Chapter 563 - 562: The Fourth Column

Chapter 563: Chapter 562: The Fourth Column

Location:Seven Peaks — Elian’s Room; The Hall; The East Barracks

Date/Time:TC1857.05.21 – TC1857.05.25

Grandma Maren’s letters came folded in three, and the paper was always slightly wrong, and Elian knew before he opened this one that it had been written over more than one day, because the fold had been made twice.

The first fold was sharp. The second one was soft and off by a finger’s width, which meant somebody had opened it again after folding it, and added to it, and folded it a second time with their hands not working properly.

He put his thumb along the second fold and sat with it for a while before he did anything else.

Fifteen days. He had counted them on the wall beside his bed with a bit of charcoal and had then rubbed them out on the twelfth day because Mira had come in and looked at them, and had gone on counting in his head afterward, which was harder and which he did anyway.

***

She told him all of it.

That was the part he kept going back to over the next four days, and it was the part that made everything else bearable, although he did not have the word for that yet and would not have used it if he had.

She told him the number of animals, and she told him it was a disagreement between two people and that nobody had made it into one number. She told him the wall and what the wall was for and who had built it and how long it took. She told him the crust that came off in sheets and what it cost. She told him thirty-one, and she named the ones he knew, which was nine of them.

She told him Emrys Dunmore stood in the third place because nobody else could, and called the head, and that the two people in front of him lived because he called it, and that a second one came in behind him.

She told him what Emrys Dunmore asked at the end, which was whether the shed was shut.

And on the second fold, in handwriting that had gone bad, there was the last part, and it was not in Grandma Maren’s words. He could tell. The sentences were shorter, and they did not have any and in them.

It isn’t about you. Somebody built those things for one person, and it isn’t a nine-year-old on a mountain three hundred kilometers away. You are going to lie in the dark tonight and decide that it is. Don’t.

Elian read that four times and then lay in the dark and decided that it was.

He had met Emrys Dunmore exactly never, and he knew a great deal about him, because Grandma Maren wrote about him nearly every week and had done so since the autumn. The man who would not come. The man who learned the whole thing anyway out of what she called spite and Elian had privately decided was something else. The man who rang the hours and had opinions about how a grave should be cut and did not like the word anchor.

Elian had spent seven months building a picture of somebody out of a weekly letter, and the picture had a wall in it now, and a lip, and a shed with twenty-two people in it.

He had never once thought about whether the man would like him.

***

He gave it about a day.

That was longer than he wanted and shorter than it deserved, and it was the best he could do. He did the thing he had learned to do in the Federation, which was to take the feeling and put it somewhere and go and get it later when there was time, and he had never told anybody he could do that because he had worked out at six that adults get upset when children can do it.

Then he asked for the numbers.

He asked Mira first, because Mira was there and because Mira did not lie to him about anything, and Mira said she did not have them and that she was not going to guess, and would he like her to ask for them.

"Yes," Elian answered. "All of them. Not the dead. The animals. How many came, how many got killed, how many went away, how long it went on, how long it took her to do one at the start and how long it took at the end."

Mira looked at him for a moment.

"That last one’s not on any sheet."

"Somebody watched. Somebody always watches now." He had his hands flat on the blanket. "Ostrek would have had it, and Ostrek’s dead, so ask whoever was standing next to Ostrek."

***

It took two days, and it came back on a single page in Thorne’s hand, because Thorne had gone and got it himself rather than sending somebody, and had not asked what it was for.

Elian laid it out on the bed and went through it the way he went through everything, which was slowly, twice.

Sixty-something. Thirty-three killed. Eleven on the wall. Twenty-two by her, in the open, alone.

Two lines for the first ones. Three for the later ones.

Twenty-two minutes.

He sat there for a long time with his finger on the last number and then did the thing, and the thing took him about half a minute because he was nine and the arithmetic was not hard.

Twenty-two animals in twenty-two minutes.

One a minute, for twenty-two minutes, with each one costing two or three of a thing that used to cost one and used to need nine seconds afterward.

"She didn’t have any gaps." He said it out loud, to nobody, in an empty room.

***

He asked to be carried to the Hall, which he had never done.

That was the part that frightened Mira, he found out later — not the question, the asking. He had spent three months getting himself standing for half an hour a day, and he had never once let anybody carry him anywhere, and he gave that up in about four seconds when he worked out that walking would cost him the half hour and he wanted the half hour for standing in a room.

So Coop carried him down, because Coop was there and because Coop did not make an occasion of things, and put him on his feet at the door, and Elian walked in on his own.

There were a dozen people in the Hall, and the argument they were having was about the north.

He waited. He had been told once by Raven, in a corridor, months ago, that the worst thing you can do in a room is arrive with a thing and say it over the top of what people are already saying, because then they have to choose between two things and they will choose the one they were already holding. So he stood at the end of the table and waited until Taron finished, and then until somebody answered Taron, and then until there was the gap.

"Can I say a thing?"

Raven turned around.

She had not known he was there. He saw that and put it away for later, because it meant he had about one chance at this and she was going to be about six different things at once for the first few seconds and none of them would be listening.

"Go on," Raven allowed.

"Twenty-two animals in twenty-two minutes." Elian kept his hands at his sides because they shook otherwise. "Two lines for the first ones and three for the later ones. And a heavy used to take nine seconds, and then you couldn’t stand up."

Nobody said anything.

"So you had no gaps for twenty-two minutes." He made himself say the next part at the same speed. "And it didn’t stop because you won. It stopped because they stopped. Twenty-seven of them walked away at the very fewest, and nobody agrees how many more than that. They walked away with you on your knees in the open ground and nobody standing anywhere near you."

Shen Wuyan had put down what she was holding.

"Finish it." Not to Raven. To Elian.

"They weren’t trying to kill her." He looked at the table rather than at any of them, because that was easier and because it was the way you say a thing you have checked. "If they wanted her dead, they had her. Twenty-seven of them hadn’t been used. They were measuring. They came, and they found out how long she lasts and what it costs her and then they went home, and they’ll do it again somewhere else, and they’ll find out something new every time, and every time they do it a village pays for the answer."

He stopped.

"And she has to go, because it’s a village. And they know that too, because they made sixty of them and sent them past everybody to get to her, so they know she comes."

***

The room did what rooms do, which was to take about ten seconds to catch up and then all start at once, and Elian did not hear most of it because his legs had started to go and he was working on that.

It was Taron who cut through it, in the flat voice, without softening any of it.

"He’s right, and I’ve been three days not saying it."

"Say it now," Raven told him.

"You can’t go." Taron did not move from the window. "That’s the whole of it, and I’ve been turning it over since the sheet came, and I could not find the hole in it. Wherever you go, that is now the place that gets sixty. Ferrow’s Rest got sixty because you’d go there. The next place gets sixty because you’d go there. The going is the thing that brings it. And every time you do go, you kill thirty of them, and the rest walk home having learned what you cost, and you’re worth less the next time."

"And if I don’t go?"

"Then a village fights sixty on its own with three-person teams, and there aren’t enough threes." He turned around. "I haven’t got an answer. I’ve got a fact. The fact is that your presence is now a weapon that somebody else is aiming, and the only person who gets to decide where it lands at the moment is them."

***

Raven did not rule that day, which Elian noticed, and which he thought about afterward and decided was correct.

What she did instead was send four riders out before dark — one to Windbreak, one to Millford, one north after Bjorn, one to the Imperial City — and every one of them carried the same four lines in her handwriting, and the fourth line was the one people talked about for a year afterward.

The animals at Ferrow’s Rest ignored every person on the field and went for me.

Twenty-seven of them at the fewest withdrew undamaged. Nobody was chasing them.

I do not know what that means, and I am not going to guess in front of you.

Until I do: do not send for me. If a thing comes at your settlement, hold it with what you have and tell me afterward. I will come if you ask twice. I am telling you plainly that asking twice may be the worse choice and that I cannot prove it, and I am leaving it with you because it is your ground and your people and it is not mine to decide from a mountain.

***

She came up to his room that evening and sat on the end of the bed, which she had not done since the winter, and did not say anything at first.

"You were right," she allowed eventually. "All of it. And I’d worked out about two-thirds of it and had not made myself finish, and I want you to know that, because otherwise you’ll spend ten years thinking adults have the whole thing and choose not to tell you, and mostly we’ve got two thirds and we’re frightened of the last bit."

"I know." Elian was sitting up. "I did the same thing for a day."

"What did you do for a day?"

"Decided it was about me." He said it flatly, because there was no point in dressing it. "Grandma Maren wrote the sentence you told her to write, and I read it four times and did it anyway. It’s not because I didn’t believe you. It’s because if it’s about me then there’s something I can do, and if it isn’t about me then I’m just a person in a bed."

Raven took that without moving.

"That’s the most honest thing anybody’s said to me this month."

"It’s not honest. It’s arithmetic." He shrugged, which he could do. "If I’m the reason, then getting better matters. If I’m not the reason, then getting better is only about me, and I’ve been the same for three months, and it’s easier to stand up for half an hour when it’s about something."

"Then I’m going to give you something, and it isn’t a kindness."

She put a flat parcel on the blanket.

He did not reach for it, because he had learned that when an adult puts a thing down slowly, it is not a present.

Four boards, tied with cord. He knew what they were before he undid them, because everybody on the mountain knew what Ostrek’s boards looked like.

"Somebody has to keep the record," Raven answered. "It goes on whether we have anybody for it or not, and if it goes on badly for six months we will lose things we cannot get back. You can read, you can count, you’re in a bed, and you have already done the only thing in this entire business that I actually needed doing, which was to look at a page of numbers nobody had put next to each other and put them next to each other."

Elian had his hand on the top board.

"The fourth column," he said.

"You will want to fill it in." Raven stood up. "Every day, about twenty times a day, and some days you will be certain, and you will be certain in a way that feels like being right. Ostrek kept that column empty for a year, and she had a quarter of a page left and a thing coming through the wall, and she still didn’t write in it."

"Why not?"

"Because the day somebody writes a guess in that column, everybody after them reads it as a finding, and then they plan around it, and then people go and stand somewhere because of a sentence nobody could demonstrate." She stopped at the door. "You can write anything you like in the first three. The fourth one’s not yours. It isn’t mine either."

Elian looked down the ruled lines of the empty column, which went all the way to the bottom of the board.

"What happens when somebody does know?"

"Then they’ll be able to prove it," Raven told him, "and it’ll go in the third column with their name on it, and the fourth one will still be empty, and that’s how you’ll know it was true."