Chapter 593 - 592: The Other Column

Chapter 593: Chapter 592: The Other Column

Location:Seven Peaks — The Boy’s Room; The Medicine Hall

Date/Time:TC1858.02.26 – TC1858.02.28

The night-lamp made the room smaller than it was.

That was the first thing Hesper Ashby had noticed, weeks ago now, and she noticed it again tonight, coming in with the book under her arm and the door easing shut behind her. By day it was a plain room with a high window and a bed and a shelf and a chair. By the night-lamp, turned low on its hook beside the door and shaded away from the bed, it was a small circle of yellow around the chair, with the boy at the soft far edge of it and everything past him gone brown and far away.

The chair was by the door. It had been somebody else’s before it was hers. She knew whose; she’d been told the name and the one sentence that went with it, and nothing else, and she had decided on the first night that nothing else was what she’d been given and that it would do.

She sat. The seat was cold through her skirt. She opened the book on her knee to the ribbon.

She didn’t turn back. She never had. The front pages were Sera Vahn’s, in a narrow upright hand, and she had read those because they were the instructions: what to write, how, and the line about writing the nothing down. After those there were a great many pages in other hands, and she had not read them, and would not, because nobody had told her to and because it was plain from the way the book had been put into her hands that what was on them was not hers.

She wrote the date. Twenty-sixth. Then she capped the pen and looked at the room.

***

The boy was not asleep. He was sitting up against the wall with the blanket around his middle and the stone in his hands.

He turned it over. He turned it over again. It was a plain gray stone, nothing to look at, smooth all the way around, and he held it the way she’d seen children in the Medicine Hall hold a cup of something warm, with both hands, close, as if it might go cold if he let it get too far away.

There was a square in the floor near the foot of the bed where the matting was a little paler than the rest. She’d stepped on it the first night and felt it give, a little, the way a floor doesn’t, and had looked under it and found a hole in the boards, a neat square one, with only dark underneath. She’d put the matting back and hadn’t asked. On the shelf beside where the book lived there was a short length of floorboard, wrapped, with a date written on the wrapping and a name. She hadn’t asked about that either.

"You’re the night one," the boy said.

"I am."

"The other one’s got her arm in a sling."

"She has. It’s mending."

He thought about that, the stone going around in his fingers.

"What do you write?"

"The date."

"And then what?"

"What happens?" Hesper answered. "If anything does."

"What happens if nothing does?"

"Then I write that."

He looked at her a long while in the lamplight. He had a way of looking at people that she’d seen in very old patients and almost never in children, a kind of patient measuring, as if he were reading a label on a jar.

"Is that all of it?" he asked.

She’d been asked a great many things by children on the night rota. Where’s my mother. Am I going to die. Why does it hurt. She had found, over the years, that the only answers worth giving were the true ones, and that the true ones were nearly always shorter than you’d think.

"Tonight it is," she said.

That seemed to satisfy him. He slid down under the blanket with the stone still in both hands and his knees drawn up, and lay looking at the wall, and after a while his breathing changed, and after a longer while the stone slipped out of his fingers onto the mattress, and she got up, quietly, and put it back in his hand. His fingers closed on it without waking.

She sat down again.

The wind was up on the mountain. She could hear it in the chimney and against the high window, a long rising push and a fall, and between the pushes the building ticked and settled the way old stone did on a cold night. Somebody went past in the corridor in soft shoes. A door shut somewhere below. Her tea had gone cold on the floor by the chair leg, and she drank it anyway, because it was there, and it tasted of the pot and of nothing.

At the end of the night, when the window had gone from black to gray, she uncapped the pen.

No episode this night.

She looked at it. It looked very small on the page. There was room under it for a great deal more, and she found that her hand wanted to put something there. Awake late. Asked what I write. Held the stone. Slept on his side toward the wall. All of it true. None of it was what the front pages had asked for.

She capped the pen without writing any of it, and went to find Sera Vahn.

***

Sera Vahn read it standing up, in the Medicine Hall, with the book held open against her strapped arm and the other hand turning the page. She read the one line. She looked at the space under it.

"That’s right," she said.

"It felt like nothing."

"It’s meant to." Sera Vahn closed the book and held it out. "If there’s ever a night you think you’ve written too little, that’s a night you’ve done it properly."

Hesper took it back.

"He asked what I write," she said.

"What did you tell him?"

"The truth."

Sera Vahn nodded, as though that were the only acceptable answer and she’d have been surprised by any other.

"Then you’re fine," she said, and went off down the Hall to let Mira look at her collarbone.

***

The second night the room smelled of wet wool, because somebody had hung his washing to dry along the end of the bed, and of lamp oil, and faintly of the honey cake the kitchen sent up for him most evenings and that he never quite finished. The window had frosted over in ferns from the bottom up. Hesper laid the backs of her fingers against the glass on her way to the chair, out of a habit she had with windows on cold nights, and took it away numb.

The boy was building.

He had a box of blocks by the window, plain wood, some of them so old the corners had worn smooth as pebbles, and he’d carried them over into the lamplight and was laying them in a line along the floor. Not a tower. A line, one after another, end to end, from the foot of the bed toward the door, with the stone set at the far end of it like a full stop.

Hesper wrote the date. Twenty-seventh. She sat back.

"Did you write the nothing?" he asked, without looking up. "Last night."

"I did."

"Is it in there?"

"It is."

He considered that, a block in each hand. "Can you see it? If you look?"

She turned back one page, which was as far back as she let herself go, and held the book out so that the lamp fell on it. He came over on his knees and looked. She didn’t know whether he could read. Nobody had told her that either. He looked at the line for a long time anyway, the way he’d looked at her the night before.

"It’s small," he said.

"It’s meant to be."

"Why?"

She thought about it. She thought about the sentence she’d been given, and the front pages, and Sera Vahn holding the book open against her strapped arm.

"So there’s room," she said, "if something happens."

He nodded, as if that were obvious, and went back to his blocks. She closed the book over her finger and found that her hand was not quite as steady as she would have liked, and she couldn’t have said why.

He worked without talking. The blocks went down with small hollow knocks on the floorboards, one and then another, and once he took one up again and turned it a quarter and put it back, and looked at it, and moved on. The line went past the pale square of matting without touching it. She noticed that he went around it. She didn’t write it down.

It was perhaps the second hour of the night when he stopped.

She knew it at once, the way you know a clock has stopped in a room before you can say what’s different. He’d been reaching for the next block. His hand was out, open, a little above the floor. And then his hand was out and open above the floor, and nothing else was happening to it, or to him.

His eyes were open. His face was turned a little to the side, toward the wall on her left. Not looking at it. Through it, maybe, or past it, or at nothing at all. His mouth was slightly open. He did not blink.

Hesper counted.

She did it silently, as she’d counted pulses for longer than she could remember, without moving her lips. One. Two. Her hands stayed in her lap. The book stayed on her knee. Everything in her that had ever sat up with the sick wanted to get up out of the chair and go to him, and she stayed in it, because the sentence she’d been given had nothing in it about going to him and because she understood, without being told, that the chair being where it was had been somebody’s decision.

Six. Seven.

The lamp hissed. The wind leaned on the window.

Eight. Nine.

He finished the movement. His hand came down, took the next block, set it in the line with a small knock. Turned it a quarter. Looked at it. Reached for another.

That was all.

She waited. She watched his face, as much of it as the lamp gave her, for anything coming from his nose, and there was nothing. She watched the floor under him. Nothing. He went on laying blocks as though no time had gone missing at all, and she supposed, for him, none had.

When she was sure, she uncapped the pen. Her hand was steady, which surprised her a little.

Second hour, about. Laying blocks along the floor. Stopped with his hand out. Nine by count, not timed. Resumed the same movement. Went on as if nothing had happened. Face turned toward the left-hand wall.

She stopped there. Her eyes went to the wall on her left, the one his face had been turned toward. It was the east wall of the room. She knew that because the sun came in at that side in the mornings, and for no other reason.

She wrote: East.

Then: No blood observed.

There was more she could have put. There was a great deal more, and all of it things she would have written in a patient’s notes without a second thought. Reflexes. Color. Pupils. She could have got up and looked. She hadn’t. She could have written that she hadn’t, and why. She could have written what she thought it was, because she’d seen children go still like that before, once or twice, in fevers, and had a word for it.

She left the other column empty, and capped the pen.

***

A little after the fourth hour, the north gate bell.

Two strokes. She heard them through the stone, faint and dull, and then nothing for a long time, and then, much later, doors and voices somewhere far below, and boots on a stair, and a stir going through the building the way a stir always did when a rider came in after dark: nobody shouting, just more people awake than there should have been, and all of them moving a little faster.

The boy had finished his line and gone to sleep across the bottom of the bed with one arm hanging over the edge and his fingers almost touching the stone. She didn’t move him.

Hesper sat in the chair by the door and listened to the building be awake around her. She didn’t get up. She didn’t go to the door to see. Whatever had come up the mountain at that hour, it had not come for this room, and if it had, somebody would knock.

Nobody knocked. After a while the stir went down again, and the voices stopped, and there was only the wind.

She didn’t write the bell in the book. It hadn’t happened in the room.

***

Sera Vahn was waiting for her this time, at the end of the Medicine Hall, by the stove, with a face Hesper hadn’t seen on her before: gray, and very still, and set. Somebody had been up all night, and it hadn’t only been Hesper.

She held out her good hand for the book without a word.

Hesper gave it to her. Sera Vahn opened it at the ribbon and read the entry, all of it, slowly, the way she’d read the one line the morning before. She read East. She read No blood observed. She looked at the empty space after it.

"Counted," she said.

"Not timed."

Sera Vahn nodded. She kept her eyes on the page a while longer, and Hesper saw her eyes go, once, to the top of the entry where the number was, and stay there, and come back.

"That’s a number this book has seen before," she said. "That’s all I’ll say about it, and I shouldn’t have said that." She closed it. "You did it right."

"I wanted to write more."

"I know. Everybody does." Sera Vahn held the book out again. "The night you stop wanting to, give it back to me, because something’s wrong with you."

Hesper took it. She didn’t ask about the bell, or the rider, or the face Sera Vahn had on. None of it had been in the room.

She went out of the Medicine Hall and across the yard toward her own bed in the gray beginning of the day, with the book under her arm because she’d forgotten to put it down, and the cold came in through her shoes, and somewhere over toward the Hall a great many people were talking in low voices about something she hadn’t been told and was not going to ask about.

She stopped at the door of her own building and looked back at the high window of the boy’s room. It was dark. It faced east.

Then she turned around and went back across the yard and up the stairs, and put the book on the shelf in his room where it belonged, beside the board. Then she went to her own bed, and lay down in her clothes, and slept.