Chapter 507: Fathers

The mothers held a meeting about us.

I didn’t know there’d been one until afterwards. Nobody did. Risa says it was on the last night at the resort, on the sand, round Sera’s fire, after Mother told them about my father and the beach he promised her. They sat there for a while, Risa says, all forty-one, not saying anything.

And then Maura said, “They’ve never had one either.”

“Who?” said Ingrid.

“The men,” said Maura. “Rory’s never had a day off in his life. Not one. He planes a door when he’s worried and he planes a door when he isn’t and I don’t think he knows there’s anything else to do with his hands.”

Nobody said anything.

“Konrad,” said Ingrid, after a while, “has never been anywhere he wasn’t working.”

“The General sleeps standing up,” said Luna.

“Kwame,” said Abena Osei, “has been digging since before Earth emptied.”

“Taveth,” said Kyria, “made forty-three children soup every night for four days and was proud of it. That’s not a holiday. That’s a war.”

Mother was at the end of the row of long white chairs, with her hat in her lap. She’d been listening.

“Well,” she said. “That settles it, then.”

They told us on the first morning home. At breakfast. The long table, the real one, with all the grandads round it still looking slightly stunned, and the mothers brown and sandy at the other end.

Mother put the pot down in the middle.

“Your turn,” she said.

The General looked up from his porridge.

“My turn for what, Mrs Dask?”

“Four days,” said Mother. “Somewhere with water. The fathers. All of you. The grandads and the dads. We’ve found you a place.” She looked round the table. “You’re going to sit down.”

Konrad put his pen down. Rory, at the end, stopped planing the edge of the bench, which he’d been doing without noticing. Kwame Osei looked at Abena Osei. Abena Osei looked back at him and didn’t blink.

“I don’t sit down,” said the General.

“No, love,” said Mother. “That’s rather the point.”

It took her two days. Less than the mothers. Mother says men are easier, because they don’t believe they’ve earned it, and you just have to tell them they haven’t, and then they go to prove you wrong.

Rory said yes once Maura took his plane away.

Konrad said yes once Aurelius said he’d come, and then Aurelius said yes once Konrad said he’d come, and then they both looked at each other and realised what had happened.

Kwame Osei said yes once he was told there’d be water. Then he asked how much water, and Mother said a whole sea, and he went very quiet and then very pleased.

Taveth said yes before he was asked. Kyria says he’s never been asked anything, and he wasn’t going to risk it.

Teva’s father said yes and then asked if he could bring a slate. Mother said no. He brought one anyway.

Liam said yes and then asked if there’d be fire. Mother said there’d be a fire on the beach every night. Liam said that’d do. Liam has never once in his life needed a reason to go anywhere.

Toby said he couldn’t. He’s a senator. He said there was a session. Mara Marsh, who was standing behind him, said, “There’s always a session,” and Toby said yes.

Big Sigmund said he’d go if Liam was going, and Liam said he’d go if Sigmund was going, and they’d both already said yes, so that was that. They’ve been doing that since they were cadets.

Keir said yes. Callum and Rowan said yes. Dinraal said yes and asked if small Bahamut could come, and Isolde said no, very firmly, and Dinraal said yes again, more sadly.

Halvane said yes, very quietly. Ilas, in her chair, said, “Finally,” and then went back to sleep.

The quiet uncle who’s good with babies said yes. Nobody had known he was a father. He has four. They’re all grown. He’d never mentioned it. Teva’s mother says that’s the most Aldri thing she’s ever heard.

And the General said no.

Then he said no again. Then Luna went and stood in the doorway of his plain rooms at the end of the long building and didn’t say anything at all, for most of an evening, and at the end of the evening the General looked up from his squared paper and said, “Very well,” and Luna went home.

And me.

I said I couldn’t. Okafor. The border. Velle. The two hundred and sixty-eight. Corvan in somebody’s sister’s house.

Mother looked at me across the long table for a long time.

“You’ve been saying you can’t since you were seventeen,” she said. “Four days, love. The Hedge will still be here. So will Okafor. So will the stars.”

“And if something happens?”

“Then Dory will be here,” said Mother. “And forty-one mothers who’ve just had a holiday and are very well rested.”

Dory, at the other end, didn’t look up from her toast.

“Go, Dad,” she said.

So I went.

The place was on Ister. Not near the cities. A long way south of them, through the Ister arch and then a day by Aldri train, on the coast of Ister’s southern sea, at the very end of a continent where the land runs out into a long arm of rock and the sea goes away grey and green for ever on three sides. Halvane chose it. He says it’s the only place on Ister where nobody has ever built anything important, and he wanted us somewhere nothing was important.

The Aldri built it in the golden year, for people who fish. It’s not like the mothers’ place. It’s not white or low or plush. It’s wood, and stone, and long porches, and every room has a window onto the sea and a hook by the door for a coat that’s going to get wet. There’s a jetty that goes out a long way, and boats tied up all along it, and at the end of the jetty there’s a hut that sells bait and very strong tea.

And beer. Gilgamesh found the beer within an hour. Gilgamesh came too. He said he wasn’t a father but he’d brought bread for every one of us and that should count, and nobody argued with him.

There were thirty-one of us, in the end. Mother counted us through the Arch Hall. She stood at the arch with her pot and touched each of us on the arm as we went through, the way she touched every one of the grey coats, and said our names.

When she got to the General, she said, “Sit down, Alaric.”

He looked at her. Nobody calls him Alaric. I’m not sure I’d ever heard it said out loud.

“Yes, Mrs Dask,” he said.

We fished.

I want to say that properly, because I’d never done it, not once in my life. My father didn’t fish. There weren’t any fish outside the bubble. There wasn’t any water you’d eat anything out of. And on Avalon I’ve been too busy, for thirty years, asking things to be other things, to stand still on a jetty and wait for something to want what’s on the end of a hook.

Kwame Osei taught me. He’s fished every river on Avalon. He stood next to me on the end of the jetty in the grey morning and put the rod in my hands and said, “Now don’t do anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean don’t do anything,” said Kwame Osei. “Don’t ask it. Don’t look all the way down it. Don’t make the fish want the hook. Just hold the rod and wait.” He looked at me. “Can you do that?”

I said I didn’t know.

I stood on the end of the jetty for three hours, holding the rod, not doing anything.

It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Harder than waiting in the Hesta’s hold past Velle’s outer moon. Every minute I could feel the fish down there in the grey water. Hundreds of them. Every one. All the way down. I could have asked any one of them, very nicely, if it would mind coming up, and it would have said yes.

I didn’t.

At the end of the third hour, something pulled on the line.

I didn’t know what to do. Kwame Osei did. He put his big hands over mine on the rod and we brought it up together. A fish. Silver, and about the length of my arm, and very cross.

“There,” said Kwame Osei. “That one wanted it. Not you. It.”

I looked at it for a long time. Then I took it off the hook, very carefully, the way he showed me, and put it back in the sea.

Kwame Osei didn’t say anything. He just nodded.

Rory didn’t fish. Rory sat on the porch of the lodge in a long wooden chair somebody else had made, with his hands in his lap, doing nothing. For four days.

Maura had taken his plane away. He kept moving his hands, the first day, as if it was still there. On the second day he found a piece of driftwood on the beach and brought it back to the porch and sat with it on his knee, turning it over. On the third day he put it down.

On the fourth day he was asleep in the chair when we came back from the boats, and Liam put a blanket over him, and he didn’t wake up until supper.

He says it’s the first time he’s slept in the afternoon since Liam was born.

Konrad and Aurelius sat on the end of the jetty with their feet over the water and argued about the Senate for the whole of the first day.

On the second day, Aurelius caught a fish. A very small one. He looked at it in his hand for a long time, very seriously, the way he looks at a law before he signs it.

“Konrad,” he said.

“What?”

“I’ve never caught anything in my life.”

Konrad looked at the fish.

“Neither have I,” he said.

They didn’t talk about the Senate after that. They sat there for three more days with their rods, very quietly, two old men on the end of a jetty, and caught nine fish between them, and put every one back, and Teva’s father wrote them all down on the slate he’d been told not to bring.

There was beer on the porch in the evenings. And a fire on the beach every night. Liam lit it.

It’s the first time I’ve seen Liam with nothing to do since we were seventeen. He lit the fire, and sat in front of it, and for once in his life he didn’t do anything else. He didn’t jump up. He didn’t pace. He sat with Big Sigmund on one side and Toby on the other and a bottle of the Aldri beer in his hand, and looked at the fire, and talked about the cadet barracks. About Okafor’s drills. About the night Toby cried and Liam pretended not to hear and Sigmund pretended to snore so Toby wouldn’t know they could hear him crying.

Toby didn’t know that. He sat very still when Liam said it.

“You both heard?”

“Every night,” said Sigmund.

“For a year?”

“More or less,” said Liam.

Toby looked at the fire.

“Thank you,” he said. “For snoring.”

Sigmund snored, very loudly, on purpose. Everybody laughed. Gilgamesh laughed so hard he dropped his bread.

The General met her on the second evening.

I’ll put it down properly. I was there. I saw it. And I’ve never seen anything like it in thirty years, and I’ve seen a great many things.

He’d gone for a walk. On his own. Along the beach, towards the long arm of rock at the end, the way he walks along the north field at dusk at home, with his hands behind his back. He doesn’t fish. He tried on the first day and stood very straight on the end of the jetty for an hour and nothing came near him, and Kwame Osei said it was because the fish could tell he was waiting for them to report.

At the end of the beach, on the rocks, there was a woman. Sitting. Aldri. With a long grey coat and her grey hair loose down her back, and a book in her lap, and a pair of very old brass glasses she was looking out to sea through.

She was very beautiful. Even I could see that. Not young. The Aldri don’t look young after their first hundred years; they look the way an old tree looks, as if every year has been put there on purpose. She had lines round her eyes from looking at the sea, and long hands, and she was watching the water as if it was going to tell her something.

The General stopped.

I was a long way behind him, on the beach, with Liam and Sigmund. We saw him stop. We saw him stand there, very straight, with his hands behind his back, for a long time.

Then he went up onto the rocks and sat down next to her.

Her name is Sabeth. She’s three hundred and something. She won’t say exactly. She’s been watching the sea off that coast since before the lodge was built, from a small stone house at the very end of the rocks, on her own. She asked the Speaker for the end of a continent where nobody was, a very long time ago, before Halvane was the Speaker, and the Speaker of the day gave it to her. She’s been there ever since. Through every jump. Every time Ister ran, the sea went with it, and the deepbacks went with the sea, and Sabeth stayed on her rock and watched them.

She studies the deepbacks.

I didn’t know what they were either. She told the General, on the rocks. He told us. He told us at the fire, that night, which is the most he’s said at a fire in all the years I’ve known him.

They’re the biggest things in Ister’s seas. Bigger than anything on Earth ever was, Sabeth says, or anything in Avalon’s. Long and grey and slow, like a hill that swims. They come up that coast every spring from the deep water to the south and go round the end of the continent and away north. They sing. They live in families, in pods, a mother and her young and her mother and her sisters, for longer than the Aldri live. Sabeth has been watching the same pod for two hundred years. She knows every one by name.

“She asked me,” said the General, at the fire, “if I’d like to see them. Tomorrow. From the rocks. They’re due.”

Nobody said anything.

“And then,” said the General, “she asked me if I’d like to have dinner. After. At her house.” He looked at the fire. “I said yes.”

Liam opened his mouth. Sigmund put his hand over it.

The General didn’t notice. He was still looking at the fire.

“She said I sit like a man who’s been waiting a long time for somebody to tell him to stop,” he said. “I don’t know what she meant.”

“Yes, you do,” said Konrad.

The General didn’t say anything. But he didn’t argue, either.

The deepbacks came on the third morning.

We were on the boats. Most of us. Three of the lodge’s long fishing boats, out past the end of the jetty in the grey water, with Kwame Osei in the front one and Rory asleep in the back of the second. The General wasn’t with us. He was on the rocks at the end of the beach, with Sabeth, and her brass glasses, waiting.

And there was another boat. Not ours. A fishing vessel from the southern towns, Aldri, much bigger, with a crew of nine and a long net trailing behind it. A working boat. It had come round the arm of rock in the night and set its net in the deep channel off the point, where the fish run.

Where the deepbacks run.

I felt them first. I couldn’t help it. I’d been not-doing-anything for three days and it had made me listen harder than I have in years.

Something very big, coming up from the south. Many things. Slow, and long, and singing. A sound so low it went through the hull of the boat and up through my feet.

“Lucas,” said Toby, beside me. He’d felt it too. He’s a sound-shaper. He feels sound the way I feel atoms. “What is that?”

“Sabeth’s family,” I said.

And then, very suddenly, the song changed.

Toby heard it before I did. He went white.

“Something’s wrong,” he said. “They’re— one of them’s screaming.”

I looked. All the way down. Out across the grey water, to the deep channel off the point. To the Aldri boat, and its net.

And in the net, tangled, very small, a deepback.

Small for a deepback. The size of a house. A calf. Caught in the long net in the dark, where it had come up with its mother out of the deep channel, and wrapped round and round, and pulled down by the weight of it, and unable to get to the air.

And round it, the pod. Coming up.

The first one hit the Aldri boat before anyone on it knew what was happening.

Not to sink it. Sabeth says deepbacks have never once in two hundred years attacked a boat. It hit it the way a mother hits a door when her child is on the other side of it screaming. Very hard. Once. The whole boat went over sideways and came back up and nine men went into the rails.

Then another.

The pod was all round the boat. Nine of them, Sabeth says. The calf’s mother and grandmother and four aunts and three cousins. Long and grey and enormous, coming up out of the channel on every side, hitting the hull, again and again, with the calf screaming in the net underneath and getting weaker.

The Aldri crew had no idea why. They were trying to cut the engine and turn and run, and the net was still out, and every time the boat moved, the net pulled the calf further down.

I could have done it.

I want to be honest. I could have done all of it, in less than a breath. Asked the net to let go. Asked the water to lift the calf. Asked the boat to hold together. Asked the pod to be calm. I could have stood up in the back of the lodge boat and done it all from there.

I started to.

And Toby put his hand on my arm.

“Don’t,” he said. “They’re frightened. If something they don’t understand does all of it at once they’ll be more frightened. Let me talk to them.”

He didn’t wait for me to answer. He stood up in the front of the boat. And he started to hum.

I’ve heard Toby hum a great many times. He hummed on the first night, on the planet nobody had been to, across the open side of the dome, to keep the wind off. He hummed into the dish for Genny to hold the speech. He hums when he’s frightened. He’s hummed his way through most of the things that have frightened him in his life, which is most things.

I’ve never heard him do this.

It was low. Lower than anything I knew a person could make. So low it wasn’t a sound, it was a feeling, going out across the water from the front of the lodge boat, through the hull, into the sea. The same note the deepbacks sing. Their note. The one that went up through my feet when they came.

He’d heard it once. Five minutes before. And he’d learned it.

And he was singing it back to them. Not loud. Steady. Over and over. The way you’d hum to a child who’s woken up in the night and doesn’t know where they are.

It’s all right. It’s all right. We know. We’re coming.

The pod stopped.

Not all at once. One at a time. The mother last. They stopped hitting the boat and hung there in the grey water round it, very close, very still, listening.

And Liam went over the side.

He didn’t say anything. He just went. In his clothes, with a knife in his teeth, straight down into the grey water off the end of the lodge boat. And Big Sigmund went after him a breath later, because Sigmund has been going after Liam since they were seventeen and wasn’t about to stop.

They swam down. Into the channel. Past the pod. Between them. Past the mother, who was longer than the lodge, and who turned one very old eye to watch them go by and didn’t move.

Toby kept singing.

It took them nine minutes. I counted. I held the boat, and the Aldri boat, and the water, very still, so the net wouldn’t pull, so the calf wouldn’t go any deeper. That’s all I did. I asked the sea to stay where it was for a while. It was very kind about it.

Liam cut. Sigmund held. The net was thick, and wet, and wrapped round and round, and every strand of it they cut the calf moved, and screamed, and the pod moved with it.

And every time, Toby sang. It’s all right. We know. And the pod stayed still.

Liam came up twice for air. Sigmund came up once. Liam’s hands were cut. Sigmund had a line round his ankle that he cut himself, upside down, in the dark, without letting go of the calf.

On the ninth minute, the last strand went.

The calf came up. Very fast. Out of the channel, out of the net, out of the dark, into the light, and broke the surface in a great grey rush of water and air beside the Aldri boat and breathed.

The whole of the sea went up into the sky with it.

Liam and Sigmund came up a moment after. On either side of it. Holding onto it. Liam had his arm over its back, the way you’d hold onto a friend after a long night. Sigmund was laughing. In the water. With his ankle bleeding. Laughing so hard he went under and came up again.

And the mother came up beside them.

Very slowly. Very close. Her eye, as big as a door, looking at the two of them. At Liam with his arm over her calf. At Sigmund in the water, still laughing.

And she sang.

Not the low note. Not the frightened one. A different one. Higher. Very long. It went right through the lodge boat and the Aldri boat and up through my feet and into the back of my teeth.

Toby stopped humming. He just stood in the front of the boat and listened. He was crying. He didn’t stop to say anything. He just listened, and cried.

Sabeth told the General what it was, on the rocks. The General told us at the fire.

It’s the song the deepbacks sing when a calf is born.

Nobody on the Aldri boat was badly hurt. Bruises. A broken arm, which Halloway saw to as soon as we were through the arch. The boat’s going to need a new hull. Tavish Orne has offered to build it. The Aldri captain has said he’s never setting a net in that channel again and is going to put up a sign on the point so nobody else does either.

Sabeth’s writing the sign. She says it’ll be in Aldri and in ours and, if she can manage it, in something the deepbacks can read, which she says isn’t impossible, it’ll just take a while.

The General’s helping her.

He did have dinner with her. On the third night. At her stone house at the end of the rocks.

He came back to the lodge at midnight. We were all on the porch, pretending not to wait up. He came up the steps very slowly with his hands behind his back, and stopped at the top, and looked at all of us.

“Well?” said Konrad.

The General looked at him for a long time.

“She makes very good soup,” he said.

Taveth, at the end of the porch, said, “Better than mine?”

“Everyone’s soup is better than yours,” said the General. Then he sat down in one of the long wooden chairs on the porch. On his own. Without being told to.

And didn’t get up until it was light.

On the last night, at the fire on the beach, Konrad stood up.

“I propose,” he said, “that this be a yearly arrangement.”

Aurelius said, “Seconded.”

Kwame Osei said yes. Rory said yes, half asleep. Liam and Sigmund said yes at the same time, with their bandaged hands and ankle. Toby said yes. Taveth said yes and asked if he could do the soup next year. Thirty voices said no at once.

The General didn’t say anything. He was looking along the beach, towards the rocks at the end, where there was a small light in a stone house.

“General?” said Konrad.

“Yes,” said the General. “Every year.” He paused. “Possibly more often.”

We came home through the Arch Hall on the fifth morning. Brown and windburned and very relaxed. Mother was at the arch, with her pot, and touched each of us on the arm as we came through and said our names.

When she got to the General, she stopped.

She looked at him. All the way. Not down to the atoms. Mother can’t see those. But all the way, the way mothers do.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, Alaric.”

The General didn’t say anything. He looked at the floor of the Arch Hall. For the first time in all the years I’ve known him, he went slightly pink.

Luna, behind Mother, put her hand over her mouth.

“Her name’s Sabeth,” said the General, to the floor. “She studies deepbacks. She’s three hundred and something. She makes very good soup.”

Mother patted his arm.

“Bring her to supper,” she said.

That was the good part. I want to put it down first, and properly, and on its own, because of what came after.

The Assize suspended the Prime on the fortieth day.

It had been coming. Since Senna read the Sallow letter. Since Ferro Hale’s case. Since Carrow sat down. Eleven more Assessors had resigned since Ferro Hale, and the ones left had been sitting in the white hall every day for a season with the Prime’s letters in front of them and the Reach outside sitting in every square, and on the fortieth day, Mattick says, the nine that were left voted.

Seven to two. To suspend the Prime of the Collective of the Bright Reach from the white, pending a full hearing of the matter of the river world on the third arm.

It went out on every band. Read by the oldest of the nine, a very small woman called Vesk who’d sat in the white hall for sixty years and had never once read anything on the steps. She read it in a voice that shook.

Dory was at the red glass. She heard all of it. She heard the Prime.

“He didn’t say anything,” she said. “He just listened to it. On the band. In his room. With his back to the wall.”

“And then?”

Dory was quiet for a long time.

“And then he laughed,” she said.

It didn’t go well.

The Assize has no soldiers. It never has. It has the law, and the white hall, and the steps, and for three thousand years that’s been enough, because the Reach has always done what the white hall said. The Collective has an army. Of sorts. The Reach Guard. Ordinary men and women in grey-blue on every member world, who stand at tithe offices and walk the streets of the inner cities and have never once in three thousand years fought anyone.

And the Refined.

The Refined don’t belong to the Assize. They never did. They belong to the Prime. They always have. Ferro Hale’s case says so, in the Assize’s own hand: the Refined are sanctioned by the Assize and answer to the Prime.

On the forty-first day, the Prime walked out of the great house on Carrow in the white. Suspended. And came down the steps. And behind him, out of the great house, came the Refined.

Not nine. Not forty. Dory says she couldn’t count them. She says they came out of every door of the great house and down the steps in a long white river, very tall, very quiet, and stood in a ring round the square of Carrow, round all the people sitting there, and didn’t do anything.

They just stood.

And the Prime walked up the steps of the Assize, through the doors of the white hall, and into the room where the nine were sitting.

Nobody knows what he said in there. Mattick doesn’t. Corvan doesn’t; Corvan’s in somebody’s sister’s house. Dory couldn’t hear it; there’s something in the white hall, she says, that’s been built to keep the inside of it quiet.

But at dusk, the doors opened.

And the Assessors came out. All nine. Vesk at the front. And walked down the steps of the Assize, between two rows of Refined, very slowly, and across the square, through all the people sitting there, and out of the square on the far side.

And didn’t come back.

The Reach Guard on Carrow tried. Mattick says that’s the thing nobody will forget. About four hundred of them, in their grey-blue, who’d been told by the Assize that morning that the Prime was suspended. They came to the edge of the square at dusk to stop the Refined taking the Assessors.

They lasted about as long as it takes to say good morning.

Nobody died. Dory says that’s the only good thing. The Refined didn’t kill them. They just stood them up, the way they stood up the people sitting in the squares. One at a time. By the arms. And took their weapons off them. And sat them down again on the stones, in a row, with the people of Carrow, and walked away.

The Reach Guard of Carrow sat there all night. With the people they’d been sent to keep in order. Mattick says the old woman at the front shared her blanket with one of them.

On the forty-second day, the Prime stood on the steps of the Assize. In the white. With the Refined in a long white ring round the square behind him.

He didn’t read anything. He just spoke.

He said the Assize had been misled. He said its members had been deceived by forgeries from the man on the hill and had attempted, in their confusion, to act against the law of the Reach. He said that in such a time of danger, with the Hedge at war with the Reach, with the man on the hill threatening to stand beside him in the dark, the Reach could not be without its Prime.

He said the Assize was dissolved. Until such time as it could be properly reconstituted.

He said he would govern the Reach himself, in the meantime, with the help of his honoured friends.

He didn’t say who his honoured friends were.

He didn’t need to.

“It’s them,” said the first house.

We were on the plateau. At dusk. The Overseer, and Dory, and me, and Okafor, and Aramaeis, who’d come with her. The two houses had been very quiet since the band.

“It is the ones in Velle,” said the second house. “They have him. They have always had him. The voice is in him. But until now there was the white hall. The nine. The law.” A pause. “Now there is nothing between them and the Reach except the man.”

“And the man is theirs,” said Dory.

The two notes went back and forth for a long time.

“Yes,” said the first house, very quietly. “The Reach is theirs now. Every world in it. Every Refined. Every ship.” A pause. “They have wanted that for longer than there has been a Reach.”

The Overseer put his cup down on the rock. He didn’t pick it up again.

The war started in earnest that week.

Not the big thing. Not the door. Not the regiment through a ring onto my mother’s hill. Small things. Skirmishes. On the edges. The Refined came out of the dark in twos and threes, the way they always have, at the gaps, at the convoys, and Dinraal’s batteries took them, one volley, and they came again somewhere else.

But there were more of them. Every week. And they didn’t just run any more. They stayed. A little longer each time. Testing. Dinraal says it’s like a man feeling along a wall in the dark for the door.

Okafor reads her four hundred and seventy-nine lines every morning before her tea. They’ve stopped all saying Quiet. Most mornings now, three or four of them say Not quiet. Then, later, Then quiet.

Gilgamesh’s Standing hold. Alexander’s Line hasn’t had to stand yet. Arcturus holds the Wings, nine hundred of them now, all at once. Caesar’s school has its first three thousand out on the posts, every one of them with the thing they want to keep written in a book on a table on Avalon.

Okafor’s slate says Now. Under it, Velle. Under that, Avalon. And now, under that, in her square sergeant’s hand, a new word:

Reach.

The General brought Sabeth to supper on the last day.

She came up the hill road on his arm. In her long grey coat, with her grey hair loose, and her brass glasses in her pocket. Mother met her at the door.

They looked at each other for a long time.

Then Mother held the door open, and Sabeth came in, and sat at the long table, next to the General, and Mother poured.

The General didn’t say anything all through supper. He didn’t need to. He just sat. At the long table, next to Sabeth, with his hands round his cup, not sitting like a man who’s waiting for anybody to tell him to stop.

Luna cried. Very quietly. At the other end. Trevor held her hand.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Four hundred and eighty-three. Four more. Wren says one of them said it very low, like a song that goes up through your feet.

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

And under it:

Thirty-one fathers: sat down.

One calf: breathing.

The Assize: gone.

The Reach: theirs.

Days 11306–11352. Fathers.

By Sera’s fire the mothers decided the men had never had a day either: Rory’s plane, Konrad who’s never been anywhere he wasn’t working, the General who sleeps standing up, Kwame digging since before Earth emptied, Taveth’s four-day soup war. Mother: your turn. Men are easier; tell them they haven’t earned it and they go to prove you wrong. Maura took Rory’s plane; Konrad and Aurelius trapped each other; Toby: there’s always a session; Liam and Sigmund as since cadets; the quiet uncle turned out to have four grown children; Luna stood in the General’s doorway all evening until he said very well; Mother to me: four days, the Hedge will still be here; Dory: go, Dad. A wooden fishing lodge on Ister’s southern sea, at the end of a continent where nothing important was ever built; thirty-one through the arch, Mother saying each name: sit down, Alaric. Kwame Osei taught me to fish by not doing anything; three hours; that one wanted it, not you; I put it back. Rory slept in the afternoon for the first time since Liam was born. Aurelius caught his first fish; neither had Konrad; nine between them, all put back. At Liam’s fire: Liam and Sigmund heard Toby cry every night for a year and Sigmund snored so he wouldn’t know; thank you for snoring. The General walked the beach and sat down on the rocks beside Sabeth, three hundred and something, who has watched the deepbacks from a stone house at the end of the continent for two hundred years; she asked him to see them, and to dinner; she said he sits like a man waiting to be told to stop. On the third morning an Aldri fishing boat’s net caught a deepback calf in the channel off the point, and the pod of nine rammed it like a mother at a door. I nearly did all of it at once; Toby: don’t, they’re frightened, let me talk to them, and he hummed their own note back to them, it’s all right, we know, we’re coming, and they stopped. Liam went over the side with a knife in his teeth and Sigmund after him; I held the sea still; nine minutes; the calf came up and breathed; Sigmund laughing in the water with a bleeding ankle; the mother sang the song they sing when a calf is born; Toby cried. Sabeth is writing a sign for the point; the General’s helping. She makes very good soup; everyone’s soup is better than yours, Taveth; he sat on the porch till light without being told. Konrad proposed a yearly arrangement; Aurelius seconded; the General: every year, possibly more often. Mother at the arch: oh, Alaric; bring her to supper. Then the Assize suspended the Prime seven to two; Vesk read it with a shaking voice; he laughed. The Refined were always his; they ringed Carrow’s square; the nine walked out between them and didn’t come back; four hundred of the Reach Guard lasted as long as good morning, stood up and sat down unharmed among the sitters, and the old woman shared her blanket. He dissolved the Assize and will govern with his honoured friends. The houses: the Reach is theirs now, they’ve wanted it longer than there’s been a Reach; the Overseer put his cup down. Skirmishes on the edges, more each week, staying longer, feeling for the door; Okafor’s slate: Reach. Sabeth came to supper on the General’s arm and he sat like a man not waiting to be told to stop; Luna cried. Four hundred and eighty-three. Thirty-one fathers: sat down. One calf: breathing. The Assize: gone. The Reach: theirs.