Chapter 15: Counterweights

The old one had strapped his ribs in kitchen sacking, torn into strips and knotted at his back, and the knots dug in whenever he breathed. Ilan stood in the middle of the hall at first light on the twenty-fifth with grey day coming through the yard arch. Five days were left of the thirty. The hall looked like a jaw with the teeth pulled. He walked it with his left hand out. The east wall was raw bedding to the height of a man's reach. The west wall had lost its facing in slabs, and the threshold bed lay open in a trench of frost. Air came down the trench and across the floor and found his ankles. Living stone held heat, and a quarter of this hall had held it. Now that quarter lay in a quay lane, slung on poles. Along his bones the reserve ran thin,…