Chapter Eleven — Arithmetic of the Ice Lake

«Eisenmere»

Balkan had counted the lake before he ever meant to fight on it.

Eisenmere lay between the taken country and the holdfasts like a held breath — a sheet of iron-grey ice a mile across, the last flat crossing before the snow climbed to Eisengrave and the high halls. Cross it, and a man saved three days of mountain. Refuse it, and the auditors saved them for him.

He stood on the near shore with his father's axe across his back and watched the far treeline darken. Behind him, ninety men breathed steam into the cold and made no other sound. They had learned that much already. You did not shout at a thing that came to count you.

Halvard came up on his right, the way he always did. The silver hide showed grey under his coat. He had brought it back from the south along with the ember and the tracing of an angle that would not close, and he had laid all three on Jorund's table and said, this is not war, it is husbandry, and Jorund had been too old and too cold to ride. So the muster was Balkan's. The fear was Balkan's. The sum would be Balkan's to close.

"They're early," Halvard said.

"No," Balkan said. "We're late."

He had walked the ice for two days before he chose it.

A lake is not a battlefield. A lake is a lie told flat — solid where it wishes, thin where it does not, and no honest man can read which from above. But Balkan was not honest about ice. He had grown up on Eisenmere. He knew where the springs fed it from below and kept the crust thin all winter, a seam of green-black water running the lake's whole width like a vein under skin. Twelve paces wide. Always twelve. He had drowned a brother there as a boy and never forgotten the number.

So he made the seam his blade.

For two nights his men worked under the moon, quiet as thieves in their own country. They cut the thin ice along the seam with bone saws and packed the cuts with snow so the moon would not catch the lines. They drove stakes into the firm ice on the holdfast side, every nine paces, and bound ropes low and slack between them. They laid sledge-runners and antler and good dry timber across the firm ice in a broad lure — a road that said cross here, the footing is sound — and the road ran true, right up to the seam, and then it was only snow over green-black water that wanted feeding.

The plan was weight against weight. Let the grey column take the road. Let it count its careful way out onto the lake. And when it reached the seam, his men on the ropes would haul the bait-ice loose and the column would go down into the twelve-pace vein, and the lake would close over it the way the lake had closed over his brother, without a sound worth hearing.

Numbers against numbers. He had nothing else to set against a thing that killed by arithmetic.

"How many do you reckon they bring," Olek asked him. Olek had buried more men than he had names for, and asked the question like a man asking the weather.

"It doesn't matter how many," Balkan said. "It matters how heavy."

They came out of the trees at the grey hour, and they came two by two.

Not an army. Balkan had braced for an army and got worse. A column. Long coats the colour of wet ash, masks lacquered black from brow to lip, veils of salt below the mouth. They walked in step, and at each step their hands moved — fingers folding, opening, a private speech that touched the air and let it go — and their mouths did not move at all. A low hum lived among them and went nowhere. They carried no torches. They did not need to see. They came to be told a number, and they came to leave one.

And as they walked, the ice ahead of them changed.

Balkan saw it from the shore and could not unsee it. A line drew itself across Eisenmere in front of the column — a single straight score in the crust, clean as if a hand the size of the sky had set a rule to the lake and dragged a point along it. The line did not crack. It did not melt. It was simply there, truer than any line water makes, and a second crossed it at a corner, and Balkan knew that corner. He had seen it traced on bark on his father's table. A square with a line through it.

"They're measuring it," Halvard said, very low. "The lake. They're measuring the lake."

"Let them," Balkan said, and did not feel it.

The column reached the lure-road and took it. Two by two, counting. He watched their masked heads tilt at each stake as they passed — one, two — and his men lay belly-down in the drifts on the firm ice and did not breathe, and the seam waited under its skin of snow twelve paces on, and for nine long breaths it was working. It was working. The arithmetic was his.

The first pair reached the seam.

Balkan dropped his hand.

The ropes came taut. The bait-ice tore loose along the cuts his men had sawed, a whole road-width of it, and the green-black vein opened its mouth under the grey column and took them down.

It should have been the end. Two pairs, three, four — gone into the dark water without a cry, the lake folding shut, the sum reduced by eight. His men hauled and the ice broke clean where he had told it to break, and for one breath Balkan stood on the shore of his own country and believed that a man could beat a ledger if he knew his lake.

Then the ones who had gone under did not drown.

He waited for the thrashing. The clawing at the underside of the ice, the white faces pressed up against it, the sounds. They did not come. The water closed and lay flat and the column above it did not so much as pause to mark the loss — because there was no loss to mark. Where four pairs had been, there were simply fewer, and the ones behind had already counted forward to cover the gap, two by two, unhurried, their hands folding the empty air where the lost had been as if folding it away.

Not killed. Subtracted. He understood it in his gut before his mind would hold it. The lake had not drowned them. The lake had been balanced.

And the column kept walking.

Not on the road. The road was gone. They walked out onto the open seam — onto the twelve-pace vein of thin green-black water Balkan had spent his whole life knowing no man could cross — and the water held them. It held them the way a floor holds a man. Their grey coats did not darken at the hem. Their feet found something under the surface that was not ice and was not water and asked nothing of them, and they came on across the place that should have been their grave as though the lake were owed to them and had at last paid out.

"Pull back," Halvard said. He was already moving. "Balkan. Pull them back."

But the line of his men was strung across the firm ice on the holdfast side, nine paces between the stakes, and now the scored line — the rule the far hand had dragged across Eisenmere — ran straight under their feet, and Balkan saw, too late, what the arithmetic had been solving for.

Not the column. Him.

They had measured the lake, and the lake's worth, and his ninety men standing on it, and the trap he had so carefully cut. They had counted his counter before he set it. The thin seam he had chosen for his blade was the line they had drawn to take him by, and the firm ice he had trusted — the ice his stakes were driven into, the ice his men lay on — was the part of the lake the rule had marked to give way.

It went all at once, on a count he could not hear.

The firm ice cracked along the scored line from shore to shore, a sound like the world's spine breaking, and the holdfast side of Eisenmere tilted and dropped and the green-black water came up through it grey with froth. Men went into the lake. His men. The ones who had hauled the ropes, the ones who had sawed the cuts, the ones who had lain so still and so brave in the drifts — the ice opened under half of them at once and they were in the water, and the water, this time, did not balance. It drowned. It was only a lake again now that it had his.

He heard them. That was the difference. The column's lost had gone in silence; his own went screaming.

There was rope in his hands. He did not remember taking it.

Half his force was in the water along the broken seam, and half stood on the firm shelf still holding, the near shore at their backs, and between the two halves ran twelve paces of black mouth and a column of grey walking out of it. He could throw the ropes to the men in the water. He could pull. And while he pulled, the grey would come up onto the firm shelf among the men who still lived, two by two, counting, and there would be no one set to meet them, and the sum that started in the water would close on the shore.

Or he could turn the standing half to face the column. Make them pay for the shelf. And leave the men in the water to the water.

Olek had a fist in his coat. Skarn — the boy was not a boy now, but Balkan still saw the boy — was on his belly at the broken edge with both arms in the lake to the shoulder, holding someone, shouting a name. Hakon was already gone; Balkan had seen the place he had been and the place he was not.

"Which half," Halvard said. He was not asking. He was telling Balkan that the asking was over. "Balkan. Which half."

He looked at the men in the water, who would die in the time it took to save them. He looked at the men on the ice, who would die in the time it took to mourn the others. He had ninety. He would not bring back ninety. The lake had set the number and the number was less than ninety and all that was left to Balkan — the warlord's son, the one the fear belonged to — was to choose which faces it would be.

He chose.

He gave the order low, the way Halvard had taught him a man gives the orders that cannot be taken back, and he did not let his voice break while the men could hear it. He would carry which half, and what it cost, alone, south to his father's table, and he would not say it twice. Some sums a man closes once and never reads aloud again.

The grey column came up onto the firm shelf, and his standing half met them on the ice, and that was its own long count, and Balkan was in it to the elbows and would not, after, remember much of it but the cold and the names.

What he remembered was the last thing he saw, when the fighting thinned and the survivors fell back to the near shore dragging their wounded and their silence.

The column did not pursue. It had no need. It re-formed on the open water where the lake should have swallowed it, two by two, and went on across Eisenmere toward the holdfast road as if the lake were a thing it had bought and meant to walk home on. The hole where the firm ice had dropped his men was already skinning over, a thin grey lid drawing shut, and the scored line — the square with the line through it — sat on the new ice exact and patient, finishing an angle that, all his life, the lake had never let close.

Balkan stood on the shore and counted what was left.

He counted twice, because the north had learned to distrust a sum that came out wrong, and he had taught himself, this winter, to distrust a sum that came out at all. He counted, and the cold took his breath and gave him nothing back, and far out on the ice the grey walked on the water it was owed, and he understood, finally, what the arithmetic had been solving for.

It had not come to win the lake.

It had come to learn the price of the holdfasts — and Balkan, with ninety men and his father's axe and a lifetime of knowing his own ice, had just spent the morning teaching it the answer.