Chapter Text
It is only quiet once they enter the vale.
Silence is such a stranger to her. With the kids and the dogs, and the call of the birds on the horizon, her world is never this quiet. Men ride by on horseback, military caravans going to and fro, and merchants pass in carriages on the riverside road, tipping their hats to the ones ferrying their cargo down the water. Silence is not something she is accustomed to, not in this life, but every once in a while, it appears. On cold mornings in the hills below Trost, before the land levels out into green plains and the city comes into view. In the dark of the night, when there is nothing but the moon overhead and the water below, their barge drifting on its way in the water, or else tied up somewhere they know they’ll be safe. On the back road by the innkeeper’s house on the first street inside Trost, where he’ll give them bread and ale and let them lock up for the night. Or else on the outskirts of Shiganshina, at the little outpost where the canal passes under the wall, where the Garrison stable their horses and the district captain’s daughter is a midwife, the one who held her hand when she birthed her first child in the cabin of this boat, the river rocking below them as her son came into the world.
That house is gone now. That outpost, that town. Shiganshina, she thinks, the name soft in her mind as she stares across the fields. Now it is only a place she once knew.
The silence comes so suddenly she is almost not sure what it is. The hairs on her skin stand up, and though she’s aware somewhere, in the back of her mind, that her arms must ache, that her feet are sore, and something within her is writhing, it is so quiet that for a moment, she keeps hearing the thunder. The footsteps. A sound that seems like it will never end, no matter how far away they sail. She’s aware first, of the blood dried on her arms— the tiniest flecks that landed on her, even from down the river. She’d always thought of the canal as a safe place. It comes then, the silence, when she glances up into the green width of the valley and realizes they are finally alone. No walls, no cities. Nothing chasing them on the horizon. A single boat on the water, headed upriver in search of sanctuary.
Even the valley is quiet. No birds, no deer. Not even anything passing, and that is the worst realization of all, as she comes to her senses for the first time in hours, the aches in her arms beginning to pang down her back, that no one is going the other way. No soldiers on horses riding with swords and rifles. She cannot say if she is surprised. She doesn’t know what they could do. What anyone could do. But slowly, she turns to look for the first time at the faces of the strangers seeking refuge on her family’s barge, and she wonders if this grim crew will be the first bearers of the news.
None of them look back at her. So is life on the barge. Faces passing on the riverbank, bringing tidings from town to town. She never imagined it would end up like this.
And it is a life, this pacing up and down the river. Her husband and children were born on the water, but for her there was a day, long ago, when life on the river was foreign, when the canal was just a playground in the villages on the other side of Trost, where the children would gather when the boats came through, stones at the ready in their tiny little fists. She always had good aim. Once she bounced fifteen round rocks off the stern of a passing barge before the old man onboard whipped his long pole out of the water and threatened to wipe the feet out from under the next kid who dared to touch his boat.
She never imagined she’d end up here, one of the barge wives, passing the days between these two cities in the vast expanse of Wall Maria. But she knows it all now. This river, these lands. The wideness of the vale when the barge soars from the hills, all lush and green in the summer, with flowers springing up on the riverside; and a deep white in the winter when all else seems to disappear from the world, and the horizon is flush with pale snow that seems to turn the land and sky into one. She knows the hills southeast of Trost, and the villages on either side, all the children who run along the boat and the merchants who grumble as they wait for their cargo. The young folk who work for them, some bright-eyed and eager to enter the trade, some passing each day with a gloom in their eyes as they offload apples and load on peaches. Those are the golden days of the year when the winds are still warm. When it is cold, it is almost nothing but cold. There is no cold like that on the river, and she doesn’t know how they do it sometimes— her fingers frozen to the long pole as she drives the barge from the bow; the children’s breaths glowing white as they run ropes and tie knots and do whatever their mother tells them needs doing; and her husband in the cabin, the knife stiff in his worn hands as he guts the fresh catch for the markets in the city.
It’s a hard life on the river. It always has been. But more than anything else, it is a life. She wonders how true that can be now. This river was their home. This stretch of land between the two walls was theirs, only theirs, and she knew every slight and curve of the river beneath their boat. It only occurs to her then, in the silence as they drift northwards through the vale, that she will never see these plains again.
The faces of the strangers on the boat mean something different to her then. She sees it in their eyes, the ones they do not lift to meet her gaze, the same feeling she has realized in the silence. They have all lost something this day. More than anything, she thinks idly, suddenly, she will miss these days on the open fields. The way the sky looks when the sunrise comes over the walls. The way it rains sometimes, and there is nowhere to take cover, so they dance on the deck with wet feet, then shiver inside later, the taste of the clouds still on their tongues. The way the entire world is still sometimes, those rare times, when the night is deep or the morning is new, when there is nothing between heaven and hearth but them and their boat, sailing from one day to the next. She will miss all of this.
There seems not to be a single breath taken in the silence as the boat carries on, and she steers with her head turned back, something within her waking, or else dying, as she sees the faces of all the people huddled on the deck. Children in their rags without shoes on their feet, with blank faces turned to the river as they pass, something deep and unspoken eating its way into their hearts to seep for years to come until they understand the things they saw this day. Parents beside them, and grandparents beside them, all cold and stiff in the shade of the cabin. Blood on their feet. Blood on their sleeves. Some of them, bleeding, gashes from rocks growing ill on their heads.
There are soldiers too, disparate among the rest. They sit with their foreheads crammed to their knees as if to hide their faces. Did they run? She can’t remember. Did they see what was coming and turn their backs and run? Some of them, maybe. Some of them are no more than children themselves.
There are some people sitting together, their arms around each other, yet most seem to sit apart, as if there is nothing between them anymore. No words of comfort passed back and forth could make right this day. A little boy sits next to an old man, his face buried in a worn straw hat. They must know one another, the way they sit close together. But she imagines for a moment they don’t, that perhaps there is some good left in the world, something to sweeten the bitter. A stranger comforts a child on the quietest day in the world. She does not know them. But she feels as if she could.
She recognizes all of their faces. She sees something in them now that can never be taken back. Something now they all share, as much as they wish they did not. All these people, all their names she could have known, and now all they will ever have together is this day of ruin, etched on their faces as sure as the stars in the night sky.
But there’s one missing.
Brandt always worked the locks. Ever since he was a little one, scarcely used to the solid ground beneath his feet. He’d always come running after the barge when the lock closed, and she’d always hold her breath, though she knew there was no harm in his falling. Sometimes he would, but only when his brothers and sister stood on the deck and watched in awe. Only to make them laugh when he splashed back up the side of the boat and threatened with a smile to throw them overboard too. He always made it when he ran.
This time, he didn’t run. He heard the thunder on the ground, heard what was coming next just like the rest of them; and though those cowardly excuses for soldiers ran for their lives and leapt into the water to claw for the last seat on the boat, Brandt stood still. He met her eyes from afar just before the inner wall came down. All she heard was silence.
Silence still, until her husband calls her name.
“Branna,” he says, hushed.
She is used to hearing him from the stern, or else calling from the cabin, telling a joke and laughing with their children. For a moment she is struck by how much he sounds the same. How much his voice echoes in the silence of the vale, not just among the wood and water, but with the long life he’s had on the river. The same man he’s always been, the same husband she’s always loved, only this time, she wonders why it couldn’t have been him who stayed behind.
She thinks only for a moment before he speaks again. “You’re bleeding.”
She had already felt it there, trickling between her legs. It’s the quietest thing. And there’s nothing to be done now. Nothing to do but keep moving forward.