Chapter 199: Twelve Guests

The twelve took four days to agree to come and see snow.

Song sent the argument up to us a piece at a time, every night, in the thin grey hand at the bottom of the post. I read it out at supper. By the third night the whole house was waiting for it the way you wait for the next part of a story.

Night one. Oro says snow is a trick. He has never seen it, so it cannot exist. Wena says he said the same about the wedding. Oro says the wedding was also a trick and he was right, because it was five hundred years late.

Night two. Sae wants to know if snow is cold. I said yes. She wants to know how cold. I said colder than me. She said that was very cold and she would need a shawl. Riho says nobody has a shawl. They are arguing about shawls.

Night three. Kamu asked whether there would be fish. I said not in the snow. Kamu has said he will not come. Toku says Kamu has never once in his life gone anywhere without being promised fish. They are arguing about fish.

“Is it always like this?” said Tao Tao, with her chin on her hands.

“It’s a village,” said Yun Shu. “It’s exactly like this.”

Night four. They have voted. Eleven yes. Oro no. Oro says he is coming anyway to prove it is a trick. Lin Bo. I think that is a yes.

— • —

“May I?” said the Scroll, that night.

“You don’t need to ask me. It’s not my legend.”

“I know. I have asked them. And Song. And Maru, because they are her people’s people.” It was very pleased with itself. “I am asking you because you would sulk if I did not.”

“I would not sulk.”

“Talent,” said the Scroll, “I have known you since an alley.”

So I said yes, three times, and it published.

[DING.] A NEW LEGEND HAS BEEN PUBLISHED. On the first deep snow, Song will come up in the fens to see winter again. It is bringing twelve guests. They are from a cove in Teru. They are very old. They have never seen snow, and one of them does not believe in it. They will need shawls. Reach: everyone. Belief: climbing. Was this legend helpful? 👍

— • —

It climbed faster than anything Xue Ningzhi had ever measured.

“Ninety-four,” she said, on the fifth morning, sounding personally offended. “In five days. Last year was ninety-one in nine.”

“Why?”

“Because of the shawls,” said Xue Ningzhi. She turned her board round. “I’ve had nine hundred letters. People want to know what size. A woman in Greenmarch has knitted four already. The fishwives on the jetty have started a list.” She looked at the board as if it had betrayed her. “I spent twelve years at the Directorate trying to make people believe things. I never once thought to tell them somebody was cold.”

— • —

The first deep snow came on the ninth night, the way the Scroll said it would. In the morning the fens were white to the edge of the sky. The reed beds stood up out of it, stiff and silver, and the water in the channels had gone grey and slow and quiet.

We went down to the bank below Reedmoor, where we’d waited last year. Me and Yun Shu with two cups of something hot. Tao Tao, who said she was only coming to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid. Su Yue, carrying a covered basket and refusing to say what was in it. Bai Qing. Nai. Ji Lan, who said she wouldn’t tell it, and brought paper anyway.

And Maru, and all six of her crew.

I had not thought about it until we got to the bank. They stood in a little group at the edge of the snow, in their thin Teru coats, and did not step onto it. Maru crouched down very slowly and put out one finger and touched the snow, and took it back, and looked at it.

“They don’t have snow,” said Nai quietly. “On their coast. It’s grey and wet all winter, but it never comes down white. The sea’s too warm.” She watched them. “None of them have ever seen it either.”

The youngest of Maru’s crew — the boy from the beach, the one who’d pointed at our sky and wiped his hand across his own — picked up a handful and held it, and watched it go to water in his palm, and turned round to Maru with his face lit up like a lamp.

Maru said something to him. Then she laughed, and picked up a handful herself, and turned it over in her fingers.

“She says it’s soft,” said Nai. “She says nobody told her it was soft.”

“What did she think it was?”

“Hail,” said Nai. “She’s been dreading today for a week. She thought it was going to be stones falling out of the sky.” She watched her captain, who had gone down on one knee in the snow and was pressing her whole hand flat into it, very carefully, and lifting it out to look at the print. “She says, your country is very strange, and she’s glad the storms kept her.”

— • —

They came up at noon.

I was watching the bank, because that’s where Song came last year. They didn’t come up on the bank.

They came up out of the water.

The channel below the reed beds went still — not frozen, still — and then there were thirteen people standing on it, on the flat grey water, the way you’d stand on a floor. One in a grey shawl, small, very old. And twelve more around it, just as old, in thin bright Teru clothes — wedding clothes, still, five hundred years out of date, with shells round their necks — standing in a cluster on top of a river in the middle of a snowfield, looking around them.

Nobody moved.

“They’re standing on the river,” whispered Tao Tao.

“Write that down,” I said to Yun Shu.

“I am writing it down.”

“You’ve stopped writing.”

“I’ve stopped writing,” said Yun Shu, with her pencil frozen over the page, “because they’re standing on the river.”

Then the old man at the front looked down at his own bare feet, standing on water, with snow falling on them. He looked up at the white sky. He looked at the reeds, and the white fens going on forever, and the snow coming down on his shoulders.

And he said something, loudly, in a Teru so old I didn’t catch a single word of it.

Song turned to me. Its grey eyes were very bright.

“Oro says it’s a trick,” it said.

— • —

They walked across the water to the bank, and stepped up onto the snow, and every one of them stopped dead.

“Cold,” said Song, translating. “Sae says it’s cold. Riho says it’s very cold. Wena says she told them it would be cold, and nobody listened, and nobody brought a shawl.” It paused, listening. “Oro says the cold is also a trick.”

“How can cold be a trick?”

“I asked him that,” said Song. “He says he’s thinking about it.”

They were shivering. All twelve of them. Old people, very old, in thin coastal clothes, with bare feet, in the middle of the first deep snow of the year. Kamu’s lips had already gone a little blue.

And then a voice came down the bank behind us like a slammed door.

“WHO BROUGHT OLD PEOPLE OUT IN THE SNOW WITHOUT COATS?”

— • —

Old Wen came down from Reedmoor with her boat-hook in one hand, using it as a stick, and three of her great-grandchildren behind her carrying blankets. She was shouting the whole way. I don’t think she stopped for breath once.

“Bare feet! In this! Look at that one, he’s blue! Who’s in charge? Is it you?” She pointed the boat-hook at me. “It’s always you. Fourteen years and it’s always you.” She reached the bank and stood in front of the twelve elders and glared at them. “And you lot. Coming up in the snow in your nightclothes. Have you no sense? How old are you?”

Song translated. Sae answered.

“She says about eighty,” said Song. “Plus five hundred.”

Old Wen looked at Sae for a long moment. Sae looked back. They were about the same height, and about the same shape, and they had exactly the same expression on their faces, which was the expression of an old woman who has outlived everybody’s opinion of her.

“Well, that’s no excuse,” said Old Wen, and threw a blanket round Sae’s shoulders.

— • —

It turned out half of Reedmoor had been knitting.

“Which one’s the one who doesn’t believe in it?” a woman asked me, coming down the bank with an armful of wool. She had a grandchild on her hip and a shawl over each shoulder.

“The one at the end. With the beard.”

“Good,” she said grimly. “I made his extra thick.”

They came down the bank in a line behind Old Wen, with shawls and scarves and blankets and thick fen socks, and the twelve elders stood in the snow being wrapped up by strangers and didn’t know what to do about it. The woman from Greenmarch had sent her four shawls by cart. The fishwives from Saltreach had sent eleven. By the time everybody had finished, the twelve oldest people in Teru looked like a row of very small, very surprised haystacks.

Except Oro. Oro wouldn’t take a shawl.

“He says it’s a trick,” said Song.

“The shawl’s a trick?”

“He says if he takes the shawl, that means the cold is real, and if the cold is real, then the snow is real, and he’s not ready to give them that.” Song considered. “I think he’s enjoying himself. I’ve held him for five hundred years. He’s always like this.”

Old Wen looked at Oro. Oro looked at Old Wen.

She took a shawl from the pile, walked up to him, and put it round his shoulders without a word, and tied it at the front in a knot so tight he’d have needed a knife to get it off.

Oro opened his mouth.

“Don’t,” said Old Wen.

He shut it.

— • —

The Reedmoor children found us about an hour later. I’d known they would. It’s always the children.

There were more of them this year. The boy from last winter was there — a year older, a head taller, and holding a snowball in each hand with the look of someone who has been waiting twelve months for this exact moment.

He looked at Song. Song looked at him.

Then he looked at the twelve elders in their haystacks of shawls, and picked the one standing nearest. Which was Oro.

The snowball hit Oro in the middle of the back.

Oro turned round very slowly. The whole bank went quiet. Song took a small step forward, the way it had stepped last year, and I saw it remember being afraid.

Oro bent down — stiffly, the way the very old bend, with his shawl knotted under his chin — and scooped up a handful of snow, and looked at it for a long time.

Then he threw it.

He did not throw it the way Song had thrown it last winter. Oro had been a fisherman for sixty years before the grey came, and he had an arm like a whip. The snowball went straight and flat and fast across thirty feet of bank and hit the boy exactly in the middle of the forehead, thwack, and the boy sat down in the snow.

Oro said one word.

“He says,” said Song, slowly, “trick.”

The boy got up, with snow all over his face, and stared at Oro with an expression of total worship.

And by the end of the afternoon there were twelve old people from the other side of the world, and nine Reedmoor children, and Maru’s whole crew, and the dark under the world, having the biggest snowball fight in the history of the fens. Oro was the best at it. Song was still the worst. Nobody kept score, except Yun Shu, who did, and who would not tell anybody the result.