Chapter 572 - 571: What She Gave Away

Chapter 572: Chapter 571: What She Gave Away

Location:Seven Peaks — The Hall Wall; The East Terrace; The Drying Sheds

Date/Time:TC1857.09.28 – TC1857.10.06

The first cold of the autumn came up through the flagstones of the Hall about nine days early, and Raven noticed it because she was on her knees at the foot of the wall list at the second hour of the morning with a lamp, doing the one piece of work she had not delegated all year.

Moving the names down.

The list had started at ninety-one in the second month, and it was not ninety-one now. Mira had assessed the north camp through the summer, augment by augment, in the order they presented, and every assessment that came back with a limb that did not answer went onto the wall under the criterion, and the criterion did not care whose it was, and the result was a page and a half of people in Raven’s handwriting who were never going to reach the top of it.

Elspeth Nyland had been third.

She was first from the middle of the eighth month, and she had stayed first for six weeks, because Hester Varden and Rhys Jessop between them had made one hand in that time and Jessop had spent three of those weeks at a bench building it alone the way a man builds a clock.

Raven took the lamp down the list to the bottom, wrote two more names at the end, and then went up to the top and struck the first line through and wrote the date beside it and left it where it was.

***

They fitted it on the third morning, and Mira put six people in the room, and no more, and Raven was not one of them, because she had asked and Mira had said no.

"Not for your sake and not for hers," Mira answered. "For the four behind her. If the settlement’s leader stands in the room for the first one, then everybody after the first one is going to notice she isn’t there for theirs, and I’d rather you were never there than sometimes there."

That was Sera Vahn’s sentence, more or less, arriving in somebody else’s mouth about ten weeks after it had been said in a corridor, and Raven noticed it and did not remark on it and put it in the book that evening, with both names and both dates, because the spread of a rule was a fact and facts went in the first column.

She saw the hand two days later, on the east terrace, doing what a hand does.

Elspeth Nyland was flipping racks. She was doing it two-handed and badly — properly badly, with the awkwardness of somebody who has spent nine years building a method around an absence and now has to unbuild it — and she was swearing at it steadily and without heat, and every fourth rack she got wrong and did it again.

She did not stop when Raven came in. That was the arrangement and had been since the drying sheds got their first sack of anything.

"It’s worse."

"For now."

"For now." Flip. "It’s slower than one-handed, and it’ll be slower than one-handed for a month, and about a dozen people have watched me be slow at it this week, and every one of them has been extremely kind about it, and I have decided that the kindness is the part I mind."

"Then be quicker."

Elspeth Nyland laughed once, which was not a thing Raven had heard her do.

"That’s what I wanted somebody to say." She turned the next rack over. "Not take your time. Everybody says take your time. I’ve got sixty people behind me on that wall and half of them will be dead before they get one, and I am not going to be slow at it in front of them for a month longer than I have to be."

***

Kira Desh came and found her on the terrace on the sixth day and said she had the answer and that it had taken rather longer than three days.

"Say it."

"We’re the ones who go."

Raven waited.

"That’s it. That’s the whole answer." Kira Desh had the arm across her front against the cold and did not appear to notice she was doing it. "The Compact says everybody goes toward it and nobody sends. Four governments have signed that, and three of them are going to be very good at it in about six years, because a government is a slow animal and it has to work out how first.

"We’re four hundred people with no country and nobody coming for us and nothing to protect except the thing we’ve decided to be. We can be on a road in a day. The Empire can’t. The Confederacy can’t — they’ve got settlements and stock and a winter. We can."

"That’s a thing to do. It isn’t a thing to be."

"It’s both, and you know it’s both, because you’ve been doing exactly that for a year and calling it going to look at something." Kira Desh did not blink. "I’d like the Corps to be the thing that gets there first. Not as yours. Not as anybody’s. As the unit that has already gone by the time three governments have finished publishing their positions, and then they arrive, and we’re in it, and they have to be in it too, because now it’s embarrassing not to be."

Raven stood with that.

"Commander Vahn’s heard this."

"Commander Vahn wrote half of it and made me say it to you, because she’s worked out that you take a thing better from somebody who has not spent two and a half years being careful with you." Kira Desh shrugged with the good shoulder. "Her words. Not mine. I’d not have put it that way."

"No, you’d have put it worse."

"I’d have put it accurately."

***

The first group came down the escorted route on the fourth day of the tenth month, and there were nine of them, and it took twenty-three days, and nobody died.

That is the whole of the report Bjorn sent, and Raven read it half a dozen times looking for the rest of it, and there was no rest of it, and after the third reading she understood that the shortness was the report.

Nine children. Five legs. Twenty-three days. Handed over at every point and counted at every point by the people handing and the people taking, and both counts written down and both counts agreeing.

Two of the points had a thing come at them in the dark, and both of them held it off the road with three people and lost nobody, and the sheets for those two are in the box and are written by the people who were standing there and not by me.

Freya walked at the back of all five legs, which is five times what anybody else did, and I have stopped arguing about it.

Tell the boy in the bed that the ones who came down are eight and nine and eleven and two of them are six, and that the eleven-year-old counted the legs and told me the number before I told her, and that I have put her name at the top of the second group’s sheet because somebody at that end will need a person who counts.

There are a hundred and ninety-seven to come.

***

Kael Xuán’s letter came on the seventh day and had been nine weeks in the writing, from the date on it.

I am not going to describe the conversation and you would not want the description.

The outcome is that the published copy stands. I offered to withdraw it and he did not accept the offer, and I have spent six weeks working out why, and the answer I have arrived at is that a withdrawal would also have had to be published, and then the record would have shown him striking a line and then compelling a son to unpublish the strike, and he would rather be a man who removed an inconvenient clause than a man who was seen to tidy up afterward.

I do not think that is principle. I think it is the same instinct that has kept him where he is for thirty-one years. I have decided that I do not need it to be principle. It is enough that the page is still the page.

He has not spoken to me about anything else since. I am told this will last until the spring and then stop without being referred to, and I am told this by people who have watched him do it to other people, which is a thing I would rather not have needed to be told.

Second matter, and it is the reason I have written rather than sent it through the channel.

He asked me one question about Seven Peaks and only one, and it was not about the Compact, and it was not about you. He asked whether the settlement had a succession.

I said it did not. He said nothing at all and went on to another paper.

I have thought about that for six weeks, and I am sending it to you unimproved and without a recommendation, because I have no recommendation and because you have taught the whole continent this year what to do with a thing you cannot demonstrate.

Raven read that four times and then took it up to Elian and had him put the question in the first column, with the date it was asked and who reported it, and nothing else.

Elian read the northern sheet twice and then did a thing he had not done since the letter about Ferrow’s Rest, which was to stop writing and sit with a page in his hands.

"A hundred and ninety-seven," he said.

"Yes."

"Then the route works and the arithmetic on the route works, and the thing I’d want in the first column is that two of the five points held something off the road with three people and lost nobody." He put the sheet down flat. "That’s the first time this year that a thing we published worked twice in a row in a place we weren’t."

"It is."

"I’m still the same," Elian said. It came out of him without any weight on it at all, as a fact being entered. "Half an hour. Nine months. Nothing."

Raven did not say any of the things that were available.

"I’ve stopped writing it down every day. I write it on the first of the month now. It’s the same number, and putting it in thirty times was making it into a thing, and it isn’t a thing; it’s a number that hasn’t changed. Joss Halbrook’s the same, and nobody writes his down at all, and he’s fine."

"Is that your ruling or Mira’s?"

"Mine. I told her after." He picked the pen up again. "She said it was a good method and then she went out, and I heard her stop in the corridor, which she doesn’t usually do."

***

Sera Vahn’s page for the last week of the ninth month had one line on it that was not a time.

Twelfth night. No episode. He asked me a question, which he has not done before. He asked what I was writing. I said I was writing down what happened. He said, "Is that all of it?" I said it was all of the part I could see. He said, "All right," and went back to what he was doing and there was nothing further.

I am recording the exchange because it happened and because I said I would record what happened. I have no view about it. I would like it noted that I have no view about it in the same way that I would like it noted when I do.

Raven read that standing in the corridor outside the Hall and did not go in for a bit.

Sixty-two sequences and no bottom. A three-year-old who wanted to know whether the record was all of it. A boy at a door with a handful of gravel in the first month of the year. A floorboard with a stain on it, wrapped, on a shelf, with a label and a date.

Four things. She had made herself a rule about four things.

She put the page in the box for the record, on its own, with the date and the name of the person who wrote it, and went in to the meeting she was late for.

***

The last thing she did that year that anybody wrote down was on the sixth of the tenth month, in the Hall, at the end of an afternoon about grain.

Thorne read out the standing list, which he had started in the second month and which nobody had ever asked him to keep: the things Seven Peaks had that it had not had a year ago, and the things it had given away.

The first column was long. Substrate cores. The bore. Planking. The three-person form. The Compact. Forty-five people on a northern road and two hundred and six children who would come down it. A mountain of people who had stopped asking whether they were going to be told things.

The second column was five lines, and Raven had written every one of them herself.

The measure, published, which they now use.The screening, published, which the Confederacy now runs, and we do not.The anchors of the Wild Confederacy, who are not ours and never were.Naida, who was never ours either and who we had the use of for nine years without paying.Any place I can go.

Somebody down the table said that the second column was a bad year.

"It’s the year," Raven answered. "The first column is what we made. The second one is what we stopped holding onto, and the second one is the one that’s still going to be true in thirty years, because the things in it are in other people’s hands now and other people’s hands don’t die when I do."

She looked at the second column for a moment longer.

"Put it up on the wall next to the other list," Raven told him. "Both columns. Same size."

"People will read the second one," Thorne observed.

"Good. I’d like somebody in twenty years to be able to work out what it cost without having to ask anybody who was fond of me."

***

She went out onto the east terrace afterward because the light was going and because she had got into the habit of it again over the autumn, and stood at the rail, and did not do anything useful for about a quarter of an hour.

Kairos came out with two cups and gave her one and did not say anything for most of it, which by now she expected and had come to want.

Down below, the drying sheds were still open, and somebody was still flipping racks badly and swearing about it.

Out past the wall the ground went east, and under it, somewhere, sixty-two sequences went down one meter at a time to a depth nobody had reached, and the animal that walked seven children north had turned side-on and looked at nothing before it left, and a small boy in a room on the east side had asked a woman with no opinions whether the record was all of it.

Raven did not put those things on a page.

She drank the tea, which was too hot, and stood on her own ground a good while longer with a man who had nothing useful to offer and had stopped apologizing for it, and let the year finish.