Chapter 570 - 569: The First Return

Chapter 570: Chapter 569: The First Return

Location:Seven Peaks — The Hall; The North Camp; The East Barracks

Date/Time:TC1857.07.11 – TC1857.07.19

A mountain smells different when three governments leave it, and what Raven noticed on the second morning after was that she could smell her own settlement again.

For six days it had been other people’s cooking. Confederacy mutton and whatever the Empire had brought that had cinnamon in it and the Federation’s field rations, which smelled of nothing at all and somehow smelled of nothing at all very strongly. It had gone in half a day, all of it, and underneath was bread and coal and wet stone and the sourness that comes off a great many people washing in cold water, and she stood at the top of the east stair and breathed it and found that she had been holding something for a week without noticing.

Then she went down and started work, because the first return was due inside a fortnight and nobody at Seven Peaks had ever done one.

***

Thorne had it laid out in the Hall on three boards by the time she got there.

"It’s not difficult," Thorne told her. "That’s the thing I want said first, because everybody in this building has decided it’s going to be difficult and it isn’t. It’s a page. Number of people, where they are, what they’re doing. Three copies. Nine days."

"Then say the second thing."

"The second thing is that when I write it out, it reads like a target list."

He turned the first board round.

Seven Peaks, entered into the territory of the clans of the northern ranges under Article Four. Forty-five persons. Five points: the Stonefall crossing, the middle ford, Cold Shoulder, the first pass, the second pass. Nine at each. Purpose: the escorted movement of children southward, and no other.

Raven read it twice.

"That’s accurate."

"It’s accurate, and it’s the location of every one of our people in a foreign country, on a page, sent to the Federation and the Empire and the Confederacy, by us, on a schedule they can rely on." Thorne had not moved from the board. "And I want it on the record that I raised it and that you overruled me, because you are going to overrule me."

"I am."

"Say why, and say it in a form I can put in the minutes, because somebody will ask me one day whether anybody thought of it."

Raven put her hand on the board.

"Because the clause has no exception in it and the first time we use an exception, we teach three governments that exceptions exist." She said it slowly, so he could get it down. "Because the Empire will publish theirs and the Federation will publish theirs, and if we shade ours we will have taught both of them how. And because I cannot demonstrate that publishing where my people are puts them in danger, and I can demonstrate what happens when people stop publishing, because I have been reading the Assessor’s arithmetic for eight days and she built it entirely out of the fact that we were the only ones who did."

Thorne wrote it down.

"And the other reason." He did not look up.

"Bjorn’s up there with his wife, and there are two hundred and six children, and I will not be the person who signed a document about telling the truth and then made an exception for my own." She took her hand off the board. "Send it."

***

It went on the sixteenth, and the first thing that came back was not from a government.

It was from Windbreak, four days later, from Naida, and it was six lines.

Your return arrived here before ours did. Speaker Kael-Ren read it out at the pavilion, which I did not expect, and then made his own clerk read out the Confederacy’s, which was two lines long and said nothing, and then stood there while the difference sat in the room.

He has now told his clerk to write ours the way you write yours. I do not think he has considered what that means. I am going to let him find out rather than explain it, because he will keep a thing he worked out and drop a thing I told him.

Second matter. The flats are screening. I did not ask for it, and neither did you. Speaker Kael-Ren asked me nine days ago what the paste was, and I told him, and he has had it made here from the sheet, which is public, which was the point of it being public.

They have read four people past seven minutes in six days.

You will want to come. Do not come.

***

Raven read that last line about six times.

She took it up to Elian’s room because he had the boards and because she had discovered over the past month that saying a thing out loud to a nine-year-old who wrote everything down was the closest she had to a way of hearing herself.

"Four past seven," Elian answered. "In six days. How many did they screen?"

"She doesn’t say."

"Then it isn’t a number yet." He was already ruling a line. "Ask her. If they screened forty people and got four, that’s one thing. If they screened four hundred and got four, that’s the same as ours, and it’s boring, and it’s still worth writing down. I’ll put the four in the first column and leave the rate out until she sends it."

"She will send it. She’ll have it already, and she’ll have left it out because she wanted me to ask, so that I’d have to write and she could put the answer in a letter that also has the other thing in it."

"What other thing?"

"I don’t know yet." Raven sat down on the end of the bed. "She does that. She’s done it for nine years."

Elian wrote for a bit.

"You’re not going."

"No."

"Good." He did not look up. "I want it written down that you weren’t sent for and you didn’t go and the reason, because that’s the whole of the clause and we’re the ones who wrote it and somebody should show it being used the first time before anybody has to be told how."

***

Sera Vahn came to the Hall on the seventh evening and did not sit down, which by now Raven could read from thirty paces.

"I’ll take the night book," Sera Vahn told her. "I’ve thought about it since the wall, and I have two conditions, and they are both about what I am not going to do."

"Say them."

"I will not form a view. Not to you, not to Mira, not in the book, not in my head if I can manage it, and I am telling you in advance that I probably cannot manage the last one, so what I will do instead is write down any view I do form on a separate page with the date, and hand you that page, and not put it in the book." She had her hands behind her back. "That’s the first."

"And the second?"

"If I am ordered to the north, or to a wall, or anywhere at all, I go, and somebody else takes the book that night and not the following morning." Sera Vahn did not blink. "I have watched what happens to a record when the person keeping it is sometimes there. Ostrek’s boards have got six months of continuous entries in them, and a nine-year-old has got them now because she died with the pen capped. I am not going to be the gap in the middle of somebody’s page."

Raven took a second with that.

"Both conditions accepted and both go in the record in your words."

"Then there’s the board." Sera Vahn did not move. "Under the dead man’s bed. Mira says somebody has to decide what it is."

"And?"

"I’m not deciding. It’s a floorboard with a stain on it, wrapped, with a date, cut out of a floor by a man who wrote down what happened and left the other column alone, and it is going to stay exactly that until somebody can demonstrate what it is." She said it flatly. "I’ll put it on the shelf in the same room as the book, on its own, with a label that says what it is and where it came from and who cut it out, and nothing else. If in eight years somebody can test it, it’ll be there to test."

"That’s the correct answer."

"It’s the only one I’ve got. I’m not a healer, and I’m not a weaver, and I haven’t got an opinion." Sera Vahn stopped. "That’s his sentence. I’ll be using it a great deal, I expect."

***

Kairos found her on the eighth evening in the Hall with the second return half drafted and took the pen out of her hand, which he had never done.

"It is not due."

"It will be."

"Everything will be." He put the pen on the table out of her reach, which was a gesture so unlike him that she looked at it rather than at him. "I have watched you for six days be extremely good at a thing I cannot do, and then I have watched you for three more days do the work that a clerk does, at night, by yourself, ahead of schedule, and I have concluded that you are not doing it because it is due."

"It’s a page. It takes an hour."

"It takes an hour, and it is a thing you are certain of." He sat down opposite her, carefully, because the shoulder was not the only part of him that had opinions. "I will not tell you to stop. I have known you long enough to know how that goes. I am going to sit here until you have finished it and then we are going to go up, and I would like it noted that I have found a form of usefulness at last and it is being furniture."

Raven looked at him for a moment.

"You’re not furniture."

"I am extremely good furniture. I have been practicing." He folded his hands. "Finish the page."

She finished the page. It took about an hour. He did not say anything else and did not read any of it, and when she put the pen down, he got up and put his hand out, and she took it, and they went up.

***

Maren Harren’s letter came on the ninth day, and it was short, and it was not an offer.

I will not be coming to Windbreak, and I want to say that first rather than have you ask me and then have to refuse, which costs us both something.

I have read the thing about anchors returning to their own ground a great many times, and I have decided I believe it. I am not sure that is the same as it being true. But I am seventy-one, and this is where I read, and this is where Emrys is, and if the thing is going to be tested it may as well be tested by somebody who has not got twenty years to waste finding out.

I can teach it in about a fortnight. It is not difficult. The paste is on a public sheet, and the timing is a sand glass, and the only part that takes a fortnight is learning to sit still and not help.

Send me somebody who can do that and I will send them back able to run a shed, and I would ask you to send me somebody young, because I have taught two people and the one who could sit still was fifty-something and the one who could not was thirty and I have concluded that it has nothing to do with age and everything to do with whether a person has ever had a job where they were not allowed to be interesting.

Raven read it out to three people and then sent for Mei.

***

"How long am I gone for?"

"A fortnight at Ferrow’s Rest. Then Windbreak, and I don’t know. Months. Possibly the winter." Raven had the letter on the table between them. "You’d be entering another signatory’s ground under a treaty that’s nine days old, which means your name and your location and your purpose go on a page to three governments before you cross and every month after."

"On a page."

"On a page. Publicly. Where anybody can read it, including whoever has been reading everything else we publish." Raven did not soften it. "That’s the honest version, and I’m giving it to you before you answer rather than after."

Mei sat with that.

"Who’s got the barracks?"

"That’s the part I thought you’d ask second, and you’ve asked it first, which is why I’m sending you." Raven turned the letter over. "The girl. The one who carried the list over a pass in her head. She’s been running the linen and the little ones for two months, and half a dozen Seven Peaks women take instructions from her and have stopped noticing that they do."

"She’s ten."

"She’s ten, and I’m not making her responsible for anything. Freya’s sister-in-law has the barracks and the girl has the mornings, and in two years we’ll see." Raven did not make it easier than that. "You can say no. I’d want a reason, but you can say no, and if the reason is the children, I’ll take it without argument, because you’ve had three of them attached to your coat since the fourth month, and that is not nothing."

Mei looked at the letter for a long moment.

"It’s not the children," Mei answered. "It’s that I’ll be the person standing in a shed in somebody else’s country telling them a number about their own child, and there’ll be a day when I read a seven and the mother’s standing there, and I’ll have to say the number and then nothing else, because the number is all we’ve got and everything after it is a guess."

"Yes."

"Can I have the sentence? The one from the sheet about the woman who worked it out. I’d like to have something to say afterward that isn’t mine."

Raven wrote it out for her on the spot, from memory, and got it right, because she had written it enough times.

Sera Vahn’s first page came down to the Hall two days later and was five lines long and had the time against each one, and the last line said no episode this night, which Raven read three times before she understood why it had been written at all.

She went and found her.

"You’ve recorded a thing that didn’t happen."

"I’ve recorded that I was there and that nothing occurred, which is not the same as a blank night." Sera Vahn did not look up from what she was doing. "A blank night could be anything. It could be that nobody was watching. I’d rather whoever reads this in eight years can tell the difference between a night with nothing in it and a night with nobody in it, and the only way to do that is to write the nothing down."

Raven stood there.

"Put that in the front of the book," she said. "As a note on method. In your words, with your name."

***

Mei went east on the nineteenth with a sand glass and a jar of paste and the name of a dead woman with no name at the top of her sheet.

Raven watched her go from the east terrace, which she had been avoiding for six months, and stood there afterward for longer than she meant to.

Three Pillar Souls. Four readings at Windbreak that nobody at Seven Peaks had done, taken with a paste made from a public sheet by a Speaker who had asked what it was.

She did not put those two things on the same page.

She went down and wrote the second month’s return instead, nine days early, because it was going to be due whether she felt like it or not, and because she had discovered at some point in the last half year that the only thing she was really certain of any more was the value of a thing that arrives on the day it said it would.