They came down the lane in a ragged line, in the pale light of early morning, with the sun at their backs and their shadows running out in front of them like long thin dogs.
He counted them as they came.
A pony first, a fat gray animal with an air of having been woken against its will, drawing a two-wheeled cart piled with instrument cases and a tripod strapped on top like the legs of a dead insect.
Beside the pony walked a thin young man in spectacles, with his elbows tucked in as though the countryside might brush against him.
Then a tall boy of sixteen with red hair, carrying a surveyor’s chain looped over his shoulder in the correct fashion, which was the way Wystan had shown him.
Behind them a great gray-whiskered man with a cooking pot on his back, singing something under his breath.
And at the rear, last of all and a little apart, a small figure in a coat patched in every color a river can be, with a stalk of sweet fennel in the corner of her mouth.
They had not seen him yet.
They were looking at the lane, and the lane, he now saw, was behaving very strangely.
The party walked the whole length of it without a glance at the ground, the pony’s hooves going soundlessly into the turf, the cart wheels leaving two shallow bruises in the green.
To them it was a path across a pasture, with a name and a use and a very ordinary history, and it ended, as the pony plainly knew, at nothing in particular, at a rise above the river where the bank was good for watering stock.
“Ah,” said the thin young man, in a dissatisfied voice.
“There he is.”
“Where?” said the red-haired boy.
“There.
The ridiculous object on the hill.”
It was true that he was a ridiculous object.
He had been sitting on the slope since dawn with his knees drawn up, covered in dew, with four driftwood pegs in the grass beside him and a chain in his lap.
He stood up.
It took a while.
His legs had gone to sleep.
When he had got them under him he raised one hand, awkwardly, and the thin young man said “Hmph,” and the boy with the red hair grinned and began to run.
“Wys!” Tam called.
He had a high, cracking voice that had not yet made up its mind.
“Wys, you great streak, we thought you were dead in a ditch!
Mistress Quarrel’s been in a state since sixth bell, she’s been chewing that fennel so hard it’s practically a toothpick, we thought you’d been…”
He stopped, three paces off.
He looked at Wystan, and his face changed.
“You look awful,” said Tam, more quietly.
“Did you not sleep?”
“No,” said Wystan.
“Did something happen?”
He opened his mouth to answer and did not know where to begin.
It was like trying to lift a large object without a handle.
He had spent the long gray hour before dawn rehearsing what he would say, and every version had come out the same, a flat plain sentence with nothing on either side of it, a sentence that would sit between him and anyone who heard it like a stone in a stream.
“Ashmere is gone,” he said.
Tam looked at him.
“It has gone,” said Wystan.
“It is not here.
I came home last night and it was not here.
I have been all over the ground.
There is nothing.” He heard his own voice, level and precise, a little too slow, like a man reading out a will.
“Everyone has gone, Tam.
Everyone.”
“Gone where?” said Tam.
“I do not know.”
The boy turned his head, slowly, and looked at the field.
It was not an unnatural thing to do.
He looked at the long grass, and the dew on it, and the river at the foot of the slope, the way one looks at a landscape somebody is describing.
And Wystan, who was watching his face with fierce attention, saw nothing in it at all.
No dismay, no recognition, no flicker of the place that had been there.
Only a gentle, uncomfortable puzzlement, such as a polite person shows toward a friend who has said something odd.
“Er,” said Tam.
“Wys.
There’s not ever been anything here.”
The pony arrived, and the cart, and the thin young man, who was called Edwin Pask and was the party’s instrument man, and who looked at Wystan over the top of his spectacles with the expression of an owl that has found a mouse in the pantry.
After him came the old cook, whose name was Pugh, who nodded, and put down his pot, and said, “Morning, lad,” in a deep slow rumble.
And last of all, taking her time, with her hands in her pockets, the woman who owned all of them.
Hesper Quarrel was sixty-one years old and stood five feet and a little less.
She had a bow-legged, deliberate walk, the walk of someone still negotiating with the ground.
A bun of iron-colored hair sat on top of her head like a nest, with a pair of surveyor’s pencils stuck through it at an angle, and her face, which was brown and broad and deeply creased, had the look of a map folded and unfolded too many times.
She looked at Wystan, and then at the grass, and then at Wystan again, and moved the fennel from one side of her mouth to the other.
“Well,” she said.
“You are late, kid.”
It was what she said to him every morning.
It meant, ‘You are late,’ and it meant, ‘Good morning,’ and on other occasions it had meant, ‘I am pleased you did not fall in the river.’ It was her whole language of affection, and he had come to depend on it as one depends on a wall.
Now he could not speak at all.
“You were due at the Weir by the sixth bell,” Hesper went on.
“You are always at the Weir by the sixth bell.
You are a dreadful, correct boy, and I had a bet with the cook that you would be at the camp before the kettle boiled.
I lost.” She said it without any heat.
“So I thought, I will go and be annoyed in person.
And here I find you standing in a field with your coat off, looking like a dropped pie.”
Pugh coughed.
“Mistress Quarrel,” said Wystan.
His voice shook.
He made it stop.
“I want to report a missing village.”
There was a short silence.
A lark went up from the Hob side, and Pask shifted from foot to foot.
“A what?” said Pask.
“A village,” said Wystan.
“Ashmere.
It stood here.
It had a hundred and ninety-one people, a ferry, a baker, a shrine.
I went home last night and it is gone.
I have walked the ground.
I have dug three trial pits.” He held up his hands.
They were black to the wrist, with dried blood at the nails.
“There is nothing.
No foundations, no ash.
I have chained the lane.
I want it recorded.
I am sorry.
I know how it sounds.”
Pask began to say something, and Hesper lifted one finger, without looking at him, and he stopped.
“Ashmere,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Ashmere Leys,” said Pask, with a delicate cough.
“Is it?
There is a meadow of that name, certainly.
I have it on the sheet.
It is the common pasture between the Third Bend and the river.
It has been in the Registry as such since…” He had already opened one of the cases on the cart.
He took out a long roll, stiff and creamy, with a red stamp at the corner, and spread it on the lid and held it flat with both hands.
“Provincial Sheet Fourteen, Sixth Edition.
It is the only copy issued to this party.
I signed for it, and I have the receipt.
You may see for yourself.”
Wystan went over.
He did not want to.
He stood at the cart’s tail with the dew soaking into his boots and looked down at the paper, and for a long moment the whole world narrowed to the ruled and shaded lines of a map he had known by heart.
It was the same sheet.
It had the same title in the same copperplate.
It had the same neat fretwork of grid lines and the same compass rose in the corner with the small crooked N that the engraver had never got right.
It had the Sloe, in a broad blue ribbon.
It had the Third Bend and the alder and the Hob chapel, a small black cross on the far bank.
It had the bend, where the river swung wide, and he could see how smooth it was, how perfectly smooth.
And where the lane met the landing there was a small printed word, in a small elegant slanting hand that he could have recited with his eyes shut.
It said: ASHMERE LEYS.
Under it, in the swelling, conventional stipple used for pasture: grass.
There was no ferry.
There was no cluster of little black squares along the slope.
There was no shrine, with its tiny cross, and no pump, and no lane.
A dotted line wandered up from the Third Bend and stopped, abruptly, in the middle of the meadow, as a footpath does when it has nowhere particular to go.
“That’s wrong,” said Wystan.
“I beg your pardon,” said Pask.
“That is not what it looked like.
I have a copy.” His hands were already in his coat, in the right inside pocket, which was not there.
The coat was still hanging on its stake by the river.
He turned and ran down the slope with his chain bumping at his hip, and snatched the coat off the stake, and picked up the loaf at its foot without thinking, and tore at the lining.
The map was where it always was, folded in eight, soft as cloth from handling.
He ran back up with it, still holding the loaf, and spread it on the lid of the case beside the other, and flattened them both with his palms.
The two sheets lay side by side in the early sun.
The same size.
The same paper, creamy and slightly grained.
The same engraver’s mark in the bottom right corner: Provincial Sheet Fourteen, Sixth Edition.
The same red stamp.
He looked from one to the other, back and forth, with dazed concentration, and every line on them was the same.
Every contour, every reed bed, every printed name.
Except that on his, in the middle of the slope above the landing, there was a cluster of tiny black squares, and a little cross, and a long thin street running up from the water, and in a neat slanting hand that he had traced with his thumbnail more times than he could count, the word ASHMERE.
“Where,” said Pask, in a strange voice, “did you get that?”
“You gave it to me in Rimemonth,” said Wystan.
“For the control survey.
You said I was not to lose it because it was the last one in the case.”
“I did nothing of the kind.
There was one sheet in that case, Mr.
Pell, and I unrolled it a minute ago.”
“You did.
You wrote my name on the back.”
Pask turned the sheet over, with the tips of two fingers, as though it might bite.
On the back, in blue pencil, in a clerkly hand with the downstrokes a little too heavy, were the words: W.
Pell, chain.
Control.
Do not lose.
Edwin Pask took off his spectacles, and polished them, and put them on again.
He did it slowly.
When he looked up his face had lost most of its color.
“That is my writing,” he said.
Nobody said anything.
Pugh had stopped fiddling with his pot.
Tam, who had come up behind Wystan and was staring at the two sheets with his mouth a little open, said, “It’s the same map.
How’s it the same map?” And then, in the plaintive voice of a boy who has never been asked to carry a puzzle, “It can’t be the same map, can it, Mistress Quarrel?”
Hesper had not said a word.
She had come up on the other side of the cart, quietly, as she did everything, and was looking down at the two sheets with her hands in her pockets.
She had stopped chewing.
The stalk of fennel stood out of the corner of her mouth, perfectly still, like the needle of a compass that has found its pole.
She read them both.
He saw her eyes move, slowly, over the one and then the other, along the line of the lane, down the slope to the river, and up again.
He saw them stop on the place where the little black squares were, and on the empty place where they were not.
She did not look surprised.
That was what he would remember afterward, when he went over it again and again in the long nights of the weeks that followed.
She looked as if she had been struck, hard, in a place that had been bruised for years.
Then it was gone, and her face was as it always was, brown and lined and unreadable.
She took the fennel out of her mouth.
She looked at it.
She put it back.
“Pask,” she said, in an ordinary voice.
“Put the sheets away.
Both.”
“Mistress Quarrel, I really must…”
“Both, Edwin.”
He put them away.
His fingers were not steady.
When he had slid them into the case and closed the lid and fastened the clasp, Hesper said, “Tam, take the pony to the water.
Pugh, I think there is bread in that pot, and I think the boy has not eaten since yesterday.” She did not look at either of them as she spoke.
She was looking at Wystan.
“Go on.”
They went.
The pony’s hooves made a soft thudding in the turf, and the cook’s voice rumbled something low and kind about tea.
In a few moments there was only the sound of the wind in the grass, and the lark, and the dry flutter of her coat.
Hesper Quarrel looked Wystan over, from the dirty boots to the uncombed hair, the way she went down a column of figures looking for the one that did not belong.
He stood still under it.
He did not know what she was going to say.
“Tell me again,” said Hesper.
“From the Third Bend.
Every step.”