Location: Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 20, Yr 76 of the Still Flame
POV: Aeryn Veyra
The taste was still there in the morning, wet metal under everything, and water did not move it, and the ration pill made it worse.
Aeryn took the drop off her finger and swallowed after it and began, out of nineteen days of habit, to work out what thirty-six drops bought.
Five days to a bath.
Nothing available before that.
Therefore nothing to be done today.
She got as far as therefore before she heard the sentence properly.
Nineteen days of it.
A body arrives in boxes.
Boxes arrive on a schedule.
The schedule cannot be hurried, so a woman lies on a cot between them and does arithmetic, because arithmetic is the one thing she is still good at and because a column of figures feels exactly like work.
The village had been treating her as an invalid, which was reasonable of the village.
And she had been treating herself as a supply problem, which was not reasonable of her, because a supply problem is a thing you wait out.
It had been comfortable.
That was what got her off the cot.
The body was damaged.
The body was not dead.
A thing that is not dead can be worked, and she had known that at nineteen and taught it to other people for a living, and had spent nineteen days on this world failing to apply it to the only body she had.
Twenty-two paces.
She stood in the middle of the floor and looked at the wall she had been walking into and out of for nineteen days, eight paces off, and the whole of it came apart in about four seconds.
Wall to wall and turn.
Wall to wall and turn.
A turn every eight paces, which is a stop and a start and a change of direction, and a change of direction is the most expensive thing a leg does.
Every figure she owned had been built out of the most expensive movement available and then run it on flat, swept boards in a windless room the length of a cot and a half.
Twenty-two was not her capacity.
It was what this room would give her.
Nineteen days, and I have been measuring the room.
Nettik came up the path with the tank while she was still standing there.
“You’re up,” he said through the frame, and then set the tank down and looked at her properly, because she was standing on the open floor with nothing in her hands and no reason to be.
“You’re never up at this bit of the morning.
You’re on the cot doing your counting.”
Not today.
“Ma says you’re to be let alone today.”
Why.
“Didn’t say.” He shrugged.
“She said it in the voice, though.”
The trench.
“They’re in it.
Torrin’s got the whole face on the second cut.” He picked the tank up again and put it down again, which was what he did instead of asking a question.
“He’ll not tell you about the wet.
He told Vekka and Vekka told your man, and that’s as far as it’s gone.”
Can I see the trench mouth from the terrace above the cistern.
Nettik thought about it seriously, which was the thing about him.
“You can see the whole of that end from the second terrace,” he said.
“It’s past the fire ground, and then it’s up.
Da takes the barrow that way when the low road’s wet, and he swears the whole time.” He looked at her legs and then at the door and then, having worked out what he was being asked, at her.
“You’d not get there.”
How far is it.
“It’s not far.
It’s up.” He considered whether that was an answer and decided it was.
“Everybody goes up it.
Skarr goes up it with the stick.”
Thank you.
“For what,” Nettik said, and waited to see whether there was more, and there was not, and went.
Aeryn put her hand on her throat and tried, and got the same nothing she had got twice on the first day and again yesterday, and stopped after one attempt rather than three, because she had a use for the day now and no use at all for a column.
***
The cold came off the mountain and went straight through the shift, and the first thing she learned was that outside is not a room.
The boards in the pod were swept and level.
The path was not.
It fell away to the left the whole length of the first stretch, loose over packed, with stone that moved under the edge of her heel, and her ankles started doing arithmetic she had not asked them for before she had gone twenty steps.
She had the finding inside a minute.
Not distance.
Ground.
Her legs had been walking a flat line at a fixed camber for nineteen days and had never once been asked to hold her up on something that tilted.
Everything she had written down was worthless, and it was worthless in a way that would have got a junior officer taken apart in front of his section, because the instrument had been built in the wrong conditions and she had built it.
Counting to fifty out of habit, she lost it somewhere on the bend below the corner where the path turned, and did not start it again.
She went past it and did not look at it.
Then the cistern, and the path widened and flattened, and with the flattening came the village.
Two women at the water.
One of them stopped with the dipper up.
“That’s her,” the younger one said, not quietly enough and not loudly either, in the voice of somebody reporting weather.
“Walking.”
“Aye.”
“All this time she’s been dying.”
“Then she’s stopped,” the older one said.
“That’s not a thing that stops.”
“Tell her that.” The older one put her pail down.
“Go on.
She’s four paces off you, and she’s got a band on her arm for writing it down.”
Neither of them said anything else while Aeryn was in front of them.
A man crossing with a bundle of split timber changed his line without appearing to, which put four paces more between them, and then kept walking with his eyes somewhere else entirely.
Nobody spoke to her.
In nineteen days on this world she had been spoken to in her own doorway perhaps forty times and on open ground twice, and both of those had been Vekka.
The path to the apron went off to the right at the fire ground, and she did not take it.
Sixty men and a half shift and a boy counting to forty-one, and whatever else she had failed to price two days ago, she had that one now, and she had paid the going rate for it.
So: up, and past, and nowhere near a man who would have to walk round her.
By the fire ground there were eleven households within earshot and most of them had somebody outside.
A woman scraping a skin looked up and did not look down again.
Two children stopped what they were doing entirely and were called in.
An old man sitting on a stone watched her the whole way across with no expression she could read, and she did not have the air to spare on reading it.
Past the fire ground the path kept climbing and somewhere past the last of the houses her thighs began to shake, which she had expected, and her breathing went wrong, which she had not.
The second finding was worse than the first.
Her legs had more in them.
Her lungs did not.
Her heart was going at a rate that had no relationship to the effort she was making, and it had arrived without warning and would not come down while she kept moving, and there was nothing to be done about it except stop.
So she stopped, against the low wall below the second terrace, with her forearms on the stone.
Strength is not wind.
Aeryn had said that to other people.
She had said it to a room of men who could each carry their own weight up a rope and could not hold a line for an hour, and she had been perfectly clear about it then, and she had come to this world and built a program on a floor and put distance in it and never once asked what her lungs were doing.
The shaking took a long time to go.
She let it.
Then the last of it, the twenty or so steps up onto the terrace, and she made those, and she stood at the edge of the second terrace above the cistern and looked down at the whole north end of the face.
It was worth the trip.
From up here the trench read like a drawing.
The cut face and the spoil either side of the mouth and the drag lines running north and the men on the second cut, small and slow and correct.
Torrin had the props stacked where a man could reach them without crossing the line of the barrows, which nobody had told him to do.
And the wet.
It was not in the spoil.
The spoil was where it showed, because spoil is loose and shows everything, but the line of the damp went up and to the left out of the trench and kept going up the face under the skin of the rock, in a track a good deal straighter than water makes on its own, and it ran toward the squared black mouth of the channel high in the cut.
Old work, then.
Not a seep.
Aeryn held that and did nothing with it, because nothing could be done with it from a terrace and because the last time she had handed a man four words about ground he had built a trench out of them and put her name on it.
The way back was down, which she had not thought about, and down is worse.
The wall below the terrace was as far as she got, and she had to sit on it, and the sitting was fine, and the getting up was not.
Both hands on the stone.
Legs under her.
And the whole weight of herself coming up off a wall on two thighs that had nothing left in them, and something in her chest and throat closed on the effort the way a hand closes.
The noise came out of her.
It was low, and it was torn, and it was not a voice, and it lasted about as long as it takes to drop a plate, and the pain arrived a full second behind it and went on arriving.
Three people on the path below turned around.
Aeryn stood on her own legs with her hand at her throat and looked back at them, and none of them said anything, and after a moment the woman nearest went back to what she was carrying, and the other two did not.
She walked home.
Two days ago Torrin’s wife and a girl from the house above the cistern had carried her down this path with one at her shoulders and one under her knees, and she had been set down at the lip of the apron because there had been no version of her arriving there any other way.
Today she had gone up past the cistern to the second terrace, and she was going back under her own power.
It took a long time.
Twice more she stopped, and she did not make either of those stops look like anything other than what it was, because there was nobody left on that path she had not already been seen by.
***
The step was empty.
Vaelith was somewhere on the hill and had not been told, because she had not told him, and for once that was not a calculation.
Aeryn got the door shut and got as far as the crate and sat down against it on the boards.
Everything below her hips had a tremor in it that went on for some while, and her heart came down slowly and unevenly, and her throat hurt in a band under the jaw on both sides and not at the front.
Then she got the dagger out of the ring.
It was a poor time to do it, and she knew that, and she did it because a body that has just been emptied is the honest place to find out what is underneath, and because she had spent nineteen days choosing the convenient hour.
Grip.
The thrust she had made ten thousand times.
What came out of her arms was a slow high wandering thing that stopped short of the line she had chosen and finished with the point drifting left, and her shoulder was already complaining, and her rear heel had swung round half a pace without being told to because her hips had not turned and something had to.
She knew precisely what had gone wrong, which was the insulting part, because she could have described the fault to a class.
Again.
Again, and again, and she watched the fault change every time, which is what happens when nothing underneath is strong enough to fail the same way twice.
The third went where she sent it, and the recovery took so long that anything with a weapon would have been inside her guard and finished.
On the fifth her stance widened without instruction, because her balance had gone looking for a wider base and had not consulted her about it.
On the seventh her grip slid a finger’s width down the hilt and she let it, and that was the worst of them, because she had not decided to let it.
By the eighth her wrist was dropping the point before the extension finished.
By the tenth she was making up the difference with her shoulder, which is how a shoulder gets ruined, and which she had personally shouted at people for.
She put the dagger down before the eleventh and sat on the boards beside it.
The knowledge had come across whole.
Every part of it.
The stance, the line, the timing, the distance, the correction for a target that moves.
And the arms that were supposed to execute any of it had spent six years in a bed, and there was no box in that chest that would ever give her back a wrist that had done this ten thousand times, because the wrist that had done it ten thousand times was ash on another world.
I have the whole of it and none of the arm.
The whole of the problem, and the first time she had stated it to herself with no figure attached to it.
She could fix it.
It was going to take a long time and a great deal of repetition, and there was nothing else it was going to take.
Vekka arrived at full dark, and Vekka was not careful.
“You walked to the second terrace,” she said.
Yes.
“And you made a noise on the way back and three people saw you do it.” Vekka put her hand flat on the door frame and left it there.
“Eight weeks ago I stood at that fire and told fifty households the woman in this pod was dying.”
On what.
“My own eyes.
And I said it hard, more than once.” The hand stayed where it was.
“There were people who wanted you moved off this face.
I stopped them.”
Was I wrong to go.
“Don’t do that,” Vekka said it flatly.
“Don’t hand me a decision after you’ve made it and call it a question.”
It was a question.
“You’d have gone if I’d told you not to, and you’d have been right to, and I’d still have had to stand at that fire tonight.” She did not move off the frame.
“I’ve enough to carry without your manners on top of it.”
Aeryn waited.
“Two days ago you went down to that face on your own legs.
Today you went through the middle of my village on them.” Vekka’s hand came off the frame.
“Nobody at that fire thinks you’re a liar.
They think I was wrong, or they think I was told wrong, and the ones that like me best are the ones saying I was told wrong.”
And there it was, and it was not the shape she had prepared for.
Aeryn had built the false record herself, on the eighth, with both hands, knowing exactly who might catch it and what it would cost.
The state.
The central brain.
An institution that was slow and blind and a very long way off.
The risk had been priced and taken, and she had been right about it.
And a woman had stood at a fire and said the same thing six weeks before she wrote a word of it, out of her own eyes, on nothing but her own credit.
She had not planted a lie.
She had walked into one that was already standing and put her weight on it, and the person underneath it was not the state.
I can stand at the fire.
“On what legs, and saying what.” Vekka did not say it unkindly and did not soften it either.
“You’ve no voice, so it’s a band, and a band has to be read out, and the one reading it out would be me.
You’d have me stand there and read a paper that says the woman I called dying isn’t.”
She thought about it and got to the bottom of it in four seconds and did not enjoy the trip.
What do you want me to do.
“Nothing clever.” Vekka’s eyes went along the floor and found the dagger where it lay on the boards and stayed on it a moment.
“Keep walking.
Every day and where they can see you.
If you’re mending, mend in front of them, because a thing people watch happen is a thing they stop arguing about.”
And if it stops.
“Then it stops in front of them too, and that’s mine to carry as well.”
Vekka turned to go and then did not.
“And I’ll tell you the part you’ll not have got to yet, because you’ve been ill and the ill are slow at this.
They’re not asking whether you were dying.
They’re asking what else I’ve been told about you, and by who, and whether I checked.”
Aeryn sat against the crate for a long while after she had gone, with the dagger on the boards beside her and her legs still not entirely hers.
Every record she had made on this world had been made against a reader she had identified in advance, and she had never once been wrong about who was reading.
Tomorrow the path would still fall away to the left, and her lungs would still be what they were, and the third movement would still go high and drift, and none of that was going to be fixed by a cup.
Aeryn got up off the floor, which took two attempts, and put the dagger where she could reach it from the cot.