Chapter 281 Under the Tree

Pebble brought Mother a second stone the next morning.

He was on his step at the bottom of our porch before anyone was up. I know, because I was up, because I hadn't slept, because it was the first night in a year and a half that my mother had been asleep in the same house as me and I couldn't stop listening to her breathe through the wall.

She came out onto the porch just after first light. In the blue silk dressing gown. With her hair loose and her grey streak bright and her feet bare on the boards, because the porch floor was warm and she'd discovered it the night before and said oh in a voice that made Sera laugh.

She saw Pebble.

Pebble stood up. Unhurried. On his short legs. And came forward, off his step, with a stone in his forelimb. Smooth. Round. Darker than the first one.

Mother didn't flinch.

I watched for it. I think she did too. She stood very still at the top of the porch steps with her hands at her sides, and I saw her decide not to. The way you'd decide not to step back from an edge.

Then she came down the steps.

All the way down. Onto the street. And knelt. The way she had the day before, in the silk dressing gown, so that her face was level with his.

And held out her hand.

Pebble put the stone in it.

Mother looked at it for a long time. Then she put it in the pocket of her dressing gown, with the first one. I heard them click together.

"Thank you," she said.

Pebble didn't understand the words. Dot wasn't there to translate. But he looked at her for a long moment, with his flat head tilted the way he tilted it at Dory. Then he turned and went back to his step and sat down on it, the way a dog sits down when it's decided something.

Mother stayed kneeling in the street.

"He's going to do this every day," she said. Not to me. To the street. "Isn't he."

"Yes," I said, from the top of the steps.

"I'm going to need a bigger pocket."

I finished the rest of them that week.

The thirty-one. The ones Okafor's list hadn't reached yet, on the dawns before the Hand came. Eleven light-years away, I'd only been able to open a few doors a morning, even with the first queen holding the hello wide. Mother, Maura, Rory, Ines, Kwame, Adaeze. A handful of others. The ones at the front of Okafor's line.

The rest were still cut.

They were here now.

Okafor brought them to the medical building one at a time, in her order. Not the order I'd have picked. The order she'd picked twenty years ago in a flat on Earth, sitting up at night with a list. The sickest last. Bram Hollis, who'd been dying slower since the hello began, was near the end.

"Why?" I asked her. Not arguing. Asking. The way Okafor said you asked.

Okafor looked at me over the top of her slate.

"Because the ones at the front have to fight," she said. "And the ones at the back have to be alive when the fighting's over." She put the slate down. "Bram's been dying for twenty years, Dask. He knows how to do it slowly. He can do it for one more week while you fix the people who'll be standing between him and whatever comes next."

I didn't say anything.

"And then," said Okafor, "you'll fix him. And he'll sit in the sun on your porch and watch the Teeming go by, and he'll be the last one, and he'll know he was the last because he was the one we were all fighting for." She picked the slate up again. "That's not the back of the line, son. That's the middle of it."

It was easier, in a room.

I'd done it down a thread for weeks. Eleven light-years, through the spine-queen, through the first queen, through Dory, through Mother. Listening first, and then helping, one door at a time, and then all at once, when the hello was wide enough.

In a room, with someone's hand in mine, it was like breathing.

They came in frightened. Most of them. They'd been on the Retention list for twenty years. They'd had the stabilizer in a dish on the first of every month, and then they hadn't, and then something bright had said their names every morning at dawn, and then a woman they'd known in the program dormitories had held three men in the air in a retired Major's flat. And then a Hand. And then a battlefield. And then the dark of a first finger for longer than anybody wanted to count. And then a red glass world with a blue sky and creatures on the canyon rim that most of them had last seen coming through the walls of a city.

They came in frightened, and they sat down on Edda's bed, and they held out their hands.

And I listened.

And I helped.

And they went out of the medical building with their hands still, and the silver round their eyes, and the markings coming up their arms. Not lines, not branches, not curves. Every one different. Every one theirs.

Edda wrote every one in her green book.

By the end of the week she'd stopped writing impossible. She'd started writing of course.

Bram Hollis was last.

Okafor brought him herself. On her arm. He was very thin and very slow and very old, older than anyone else on the list, and he didn't hold out his hand when he sat down on Edda's bed. He held out both.

"Major says you'll want my heart first," he said. His voice was a whisper. "She says that's where you start."

"Yes."

"Then start," said Bram Hollis. "I've been waiting for twenty years. I'd quite like to stop."

I started.

His heart first. Then out. The way I'd done Jessa, and Mother, and everyone. Listening. Then helping. All of it, all at once, because there was nothing in the way any more and no thread to thin.

When I'd finished, he didn't say anything for a long time.

Then he looked down at his hands. At the silver markings coming up from his wrists. Small round shapes, very regular, like the rings in a tree.

"Huh," he said.

And then, very quietly, to Okafor, who was standing in the doorway with her slate:

"You were right, Maris. About the middle."

Toby and Wren were married on the seventh day.

Under the tree.

The tree we didn't move. The one in the middle of the square, with silver bark that peeled in long curls and leaves like small hands that turned to follow the sun. Where Dov and Priya had been married. Where the queen had come to the wall and Sesh had stood at the edge of the square and said the tree is very beautiful.

Toby had said when Mum's here.

Mum was here.

They didn't ask Holt.

Wren had thought about it. She'd told me so, on the north wall, the night before, with her book shut on her knee and her hand on her stomach. Fourteen weeks now, or near enough. She'd sat there a long time, not counting anything, which wasn't like Wren.

"Holt married Dov and Priya," she said. "He'd do it. He'd do it well."

"But?"

"But I'd like to ask someone else." She looked north. "Someone who knew Toby when he was being sick behind the tower every morning. Who made him come back anyway." A pause. "Someone who gave him back to me."

I knew who she meant.

So did Toby.

So, when they asked, did Okafor.

She stood at the edge of our kitchen with her slate in one hand and her other hand behind her back, and listened to Wren ask, very formally, every word in order, the way Wren did things. And when Wren had finished, Okafor didn't say anything for a long time.

"I've never married anyone," she said.

"Holt said that," said Wren. "Then he did it."

Okafor looked at her.

Then at Toby, who was standing very straight beside Wren with his hands at his sides, open, the way they were when he was about to put up a wall.

"Marsh," said Okafor.

"Ma'am."

"You threw up behind the tower every morning for the first month of live drills."

"Yes, ma'am."

"And you came back every morning."

"Yes, ma'am."

Okafor put down her slate.

"Then I suppose," she said, "I can stand under a tree for an afternoon."

Everyone came.

Of course they did. Everyone came to everything now. The whole of Scarecrow, and the three hundred and six, and the Teeming along the rim and on the terraces and in the courts. The queen at the garden wall, at her full height, the way she'd been at Dov and Priya's. The Overseer at the mouth of the meeting passage, holding its bread, not close.

Sesh came. With the youngest queen on her back, and the other Kethri round her, all with their wings now, all grey and copper. All but one place in the ring of them, which they kept open, very deliberately, the way you'd leave a chair at a table for someone who wasn't coming.

The Hesk didn't come into the city. There were too many, and the old one had told them about the deep country under the eastern ranges, and they were leaving in a few days to go and see it. But they'd come as far as the plain. Ten thousand of them, on the red glass beyond the canyon, lying down in the afternoon sun with their jaws on the ground. Rory said they liked the warmth. Rory went down to see them every evening. He said they were the best listeners he'd ever met.

And people dressed up.

The way they had for Dov and Priya. Clean, mostly, and mended. The three hundred and six had brought what they could carry from the dome, and some of it was good. Maura had a dress. A real one. Blue. She'd worn it at her own wedding, she said, a very long time ago, and kept it in a box under the bed on Hearth Block for all the years since, and carried it eleven light-years in the dark of a first finger because she'd had a feeling.

Mother didn't dress up.

She wore the blue silk dressing gown. Over a plain shirt and trousers that Sera had lent her, because Mother had brought almost nothing from the penthouse. She said the dressing gown was the only thing she owned that she'd chosen herself. She said she'd worn it on every call home so I'd always know it was her.

She had Dory on her hip.

Dory hadn't left her since she came down off the palm. Not willingly. Risa had taken her back that first night and Dory had cried until Mother came in from the garden wall. The next morning she'd walked across the porch on her own two feet, straight past Risa, straight past me, to Mother's chair, and held up her arms.

Risa had laughed until she cried.

"Mine for nearly two hundred days," she'd said. "And then one look."

"She's not leaving you," Mother had said, with Dory on her lap and her face very gentle. "She's just found somewhere new to sit."

Thorne made the bread.

Nobody asked him to. He'd been in Priya's kitchen since the day after the Hands landed, with his daughter and her sack of starter, and Priya had looked at him the first morning with her arms folded and her mouth very tight, because Priya's kitchen was Priya's kitchen and nobody went in it without asking.

He'd asked.

He'd stood at the kitchen door with flour in the creases of his knuckles and asked, very quietly, if there was anything he could do. And Priya had looked at his hands, and at the sack of starter in his daughter's arms, and at his face.

And said: Can you do rye?

He could do rye.

By the seventh day, Priya and Thorne and Thorne's daughter had made enough bread for every person in Scarecrow and ten thousand Hesk and as many Teeming as wanted any. Which turned out to be most of them. Priya made the cake. Three layers. The way she'd made it for her own wedding. She said there were rules about cakes, and three layers was one of them.

Thorne brought the first loaf out of the kitchen himself.

He carried it across the square, through the crowd, past the tree, to where Mother was standing with Dory on her hip.

He stopped in front of her.

He didn't say anything.

Neither did Mother.

He held out the loaf.

Mother looked at it for a long time. At the bread, still warm, still smelling of the oven. At the flour on his knuckles. At his face, which was very grey and very frightened and very determined.

She took it.

"Thank you," she said.

Thorne nodded. Once. And went back to the kitchen.

Mother stood under the tree with Dory on one hip and a warm loaf of rye bread in her other arm and didn't move for a long moment.

Then she broke off a corner of the loaf and gave it to Dory.

Dory turned it into a strawberry.

Mother laughed.

Toby's mother sang.

That was what Toby had said, on our porch, the night they announced it. Somebody else'll have to play. I'll be busy. Maybe Mum. She sings better than I play.

So she sang.

Adaeze Marsh, very small, in a dress the colour of the inside of a shell that she'd made herself in the first finger out of a blanket somebody had given her. She stood at the edge of the square, by the kitchen, and when Okafor came out to stand under the tree, she started.

Not the old song. Not the four notes she'd sung to Toby on the hello, the song for a baby in a ward where nobody was allowed to wake.

Something else.

Something I'd never heard. Low and warm and slow, the way Toby's note was low and warm and slow when he carried the hello. A song from the lower floors of the dome, Toby said afterward. A song people sang at weddings there, when there was nothing else to give.

And the whole of Scarecrow went quiet.

The Teeming on the rim went still. The Hesk on the plain lifted their heads. The queen at the garden wall lowered her great head to the top of the wall and closed her eye.

And then, under it, very softly, the queens began to hum.

Not the lullaby. Not the hello. Just the note under Adaeze's song. Carrying it. The way Toby carried everything.

Our queen. The old one, far off on the mountain. The first queen, from the Hand on the plain, with her daughter in her palm. The second queen beside her. The spine-queen, high overhead in the Meridian, with dozens of new pieces of queens singing in her walls.

And Toby's mother sang over all of them, very small, in her blanket dress, with tears running down her face.

Wren came down the street.

Not from the house. From the north wall. She'd said she would. She'd said that was where she'd been, every morning, for as long as anyone could remember, facing north, and if she was going to walk to Toby from anywhere, it would be from there.

She came down off the wall and along the street and into the square with her book under her arm. Of course with her book. In a dress Luna had made for her, at midnight, with Sera telling her it was going wrong and Risa telling Sera to leave her alone. It was grey. It was a little crooked at the hem. Wren said she'd never liked anything as much.

And beside her, holding her arm, very straight, in her coat, with her hands folded—

Miss Pell.

Wren had asked her. That morning. On the north wall.

You're not my mother, Wren had said. I know you're not. I'm not yours. You've got Juno. A pause. But you made lemon cakes for families' day, for the cadets nobody came to see. I was one of them. I ate mine on my own on the roof. Another pause. And you came to Avalon on a transport and the first thing you did was count the young in the courts.

Will you walk with me?

Pell had looked at her for a long time.

Then she'd said, very quietly: I'd be honoured, Mara.

And Juno, beside them on the wall, had put her hand over her mouth, and said nothing at all, because there was nothing to say.

Okafor married them.

She did it the way she did everything. Plain. No decoration. She stood under the tree with her hands behind her back and no slate, for once, and she didn't make a speech.

"Marsh," she said. "Voss."

"Ma'am," they said. Both of them. At once.

"I've been asked to marry you," said Okafor. "I've never done it before. Captain Holt tells me it's quite straightforward." A pause. "I've decided he's right."

She looked at Toby.

"Do you want to marry her?"

"Yes, ma'am."

She looked at Wren.

"Do you want to marry him?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Okafor nodded. Once.

"Then you are," she said. "Write it down."

And Wren, under the tree, in a crooked grey dress, with Pell at her elbow and Toby's hand in hers, opened her book to the back page, where the column of forty names was, and below it, all the others, everyone she'd ever counted.

And wrote it down.

Marsh, Toby. Voss, Mara. Married. Under the tree.

Toby didn't put up a wall.

That was the first thing I noticed, afterward, when the square had gone loud again, and Liam was throwing small harmless fire over people's heads and Rory was shouting at him to keep his elbow up, and Garnet was floating over the crowd handing out bread.

Toby always had a wall. Round Wren. Round Sera. Round whatever he loved most, at any given moment, so that nothing could get through. Ever since the first year, when the roof came down in the queen's chamber and he held it up over seven people and a nursery of Teeming young.

He didn't have one up now.

He was standing under the tree with Wren beside him and his mother on his other side and his hands at his sides, open. Not holding anything. Not holding anything up.

I went and stood beside him. Shoulder to shoulder. The way I had on our porch the night they announced it.

"No wall," I said.

"No," said Toby.

"Why not?"

He was quiet for a long time.

"Because everyone's here," he said. "Everyone I'd put one round." He looked at Wren. At his mother. At the square, full of people. "I don't need one. There's nothing left out there that isn't in here."

I didn't say anything.

"For today," said Toby. "Just for today."

"Just for today," I agreed.

Sigmund danced with Jessa.

I want to write that down, because nobody would believe it otherwise. Not even Risa, who saw it, and stood very still with her hand over her mouth for the whole of it.

He didn't dance well. Sigmund didn't do anything badly, as a rule, but he danced like a man carrying something he was afraid of dropping. Very carefully. Very straight. With his lightning held so tight it was still.

Jessa didn't care.

She danced with her hand on his shoulder and her face turned up toward his, laughing, because he kept getting it wrong, and every time he got it wrong he went red, and every time he went red she laughed harder.

Marlo watched from the edge of the square with his terrible hair finally cut short, by Jessa, the night before, so he'd look decent.

"I'm going to have to be nice to him," he said to me. Gloomily. "For the rest of my life. Aren't I."

"Probably."

"He set a Senate order on fire to keep us on the list."

"I heard."

"He sat up every night in the first finger so she could sleep." Marlo sighed. "I can't even hate him properly. It's very annoying."

The first queen spoke at dusk.

Not to me. To Dory. Through the thread, which came down from the palm of the Hand on the plain every evening now, the way it used to come down every afternoon, and found Dory wherever she was. On Mother's hip, mostly. Under the tree.

Dory touched it.

And went very still.

Mother felt it. Of course she did. She'd held Dory all day. She went still too, and looked down at the small dark head on her shoulder, and then out, past the square, past the canyon, to the Hand on the plain.

Then at me.

"Lucas," she said. Quietly. Under the noise of the wedding. "Come here."

I came.

"Put your hand on her back."

I did.

And through Dory, through the thread, through the first queen at the bottom of ten thousand folds, I heard it.

Not the first queen's voice. Not the second's. Further. Much further. Past north. Past where Juno had ever felt anything. Past where the first queen had first heard the others singing, once the voice went quiet.

Lots of voices.

Not singing.

Talking. To each other. Low and fast and urgent, in a way I'd never heard a queen sound. The way the Teeming had sounded, the day the first Hand came down over the plain. The way a brood sounds when it knows something is coming.

They have heard, said the first queen. Very slowly. Every word right. The others. In the other Hands. They have heard about the Hesk, and the moon, and the tender, and the knuckle. They have heard that a queen stopped carrying. And then another.

And?

The first queen was quiet for a long time.

And the ones who hold them have heard too, she said.

Days 816–823. Under the tree.

Pebble brought a second stone at first light, darker. Mother, barefoot on the warm porch floor, decided not to flinch, came down, knelt, held out her hand. It clicked against the first in her pocket. Thank you. He went back to his step like a dog that has decided something. "He's going to do this every day." Yes. "I'm going to need a bigger pocket."

I finished the rest of the thirty-one that week, in Okafor's order, sickest last. Why? Because the ones at the front fight and the ones at the back must be alive when it's over. Bram's been dying twenty years; he can do it slowly one more week while you fix the people who'll stand between him and whatever comes. Then he'll sit in the sun on your porch and know he was the one we were all fighting for. That's not the back of the line, son. That's the middle of it.

In a room, with a hand in mine, it was like breathing. They came in frightened after everything, the dish and the hello and the Hand and the battlefield and the dark of the first finger and creatures on the rim they last saw coming through city walls, sat on Edda's bed, held out their hands. They went out still, silver round their eyes, markings every one their own. Edda stopped writing impossible and started writing of course.

Bram Hollis last, on Okafor's arm, holding out both hands. Major says you'll want my heart first. Twenty years; I'd quite like to stop. Markings like the rings in a tree. Huh. You were right, Maris. About the middle.

Wren on the north wall, near fourteen weeks, not counting anything: she wanted someone who knew Toby sick behind the tower every morning and made him come back, who gave him back to her. Okafor in our kitchen: I've never married anyone. Holt said that, then he did it. Marsh. Ma'am. You threw up behind the tower every morning for the first month of live drills and came back every morning. Then I suppose I can stand under a tree for an afternoon.

Everyone came. The queen at the wall, the Overseer at the passage with its bread. Sesh with the youngest queen, the Kethri all winged now, keeping one place in their ring open like a chair for someone not coming. Ten thousand Hesk on the plain in the sun before they leave for the eastern ranges; Rory visits every evening; best listeners he's ever met. Maura in the blue dress from her own wedding, kept under the bed on Hearth Block and carried through the dark because she had a feeling. Mother in the silk gown, the only thing she owns that she chose, worn every call so I'd know it was her. Dory on her hip since the palm; she walked past Risa and me to Mother's chair and held up her arms. Risa: mine for nearly two hundred days and then one look. Mother: she's just found somewhere new to sit.

Thorne asked at Priya's kitchen door if there was anything he could do. Can you do rye? Bread for everyone; Priya's cake in three layers because there are rules. He carried the first loaf across the square to Mother, grey and frightened and determined, and said nothing. She took it. Thank you. He nodded once and went back. She gave Dory a corner; Dory made it a strawberry; Mother laughed.

Adaeze sang, small, in a dress like the inside of a shell made from a blanket in the first finger: a wedding song from the lower floors for when there's nothing else to give. The rim went still, the Hesk lifted their heads, the queen laid her head on the wall and closed her eye. Then the queens hummed the note under it, ours, the old one, the first and second, the spine-queen with her new pieces. Adaeze sang over all of them, crying.

Wren came from the north wall, where she's faced every morning for as long as anyone can remember, book under her arm, in a grey dress Luna made at midnight, a little crooked at the hem; she's never liked anything as much. Pell at her arm. You're not my mother; you've got Juno; but you made lemon cakes for families' day for the cadets nobody came to see, and I was one, and ate mine alone on the roof; and on Avalon the first thing you did was count the young. Will you walk with me? I'd be honoured, Mara. Juno's hand over her mouth.

Okafor, no slate, hands behind her back: Marsh. Voss. Ma'am. Captain Holt tells me it's quite straightforward; I've decided he's right. Do you want to marry her? Yes, ma'am. Him? Yes, ma'am. Then you are. Write it down. Wren opened her book to the back page, the forty and everyone after, and wrote: Marsh, Toby. Voss, Mara. Married. Under the tree.

Toby didn't put up a wall, for the first time since the roof came down in the queen's chamber. Everyone I'd put one round is here; there's nothing left out there that isn't in here. For today. Just for today.

Sigmund danced with Jessa like a man carrying something he's afraid to drop, red every time he got it wrong, and she laughed harder every time. Risa watched with her hand over her mouth. Marlo, hair finally cut short by Jessa: I'm going to have to be nice to him for the rest of my life. He burned a Senate order to keep us on the list and sat up every night so she could sleep. I can't even hate him properly. It's very annoying.

Dusk: the thread came down to Dory on Mother's shoulder and they both went still. Put your hand on her back. Past north, past anywhere Juno has felt, past where the first queen first heard the others: lots of voices, not singing, talking, low and fast and urgent, like a brood that knows something is coming. They have heard about the Hesk, the moon, the tender, the knuckle; that a queen stopped carrying, and then another. And the ones who hold them have heard too.