"The Sum"

Light came up grey through the mangroves and found him where the river had left him.

He had not moved. He sat with his back against a root the thickness of his own waist and his legs in the black water to the knee, and across his chest there was a line where the tide had come up in the night and stood a while and gone down again, a dark band of silt drying pale at its top edge, and he had been still long enough for the river to mark him the way it marks a piling.

He took stock of the body the way he would take stock of a boat after a hard crossing, the hull first.

The rib was the main thing. Left side, low, the third or fourth up---cracked and not gone all the way through, because when he breathed shallow it held and when he breathed deep it shifted, a small wrong slide of bone on bone that caught the breath at the top of it, and a man could work around a thing that only punished the deep breaths. He would breathe shallow. The face was next and the face did not matter. One eye had swollen to a wet slit in the night, and he could see out of the slit, and that was all the eye was being asked to do. The jaw worked, opening and closing on nothing, the way it did when there was damage in him and no use to be made of it. He let it work. The leg had a furrow above the knee where something off the bank had touched it going into the water, and it had clotted brown and stiff in the cold, and it was nothing. He had carried worse a longer way than the way he had in front of him. He knew that he had. He did not have to guess at it.

He had lost blood. He put his fingers into the cold under his shirt and read how much by the give of his own skin and the slow way his head came round when he turned it, and the number it gave him was some. Not enough. Not near enough to matter. The river had wanted the rest of it and had not got the rest of it, and that was an old argument between him and the water, and the water had lost it again.

The thing the dead man had said turned over in him.

He did not pick it up. It lay where it had lain since the bottom of the river---you only changed the name of it---and it had an edge he could feel without putting his hand to it, and he did not have the answer this morning, and he was not sure he would have it on any morning, and a thing like that a man does not carry in his hands while he works, or it takes his hands. He set it down. He set it where the other things he could not answer were set, a low place in him he did not look into, and he left it there with them, and it did not go away, and he had not asked it to. He needed his hands.

His hand went to the pouch at his belt.

The stone was in it. He did not open the pouch; he found the shape of it through the leather with his thumb, flat and cold, the cold of a thing that had been all night in the river and had not been warmed by anything living. The water had taken the boat. The water had taken the rifle. The water had taken the dead man down into the dark where it took everything. It had not taken the stone. He noted it the way he noted the depth of a channel or the set of a current, a fact about the water that a man files and does not argue with, and he took his thumb off the leather and put his palm flat against the root and pushed himself up.

The rib moved and he breathed shallow against it and stood in the water and let the grey light settle into his one eye. There was no large reason in him for standing. He had looked for one and there was none and he found he did not need it. He had put people ashore on a mudbank in the dark and had gone out onto the water to draw the hunters off them, and the water had carried him here, and he did not know what had become of the people on the mudbank in the hours the water had him. That was the whole of it. That had always been the whole of it. He did not require it to be more.

He started walking.

⁂

The mangrove gave onto the river, and the river ran wide and brown in the early light, and he went along the margin of it with the water at his shins where the bank gave no footing and on the mud where it did, reading the shore as he walked, and it took him the better part of an hour on the bad rib to come back to the place. He knew it when he reached it. The mud held the long flat scars where he had run the bow up to let them off, and above the scars the bank had been climbed, and above that the prints began.

He stood over the prints and read them.

Boots. Military tread, the chevron the Vanguard cut into its soles, and not a few of them---dozens, laid one over another, come down off the high ground and standing the way men stand when they have arrived somewhere and are waiting for the rest of a thing to happen. He had read enough ground to know the difference between men hunting a trail and men who already had one. These had not hunted. They had come down to this bank knowing it was here and knowing what would be on it, and they had stood, and waited, and gone back up. It was not the print of a search. It was the print of an arrival. Somebody had told them where to stand.

The land climbed off the river into forest, and the trail the boots had cut was a wide trampled thing a child could have followed, and he followed it with the rib catching at every rise and the breath going short over it, and a hundred yards up, where the trees opened around a shelf of rock, he found the first one.

A girl. Face down on the rock with her arms flung out ahead of her and her fingers half curled into the stone, and he stood over her and read her the way he read the ground. Her feet told it. The back foot was up on its toe and dug in, the way a foot is when it is pushing and not standing, and the whole line of her from that foot to those hands was the line of a body going forward at speed, and the dark hole was in her back below the shoulder, and a person does not take a thing in the back below the shoulder unless the thing is behind them and they are running and have not turned to look at it. She had been running. She had not seen it come. He did not know her name. He would learn her name---that was a matter for later and he set it with the later matters. He crouched, and the rib bit, and he let it, and he put two fingers on her eyelids and brought them down over the eyes that were looking at the stone, and he did it without weighing it, the way a man coils a line he finds uncoiled, because it was the thing the body in front of him needed and there was no one else to do it. Then he stood and went on.

The trail bent toward a ravine and he found the second one at the foot of it.

She was under the lip of a boulder that had no business at the foot of a ravine, a boulder that belonged up on the edge where the raw socket of it still showed in the earth, and beside the boulder lay a motorbike folded near double around it, and under the bike a man who had stopped being a man's shape in the places the stone had come down. He stood at the bottom and built it back upward. The girl had been up on the lip, at the socket. The bike had come up the ravine after the running---he could see its torn line laid in the slope---and she had been at the boulder when it came, and she had not run from the boulder the way the first one had run on the rock. She had stayed at it. She had put her weight against it, all the weight an arm and a shoulder that size could find, and the boulder had gone down the way she sent it and taken the bike and the man on it with it. It had cost her the lip. She had gone down after it, or been brought down, and he read where she had come to rest, off in the scrub to the side, and he read that the cost had been exactly the cost she meant to buy, which was the bike and the man on it, and that she had paid it with her eyes open. He did not move her. There was nothing in moving her that she needed. He went on up the ravine the way the bike had come, and his hands, while he climbed, had started.

He caught them at it on the third or fourth hold. Counting. Counting the other thing. The thing they had counted on a hundred fields before there was a river or a boat or a name like ferryman to lay over the top of the older name: the dead. One on the rock. One at the boulder. The hands kept the tally without being asked, and he let them keep it, because the tally was about to be of use, and a thing that is about to be of use a man does not argue with on the question of where it came from.

The ravine gave onto a flat, and on the flat he found the rest of it.

Men this time. Vanguard, five of them, down in the open in the red dirt, and he walked in among them and read them, and what they told him was not a battle. A man who falls in a fight falls every way there is; these had fallen one way, close together, and the dirt by each of them was scuffed in the short tight pattern of a man put down onto his knees, and the spent brass lay all of it inside a span of ground a man could cross in three strides, which is the brass of a thing done at arm's length and at leisure, after, when the deciding is finished and only the doing is left. He read the footwork around the bodies, and the footwork was Vanguard boots standing over Vanguard dead, the same tread coming and going, no second pattern in it, no enemy. The men who had killed these men had worn the same boots as these men. Somewhere inside the uniform a seam had opened, and a thing had come through the seam and put five of its own on their knees and shot them and walked on. He did not know what the seam was. He marked it whole and unopened, the way he had marked the prints on the bank, a fact too large to use yet and too large to set down. What it told him he could use. It told him the killing on this flat had a purpose that was not the women, because a man does not execute his own to kill children he could kill himself; a man executes his own to keep them from stopping him taking a thing away. The women had not been killed here. The women had been taken.

He walked the edge of the flat and counted what the flat would give him.

The dead first---the five men, and back down the trail the two girls---the hands holding all of it in order, seven, and he carried the seven with him to the head of the firebreak where the vehicle had stood. A jeep, sat heavy on its springs when it left, the tread squashed flat the way tread goes under load, and around the place it had stood the ground was printed with the short driven steps of people moved at gunpoint and put up into it. He read the prints out of the churn one kind at a time, the way a man picks one current out of a confluence. Grown men, the guards, booted. A woman in a flat sandal, the stride even, walking and not dragged----he held there half a second on the evenness of it and went on. Older girls, barefoot and shod both, close, herded. And one set small. Small and bare and high on the toe, a child's foot driven up into the jeep among the rest.

He counted the taken and set the taken beside the dead, and then he ran the whole of it again from the start, the dead and the taken both, against the number of people he had put off his boat onto the mudbank in the dark.

The sum came up short by one.

He stood at the head of the firebreak and ran it a second time, slower, the hands going down the column with no heat in them, and it came up the same. One small one was in neither column. Not among the dead on the rock, or the dead at the boulder, or the dead on the flat. Not in the churn at the jeep, not in the small, bare prints driven up into it. He turned and looked for the missing one's track running off into the trees, the way a small thing goes when it comes loose in a fight and runs for cover. The trees gave him nothing. Then he found it going the other way.

Not into cover. Away from the jeep and away from the trees both, out across the open of the flat toward the far side where the ground ran out, the prints far apart and square-driven, a thing running flat out and running on a line and not weaving. Running for the edge.

⁂

He followed the running prints to the place where the ground ended, and at the edge he crouched and read the edge.

There was blood on it... not a pool---a pool is what a stopped thing makes, a thing that is hit and stays to bleed where it stood---but a throw of it, out and forward over the lip and down onto the first of the slope, fine at the trailing end and heavy at the front, the spatter of a thing that was moving when the blood left it and carried the blood out ahead of itself the way a runner carries everything out ahead of him. A body standing still does not paint the ground in front of it. A body running does, when the round finds it and the legs have not yet learned that the rest is finished. And the legs had not learned it, because the throw went past the lip and out into the air.

Alive when it went off.

He read the ground back from the blood a stride and found the rest of the sentence in the scuff. The prints came on straight and fast to within two strides of the edge, and there, in the last of them, the line broke---a hard scrape to the left, the outside foot biting, the body weight thrown across it, a cut so sharp there was nearly no forward left in it at all. It was not the slide of a foot that slips. It was not the scramble of a foot that meets the edge too late and tries to stop. It was a thing done on purpose, and done fast, and done by a body that had been taught to do it: the break to the side that a person under fire makes because the straight line is the line the gun is already on, and the angle is the thing the gun has to go and find again. He had seen this cut thrown before. He had stood on docks and on the wet boards of boats and on flat dry ground and watched it thrown, the small sideways break, the instinct of it, weeks of it, until he could have told you which way the break would go before the body knew.

He knew the count. He knew the cut. He knew which of the ones he had set off his boat onto the mudbank in the dark had legs that broke that way under a gun.

He did not put the name to it. There was nothing the name would do that the knowing had not done already, and the knowing was enough to act on, and a man does not need to hear himself say a thing he knows down to the ground. He left the name where it was.

He looked over the edge.

The slope went down a long way---mud and shale and loose stone---and down the middle of it ran a scar, a single torn track where a body had gone down it not falling free and not climbing but somewhere in between, taking the slope the way a thing takes a slope when it is past choosing how. At the bottom the river lay brown and low and slow in the last of the day's light, shallow over its bars, running on the way it had always run, and telling him nothing, the way it told him nothing, the way it had told him nothing the two times he had gone down into it asking. It had refused him fifteen years ago and it had refused him in the dark of last night, and it ran down there now in the going light with whatever it had done with the small one folded somewhere into the brown of it, and there was the one way to learn what that was.

He stood at the edge a moment. His hand did not go to the pouch. There was nothing in the stone to settle and nothing left to weigh; he had run the sum and the sum was done, and the doing of it was the slope.

He started down.

⁂

The slope did not want him on it and he went onto it anyway.

He went down facing the rock with his hands above him and his feet feeling under for the holds, and the holds were mud and they were loose stone and they gave when he weighted them and he found others, and he went down a hand's length and a foot at a time the way the body had gone down it before him, past choosing. The rib turned on him each time he reached up, and he reached up, and breathed it shallow. The clot on his leg split somewhere in the first of the descent and the warmth came down his shin and into his shoe and he left it. There was a hold, and below it another hold, and that was the whole of what there was.

He did not look up. Above him on the flat the dead lay where he had read them, and there was nothing up there for his eyes now; he had taken from the flat everything the flat had to give and he had it in him. He did not look back across the slope to where the cut of the river ran out against the failing sky. He looked at the rock in front of his face, and the hold under his hand, and the next one below it, and the slope came at him a hand's length at a time, and the light went down out of the day behind him while he went down into it, and the river got no nearer and no nearer and then was nearer.

The blood had said alive. That was the thing he carried down the slope, the only thing, the one fact the edge had given him that was worth the carrying: that whatever had gone over this edge had been alive when it went. The river was at the bottom. The river had taken him in and refused him twice and put him out again on its own terms both times, and he did not know what terms it kept for a thing eleven years old that broke left under a gun and went off a cliff into the brown, and there was no knowing it from the slope, and there was no knowing it from anywhere but the bottom.

He went down toward the water to find out.