Shadow and Betrayal

and let the brambles grow up through the dead, dry branches. He smiled as he pictured them, at breakfast round the long kitchen table: one of these days we’d better fix that gap in the wall, and the others all nodding. Seventeen years; seventeen years slipping by, and they’d never found the time. For some reason, that made him feel sad and rather angry.
    Walking down the drove, Stoneacre on his left, he could see Big Moor clearly in the distance. Seventy-five acres of bleak, thin hilltop pasture, a green lump. It cost him a good deal of effort to avoid looking at it, but he managed.
    At the point where the drove crossed the old cart road (now it was just a green trace in the bracken; by the look of it, the lumber carts didn’t come this way any more), he saw a boy sitting on a fallen tree, staring at him. He pushed his hat back a little, to show his face, and called out, “Hello.”
    The boy’s head dipped about half an inch. Otherwise he didn’t move. Kunessin understood the look on the boy’s face all too well: the natural distrust of newcomers, at war with the furious curiosity about a stranger, in a place where strangers never came.
    “There’s a stray ewe caught in the briars up at the top, just past the deer track,” he said. “One of yours?”
    The boy studied him for three heartbeats, then nodded a full inch. His lips moved, but “thanks” didn’t quite make it through. He stood up, but didn’t walk.
    “You’ll be Nogei Gaeon’s boy,” Kunessin said.
    “That’s right.”
    “I’m on my way up to the house now. Is he likely to be in the yard, this time of day?”
    Desperate hesitation; then the boy shook his head. “He’ll be up at the linhay,” he replied, “feeding the calves.”
    “Over Long Ridge?”
    The boy’s eyes widened; he couldn’t understand how a stranger would know the names of the fields. “Thanks,” Kunessin said. “How about your uncle Kudei? Where’d he be?”
    The boy gave him a long, frightened look. “You from the government?”
    Kunessin grinned. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” he said. He left the boy and carried on down the hill until he reached the top gate of Castle Field, which led into Greystones, which led into Long Ridge. The hedges were high, neglected, and they shielded him from the sight of Big Moor.
    (Well, he thought, I’m home, as near as makes no odds; the last place on earth I want to be.)
    Then, before he was ready, he was standing at the top of the yard, looking down the slope. Directly in front of him was the old cider house, which had finally collapsed. One wall had peeled away, and the unsupported roof had slumped sideways, the roof-tree and rafters gradually torn apart by the unsupportable weight of the slates; it put him in mind of the stripped carcass of a chicken, after the meal is over. A dense tangle of briars slopped out over the stub of the broken wall, and a young ash was growing aggressively between the stones. It must have happened so slowly, he thought: neglect, the danger dimly perceived but never quite scrambling high enough up the pyramid of priorities until it was too late, no longer worth the prodigious effort needed to put it right. There would have been a morning when they all came out to find it lying there, having gently pulled itself apart in the night. They’d have sworn a bit, shaken their heads, accepted the inconvenience and carried on as before.
    A man came out of the back door of the house: tall, bald, slightly stooped shoulders. He was carrying a large basket full of apples. Halfway across the yard he stopped and looked up. For a moment he stayed quite still; then he put the basket down. Kunessin walked down to meet him.
    “Oh,” the man said. “It’s you.”
    Kunessin smiled. “Hello, Euge,” he said. He noticed that the apples in the basket were all wrinkled, some of them marked with brown patches. Forgotten about, left too long in store, spoiled, now only fit for the pigs.
    “What’re you doing here?”
    “Visiting,” Kunessin replied. “Where’s Kudei?”