Chapter 605 - 604: Forty-One

Chapter 605: Chapter 604: Forty-One

Location:Seven Peaks — the boy’s room; the Medicine Hall

Date/Time:TC1858.03.10 – TC1858.03.11

The north gate bell was going, and not the way it rang for a rider.

Hesper Ashby heard the first stroke in the chair by the door and thought it was two. She waited for the second, and it came, and then a third came on top of it, and a fourth, and after that she stopped waiting and only listened. It went on. Whoever was on the rope wasn’t counting. They were pulling as fast as the bell would swing back.

The boy sat up in bed.

He didn’t cry out. He sat up as he did when he woke in the night for no reason, all at once, with the blanket sliding off his shoulders and the stone in his fist. The lamp on its hook by the door gave him the edge of its light and no more. His face was turned toward the sound, toward the wall behind the bed, which was the north wall. The window was on the east.

"That’s not a rider," he said.

"No."

"A rider’s two."

Hesper nodded.

Tianlei listened. The bell went on. Somewhere below in the building, a door banged, and feet went past on a stair, quick, and then more feet, and then a voice she didn’t know said something sharp and the feet stopped. The bell didn’t.

"What is it?"

"I don’t know," Hesper said. It was true.

The chair was by the door because somebody had decided it should be, before her, and the decision had been about the boy and not about bells. She had thought about it on other nights, when there was nothing, and she thought about it now. She stayed in the chair with the book on her knees and the pencil in her hand and did not go to the door.

"Can I count it?" Tianlei said.

Nobody had ever told him he had to ask before he counted things. She had watched him count blocks, and the stones in the path below the window, which he couldn’t see, so he counted the ones he remembered, and the stitches in his blanket hem, and once the times she turned a page.

"You can count it," she said.

Tianlei started at the beginning. Not at the beginning of the bell, which had been going for some while by then, but at the beginning of his own counting, at one. He said the numbers out loud, under his breath, in the voice he used for things that mattered to him, keeping time with the strokes so exactly that after the first ten she found she was waiting for his voice to tell her when the next one would come.

Eleven. Twelve.

The date went at the top of the page, as it always did. Then she wrote, Third hour, about. Bell at the north gate, many strokes, not a rider. Awake. Counting the strokes aloud.

She looked at the line. The bell was outside the room. On the second night she had not written the bell, because the bell had not happened in the room. But the counting had, and you couldn’t write the counting without the thing he was counting, or it was a line of numbers with nothing under it. She left it.

Twenty-six. Twenty-seven.

The stone was in his right hand. His left hand was open on the blanket, palm down, and with each number the forefinger lifted and came down again, very small, as if he were pressing something.

Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine. Forty.

He stopped.

Not the counting. Him.

It was the second time. She had seen it once, on the twenty-seventh of last month, with a block in his hand, and once was enough to know it the second time. His mouth was a little open on the next number. His forefinger was up off the blanket and stayed up. His face had turned away from the north wall, where the bell was, to the left, to the window, to the east, and his eyes were open and did not blink and were not on anything in the room.

The bell went on.

Hesper counted. She did not count the bell. She counted as she had counted the first time, slow, one to herself and then the next, in her own time, her own breath, not keeping to anything outside.

Four. Five.

The bell went on past her count. She felt it going past, strokes she wasn’t counting, falling into the room and through it.

Eight. Nine. Ten.

Eleven.

His forefinger came down on the blanket.

"Forty-one," he said.

Then on. Forty-two, forty-three, in time with the bell, the same as before, as if nothing had happened. As if the bell had waited for him. It had not waited. Hesper sat with the pencil and knew, as you know a sum is wrong before you’ve found where, that while he had been gone the bell had rung a good many more strokes than one, and he had come back and picked up the next number after forty as if no time at all had gone by.

The boy didn’t know. That much was plain. He was counting carefully, as he did everything, and the number he said was wrong, and he had no way to know it was wrong, because the only one in the room who could have told him was her.

Hesper didn’t tell him.

The bell stopped at what he called sixty-three.

It stopped all at once, mid-swing, as if somebody had caught the rope. The silence after it was very loud. Below, voices, a lot of them, and feet going the other way now, and then a long while of nothing. The boy sat with the stone in his fist and his lips moving, and then stopped moving them, and then said, "Sixty-three," again, aloud, to make sure of it.

"Is that all of it?" he said.

He had asked her that on her first night, with nothing in the book. She had answered it then. She still did not know what it was for.

"The bell’s stopped," she said. "That’s all I know."

Tianlei lay down and curled up facing the wall, the stone against his chest. His breathing went slow.

Counting aloud with the bell. Stopped at forty. Eleven by count, not timed. Face turned to the left-hand wall. East. Forefinger raised and held. Resumed at forty-one. The bell did not stop while he did. Bell stopped at what he counted sixty-three.

Then she wrote one more line.

His count of the bell is short by the strokes rung while he was stopped. Not known how many.

No blood observed.

She closed the book on the pencil and sat with it on her knees, and did not sleep, and at about the fifth hour she noticed she was counting her own breathing and made herself stop.

+++

Sera Vahn was at Halbrook, or near it.

Hesper had known that for four days, as she knew the date. It had not mattered until the gray light came in at the high window and the boy slept on and she stood up with the book and understood that there was nobody to hand it to.

The condition said Sera Vahn read each night’s page when the night was handed over. That was how it went. She wrote; Sera Vahn read; Sera Vahn said That’s right or said nothing, and once said a number had been seen before, and took nothing away and added nothing. Hesper had not known until that moment, standing by the door with the cold of the floor coming up through her stockings, how much the reading at the stove had been the thing that let her go to bed afterward.

The book went back on the shelf beside the board, because that was where it lived. Then Hesper took it down again. She stood holding it and watched the boy, asleep with his back to the room and one hand open on the blanket, the forefinger down now, resting, and thought about waking him to say she was going, and didn’t. He was four. Whatever the bell had been, he would hear about it from somebody in the barracks before noon, and it would not be her, and that was as it should be.

She turned the lamp up a little and looked at his pillow, as she did every morning, close, without touching it. Nothing on it, and nothing on his lip.

She crossed the yard with her eyes on the frozen ruts in front of her boots. There were people at the north gate, a lot of them, standing quiet in the cold. She didn’t look that way. She had never looked that way, not once since she’d had the chair, and she wasn’t going to start with the book in her arms.

The Medicine Hall was where she took it, because that was where the handover had always been, and because Mira was the one person Sera Vahn had ever told her to go to if something in that room was more than she could carry.

+++

The Medicine Hall smelled of the stove and of wet wool and of something sharp Mira used for hands. It was fuller than it should have been at that hour. Corps, mostly, sitting on the benches with their coats on, not hurt, as far as Hesper could see, only there. A woman with a slate under her arm and a gray scarf sat by the door with her eyes shut, not asleep. Somebody near the stove was saying a name quietly to somebody else, and the somebody else nodded, and the name was Pask, and Hesper didn’t know it and didn’t ask.

Kairos was not there. Hesper noticed that without knowing why she noticed it; she had seen him in the Medicine Hall only once, and that had been with Raven, and she found herself looking for him as you look for the other half of a pair.

Raven was on the bench nearest the stove.

Hesper had seen her perhaps a dozen times to speak to and a hundred across a yard. She sat propped in the corner by the stove with her hands in her lap, and her hands were wrapped. Not bandaged; wrapped, in strips of clean wool, loosely, the way you’d wrap something to keep it warm rather than to mend it. Her feet were bare and black on the soles. Mira was crouched in front of her doing something to one foot with a basin.

Raven saw the book.

The book was against Hesper’s chest, where she always carried it across the yard, and Raven’s eyes went to it and stayed.

Mira glanced up. "Hesper."

"Sera Vahn’s not here."

"No." Mira set the basin down. Her eyes went to the book too, and then to Hesper’s face, and she seemed to take a good deal from it. "Do you want me to?"

"I don’t know what I want. It’s meant to be read in the morning. That’s the condition."

"Then I’ll read it."

Mira dried her hands. Hesper held the book out, and Mira took it, and opened it at the ribbon, not anywhere else, and read the one page standing.

Mira read it twice. Her eyes went back to the top and came down again, slower, and stopped on the last lines, the line about the count being short, and stayed there.

"That’s right," Mira said. Then: "That last line."

"I didn’t count it myself."

"No. You said so. That’s why it’s right."

She closed the book and held it out, and Hesper took it back. Before she shut it again, she wrote under the last line, standing, with the pencil from the ribbon: Read by Mira. Sera Vahn away.

"Was he awake?" Raven said.

Hesper turned.

Raven hadn’t moved. She was still propped in the corner with her wrapped hands in her lap. She hadn’t said it loudly. She had said it the way you might ask whether it was still snowing.

Mira said, "Raven."

"I’m asking if he was awake. With the bell. That’s all."

"That’s in the book," Hesper said.

"I know it’s in the book."

"Then it’s not yours."

Nobody in the Medicine Hall said anything. Hesper heard the stove tick. The woman by the door with the slate had opened her eyes.

Hesper had never spoken to Raven like that, and she didn’t know where it had come from, and she was not going to take it back. She stood with the book against her chest and waited to be told she was wrong.

Raven’s eyes stayed on her. Then on the book. Then on her own wrapped hands.

"No," she said. "It isn’t."

Raven turned her face to the wall.

Mira picked up the basin again, and knelt, and took Raven’s foot back into her lap, and went on with what she’d been doing as if nothing had been said. Hesper went out.

+++

In the afternoon she slept in her clothes, and woke at dusk not knowing where she was.

The boy was sitting up when she came in, building. Not a line this time; a stack, blocks one on another, as high as he could reach from his knees on the floor, which was not very high. He counted them going on, under his breath, and stopped at twelve because there weren’t any more. The stone sat on top. He was very careful about it.

She lit the lamp and hung it, turned it down, and sat.

"The bell," he said, without looking up. "Last night."

"Yes."

"How many did it ring? Really."

Really. He’d chosen the word. She didn’t know who had taught it to him or when.

"I didn’t count the bell," she said. "I counted something else."

"I did."

"I know. I heard you."

"Sixty-three."

His eyes came up to her then, over the top of the stack, with the stone on it. He was waiting for her to say yes.

Hesper had been told one thing when they gave her the chair, and it had not been about the boy, and it had not been about bells. Write what happens, and the nothing too. Don’t write what it means. Nobody here knows what it means.

She had not been told what to say when a four-year-old held out a number and asked her if it was true.

"That’s the number you counted," she said.

He considered that. He was quiet so long she thought he might ask again, and she did not know what she would say if he did.

Then he reached up and took the stone off the top of the stack, and the stack stood, and he set the stone on the floor beside it instead, square, where it couldn’t fall. Then he went back to building, and Hesper sat in the chair by the door with the book on her knees, and watched the stone where it sat on the floor and did not fall.