Last Mail Over Kesar Pass

At half past four on Monday morning the post office at Sarekh was the only lit window in the town, and the lamp in it was Postmaster Kavan's, as it had been at half past four on the morning of the last mail for nineteen years.

Mara crossed the yard in the dark with frost creaking under her boots. Above the roofs the mountains were there and not there, a blacker black against the stars, and the air had the thin clean edge it only had at the end of the season, when the snow on the main range came a little lower every week and the river had gone quiet under its first ice.

Sarekh sat at the road-head, at two thousand nine hundred metres, where the lorries from the plains turned round in a churned square of mud and went back. Beyond it there was no road. There was the gorge, and the path, and the Hill Post, which had carried letters up the gorge and over Kesar Pass to Hemri on the far side every summer since 1893, and had never yet failed to carry the last mail.

Inside, the stove was lit and the room smelled of kerosene and sealing wax. Kavan stood at the long counter in his grey coat and his fingerless gloves, with the register open in front of him and the two canvas mailbags laid side by side like sleeping dogs.

"You're early," he said, without looking up.

"So are you."

"I am always early. That is what postmasters are for." He dipped his pen. "Four hundred and twelve letters. Thirty-one parcels. One packet of pension orders for the Hemri office, registered, which is to say if you lose it I will be forced to have you shot." He wrote, in his small exact hand, and blotted it. "And one parcel for the clinic at Hemri, medical, which is to say if you lose it the doctor will shoot you first and save me the trouble."

Mara watched him close the first bag. He drew the cord through the brass eyelets, snapped the padlock, and then held the stick of red wax in the lamp flame until it dripped. He pressed the Hill Post seal into it, the old seal with the pass and the two crossed staves, and held it there for the count of five, as he always did, as if he were taking its pulse.

Then the second bag. Then he turned the register round on the counter and held out the pen.

Mara signed for them. Received for carriage over Kesar Pass, 14 October 1974. Last mail. The signature looked small beside the column of names above it, the carriers of other years. Six of them were Mara's. Forty of them were Tashek's.

"Now," said Kavan, and took off his spectacles, and polished them on his scarf, which was how he announced anything he did not like. "The bulletin."

The radio-telephone sat on its own table in the corner under a cloth cover, like a parrot put to bed. Kavan had sat up with it at midnight for the plains bulletin, as he did every night in October, and had written it out on a form.

"Cyclone in the Bay," he read. "Third day. Moving north-west. Expected to weaken over land." He looked over his spectacles. "Snow possible on the main range, they say, perhaps from Thursday. Perhaps." He laid the form on the counter. "They say perhaps in the plains the way we say good morning. It costs them nothing."

"Thursday," said Mara.

"Thursday. Your exchange at the stones is Thursday at first light. Nawa will be coming up from Hemri the same morning with the north bags. If you keep to the days, you will be on the pass before their perhaps." He put his spectacles back on. "If you keep to the days."

Through the window the first grey was coming into the sky over the eastern ridge. In the yard someone was moving about with a lantern, slowly, the way a man moves whose knees have stopped arguing with him and simply refuse.

"He's been out there since four," said Kavan. "Go and talk to him, or come and look at my barometer, which has been falling since Saturday and does not say perhaps. Either way, you leave at six."

Tashek was standing by the woodpile with his face turned up, in his old sheepskin coat that was older than Mara, leaning on the staff he had carried over Kesar for forty years and now used to cross his own yard.

He did not say good morning. He pointed with the staff.

High in the east, where the grey was coming, there were thin white threads across the sky, so high they caught the light before anything else did, combed out long and fine with hooked ends.

"Mare's tails," said Mara.

"Mare's tails," said Tashek. "Coming from the south. Look how fast." He watched them for a while. "Up there the wind is already walking. Down here it hasn't heard." He lowered the staff. "Three days. Maybe two and a half. The plains think Thursday because they read paper. I think Thursday because I read that." He looked at Mara at last. "So you are not wrong to go. But you are not early, either. Go up slowly and cross fast. Don't wait for anybody on the saddle."

"Nawa will be there."

"Then she won't make you wait." Tashek smiled, which made his face into a map of the whole district. "I taught her too."

At a quarter to six a cart came up the lane from the lorry square, pushed by two boys, with a tin trunk on it painted green, and behind it a young woman in a plains coat far too thin for Sarekh, with a woollen hat pulled down to her eyebrows and a leather satchel across her chest.

She stopped at the gate and looked up at the post office, and at the mountains behind it going grey and gold at their tops, and seemed to forget for a moment why she had come.

"Hill Post?" she said. "I'm told the mail carrier takes passengers. I'm Imla Saran. I'm the new teacher for the school at Hemri." She held out a letter with a district stamp on it. "They said I could go over with the last mail, if I could keep up." She looked at Mara. "Can I keep up?"

"Slowly," said Mara. "Everyone keeps up slowly."

Behind her, through the yard gate, came a sound Mara had known all her life: a single deep bell, swinging, and the soft heavy tread of beasts on frozen ground. Kunlo came in leading the two tolu, Soot in front with the bell at her throat, black as her name, her long skirt of hair brushing the frost; Pebble behind, brown and broad and already trying to eat the woodpile.

Kunlo was seventeen and tall and grinning, in a new coat his grandfather had bought him for his first season, and he had clearly been up longer than anybody. He saw the tin trunk, and stopped grinning, and looked at Mara.

"That," he said, "is not going over the pass."

"We'll see," said Mara.

Kavan came out onto the step with a lamp, and behind him Tashek, slowly, on his staff. The bags were carried out and laid on the frost. Kavan poured a cup of tea from the kettle and set it on the gatepost, untouched, for the road, as the valley people always did, and nobody drank it, and nobody would.

The sun came up behind the eastern ridge and lit the main range all at once, peak after peak, white and gold and impossibly high. And far up the valley, small at that distance, a notch in the skyline with a band of yellow rock below it like a stain of saffron on a white cloth: Kesar.

"Four days," said Tashek. "Go."