Chapter 571 - 570: Ground of Their Own

Chapter 571: Chapter 570: Ground of Their Own

Location:Wild Confederacy — Settlement Windbreak; The Pavilion; The Flats

Date/Time:TC1857.08.24 – TC1857.09.20

The paste tasted of wax first and then of something green underneath it, and Naida had known that for six days before anybody else at Windbreak did, because she had taken it alone in a shed at the second hour with nobody watching and a sand glass she had borrowed and not returned.

She had done it that way on purpose, and she had written down that she had done it on purpose, on a separate page, with the date, because she had learned that trick from a woman in a cold camp on the other side of the continent and had not told anybody where she got it.

She had read ten minutes.

***

She sat on it for twenty-six days.

That is the number she put in the letter afterward, because a number is harder to be generous about than a phrase, and because she had decided at the outset that when she finally wrote the thing down she was not going to write it in a way that made herself look better.

What she did with the twenty-six days was work.

She ran the settlement’s end of the joint survey. She wrote three returns for Speaker Kael-Ren’s clerk and then stopped writing them and made the clerk do it and corrected them, which took four times as long and was the correct thing. She kept the flats screening. She did not take the paste again and did not need to, and every time a reading came in past seven she wrote the number in the book and did not put her own beside it.

On the nineteenth day Speaker Kael-Ren came and stood in the doorway of the shed and asked her, without any preamble at all, what her number was.

Naida had prepared for about six ways that conversation could start and that had not been one of them.

"Why do you ask?"

"Because you built the book and you’ve never once been in it." He had his hands in his coat. "And because the woman who taught the paste took it herself in front of everybody at Ferrow’s Rest, every week, for seven months, and it is on the public sheet that she did, and you have read that sheet more times than I have."

"Ten minutes," Naida answered.

Speaker Kael-Ren took that without moving.

"Then you’d better sit down," he allowed, "because I’ve been putting off a conversation and you’ve just taken the last excuse out of my pocket."

***

She walked out to the gate on the twentieth evening because she had got into the habit of it and because the walking was the only part of the day nobody wanted anything from her.

The woman on the gate that night was somebody’s cousin and about nineteen and had been on the gate for two months, and she straightened up when Naida came through and said the thing they all said, which was her mother’s name and then hers, in that order, the way it is done here and the way it has been done here for longer than anybody has bothered to work out.

Naida had heard it perhaps three hundred times since the second month.

It had never once landed anywhere until the sixth of the eighth month, and it had landed every single time since.

***

Mei arrived on the twenty-third day with a sand glass and a jar and a fortnight of Ferrow’s Rest in her, and ran her first shed at Windbreak two mornings later, and was better at it than Naida had expected and worse at one part of it than she had hoped.

The part she was good at was the sitting still.

Maren Harren had evidently spent a fortnight on almost nothing else. Mei set the glass, said the four sentences from the sheet, and then put her hands in her lap and said nothing whatever for seven minutes while a Confederacy herder’s boy sat opposite her and got frightened and stopped being frightened and got bored, and she did not help him once, and at the end of it she wrote the number and thanked him and called the next one.

The part she was not good at was afterward.

The boy read nine. His mother had come in from the flats and was standing at the door, and Mei said the number, and then said the sentence from the top of the sheet about the woman who worked it out, and then stopped, because there was nothing after it.

And the mother said, "What does nine mean?"

Mei looked at her for a second and said, "I don’t know."

Naida watched her get through the next hour and did not step in, and found her afterward at the back of the shed with both hands round the empty glass.

"You did that correctly."

"I know." Mei did not look up. "I’d rather have done it badly and had something to give her."

***

They screened four hundred and six people at Windbreak and the flats over six weeks.

Eleven read past seven minutes. Two read past ten.

Naida did that arithmetic on the page for Speaker Kael-Ren and put the Seven Peaks figures beside it for the same period, which were worse, and then put the Ferrow’s Rest figures beside both, which were worse again, and then wrote underneath in her own hand: I do not know why this ground reads high, and I am not going to guess in front of you.

"Seven Peaks has been at this for a year," Speaker Kael-Ren observed.

"Yes."

"And they’ve got three."

"They’ve got three, and they’ve had four, and one of them was killed on a wall at Ferrow’s Rest, standing in a position he taught himself out of a sheet." Naida kept her voice flat. "And two of the three can’t be moved, because the thing they’re for is standing where they are."

Speaker Kael-Ren looked at the page for a long time.

"Then say the thing you’ve been not saying since the sixth," Speaker Kael-Ren told her. "You’ve written it down somewhere. I know you have. You write everything down, and then you sit on it until the person you’re going to hand it to has worked out most of it on their own, and I have worked out most of it, and I would like the rest before I say something stupid in a pavilion."

***

She said it standing, which she had not planned.

"Eleven of yours. Two of them past ten. And every single instinct anybody at Seven Peaks has had for a year says you put them on a cart and send them south to be trained on the mountain with the others, because that is where the teaching is and where the safety is and where the woman is who knows what any of it means."

"And?"

"And it’s wrong, and I have known it was wrong since the second month, and I have not said so out loud to anybody because the person it would cost is the person who has fed me and paid me and trusted me for nine years." Naida had her hands behind her back. "The whole of the anchor doctrine is that they hold where they are from. Not where they trained. Where they are from. Maren Harren won’t leave Ferrow’s Rest, and she’s right. Joss Halbrook stayed on the Millford road, and that was the first time anybody worked it out, and it cost an argument.

"So the eleven you have are not Seven Peaks’ eleven. They’re yours. They train wherever you like — and I’d send them south for a season, because the teaching is there and there’s no sense in pretending otherwise — and then they come home, and they stay home, and the Confederacy holds its own ground with its own people, and Seven Peaks does not have a single one of them and cannot call on them and does not get to say where they stand."

Speaker Kael-Ren sat back.

"You understand what you’ve just done."

"Yes."

"You’ve handed me the argument. You. Her intelligence officer. In my pavilion, on my paper, in your handwriting."

"It’s not an argument. It’s the doctrine, and it’s on a public sheet, and you’d have got to it by the winter on your own, and you’d have got to it angry." Naida did not move. "I’d rather you got to it early and unangry and with the arithmetic in front of you, because in about two years somebody in this country is going to say that Seven Peaks is building a thing that answers to Seven Peaks, and on that day you will need to be able to stand up and say that you raised it first and that she agreed, and I intend for both halves of that to be true."

***

The second bore came up on the twenty-sixth day, and Silas’s rider brought the sheet to Windbreak before it went south, because Windbreak was nearer and because the crew had got into the habit of doing what the ground told them rather than what the map did.

Longer string. Deeper hole. Twenty-two more meters before it ran out again.

Twenty-two more sequences. Fine at the bottom, coarse at the top, cut boundaries, no blending, one meter apart, every one of them.

Sixty-two in total and still no bottom.

Naida read it twice and put it in the box for the south with a note that said arrived here first, forwarded unopened by me, opened by Speaker Kael-Ren in my presence, copy retained under Article Six, because the Compact was eight weeks old and somebody was going to have to be the first person to do that part properly.

Then she stood in the doorway of the shed and looked out at the flats for a bit, at four hundred kilometers of perfectly level ground with a survey cord across the near end of it, and thought about a number that kept not having a bottom.

She did not write anything about that. There was nowhere to write it.

***

She wrote the letter that night, and it took her four hours, and she burned two attempts.

Four hundred and six screened. Eleven past seven. Two past ten. That is the rate you asked for, and I withheld it, and I want to say plainly that I withheld it so that you would have to write to me, because I wanted the answer to arrive in the same letter as the rest of this, and I did not trust myself to send the rest of it on its own.

The rest of it is two things.

The first is that the Confederacy will keep its own. I put the argument to Speaker Kael-Ren two days ago in his pavilion in my handwriting, and he has taken it, and he will put it to his settlements in the autumn as his. It is the doctrine as published. They train where the teaching is and they hold where they are from, and Seven Peaks does not call on them and does not place them. I am aware what that costs you, and I am aware that you will agree with it in about four seconds, which is not the same as it not costing you.

The second is that I read ten minutes, on the sixth day of the eighth month, alone, in a shed, at the second hour, with a borrowed glass. I did it alone deliberately, and I am not going to pretend that was method. I did it alone because I wanted to know before you did.

I have sat on it since. I am telling you the number of days, which is twenty-six, because you would find out, and because I would rather you had it from me in the same sentence as the number itself.

You know what it means. I am from here. My mother’s name is on the gate, and the guards still use it. If the doctrine is true, then I hold this ground and not yours, and I do not get to be your intelligence officer and an anchor of the Wild Confederacy at the same time, and I have been going round that ever since and have not found a way through it that is not a lie to somebody.

I am not asking you to decide. I am telling you what is on the page and I will do what you say, and I want it written down that I said that, because I mean it and because in a year I may not.

***

The answer came back nineteen days later, and it was shorter than Naida had braced for.

Four hundred and six, eleven past seven, two past ten. Thank you. That is now in the first column with the date, and the numbers of screeners and the name of the settlement, and Elian has asked me to ask you for the ages.

The Confederacy keeps its own. Of course it does. I agree with it in about four seconds exactly as you said, and I have made myself sit with it for a day before writing, and the day did not change anything, and I would like you to know I took it.

You are not my intelligence officer any more. I am not releasing you as a kindness, and I am not doing it because you asked, because you did not ask. I am doing it because you are right about the doctrine and because I will not be the person who publishes that anchors hold their own ground and then keeps the one who is from somewhere else.

You are the Confederacy’s, and you were always the Confederacy’s, and I have had nine years of the benefit of that and have not once paid for it.

Two things I want, and neither is a condition.

Tell Speaker Kael-Ren I would have agreed to it on the first morning at Windbreak in the second month if anybody had asked, and that I am glad nobody did, because he has it now as his own and that is worth more than my permission.

And write to me. Not reports. You have a clerk for that now. I have discovered this year that there is a difference between a thing arriving because it is due and a thing arriving because somebody sat down, and I have got a great deal of the first and almost none of the second, and I would like to be sent some.

***

Naida read it on the pavilion steps in the last of the light, and then folded it, and then sat there rather longer than she had intended to.

Down on the flats the survey line was still pegged out to the northeast and the cord was still the only thing on the whole plain that had a shadow, and somewhere out past where she could see it the second bore was going down with a longer string on it, and Mei’s shed was shut for the night with a sand glass on the bench and a column of numbers in a book that did not belong to Seven Peaks and never had.

She got up after a while and went in to find the clerk, because the monthly return was due in six days and she had decided that she was going to make him write it himself and get it wrong and do it again.