Chapter 104: Eight Inches of Daylight

Theo got into the kitchen at Harrowgate and turned round twice, which used most of it.

Eight feet by ten. Two burners, one oven, and one pot big enough for twelve carters.

The panel came up on its own.

[Domestic Manager — active]

[Turnip: 61 units. Grain: 47 units. Salt pork: 31 units. Hard cheese: 4 units.]

[Fuel: adequate. Water: abundant. Labour: unassigned.]

’Yes. I noticed that as well.’

He put a pot of water on before he did anything else.

’Smell first. Four days they’ve sat in a cold room with nothing on the fire.’

Then he went out and unassigned nobody and assigned everybody.

The old sisters could peel sitting down, so they peeled, two stools pulled to the warm end of the long room and the turnip going into a bucket between them a handful at a time. Two of the children could carry one bucket between them, so they carried, water from the yard pump to the burners and back out again, slopping half of it and going faster on the second trip.

Yesh could not lift with his right arm and could count perfectly well with his mouth, so Yesh sat on a crate by the store door and counted what went out of it, out loud, every sack and every hand. Wick opened the toolroll for the first time in four days and rehung the door of the store so it shut flush, which saved a quarter of the heat in the building.

The hinge stopped whining halfway through the job and did not start again. He looked faintly amazed that anyone had asked him for anything. Steam came up off the pot and went along the ceiling, and by the second hour the whole ground floor smelled of turnip and salt pork.

By dark there was soup, and it was thin, and there was one bowl each but no second bowls.

Nobody complained about the unavailability of seconds. What Theo got instead was the sound of the room changing, forty-one people making the particular noise of people with something hot in front of them, spoons on tin, a bench shifting, somebody blowing across a bowl, and he stood in the kitchen doorway with a cloth over his shoulder and let himself have it for about four seconds.

[Note: No Investment has been detected]

[Note: These actions have no measurable return]

’You’ve done this joke.’

Much later, the girl came into the kitchen with the bowls stacked wrong, big on top of small, set them down and did not leave.

She had to go up on her toes to get the stack onto the board.

Theo scraped the pot and waited her out.

She held out until he had the pot half clean.

"Rill."

"Theo."

"Thank you for the meal, brother Theo. It’s been a while since I had such delicious food."

She picked up the cloth he had put down and started drying, badly, and he let her do it badly for a minute before he took the plate out of her hand and showed her the way round the rim, and she watched his wrist and did it again and got it right the second time.

’...She got it right the second time.’

Turning the next plate over, he asked:

"Where were you going?"

Rill tipped her head at the wall, at the north, at two miles of road and the hole in the daylight.

"Other side. My father took the mail contract at Fenn in the spring. He crossed before it shut."

She said it without any weight on it at all, and went on drying.

Theo looked at the back of her head.

[Rank Potential: A]

[Note: Never tested.]

’Was he taking her to get tested, and then the storm caught them?’

He handed her another plate.

"Do that one again. Rim first."

He went up the north road alone with a stake and a hammer once the house had gone quiet.

Two miles of it, uphill, the road frozen hard enough to ring under his boots.

The wind had dropped. Harrowgate showed two yellow windows behind him and the valley ran up ahead of him blue-white with the snow still on it, and at the top of the valley the line sat exactly where it had sat that afternoon, black and clean and perfectly still.

Theo stopped forty feet short of it.

Up close it was worse, because up close there was detail right to the edge. Half a boulder. The near rut of the cart road. A juniper with its branches going into the line and not coming out the other side, close enough that he could count the needles, and the branches on this side had frost on them and were absolutely ordinary.

He put out his hand and did not touch it. He held it there until his fingers ached with the cold and then took it back.

The road pushed its cold up through his boots. From the line, nothing came back at all.

’Genesis Eyes says there’s nothing there.’

But there was a mountain there. Theo had walked past it. It was still standing behind that.

He drove the stake into the frozen road, four strikes and a fifth to seat it, four feet out from the line, and paced it back to the boulder and counted his steps and wrote the number on the inside of his forearm with a stub of Wick’s carpenter’s pencil.

The hammer went off flat against the valley and came back once off the rock behind him.

Then he walked back down to the two yellow windows and slept four hours on the kitchen floor.

He was up the road again before the light, with the hammer still in his hand and the pencil number smudged but readable on his arm.

The valley came grey, the snow holding what light there was before the sky had any of its own. The line was where it had been, black from shoulder to shoulder of the rock, and Theo walked up the middle of the road counting his paces off the boulder, out loud, his breath going ahead of him in the cold.

He got to the number on his arm and stopped.

Then he looked up.

The stake was in front of him and about ten feet away, and eight inches of it stood in the daylight, and the rest of it did not.