Chapter 89

RHYS

The last remount post on the north road was not a place. It was a stone barn, a picket line, a well with a bucket and no rope, and a captain who had given up shaving. Beyond it there was a valley with two burned farms in it, and beyond that, if you keep going, the war.

It took me eighteen days to get there. It should have taken eight. I lost the other ten in captains’ books.

***

Every post on that road keeps a book, and every book has the same line in it, in a different hand. Guardsman Tolly, to the next post, ordinary rota. I read them all. I read the dates, and somewhere about the seventh post I stopped reading and sat on a bench in a cold guardroom with the book open on my knees.

Every move came eight or nine days after a letter of mine reached the post before it.