He did what Hesper Quarrel had taught him to do when he was frightened, which was to be exact.
“Right,” said Wystan, aloud, to the field.
His voice came out thin and flat.
He cleared his throat and tried it again.
“Right.
We will start from the control.”
There was no control.
That was the first difficulty.
A survey begins at a fixed point that everyone agrees on, and from that point you measure outward in a chain of legs, each one tied to the last, and at the end you come back and see whether the chain has closed.
He had no stone, no brass cap, no ring of beaten earth.
But he had his own two feet, and the memory of eleven hundred and four steps, and a river that did not move.
He took a bearing on the far bank, because the far bank was the one thing he could still check.
Across the water, a quarter mile off, stood the reed chapel of Saint Aubrin on the Hob side, with its little pointed roof and its lantern lit for the night.
It was a poor sort of chapel, built of bundled reed and tarred rope, and the Hob folk kept the lantern burning so that the ferry would know where to land.
It stood exactly where it had always stood.
From the Ferry Stone it lay thirty-one degrees east of the line to the willow, and he knew that because he had taken the angle himself, with a borrowed theodolite, on his seventeenth birthday, and written it on the inside of his wrist so that he would not forget to be pleased.
He had no theodolite now.
He held up the plumb bob on its string at arm’s length, sighted the lantern past it, and laid off the angle he had carried in his head since that day.
Without an instrument it was a guess, and he made it with the care of a boy who knew the size of his own error.
Then he walked forty paces up the slope with the chapel lantern on his left shoulder, and stopped, and knelt, and put his palm flat on the earth.
The ground was soft and spongy.
The grass came up to his knees and left wet stripes on his trousers.
It was the right place, or near enough.
The ground under his hand had a gentle tilt toward the river, the tilt of a floor that has been swept toward the water for a hundred years.
But there was no floor.
There was no step, no threshold, no flat stone where Orla tapped her unlit pipe out of habit.
He closed his fingers and pulled up a handful of turf.
It came away easily.
Underneath it was black loam, damp and full of small white roots.
‘It is the wrong place,’ he thought.
‘It is simply a very similar place.’
He dug with both hands.
The loam went under his nails.
He dug a hole the length of his forearm, and then another, a yard to the left, and then a third.
A surveyor knows that the ground is never innocent.
Wherever people have lived there is a litter of them under the soil: a bent nail, a shard of crockery, a smear of ash where a hearth has stood.
A village leaves a thousand traces, and they last for centuries.
He had once dug a trial pit on the Tarnby road for Hesper and unearthed a bone comb, four hundred years old, in a layer of what had been a midden.
He found loam, and roots, and a worm.
He dug until his fingers bled at the cuticles and then he got up, with his heart going in great slow thuds, and did what he should have done in the first minute.
He walked the village.
He did it by memory.
Ferry Lane ran from the landing straight up the slope for a hundred and forty paces to the shrine on the rise, and everything in Ashmere was strung along it like beads on a cord.
He went back to where the Ferry Stone had been.
He faced the hill.
He lifted his left foot and set it down.
“One,” he said.
At sixty-one paces there should have been Maudie Rudd’s baker’s step, worn into a shallow dish by sixty years of customers, with the door beyond it that stuck in wet weather and the window on the right where she kept her loaves on a board for the passing trade.
Maudie was fifty and had a voice that could cut a loaf.
She had given Wystan a heel of fresh bread every Friday of his childhood and said, every time, in exactly the same tone, “You’re too thin, you are, you’ll blow away.”
He stopped at sixty-one.
He looked down at the grass.
“Maudie,” he said.
He felt absurd.
“Maudie Rudd.”
The frogs went on.
He walked to ninety-four, which was Widow Marlow’s school, a long low building with a slate roof and a wall of whitewashed stone where she had painted, in her own hand, the maps of imaginary countries that her pupils invented.
He had spent four winters of his life in that room.
He could have told you how many panes there were in the east window.
Eleven, and one of them was cracked, and he had cracked it, with a wooden ruler, when he was eight, and Marlow had never said a word about it, only set a new pane in the following spring and put the cracked one in her kitchen window, where it was a kind of private joke.
At ninety-four there was grass.
At a hundred and two he stopped for Old Jory Dace’s cottage, with its fence of eel baskets and its door painted the blue of a bad mood.
At a hundred and eleven he stopped for the Oaksey twins’ house, where there were always two wooden hoops and a trundling stick thrown down in the yard.
At a hundred and twenty he stopped for the pump on the green, and at a hundred and thirty-one for Father Dunstan’s house with its little herb plot, and he said the name of every one of them aloud, in the dark, in the order they came.
Dunstan Teasel.
Jory Dace.
Fenna and Fenn.
Maudie Rudd.
Widow Marlow.
He said them the way you count a flock in the evening, to see that the number comes out right.
At a hundred and forty he reached the rise, and the shrine, and nothing.
The shrine was a squat low building of river stone, with a reed thatch and a bell no bigger than a fist, and in front of it a cairn, a pile of pebbles that every pilgrim to Ashmere had added to for six hundred years.
It was the oldest thing in the village.
He had been taken inside it at seven, on a cold morning, to be Inked, and it was the one place in Ashmere he had always walked past with his eyes on his boots.
He stood where it should have been and turned slowly in a circle.
Below him the whole length of the lane ran down to the river, empty.
Beyond the river the ground rose again toward the dark line of the Hob hills.
The sky was thick with stars, more stars than he had ever seen from this spot, because there was no smoke, and no lamp, and no roof to keep the sky out.
He was shaking.
He did not recognize it at first.
It came up through his knees.
He sat down on the grass where the cairn had been, with his chain in a heap beside him, and wrapped his arms around his shins.
‘Do it properly,’ he told himself.
‘Do it in order.
A thing that cannot be explained can still be measured.’
“Orla,” he said.
It came out hoarse.
“Aunt Orla.”
Nothing.
“Brea!”
He had never been loud in his life.
He had always been the sort of boy who corrects people in a murmur.
The name flew out of him across the empty slope and the river and the reeds, and nothing came back, not even an echo, because there was no wall for it to hit.
“Brea!” he shouted again.
“It is Wys!
It is not funny!
Brea!”
A heron went up off the water with a slow creak of wings.
He sat there with his mouth open, panting, and listened to the sound of his own voice go out into the dark and not return.
He thought of the stupidest thing in the world, which was that she was nine, and that she always hid, and that she did it very well.
She would be under the settle with her boots on.
She would be in the loft with her hands over her mouth, shaking with the effort of not laughing.
If he found her she would say, “You counted wrong,” in her small, infuriating voice, and he would say, “I did not,” and everything would be perfectly all right.
He did not find her.
He walked the whole village again, the other way, from the shrine to the landing, with his hands held out in front of him.
He said all the names a second time.
He felt for the doors with his palms.
He walked through the exact middle of the room where Orla’s kitchen had been, and bumped his shin on nothing, and stood still, and understood that he had been waiting to bump it.
A few paces on, at the corner of the yard where the willow’s roots should have come up through the flagstones, he barked the same shin on something that was there.
He knelt and found it by touch: a stump, knee-high and grassed over, the sort a farmer burns out in spring.
A willow stump.
Somebody had felled the willow, then, long ago, and left the root to rot.
He laid his palm on top of it.
It was cold, colder than wood, and under the turf there was no bark and no grain and no give.
A stump has a grain.
He had taken bearings on a hundred of them.
He knelt with the thought in his hand and it would not close; it slid sideways in his mind, and he found he was looking at the grass beside it instead.
He did not dig.
It was the one place that night where he did not, and he could not have said why.
The gravel spit below the landing was last.
He had been dreading it without being able to say why.
The slope gave out there into muddy gravel, and the river made its bend.
In daylight the Sloe ran wide and brown and unhurried at that spot, and slid around a great curve of reed-fringed bank, and Orla had always said that the Ashmere bend was the best crossing on the whole upper river because the current did half the work for you.
Standing on the gravel, with the water moving past his boots, Wystan looked at the curve.
It was wrong.
It took him a long moment to know how.
The bend was where it had always been.
It had the same radius, near enough.
The reeds along it were the same reeds.
But the line of the bank, which he had walked and sketched and tied into the survey two dozen times, had been a living, untidy thing, nibbled by spring floods, scalloped where an old tree had been undercut, with a small raw notch where the ferry slip had been cut.
Now it ran in one smooth unbroken sweep.
It was a line drawn a second time by a more confident hand.
He crouched at the edge of the water and stared at it.
Somewhere at the back of his skull a faint, high whine started up, like a note held too long.
He could see the curve, and he could see something wrong with the curve, and when he tried to look straight at the wrongness it slid sideways in his eyes like a speck on a lens.
The best he could say was that the bank looked unwritten.
It looked as if someone had gone along it with a fine brush and filled in everything that had ever happened to it.
‘It is a trick of the light,’ he thought, and then, because he could not lie even in his own head, ‘No.
It is not.’
His boot touched something that was not gravel.
It was small.
It rolled under his heel, and he looked down, and for a moment it was only a pale stick in the starlight, a bit of reed gone dry.
Then he picked it up, and his hand knew what it was before his eyes did.
A reed whistle.
A span long, thin as a finger, cut at one end to a slanted mouthpiece, with four neat holes down its length burned through with a heated nail.
The reed was bleached and furred at the edges with handling.
Near the mouthpiece, scratched with a pin into the pale skin, was a small crooked letter B.
She had carved it herself, in the summer, with her tongue between her teeth.
She had made four of them before she got one that sounded right, and given the other three away, two to the Oaksey twins and one to Maudie Rudd’s cat, which had not appreciated it.
This one she had kept in her pocket with her feathers and her string and her counting stones, where it had rattled against everything else for the whole of the spring.
Wystan held it in his palm.
Then, because there was nothing else to do, he put it to his mouth and blew.
Four notes came out of it, low, high, middle, low, the little rising and falling tune that he had taught her himself at the table in the Ferry House last winter, when she had been nagging him to make something that was not a number.
It was a plain, foolish tune.
It was almost a question.
It went out across the water in the dark and bounced, a little late, off the far reeds, and came back to him, and then it was gone, and the night was exactly as quiet as before.
He did it again.
And again.
He blew until his lips were numb and the sound had begun to crack at the top.
He blew until he knew that no one was going to answer.
Then he sat down, on the gravel, on the very spot where Orla’s boat had been drawn up for the night every night of his life, and he put the whistle in the pocket over his heart, with the money, and held it there with his fist.
He did not cry.
It would not have helped, and he had a cold clerkly streak that he had never been proud of, which now came forward and took the pen.
He drew a breath.
Then he got up, and fetched the chain, and did the only thing that was left.
He chained the lane.
It took him most of an hour in the dark.
He pegged the near end at the place where the Stone should have been, with his plumb bob stuck in the earth for want of a stake, and he ran the chain out up the slope, link by link, counting aloud, until he had laid out two chains and thirty links, and there he drove a peg made of a piece of driftwood into the turf with the heel of his hand.
He had measured the distance from the Stone to Maudie Rudd’s baker’s step on a Saturday morning in autumn, because Maudie had been telling the parish that her step was in the road and the Provincial Surveyor had wanted it settled.
It was two chains and thirty links to the dish in the stone where sixty years of people had put their feet.
There it was.
He stood on the peg and looked down.
Grass, and a small piece of driftwood.
He pulled up the plumb bob and went back down toward the river, to the spot forty paces above the landing where the Ferry House door had been.
There he drove a stake, a length of driftwood as long as his arm, hammered in with a stone.
He took off his coat, the long brown one with the eleven pockets, and hung it over the stake to mark the place, and also because he was suddenly very cold.
It stood there in the starlight, empty, with its arms hanging, rather like a small and patient scarecrow.
He took the loaf of black bread out of his pack and set it at the foot of the stake, wrapped in its cloth, for Brea, in case.
He sat down beside it with his back against the stake and his chain across his knees.
The frogs went on.
The river went by.
A little after midnight, with the stars wheeling slowly overhead through the place where the roof of the Ferry House had been, he realized that he was waiting, with all the dumb patience of a boy at a crossing, for someone to come down the lane and tell him that it was a joke.