Where the Map Ends

The thaw came to Scarrow in a single night, and in the morning the whole moor was running.

Elias heard it before Elias saw it: a sound under everything, like a great many people talking very quietly in the next room. Water. It was coming off the Brede in every direction at once, out of the peat and the old snow, down a thousand small channels that had been frozen since autumn, into the beck below the village and away south toward the river country and the long road home. By noon the track up the hill was a stream. By evening the lane outside the inn was ankle-deep and brown, and Mother Withy had put a plank across her doorstep and stood on it with her arms folded, looking at the sky as if it owed her money.

Elias went up the hill at dusk, with Finch.

It was not far. Scarrow sat in the last fold of the farmed country, a dozen grey stone houses and a chapel with no bell, and behind it the land went up in one long, bare, brown shoulder to the sky. There were no walls on the hill and no trees. There was heather, black and wet, and pale dead grass, and patches of old snow lying grey in the hollows, and in places the bright, treacherous green of standing water. A curlew went up from almost under Elias's feet, crying, and Finch stopped dead and watched it all the way out of sight with his mouth open.

At the top of the first rise they turned and looked back.

Below them, Scarrow was lighting its windows. There were not many. Candles were dear this far north, and the village had been hoarding them all winter; but a few lights came up gold in the dusk, one after another, and down by the chapel, at the end of the lane, the village waystone was burning too. It was the last stone on the last track in this corner of the Wendmark. It was very old, and its glass gave a light no stronger than a lantern's, a thin pale circle on the wet road. Elias had looked at it every day since coming to Scarrow, the way you look at a sick friend, and every day it had been a little dimmer.

"Not long now," said Elias, to nobody in particular.

Finch looked up. Then he looked where Elias was looking, at the small tired light by the chapel, and frowned, and took Elias's hand.

Elias turned, and looked north-east, up the hill.

The Brede went on above them for miles. It rose and rose, bare and brown and patched with snow, in long smooth swells like a sea that had stopped moving, until it met the sky in one clean line. There was nothing on it at all. No house, no wall, no tree, no track; only the shine of water in the last of the light, and the wind, and the curlews.

And the grey.

It lay along the crest, very still, like a long low bank of cloud that had settled on the moor to rest. It had been there all winter. The people of Scarrow did not look at it, and did not talk about it, and did not go up the hill past the first rise; and if a sheep strayed up there into the grey, they let it go, and it came back, sometimes, days later, quite calm, and stood in the lane outside its own fold, and did not know which gate was its own.

Elias had seen the grey before. This was different. It did not move. It did not creep or drift or come in under doors. It lay along the top of the Brede as if it had always been there and always would be, and as if it were waiting, very patiently, for something to come up to it.

Finch tugged at Elias's hand.

He was not looking at the grey. He was looking at something closer, a little way up the slope above them, where the heather stopped at the edge of an old snowdrift.

It was a stone.

Elias would have walked past it. It was small, no higher than a milestone, and half buried in the peat, and so white that in the dusk it looked like a last patch of snow that had not yet melted. But Finch let go of Elias's hand and went straight up the slope to it through the wet heather, as if he had known it was there all along, and crouched down beside it, and put his palm flat on the top.

Elias followed, slowly.

Close to, it was not snow-white but bone-white, a pale smooth stone that had no business on a brown moor; It had been shaped, once, long ago, by hands. The top was rounded. The sides were square. On the face that looked north-east, up the hill toward the grey, there was a line of carving, so worn by three hundred winters that Elias could only feel it, not read it, tracing it with his fingertips in the dusk: a word, or a name, in letters older than any Elias knew.

There was no cage on it. There was no glass. It had never held a light.

"It's a waystone," said Elias slowly. "Isn't it? It's the right size. It's set like one. Facing up the road." "But there's no cage. There's never been a cage. Who would build a waystone without a light?"

Finch did not answer. He could not; he had not said a word in all the time Elias had known him. But he kept his hand flat on the top of the white stone, and his face, turned up toward the long grey line on the crest of the moor, was not frightened at all. It was the face of a boy listening to something a long way off.

Then, very softly, he whistled.

It was not any tune Elias had heard him whistle before. He whistled at grey coats, and at dogs, and at the wind; he whistled the tunes the carters sang on the Ninth Road. This was none of those. It was very short and very plain, four notes going up and one coming down, like a question with its answer folded inside it. He whistled it once, and then again, and then he stopped and looked surprised, as if he had not known it was in him.

On the crest of the Brede, a long way off, the grey moved.

It was not much. Nobody in Scarrow would have seen it. But Elias was watching, and Elias saw it: all along the top of the moor, the long still bank of cloud stirred, very slightly, the way a sleeper stirs at a sound in the house; and settled again; and lay still.

The wind dropped. The curlews had stopped crying. In the sudden silence Elias could hear the whole moor running with water, all round them, in the dark, a thousand small voices going down the hill.

"Finch," said Elias, very quietly. "Where did you learn that?"

Finch looked at Elias. Then he took his hand off the white stone, and stood up, and wiped his palm on his coat, and shook his head. Not no, exactly. More as if the question did not make sense. As if someone had asked him where he had learned to breathe.

It was nearly dark. Below them, at the foot of the hill, the windows of Scarrow had all come up gold, and the waystone by the chapel was a small pale smudge of light, and somebody was calling in the lane, a woman's voice, long and patient, calling someone home to supper.

Elias took Finch's hand again, and they went down.

At the bottom of the hill, where the track came into the lane by the chapel, Elias stopped, and looked back once more at the long dark shoulder of the Brede against the last of the sky. The white stone could not be seen from here. Nothing could. But Elias knew where it was now, and knew which way it faced; and knew, with a cold slow certainty, the way you know a fact you have been refusing to know for a long time, that there would be another one beyond it, a mile further on, up the hill, into the grey. And another one beyond that.

Every map of the Wendmark that the Royal Survey had ever made stopped here, at Scarrow, at the end of the last farmed track. Beyond it, on every one of them, there was only a blank.

Elias had come to the end of the map. Tomorrow, or the day after, when the water went down, Elias would have to walk off it.