Chapter 529: The Gate Is Open

Two things happened in the spring that I should put down before the valley, because they’re bigger, and because Mother says a chapter that starts with two billion people and ends with a wedding has got itself the wrong way round.

Pip and Davo were married on the plateau.

Where everybody from the tents got married. Where Dov and Priya were married, thirty years ago, with a ring made of kit wire. Pip said that was the only place she’d do it, because she was from the tents, even if she was only small, and because her mother had stood on that red glass at a dozen weddings and never once had one of her own children’s.

Captain Amu came from the cliff city with his stick. He’s very old. He sat in the front, and when Davo came out onto the glass he started crying before anything had happened at all, and had to be given Konrad’s handkerchief, which Konrad carries for exactly this.

Davo’s sister came down from the Meridian. She navigates. She brought nine of the crew and they stood in a row at the back in their ship coats with their caps off.

Mother poured. Maura cried into the royal tea towel, which Oona had washed specially. Rory had planed the long table that morning, which it didn’t need, and then carried it out onto the plateau himself with Liam and Big Sigmund, because Pip said she wasn’t getting married anywhere the long table wasn’t.

Aurelius asked the questions. He’s done four now. He says the coat has definitely had to be let out.

“Do you know what you’re asking her for?”

Davo stood on the red glass with his four-fingered hands at his sides and his copper freckles going darker and darker.

“Somewhere to go,” he said.

Aurelius looked at Pip.

“Do you know what you’re giving him?”

“Somewhere to go,” said Pip.

They didn’t have a word. They’re not Aldri. But the Aun have something, Davo’s sister says, that they do on the trains: at the end of a long run, when the last stop’s in sight, the driver says the name of it out loud so the whole carriage knows they’ve arrived.

So Davo said the name of the cliff city. And Pip said the stall. And everybody on the plateau laughed, including Rory, who doesn’t.

Nine tin cups on a table at the side, and nine bread-dough balls in Rory’s box with the nine compartments. Everybody at the party had a throw. Mother hit three. Okafor hit nine, in nine throws, without looking pleased about it. Rue stood on Oona’s feet and threw one underarm and missed by a long way and Davo gave her a ribbon anyway, a brown one, like his bread-dough, which is in the bag with the leaves and the horse and Maura’s small grey thing.

Maura’s five knitted things were a blanket, two jumpers, the thick gloves for the hot iron, and one very small thing that nobody has said anything about and that Pip put at the bottom of a drawer with her face bright red.

And on the morning the pod came round the point, the General went down the rocks.

He’d been waiting for it since the winter. Since the longest night. Since Sabeth said ask me again when the pod comes round in the spring, and then stayed on Avalon through the whole of the winter and the whole of the spring and never once mentioned it.

Sabeth went back to Ister for the pod. She always does. She’s watched the calves come down the channel past her house for two hundred years and she wasn’t going to stop for anybody.

The General went through the Ister arch and took the train south, a day, on his own, in his good coat, with no bag at all. Luna wanted to go with him. He said no. Luna says he said it the way he says things at the board.

He walked out along the rocks to the small stone house at the end. The light was in the window. The chair was on the porch.

Sabeth was on the rock above the channel with her brass glasses and her book, because the pod was coming round and she had notes to make and no intention of making anybody else’s morning more important than two hundred years of notes.

He sat down on the rock beside her. Not in the chair. On the rock.

And they watched the deepbacks come round the point. The whole pod. Nine, and then more, like hills, with the water coming off them in sheets. And the calf from the net, grown now, bigger than the lodge, swimming on the outside of the pod where the big ones swim.

Sabeth wrote it down. All of it. The way she has every year since before I was born.

Then she closed the book.

“Ask,” she said.

The General stood up. On the rock. Very straight. With his hat in his hand, which is how he does everything that matters.

“I’d like to marry you,” he said. “If you’ll have me. I’m a soldier and I’m not much good at anything else and I’ve got a great many years I didn’t expect and nothing I want to do with them that doesn’t have you in it.”

Sabeth took her glasses off.

“I’ve found the word,” she said.

The General didn’t say anything.

“Three hundred and forty years,” said Sabeth. “Two men asked me and I couldn’t think of one. I’ve had one since the longest night. I didn’t tell you because I wanted to see if it stayed.” She folded the glasses. “It stayed.”

“What is it?”

Sabeth looked out at the channel, where the pod was going south, and the calf on the outside of it, and the water settling.

“Still here,” she said.

The General sat down on the rock very suddenly, which Sabeth says is the only ungraceful thing she has ever seen him do.

They’ll marry on Ister, in the autumn, after the Fours, with the keepers and the book. Mother’s already arguing with Teva’s grandmother about who pours.

Luna cried for an hour. Trevor held her hand. Lumi, who is nearly two and says four words, patted her mother’s knee and said one of them, which is good.

The General told me on the porch, standing up, as if making a report, and at the end of it he said: “Three words. She said three words.”

“Still here is two,*” I said.

“She said still here,” said the General, “and then she said Alaric.”

The mothers went to the beach with forty days on the Count.

Mother wouldn’t move it. Maura said they could skip a year, with two billion people arriving and the valley to fill and Pip’s wedding in the spring and everything else, and Mother put the pot down and said no.

“If we skip it once we’ll skip it always,” she said. “There’ll always be two billion of something.”

So they went. Fifty-seven this year. Four new ones: Hanne Brisk, who said she couldn’t possibly, with nine miles of benches to count, and who was told by Vesk that she could count benches from a white chair; Saffa Rennick from Ammet, who brought the soup bowl; Oriel, because Kwame finally asked Mother to ask her; and Bess.

Bess had never been anywhere. She’d mended shoes in the old quarter of Carrow for sixty years and been asleep under Velle for one, and the furthest she’d ever travelled was the river below the quarter. Mother went up the stairs to her little room with the bench and the lamp and asked her, and Bess said she had nine pairs to finish.

“They’ll wait, love,” said Mother.

“They won’t,” said Bess. “Shoes don’t wait. People do.”

She came anyway. She sat in a white chair at the end of the row for four days with her feet in the non-stick sand and a mimosa she didn’t drink, looking at the sea, and on the third day she said, to nobody, “Well. That’s a lot of water.” On the fourth day the tray-man brought her a pair of his own shoes, very worn, and asked if she’d look at them. She mended them on her knees in the chair in an hour, and then she drank the mimosa.

Mother sat down on the first afternoon again. Three hours under her hat.

And nine days before the Fours, Dot found the root.

She’d been looking for fifteen months. Since the concert on the great lake. Since the moment in the fourth song when the ice cracked and something very far away, in a hall nobody had found, moved a little towards the sound.

She never stopped. That’s the thing about Dot. She sends the dawn count down from the Meridian every morning and sits in her corner by the bread every evening and in between she listens to everything there is, and she had one root, out of all the roots in the Collective, that she wouldn’t let go of.

She came down the hill road at dawn with Ilka. She didn’t wait for Mother to put the kettle on.

“Query,” she said. “Where is Saelle?”

Saelle was on Thrane. In the great hall, which has been open since the Refined left its doors, singing every ninth night to two hundred thousand people and whoever has a box turned on. She came through the arch inside an hour, in a coat thrown over her nightclothes, with her white hair loose.

She stood in the kitchen with her hands at her sides.

“Say it,” she said.

“The root is very old,” said Dot. “Fifteen years. It is the oldest this one has ever heard that is still listening.” A pause. “It is on a world called Ovis. Past the second arm. Nine halls were found. This one was not. It is not a hall. It is one room, under a house, in a town with four hundred people in it, and nobody on that world knows it is there.”

“Is she alive?”

“Affirmative,” said Dot.

Saelle put one hand on the long table. Very carefully. The way you put your hand on something to find out whether the floor is still there.

“She’s been asleep for fifteen years,” said Dot. “Her gift has been in nine Refined in that time. Nine. One after another. When one died they moved it to the next.” A pause. “She has been singing to all of them. For fifteen years. Nobody has ever answered.”

Saelle didn’t say anything.

“This one would like to say something that is not in the report,” said Dot.

“Say it.”

“On the night of the great lake,” said Dot, “when the ground cracked and the sea came in, the root moved towards the sound.” Her colours came all the way up. “This one has listened to that root for fifteen months. It has never moved again. Not once. Not for anything.” A pause. “Except when you sing the fourth.”

We went that night. Dot wouldn’t let us wait for Okafor’s sheets, which is the only time in her life she’s ever said anything like that, and Okafor drew them in an hour instead of a night and didn’t complain.

It was small. Ovis is a quiet farming world with nothing on it the Collective wants. Four Refined in the town. One room under a house. Dory and Ash and me, and Elin on the door, and Saelle, who would not stay behind, and who stood on the red glass with her arms folded and said, in a voice I’ve only heard her use on the stage, that she had waited fifteen years and nobody in the Hedge was going to ask her to wait in a kitchen.

Mother said she could come. Okafor looked at Mother and then wrote S. on the sheet.

The room was white. Of course it was. One bed. One root going up into the dark. A woman of about forty, very thin, with white hair, the way all Thrane people’s hair is white from birth.

Saelle stopped in the doorway.

“That’s not her,” she said. “She was nine.”

“It’s her,” said Dory, very gently. “Fifteen years, love.”

Saelle crossed the room. She knelt down by the bed. She didn’t touch her. She put her face very close, the way you do with somebody you’re trying to recognise, and looked, and looked.

And then she made a sound I won’t put down.

Ash did the root. Not me. I asked her to. Fifteen years is a long knot and Ash sees knots all the way down now, since the last hall, since her eyes went black.

It took her an hour. She went very slowly. She said afterwards it was like untying something that had been pulled tight by nine different people who all pulled differently.

And while she did it, Saelle sang.

The fourth one. The one where the sea comes in late, after the voice, where you wait. On her knees on the floor of a white room under a house on a farming world, with no musicians and no ice and no lake and no million people. Just the voice. Very high, very clear, very cold.

And she waited.

She held the note and waited. Longer than the recording. Longer than the great lake. Longer than she’s ever held it.

And Ilya Cord came in.

Low. Very low, and very rough, and very faint, because a throat that hasn’t been used in fifteen years doesn’t do what you tell it. But it was the part. The sea part. Coming in late, after the voice, exactly where it comes in, from a woman who hadn’t been awake since she was nine years old and who had written it when she was eight.

She didn’t open her eyes until the end of the phrase. She finished it first.

Then she opened them.

She looked at the ceiling. Then at Saelle, a hand’s breadth away.

“You waited too long,” said Ilya Cord.

Saelle put her head down on her friend’s chest and howled.

I’m not going to put down the rest of that room. Dory says I shouldn’t. She was there and she says some of it isn’t mine.

I’ll put down what Ilya said when we got her out onto the plateau at dawn, in a blanket, with Mother’s cup in both hands and the whole hill standing round at a polite distance pretending to be busy.

She drank the tea. She looked at the red glass, and the house on the rise, and the north field, and the two hundred people trying not to stare.

Then she said, to Saelle, “They’ve been singing my songs.”

“Yes.”

“Everywhere. For years.” Ilya Cord’s voice is wrecked. Halloway says it may come back a long way and it may not come back all the way. “I could hear them. Through the one in me. Whoever had it. I heard a whole square sing the fourth once, somewhere, at dawn, very badly.”

“Carrow,” said Saelle.

“They sang it wrong,” said Ilya.

“I know,” said Saelle. “They sing it wrong everywhere. For fifteen years I’ve had to sing it right in front of people who learned it wrong.”

Ilya Cord laughed. It sounded terrible. Halloway says laughing is the best thing for it.

She’s on the ward. Halloway won’t let her out for a month. Her muscles are fifteen years asleep; she’s learning to stand again the way Bess had to, only worse, and Abena breathes for her at night when she forgets.

Luka came on the second day.

He didn’t go to Saelle. That’s what Sera noticed. He’s nearly eleven now, and tall for it, and the red has mostly stopped happening. He went down the long ward past nine thousand students and stopped at the right bed and stood at the end of it.

Ilya Cord looked at him.

“You’re the fourth one,” she said. “She told me. The one who said you wait in the fourth.”

Luka went red after all.

“Nobody says that,” said Ilya. “Everybody says the ninth.”

“The ninth’s very good,” said Luka. “But you don’t wait in the ninth.”

Ilya Cord put her hand out. It shook. Luka took it, very carefully, the way you’d take something that had been in a drawer for a long time.

“I was eight when I made it,” she said. “On the ice. Waiting for her to catch up. She was always slow on the ice.” She looked past him at Saelle, asleep in the chair by the bed with her white hair over her face. “That’s what the waiting is. It’s her, coming.”

Luka didn’t say anything for a long time.

“Can I tell people?” he said.

“Tell everybody,” said Ilya Cord.

He told the Herald. Tamsin printed it on the front, in his words, with his name on it, which Imre says makes him the youngest person ever to have a piece in the Herald. He’s had nine hundred letters. He answers every one. Sera makes him stop at nine a night.

Hanne Brisk came to the ward on the fourth day. She’d come to ask Saelle to open the Fours. Two billion people, the first morning, before the first throw. She’d been trying to ask for a month and losing her nerve.

Saelle listened to the whole thing. Then she looked at the bed.

“Only if she’s there,” she said. “On a bench. At the bottom. Where I can see her.”

“Can she travel?” said Hanne.

“No,” said Halloway, from the next bed. Then, after a moment: “She can travel.”

Ilya can’t sing yet. Not properly. Not two billion. She knows it. Halloway’s told her it may come back a long way and it may not come back all the way, and Ilya Cord, who spent fifteen years asleep singing to nine Refined who never answered, says that’s the best news anybody’s ever given her.

So they decided it between them, in the ward, over three days, with Luka sitting on the end of the bed because nobody could get him to leave.

Saelle will sing the fourth. Alone. At the bottom of a valley nine miles across, with two billion people, the way she sang it on the lake.

And she’ll hold the note. And wait.

And Ilya Cord will come in on the sea part. From the bench. In whatever voice she’s got.

Luka asked whether that was allowed. Whether you could do that, with a wrecked voice, in front of two billion people.

Ilya looked at him.

“It’s my song,” she said.

And then the arches opened, and two billion people came.

Nine days. That’s what Crane gave himself. Nine days of arches, from every world in the Hedge and the fifty-three new ones and every edge world in the Reach that could get a crate to a port, to a long row of gates at the top of the valley on Caul.

He had a sheet. The biggest sheet anybody’s ever seen. Konrad helped him. It took the two of them a season and they argued the whole time and Ingrid says they’ve never been happier.

Nine hundred and eleven arches. Opening in order, by world, by hour, for nine days. Every person coming through into a green terrace nine miles across with a bench waiting and a number on it, and nobody allowed through until the bench was ready.

It worked. Mostly. On the fourth day the Kiln arch and the Thole arch opened at the same hour by mistake and four hundred thousand people arrived on the same terrace and had to sort themselves out, which they did, by shouting, and which Hanne Brisk says was the most Kiln thing she’s ever seen.

Crane stood at the top of the valley for nine days with his board and his cane and watched. He didn’t sit down. Holt stood with him. On the ninth night, when the last arch closed, Crane wrote something on the board and turned it off and let Holt take him down to a hollow to sleep.

Holt says the board said All of them.

The hollows were Kwame’s. Under the terraces. Two billion people have to sleep somewhere, and Caul is a quiet green world with low white towns and no room at all.

So the Ground went down. Nine thousand of them, with the Caddi, and every digger in the Hedge, for six months, under the new valley. Sleeping hollows, warm, dry, deep, with springs. And in every one of them, at the bottom, a kitchen.

Mother insisted. She always does.

Which meant somebody had to feed two billion people.

Taveth had been waiting four years for this.

“Nine thousand grandfathers,” he said, at the long table, with the great iron pot in front of him. “I’ve taught nine thousand. On two hundred worlds. Every Thursday for four years.” He put his hand on the pot. “They can all make it. Badly. Correctly badly.”

“You want nine thousand pots in the hollows,” said Mother.

“I want nine thousand pots in the hollows,” said Taveth. “So when two billion people come up out of the ground on the first morning of the Fours, they come up smelling of it.”

Mother looked at him for a long time.

“Four days,” she said. “It takes four days.”

“Then we start four days before,” said Taveth.

They started four days before.

Nine thousand pots. In nine thousand hollows under nine miles of green terraces on a quiet world called Caul. Nine thousand grandfathers who’d come through arches from two hundred worlds with their own spoons, because Taveth’s first rule is you bring your own spoon.

Konrad in one. The General in another, stirring like a man on parade. Old Kwame Osei, who still says he’s too old for this and was in the hollow before anybody. Rory, who made every chopping board. Holt, supervising. Teva’s father with a slate working out proportions, which is still cheating. Captain Amu from the cliff city with his stick, sitting down to chop. Linnet’s grandfather from Isk. Tolland Rusk from Brannock. Dov, who got a hollow of his own because Priya said she wasn’t having him in hers.

Taveth went round all nine thousand on the fourth day with his spoon. Through the hollows, one after another, on a cart Kwame ran along the bottom of the valley, tasting.

It took him eleven hours. He tasted nine thousand pots.

At the end of it he stood up on the cart at the bottom of the valley, under nine miles of terraces, with his spoon in his hand, and said, to nine thousand grandfathers waiting in nine thousand kitchens underground:

“Terrible. All of them.”

Dot carried it on the band. Every hollow heard it.

Mother says the whole valley shook.

They came up on the last morning. Two billion people, up out of the hollows, up the steps, onto the terraces, in the dawn, smelling of the worst soup in the galaxy.

I went up to the top with Mother, the night before.

Not the very top. The Kethri have the very top, in the mist, where you can’t get to unless you can fly. The second-highest terrace. We went up by the long stair Rory built, which has nine thousand steps and a bench every hundred, and took an hour, because Mother wouldn’t be carried and wouldn’t be flown.

“I’ve walked up worse,” she said. “Forty-one floors. Every day. For years. There wasn’t a lift for the halls.”

We sat on the second-highest terrace and looked down.

The valley was full. All of it. Nine miles of green terraces going down and away in rings, and on every bench, people. Two billion of them, in the dusk, with lamps. Every world in the Hedge. Kiln and Hyrran and Thole and Marrach and Ister and Brannock in the snow-coats they wear everywhere. Kessry in white. Ammet in team coats. Caul and Myre and Onsey. Thrane with their white hair. Hesk’s Field. Carrow’s people, nine thousand of them, who came under the rabbits in Mattick’s crates over nine weeks, and who all sat down together, in a block, the way they sit, back to knees, because they couldn’t stop doing it.

The Kethri above us in the mist. The light-benders somewhere, slightly to the left of wherever you looked. Nine hundred Drenn young among the seats, unseen. Dot’s kits in the terraces, one every mile, listening.

Fifty-three Firsts in the front row by Rue.

And down at the bottom, very small, four dark stiles in a diamond, and a throwing mound, and Toby’s bench with nobody on it.

Mother looked at it for a long time.

“Say something,” I said.

Mother didn’t say anything for a while.

“When your father and I were in the halls,” she said, “on the forty-first floor, there was a window at the end of the corridor. Harriet and I used to stand on a chair to see out of it. You could see the dome roof and about nine feet of sky.” She had her hands in her lap. “That’s what I thought the world was. Nine feet of sky and a lot of corridor.”

I didn’t say anything.

“And now there’s this,” said Mother. “And they’ve all come to watch a game.”

She shook her head.

“Not to be rescued,” she said. “Not to be counted. Not because somebody’s dying. They’ve come because it’s fun.” She put her hand on my arm. “Lucas. Do you know how long it’s been since anybody did anything because it was fun?”

Okafor walked the valley on the last night.

All of it. Nine miles. On foot, from the bottom to the top and down the other side, with her slate under her arm, past two billion people sitting on benches in the dark with lamps and bowls and soft ones. Nobody stopped her. A great many people stood up.

Gilgamesh went with her for the first mile and then she sent him to his post. Aramaeis met her at the fourth and walked the fifth. Dot was in her pack, which I didn’t know she did for Okafor as well.

She came down at about midnight to the bottom, where Hanne Brisk was walking the diamond with her lamp, and the two of them stood by the first stile, the old one, and looked up at two billion lamps going up into the mist in rings.

“Well?” said Hanne.

Okafor looked at her slate for a long time. Then she turned it face down, which she almost never does.

“Every arch is held,” she said. “Every kit is listening. There are nine hundred of the Drenn queen’s young in those seats and not one person has seen one. The Kethri are in the mist. The Standing is in the crowd with their hands on things.” She put the slate under her arm. “And if he comes anyway, with everything, through the fold, into the middle of this, then two billion people will find out what we are.”

“Is that a yes?” said Hanne Brisk.

“That’s a yes,” said Okafor. “Open the gate.”

We went down. It took longer. At the bottom Hanne Brisk was walking the diamond with a lamp, checking it, the way she’s walked it every night for six months.

She stopped at the first stile. The old one. Rory’s planed rail.

“I keep thinking somebody’s going to tell me I can’t,” she said. “The whole time. Six months. Every morning I wake up and think, today’s the day the Prime stops it.”

“He can’t,” said Mother.

“No,” said Hanne Brisk. She put her hand on the top rail. “I know. I still think it.”

The Count got to one.

Rue put the last peg in on the porch at dawn on the first day of the Fours, with Mother holding the board, with the whole house standing round in the doorway in their coats, waiting to go through the arch.

Two hundred and seventy holes. All full.

Rue looked at the board. All the pegs in. No holes left.

“None,” she said.

“That’s right, love,” said Mother. “None left. It’s today.”

Rue looked at the board for a long time. Then she turned it over, so the empty back was up, and held it out to Mother.

“Again,” she said.

The leagues, which stop now, because they’ve all arrived:

The Hill came through the Caul arch first seed with nine thousand people from the hill behind them. Sigmund threw at the orchard wall every evening until the night before and then stopped. Tovi has nine apples in her bag.

Caul’s Haze came through their own home arch to the loudest noise Toby says he’s ever heard from four million people. They play the Hill in the Stile final, if they both get there. Hanne Brisk says if they both get there she’ll have to be taken out of the valley.

Brannock’s Fell came in snow-coats. Hesper Daine threw in the last league game with Gilgamesh in the stand and won it, and then came to the Fours in a coat with no rank on it, and Gilgamesh carried her bag, which the whole of the Hedge has an opinion about.

Ammet’s Soon came with Saffa Rennick and the bowl.

The Ridge-Ends came up the hill road to the Avalon arch at dawn with Kyrie at the front, carrying her own stick and the soft Andraste, with Kyria and Taveth and Andraste and nine Hyrrani grandmothers behind her. Okafor was at the arch. She didn’t say anything. She stood by the gate as the team went through and when Kyrie passed her she put her hand on her chest.

Tiri sailed the Lumi from Ister to Caul herself, nine days, with Halvane as crew. Halvane says he was crew. Ilas says he was cargo.

The Kethri flew.

Pim came with Kesh and the Gales. He’s got new boots. Bess mended them before they were worn, which she says is the only sensible time.

And the Caddi came up out of their hollows with a bag of small stones and no explanation.

Mattick’s nine thousand are the ones I keep thinking about.

Carrow’s people. Nine thousand of them, out of a world with a square where the scientists still choose one a morning, who got themselves into crates on the Hesta over nine weeks, nine hundred at a time, under rabbits and barley and iron bells, with no guarantee of anything at the other end.

They came up out of the hollows on the last morning and walked up to their terrace and sat down. In a block. Back to knees. The way they sit. Nobody told them to. Nobody could have stopped them.

The old woman from the front of the square didn’t come. Mattick asked her, the first week. She said somebody had to read the Herald out in the morning, and somebody had to sit at the front, and if she went there’d be a gap at the front of the square, and the scientists would see it.

She sent something instead. With Mattick. For Hanne Brisk.

A stile. A small one. A child’s one, about a foot high, made of two bits of fence-wood and a nail, the kind somebody puts up in a yard so a very small child can practise climbing.

Hanne Brisk put it at the bottom of the valley, in the middle of the diamond, next to the old stile from the Hazy Field. It’s still there. Nobody’s moved it. The players climb the real ones and step over the small one, every game, without being told.

The stars said Not yet this morning. A thousand and ninety-nine.

Wren wrote the count on the slate at dawn, on the porch, and then carried the slate through the arch, because she wasn’t leaving it, and wrote the rest of it at the bottom of the valley sitting on Toby’s bench with two billion people coming up out of the ground behind her.

The Count: none left.

Ilya Cord: awake.

Two billion: here.

Days 13303–13344. The Gate Is Open.

The mothers went to the beach anyway, and Bess saw the sea. Nine days before the Fours, Dot’s fifteen-year root led us to Ilya Cord in one room under a house on Ovis; Ash untied it while Saelle sang the fourth, and Ilya came in on the sea part and said she’d waited too long. Then Crane’s nine hundred arches brought two billion people into Kwame’s hollows under Caul, Taveth tasted nine thousand pots of soup and pronounced them all terrible, and Rue put the last peg in the Count.