Brendeck

I. Assigned

VOX MESSAGE · Brendeck to the Council of the Cities · Svartholm, Ice Field, 952.M41

"We stand. We have nowhere else we could stand."

Recorded in the Council Book on the day of the battle, other station: the Landammann.

Hajo Brüning had not felt his toes for three days, and he took that for a good sign, as long as they did not hurt.

The tent of the Third Company stood on the shore of the ice bay, in a hollow that the wind did not quite reach. Twelve men slept in greatcoats around a stove that smelled more than it warmed, of wet woollen cloth and burnt fat. Brüning lay by the entrance, where the canvas breathed in the draught. His left ear had frozen two winters before and never quite got warm again. It throbbed now in time with his pulse, and he lay there and counted along.

Sergeant Pfaff came in shortly after the evening soup, with snow on his shoulders and a sheet of paper in his fist. He was a bald, heavy man who chewed on a match when he was thinking, and he was chewing now. "Fall in outside the tent. The captain is reading."

They stood in the dark, in two ranks, the clouds of their breath above their heads like a second regiment. Captain Rindt held the sheet close in front of his spectacles, which misted in the frost and which he wiped clear with his thumb every few lines.

They had been on Svartholm for seven weeks. When they landed there had been one hundred and twenty-eight of them, and the Orks who came across the ice when the wind turned had taken sixteen, almost one every third day, without haste and without regard for the Karrenfelders' schedule. Brüning had learned to hear the Orks before one saw them: a dull beating on sheet metal that came out of the white nothing, and then the voices, deep and all at once, like a stadium at a game one could not win. He had never learned a name for them, only the word that everyone used.

Rindt read without emphasis. He read that the Third Company of the 27th Karrenfeld Rifles, one hundred and twelve men, was assigned with immediate effect to the 1st Askerholder City-Tank Regiment, on probation, until a decision was taken on the consolidation of the formation. Then he folded the sheet and put it in his coat.

"On probation — who?" someone said in the second rank.

"It doesn't say," said Rindt.

They were silent. Brüning looked at Dohl, who stood beside him stamping his feet to keep warm, a tall, white-blond boy from the neighbouring village who had told every story better than it was, even as a child. Dohl grinned, with his lips and not with his eyes. "The Cities," he said quietly. "My cousin was camped beside them, on Brakkis, three weeks."

"And?"

"They've got children in the tanks."

"Everyone's got children."

"In the tanks, I said. With school benches." Dohl shrugged. "And they've got no world any more, only the rest. There were twelve cities, and now there are nine, and a city is a tank. My cousin says when they come down the road, you stand up."

"Who stands up?"

"Everyone. Even majors."

"That's what your cousin says."

"That's what he says."

Once, at a loading station, Brüning had seen a command staff drive past, a major general in an open car, and nobody had moved, except to raise a hand to the cap, because one had to. He had seen men stand up of their own free will only when a fire broke out. He said nothing more. He shifted from one foot to the other, and the throbbing in his ear kept his mind on it.

The captain dismissed them with a wave of his hand. At the tent flap, when he thought that nobody could hear, he said to Pfaff: "On probation means somebody is watching and taking notes. Ask yourself who." Pfaff did not answer, he chewed. They went back into the tent, into the stinking warmth, and lay down again around the stove. Pfaff pushed another piece of wood in and set the damper crooked so that it would draw. "March out at daybreak tomorrow," he said, looking at no one. "With everything. Boots off the wall, Brüning, or the leather will freeze."

Brüning took them from the wall. He wrapped his foot cloths afresh, one after the other, dry against the skin, the way his father had taught him, back when winter in Karrenfeld was still the worst thing there was in the world. Then he lay down, his head on his pack, and watched in the glow of the stove the smoke creep along the peak of the tent.

He slept badly. The ice sang, as it had sung all night, a deep cracking far out that went through the canvas into the ground and from there into the bones. Dohl talked in his sleep about a dog. Once someone fell over the stove rod, cursed and lay down again.

When it grew grey they got up, coughing, with stiff jaws, and ate cold hardtack, which they dipped in tea. Outside one could see the bay, a grey expanse to the edge of the world, without waves and without shadows, and far over, on the other side of the ice, a row of dark hills that had not been there when it grew dark. Brüning narrowed his eyes. The hills had edges.

"That's them," said Pfaff beside him. He chewed.

Then the sun rose. It came up reddish and flat over the edge of the ice, without warmth, and threw the shadows of the tents two dozen paces long across the snow. At that moment a bell struck over the ice.

He heard it first in his ear, the bad one, then in his breastbone. A bright note, short, with a faint rasp as it died away, like an object that had once got a crack. There was a pause, in which Dohl opened his mouth and closed it again. Then the second, a little deeper. The third. He counted them, without wanting to, on the fingers of the hand in which the teacup trembled, and when he had come to the last one, so deep that the lid of his water bottle on the tent rope began to hum, he had needed the whole hand and four fingers of the other.

"Nine," he said.

"That's them," said Pfaff again, and this time Brüning heard something in it that he did not know, a kind of respect that the sergeant was not used to producing and that evidently embarrassed him. He spat the match into the snow.

II. The Column

ASSIGNMENT ON PROBATION · Departmento Munitorum, Strength Section · The Third Company of the 27th Karrenfeld Rifles is assigned to the 1st Askerholder City-Tank Regiment until the consolidation is decided.

LOAN · Council Book of the Cities · The Third of the Karrenfelders is lent to the Guild of Brendeck, for the battle, and comes back.

The ground came first.

They waited at a crossing where the ice track from the coast met the road over the plateau, a mast with a lamp and four poles in the snow. Whatever was on the move that day was already camped there: a supply convoy with its engines shut off, a group of sappers sitting on crates and drinking from tin mugs, a mortar platoon with smoking pipes. Brüning stood with the company at the edge, his pack between his feet. The tea in his mug formed rings, first fine ones, then a coarse swell. Dohl let his teeth knock together to test whether it was him.

Then one heard it, deep, slow, a grinding and shoving of iron on ice, and over the plateau steam rose, in a row, as from a dozen chimneys.

The first thing he saw was the Guild. Men and women in grey jackets, in threes and fours around heavy weapons that were carried on shoulders, in two rows left and right of the road. They walked in step, and they did not look up. Behind them came the tanks. He had seen Leman Russ, at Brakkis in a battery, and he knew how they looked close up, like a house that had been set down. These were arranged in groups of four, at equal intervals, and they kept it without anyone shouting or giving a sign, as if the running gear itself had been built for marching in step. Then came the first of the other vehicles.

It was taller than the church tower of Karrenfeld, and it moved. He knew that it was a vehicle. He told himself so, with the words he had been taught, super-heavy, track, gun, and the words did not hold. On the rear of the hull sat a superstructure with hatches, in one hatch a lamp was burning, in another washing hung, and on the back wall, from an iron bell-frame, something round and dark dangled that moved with the motion of the tracks and did not ring.

He did not notice when the sappers stood up.

The first was a trooper with a mug in his hand. He stood up without looking round, and did not put down the mug. The second stood beside him, then the whole group, without a word, without an order, without one looking at another. The mortar men took their pipes out of their mouths. A major of the supply convoy, a round man with a fur collar, came out of the cab and held on to the door frame, his cap pushed to the back of his head. He was standing too.

And Brüning stood. He was already standing before he knew that he stood, his hands at the seams of his trousers, the tea in his left fist, as if he had been summoned for this moment. His knees had decided it. He looked down at himself and then to the right: Dohl stood with his mouth open, chalk-white, and behind him Pfaff, who had stood up last and still looked as if he were thinking it over.

"Everyone," Dohl whispered. "Even majors."

Nobody from the Cities looked across at them. The Guild marched on, eyes straight ahead, and on the town halls, as the Weibel later called them, children sat at the hatches, one with a spoon in his mouth, another with an exercise book on her knees, and none of them waved. Nine hulls passed, one after the other, at the slow intervals of clockwork, and each time one had passed the crossing, one of those standing bent down to pick up the mug he had not put down.

Last came the wagons. They were tarpaulin wagons on tracks, one behind the other, and from the rear hatches faces looked out, women holding laundry baskets, an old man with a pipe, a boy carrying a hen that did not want to. Between the wagons walked a single man in a grey jacket, small, wiry, with a grey beard that looked as if it had stopped in the cold. When he saw the Karrenfelders, he stopped.

"Karrenfelders?"

"Third Company, Twenty-seventh Rifles," said Captain Rindt. "Assigned."

"Rüegg. Weibel of Brendeck, Guild." The man raised his hand to his cap, flat, as one did not do in Karrenfeld. "You are lent. Fall in at the back, with the benches of Brendeck. You come back."

"Assigned," said Rindt once more.

"As you wish." Rüegg did not flinch. "With us the word is lent."

They marched three days behind the wagons. Brüning learned what he was not meant to see and saw all the same: the kitchen marched along. A woman with a cauldron on her back, in which something bubbled, walked beside the Guild and filled tin bowls as she went, held out to her. A girl, perhaps eight, carried a trooper's water bottle and had evidently decided to adopt him. At the side of the road a wagon stopped every two hours, and children jumped out, ran as far as the first bushes, came back, and the wagon drove on again.

On the evening of the fourth day they camped at the bay. The town halls stood in a row on the shore, their stern walls to the ice, and on each the bell hung in its iron bell-frame. Brüning walked past the vehicles to stretch his legs and stopped before the first, on whose seal stood a mural crown and a name. The bell at its stern was no bigger than a water bucket. On its flank was a bright patch, polished like a worn-down heel, where the hands touched it.

They called it salt-herb soup, and there was none in it. "Old recipe," said the boy beside him at the fire, a redhead with hands like spades, Wassmer, citizen of Brendeck, twenty. "The salt-herb grew on Askerhold, by the salt lake, and it's long gone. We use kelp from here. Tastes like nothing of what it was."

"How do you know it doesn't taste like the original?"

Wassmer grinned, as if he had been caught. "I don't know," he said. "My mother says so. Her mother had it from her mother, and she at some point from the salt-herb."

After the meal the city stepped up before the last of the town halls. Brüning stood at the back with the Karrenfelders, because Rindt wanted it that way, and heard a man speak, calmly, with long pauses, three names that he did not know, and then everyone said a word together that he did not understand either. There were several thousand of them. They dispersed afterwards as after a roll call. "They do that every evening," said Pfaff, turning the match in his mouth. "Not our problem."

From the stern of the town hall of Brendeck came a voice that spoke a sentence, and many repeated it. Seven times seven, forty-nine. Seven times eight, fifty-six. The children said the table in the dark, under a vaulted roof, behind a hatch with a lamp, and it sounded as though they were counting something that belonged to them.

III. Ice Field

SCHOOL EXERCISE BOOK · Class three, Brendeck · Essay: What I take with me on the relocation

"The spoon and the cap and the exercise book. I am not taking the bell with me, the town hall carries it."

Beneath it, in red ink: Good. Next time in whole sentences.

On the morning of the fifth day the bells rang again, nine, and Brüning counted them with his hand on his water bottle, without having meant to. The first note was bright. The last went into his teeth.

Then they moved onto the ice.

It held. Rüegg had told him so in the evening, briefly, without adding anything, two metres thick and frozen for months, and Brüning had nodded and not believed it until the town halls stood on it. They pushed out one after another, and the ice made no sound, only a breath, deep under the tracks, a pull like that of a load that someone shifts. Brendeck took the middle. Its four quarters went into position left and right of it, ten Leman Russ, which dug themselves into the snow and showed only barrel and turret, and the Guild closed a ring behind them around the town hall, bench beside bench, with the weapons on tripods, the barrels to the west.

The wagon train pulled out. Brüning saw it from the corner of his eye as he lifted ammunition belts from a crate and handed them to Wassmer, who manned the heavy weapon of the third bench. The tarpaulin wagons turned on the shore in a line, the children were lifted by arms into the hatches, the old man with the pipe was already sitting up there, and the wagons rolled up onto the plateau, without haste, in the order in which they had come. Only the woman with the cauldron did not go along. She carried it up the ladder at the stern of the town hall, with both arms, and vanished into the hatch, and behind her two men climbed with a stretcher on which lay a boy too small to know what was being done with him. The hatch did not close. It was left open, so that it would draw.

"Wagon train is moving," said Rüegg to no one. He said it without feeling, as if he were counting boots.

At about noon they heard the drums.

They came from the other shore, a beating on sheet metal, slow and with gaps, and then denser, until it was no longer a beat and only a surface of noise. The ice passed them on. Brüning felt them in his soles, in his belt and in the bad ear, and he had felt them often before, on Svartholm, and never so many. At the edge of the world lay a dark strip that did not stay still.

"Waaagh," said Wassmer quietly, as if he were saying the name of a dog, and did not smile.

They came in a line so wide that Brüning could not see its ends. First the vehicles, Trukks on runners instead of wheels, welded together from sheet metal and rope, with superstructures of iron plates and hides, and on them stood the Orks, big and green and dense as wheat, with weapons that they held on to as if they might slip away from them. Behind them ran the others. Hundreds. He heard them now one by one, a roaring that sounded like laughter, and he thought of nothing. He held a belt in both hands and waited for someone to say something.

"Fire," said Rüegg.

He did not shout it. He said it as one opens a door. Then the weapons spoke.

Brüning had fired before, often, with the lasgun, and it had always felt like work, dry and exact. This felt like a blow to the chest that did not stop. The town hall above him gave a jolt, and the snow leapt from the hull. The main gun spoke, and the air turned solid. He pressed his hand to his good ear, and the other throbbed of its own accord. Wassmer fired, short, in bursts, with the face of a man hanging out washing. The barrel smoked white, then red, and Brüning reloaded without counting, the belt over the shoulder, the cover up, the lever through, as they had shown him in two minutes.

In front of them the quarters detached themselves from the snow. Two, three tanks moved off, not all of them, only ever one quarter at a time, diagonally across the ice towards the flank of the Ork line, and the Guild spoke louder to cover their backs. He saw a Trukk burst. He saw an Ork with its mouth wide open torn apart in mid-leap. The tanks drove into the gap that opened, and the gap closed, and out of the smoke no more tanks came back, only the sound.

"Three," said Rüegg beside him. He had held up his hand and was counting on his fingers, his eyes half shut. "Three."

The Orks reached the ring.

Brüning saw them as shadows, then as faces, then as a heap. One jumped onto the tripods of the second bench, and the weapon went from under him like a table that someone has jumped on. He heard metal on metal. Beside him Wassmer thrust the barrel forward, without firing, as one thrusts a broom, and something big fell back. Then he saw Dohl.

Dohl stood in front of the line of the Karrenfelders, ten paces to the left, with his rifle at his hip, shooting at one who was already on him. He fired at arm's length. He screamed something that Brüning did not hear, and Brüning knew all the same what it was, because it was the only thing Dohl had ever said when he was afraid: Everyone, even majors. Then the Ork was over him, and the rifle fell, butt up, into the snow.

He wanted to run to him. He had already put one foot forward when Rüegg jerked him back by the collar, hard, and said nothing, and Brüning stayed where he was. After that there was only noise.

It ended as it began, without his finding a place where it would have been. The drums grew slower. The shouts became single voices. The Ork line, what was left of it, withdrew onto the ice, in heaps, over corpses and burning vehicles, and above the plain stood a wall of black smoke in which one heard something crackling. The quarters came back, slowly, singly, with singed paint. Rüegg counted them, again on his fingers, and held his thumb down when he had finished. "Seven."

Brüning took his hand from his ear. He looked at it as if it belonged to someone else. From the open rear hatch of the town hall came steam, warm and fatty, a smell of onions, and in the hatch stood the woman with the cauldron and filled with a ladle the tin bowls that were held out to her from the Guild, as if the day were nothing more than a midday meal that came later.

IV. The Town Hall

COUNT SHEET · Kitchen of the City of Brendeck · Day of the battle

Diners in the morning: 419. Diners at midday: 219. Diners in the evening: no entry.

The second wave came in the early afternoon, and it came quietly.

No drums. Brüning lay behind the crate, his head below the rim, and noticed only from Wassmer's silence that something was missing. The plain in front of them was empty up to the curtain of smoke, in which something smouldered, and out of the smoke a shadow pushed itself. At first he took it for a piece of coast that had torn loose.

It was a ship. Or it had once been one, an icebreaker or the hull of one, black, curved, with a bow of steel plates two men high, and the Orks had welded runners to it and chimneys and along its whole length a fence of hooks. It glided, without hurrying, across the ice, and behind it ran a mass, dense and silent, that did not scream. Brüning heard only the screeching of the steel.

"Brendeck to the Council of the Cities," said the vox set beside him.

The Karrenfelder vox-operator crouched two paces further along, the headphones around his neck, and had turned the loudspeaker up because the captain demanded it. Since the morning the company had been tied into the net of the Cities, and it was the first time a voice had spoken there that did not say figures. It was calm. It was the voice of a woman, no longer young, and she spoke slowly, with pauses in which something hissed.

"We stand. We have nowhere —"

Then the hiss grew louder, and Brüning did not hear the rest, because at that moment the town hall fired. The gun coughed, and a flame leapt from the barrel as long as a house. The snow on the hull flew off in one piece. The ship at the edge of the world jerked, and in its bow a seam flashed, a bright line in the plate, but it kept coming.

The quarters moved off. All four, this time at once, with black breath from the exhausts, the seven tanks of Brendeck in a line at an angle towards the ship, and the Guild fired until the barrel of the weapon in front of Brüning turned blue. He saw a tank disappear under the bow as if someone had laid a hand over it. He saw a second one burning, with its hatch open, from which nobody came. He saw the third stand still and go on firing, and it fired until the smoke swallowed it. It did not take long. Of seven, two drove back.

The ship reached the town hall.

Brüning had not known that a sound could be so deep that one heard it with the stomach. The bow rose, then it pushed itself under the lower hull of the city tank, with a noise like a whole roof collapsing, and the town hall reared at the front, so high that the tracks came off the ice, and fell back. Out of the ship something shot, white and then orange, and in the same breath the town hall was in flames. It burned from the lower hull upward, in a wall of oil that ran over the hull and flowed down the sides like a curtain.

The gun fired once more.

Then the commander's hatch in the turret opened. A woman climbed out, in her mid-fifties, with a leather cap and broad hands, and she laid both hands flat on the rim of the hatch, as if laying them on a table. She looked across the ice, across the Guild, across the quarters that were coming back or were not, and her gaze did not last long, only as far as the stern. She said something, and it was not for the gun.

Brüning saw it properly for the first time, because he looked without knowing why. People were coming out of the rear hatch. The woman with the cauldron, without the cauldron, a ladle in her fist. An old man with a bandage around his head. Two men with a stretcher on which nobody lay any more, then a young woman with a child in her arm, who was screaming. They came down the ladder, one after another, and there were more than he had believed would fit into that space. Then something jammed. The hatch jerked, a piece of iron bent in the frame, and the hull tilted backwards, the ground beneath the stern seemed to sink, and nobody came any more.

"Ambros!" the woman called from above.

Rüegg ran. He ran to the stern, his head pulled in, and tore at the hatch, with both hands, with his foot braced against the wall. Two Guildsmen came to help, with a crowbar. There was a sound of iron on iron and from behind, from inside the hull, a knocking, three times, at long intervals. The hatch did not move. The heat from the lower hull already stood like a wall in their faces.

"Leave it," said the woman in the hatch. She did not say it loudly, and Brüning understood her anyway, because she raised her hand as she said it. "Ambros. The bell-frame. The bell."

Rüegg let the crowbar fall. He looked at her, only half a second, and something passed over his face that Brüning did not know. Then he turned and saw Brüning, who stood three paces behind him, without knowing why, with empty hands. "You," he said. "With me."

The iron bell-frame hung on the stern wall above the hatch, four bolts, red-brown with rust, and the bell on it swung gently, the way an object swings that one heard before one saw it. Wassmer was already on the ladder and struck the first bolt with a hammer. It broke at the first blow. The second would not. Brüning laid his hands on the flank of the bell, and the bronze was warm, not hot, but as warm as an animal is. He felt the hammer in the metal. On the shoulder of the bell stood letters, large, cast into the bronze, and he read them because they were in front of his face: BRENDECK, and beneath it, smaller, WHOEVER HEARS, COMES.

No more knocking came from the hatch.

"Carry!" shouted Rüegg.

The third bolt broke, the fourth gave way, and the weight fell into their hands. Eighty-four kilos, someone said later, but at that moment he had it in his arms and in his legs and in his back, an animal that did not want to. They took it three together, Rüegg at the crown, he and Wassmer at the sides, and ran. Under their boots the ice began to speak, in short, hard sounds like shots. Behind them the town hall sagged, first a hand's breadth, then two, with a deep sigh in its flank, and the gun, which had fired once more, fell silent.

He did not look back. He carried the bell, and they ran until the ice was firm under their feet again and the heat at his back turned to mere warmth.

V. The Relocation

COUNCIL BOOK OF THE CITIES · Evening after the battle · Ice Field, behind the line

Brendeck stands no more. The burgomaster has fallen. Her chair is set.

The survivors pass into Kaltenau and into Torgelow, counted by head. Guests are not counted.

By evening the Orks were gone, and nobody could say why.

They had detached themselves from the town hall when it sagged, in heaps, without orders, the smoke at their backs, and the remaining quarters of the Cities had struck them in the flank, until only wrecks stood on the ice and scraps of fur. Whether they were beaten or sated, the Weibel did not know. Brüning stood on the shore where the Guild was gathering, and watched the sun vanish behind the ice. Something still burned at one spot in the middle of the bay, deep down, in the ice, a patch like an eye that grew a little smaller every quarter of an hour.

His hands were shaking, and he could not get them still. They were torn open, on the palms, and the blood was already dry. In his boots, which he had not felt for a week, it burned now, ten sparks, one at each toe, so fiercely that he had to sit down on a stone. He had thought it was good if they did not hurt. He sat there and let them hurt.

The bell lay on a wagon.

Gantner had taken it from them, the Weibel of Torgelow, the one with the bad leg, and he had said nothing about it. He stood at the rear of a tarpaulin wagon on which lay sacks and bales of straw, and took it in both arms, the way one lifts a child out of a boat, and laid it on its side, in the straw. "Don't stand it," he said to Wassmer. "Lay it." Then he drew the tarpaulin over it, and Brüning could still see an edge of the bronze, with soot clinging to it, and the curve of the shoulder on which the letters sat, which could not be read now.

"It does not hang, so it lies," said Rüegg, and he said it without intonation, to himself, quietly. He stood beside it, his cap in his fist, and something was missing in him that Brüning could only name later: he had stopped moving his hands.

Wassmer sat down beside him on the drawbar of the wagon. He said nothing for a long time and finally handed him a piece of bread that was hard and still warm from his jacket. "The one with the cauldron was called Hedwig," he said. "She always took too many onions. Always. My mother quarrelled with her about it every time." He chewed, and Brüning saw that his jaws hurt. "The bread's from yesterday. She baked it."

Brüning ate it. He knew nothing that he could have said, and said it.

They fell in. There was no shout for it. The Brendeckers, what was left of the Guild, formed up in a line on the shore, and Brüning, who was still standing beside the wagon, saw them arrange themselves, by benches, as they had been counted that morning. Where three men had stood around a weapon before, there stood now two or one. Then came the tank men, two crews, in grey overalls, with sooty faces, five each, who had climbed out of their two vehicles and took their place at the end, without anyone looking at them. When all were there, Gantner stepped in front of the line.

"I count," he said.

He counted them with his finger, he did not move his head, each one singly, from left to right, with a murmur that nobody understood. He counted to the end and started again from the end, because the number had to be right. Brüning watched him come past the men of the third bench, past Wassmer, who did not look up, and then past him.

"Seventy-five," said Gantner.

"He's on loan," said Rüegg without raising his head. "He belongs to the Karrenfelders."

Gantner looked at Brüning. It was the first time the Weibel had looked at him, and the look asked little. It checked whether something was right, as one holds a measure against a rod. "Then seventy-four," he said.

Only now did Brüning notice that he was standing in the line. He had stood himself there when Gantner began counting, with his heels together, because everyone did. He took a step back, to the side where the snow was not trodden down, and his boot sank in. It was a very small step. It seemed long to him.

"Seventy-four," Gantner repeated. "Brendeck, Guild and quarters. There were one hundred and eighty-eight." He said it to no one, he said it out onto the ice, and it was a number that one spoke so that one did not have to carry it alone. "The wagon train?"

"Two hundred," said a woman from the other side, with a sheet in her hand that she had not read. She was from Brendeck, she had the narrow face of a teacher, and she said it as if passing a figure over the vox, flat and exact, and her lips did not tremble. "Two hundred. The kitchen is not included."

That was all. Then Gantner said that they were moving, and the line dissolved into movement.

The relocation began as it grew dark. Brüning went along with it, because his company lay in that direction, and because it was the way one went. The wagons drove ahead, with their lamps put out. The Guild walked left and right, faces turned outward, weapons on their shoulders, and behind the wagons, with their tarpaulin loads, walked what was left of Brendeck, seventy-four men and two hundred women, children and old people, so quiet that he heard the snow under the soles, two hundred and seventy-four times. Nobody said anything. A child asked, and a hand laid itself over its mouth, not hard.

Pfaff caught up with him at the edge of the road, with the match in the corner of his mouth. He looked tired, older than he had been yesterday. He had the sheet in his fist on which the names of the company stood, and he had struck them through, in pencil, three lines, then one more, and the lines in the middle he held down with his thumb.

"Twenty-three," he said. "Dohl too."

"I saw it."

"Thought so."

They walked for a while. The sergeant chewed. "They do that every evening," he said then, not to Brüning but into the darkness. "Tonight they have one more."

VI. The Roll of the Fallen

COUNCIL BOOK OF THE CITIES · Evening Roll of the Fallen · in front of the town hall of Torgelow

The Landammann: "Halmstadt is read. Her bell hangs no more. Her name rests until sunrise." All: "It rests." Likewise Gerrinsfurt. Likewise Ulmersfeld. Likewise Brendeck.

Counted: four names. The Cities stand. Still.

The Roll of the Fallen was held only when the relocation had arrived.

It was already deep in the night. The town halls stood in the new row on the shore, eight, with gaps between the stern walls that one should not have seen and yet saw, and nobody had lit lamps. The people stood in the dark in front of the last one, in rows, as they had walked, the Guild at the edge, the children in front. The Brendeckers stood scattered, a few with Kaltenau, a few with Torgelow, as if they did not know whether they belonged. Brüning saw the teacher counting her class, with her finger, and he saw Wassmer, who kept his head lowered.

He stood at the back. He stood with the Karrenfelders in a rank that nobody had assigned to them, and Pfaff beside him held his hands behind his back, as at a roll call that one did not know and nevertheless took as binding. The ice cracked. The stars were there, so sharp that it hurt the eyes. Then the Landammann came.

He came out of the hatch of the town hall, a lean old man with spectacles whose arm was mended with twine, and he climbed onto a crate that stood there for him. In his hand he held a book. He did not open it. He stood for a while, and the silence grew so great that Brüning heard his own pulse in his ear, the bad one, and the breathing of thousands who said nothing.

"Halmstadt is read."

A short pause. "Her bell hangs no more. Her name rests until sunrise."

"It rests," they all said.

It came in waves, a little offset, like an echo from different walls. Gerrinsfurt. Ulmersfeld. He did not know the words, and yet something in him had settled that expected them, as on a long march one expects the next step. He stood with his mouth open and noticed that he was not breathing.

"Brendeck is read."

It did not go through the field. It stayed standing. The Landammann had said the name like the others, in the same voice, without a weight that one could have weighed, and yet Brüning saw heads bow, not all, only at certain places, and how at one place, at the front among the Torgelowers, a woman with a child on her arm laid her hand on the back of the child's head, as if she wanted to hold something shut for the child.

"Her bell hangs no more."

On a wagon behind the rows lay a bronze under a tarpaulin, and Brüning thought of the straw.

"Her name rests until sunrise."

"It rests," they said.

He said it with them. He knew it only when it was out, two words, quietly, into his cloud of breath. Beside him Pfaff turned his head, not far, only far enough to see it, and the match in the corner of his mouth rested. He said nothing. Further forward, in the first row of the Brendeckers, Wassmer said it half a word behind the others, and his voice broke on the second, and Rüegg, who stood beside him, kept his mouth closed until it was over, and then he spoke it to the end, alone, a little too late, as though he had gone down a flight of stairs and found one step too many at the bottom.

"The Cities stand," said the Landammann.

"Still."

Brüning did not say it. He heard it from the others, and it sounded like something one carries out of a room in which the light is going out, and then they dispersed, in silence, each group in its own direction, and it grew truly dark on the field.

He had the second watch. He stood from midnight until morning at the ice edge, where the shore passed into the bay, in a fur coat that smelled of somebody else, and stared at the surface on which one spot still glowed. It was a clear, hard night, so cold that the skin of his fingers stuck to the rifle if he left them on it for long. Behind him he heard the camp, men turning over in their sleep, a cough, a child. He noticed that in the camp nobody said the name.

It struck him only at the relief. Wassmer came, sleepy, red-faced, and said he had come to relieve the watch, and he did not say which city he came from. He said: "from the third bench." The Weibel spoke of the middle when they meant the place where the town hall had stood. The women said she. Captain Rindt, who came shortly before dawn to check on the watch, said the Ice Field and then read the name off a map, silently, with his lips. Nobody had ordered him to. Brüning noticed that during the night a gap had formed in the camp, in the shape of a word, and that everyone went round it, as on a path one goes round a spot where something lies.

He himself had almost said the name three times. He had had it in his mouth like a hot stone.

At last it grew grey. The east acquired an edge, then a line, red and flat, and Brüning stood with stiff legs and both hands on the rifle and waited. He knew now what for. The sun came up, a piece, only the rim, and far along the shore, from the first town hall in the row, where until yesterday the first had stood, came no sound.

It stayed quiet. For the length of a breath it was so quiet that he could count the beat of his heart, and he waited for the bright note with the rasp as it died away and knew that it would not come.

Then the second bell struck, deeper, round, without a rasp, as the first. After it the third. He counted along, on his fingers, pressed against the grip of the rifle, one after another, until he came to the last, so deep that the surface of the ice in front of him swayed for a moment. He had needed eight fingers.

"Brendeck," he said.

He said it quietly, to no one, and his breath stood in the air in front of him for a while before the wind took it.