Chapter 46: Every Man Is a Resource
The southern gate of the Wall was called the Mouth, and it earned the name.
It was less a gate and more a fortified town with a tunnel through it like a barbican complex jutting out from the Wall’s face, with its own moat, its own towers, and a throat of a passage sixty paces long, its ceiling lined with murder-holes. Every wagon, mule, and man entering the Wall’s territory had to pass through it in single file under the eyes of the gate watch.
The processing took the rest of the day. Encrid had expected to hate it. Instead, he found himself taking professional notes.
Because the Wall, he discovered, ran on paper.
Every man of the column was entered into a ledger the size of a door. Name, origin, crime if any, skills if any, star and realm if any. The clerks asked the cultivation question as flatly as they asked for names and wrote down the answers without comment. The bandits were processed as a labor levy, their tallies checked, their sentence terms recorded. The wagons were inventoried down to the last sack. Even the horses were entered.
"You’ll want to understand this now, my lord, and save yourself grief later," said the officer who processed Encrid personally - a one-armed man of about fifty, with clerk’s ink on his remaining hand and a voice like gravel settling. His name was Cray, and his title, as far as Encrid could work out, was simply Gatekeeper. "The Wall has no lord and no law of the empire. What it has instead is one rule, and everything else hangs off it."
He turned the great ledger around so Encrid could read the motto inked across its first page, in letters gone brown with age.
EVERY MAN IS A RESOURCE.
"Two hundred kilometers of stone," Cray said, "and never enough hands. We don’t hang thieves, because a hanged man carries no stone. We don’t flog shirkers bloody, because a flogged man lifts nothing for a week. We don’t ask what you were south of the Riven, because as far as the Wall is concerned, south of the Riven doesn’t exist. The Wall asks one question of every soul that comes through the Mouth." He dipped his pen. "What can you do?"
He looked up at Encrid, and the question was not rhetorical.
Encrid didn’t answer immediately. He thought for a moment, considering what he could actually offer.
The damned body he had possessed had no skills worth boasting about. No great physique. No exceptional talent. Nothing that would make a soldier look twice.
But he did have something that was highly valued at the Wall.
Something he had developed in his previous life and could make use of now because of the System. It wasn’t listed as one of his skills, but Encrid considered it a skill all the same.
"I can read and write," he said. "I can keep accounts and draft correspondence."
He didn’t know how, but he could understand the language of this world. And the mathematical ability he’d built while preparing for competitive exams in his previous life was something he could actually boast about here where literacy was rare.
At the Wall, someone who could read, write, and handle numbers was more useful than an average warrior.
"And I’ve recently become slightly less than useless with a sword."
Of course, he also needed to boast about his recent accomplishment.
Behind him, someone who was almost certainly Harun turned a laugh into a cough.
Cray’s pen scratched. "Letters," he said, with the reverence other men reserved for gold. "You’ll go to the Quartermastery, my lord. The Third Office, under Steward Vess. Half our stores rot because we don’t have enough men who can count them." He kept writing. "Your servant?"
"He stays with me. He’s free, he’s paid, and he’s learning his letters."
"Then he counts as two resources." Scratch, scratch. "The levy men go to the Works and the outer details, sorted by ability. The woman Merta-" he checked a page, and something like respect crossed the ruined face "-claims she can quartermaster. If she’s half of what she claims, Steward Vess will fight you for her."
"He can have her. She’ll rob him blind, and the stores will run perfectly."
"That is the job, my lord." Cray stamped the page, and the stamp came down like a verdict. "Welcome to the Wall."
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They spent that night in the transit barracks of the Mouth.
The next morning, Encrid climbed the Wall for the first time.
Two hundred and six steps.
He counted every one of them because counting was better than thinking about his thighs, which hurt like hell.
Until now, Encrid hadn’t really experienced the disadvantages of having a fat body. The journey to the Wall had been surprisingly comfortable. He had spent most of it sitting or riding.
Two hundred steps changed that.
By the time he reached the top, his legs were burning, his breathing was heavy, and he had come to an important realization.
’Fuck, I need to get fit.’
The stair rose through the thickness of the rampart in switchbacks, past storerooms and guardrooms and racks holding javelins by the hundred, and finally let out through a low door into wind and light and the top of the world.
The walk was forty feet wide - wide enough to drill a company on. It ran east and west out of sight, a stone road in the sky, manned at intervals by grey figures who stood their posts with the stillness of men who had done it ten thousand times. Braziers burned every fifty paces. The blue lamps hissed on their masts.
And over the outer parapet, close enough now to knock the breath out of him,
was the enemy.
The forest began four hundred paces from the Wall’s foot.
Between them lay the killing ground, scraped bare and planted with stakes. It stretched out flat and grey before giving way to the treeline.
Sixty-foot pines stood shoulder to shoulder along the front rank, their needles black-green and completely still. Behind them, the canopy stretched northward as far as the eye could see.
And from that vast mass of trees came not a single sound.
Encrid stood at the parapet for a long time.
"First time on the stone, my lord?" The watchman at the nearest post was an older man, grey-stubbled, missing three fingers of his left hand to something that had clearly enjoyed taking them.
"Is it that obvious?"
"You’re staring at it so intently that I couldn’t help but notice." The man nodded toward the forest without looking at it himself. "Newcomers look at it. After a month, you learn to watch it instead. There’s a difference." He turned his head and spat companionably into the killing ground. "It’s been kind lately. Three weeks of nothing. Barely a roamer at the stakes."
"That sounds like good news."
The watchman was quiet for a moment.
"My lord, I’ve stood at this stone eleven years," he said. "And I’ll tell you what every man past his first winter will tell you." He looked at the forest then, finally, directly, the way a man looks at an old enemy across a table.
"The forest is never kind."
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