The bucket was Pugh’s and still smelled of porridge.
Wystan sat on it by the cart with a mug of tea going cold between his hands and told it again, from the Third Bend, every step.
It took half an hour.
Hesper stood over him with her arms folded and did not interrupt.
Pask hovered at the edge of the circle, and Pugh stirred something in a black pot that he insisted was porridge and the rest of the party knew to be a threat.
Tam sat cross-legged in the grass, chewing a straw, with the stricken look of a boy who has been told that the sky is a lid.
Wystan left nothing out.
He gave them the alder at a hundred and ninety.
He gave them the eel fence, and the dog that had not barked, and the pump that was not there.
He gave them the ruts that thinned and stopped, and the grass that came up, and the dark, and the smell, and the eleven hundred and four steps.
“That is a remarkably round number,” said Pask, “for a man in distress.”
“It is not round,” said Wystan.
“It is the number.
I am always exact when I am distressed.
It is the only thing I have to do with my hands.”
He told them about the whistle, and took it out of his pocket and showed it, and Pugh looked at it and said gravely that it was a very good whistle.
He told them about the smear above the shrine’s threshold, and the pegs.
He told them about the bend.
He did not tell them about the Ink.
That was an older shame, and it did not belong to this morning.
“And that is all,” he finished.
“That is every step.
I have the figures.
I wrote them down.”
“Hmm,” said Hesper.
It was all she said.
She took the fennel out of her mouth and examined it.
Then she turned on her heel and stumped away across the grass toward the river with her hands behind her back, and stood there looking at the water.
Wystan stared after her.
A small cold feeling opened in his stomach.
“She does that,” said Tam in a whisper.
“When she thinks.
Don’t take it personal.”
“I do not take it personal.”
“You look like you do.”
Wystan drank some tea.
It was tepid, and tasted of wet leaves and wood smoke, and he drank it all because it was something to do with his hands.
When he looked up Pugh had crouched down beside him with a bowl of porridge, like a large mild animal settling in a doorway, and was holding it out.
“Eat, lad,” he rumbled.
“Thank you.”
“You are as thin as a rake.
Whoever feeds you ought to be ashamed.”
Wystan took the bowl and the spoon and held them.
Something went taut in his chest, without warning, like a rope on a windlass.
“Maudie Rudd feeds me,” he said.
“On Fridays.
She says I will blow away.”
“Who?” said Pugh.
“Maudie Rudd.
The baker at Ashmere.
She is fifty.
She has a voice like a bread knife.
I have eaten her bread every Friday since I was six.” He heard his voice rise and could not stop it.
“You have had it too, Pugh.
A week ago Friday.
I brought a loaf of hers to the camp.
A seed loaf, with caraway, and you said it was the only decent thing you had eaten in a month.”
Pugh looked at him.
It was a kind look and a troubled one, the look of a very large man who has been handed something small and breakable.
“I don’t recall that, lad,” he said gently.
“I’m sorry.
I don’t recall any seed loaf.”
“You put the end in the stew.”
“I don’t put bread in my stew.”
“You do, you put the end in, you say it thickens it.”
“That,” said Pugh, “would be a sin.” He said it without offense.
He seemed to be searching Wystan’s face for something.
“I’ve never heard of any Maudie Rudd.
I’m sorry, boy.
I would tell you if I had.”
He believed it.
That was the thing.
Wystan sat on the bucket with a bowl of porridge going cold in his lap and looked into the old man’s honest, bewildered, bristling face and saw nothing there but the plain unease of someone asked to remember what was not in him.
He had looked into lying faces before.
His own was a poor one for it.
He could not lie himself, not even a little, not even by omission, and so he had become over the years rather good at seeing it done: the too-quick swallow, the glance to the left, the pause that arrives a breath too late.
There was none of that in Pugh.
Pugh was telling the truth as he knew it, and the truth as he knew it did not contain a baker.
“Try this,” said Wystan.
He heard himself speaking as he spoke to the new chainboys, in short plain commands, pulling at each knot to test it.
“The Hob ferry.
When we crossed to chain the north bank in Rimemonth.
Who took us over?”
“The ferryman,” said Pask, from the edge of the circle.
“Which one?”
“The one on the Hob side.
A short man.
I believe he had a limp.”
“There is no ferry on the Hob side.
It is a rowing boat that belongs to the chapel.
We crossed from the Ashmere landing, on the ferry, the big flat one with the rope, and the ferrywoman gave Tam a crab apple and told him he was holding the chain wrong.” He turned.
“Tam.”
Tam looked at him over the straw.
“Who was the ferrywoman?”
“I don’t know, Wys.” He said it wretchedly.
“I don’t recall a ferrywoman.
We came in by the Hob bridge, didn’t we?
Wasn’t that the way?”
“There is no Hob bridge.”
“There is,” said Pask, sharply.
“At Hob’s Ford.
Two miles east.
The sheet has it as a footbridge.”
“We have never crossed it.”
“I crossed it in Rimemonth with the tripod,” said Pask.
“I recall the planks were rotten.
I should very much like to know why you are shouting at me.”
He had not realized he was shouting.
He stopped.
His hands were shaking so badly that the porridge slid in the bowl.
Tam, with great care, reached out and took the bowl from his lap and set it on the grass, as if it were likely to go off.
“Wys,” he said.
“Wys, it’s all right.”
“It is not.”
“No,” said Tam, who was sixteen and not stupid.
“I can see it’s not.”
For a minute nobody spoke.
The wind came up off the river and combed the long grass, and the pony, grazing nearby with a calm that had begun to seem sinister, lifted its head and looked at them all.
A cloud came over the sun.
The whole slope darkened and brightened again.
Wystan put his face in his hands and took one long breath.
‘Think,’ he told himself, in his clearest voice.
‘Think like a surveyor.
You have a discrepancy.
Reduce it.’
He had a hundred and ninety-one people missing from a field.
He had three witnesses who had known them, or ought to have, and who now did not.
It was not that they had forgotten.
People forget names, they forget faces, they forget the color of a coat.
That leaves a shape behind it, a gap with edges.
These men had not got a gap.
They had a different story, finished and smooth, as seamless as the bend in the river.
They did not remember the ferry because, in their memory, there had never been one.
They had come in by the Hob bridge.
They had always come in by the Hob bridge.
Somebody had gone through their heads and tidied, with the neat fine hand of a good clerk, and every place that had a hole in it had been filled.
‘Like the grass,’ he thought.
‘Like the rabbits.’
He lifted his head.
“Tam,” he said, as gently as he could.
“Where am I from?”
“What?”
“Where do I come from?
Where was I born?
You know me.
We have been in the same party since Lastsnow, we have eaten at the same fire.
You must have heard me say.”
Tam stared.
His freckles stood out on his face like spilled pepper.
“The Weir,” he said, in a small voice.
“The orphanage at the Weir.
With the Sisters of Saint Aubrin.”
The words went into Wystan like a nail.
“You told me,” said Tam, a little desperately.
“On the night we got the new tent.
Do you not recall?
You said your mam and da died in the flux when you were three, and the Sisters took you in, and you ran off to the survey at fourteen because you could not stand the porridge.
You said you could still do the whole of the Litany of the Twelve Lines, backwards.
You did it.
I remember.
It was the longest thing I ever heard.” He swallowed.
“I said you were the best-read orphan in the province.”
“I never said that.”
“You did, Wys.”
“I did not.” It came out in a whisper.
“I have never said that.
I was raised by my aunt.
She is the ferrywoman at Ashmere, Orla Pell, she is forty-four, she smokes a clay pipe that she never lights.
I have a cousin called Brea.
She is nine.
She has a gap in her teeth.
I have lived in the ferry house since I was a baby.”
“I’m sorry,” said Tam.
“Do not be sorry.”
“I am, though.
I recall it very clear.” The boy’s face was working.
He looked from Wystan to Pask to the old cook, and then, with real misery, at the ground.
“I recall the bit about the porridge.”
Pugh said nothing.
Pask had gone, if it were possible, still paler.
And Wystan, sitting on his bucket in the sun, with the whistle in his pocket and the dew going cold on his trousers, understood something much worse than anything he had understood in the night.
It was not only the village.
It was not even only the people who had lived in it.
It was him.
They had taken a village out of the world, and the world had closed over the hole, as a pond closes over a dropped stone, and in closing it had pulled everything near it out of true.
He was a boy with a past, and the past had been in Ashmere, and so the past had gone too.
It had been replaced with another, fitted to his size, with an orphanage and a flux and a litany.
Somebody, somewhere, had written him a new beginning, and written it so well that three honest men had been carrying it around for months, and one of them could tell him how it ended.
He thought: ‘If I had not been away.’
He thought: ‘If I had been home.
If I had come back a day earlier.
If I had not left with my speech.’
“Tell us about it,” said Tam.
Wystan looked at him.
“The village,” said Tam.
He had a flushed, earnest, stubborn look.
“If you say it was there, I want to hear.
I’ll not say I recall, because I don’t.
But if you say it, I’ll hear it.” He put the straw in his mouth and took it out again.
“What was it like?”
It was the kindest thing anyone had said to him all day.
Nobody had ever asked Wystan Pell to describe anything that was not a measurement.
He opened his mouth, and shut it, and then, slowly, as one lifts a weight with the legs and not the back, he began.
He told them about the lane.
He told them about the ferry, flat and broad, hauled across on its rope by Orla alone, who could do it in nine minutes with a loaded cart and was proud of it.
He told them about Maudie, and the dish in her step.
He told them about the shrine, and the cairn, and the little bell that nobody dared to ring except on feast days because it had a voice like a cracked cup.
He told them about the willow, which was older than the village and leaned out over the water as if it were about to say something.
He told them about Brea.
Pask had taken out a notebook.
He was writing, with his lips pressed together, in a small tidy hand.
Wystan watched the pencil go.
A ferry, it wrote.
A baker.
A shrine.
He saw it come out on the paper in short polite lines, and for the first time he heard what he sounded like.
“It sounds like a story,” said Wystan.
Tam said, “It sounds nice.”
“It does not sound true.”
“It sounds nice, though,” said Tam, and then, in the helpless voice of a boy who wants to give something and cannot, “I’d have liked it.”
The cloud came off the sun.
A strip of light ran across the grass, over the slope and the river and the empty place where the willow was, and the world went gold at the edges.
Pugh took the cold porridge away and gave him a fresh bowl, in silence, and Wystan took it.
His eyes were hot.
He ate it all.
When he had finished he looked up and found that Hesper had come back.
She was standing at the edge of the circle with her thumbs in her belt.
She had been there for a while.
He could tell by the stillness of her, by the way the fennel in her mouth had gone slack.
She had heard it all, the ferry and the baker and the willow and the girl with the gap in her teeth, and her small brown face was perfectly unreadable.
Only her eyes moved.
They went from Wystan to Tam, and rested there, and went back to Wystan.
“Eat your bread, kid,” she said.
It was not what he had expected.
He looked down.
The Weir loaf lay wrapped in its cloth against his boot, Brea’s loaf, and he put his foot against it so that no one would touch it.
But there was a heel of bread on the lid of the cart as well, which Pugh must have set there.
He took that.
He chewed it, mechanically, without tasting it, while the party watched, and Hesper Quarrel, who had a field book to keep and a province to survey, stood with her arms folded and waited for him to finish, as though it were the most important task in the world.