Chapter

6

Deep and Crisp and Even

In the time it had taken them to trek through the shadowed snow of Would Be, the sky had changed colour. Looking up through the trees, Amy saw an expanse overhead that looked like wet slate. There was a whisper of cloud. A moody twilight had fallen across the wood.

Snowlight. She remembered it from her childhood.

A magical dusk where the ground seemed brighter than the sky, foretelling the imminent arrival of snow. It was an oddly fond memory, but in her current situation, it was not an exciting prospect.

A minute or so later, the first flakes started to fall.

They came down lazy and slow, just one or two at first, drifting like ash from an evening bonfire, or drowsy bumblebees.

‘Button up!’ declared the Doctor. ‘Not far now.’

The snow grew a little heavier, but it was still pretty, like the picturesque flakes on a Dickensian Christmas card scene, rather than a full-on Scott of the Antarctic /

March of the Penguins / ‘I’m just going outside now, I may be some time’ thing.

Adjusting her mittens, Amy noticed how both Arabel and Samewell were intrigued by the falling snow. Neither of them had ever seen much of it, certainly not in its most fleeting, eerie state of actually falling out of the sky.

‘It’s a real novelty,’ said the Doctor, noticing her interest. He had plucked up the collar of his jacket and was holding it closed with one hand.

‘Like a Christmas single?’ she asked, smiling.

‘It doesn’t mean it’s a good thing,’ he replied.

‘So, just like a Christmas record, then?’ she asked.

She watched Bel take off her glove and hold out a hand, letting flakes alight on her pink palm. Samewell grinned, and stuck out his tongue to catch a flake.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Amy asked the Doctor.

‘I’m thinking about the little pockets of early human beings,’ he replied quietly. ‘Little communities of brave and determined hunter-gatherers, delighted by the unfamiliarity of snow and not even beginning to realise it’s the first traces of an approaching ice age. Not even beginning to realise that what is enchanting now will starve them and freeze them and kill them inside six months.’

He blew on his hands.

‘Let’s find this memory yard,’ he said.

It wasn’t far off. With the ghost snow falling as silently as moving stars, the clearing was hauntingly beautiful. It was also terribly melancholy. The Doctor reckoned that Would Be had been deliberately planted by earlier generations of Morphans. The little grey headstones looked like trees that had yet to flourish.

Amy couldn’t believe how many of them there were.

They were like the rings of a tree. Add them all together, and they represented the toil and dedication that had gone into building Beside.

Bel took them to the marker of her father’s grave.

Though the snow was laying, it had not yet covered and hidden the jar and the little bunch of heathouse flowers.

‘She was here,’ said Bel. ‘Only Vesta would do that.’

‘You wouldn’t do it?’ asked the Doctor.

Bel seemed to think about replying, but didn’t. She looked as though the answer was too sad or ordinary or unremarkable for her to say out loud.

‘Bel would mean to,’ said Samewell, ‘but she’s always so busy. We’re all so busy. Vesta would remember what day it was.’

The Doctor walked around the grave two or three times, a thumb under his chin and an index finger crooked across his mouth.

‘There are only her tracks,’ he said, pointing. ‘Only hers. The snow’s beginning to hide them. Look, that’s her. Footsteps and the brush of long skirts. Just hers.

Well, ours too now, but ignore them. She came up the way we came, up the path. She came up from the plantation. But she didn’t go that way. She went off in the other direction.’ He turned to Bel. ‘Where else would she go?’

Bel shrugged. ‘Nowhere. She’d have been late for work as it was. Guide’s Bell would have rung. She would have just gone back.’

‘What’s this way?’ the Doctor asked, following the line of swiftly vanishing footprints.

‘Nothing,’ said Samewell. ‘If you go that way you’d eventually reach Farafield, I suppose. Firmer Number Three is roughly that way.’

‘Only roughly,’ said Bel.

They all squinted into the falling snow. The sky had darkened so much, it was hard to make out the gloomy shoulders of the mountains.

‘She was going somewhere,’ said the Doctor, leading the way briskly. The trail took them out of the memory yard and deep into the trees. He pointed at the ground as he walked.

‘Look,’ he called back. ‘Straight line! She wasn’t wandering, wasn’t strolling around. A very deliberate straight line.’

‘Maybe she saw something,’ suggested Amy, close on his heels.

‘Saw what?’ asked Bel, following along with Samewell.

The Doctor stopped suddenly. ‘That’s also a very deliberate straight line,’ he said. There was another line of prints in the snow, crossing Vesta’s path like a ‘T’. It was also fading in the snowfall, but not quite as fast because of the sheer size of it.

‘What made those?’ asked Amy, slowly and very cautiously.

‘I don’t know,’ said the Doctor, hunkering down to examine them. He measured one out against the side of his hand.

‘They’re giant,’ said Samewell. There was a catch of anxiety in his voice.

‘Yes,’ said the Doctor, ‘they are.’ He got up. ‘They were here first,’ he said. ‘She came upon the trail.

Found it.’

‘What are you, the last of the Mohicans or something?’ asked Amy.

The Doctor looked at her.

‘Baden-Powell taught me the rudiments of tracking,’

he replied.

‘Of course he did,’ she replied.

‘Chingachook merely refined some of my techniques,’ said the Doctor.

‘Chingachook’s a fictional character,’ Amy replied.

‘Is he?’ asked the Doctor.

‘Yes, he is,’ said Amy.

‘Or was that just the deal Fenimore Cooper struck to get permission to write the story?’

‘What are you talking about?’ asked Bel.

‘The real question,’ Amy replied, still looking at the Doctor, ‘is why are we talking about it, because it’s a stupid conversation.’

‘You started it,’ said the Doctor. He turned back to the tracks. ‘Look, she came up here, came across the tracks.’

‘The giant tracks,’ said Amy.

‘The giant tracks, yes, and then she headed off back into the woods. In a hurry.’

‘Scared?’ asked Bel.

‘Maybe scared. She didn’t retrace her steps, just went off in a hurry. Come on,’ he added, and started to follow the new trail in a hurry.

‘Slow down, Davy Crockett!’ Amy cried, following.

‘Davy Crockett was a terrible tracker!’ The Doctor called over his shoulder. ‘Lovely man. Nice hat. Very overrated in the tracking department.’

He came to a halt again. They’d reached a small clearing close to the northern end of the memory yard.

‘What is it?’ asked Amy.

‘Oh dear,’ said the Doctor.

‘What is it?’ Amy repeated.

‘Something bad happened here,’ said the Doctor quietly.

Samewell and Bel came up behind them.

‘Is that..?’ asked Samewell.

‘That’s blood,’ said Bel.

The snow was falling heavily, but it hadn’t quite managed to obliterate the dark stains soaked into the ground cover.

‘Yes, it is,’ said the Doctor. ‘And I’m rather afraid there’s an awful lot of it.’

Ten seconds before he drowned, Rory managed to right himself in the fast-flowing undercurrent, just long enough to hammer his fists against the roof of ice. It was like banging against the glass of a display aquarium. The noise was as muffled as the thud of his heart. Nothing yielded.

The light was strange under the filter of the ice.