“I am obliged to note,” said the dagger, “that you are not mad.”
“That is exactly what a symptom would say.”
“I have no idea what a symptom would say.
I have never met one.” The crossbar tilted.
“I should also note that ‘I would like it recorded’ is a slovenly construction.
In the first person one should like.
Would is the voice of a man who expects to be refused.”
Wystan looked at the thing standing on his knee.
It had been talking for under a minute and it had already corrected his grammar.
He could not think of a hallucination that would do that.
Any hallucination of his own would have been kinder.
“You are grading my sentences,” he said.
“I am correcting your sentences.
Grading is for the Registry.”
It spoke in a whisper, as he did, because it appeared to have noticed Hesper.
The whisper was a dry thin scratching, like a nib crossing a ruler, and it was unmistakably a voice.
Across the dead fire Hesper snored on, steady as a mill wheel, with her back to the pegs.
The dagger glanced at her, if it could be said to glance, and moved a little closer to the warm cloth of his coat.
‘Right,’ he thought.
‘Method.’
He put the field book flat on his other knee.
He had been taught, by a woman who had once tested a goat for Ink, that when a witness was of doubtful reliability one asked three things: something you knew the answer to, something you could check, and something you could not.
If the witness got the first wrong, you stopped.
If it got the third right, you had a problem.
“What is the date?” said Wystan.
“The third of Greenmonth.
You have written the second at the head of the page, and crossed it out, and written the third beneath it.
I do not know whether you are aware that you have underlined the three.”
He had not been.
He looked, and he had.
“Read me the third entry on this page.”
“The east window of the school, eleven panes, one cracked.” It paused.
“I should note that the comma after ‘panes’ is doing the work of a semicolon.
I forgive it.”
He checked.
It was word for word, and the comma was doing the work of a semicolon.
“Who set the Ferry Stone?”
“I do not know.” The dagger considered the page.
“It is not on this page.
I know what is on this page.
It is a narrow acquaintance, but I should say it is a thorough one.
I know the pump.
I know the alder, and that you have measured the lean of it to four degrees.
I know that there is a girl called Brea, because you stopped writing for some time at the notch on the doorframe, and the pencil lay on the line long enough to dent the paper.
I do not know who set the stone.
I should like to.”
That was the third question, and it had answered it wrongly in the best possible way: it had said it did not know.
A hallucination knew everything its owner knew, and no more, and would have been happy to tell him.
This thing had gaps.
“What are you?” said Wystan.
“I am an obelus.
A dagger mark.
The sign of doubt.”
“That is what you look like.
I asked what you are.”
“I have found that distinction less useful than people suppose.”
“Are you alive?”
“I am annotated,” said the dagger, with dignity.
It drew itself up, and the point at the top of it shivered.
“I should say that I am an annotation.
A note.
I note.
I have no other function that I am aware of, and I am inclined to doubt that I was intended to have one.
I would say that I am a footnote, but I am not at the foot of anything, and I should not like to mislead you.”
“Notes do not walk.”
“Some of us are articulate.”
“Who wrote you?”
“You did.
Beside the pump.
I am obliged to note that the pump is doubtful.”
“Before that.”
The crossbar sagged.
It did so slowly, like a sail with the wind going out of it, and the thing on his knee seemed to get a little smaller.
“I do not care to discuss before,” said the dagger.
“Why not?”
It said nothing for so long that he thought it might not answer.
A coal ticked in the fire.
When it spoke, the thin voice had gone thinner, and all the primness had run out of it, so that for the first time he could hear what was underneath, which was something small and anxious.
“It was white,” it said.
“I mean to say that it was blank.
It was a great deal of blank, and it had no edges, and nothing in it was written.
I did not care for it.
I do not know how long I was there.
Then there was a page, and a margin, and a warm thing with a pencil that had written a doubt, and I was that.” The point of it dipped.
“You were the nearest page with room on it.
That is the whole of what I know.
I am sorry that it is so little.
I am not accustomed to being asked.
No one has ever asked me anything.”
Nothing in Wystan’s training covered this.
“It is a good deal,” he said at last.
“It is a good deal more than most witnesses give.
You gave the limits of it.”
“Did I?”
“That is what a limit is.
It is the part you say you do not know.”
“Ah.” The crossbar lifted a degree.
“That is handsomely put.
I shall remember it.”
He had a dozen questions and he asked the one that mattered.
He held the field book out flat and said, “Go back to the page.”
It stepped, obediently, to the edge of his knee.
Then it stopped.
The page below it was open at the bottom of the gathering, where the ruled lines ran out into a bare white margin half a hand wide, and the dagger stood looking at the paper with its point lowered.
“Not that part,” it said.
“It is only a margin.”
“It is a great deal of paper with nothing on it.”
“There is a figure here.” He moved the book, so that the line of the pump swam under its legs, and the doubted thirty-two.
“Beside the pump.”
“Ah,” said the dagger, and went at once, and stood beside the figure, and shivered.
“I will stand beside the pump.
If it is all the same to you.
It has a figure.” And then, because it could not help itself: “I should like to say, for the record, that I have no objection to edges as such.
I merely do not care for them.”
“Do you ever lie?”
“I do not think I could.
I have never wanted to.” The crossbar went down again, with a small, ashamed motion.
“I should like to be able to want to.
It seems to me a hallmark of character.”
He thought of Hesper saying that a man who says nothing is a man nobody can strike a line through.
He thought of Pask, and Tam, and Pugh’s porridge, and the whole honest, bewildered company of people who had looked him in the eye and told him, with perfect sincerity, that there had never been a baker.
He looked at the small black thing on his page.
“What do I call you?” said Wystan.
“The dagger is technically accurate and lacks respect.”
“Hesper calls the mark a dagger.”
“Hesper is a surveyor.
The correct term is obelus.
It is the old copyists’ word.” It stopped.
“I seem to have a number of those.
I do not know where I got them.”
“Obelus.”
“With a capital, if you please.” It said it over to itself under its breath, once, tasting it, with a small settling motion, like a cat finding the warm place in a chair.
“Yes.
That is acceptable.”
Across the fire, Hesper’s snore stopped.
It did not trail off.
It stopped between one breath and the next, like a rope cut, and the silence that came after it was the sound of a person who has gone on sleeping but is no longer resting.
Wystan froze.
The dagger froze with him.
Out on the river a small fish turned over.
Hesper spoke.
It was not the voice she used in the field.
It was flat, level, and a little bored, a clerk’s voice, reading a deposition for the fortieth time, and it came out of the dark in short exact pieces with the long pauses of an answer being waited for.
“Quarrel.
Hesper.
Chief of party.
Sheet Fourteen.” A pause.
“No.
I have never been to Ashmere.
I surveyed the Leys.
It is a meadow.”
Wystan did not breathe.
On his knee, the dagger changed.
He did not see it start.
He saw only that it was going.
The black of it, which had been the black of wet ink, drained away from the edges inward, as dye comes out of cloth in a stream, until it was the gray of a pencil line rubbed with a thumb.
The crossbar sagged.
The point drooped.
It stood on its two legs on the wool of his trouser, shrunk and smudged and the color of ash, and he heard it make a small sound, like a quill breaking.
“Oh,” whispered the dagger.
“Oh, that is unpleasant.”
“What?”
“That sentence.
The one she said.” The thin voice was shaking.
“It is like the pump.
It is the feeling I have when I look at the pump.
It is a figure that does not close.”
Across the fire, Hesper turned over and went on sleeping, and the dark held its breath.
Wystan sat still with the field book on his knee.
He thought of Highsun last year, and the brass cap that she had said he might cut.
He thought of the shed that Jory Dace had never told the Registry about.
She had stood on this ground.
She had stood in the lane with her thumbs in her belt and a fennel stalk in her mouth, and told a boy of sixteen that it was the first mark he would make on the world that was likely to outlast him.
She did not remember it.
She had said so, with her lips shut tight, over the book.
She had a gap with a smooth edge.
“She said she has never been to Ashmere,” said Wystan, low.
“I know.
I heard.”
“It is false.
She was there.
I set the stone with her.”
“Then I should think that was why I went.” The gray point lifted a little, uncertainly.
“But I must note that I cannot tell you if it was a lie or a mistake.
I know only that the sentence is off.
I do not know why.
If a person believes what she says, I may stay lit, or I may not.
I have no statistics.
I have been in existence for something under an hour.”
“She was asleep.”
“A sleeper says wrong things all the time.
It is not evidence.”
“It was not that kind of sleep,” said Wystan.
He sat with it for a while, listening to the river.
It had not been the voice of a dreamer.
It had been the voice of someone who has been asked a question many times and has learned the answer by heart, and the one thing he knew about people who had learned an answer by heart was that somebody had made them.
He wrote it down.
He wrote, in the small cramped hand, under the pump, in the margin where the dagger had stood: 3:40.
H.Q., asleep: “I have never been to Ashmere.” Obelus dimmed.
I do not know whether she lies.
The page took it without complaint.
The dagger had not moved.
It stood on his knee, gray and quiet, drained to the color of old pencil, and he could tell by the set of the crossbar that it was ashamed of having gone out, and a little frightened by what it had felt.
“I should like to ask,” it said, in a small voice, “what you intend to do.”
“About what?”
“In general.
I find that I want to know.
One does not like to be attached to a page that has no plan.” It paused.
“I have observed that you are recording a great many things, and I should like to understand to what end.
I am afraid that it is the only way I am likely to find out what I am for.”
He looked at it, small and gray and anxious, and at the open book, and at the long dark slope falling away below the rise to where a river ran without a ferry.
“I intend to find them,” said Wystan.
He had not said it aloud before.
He said it carefully, as one sets down a figure for the record.
“Orla.
Brea.
Maudie Rudd.
Widow Marlow.
Jory Dace and his dog.
The whole village, all one hundred and ninety-one.
I do not know where they are.
I do not know how.
I intend to find my family.”
And the dagger lit.
It did not flare.
It came on slowly, from the center outward, a warm gold, and the gray ran out of it as dye runs back into wool.
The black came back, and over the black a steady light lay along the edges of it, the color of candle flame seen through a closed eyelid.
It did not flicker.
It did not waver.
It stood on his knee and shone, and the light fell across the page and across his hands and across the dry grass, and the field book lay in it like an object that had been given a name.
“Oh,” said Obelus.
“Oh, I am obliged to note that that is not doubtful at all.”
“What are you doing?”
“I do not know.
I have not done it before.” The thin voice had a wondering sound.
“I believe I am glowing.
It is a strange sensation.
I do not at all mind it.”
Wystan’s mouth opened, and stayed open.
The light went out across the camp in a small warm circle, over the stones and the coals and the case, over the Alderman’s brass, and over a short square shape in a blanket on the far side of the fire.
It touched her boots.
It touched her hand.
It reached her face, and the face stirred, and the eyes in it opened.
For an instant they were open and blank, the eyes of someone hauled up from deep water.
Then they found the light.
Hesper sat up.
She did it in a single movement, with none of the two stages he had grown used to, as a person sits up when the roof is on fire.
She was on her elbow and then upright, and the blanket slid from her shoulders, and she was looking at his knee.
The gold shone full on her face.
And he watched the color go out of it, the brown going from the top downward, like a hand being drawn across a slate, until she was the gray of an old pewter plate and the lines in her face had turned to cracks.
She had not made a sound.
She had not reached for anything.
She sat in the light with her hands open on the grass, and her mouth a little open, and looked at the small black thing on his knee without blinking.
“How do you do,” said Obelus, politely, and made a small bow with its point.
“I am obliged to note that we have not been introduced.”
Hesper did not look at it.
She was looking at Wystan.
“Pocket,” she said.
It was barely a voice.
“Put it in your pocket.
The left.
Now.”
“It is an annotation,” said Wystan.
“It is a note in the margin of the field book.
It came off the page.”
“I am an annotation,” said Obelus.
“Nothing more.”
Hesper did not seem to hear it.
She had put her hand to her mouth, and taken it away, and he saw that the fingers had begun to shake, and that this time, in the full gold light, she did not put the other hand over them to hold them still.
“Do not let anyone see that,” said Hesper.