The Wardens

There is no soldier caste under the roof, no class raised apart to fight. The narrow places where one route meets another — the throats, we call them — are watched and kept by the same wardens who maintain the doors and read the water, because it is the same work. To know a throat well enough to keep it warm and dry is to know it well enough to close it, and a closing is only a keeping done in haste.

What a warden carries is mostly tools: line and drum and anchor, the signal-lamp, the cold-mask, the short hooked things one uses where a long blade is a danger to its own side. They train, they keep registers, and they have cadences older than the words that record them, because rhythm moves a frightened body faster than an order can. But ask a warden what wins a struggle under the roof and not one will name a weapon. They will name the ice, the cold water, the long memory of which floors are sound, and patience.

This is the part outsiders find hardest to credit of a people so plainly gentle: that we are not afraid of much down here, and that the not-being-afraid was earned. We were come for once, by something that should have been the end of us, and it was not. The how of it is kept in the oldest cycle, and the lesson it left is short enough to carry in one hand — that weight is not answered with weight.