Location: Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 7, Yr 76 of the Still Flame
POV: Aeryn Veyra
Four.
Five.
Six.
Nettik counted the pails on the way up and counted them again on the way down, out loud.
It came through the wall of the pod the way everything came through the wall of the pod.
Aeryn listened to him a moment with her eyes still shut, and then, without moving anything else, listened past him to the door.
Nothing on the boards.
No metal on wood.
Only then did she open her eyes and look.
The crate stood where she’d walked it the night before, its long edge canted against the door plate so the plate couldn’t swing in without shifting it.
The canteen sat on the high corner exactly as she’d balanced it, upright, half full, with about a finger of overhang holding it there.
Three fingers of movement on that door, and the canteen came off the crate and onto the boards from the height of her hip.
Setting it had taken a while.
Afterward she’d lain on the cot a long time, listening, learning what the pod did on its own at night so she’d know the difference when something did it for her.
The hum in the walls, steady, warm.
The outer skin ticking as the night cold took it.
The fill port breathing when the wind came round the mountain’s shoulder.
Nothing else.
Then she’d slept, because she’d made it safe enough to sleep, and that was the difference between last night and the one before it.
Which is a trap, not a watch.
A trap tells you somebody is already through the door.
A watch tells you before.
She’d traded one for the other because there was nobody to stand the watch, and because a woman who doesn’t sleep stops being able to think inside a week.
It was the correct trade, and she disliked it exactly as much as she had at the time.
+++
Two fingers on the side of her own throat.
Slow.
Heavy.
Even.
That had held since the night of the bath, and Nettik’s pails came at a steady enough rate to count against, which was the only clock she had.
Then the rest of it, in the order a training officer would’ve run it.
Up off the cot, four times, the count running from the first movement.
The fourth cost more than the first.
A curve, and a curve has a shape, and a shape can be measured.
Breath, all the way out and counted until counting turned into pushing.
The number was contemptible.
Twice more, to be sure it hadn’t been an accident.
It hadn’t.
Grip, on the frame of the cot and the edge of the crate, holding on until the hand opened by itself.
Left, then right.
The left let go first.
The left was the arm with the marks inside the elbow.
Her hand was most of the way to the band before she caught it, and for a moment she sat in an empty room with her arm half raised, working out how close that had come.
A woman assessed at the bottom of every scale this world had does not keep a record of her own recovery on a state instrument that reports somewhere she’s never been shown.
The line came off the band unfinished.
Her arm went down.
Head, then.
Every figure carried in order, with nothing to check it against, and all of them taken again tomorrow to see what had moved.
Then the walking, which she’d been putting off all morning.
Eight paces to the far plate.
Turn.
Six back, and the left knee stopped taking instruction, and the plate came up under her hand.
Fourteen.
Two more than the night she walked to the fire.
She sat against the plate and paid attention to the waiting, because the waiting was the measurement and the walking had only produced it.
Breath came back first.
Then the thighs stopped shaking.
Then the pulse came down, faster than it had any business coming down, and she went very still on the boards with her legs out in front of her.
Again.
Fourteen.
Down.
Wait.
Again.
A third run put the figure between the other two, which made a range, and a range meant the thing was real.
The body recovers faster than it works.
In her own service, those two had tracked.
A body that came off exertion quickly was a body with a great deal left in it, and recovery was the proxy everyone used for capacity, and it had never once let a training officer down in her hearing.
This body recovered like something with reserves.
Then it emptied after fourteen paces.
Not a wrecked engine.
Which settled the box under the cot.
Nine boxes, sealed.
The cup at the spring had been filling for two days, and the water had stopped being the constraint some time yesterday without her admitting it.
The constraint was what she could spend, and she’d learned that on these same boards with more in her than the body knew how to hold.
Open the second box today, a full sachet, and she’d be carrying twice what had nearly finished her, with fourteen paces to get rid of it.
So it waits.
She hadn’t waited for anything in a very long time.
Shortened, gone early, gone without.
Waiting belonged to people whose schedule was working.
+++
The third position of the sequence was underway when the light in the doorway changed, and she finished the position before she looked, because stopping halfway is how a person gets hurt.
Vaelith stood outside with the light behind him.
“You are working.”
Off the boards without the wall, which hadn’t been available to her the day before yesterday, and she managed it without looking at him.
Come in.
She walked the crate off the door, slowly.
He waited for her to do it rather than do it for her.
He came his two paces and sat on the crate in the flat stillness he had instead of a posture.
Indoors, close to, the black mark under his left eye was the only thing on him that the lamp found at once.
You are early.
“I am on time.
You are on the floor at midday, which you were not yesterday.”
Where is the other one.
The line was on the band before she’d decided to write it, and she watched him take the question and decide about it.
“He is out.”
Out.
“Yes.”
Twice past the fill port this morning, and the gravel had carried Nettik and nothing else.
The treeline post had been empty at first light and empty at the second look.
It read one way, and she didn’t like the way.
Yesterday, in front of every window on the slope, she’d stopped one man of her house with a look on the gravel.
This morning the other one was gone.
Whether that was Vaelith moving his own man or the man moving himself mattered very little.
Down to one, at the bottom of a slope, behind a door she held shut with a crate and a canteen, and she’d done the whole of it to herself in the time it took to turn her head.
Three times this week her reading of these people had been wrong, and she went looking for a fourth reading.
She didn’t find one.
Being wrong would have been preferable.
How long.
“A day.
Perhaps two.”
Is that a punishment.
He took a moment over her.
“No.”
Then say what it is.
“It is not mine to say,” Vaelith said, “and I would rather hand you nothing than hand you something that is not mine.”
Twice now in two days, in almost those words.
Yesterday, her own body.
Today, a man off a post.
The same door, closed the same way, without heat, and no version of pushing on it was going to work this afternoon.
She held his eyes a moment longer than the exchange needed.
Then start where we stopped.
He started where they’d stopped, in his own order, because taking it in hers had been tried yesterday and had lost them most of an hour.
The world first, and what it was for.
What came down the face, which was nothing.
What went up, which was energy crystals.
The seasons and their names, and that the one standing over them now was the Growing, six days old, opened with a festival she’d lain through.
What does the village owe.
“Ten dim energy crystals a head, a year.” He said it in the voice he kept for figures.
“Paid a quarter at a time, at every turn of the season, weighed raw as it comes out of the rock.
Iskel Belloch weighs it.”
And if the shaft closes.
“The weight does not close with it.
That is the first thing anybody here will tell you, and they will tell you before you ask.”
When is the next turn.
“Longhunt seven.”
Forty days.
Then what does the village keep.
“What is left.”
How much is left.
He didn’t answer that at once, which was an answer, and she waited him out, because she had nowhere to be today and he did.
“I have not been shown a ledger,” he said.
“Nobody on this face has.
The weight is stated at the turn, and the men go and get it, and what comes back to the households after is what comes back.”
Stated by whom. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
“That is a better question than the one you asked before it.”
She made him give her the figure again, because the first pass had produced something she didn’t believe, and the second pass produced it again.
Fifty-odd households.
Call it nine hundred heads, children and all.
Nine thousand dim energy crystals a year, and better than two thousand of them due at the scales in forty days, every one dug by hand out of a mountain.
Nobody in the village had ever seen the arithmetic written down.
It wasn’t complicated.
If she had it right, there was no year in which this place got ahead of the year before it.
She thought about the dozens beside her spring, which had felt like a fortune three days ago.
Against what this village owed in forty days, they were a handful.
It explained Nettik and the pails.
It explained a headwoman who counted things out loud in front of people.
It explained a village that had put its timber where the timber was worth most and left four hundred paces of open ground in front of a wall nobody could afford to finish.
None of it was about her.
All of it was about the ground under her, and he’d chosen the order on purpose, because a place has a shape, and the shape tells you what can be done in it.
Somewhere in the middle of the tithe her hand went.
She watched the letters come out of the band wrong.
She put the arm down on her knee and didn’t try to finish the line.
Vaelith was already standing.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
He got as far as the doorway.
The one who is out.
“Yes.”
When he comes back.
He stood in the light with his back half to her.
“Then he is back,” Vaelith said, “and it will not need anything from you.”
+++
The smell came up the slope before the woman did.
Fat, and something under it that had been in the pot a long time, and it went through Aeryn hard enough that she sat down on the crate and waited for her mouth to stop doing what it was doing.
Vekka came up the gravel slowly, the iron-gray roped back with its cord, a bowl held in a cloth against her middle so the heat wouldn’t go out of it on the way.
Sixty-odd years on her.
The slope was steeper than it looked, and she’d climbed the whole of it.
At the doorway she stopped and looked at the far wall of the pod a while before she came in.
“You didn’t come down.”
No.
“Aye.
Well.” The bowl went on the crate.
“Then it comes up.”
Yesterday Aeryn had crossed forty paces of gravel to hand a mirror back rather than let a man carry it for her.
Today a woman more than twice her age had carried her dinner up a hill, and was breathing a little harder than she let on, and wasn’t going to mention it.
There was no writing her way round that.
I will come down tomorrow.
“You’ll come down when your legs let you and not before, and I’ll not be told about it by a woman sat on a crate.” Vekka went along the roof seam next, tracking it end to end while she decided what she was going to say.
“You’re wearing the leathers again.”
Yes.
“Two of them came and asked me about that, separately, and neither one had the sense to make it sound like something else.” She snorted.
“You’ll want to eat that before it goes cold.
There’ll be better in it in a day or two.”
Aeryn had the band up before the sentence had finished landing.
Better.
“A day or two,” Vekka said, and left it there, and went and stood in the doorway with her arms folded and looked down the slope at nothing in particular.
An hour ago a man had sat on that crate and told her nothing came down the face.
Now a woman who fed fifty households was telling her there’d be better in the pot by the day after tomorrow.
One of them was wrong, or one of them was managing her, and the second was likelier, because the first would mean the Long Count didn’t know where her own food came from.
She’d put it to Vaelith tomorrow, in among the tithe, where it wouldn’t look like the question it was.
+++
The gravel hadn’t finished with the sound of Vekka before she was down on the boards again.
Fourteen paces, turn, and down.
The recovery landed inside the morning’s range, which meant the day had taken nothing out of her that she could measure.
Up.
Again.
Longer this time, and she didn’t stop counting when the figure went long.
A number that disappoints is worth exactly what a number that pleases is worth, and a great deal more when you have as few of them as she had.
Up.
By the last one the wall was doing more of the work than her legs were.
She gave it that.
The wall was equipment, and a soldier who won’t use her equipment is a soldier making a point to nobody.
Afterward, flat on the boards in the dark, in a room eight paces long, on a penal world, in a body handed to her rather than built, she closed the day in her head.
Fourteen.
Three runs.
Three recoveries, and the range.
Tomorrow, fifteen.