Location: Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 11, Yr 76 of the Still Flame
POV: Aeryn Veyra
Nine, and the ninth was worse than yesterday’s ninth.
Aeryn lay on the boards with her knees up and her breath going in and out of her too fast for the work she had done, and did not get up for a while, and did not pretend to herself that the getting up was being delayed for any reason other than that she could not do it yet.
Then the plate, twice, when the boots came.
“You are on the floor.”
On purpose.
Vaelith looked at that for a moment.
“Then I will come back at dark,” he said, and went, and something in the way he had turned suggested he had come with a second sentence in him and had put it away again.
***
The boy brought four, and at the bottom of the fourth he came for the count.
Four.
“Four.” He nodded once, satisfied, as though a figure held by another person were worth more than the same figure held by him, which, as far as Aeryn could tell, it was.
“You’ll do that tomorrow as well.”
It was not a question, and she did not answer it, and he went off down the slope not counting.
***
The problem was a supply problem, and she laid it out as one, because that was the only way she had of getting at it and because pretending otherwise would waste a day.
Objective: broken ground above the second shoulder.
Distance: unknown, and she had been careful not to ask in front of the fire.
Route: unknown.
Load out: nothing.
Load back: the whole point of going.
Her own capacity: eight paces yesterday, and nine of a thing done lying down, and a forty-pace crossing that had taken six stops going and five coming back.
Every line except the last one was a hole, and holes get filled by asking somebody, and the somebody had to be a woman, because every person she had watched go up past the second box in ten days had been a man going to a shaft.
One woman on this face would talk to her, and that woman had four hundred people to run and had already given her more of a morning than she could afford.
So the other one.
***
She came in the middle of the afternoon and did not knock, and did not stand in the doorway either.
Two paces in, she stopped in the middle of the floor with her hands behind her back and took the room in, wall and cot and crate, and finished on Aeryn.
Tall.
Dark red hair, roughly cut off at the shoulder.
Sixteen or seventeen at the outside, with the wrists and forearms of somebody who had been carrying things since she could walk.
“Long Count says I’m not to ask you anything.”
Then do not ask me anything.
The girl’s mouth moved very slightly.
“Skarr.”
Aeryn.
“I know what you’re called.” She sat down on the crate without being invited, which was the second time this week somebody had done that and the first time it had been a person young enough to not know it was a thing.
“Everybody’s got a version of you.
My mother’s is the boring one.”
What is yours.
“I’ve not got one yet.
That’s why I’m here.”
***
Getting to the breaks took most of an hour, sideways, because Skarr answered every third question with a different one and had to be steered.
The ground broke above the second shoulder where the water came off it in the Growing and had been coming off it since before anybody.
There were four breaks that were worth the walk and a dozen that were not.
The two nearest were worked out by the middle of a Growing, and the two that were not were not, and there was a reason for that.
What reason.
“They’re further.”
That is not a reason.
That is the same fact in different words.
Skarr grinned at the wall.
“They’re past the last of the cut,” she said.
“Nothing’s been taken off that ground, so there’s nothing keeping off it either.
Ma won’t have anybody up there on their own, and she won’t say it like that; she says the ground’s bad, and the ground is bad, and that’s not why.”
Has anything come down off it.
“Not in my life.” She said it evenly.
“My gran’s, twice.
She’d tell it if you let her, and she’d tell it three times.”
What came down.
“She never said what.
She said how many of them went up.” Skarr looked at her.
“That’s the part old women tell you.
Not the animal.”
How much further.
“You go up when it’s still dark, and you come back when it’s going,” Skarr said it as a fact about the world rather than a measurement.
“Ma does the near ones now.
She’s got the village on her.”
And the far ones.
“Me.
And Torrin’s two, and Bregg’s wife when her hip’s not at her.”
Aeryn put that in and found it did not go anywhere useful, and went at it from the other side.
What do you carry up.
“Nothing.
Basket, knife, and something to drink.”
And down.
“As much as you can and then a bit more than that.” A shrug.
“That’s the whole of it.
Anybody can walk up a hill.”
Which was the answer she had been going for, and she sat back on the cot with it.
The climb was not the problem.
The climb was a problem she could have solved in a month with a floor and a wall and a great deal of tedium.
The problem was that the entire value of the day happened on the way down, with a load, on ground that had already taken everything out of her legs on the way up, and that a woman who arrived at the top of a break with nothing left in her was a woman who had walked up a hill for the exercise.
How heavy.
Skarr thought about it, and then got up and went out, and came back with one of Nettik’s pails, which she had evidently taken off the boy without discussion. Read the latest chapters at novelping.com.
“Full,” she said.
“That, and about half of it again, and you carry it in front of you and not on your back, because of the ground.”
Aeryn looked at the pail for a while.
Then she got up off the cot and went over and put both hands under the handle and lifted.
It came off the floor.
It came about as far as her knees, and it stayed there for the length of two breaths, and then her arms informed her, in the flat way they had, that this was the whole of the transaction, and she put it down without dropping it, which she counted as the win it was.
Skarr stayed on the crate with her hands where they were and let the whole of it happen.
Then that is the figure.
“That’s the figure to come down with.
You’d want more than that in you, or you’d have nothing left at the bottom.”
Yes.
“You’ve not got it.”
No.
“Not near.” She said it without any cruelty in it at all, which was worse.
“I’m not being unkind.
I’ve seen you go forty paces.
Ma made everybody stop and not watch, and everybody watched.”
***
The whole conversation had been steered, and she had known she was steering it, and Skarr had let her, and about here Aeryn began to suspect that the letting had been deliberate.
“Now I’ll ask my thing.”
You were told not to.
“I was told not to ask about you.” Skarr put her hands on her knees.
“This isn’t about you.
What’s Ossara like?”
Aeryn sat with that for a moment.
It was a safe question, and it was safe for a reason she did not like.
The girl had picked the one subject a woman off the transport could be expected to have and no reason to lie about, and had asked it plainly, and there was nothing in it that touched the room.
Green.
Wet.
Loud.
“That’s three words.”
You asked in four.
That got a proper laugh, one syllable of it, cut off.
“Fair.
Go on then.”
So she went on, and gave her the things a person knows about a place without having to have loved it: that the rain there came in off a warm sea and not down off a mountain, that there were more people in one district of the capital than there were on this entire face, that nobody there had ever had to think about what a path being shut meant.
Anything that would have required her to have stood somewhere, she kept away from.
It was not difficult.
Every one of those facts sat in her head like a line in a manual, clean and unattached, and she understood while she was handing them over that she was describing a place she could not remember arriving at or leaving.
Skarr took all of it without saying much, and at the end of it she said:
“Ma says nobody comes back off the Ninth.”
Nobody has.
“Aye.” She looked at the sealed chest under the cot for a beat longer than she needed to, and then she looked away from it.
“That’s what I wanted to know.”
***
One more.
“Go on.”
Who would I go with.
Skarr stopped.
It was a real stop, not the pause of somebody assembling an answer, and it went on long enough that Aeryn understood she had put her foot through something without having any idea what was underneath.
“Go with.”
To a break.
Who goes.
“You go with your house,” Skarr said it slowly, in the manner of somebody explaining that water is wet and beginning to wonder why she has been asked.
“Your mother, or your mother’s sister, or your girls when they’re big enough.
Bregg’s wife goes with Torrin’s two because they’ve been going together thirty years and their mothers went together before that.”
And a woman on her own.
“There isn’t one.”
There is now.
Skarr looked at her.
Her hands came off her knees and went back onto them.
“Ash,” she said.
***
She did not offer.
Aeryn had expected her to, somewhere in the last three sentences, and had been getting ready to work out what accepting would cost the girl with her mother, and the offer did not come.
Skarr sat on the crate with her forearms on her knees and looked at the floor between her boots for a while, and whatever was going on in her was not something a stranger got to be shown.
Then she stood up.
“I’ll bring the pail back to the boy,” she said.
Skarr.
The girl stopped in the doorway with it in her hand.
Thank you.
“For what?”
You told me the truth twice.
The second one cost you something.
Skarr stood there and worked on that.
“You’re not what they say,” she said, and went.
***
He came at dark, as he had said he would, and this time he did not stop outside.
“Yesterday you held your band up at the fire.”
I did.
Vaelith stood in the middle of her floor with his hands empty and did not sit and did not start, and she let him have it, because a man arranging an order in front of you is a man who has decided to give you all of it.
“You will get it in pieces off the boy inside three days.”
Then give me the whole.
“What did you think you were asking for?”
Work.
“Yes.” He let that be true for a moment.
“And what the fire heard was a woman whose males cannot keep her.”
That is not what I said.
“No.”
Then it is a bad reading, and a bad reading gets corrected.
“There is nothing to correct it with.” He said it in the register he used for a figure.
“A woman on this face does not ask for work.
Not a poor one, not an old one, not a woman down to one man and a bad year.
There is no version of it that carries what you meant, so what you meant has nothing to stand on.”
She had watched it happen and had not been able to name it.
Every head at that fire had come up and gone past her, to a place off her shoulder where nobody was standing.
A man asked whose I was.
“He did.”
Who told you.
“Four people, before midday.
Not one of them thought they were telling me anything.” He turned slightly toward the doorway and back.
“Nobody says a thing like that to a man.
It arrives anyway.”
Then Ashkar has not heard it.
“Ashkar heard it on the timber from one of the two he was working beside.” A pause of about a breath.
“An hour before you raised your arm to him.”
Aeryn sat very still.
Her hand half up on the gravel at forty paces, and a man turning back to a length of wood, and her own reading, which had been that he did not want to be thanked in front of two of his own and that she had chosen bad ground.
The reading had been correct.
It had also been about a quarter of the size of the thing it was describing.
I did not know.
“No.”
You did.
“I have had ten days.” He did not soften any of it, and she was glad of it.
“I spent all of them deciding what you were well enough to hear.
That is mine, and I am not handing you a share of it.”
Then start tomorrow.
All of it, in order, and you do not get to decide what I am well enough for.
“Yes.”
He got as far as the doorway.
“For what it is worth,” Vaelith said, without turning round, “the thing you put to the Long Count is not asked here either.
What do I owe?” He was quiet for a second.
“I have never heard a woman say it.
Not on this face and not anywhere I have been.
She will not have told you it meant anything to her.”
***
Full dark, and the lamp stayed unlit on the crate.
She had the figure now.
That pail and half again, carried in front, down broken ground, at the end of a day already spent getting up there.
Against it she had eight paces and a pail she could take off the floor and hold at her knees until her arms said otherwise.
All of which would come.
It was tedium and months of it, and she had done longer for worse.
And then, at the bottom of the whole thing, a line for a woman’s name, in a place where a woman’s name came off her mother or her sister or her daughters, and she had been put off a ship with ten men and nothing else.
She went at the inventory anyway, out of habit, as a person checks pockets they know are empty.
And the reserve was there.
***
Sitting completely still, she went along the edges of it twice to be certain she was not inventing it out of wanting it.
Not full.
Not near it.
But not the scoured nothing of two days ago either, and reaching produced an answer instead of a wall.
Two days.
She had said days and meant a week, with the confidence of a woman who had never done any of this and had no figures at all.
So what was different.
The answer had been sitting in the open since the morning she woke on that cot.
Those eighteen hours had not been rest.
They had been somewhere the body went without consulting her, all the way down, past anything she could report on afterward, and both men who came at that door had used the word sleep and neither had been describing it, and Vaelith had stood on this floor and told her plainly that he had no name for what she had been.
She had filed that under the danger it created and had not once asked what it was for.
It does not come back while I am awake.
It comes back while I am not.
The crash was not the price of the work.
The crash was the second half of the work.
***
Which left the box, and the ruling she had made about it four days ago, and the ruling was wrong.
Taking her own reasoning apart gave her more satisfaction than the occasion strictly called for.
The second box waits until I can spend what it gives me.
That had been the line, and spending was the sequence, and from there she had gone straight to fourteen paces and a hand that let go of a crate, and had written the whole thing down as a legs problem.
The sequence is not walking.
She had known that on the night of the first bath, flat on these boards, steering something out of the middle of herself with nothing in the world moving except her breathing.
What runs the sequence is the reserve.
The gate had never been her legs.
Get up.
***
The chest came out from under the cot and onto the crate, and she opened it, and the nine sealed boxes sat in their rows and gave off the faint clean smell they had given off in the first week, before she knew what any of it was for.
Box two came out heavier than she remembered box one being, which was probably not true and which she noted anyway.
The lamp went where she would need it, unlit.
The crate stayed against the door.
She drank what was in the canteen so it would not sit there half full, and put the empty one on the floor beside the cot where a hand could find it.
Then, without having planned to, she went and stood in her own doorway.
The fire was down to embers, and there was nobody at it.
Somewhere up the slope, a man was sitting outside a box waiting to come and stand in her room at dawn and find out what kind of morning it was.
Fourteen days from now, three more of them would walk in off a mountain expecting to be met by a woman who could not cross a floor.
Eight paces.
Not in fourteen days.
Then she went back in and broke the seal.