Location: Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 10, Yr 76 of the Still Flame
POV: Aeryn Veyra
Boots on gravel, stopping outside, and then nothing for a while.
He was giving her the time to be awake.
Lying on the cot in the gray, she let him have the courtesy and understood that it was not entirely a courtesy, because a man who waits outside a door is also a man establishing that he intends to open it.
Aeryn knocked twice on the plate beside the cot, and the door came open before the second one had finished traveling.
Vaelith came his two paces.
The light was behind him, and there was not much of it yet.
“You are on the cot.”
I am.
“That is what I came for,” he said, and went.
The gravel took him back up the slope, unhurried, and she lay there working out whether she had just been examined or reassured, and arrived at the answer that it did not matter, because both of them were the same act performed by a man who was going to keep performing it every morning for as long as she lived on this mountain.
***
Ten paces, then eight, with a long sit between them.
The second run gave out two short of the first, and she took the eight honestly rather than argue the stagger into it, and she sat afterward on the boards and made herself look at the figure instead of around it.
Eight was what a night’s rest had bought her.
A night’s rest had bought her nothing, and it would go on buying nothing until something changed that was not sleep.
With her back against the plate, she let herself say the thing properly, because it had been walking around the edges of her since she woke on that cot with her arms laid down at her sides by somebody else’s hands.
The reserve was the whole of her advantage.
It had found the agent nobody else could find.
It had gone into the band and made the empire wrong about her forever.
Nothing else had come out of the last life into this one.
And for two days it had been empty, and for the whole of the day before that she had been a body on a floor, and if anything had come through the door in that time the entire inventory of what she could have done about it was the canteen.
So the reserve is not the answer.
It is the thing I spend when the answer is not available.
Which meant the answer had to be something that worked when the reserve was gone.
Which meant legs, and lungs, and a hand that would close when she told it to.
***
Then down the slope.
Forty paces had cost her the evening on the night of the fire, when she had fourteen in her.
Today she had eight, and she went anyway, and she did it in six stages with a stop at each one, and she picked the stops in advance so that stopping would look like a decision rather than a failure.
A stump.
The corner of the second box.
A rock she had been looking at from her doorway since her first week without knowing what it was for.
By the fourth stop, her hands had gone unsteady, and she stood there with them behind her.
By the sixth she was not thinking about the village at all, which was its own kind of information.
Vekka watched the whole of it from beside the fire and did not come to meet her and did not send anybody, and when Aeryn finally got there and sat down on the log with her legs out in front of her like a pair of objects somebody had left there, the headwoman put a bowl into her hands and went back to what she had been doing.
Neither of them said anything about it.
***
How much do I eat.
Vekka looked at the band and then at her.
“You want that in what.”
In whatever you count it in.
“Then you’re asking the wrong question, and I’ll answer the right one.” She sat down on the other end of the log.
“Six weeks you’ve been fed off this fire, near enough, and for most of it you were carried down to it.
The rest you’ve had about what a woman gets.”
And now.
“And now you’ve started eating like a man on the face.”
She had known that was coming, and it still landed.
The body had wanted more since the first bath, in a way she had been treating as good news, and underneath the good news was a quantity of somebody else’s work she had never once put a figure against.
Then what do I owe for it.
The stick stopped in Vekka’s hand.
She read the line twice, which she had not done with any of the others, and then looked up.
“Say that again.”
What do I owe.
“I’ve been handing out off this fire a long time.” Vekka turned the stick over and put it back in the ash.
“No woman has ever put that to me.
Not one.
Not the ones with nothing.”
I am asking.
“Aye.
You are.” She let a breath out through her nose.
“Nothing.
There’s three of your men on that hunting team, and half of everything they carry in comes here before it goes anywhere near your door, and the other half was yours before it was cut.
You’ve been eating your own and eating mine, and mine’s not the half anybody would think about.”
And if my men had brought nothing.
Something went over the headwoman’s face while she said it and was gone before it could be read.
“You’re a woman.
That’s the whole of it, and there’s nothing under it.”
I have cloth.
“You’ve cloth in Bregg’s store on the wrong side of a shut path.” She got no enjoyment out of saying it.
“Nothing goes off this face till the paths open and nothing comes onto it either, which is why there’s blackspine hanging and no salt worth the name to put on it.”
And the meat.
“What about it.”
How much of it came to me.
“About what you’d expect.
Four bowls out of it went in this box, and the rest went round, and sixteen households had blackspine in the pot last night, and there’s more of it hanging that’s yours, and nobody’s touching.” Vekka looked at her sideways.
“That’s not a small thing at the top of a Growing.
There’s people down there who’d not seen liver since before the freeze.”
That had not been considered.
The bowl had been in her lap the night before while she did arithmetic on a single animal and a single obligation, and the animal had gone into sixteen houses, and the obligation had gone somewhere she could not find the edges of.
***
Then let me work.
She held the band up so the fire could see it, because it had stopped being a thing between the two of them somewhere in the last few lines, and she had decided to stop pretending otherwise.
The fire went quiet.
There were four of them near enough to read it.
A woman on the other side with a child against her hip.
Two men who had come down off the face early and were eating standing up.
Bregg’s wife, who had brought a basket and had not gone away again.
One of the men put his bowl down on the stones and did not pick it up.
The other looked at his own hands for a while, and then over Aeryn’s head at the slope behind her, and then at Vekka, and it was Vekka he said it to.
“Whose is she?”
“The Snake’s.
The Lion’s.” Vekka did not look up.
“Three out with the hunting team and five in a shaft under another mountain, and none of the eight due.”
“Then what’s wrong with them?”
Aeryn sat on the log with the bowl empty in her lap and watched a thing she had built go somewhere she had not aimed it.
Nobody at that fire was looking at her.
They were looking at a gap where two men should have been standing, and the gap had her sitting in it holding a band up, and every one of them was doing arithmetic that had nothing to do with her at all.
Bregg’s wife picked up her basket.
“That’s not for the fire,” she said, to nobody, and went off toward the boxes without finishing what she had come for.
“Enough,” Vekka said it flatly, and it landed flatly, and the man picked his bowl back up.
“She’s not from here.
She’s asked a plain thing, and not one of you has to answer it.”
Then, to Aeryn, in a different voice altogether, and without any softening in it:
“There’s the banks.”
Explain.
“Above the second shoulder, where the ground breaks.
Roots, greens, bark, whatever’s up there at the top of a Growing.” Vekka nodded up the slope without turning her head to it.
“What a woman brings off a bank is hers.
Not the half of it.
All of it, and there’s never been a scrap taken off any woman on this face for any reason at all.”
Then that.
“Aye.
That.” She let it sit long enough to be sure Aeryn had heard the whole of it.
“It’s a bank, and it’s a full day, and it’s a long climb above the second shoulder before you start climbing, and you’ve eight paces in you.”
Aeryn started a line on the band and cleared it before the second letter.
The distance was not the objection.
The distance was arithmetic, and arithmetic could be worked at.
What she had not been given, and could not ask for without asking it in front of the fire a second time, was whether a woman who came off a bank with a full basket would be a woman who had done something, or a woman everybody had watched doing it.
***
They drifted off it after that, as people do with a subject that has stopped producing, and somebody started talking about the second box’s roof and the morning went on around her.
The list she had not put on the band ran underneath the whole of it, and she went along it once, privately, out of something that was not quite spite.
A defensive line she could site on ground she had walked once.
A supply chain she could break in a season.
A crew she could take and tell you inside a week which of them would still be standing at the end of a bad year.
She could stand in her own doorway and name the three ways up onto this village and say which one a thing would use, and she had done that on her third morning here without anybody asking her to.
Every item on it was something a man does.
I do not know what I am for here.
Aeryn held it up rather than turning it toward the log, because the answer she wanted was not Vekka’s alone.
Nobody came in on it.
The man who had put his bowl down had gone back up to the face without finishing it, and the woman with the child had turned herself a quarter away and was talking about something else at a volume that was slightly wrong.
“No,” Vekka said at last.
That’s the trouble with you.”
On the far side of the fire, a tall girl with dark red hair had not said anything and had not stopped looking, and went on looking a good beat past where anybody else at that fire had stopped.
***
He was up there on her way back.
Beyond the second box he stood with two of the village men over a length of timber, his back to the slope, and she stopped at her fourth stop and looked at him for longer than she had intended to.
The meat had been in her twice now, and half of what he had gone under the third shoulder for had gone into houses she could not name.
How to do this had been settled on the way down, and only one version was available, which was to write it out plainly and hand it over, and she had been rehearsing the wording at the second stop and the third.
She got as far as lifting the arm.
Then one of the men said something, and Ashkar turned to answer it, and saw her standing on the gravel forty paces off with her hand half raised, and she watched him understand what it was.
And he turned back to the timber.
Not quickly.
Not as a snub, which is a thing delivered so it can be seen.
He simply put his attention back on what he was holding and left her standing there with the sentence half made, and went on working, and did not look up again.
She made her own door in five stops instead of the two she had allowed for.
The last of them was against the plate with both hands and her forehead between them, and she did not turn round to find out whether that had been watched.
Inside, with the band dark on her wrist:
Refused four times.
That is the fifth, and it is the first one I have been on the giving end of.
The reading available to her was that a man who has been turned away from a doorway four times does not stand still to receive gratitude in front of two of his own villagers, and that she had chosen the worst possible ground to try it on, and had chosen it because she had wanted the thing discharged rather than done well.
That was correct as far as it went.
What she could not place was the rest of it, because there had been nothing in the turn that was aimed at her.
The aim had been a transaction.
She had a debt on one side and an offer on the other and a clean line drawn under it, and the whole arrangement had required him to accept payment, and he had not so much refused the payment as failed to recognize that a payment was being offered.
Then find out what it cost him and pay that instead.
It went into the column under the heading she kept for debts.
***
The boy came up with the pails in the late afternoon and stopped in the doorway instead of going straight to the port, which he had never done.
“You were down at the fire.”
I was.
“Da says you asked for work.” He put the pails down.
“He was in a temper about it, and he wouldn’t say why, and Ma laughed at him, and then he wouldn’t say why about that either.”
And you.
“I don’t care.” He shrugged at the doorframe.
“You can’t lift a pail.
That’s a lot of water.”
He got on with the port, and she sat on the crate and let him, and it took him the usual time, and he counted the usual way, and about halfway through he said, without turning round:
“You could hold my count.”
Your count.
“I lose it.” He said it as a person says a thing they have said before and been told off for.
“Four up, four down, and if somebody talks to me on the path, I have to start it at the bottom again.
Long Count says I’m to bring eight, and if I bring seven she knows, and if I bring nine she knows that as well and she’s worse about it.” He shrugged at the wall.
“You’re sat here anyway.”
Aeryn looked at the back of his head for a moment.
Yes.
I will hold your count.
“Right.” He picked up the empty pails.
“Four.”
Four.
“Say it back at the end, and I’ll know I’ve got it.” He went out and down the slope, and she heard him not counting, and understood that he had already handed the whole of it over.
She sat with the number four in her head.
In the last life she had been given four hundred and eleven people and a tonnage and a schedule, and had signed for all of it in one morning, and had thought nothing about it whatsoever.
Four.
She held it, and did not find it as funny as she had expected to, and did not find it humiliating either, which surprised her more.
***
The light went, and she did not light the lamp.
Eight paces.
No reserve.
Nine boxes, sealed, sitting under the cot, being worth nothing whatever to a woman who could not spend what they held.
She got down onto the boards, which took a while, and lay on her back with her knees up and put her hands flat on the floor either side of her.
Then she lifted her shoulders off the wood.
The first one came up about as far as a hand’s width and dropped.
The second went a little better.
Nine came before the middle of her stopped participating, and she lay there breathing at the ceiling of the pod and understood that she had just found the bottom of something, and that a bottom is a place with a measurable distance between it and where a person intends to stand.
Nine.
Tomorrow, nine again.
And the day after that, nine.
Somewhere above the second shoulder there was broken ground with a full day in it, and she had eight paces and nine of these and no way at all of getting there, and she lay on the floor of a metal box on a penal world and began counting toward it.