What the River Does Not Divide

Chapter 2: What the River Does Not Divide

Three evenings after the cave, Ergard crossed the Thames.

The ford was a half-mile of cold gravel and knee-deep current, studded with raised islands of reed where the tidal water had withdrawn. The light came in flat and amber from the west, throwing long shadows across the mud, and the river smelled of iron and rot and something older beneath both. Ergard went in without removing their boots, because to stop and think would be to stop entirely.

The Vernaii kept their horses on the south bank, in a wide meadow where the floodplain drew back from the river and the ground firmed to damp clay. Ergard had seen the herd from the north bank on the morning after the cave, when the two parties had separated without ceremony — the Vernaii filing south into the mist, the Durovic turning north toward their kin-cluster. Ergard had watched until the last figure dissolved into the grey, and had not spoken of it.

The meadow held perhaps forty horses, dark-coated and heavy through the chest. A fire burned at the meadow's edge, small and deliberate. Huraiga sat beside it.

They heard Ergard before they saw them — the squelch of wet boots in clay — and their hand went briefly to their belt before falling still. They looked up. The jagged scar on the left side of their face caught the firelight and held it.

"Durovic," Huraiga said.

"I came alone." Ergard's voice came out steadier than it had any right to. "I'm not carrying."

Huraiga studied them for a moment the way a person studies weather on the horizon — not with alarm, but with the careful attention of someone who has learned that what begins as a distant grey line can become, very quickly, something else.

"Sit," they said. "You'll catch marsh-fever standing in those boots."

Ergard sat.

The fire was hawthorn and dried dung, and it burned with a particular sweetness that mixed with the river smell and the horse smell until the air itself seemed layered with it. Huraiga handed Ergard a clay cup of something warm without looking at them. Then they went back to what they had been doing, which was working a piece of harness leather with a small bone tool, their thick fingers moving slowly and with authority.

The silence between them was not the silence of the cave, which had been a silence held by fifteen people. This one belonged to just two.

After a time, Huraiga began the murmuring Ergard had heard through the whole long cave-night — the same low cadence, rhythmic and unselfconscious, the sounds shaped like words but too quiet to parse.

Ergard watched the firelight move across their hands.

"What is it you sing?" Ergard asked.

Huraiga's hands stilled on the leather. They did not look up immediately. When they did, something behind the habitual wariness in their eyes had shifted — not opened exactly, but become curious about being opened.

"It is not a song," Huraiga said. "It is a count. I count the horses. Sixty-two words for sixty-two horses. It keeps them from being lost in the dark."

Ergard looked out at the herd, their shapes blurred and enormous at the meadow's edge.

"Does it work?" Ergard asked.

The scar pulled slightly as one corner of Huraiga's mouth moved.

"Come back tomorrow," Huraiga said. "Count with me then."

The river took the last of the light on Ergard's way back across, and the gravel shifted underfoot with every step, and the cold water was above the knee before Ergard reached the far bank. None of it mattered. None of it even registered. The warmth of the clay cup was still in Ergard's hands, and in the north-bank dark, soaked through and shivering, Ergard was already calculating how many hours remained until dusk.

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