Location: Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 14, Yr 76 of the Still Flame
POV: Aeryn Veyra
The pail went up to her knees and stayed there for a count of four, and on five her hands opened without asking her.
It went down on the boards hard enough to slop, and Aeryn stood over it with her arms hanging and waited for the shaking in her forearms to be something she could see the end of.
A third full.
Four counts.
Yesterday it had been four counts as well.
Aeryn sat down on the crate with her wrists across her knees and did not look at the pail, because a person who stares at a thing that has beaten her twice starts making decisions about herself instead of about the thing.
***
Somewhere in the middle of the second set the reflex went off.
It was not a thought.
Her legs were gone, and the wall was doing the work, and she reached for the reserve the way a hand goes out to a rail, without any part of her being consulted about it, to put a skim of something under the next repetition.
And it was there.
Thin, and low, and there.
She stopped with her palms flat on the plate and her forehead nearly against it, and did not move for a while, because a reflex that fires is a reflex that has fired before, and she had no memory whatever of authorizing it.
How many times.
There was the question, and she did not have an answer to it, and that was worse than any figure the morning had produced.
***
So she tested it, because there was no other way of finding out and because not finding out was not an option.
Down on the boards.
Hands flat.
Shoulders up, and she got to six on her own and stopped there with her middle burning and her heels pressed into the wood, and held herself at the point where the next one was not going to happen.
Then she reached, on purpose, and put a skim of it under the seventh.
The seventh went up.
It went up badly, and it went up, and she came down onto the boards and lay there with her arms out and understood two things in the wrong order.
The first was that it worked, and that it had probably been working for days, and that somewhere in the last week she had walked forty paces down a slope in front of eleven households on a body that had been quietly underwritten by an account she had not been reading.
The second was that a soldier who does not know what her own supply is doing is not a soldier.
She is a person standing on a floor that somebody else is holding up.
And I did not install that reflex.
It installed itself.
Flat on the boards, she went back through it properly, the way she would have gone through a manifest, and found four places where she could not swear she had not done it.
The last of the forty paces.
The second time up the slope.
The pail, twice.
Four that she could find.
She had no way at all of counting the ones she could not.
***
Skarr arrived while she was still on the floor.
“Ma’s gone to the near breaks.
I’ve got the day.” She stopped.
“You’re on the ground.”
On purpose.
“That’s what he says.” Skarr came in and sat on the crate.
“The whole face has that off him now.
Somebody asks, and he says on purpose and walks off.
Ma thinks it’s funny.”
Aeryn got herself up, which took the length of a sentence she was glad not to have to say.
Tell me about the near breaks.
“Worked out by the middle of a Growing.”
Why.
“Because everybody goes to them.” Skarr shrugged.
“Near ones are near.
You’re up and back before noon, so that’s where you go if you’ve a baby or a bad hip or you’ve got the fire to run.”
And then they are empty.
“They come back.
Not the same year.” She was picking at the frame of the cot with a thumbnail.
“That’s why Ma won’t have the whole village on one.
She sends folk about.”
She rations it.
“She doesn’t call it that.”
What does she call it.
Skarr thought.
“She says you don’t eat the seed.”
***
Aeryn sat down on the cot.
“It’s a thing everybody says here,” Skarr went on, entirely unaware.
“You get a bad Growing, and there’s folk who’ll boil what they should be putting in the ground.”
Aeryn waited.
“Because that’s this month and the ground is next year,” Skarr said it as if it were obvious, which to her it was.
“So Ma goes round in the spring and looks in the crocks.
She’s had to take one off a woman twice.”
And the woman.
“Cried.
Called her every name there is.” Skarr picked at the frame again.
“Thanked her the year after.
They all do.
Ma says the thanking’s the worst part of it and she’d rather have the names.”
Why the worst.
“Because it means they’d have done it.” A shrug.
“Anybody’d have done it.
That’s the whole of why she goes round.
It’s not that there’s bad women in the crocks.
It’s that a hungry month is right here and next year isn’t anywhere at all.”
Aeryn sat very still on the cot.
“Are we doing the lesson or not?”
In a moment.
“You’ve gone the same as you went yesterday.”
I know.
+++
Thirteen days.
The cup filled at twenty a day and she had spent every one of them on the boxes.
All of them.
From the first bath to the second, and not one drop had gone anywhere except into a tub of scalding water in service of a chest she could not read.
A drop taken and used on herself accelerated the recovery of the soul.
That was not a discovery.
It had been sitting in her since the first morning she got a hand under that lip, plain and unremarkable, as plain as the ratio of a bath, and she had walked past it every day for thirteen days on her way to do something visible.
It had gone into a full dose at whatever level it happened to be sitting at, and it had held, when seventy-six drops at half a dose had very nearly ended her on the floor of a recess.
It had gone into the column two nights ago as a thing to be frightened of.
The question she had asked was what the dose was.
The dose was known.
What she had not asked was what had been standing on the other side of it.
I have been boiling the seed.
***
“You’ve stopped again.”
Yes.
“Right.” Skarr got up and went and looked out of the door, which was the politest thing anybody on this world had done for her.
“I’ll come back.”
No.
Sit down.
She sat down.
What do you see out of that door.
“Ma already told you what’s out there.
That’s how you did it your third morning.”
Your mother told me nothing.
She watched me do it, and repeated the answer to you eleven days later, and now you have an answer and no way of getting another one.
Aeryn turned the band around.
Out of that door.
What do you see.
Skarr looked at it, and then back, with her jaw set.
“The village.”
Try again.
“The village and the shoulder and the cut ground and the wall.”
That is a list.
Anybody could stand there and give me that list.
“Then say what you want.”
I did.
I asked what you see.
Look at the wall.
“It’s a wall.”
Where does it stop.
A pause, and Skarr went and stood in the doorway properly to do it, which was the first thing she had done all morning that Aeryn did not have to ask for.
“Past the second box.
Where the timber ran out.”
And on the other side of where it stops.
“Open.
Four hundred paces to the trees.”
So.
Aeryn let the silence run, which was the entire technique and the only part of it that was difficult to teach.
“Then it’s not a wall,” Skarr said slowly.
“It’s a fence.”
And.
“It’s only doing something for the bit behind it.
And anything coming at us comes round the end, because that’s where it isn’t.” She turned round.
“That’s not clever.
That’s just looking.”
It is just looking.
“Ma gave me the end of that in a breath, and it was worth nothing to me.” Skarr sounded almost angry about it.
“I’ve had it off myself in an hour, and it isn’t.”
Then you have had the lesson and there was only ever one.
“Give me another.”
No.
Give yourself another.
Skarr stood in the doorway a good while for that, and Aeryn let her, and watched her go at it with her arms folded in a stance she had certainly got off her mother.
“The cut ground,” she said eventually.
Go on.
“It’s flat, and it’s open, and it’s ours, and it goes right up to the trees on the north end.” Her mouth turned down.
“That’s not a good place for it to go, is it?”
Say why not.
“Because whatever comes out of those trees on the north end gets a run at us.” She turned round.
“And that’s where the drag lines are, so that’s where our men are.
Every day.
In the open.
With their backs to it.”
Aeryn sat on the cot and did not say anything for a moment.
How long have you lived here.
“All of it.”
And how many times had you thought about that before this morning.
“Never.” She said it flatly, and then again, differently.
“Never.”
Then that is what I have to teach you, and it is not a list of things about walls.
***
The boy came at the usual time and took the count off her at the bottom of it, and went, and she stood in her own doorway afterward and looked down the slope at fifty-odd households that had got through a hundred bad Growings because somebody went round in the spring and looked in the crocks.
Two claims on the cup, and they came out of one account.
The boxes.
Six days each, non-negotiable, in an order she could not change, and she could not read one word of what any of them held.
And the soul, which had steered her through the second box, which no instrument on this world could see, and which had sat where it sat for thirteen days because she had never once fed it.
Eleven days to the twenty-fifth, and forty in the cup already.
Two hundred and sixty drops if the seep never faulted.
A box was a hundred and twenty of that.
So: one box, and a hundred and forty into herself.
Or two boxes, and twenty.
And a drop taken for herself came off that total like everything else.
There was no third column.
There was one number, and a decision to be made about it every morning.
***
He came at dark and did not sit.
Last night you would not give me the second answer.
“No.”
Give it to me.
Vaelith put the case flat on the crate and did not open it.
“Your Core is gone.
Taken.” He said it to the case and then to her.
“The first thing anybody puts a scanner on is that.
I did it the morning we came off that transport, before you had your eyes properly open.”
“There is nothing there.
There is no procedure in the Covenant for growing another, and there never has been.”
Then where does that leave me.
“At the bottom of it.”
The letter came up before he said it.
F, and E above it, and D above that, and the whole ladder unrolling in her head in order with the spacing between the rungs and what each one meant a body could be asked to do.
It arrived as the dress had arrived on her first morning.
Complete, unasked for, and impossible to account for.
None of it had been gone looking for.
She had never once gone looking for any of it.
It turned up when the room had a use for it and declined to turn up when she needed it, and she had stopped expecting to be consulted about which.
F.
“F,” Vaelith said, “and F is where you will stay, and every physician in the empire would say that in fewer words and be kinder about it.” He turned a hand over.
“A body without a Core does not refine and does not draw.”
And that is the unpleasant answer.
“No.
That is the arithmetic.”
He looked up.
“The unpleasant answer is that I have put that scanner on you eleven times in eight weeks and it says the same thing every time, and something is happening to you anyway.”
She waited.
“And the only version of that in which I am not simply wrong,” Vaelith said, “is the one where you know what it is and are not telling me.”
***
The room stayed where it was.
She did not reach for the band, and did not look away from him either, and let the silence do what silences do to a man who has just said the true thing out loud.
“You are not going to deny it.”
She let that stand as well.
“No.” He sat down on the crate after all.
“You could have.
It would have worked.”
Then why hand me a story about my house.
“Because I would rather hold a poor answer that costs you nothing.” He put both hands on the case.
“And because if I am right, then whatever it is you are doing is the only reason you are on your feet.”
He got up.
“I am not going to ask you again,” he said, and went out.
***
Aeryn went over it after he had gone, because he had left her no choice about going over it.
He was the only person on this world who could be told.
He had eleven readings of her and a scanner and eleven years of using one, and he had sat outside her door for two nights, and he had just declined to press her when pressing her would have cost him nothing at all.
And she could not use one word of it.
Not because he would carry it to the Long Count.
He would not, and he had proved it on the twelfth at a price he had made sure she understood.
Because a man who knows there is a chest under this cot is a man who knows it on the twenty-fifth, when three men who have been out nineteen days walk down that slope and go through this village asking after her, and because the whole of what protects her at present is that there is nothing here worth taking.
And he would keep it.
And keeping it would put him between them and me.
Which was the actual reason, and she looked at it for a while, and did not like what it said about the last four days.
***
Aeryn went to the wet end after the sound of him had settled on the gravel.
Forty in the cup.
Twenty tomorrow, twenty the day after, and a hundred and twenty on the eighteenth if she never put a finger in it.
Kneeling down, she tilted the cup until the surface came up level with the rim, touched a fingertip to it, and let the cup back.
What came away was about a drop.
There was no way of making it exactly a drop and no way of checking, and every figure she built from here was going to sit on a fingertip and a tin cup.
The finger went in her mouth.
It went down like cold water into a dry line.
Nothing hurt, nothing moved, and she sat on the boards until it stopped.
Thirty-nine left in the cup.
That put the next box a day later, on the nineteenth.
***
Then she got the spear out.
The necklace came off first, because the ring was strung on the cord with it and had been since her first week.
A ring on a hand is a thing people look at.
A ring on a cord under a shift is a bead.
The spear came out of the ring onto the boards and lay there, longer than the room was wide, plain leather at the grip and nothing decorative anywhere on it.
It had not been out since her third day.
That morning she had got it a hand’s width off the blanket and her arms had gone, and she had written the height down in her head and had not been back to it, because there is no sense measuring a thing that is not going to move.
Aeryn stood over it and set her feet and got both hands on the shaft.
Up.
It came off the boards.
It came up past her knee, and it kept coming, and somewhere around the middle of her thigh the left hand opened as it had on the crate, without warning and without consulting her, and the whole weight went down and rang on the wood.
Outside, on the gravel, a man did not move.
Aeryn listened to him not moving for a while, and then went back to it.
Mid-thigh.
A knuckle against her own leg where it had failed, held there, and she made herself keep the height.
A hand’s width on Firstclaw three.
That, on Firstclaw fourteen.
Not lifted.
Nothing about it was lifted.
But it was a figure, and it was the first one she had taken off that stick in eleven days, and it went into the column with the paces and the recoveries and the pail.
***
The spear went back, and a dagger came out instead.
A dagger weighs nothing, which was the whole of why.
She stood in eight paces of floor with the thing in her right hand and no idea what she intended to do with it, and her arm went into the first movement before she had decided on one.
Then the second, and the turn under it, and the third.
Then she stopped, and stood still.
Nobody had taught this body that.
Somebody had taught her, a long way from here, in a hall with a floor that gave slightly and a woman shouting numbers, and she could not produce one hour of it and her arm could.
It had done the same thing on the night of the purge with the sequence, and she had put that down at the time to the sequence being the sequence.
So what else is in here that I have not asked for.
Again, slower, watching her own hands do it.
Four movements before the grip went.
Then a rest, and three.
Then a rest, and three, and the third of those was bad enough that she stopped rather than teach the arm something wrong.
Ten in total, out of a drill that ran to sixty.
Aeryn put the dagger back and stood in the middle of the floor with her hands hanging, breathing like a woman who had run somewhere.
Eleven days.
A drop a day out of that cup still put the third box on the nineteenth and the fourth on the twenty-fifth, which was the morning three men would come down off the mountain.
All of that had been known since the middle of the day.
It had taken her until dark to do the first drop.
Tomorrow she would take another drop out of the cup and pay the day for it, and do the spear again, and eleven of the drill.