Chapter 584 - 583: Sixty-Three

Chapter 584: Chapter 583: Sixty-Three

Location:Wild Confederacy — The Northern Flats, The Bore Site, Eight Kilometers Northeast of Windbreak

Date/Time:TC1858.02.03 – TC1858.02.07

The mixing pit smelled like a wet stone left too long beside a fire.

Nobody had warned her about that, and it was the thing she went on smelling in her sleep for a week afterward: hot slurry in a cold place. The crew kept a fire burning in a trench under the iron pan at the head of the pit, day and night, because the mix took a skin at dusk and set to a crust by morning if you let it, and a crust in the pit meant a crust in the hole. Steam came off the pan in a slow gray sheet and hung over the deck. It carried the smell everywhere, bitter and mineral and faintly scorched, into the tents and the bread and her hair.

Mei had walked out from Windbreak that morning with a crate of empty glass tubes lashed to a hand-sledge and a letter in her coat from Speaker Kael-Ren. She didn’t need to read it. He’d told her what was in it at the gate.

"Silas asked me for somebody who can write down what comes up out of that hole and not say what it means." He had looked her over the way he looked at a wall he was deciding whether to take down. "I’ve got a settlement full of people who can do the first half."

"And you think I can do the second."

"One of my herders says you sat with his daughter while she was scared stiff, the whole count, and never once reached for her." He’d handed her the rope of the sledge. "Yes."

The deck was older than her time at Windbreak. Twelve paces of planking gone silver with weather, the rig standing in the middle of it like a tall man with his hands in his pockets, and a board road running out to it from the tents: a doubled lane of plank, swept clear of snow every morning by whoever got up first, with a short branch to the mixing pit and another to the latrines. Somebody had told her on the first evening that the branches were laid because those were the places people used to step off the planks and not come back. They hadn’t said who’d told them.

Either side of the lane the flats lay white and level as far as she could see, and none of it would take a person’s weight once you were through the crust. She’d believed that the way you believed a thing somebody else had written down. Then she put one boot off the planks to see, the second morning, and the ground under the snow gave the way sugar gives under a spoon, and she took the boot back and didn’t do it again.

Silas met her at the head of the lane. He was thinner than she remembered, and his hands were split across every knuckle, and the splits had been bleeding and stopped and started again so many times that the cracks were black.

"You brought the tubes," he said.

"A hundred."

"Good." He took the crate off the sledge himself, although it was heavy and she could have done it, and carried it along the lane to the tent nearest the deck. Inside, on a white cloth laid over two trestles, the plugs from the hole so far lay in a line, each in its tube, each tube labeled at both ends.

Fifty-eight of them.

The line ran most of the length of the tent. She’d heard the first line described, the one that went to Seven Peaks, forty tubes about as long as a man, and this was already a good deal longer, and there was space past the last tube that somebody had left on purpose.

"I want you to do the labels," Silas said. "Both ends. The number, the depth, the date, your mark."

"You’ve been doing them."

"I have. Look at them." He picked up the tube marked fifty, and then the one marked twenty, and held them side by side. The numbers were the same shape. The twenty was neat. The fifty leaned, and the tail of the zero ran off the edge of the paper. "Last time my hand went at about the twentieth. This time it went a bit later. I’d like the labels to look the same all the way down, and they won’t if I keep doing them, and somebody reading them in a year is going to look at the handwriting and wonder what happened to me at fifty instead of looking at what’s in the glass."

She took the tube from him and turned it in the light from the tent door. Fine material low in the plug, grading up to coarse. Then an edge. Flat and clean, cut across like somebody had drawn a knife through it, and the fine stuff beginning again above it on a surface as smooth as a scrubbed table.

She’d read about the edges. She hadn’t known they would look like that, like something a person had done carefully.

"What do I write about the edge?" Mei asked.

"That there is one. Where it is in the tube. Nothing else."

"And if there isn’t one?"

Silas was quiet long enough that she thought he wasn’t going to answer.

"Then you write that there isn’t one," he said, "and where you looked, and you bring it to me before anybody else sees it, and I’ll write the same thing underneath in my hand, and then we’ll both have said it."

***

The frost came down the second night like a lid.

She heard it before she felt it. The wind had been blowing steadily out of the north all afternoon, a flat hiss over the snow that you stopped noticing, and a little after dark it dropped. Just stopped. In the silence she could hear the pan fire ticking and the crew at the winch, somebody laughing in the far tent, and underneath all of it, very faintly, the snow on the flats making a small dry creaking noise as the cold went into it.

Then the woman on the pan called out.

Mei was at the deck with her hands in her armpits and a lamp by her feet, waiting on the sample line, and she was the closest. By the time she got to the pit, the skin was already across the pan. Gray, dull, and when she touched it with the back of a finger it was stiff, and it didn’t give.

"Fire’s gone down under it." The pan woman was on her knees at the trench with her whole arm in it, dragging the embers together. "Wind dropped, and it went straight up the flue instead of along. Get the hot water. Get Silas."

She got both. She ran the kettle from the tent stove along the lane with both hands on the wire handle and the steam coming off it into her face, and Silas was at the head of the hole before she got back, down on his knees on the deck with a length of iron that had been sitting in the tent fire. He put it into the skin on the slurry at the iron collar around the mouth of the hole, and the skin cracked like old varnish.

"Pour there. Slowly. Not on me, on it."

She poured. The hot water ran into the crack and the crust lifted and broke, and Silas worked the iron along the collar and the crust came away in plates that he fished out and flung onto the snow, where they lay smoking.

It took the rest of the night.

Nobody said it would, and nobody asked whether it was worth it, because everybody on the site had been told the same thing on their first day: keep the slurry working and the hole stayed open; let it go for a week, and the hole was gone, and nobody could sink another till summer. Mei did the arithmetic without meaning to. Weeks of hole. Near sixty meters of ground that had swallowed an iron casing whole and had already killed one man. All of it standing on a skin of wet gray mix that had to be kept from turning into a lid.

So they kept it from turning into a lid.

The crew went in relays, the pan fire and the kettles and the iron, and at about the third hour after midnight the man working the kettle beside her put his bare hand flat on the collar to steady himself and took it away again with the skin of the palm left behind on the iron. He didn’t make a sound. He looked at the hand and then held it out to the pan woman, who wrapped it in a strip of somebody’s shirt and sent him to the tent, and Mei took the kettle off him and went on pouring.

Her own hands stopped being hands at some point in the fourth hour. She knew they were holding the kettle because she could see them doing it.

She thought of the glass. The sand glass in the shed at Windbreak, cold enough to hurt every morning, held in both hands until she stopped being able to feel the sand through her gloves. She’d done that every morning for five months and never known why she needed to. She did the same thing now with a kettle, on her knees on a deck in the dark, and it was the first time she’d had any idea at all what it had been practice for.

At first light the wind came back out of the north, and the skin stopped forming, and the pan fire drew along the trench again the way it was built to. Silas sat back on his heels. The iron was still in his hand, and the splits across his knuckles had opened and bled down his wrist into his sleeve.

"It held," he said.

The pan woman got up off her knees in stages. "It held because we held it."

"That’s what I said."

"It isn’t," she said, and went to sleep.

***

The sample line brought up sixty-two just after midday on the fourth day.

Mei was waiting for it on the deck with the tube and the labels and a pencil she’d been keeping warm in her armpit, because ink froze out here and nobody had thought to tell her until the first morning. The line came up hand over hand out of the hole, gray and dripping, and the sampler on the end of it, and the man on the line unscrewed the cap and tipped the plug into her tube as neatly as pouring tea.

Fine low. Coarse high. The edge across it, clean as the others.

She wrote 62 at both ends, and the depth, and the date, and her mark. Then she carried it along the lane to the tent and laid it last on the white cloth, and stood looking at it.

Sixty-two was where the last hole had stopped. Everything she’d carried along that lane since she arrived was ground somebody at Seven Peaks had already seen. Everything after it wasn’t.

Silas came in behind her and stood at the other end of the cloth, by the first tube, and didn’t say anything. After a while the pan woman came in too, with her hands wrapped in rags, and then two of the winch crew, and then more of them, until the tent was full of people standing with their shoulders hunched and their breath going up in the lamplight. Nobody had called them that she heard.

The string went down again. She heard it through the tent wall, the drag and knock of the next length going onto the rig, and the winch taking it.

When the sample line came up the next morning, she was already on the deck. She didn’t remember deciding to go. The man on the line was the one who’d left the skin of his palm on the collar on the frost night, working with the wrapped hand held clear, and he unscrewed the cap and tipped the plug into her tube, and then stepped back, which he had not done with any of the others.

She held it up.

Fine low. Coarse high. And the edge, a third of the way up the plug, flat and clean and exactly where it should have been if the edges were still a meter apart.

Sixty-three.

She wrote it at both ends. Her hand didn’t do anything she didn’t tell it to, and she was grateful for that, and then she noticed she was grateful and it made her want to laugh, which she didn’t.

In the tent, nobody said anything when she put it down. Somebody at the back let out a long breath. Silas leaned over the cloth and looked at the tube for a long time without touching it, and then went out.

The pan woman was nearest to Mei. She had a daughter at Windbreak. Mei knew that because she’d screened the girl in the autumn, a quiet child who had sat very still and read past seven, and whose number was written in the Confederacy’s book, not Seven Peaks’. The woman looked at the line on the cloth, sixty-three tubes, and then at Mei.

"You’re the one from the shed."

"Yes."

"The ground out here reads high. Everybody says. My girl read high." She pointed with her wrapped hand, at the cloth, at the floor, at the flats outside the tent wall. "Is it this? Is it what’s down there?"

Mei had been asked the question at the shed door by mothers every week since the eighth month, in one shape or another. She’d learned there was only one answer she was allowed to give, and she knew what it cost, and she gave it anyway.

"I don’t know."

The woman nodded as if that was what she’d expected. She didn’t look disappointed. She looked at the tubes again, and Mei watched her count them with her lips moving, all the way to the end.

***

Sixty-four came up that night, in the dark.

The fives had gone out on the board road at dusk, the way they’d gone out every night since the sheet arrived from Seven Peaks with the rider, one at each end of the lane, so that one could come across to the other if it had to. Mei watched them take their places from the deck. The fifth at the near end stood with his back to the rest of them, facing the flats. She’d read the sheet twice when it came. She thought it looked right.

Silas was at the rig when the sampler came up. He took the plug from the man on the line himself this time and held it under the lamp for her, and she could see his hands shaking and didn’t know whether it was the cold.

Edge.

"Sixty-four," she said.

He gave it to her. She labeled it. Both ends, the number and the depth and the date and her mark, and her letters looked exactly the same as they had at fifty-nine.

"How much string’s left?" she asked.

Silas looked at the rack at the back of the deck, where the lengths lay under a hide in the snow.

"More than there was last time."

"How much more?"

"Enough to find out," he said. "Or enough to not find out a bit further down than last time. I don’t know which. Ask me when it stops."

She carried sixty-four along the lane in both hands, the glass so cold it burned through her gloves, and laid it at the end of the line. The cloth was running out. Somebody would have to bring another trestle out from Windbreak, or they’d have to start a second row, and she found she minded that. She wanted it to stay one line. She wanted somebody in a year to be able to stand at one end and look down it and see all of it at once.

She sat down on the crate of empty tubes with her hands between her knees, and waited for the string to go down again.

It went down. She heard the next length go on, and the winch take it, and the pan fire ticking in its trench, and out on the board road somebody at the far end calling the hour to somebody at the near end, both voices small in all that flat white.

Either there was a bottom, or there wasn’t. Nobody on the flats was going to say which before the string did.