Chapter 625: Tongs

Location: Kaelport — the long shed, and the Lower School yard above it

Date: 5 Emberwane 9943 AZI, Grindday, mid-morning to late afternoon

Realm: Lower Realm

Old men with bad knees didn’t run.

Meifen saw him from the long-shed window before she knew him. A shape on the school road, coming down between the last of the late carts, going at a lurch, one leg doing the work and the other dragged along for the company. Then she saw the gray scarf he’d worn every morning since Emberrise, whatever the weather did, and she was on her feet with the fodder slate still in her hand.

The paper from Hammerday was where it had been for three days, square to the edge of her trestle. Page seven. Nobody had moved it. She’d stopped seeing it somewhere around Temperday, and it made her angry every time she noticed she’d stopped.

She met him at the foot of the stair. He had both hands on his knees, and his face had gone the color of whey.

“Sit down.”

He didn’t. “Bai Shu,” he said, and had to breathe. “Says fetch you.”

“What’s wrong?” Meifen asked.

“The ones who lost one.” He got a hand on the rail. “She’s sitting with them. On our wall.”

“Who is?”

He looked up at her then, and she watched him find the rest of it where Bai Shu had put it. “The woman from Hammerday.”

Cold went down the backs of her arms, like a weld you’d trusted ringing false under the hammer.

She knew who the ones who lost one were. Not their names, most of them. Their shape. Ninety-one children on the school roll had come from villages where the cart had already been once, and every one of those children had a mother who’d stood at a hall door and smiled because she didn’t know what else to do with her face. Some of those mothers walked their second child up that road twice a week and stood at that wall, and stayed.

And Lanhua had found them inside a morning.

“Sit,” she said again, and this time he did, on the bottom step, the bad knee stuck out stiff in front of him.

Up the stairs two at a time. In the back room, where the shutters stayed closed, she wrote on a clean slate in her plain square hand. Lanhua at the school. On the wall with the mothers. Going up. M. She put it in the box by the inside door. Slates went into that box, and answers came out of it, by a road she’d never asked about, and she didn’t ask now.

Then she knelt by the trestle.

The case was oiled wood with an iron hasp, and it hadn’t been out of her sight in ten days. Inside it was the book. Eleven hundred and forty-two lines, every one of them in her hand, taken down at a table in the cold while an old nurse called Orsa asked the questions, and Meifen wrote the answers and the children’s discs lay face down in two trays at her elbow. Name. Age, or a guess at one. Village. Mother. Father. Valley. Hall. The number off the back of the disc, last, because the Commander had wanted it last.

She’d carried it everywhere for ten days.

Not today. She shut the lid, turned the key, and put the key on its cord inside her shirt where it lay cold against her breastbone. There was a thing her father said when a buyer wanted to see his best stock and the forge was going full: you don’t carry the good iron through the fire to prove it’s good. She’d never known what he meant by it, and thought she might, now.

Her boots on the stair. The gate man’s face turned up to her from the step.

“Stay,” she said. “I’ll send if I want you.”

Then up the hill, at a run.

+++

The noise reached her first, and then the yard came into view over the rise, and it was ordinary.

That was the worst of it. First break had gone long, as it always did on a Grindday when nobody wanted to be the one to ring the bell, and the yard was full. A rag ball. A shrieking knot of small ones by the pump. Two girls in a tug-of-war over somebody’s cap. The bread-eaters sat along the top of the wall with their legs hanging, and the mothers stood below them the way they did every morning, and Bai Shu was halfway along with green to the knuckle and her ears gone red.

At the far end of the wall, where it ran out into a heap of stone, two women sat with their backs to the yard.

One of them wore plain gray wool.

By the back wall, in a pale coat, stood the young man who’d counted thirty-four mornings and then stopped. He had a book under his arm. It wasn’t his. His had been small and brown, and this one was bound in cream with a ribbon, and he held it the way you hold another person’s coat.

Meifen was ten paces into the yard when the gray head turned. Not quickly. Lanhua had heard boots, and she turned like a woman at a door she’s been expecting somebody to come through, pleased, unhurried, already smiling.

“Captain,” she said, across the whole width of the yard, not loud at all.

Meifen didn’t go to her.

Her boots took her to the middle of the wall without asking. They did it as they’d taken the left flank in the Harrowing before anybody gave the order, because she’d seen where she was needed and there wasn’t room in her for anything else.

Tam was up on the top course, the slate on one knee and the fair-haired child tucked in close, reading the back of it out loud.

“—and the boatman said—”

Meifen got both hands under Tam’s arms and lifted. Slate and all. Tam came off the wall like a sack of meal, light, all elbows, and Meifen set those small feet down on the packed earth and kept her hands where they were.

“Inside.”

Tam stared up at her. “The bell hasn’t gone.”

“Inside. Now. Take the little one.”

Seven years old, and Tam looked at her face, and whatever was in it made the argument die where it started. The slate went flat against Tam’s chest. A hand went out for the fair-haired child, who took it without understanding anything, and the two of them crossed the yard to the long hall’s door and went in, and it shut.

Meifen stood with her hands still half out in front of her and nothing in them.

Then she turned round.

Lanhua was looking at the door. Not at Meifen. At the door Tam had gone through, with the same warm open face she’d worn coming up the road on Hammerday, and she looked at it for perhaps the space of a breath. Then she looked at Meifen. The smile hadn’t moved. It hadn’t needed to.

Never pick a piece up off the anvil because it’s gone black, Halvar said. Black iron’s still hot iron. Tongs, girl. Always the tongs.

A yard full of children. Thirty grown people along that wall. And Meifen had just walked into the middle of all of them and shown the Temple’s best, with her own two bare hands, which child on that wall she’d die in front of.

She made herself walk the rest of it. Past the mothers, who’d seen and were pretending they hadn’t. Past the woman from the ropewalk, who said good morning in a voice that didn’t know where to put itself. Down to the end, where Bai Shu had come round to meet her with her basket forgotten somewhere and her hands held away from her coat.

“Three,” Bai Shu said, very low. “She walked the whole wall and stopped at three, Captain. The willowbark woman off the Anseth road. The river one. And her.” A tilt of the head toward the end. “She knew his name. The elder boy’s. I’ve heard it once in my life, and I never told it to anybody.”

“What is it?” Meifen asked.

Bai Shu told her, close to her ear. She took it and put it somewhere she would find it again.

+++

Lanhua stood when Meifen reached her. A small courtesy, nothing in it to object to. Beside her, the woman from up the Corran road didn’t turn round. She was sitting with her face to the road and her hands lying open in her lap, palms up.

“I’m sorry to have brought you up the hill,” Lanhua said. “I promised Bai Shu I wouldn’t be in anybody’s way.”

“You’re on my wall.”

“It’s a good wall.” She looked along it, at the four uneven courses and the end where the stone had run out. “The fathers built it, I’m told. On a Restday.”

No need to ask who’d told her. He was standing by the back wall with somebody else’s book.

“I’m not here about the paper, Captain,” Lanhua said it gently, as if Meifen might have been worrying. “That’s for the magistrates.”

“Then what are you here for?” Meifen asked.

Lanhua looked down at the woman beside her. It was a long look, and it was a kind one, and that was what made the back of Meifen’s neck go tight.

“For the ones like her,” Lanhua said. “Somebody owed them an apology. Nobody had come. I thought someone should.”

There was a silence then, and it was a good one, warm and wide, the sort of silence a person walks into without meaning to and finds herself saying things in. Meifen had felt the edge of it on Hammerday in the long shed and set her heels. She set them now, and stood there with Tam’s weight still in the muscles of her arms and said nothing at all, and the silence went on, and Lanhua let it, and didn’t seem to mind.

“I’ll come on Grindday and Temperday,” Lanhua said at last. “Mornings. The same mornings he did.” Her eyes didn’t move toward the young man at the back. “I’ll sit here, if the school doesn’t object. Anybody who’d like to talk to me will know where I am.”

“Anybody,” Meifen repeated.

“Anybody at all.”

Her eyes didn’t go down the hill toward the long shed. They didn’t go anywhere. They stayed on Meifen’s face, warm, and they didn’t need to go anywhere, because both of them knew which two names were on that paper.

Lanhua sat back down on the wall. Not close to the woman. Just near.

Meifen stayed.

There was a place where she could see the end of the wall and the door of the long hall both at once, and she put her back against the corner of the woodstore, and she didn’t move. The bell went, the yard emptied, and the grown ones drifted off.

Bai Shu went back down to the ninth block, because the mint wouldn’t cut itself, and came up again inside the hour with nothing in her hands and stood beside Meifen without a word.

Lanhua talked to nobody. That was the thing Meifen would turn over afterward, longer than anything else. She’d come all that way, she’d sat down beside the one woman in that yard with most cause to listen to her, and now she simply sat. Once she asked Bai Shu whether the frost had taken the late sage as well, and Bai Shu said it had blackened the tips and she’d cut it back, and Lanhua said that was the right thing to do, and that was all. The young man at the back opened the cream book once and wrote in it and shut it again.

The woman from up the Corran road sat with her hands open and her face to the road for the whole of the morning, and Lanhua sat beside her, and neither of them said anything, and the sun came round off the woodstore roof and onto Meifen’s boots.

+++

The noon bell went at last.

The long-hall door opened and the morning children came out at a run for their mothers and their bread. The younger boy came out among the first. Eight, thin, his collar half out of his coat, his brother’s face if Meifen had ever seen his brother, and she hadn’t. He went straight down the wall to the end, the way a child goes to a place where he’s been told somebody will be.

His mother got down off the stone, stiffly, as though she’d been sitting there for years and not for a morning, and she took the boy’s hand.

Lanhua stood as well, and said the woman’s name, quietly, and touched her sleeve above the wrist, and said she’d be there on Temperday. Then she turned and nodded to Bai Shu, and to Meifen, a small warm nod, with nothing in it to object to.

Out through the gate, then. The young man with the cream book followed her a step behind, and the two of them went down the school road toward the town among the carts, on foot, at the pace of people with nowhere they had to be.

There was no carriage this time. Meifen watched the road until the gray coat was gone round the turn by the cooperage.

When she looked back, the woman from up the Corran road was standing in front of her.

Close up, she was younger than Meifen had thought. Her shoulders were still up round her ears, as if the morning hadn’t let them down yet. The boy hung off her hand, looking at the burns on Meifen’s knuckles.

“You’re the Captain,” the woman said.

“Yes.”

“She says he’s been moved up a year. That he’s too busy to write, and she’ll see he does.” The flat voice didn’t change. “Is that true?”

Meifen could feel the key on its cord, cold against her breastbone.

Never in her life had she lied to anybody under her about a number, and this woman wasn’t under her, and that made it worse, not better. She looked down into that braced face and found there was exactly one true thing she was able to say.

“I can’t tell you it’s true,” Meifen said.

The woman didn’t look away. Something in her shoulders came down, a finger’s width, no more.

“Two summers,” she said, “and you’re the first one who hasn’t told me it was.”

Out through the gate with the boy, and up the Corran road, and the boy turned round once at the top of the slope and waved, not at Meifen. At Bai Shu, who lifted a green hand and held it up until he’d gone.

+++

The gate man was still on the bottom step of the long shed with his leg out in front of him.

“I’m all right,” he said, before she could open her mouth.

“Go home.”

“Not my hour.”

“Go home anyway,” Meifen said, and he looked at her face as Tam had, and went.

Nothing had come out of the box in the back room. She checked twice.

The cord came off over her head. Kneeling at the trestle, she unlocked the case. The book came out heavier than it was. She laid it open on the boards beside page seven and pulled the lamp across, though it was hours yet to dark, because she wanted to be certain of every letter.

It wasn’t kept by village. It was kept in the order the children had come through the door at Hearthwell, valley by valley, hall by hall, as Orsa had sat them down. So there was no page she could turn to. There was only the first line.

None of it was a surprise. She’d known on the hill, listening to the woman say two summers. Cangwei’s columns had said months, between the cart and the gate. Months, not years. A boy who went on a cart two summers ago hadn’t been waiting in any valley for anybody.

The first line, anyway.

Her finger went down the margin and her lips moved on the names. Tilla. Bram. A boy whose mother was called Dorrit. Eleven from Ostrey, and the wetted-hair boy among them, whose name she’d written in the cold with Orsa’s lamp behind her. Children from the coast, from the far west, from a village in the hills she’d never heard of before the night she wrote it down. Every few pages, a line where the village column said only does not remember, and she’d learned since that some of those had remembered by morning and some hadn’t yet. Her own hand all the way down, square and plain and getting smaller as the night it was written had worn on.

Outside, the carts came and went. Somebody shouted for Orun. The light off the water came in under the shutters and crept up the trestle leg and went gold and then went gray.

The page seven paper lay beside her elbow the whole time, untouched.

At the eleven hundred and forty-second line, Meifen’s finger stopped at the bottom of the last column, on the last name in her own hand.

His wasn’t there. It wasn’t anywhere.

She didn’t close the book.

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