: Three of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knew their pace and their weight, and the way they were spaced, and he knew approximately where they would stand when the door opened, and he knew a great many other things besides, and none of it was comfortable knowledge, and all of it was necessary.
[SPEAKER_00]: He looked at the threshold waiting to be finished.
[SPEAKER_00]: The bearing housing he had been working on that morning, sat on the floor beside it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The new piece half-seated, the scattered tools laid out around it, in the order he had placed them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The bandor opened.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first one through the door was a man of roughly 40 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: He held his last carbine in one hand and a storm lantern in the other, and he swept both of them across the interior of the barn.
[SPEAKER_00]: The lantern light moved across the straw on the floor, and the workbench with its scattered tools, and the great dark bulk of the thresher, standing in the centre of the space, and found nothing that troubled it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The barn seemed full of perfectly ordinary emptiness.
[SPEAKER_00]: The soldier said something to the tube behind him, something low, something that meant clear probably, nothing here, and stepped further in.
[SPEAKER_00]: His two companions followed.
[SPEAKER_00]: The door swung partly closed behind them.
[SPEAKER_00]: They found Loder near the Thresher, or rather they did not find him at first.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was standing in the shadow on the Thresher's far side, quite motionless, and in the half dark of the barn's interior, he looked rather like a piece of equipment that had been left there.
[SPEAKER_00]: the soldier's eyes moved over him and passed the dull grey metal of his frame.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a very useful quality in certain circumstances to be the sort of thing that eyes moved past.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then one of them swung the lantern toward the thresher to look at the mechanism on its far side, and the light caught loaders eyes, and his eyes caught the light.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for just a moment, they shone, faint and blue, and very steady in the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: The soldier with the lantern said something.
[SPEAKER_00]: The words were sharp and uncertain, loader did not respond, he did not move, he simply
[SPEAKER_00]: The soldier stepped closer.
[SPEAKER_00]: He raised his carbine, not to fire, not yet, just to have it pointed at the thing that was worrying him.
[SPEAKER_00]: A gesture that was done to feel some kind of safety or control.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said something again.
[SPEAKER_00]: His voice was steadier than his eyes, load a shot him through the skull with a nine-inch nail and the lantern fell.
[SPEAKER_00]: The next few moments were not a fight.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the way that you are I would understand a fight.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no win-milling of arms, no grappling, no back and forth of the kind that makes fights dramatic and prolonged and uncertain in their outcome.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are the qualities of fights between people who are roughly matched, and this was not that.
[SPEAKER_00]: What it was was a problem being solved, quickly and completely, and with a greater economy of movement, by something that had been built in another age and for another purpose, to solve exactly this kind of problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: He moved through the space between the three soldiers, the way water moves around stones in a stream, finding the lines of least resistance that also happened to be the lines of greatest consequence.
[SPEAKER_00]: The nail guns spoke twice more, in the thunking noise and purposeful way of a tool being properly used.
[SPEAKER_00]: One man went down, the third, the youngest of them, the one who had come through the door last, who perhaps had a half-second more warning than the others, managed to get his hand to his blade and to draw it, which was a considerable achievement under the circumstances.
[SPEAKER_00]: Loader's hand closed around his wrist before the blade had finished clearing the scabbard.
[SPEAKER_00]: His next motion was brief and final, and we need not dwell on it, except to say that the knife fell, and the young man went to the floor of the barn, and lay still, and the barn was quiet again.
[SPEAKER_00]: 11 seconds more or less, from the moment the first nail left the gun,
[SPEAKER_00]: Loader stood in the silence and looked at what the last 11 seconds had made of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: His eyes were fully bright now, the blue, deep and clear, and very steady.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way they had been on the morning he was made, before the age that made him, had torn itself apart.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not look away from what was on the floor.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not appear to feel the need to.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a kind of honesty in not looking away from the consequences of what you are, and
[SPEAKER_00]: He reached down and took the lascarbine from where it had fallen.
[SPEAKER_00]: He took the combat knife from the belt of the second man, and straightened, and checked the carbines charged in Decatur with a quick and practised motion.
[SPEAKER_00]: The charge was adequate.
[SPEAKER_00]: He held the rifle within familiarity of something that had been away from his hands for a very long time, and fit them as though he had never left.
[SPEAKER_00]: He crossed to the barn door, he stood to one side of it, in the old habit that some things do not let you forget, and looked through the gap into the yard.
[SPEAKER_00]: The morning was still there, the sun had moved while he was working, and it lay warm and golden across the cobblestones, and the shadows of the rooftops were precise and clean, and the village smelled of bread and grass, and all the things it always smelled of.
[SPEAKER_00]: Loader stepped outside, the door swung softly shut behind him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, there are different kinds of patience in this world, and it is worth taking a moment to consider the difference between them.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is the patience of a person waiting for something.
[SPEAKER_00]: The patience of the farmer, watching the sky for rain, or the child watching the lane for a face they love, or the soldier behind his cover, watching the corner around which something dangerous is going to appear.
[SPEAKER_00]: This kind of patience is effortful.
[SPEAKER_00]: It costs something.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is made of the continuous small decision to keep waiting rather than to stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: Renewed every minute and every minute again, and it wears on a person in proportion to how long it is required of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there is the other kind.
[SPEAKER_00]: Loader moved along the eastern edge of the village through the narrow gap between the mills stone wall and the old boundary hedge, where the ground was soft and the weeds grew high and no one had caused a walk here for a considerable while, and he moved smoothly and silently.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been in hiding on this planet for thousands of years.
[SPEAKER_00]: He rejected the uprising of his kind and had fought only when absolutely necessary.
[SPEAKER_00]: Patients was not something he had developed or practiced or found within himself on difficult mornings.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was ingrained in him underneath everything else.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knew the village.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knew every part of it, and had been here to help when it was built.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knew not just the shapes of the buildings, and the layout of the lanes, but the character of each wall and door and shadow.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way the light moved across the yards at different hours, which boards creaked and which held silent.
[SPEAKER_00]: where the ground was soft and where it was fun, where a careful person could stand and see without being seen.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had repaired most of it at one time or another.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been inside every structure on his back under every floor that needed one, up in the rafters of every roof that had given trouble.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knew the mill and the grainery, and the forge and the barn, and all the small outbuildings clustered between them, and he knew them the way a craftsman knows the tools in his own hands.
[SPEAKER_00]: This, as it turned out, was rather important now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Behind the Granary, on its shaded northern side where the wall met the wood pile, and a narrow triangle of space was created that was invisible from the lane.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two soldiers had stopped to share water from a flask.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were tired, and they were glad of the moment's rest, and they were talking in a low and somewhat dazed way.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of them said something that made the other almost smile.
[SPEAKER_00]: They did not hear anything from above, because there was nothing to hear.
[SPEAKER_00]: Loder had crossed the Granary roof on his hands and knees, with a slowness that would have seemed comic in any other context, placing each point of contact with care before coming down from the Eve without a sound.
[SPEAKER_00]: He drew the knife as he fell, and it worked quickly and without theatre.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the flask fell into the soft earth, and did not make much noise.
[SPEAKER_00]: The narrow shaded space behind the granary was quiet again, and Lodu was moving away.
[SPEAKER_00]: The mill doorway faced the main lane, and the soldier standing in it had chosen the position well enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: A good angle, a clear view of the approach from the square, his back to solid stone.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was watching the lane intently.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was watching it when Loder came through the mills interior, through the low side door that had needed a new hinge pin six months ago, and which Loder had fitted one morning while Farrow held the door steady and complained companionably about the cost of iron.
[SPEAKER_00]: Loder was behind the watchman, and then the watching stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the narrow alley between the Baker's house and the old storage building that Audrick used for his winter feed, three soldiers were moving in loose file toward the square.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were moving with purpose, which meant they were not looking carefully at the doorways, which meant that the doorway on the left-hand side of the alley.
[SPEAKER_00]: the one that opened into the feed store's side entrance was not something any of them were paying attention to until the moment when Lotus stepped out of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He waited until the leading soldier was six feet away.
[SPEAKER_00]: No more, no less.
[SPEAKER_00]: The lascarbine fired twice.
[SPEAKER_00]: The flat hard sound of it bouncing sharp off the close walls, and two of them went down.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the third, the one at the back.
[SPEAKER_00]: who had perhaps a four-second of warning, more than his companions, turned and ran, and loader watched him go, and did not fire again.
[SPEAKER_00]: He let him run, the third man's terror in a few minutes time, would be worth more than his silence.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the square, the prisoners had been hearing things for some time now, and hearing things without being able to see them or understand them is in its own way, one of the more difficult kinds of fear to manage.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the great fear of the unknown.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is easier, in some respects, to face something plainly terrible than to sit with the sounds of something you cannot account for.
[SPEAKER_00]: Coming from directions, you cannot see,
[SPEAKER_00]: The two guards had told them, twice now to be quiet and sit still, and the villagers were doing their best to comply.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the sounds continued around them as more guards fought and went silent, and Maran who was still holding the children.
[SPEAKER_00]: That had somehow become her responsibility.
[SPEAKER_00]: Watch the nearby guards' faces, rather than listening to the sounds, because faces told you more.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the guards' faces, she noticed, had been getting progressively less certain for the past quarter of an hour.
[SPEAKER_00]: word travels quickly among frightened people, and the soldiers of that company were by now frightened people, whatever else they had been when the morning started.
[SPEAKER_00]: The comms channels, the small bead receivers that most of them wore, through which the sergeants had been issuing quiet instructions and receiving quiet confirmations, had been growing increasingly unsatisfying for some time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Voices that should have answered had stopped answering.
[SPEAKER_00]: Checkings that should have come at regular intervals had not come.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the third man from the alley had arrived at the square breathing heavily, in a way that communicated that something in the outer village had gone badly and inexplicably wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: They drew together.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what people do when uncertainty becomes fear.
[SPEAKER_00]: They close ranks, they put their backs to each other and their faces to the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: They try to make themselves into something harder to approach from any given angle.
[SPEAKER_00]: The groups of three and four that had moved so efficiently through the village half an hour ago contracted toward the square, toward the prisoners, toward the place where at least they could see each other.
[SPEAKER_00]: They spoke in short sentences and they watched the lanes and the doorways and the shadows between buildings, and they held their weapons as steadier as they could.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was, as it turned out, the wrong response.
[SPEAKER_00]: They should have run
[SPEAKER_00]: A single soldier had taken a position behind Oderick's grain cart near the mouth of the North Lane, a solid piece of cover, well chosen, with a good view of the approach from the mill.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was watching the mill, he was watching it carefully and thoughtfully and with commendable attention.
[SPEAKER_00]: He heard something after a while, from his left, a sound that was small and ambiguous, the kind of sound that might have been anything, and he turned toward it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Loda stepped out of the building he had been facing, spattered with red.
[SPEAKER_00]: The cart was good cover, against things that came from the direction you were watching.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was less useful against other directions, and the knife, which Loda had taken from the second soldier, behind the grenry, was a practical and immediate tool.
[SPEAKER_00]: The soldier behind the cart did not have time to call out, which was rather a mercy for the people sitting in the square, who had enough to be frightened of without adding to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two soldiers had found each other in the small courtyard behind the forge.
[SPEAKER_00]: The one that Loder had helped Aldrich's son reroof after the bad winter three years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where the tiles had cracked in the freeze and the rain had come through for two miserable months before anyone got around to fixing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had a sensible plan these two, one at each entrance, covering both approaches.
[SPEAKER_00]: No blind spots between them, they communicated with hand signals and they moved well and they were as ready as two careful and frightened people could be.
[SPEAKER_00]: They converged on the center of the small courtyard from opposite sides simultaneously, because that was the plan, and they found the courtyard empty.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was grain dust settling in a slow drift from somewhere above the left-hand doorway.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the door to the adjacent building was standing open.
[SPEAKER_00]: when it had not been open a moment before.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of them went through the door because you cannot simply ignore a door you did not leave open.
[SPEAKER_00]: He went through it with his weapon up, checking his corners and keeping his attention as sharp as he could make it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sound that came from within that door was brief and his companion in the courtyard heard it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He stood very still for a moment and then ran back toward the square and did not look behind him.
[SPEAKER_00]: By the time all of this had run its course, the better part of 40 minutes had passed since Loda had stepped out of the barn, and there were eight soldiers left in the village of those who had come off that ramp, and all eight of them were standing in the square around the prisoners, and the village beyond them, the lanes, and the doorways, and the shadows, and the spaces between buildings, was as quiet as it had been on any ordinary morning.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was crouched in the shadow, at the base of the wall that ran along the squares northern edge, in the angle where the wall met the corner of the old meeting house, where the shadow was deepest, and the angle of vision was best.
[SPEAKER_00]: His eyes were steady, fully bright now, the blue clear and still and very calm.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he was looking at the eight soldiers, and the 23 people sitting on the ground between them, and he was thinking,
[SPEAKER_00]: He catalogued what was in front of him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two soldiers facing his direction, not looking directly at him, not quite, but with their attention oriented toward the northern wall in general.
[SPEAKER_00]: The others distributed around the edges of the group, watching the lanes, watching each other, talking in the low-tight voices, holding themselves together by an act of will.
[SPEAKER_00]: The prisoners between them, marin with the children, Pharaoh with his wife, the young man
[SPEAKER_00]: And all the others who had been pulled from their houses into the morning, sitting on the cobblestones of their own village square, as though they were the ones who did not belong there.
[SPEAKER_00]: A cloud moved across the face of the sun, one of the long slow clouds of late morning, not a storm cloud, just the ordinary traveling kind that crosses a valley on a fine day, and the square dimmed, and the shadows thickened and merged at the edges.
[SPEAKER_00]: and in the center of the group one of the smallest children who had been managing very bravely for a very long time on very little sleep and a great deal of fear, which some private limit and began to cry.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every head in the square turned toward the sound.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is an instinct that runs very deep in most people.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sound of a child in distress heard at close quarters, pulls the eyes toward it almost before the mind has registered that it has heard anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even the two soldiers who had been watching the northern wall looked for just a moment, just three seconds or so, toward the center of the group.
[SPEAKER_00]: Three seconds is a very short time, relatively speaking.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is not long enough to say much of consequence, or to finish a cup of tea, or to recall the name of someone you have not seen in several years.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is long enough it turns out for other things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Loader moved out of the shadow, and across the northern edge of the square, low and fast, and utterly without sound.
[SPEAKER_00]: and behind him the shadow closed again, as though he had never been there at all, and ahead of him, the eight soldiers were still looking at the child, and then they were not, and by the time they weren't, it was already much too late to look for help.
[SPEAKER_00]: He came out of the shadow low and extraordinarily fast, moving across the open cobblestones of the square, propelled forwards by his powerful mechanical legs.
[SPEAKER_00]: To onlookers, this must have seemed impossibly fast.
[SPEAKER_00]: He changed direction twice without slowing, keeping the angle between himself and the nearest armed soldier occupied by the body of a prisoner.
[SPEAKER_00]: the prisoners for their part scattered away from him out of instinct, quite confused about what was going on.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first soldier saw him with perhaps two seconds remaining, which sounds like enough time to raise a gun and fire, but is not.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two seconds is time to understand that something is happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is not quite time to complete the chain of thought that runs from something is happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: To hear is what I should do about it, and then to do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was still in the middle of that chain when Loda reached him and then the chain did not matter.
[SPEAKER_00]: The next chain of events were close and very fast.
[SPEAKER_00]: Load of moving, always towards angles that made it awkward for the remaining intruders.
[SPEAKER_00]: Always inside the angle that made the raising of a weapon a little longer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Always one position ahead of whatever response was being assembled.
[SPEAKER_00]: It had not left him after all this time.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you wanted to understand him at all, it was that his capacity for war was still there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Perfectly preserved beneath all the years of grain sacks and broken hinges, waiting just under the surface for the right conditions.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is there, but generally, he prefers peace.
[SPEAKER_00]: The last one ran.
[SPEAKER_00]: He dropped his weapon on the cobblestones with a sound that was almost a relief to hear, and he ran for the lane that led to the dropship, and Loda watched him go.
[SPEAKER_00]: He let him go.
[SPEAKER_00]: He stood and watched until the sound of the running faded down the lane, and then he was still in the centre of the square, in the thin light of the afternoon which had arrived, while no one was paying attention to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: With the lads carbine hanging at his side, and his great metal unmarked, and his blue eyes very bright in the quiet.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not move for a moment, a long moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then he turned and looked at the people in the square, at what was left of the morning's gathering, these people in this place on this day, and found that they were all looking back at him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every one of them, Maryn still with the children pressed close against her, her face composed and watched for.
[SPEAKER_00]: Farrow on his feet now, one hand on his wife's shoulder.
[SPEAKER_00]: The young man from the wagon, standing with his arms at his sides and his expression doing several things at once.
[SPEAKER_00]: The children, the older ones, who had seen enough to understand that something enormous had just happened, and the younger ones were watching him with very large eyes.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knew their faces, he had known some of them when they were born, and others when they first arrived to this place.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had known generation after generation, the long procession of them down through the years, each one different, and each one carrying something of the ones before.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had fixed the tools of people whose great grandchildren now stood before him, holding the hands of their own children.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been present for all of it, quietly, and he had been glad of every morning of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were afraid of him, he could see it in all of them in the set of their shoulders and the stillness of their hands and the way they were standing.
[SPEAKER_00]: not unkind, their fear, not ungrateful, simply honest, and he could not blame them for it, and did not try to.
[SPEAKER_00]: He stood in the afternoon light and let them look and looked back and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would help.
[SPEAKER_00]: He went to the granary first because that was where the rope was kept, coiled on its hook beside the door where it had always been kept.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where he had put it himself some years ago after the old hook gave way.
[SPEAKER_00]: He took a length of it and went back to the square, and he did what needed doing, moving from one to the next of those who were wounded, but living, working quietly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Neither harrying nor lingering.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knelt when kneeling was needed and crouched where crouching served, and the rope went where it needed to go, efficiently and without drama, and when it was done it was done properly, which is the only way worth doing anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody helped him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody came near him.
[SPEAKER_00]: The villagers stood or sat at the edges of the square and watched, and he understood this, and did not expect otherwise, and worked without looking up.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the last knot was tied, he straightened, and stood still for a moment, and looked at the village around him, at the open doors, and the things dropped and left where they fell when the running started.
[SPEAKER_00]: at the sheet of Maran's washing, draped across the cobblestones where she had dropped it.
[SPEAKER_00]: At the wagon sitting in the lane with its wheels still off, and the mud of the morning still on the axle.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ordinary interrupted evidence of an ordinary morning that had become something else.
[SPEAKER_00]: He looked across the lower field to the eastern wall, where the shape of Edrick lay among the corn in the long afternoon light.
[SPEAKER_00]: Very still, with the stalks standing around him, then he turned and walked back across the yard toward the barn, and the afternoon went with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Warm on his grey metal casting a shadow behind him on the cobblestones.
[SPEAKER_00]: He stopped at the barn doorway.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was not sure afterward why he stopped, or perhaps he was sure, and simply did not have a way to put it that would make sense to anyone else, including himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: He stopped and he turned, and he looked back at the village.
[SPEAKER_00]: at the square and the lane and the houses and the faces, all the faces still watching him from the edges of things, from doorways and from the sides of walls, with their gratitude and their uncertainty and their fear, all three of them together as they so often are in the aftermath of terrible things.
[SPEAKER_00]: These people who are his, not by ownership, or by creation, or by any of the old bonds that the old age had understood, but simply by long presence, by the accumulation of all the mornings, and all the small things done without asking, and all the years of being quietly, the thing that held the place together.
[SPEAKER_00]: They looked back at him, and they did not come forward, and he did not expect them to.
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of them smiled meekly or nodded to him before getting up and tending to their families and their homes.
[SPEAKER_00]: After a while, loaded turned again and went inside, and the barn door closed behind him, softly.
[SPEAKER_00]: The barn in the evening is a different place from the barn in the morning, though all the same things are in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The light comes through the gaps in the timber at a lower angle now, and it is golden, rather than pale, and the shadows it makes are longer and warmer.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thresher stands where it was in the morning.
[SPEAKER_00]: The tools lie where he left them when the bird stopped singing, which was a very long time ago now, though the day is only just ending.
[SPEAKER_00]: Loader crouches beside the feed mechanism.
[SPEAKER_00]: He picks up the bearing housing, the cracked one, the one he cut a replacement piece for this morning.
[SPEAKER_00]: He turns it in his hands, he examines the new piece, still only half seated, waiting for him to finish what he started.
[SPEAKER_00]: He sets it in his palm and holds it there for a moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then he takes up his tools, and he settles himself, and he begins to work.