Chapter 497: The Listener

The ninth meeting was at the top of Orsk.

Teva’s father had drawn it as an empty circle on the third slate for most of a month. One place neither family has been. He’d started to think there wasn’t one. The Dasks had been everywhere in the Hedge by now, one way and another. So had Teva’s family, since the Arch Hall opened; her grandmother had been to forty worlds since the spring, on her stick, and says she’s going to do all of them before she dies, which the Aldri say at about the age the rest of us start saying we’d like a sit-down.

It was Gath who solved it. He was at the Table, in eight layers, and he heard Teva’s father talking about the circle to Mother, and he said, through the walker, very slowly,

“Nobody has been to the top.”

Teva’s father looked at him.

“Of Orsk,” said Gath. “The town in the cloud. At the very top of the staircase. Nobody who isn’t Orsk has ever been up. Not even the miners. They went in at the bottom.” He considered. “Not even him.”

He meant me. It was true. I’d laid the floor for Orsk’s engine from underneath, in the roots of the mountain, and never once gone up.

Teva’s father drew a mountain in the circle. Very small. With a cloud on top.

It’s a very long way up.

You can’t arch to the top of Orsk. The Orsk won’t have it. There’s an arch at the bottom of the staircase, in the first town, by the barley terraces, and from there you climb. Everybody climbs. Gath says the climb is the point. Gath says if you arrive at the top of Orsk without having climbed, you haven’t arrived anywhere, you’ve just appeared, and the Orsk have a word for people who just appear and it isn’t polite.

So we climbed.

All of us. Both families. The Dasks and the Oseis and the Calders and the Frieses and the General, and Kyria, and Teva’s father with the slate under his arm and Teva’s mother and Tovi and the quiet uncle who’s good with babies, carrying Queenie. And the two oldest: great-grandmother Efua and Teva’s grandmother, side by side, in the two carrying chairs that the Orsk brought down for them, with four stocky Orsk under each, in their wool.

Great-grandmother Efua shouted at birds the whole way up. There are a great many birds on Orsk.

Teva’s grandmother shouted with her. She’s got very good at it.

The staircase is exactly that. Towns, one above the other, up the side of the highest mountain, every one built on the roof of the one below. You climb through them on steps cut into the rock, worn hollow in the middle by more feet than anyone’s counted. Every town has a door at the top of its stair, and in every doorway, as we came up, there was somebody from that town holding out a cup.

Not tea. Something hot and thick and sweet that the Orsk make from their barley. Mother tried the first one, at the bottom, and her face did a thing I’ve never seen it do. Then she drank all of it and asked for the recipe.

The Orsk woman in the doorway said it couldn’t be written down.

“Then I’ll have to come back,” said Mother.

She had a cup at every town. Thirty-one towns. By the top she was singing.

And the top was in the cloud.

You climb out of the last town onto a wide stone shelf right at the summit, and the cloud is all round you, white and soft and so close you can put your hand into it. You can’t see the edge. You can’t see the sky. You can’t see anything at all except the people next to you and the stone under your feet and the white.

And then the wind moves, and the cloud goes, all at once, like a curtain, and you’re standing on the top of the world.

Orsk’s new sun was just coming up. Warm and young and gold. Below us, all the way down, the staircase. Thirty-one towns, one under the other, every roof catching the light in turn. And past them the terraces, and the valleys, and the other mountains, and the snow on the peaks that’s been there since before the Collective had a name and didn’t so much as slide when Orsk moved.

Nobody said anything.

Gath took off another layer. He folded it, and put it on the stone at the very top, where a great many other folded layers already were, in a heap. Every one of them, he said, put there by somebody who’d climbed up this year and seen the new sun come up for the first time.

Then, without anyone saying anything, everyone took off a layer.

Mother took off her long brown coat. Kyria unbuckled her armour, which she never does. The General took off his jacket and folded it into a perfect square. Teva’s grandmother, in her carrying chair, took off her shawl. Kwame Osei took off his hat. Great-grandmother Efua took off nothing at all, because she said she was cold, and then took off one glove, so as not to be rude.

Trevor and Teva put theirs on the heap last, together.

Teva’s father looked at the heap of coats and armour and shawls and the General’s perfect square, for a long time.

Then he took out the slate, and in the circle, under the mountain and the cloud, he wrote, very small, Done.

That’s nine.

Next, the keepers. Trevor and Teva go to the keepers of the long record on Ister, and stand in front of them, and say what they’ll be called together. Then a year, for changing their minds, which nobody ever does. Then the wedding, which takes about as long as it takes to say good morning.

They haven’t decided what they’ll be called. Teva’s father has started a fourth slate for suggestions. It already has eleven names on it, all his.

Mother says the year starts as soon as they’ve stood in front of the keepers. She says she’s going to count every day of it. She says it’s the first wedding she’s had to wait a year for and she intends to enjoy every minute.

She had one more cup of the barley drink at the top. The Orsk woman who’d been holding it said it was the first time anyone had come up the staircase and had a cup at every door.

“Thirty-one,” said Mother. “I counted.”

The Orsk woman bowed. Gath told us afterwards that she’d said something very old, in the hill tongue, that’s only said about once a century. He said it means she climbed properly.

Bell finished the sum the week after.

She came up the hill to tell me. Bell doesn’t come up the hill. She sends a note, or she waits for you to come to her. She came up the hill in the rain with a wet slate under her coat and stood in the kitchen doorway, dripping, and said, “I’m happy with it.”

That’s twice now, in her whole life.

“With what?” said Mother.

“The listener,” said Bell. And then she sat down on the bottom step, which she has never done, and put her head in her hands, and Mother put the kettle on.

I’ll explain it as well as I can. Bell explained it to me three times, and Asha twice, and I think I’ve got about half of it.

Lumen remembers being asked. That’s the thing about it. That’s why it glows when the queen under Thole sings, and why Halvane’s battery works, and why the Lantern lamps won’t light unless somebody touches them first. It’s the only stone anyone knows of that keeps a question in it, the way a bell keeps a sound after you’ve stopped ringing it.

And a door is a question. A real one. Every door ever made is somebody asking a place to let them through.

So if you take a piece of lumen, and you cut it very thin, the way Mira cut the slab for the Table, and you set it just so, in a ring of Kiln iron, with an Ister engine underneath it to keep it steady, and Bell’s sum to tell it what to listen for:

It hears the question.

Not the door. The asking. The moment before. When someone on the far side, a long way off, in the dark under Velle, starts to ask a world to open.

And it rings.

They tested it on the plateau. Of course they did. Elin made a door, a small one, from the bottom of the garden to the Arch Hall, the way she and Goldie did the first time, on their own. She made it very slowly, so they could watch.

The listener sat on a stone in the middle of the plateau. A ring of dark iron the size of a dinner plate, with a disc of lumen in it, thin as paper, faint blue. Asha sat beside it. Bell stood behind with her slate. Okafor stood at the edge with her arms folded.

Elin started to ask.

The listener rang.

Not loud. A clear, small, single note, like somebody tapping a glass with a spoon. And the disc of lumen went bright, all at once, from faint blue to the colour of the Table’s river at dusk.

Elin hadn’t even opened the door yet. She’d only started to want it open.

“How long?” said Okafor.

Bell looked at her slate. “Two breaths. Before. Nearly three.”

“Dory gets two.”

“Dory gets two,” said Bell. “And Dory has to sleep.”

Okafor didn’t say anything for a while. Then she unfolded her arms, and walked across the plateau, and knelt down by the listener, and put her hand on the iron ring, very gently, the way you’d put your hand on a dog that had done something clever.

“How many can you make?” she said.

“One a day,” said Asha. “Now. With the Thole girl. And Kiln. And the second city.” She paused. “Nine a day by the end of the month. Thirty by the end of the season.

“Four hundred and twenty posts,” said Okafor.

“I know.”

“And every square on every world.”

“I know.”

Okafor stood up.

“Then you’d better start,” she said.

Dory slept that night.

The whole night. In her own bed, in the end room, with the curtains open. Not at the glass. The first time since Hollen.

I know because I couldn’t, and I went down at two in the morning to sit at the red glass myself, the way she does, with my hand flat. I’m not as good at it as she is. I’ve never been. But I can hear the net, if I listen hard enough, and I sat there till dawn listening to it, all four hundred and twenty worlds, quiet, and the listener on its stone on the plateau above me, faint blue, not ringing.

At dawn, Dory came down in her nightgown with her hair everywhere and sat down next to me.

“You shouldn’t have,” she said.

“You slept.”

“I know.” She put her hand flat on the glass next to mine. “I’d forgotten what it was like.”

We sat there until the stars said Not yet.

They put the first ones on the border worlds. Ammet first, then Isk, then Hollen, in the market square, right where the hole opened, between the pear stall and the stall that sells soft ones. Issa’s stall. Her sister runs it now.

Hollen’s First asked for the listener to go there. She said if it was going to ring anywhere, she wanted it to ring there.

The Thole miners call them listeners. The Kiln smiths call them bells. The Aldri have a long word for them that means the stone that hears you ask. Hollen calls theirs Varrin.

Imre Oshan has made a soft one already. It’s a round grey ring with a blue middle that lights up and goes ting when you squeeze it. Children on every world in the Hedge have started squeezing them at each other across the playground and shouting I heard you!

Halloway’s put it on the chart.

It rang on Ammet on the thirty-fourth day.

Not Elin. Not a test. The real thing. Two breaths before, nearly three, the way Bell said. In the square in the main town by the deep wells, at noon.

And here is the difference.

On Hollen, the hole opened in a market full of people, and there was one Standing, and Varrin had eleven knots and didn’t come down the twelfth time.

On Ammet, the listener rang, and the Standing at the post rang the town’s bell, which they’d agreed on, and in the two breaths and a bit before the hole opened, every person in the square went into the houses round it. Every one. They’d practised. Okafor had made them practise every morning for a week. Ammet children are very fast. The last one in was a girl with a soft Ash, and she slammed the door.

The hole opened in an empty square.

Six Refined stepped out. Very tall, in their white. Into a square with nobody in it except forty Hyrrani with their blades out, in a ring round the edge, and Teth in the middle, who’d come over from Isk the week before, and Kasrai on the roofs.

Kyria says the Refined stood there for a moment and looked round, very slowly, as if they’d walked into the wrong room.

Then the Hyrrani came in.

I wasn’t there. Nor was Dory. That’s the point. That’s the whole point of it.

Dory was asleep. She’d been asleep for nine nights running. I was at the long table, eating porridge.

By the time the post’s line came in to Okafor’s room in Commonhold, it was over. Six Refined. All six. Two Hyrrani hurt, one badly; Halloway’s ward had an arch open before he hit the ground, and he’s going to be all right. Nobody in the houses. Nobody in the square.

The hole they came out of was still open, behind them, when the last one fell.

Teth walked up to it. He’d been told what to do, if it came to this. Okafor had told every Standing what to do.

He took a soft listener out of his pocket. The grey one, with the blue middle. One of Imre’s. He’d been carrying it since Isk; the Isk girl gave it to him. He squeezed it once, so it went ting.

Then he threw it through the hole.

Then Thessaly, on the ridge, a long way off, who’d felt the whole thing from the beginning and been waiting with her hand half up, leaned on the hole from this side, the way Elin taught her, and shut it.

The post’s line to Okafor, that day, was very short.

Not quiet. Then quiet.

Okafor read it out at the Table at dusk. Then she put it on the glass, next to Varrin’s cup under its iron cover. And left it there.

The girl with the soft Ash wrote to Ash afterwards. Her name’s Tamsa. She’s seven. She wrote in very big letters on the back of a grain sack, because she couldn’t find any paper, and the Standing at Ammet post sent it through the Arch Hall rolled up in a tube.

Dear Ash. I was the last one in. I slammed the door. Your soft one was with me. I held it the whole time and it didn’t even cry. When I’m big I’m going to be a Standing. Teth says I can if I practise. I am practising. Love from Tamsa of Ammet. P.S. Your well man is very tall.

Ash pinned it to the wall of Odra’s forge, above the anvil, where the iron dust gets on it. Kwame has asked her to take down the postscript. Ash has said no. Ash has said it’s the best thing anyone’s ever written about him and she’s going to keep it for ever, and given how long for ever is turning out to be for us, that’s a long time.

Odra read it, standing at the back with her arms folded.

“She’ll do,” she said.

I’ve been meaning to put Kwame down again. It’s been a month.

Oriel came to Avalon. She’d never been. She’s spent her whole life under Ister, mapping water in the dark, and she came through the Ister arch onto the red glass in the morning and stood there and looked up at Avalon’s sky for a long time without saying anything.

“It’s very blue,” she said, at last.

“Yes,” said Kwame.

“Ister’s gold.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t know a sky could be blue,” said Oriel. “I mean, I knew. I’d read it. I’d never seen it.” She was still looking up. “Is it always like this?”

“Not when Kesh is in a mood,” said Kwame.

She laughed. Hana says it’s the first time she’s heard an Aldri laugh at a joke about weather.

Kwame took her to the north field. To the place where he digs. He’s been digging there since he was very small, and the ground there knows him. He put his hand flat on it, and Oriel put hers flat next to it, and he asked the ground, very politely, if it would show her the water.

It didn’t come up. He didn’t ask it to. He just asked it to show her.

She says she felt it. She says she felt all of it, every spring and stream and slow deep river under the north field and the hill and the plain, going away in every direction like the roots of a tree, and that she sat there on the grass with her hand flat and cried, and Kwame sat next to her and didn’t say anything, which is the thing Kwame is best at in the whole world.

Then she took out her book. The old Aldri one, the one older than the long record. She opened it at a new page, and she wrote, at the top, Avalon, and under it she started to draw.

She’s been drawing ever since. She says it’s going to take her a hundred years. She says she has five hundred.

Hana says that’s the most romantic thing she’s ever heard.

Abena Osei says it’s the most romantic thing she’s ever heard too, except for the river.

Kyrie’s nearly four. She does the forms now.

Not with Holdfast. Not with a blade at all. With a stick. A straight one, from the orchard, that Corin cut for her and smoothed and wrapped round the middle with a strip of leather so her hands wouldn’t slip. She does them every morning on the plateau with Andraste and Kyria, in a row, the three of them, oldest to youngest, and her stick goes exactly where their blades go, a moment after.

And on her back, tied on with a long red ribbon, she carries a soft Andraste.

She won’t do the forms without it. She says it’s so her mother can watch even when her mother is doing the forms herself. Andraste didn’t know what to say to that. She went and stood on the edge of the plateau for a while.

Kyria says Kyrie holds the stick exactly right. The loose way. Holding. And when the form needs her to, she tightens. Holding on. And then lets go. And her stick goes up, and turns over once in the air, and comes down into her hand the other way round.

Every time.

“The right way round,” says Kyria. Every morning. She says it to herself, very quietly, the way you’d say a word you don’t want to wear out.

Corin says Kyrie’s better at it than he was at nine. Corin says that’s the most annoying thing he’s ever had to say out loud.

Queenie taught me something this month.

She’s nearly four too. She’s got my eyes. Black, all the way, whites and rings, the first Dask ever born with them. She sees everything the way I do. The way Dory does. All the way down. The little things holding hands, in every stone and leaf and person.

She’s been able to since the moment she was born. She looked at me then, all the way down to the silver, before she’d ever seen anything else.

And she can choose not to.

That’s what’s different about her. I can’t. I’ve never been able to. I see the bottom of everything, all the time, every moment I’m awake. Dory does too. We’ve just got used to it.

Queenie hasn’t. She looks all the way down when she wants to. And when she doesn’t, she just looks. At the top. At the thing.

I found her in the garden one afternoon, sitting by the wall with a leaf in her hand. Just a leaf. From the old tree by the gate. She was turning it over, very slowly, and looking at it.

“What are you looking at?” I said.

“The leaf,” said Queenie.

“All the way down?”

She shook her head.

“Just the leaf,” she said. “It’s green. It’s got lines. It’s a bit wet.” She held it up to me. “You try.”

I took it. I looked at it.

And I saw what I always see. The lines, yes, and the green. But under that, the little things holding hands, and under those, the smaller ones, all the way down, millions, holding on, the way they do in everything, very busy and very old.

“I can’t,” I said.

Queenie looked at me for a long time with her black eyes.

“You’re looking too hard,” she said.

She took my hand. She put it flat on the leaf, with her small hand on top of it.

“Don’t ask it anything,” she said. “Just say hello.”

So I did. I didn’t ask it to be anything. I didn’t ask it what it was made of. I just said hello, very quietly, the way the first house says good morning.

And for about as long as it takes to say good morning, I saw a leaf.

Green. With lines. A bit wet.

That’s all. Just a leaf. I sat by the garden wall with my daughter and looked at a leaf, and it was the most restful thing that has happened to me in years.

“Leaf,” said Queenie, which she says about people when she means you’re all right.

She took it back and went inside.

The Hedge found out about the climb, of course. You can’t take two families up thirty-one towns without somebody seeing.

Quenby’s magazine had the heap of coats on the front, from a very long way away, with the General’s jacket folded into its perfect square on the top. THE ROYAL ASCENT. Inside, there were nine pages about the barley drink.

By the end of the month every café in Commonhold was selling something they called Mother’s Climb, in a tall cup, hot and thick and sweet, which Mother tried once and said was nothing like it and very nice anyway. The Orsk won’t sell the real thing. They say it can’t be carried down the staircase without going wrong. They say if you want it you’ll have to climb.

So people climb. Gath says more people have come up the staircase in a month than in the whole of Orsk’s history. He says the heap at the top is now taller than he is, which isn’t hard, and that they’re going to have to start a second heap.

Long Summer has a new ride. It’s called The Staircase. It’s very slow and goes up a great many steps and gives you a hot drink at the top, and the queue for it is longer than the queue for The Thread. Kyria went on it once. She says it needs a blade at the bottom.

The keepers sent their half-year early, because they said they couldn’t wait. There are three hundred little Aldri girls called Oriel this year, which is three hundred more than there have ever been, and Oriel went the colour of Ister’s sky when she heard. There are forty-one Gaths, all on Ister, which Gath says is too many for one world to manage. And there’s a small Orsk boy, born at the top of the staircase on the morning we climbed, whose mother named him in the hill tongue for the woman who had a cup at every door.

Gath won’t tell Mother what the name means. He says she’d only go pink.

Dory asked Mother about time.

I wasn’t meant to hear it. I was on the porch, and they were in the kitchen, and the window was open, and I didn’t move, which I’m not proud of.

It was late. Mother was drying cups with the tea towel. Dory was sitting at the end of the long table with her hands round a cup that had gone cold, the way she sits now, and she said,

“How long did you have Grandad?”

Mother didn’t stop drying.

“Not long enough,” she said. “Nobody ever does.”

“But how long?”

Mother put the cup on the shelf. She picked up another one.

“From the day I met him till the day he went? Less time than you’ve been alive, love. A good deal less.” She dried it very slowly. “And I knew. From the start. We both did. The program did that to all of us. We knew we wouldn’t get long.”

Dory didn’t say anything.

“And I’d do it again,” said Mother. “Every day of it. The bad ones too. The day he made the man explode. The day he couldn’t get out of bed. The last one.” She put the cup down. “If you’d told me at the start that I’d have him for a week, I’d have had the week.”

“Even knowing.”

“Especially knowing,” said Mother. “You hold on harder, when you know. You notice.” She folded the tea towel over the rail. “That’s the bit nobody tells you. Knowing isn’t the sad part. Knowing’s what makes you notice. Not knowing is how people waste forty years.”

Dory was quiet for a long time.

“I’m still thinking,” she said.

“Good,” said Mother. “Think as long as you like, love. You’ve got time.” She stopped, in the doorway, and looked back at her. “Just don’t let thinking be the thing you spend it on.”

Mattick came back on the forty-ninth day with the Hesta in a convoy of three, a Wing either side, Sorrel’s crooked blue Wing on the nose. There was a packet tied to the bottom of an empty crate with a bootlace.

Corvan.

Not the word. Dory saw that straight away, before she’d opened it. It wasn’t Now.

It was longer than that.

He knows about the listeners. Of course he does. He knows about Ammet. Everyone in the house knows about Ammet. He doesn’t shout. He’s never shouted. He sat in his room for two days and didn’t come out and nobody went in.

When he came out, he went to the Assize, and then he went to Velle. I’ve never seen him go to Velle. I went with him. A step behind.

He asked them for a bigger door.

Not one that six can come through. One that a ship can. A whole one. A white one. With a regiment in it.

They said it would take a long time. They said they’d need more. I don’t know more of what. He said take what you need.

He said he wants it opened on Avalon.

Not on a border. Not on a small world. On Avalon. On the hill. He said it twice. He said the hill. He said, in front of all of them, where his mother pours.

I don’t know when. I don’t think they know yet either. But they’ve started.

I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say. I’m sorry.

C.

Nobody said anything at the long table for a long time.

Mother was the one who moved first. She picked up the pot. She poured. For Okafor, who’d come up the hill when Dory sent for her. For Halvane. For Bell and Asha. For Senna and Iolo and Mara Quell, and for Kyria. For me.

Then she poured her own, and sat down at the end of the bench, which she never does at the long table either.

“Well,” she said. “Then they’ll have to come up the hill road. Like everyone else.”

Okafor took out her slate. Under Now, and the list, and Velle at the bottom, she wrote one more word.

Avalon.

And then, beside it, small, the way she writes the things she isn’t going to say out loud:

Listeners. Every room.

Bell went straight back to Ister that night. So did Asha. Halvane went with them. Nobody told them to.

Dory went to the red glass.

I went after her, and she was sitting there with her hand flat, and I sat down next to her and put mine next to it. And we sat there all night, the two of us, listening. To the net. To all four hundred and twenty worlds, quiet. To the listener on the plateau, faint blue, not ringing.

And past all of it, past the Watch, the forge. Not at Carrow any more. Further in. A long way down, in the dark under the gardens of Velle.

Not angry any more. Dory said that, about two in the morning, very quietly.

“It’s not angry,” she said. “It’s not hitting a thing.”

“What is it?”

She listened for a long time.

“It’s building,” she said.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Four hundred and twenty. Ammet’s said it the way you’d say it with your chin up.

At the top of the slate, the way she does, Wren wrote the count.

And under it:

Ammet: not quiet. Then quiet.

Orsk: climbed.

The hill: listening.

Days 10725–10781. The Listener.

The ninth meeting was the one place neither family had been: the top of Orsk, which nobody who isn’t Orsk has ever climbed to (Gath: if you just appear you haven’t arrived). Both families climbed the staircase, thirty-one towns, the two old women in carrying chairs shouting at birds; a hot barley cup at every door, which can’t be written down; Mother had all thirty-one and was singing. The cloud went like a curtain over the new sun; everyone took off a layer onto Gath’s heap (the General’s jacket a perfect square; Efua one glove); Teva’s father wrote Done. Next, the keepers, then a year. The Orsk woman: she climbed properly. Bell sat on the bottom step: she’s happy with it, twice in her life. The listener: thin lumen in a Kiln-iron ring over an Ister engine; lumen keeps a question, and a door is a question; it rings when somebody far off starts to ask a world to open, two breaths early, nearly three. Okafor knelt and touched it: then you’d better start. Dory slept the night, the first since Hollen; I sat at the glass for her. The first went to Ammet, Isk and Hollen’s square, where they call it Varrin; the soft listener goes ting (I heard you!). On Ammet it rang at noon; the town bell went; every person was indoors before the hole opened; six Refined stepped into an empty square ringed by forty Hyrrani, Teth and the Kasrai, and none walked away; two Hyrrani hurt, nobody else. Teth threw a soft listener through the hole and Thessaly shut it from the ridge. Not quiet. Then quiet. Tamsa of Ammet, seven, the last one in, wrote to Ash on a grain sack (your well man is very tall); Odra: she’ll do. Mother’s Climb in every café, The Staircase at Long Summer, three hundred Oriels. Mother to Dory about Grandad: knowing is what makes you notice; don’t let thinking be the thing you spend it on. Oriel on Avalon: it’s very blue; the north field showed her all its water; she cried, Kwame said nothing, and she began a map of Avalon that will take a hundred years; she has five hundred. Kyrie does the forms with Corin’s stick and a soft Andraste tied on with red ribbon, and the stick comes down the other way round every time. Queenie with a leaf: you’re looking too hard; don’t ask it anything; just say hello; and for as long as it takes to say good morning, I saw a leaf. Corvan: he knows about the listeners; he went to Velle and asked for a door a ship can come through, a whole regiment, opened on Avalon, on the hill, where his mother pours; they’ve started. Mother poured, and sat: then they’ll have to come up the hill road like everyone else. Okafor wrote Avalon, and Listeners, every room. Dory at the glass: it’s not angry any more; it’s building. Four hundred and twenty.