Chapter 320 The Long Table

Wren counted everyone the morning after the last ship came home.

Not the ships. Not the ramps. Everyone. On Avalon. From the north wall at dawn, with Harriet singing the note louder than she'd ever sung it, out over the city and the plain and the roads and every town north and east and west, as far as it would go and further. Toby stood beside her with his fiddle under his chin, playing the counter-note under Harriet's, so it went further still. And the queens took it up, along the hello, every one, and carried it out to the edges of everything, to the towns past the ninth lake and the Reach on the far plains and Ashby under its hills by the western sea.

It came back off three and a half million people.

Wren counted until dark. She didn't stop to eat. Toby held a cup of water to her mouth at noon and she drank without opening her eyes, still counting, her lips never stopping.

When she finished she sat down on the wall.

"Three million, four hundred and eighty-one thousand, two hundred and nine," she said. "People. Not counting the broods. Not counting the babies born today. There were sixty-one of those." She opened her eyes and looked at Okafor, at the foot of the wall. "And not counting Selwyn. He's on Tally's page. He asked me not to count him with the rest yet. He said he hadn't earned it."

Okafor wrote the number on her slate.

Then she looked at it for a long time.

"We were forty," she said. "In the canyon. At the start."

"Forty-one," said Wren. "With you."

That was the morning Okafor said she was stepping down.

Not from the war. Not from the ships, or the Hands, or the place under the ring. From the rest of it. She said it in the map room, with everyone there, standing at the head of the table with the new slate on the wall behind her that said Every one.

"I'm a soldier," she said. "I was a sergeant in a training hall. I've been running this place because there was nobody else, and because when it was forty people in a canyon running it and fighting the war were the same thing." She put both hands flat on the table. "They're not the same thing any more. There are three and a half million people on Avalon who didn't come here to be soldiers. They came for a sky. They'll want roads and schools and water and someone to complain to about the neighbour's dog." She looked at Voss, by the door. "And I'm not the person to listen. I don't listen. I give orders."

Nobody said anything.

"So I'd like someone else to run it," said Okafor. "Not one person. I've seen what one person in a chair does." She didn't look at Voss. She didn't need to. "Something else. I don't know what. I'd like you all to work it out." She picked up her slate. "And I'd like it worked out before the Hands come. Because when they come, I'll be on the Scarecrow. And so will half the people in this room. And somebody has to be here, deciding things, who isn't us."

It took three weeks.

Not to decide. To argue. Holt said that was the right way round. "Anything decided in three days," he said, "falls down in three years. Anything argued about for three weeks might last." He leaned on his stick, the one he didn't need. "I'd give it three months if we had them."

We didn't have them.

So for three weeks, every evening, the map room was full. Then the map room was too small, and Holt said he'd always hated the door, and we moved it out onto the green under the silver tree. And then the green was too small. People came from everywhere. From the new city and the old. From Carver's square in the north and the Reach on the far plains and Stillwater on its clear lake. They walked, or rode, or came on Keir's carts, which weren't nearly enough. And they sat on the grass in the evening under the tree, thousands of them, and listened, and argued.

Voss wrote it all down.

Every word. In the book. Sitting at a small table at the edge of the green with a lamp, the way she'd sat in the room at the end of the arrivals hall. She didn't say anything. Not once. In three weeks. People kept looking at her, waiting for her to say something. Expecting it. She'd run four million people for twenty years.

She wrote it down.

"It isn't mine to say," she told me. On the fourteenth evening. When I asked. "I said a great deal, for a long time, in a chair. Most of it was wrong." She turned a page. "I'd like to listen. And write it down right. So that whatever they decide, they can read back what they said when they decided it."

Here's what they decided.

Not one person. Not a chair.

A table.

Long. Very long. Under the silver tree in the square, in the open, where anyone could come and stand and listen. And at it, one seat for every town. Carver, and Stillwater, and Ashby, and the Reach, and all the towns that had grown up north of the ninth lake and along the river and out on the eastern plains. One seat for the new city. One for the old one, Scarecrow, the canyon, the forty.

And one seat for every brood.

That was the part that took the longest. Nobody argued against it. Not really. But nobody knew how. How a Karst young sits at a table. How a Hesk speaks to a man from Carver about a road. How the heavy queen, who took all morning to cross the plain, could come to a meeting in the evening.

It was Hana who worked it out.

She stood up on the eleventh evening. On the green, in front of everyone. With Efua on one hip, shouting at a pigeon, and Kwame in a sling on her chest, watching everything.

"You're thinking about it wrong," she said.

Thousands of people turned to look at her. She didn't go red. She used to. She'd have gone red to the ears, once, a long time ago, before I put my hands on her head and found the place where the words had gone and asked them to come back. She didn't now. She just stood there with her children and looked at all of them.

"You keep saying how will the broods sit at the table," said Hana. "As if the table's the thing. As if they have to come to it." She shifted Efua on her hip. "My father turned a river his whole life. He never once asked the river to come to him. He went to the river." She looked at the silver tree. "Don't make the queens come to the table. Bring the table to the queens."

Nobody said anything.

"Every brood has someone who can hear them," said Hana. "Juno. Lucas. Dory. Genny. The children. Half the children on Avalon can hear a queen now. Every child born to a finished parent." She put her hand on Kwame's head. "So give every brood a seat. And put someone in it who can hear that brood's queen. Not to speak for her. To carry what she says. And carry back what everyone else says." She looked at me. "Like you do. On the green. When you sat with Dory on your knee and said what every queen said, one after another, till dark."

So that was the table.

A seat for every town. A seat for every brood, with someone in it who could hear. And once a month, under the silver tree, everyone sat down. And anyone on Avalon who wanted to could come and stand on the green and listen.

They needed someone at the head. Not to decide. To keep order. To say you've had your turn, let her speak. To read out what had been decided at the end.

They asked Holt.

He said no.

"I'm too old," he said. "And I ran the city. I'd run the table like I ran the city. I'd want everything in its place." He leaned on his stick. "You need somebody who doesn't."

They asked Pell.

Pell said no too. Very firmly. In her best coat. "I have horses to see to," she said. "And towns. Somebody has to tell them their doors are good."

In the end it was Kwame. Hana's father. Who'd turned rivers. Who'd stood at the top of the canyon and told me I couldn't do it all again. Who'd told Stillwater's black lake that rivers go somewhere.

He said yes. On the condition that nobody called him anything.

"Not Chair," he said. "Not Chancellor. Not anything. I'm Kwame. I sit at the end and I say your turn." He looked at the long table under the silver tree. "Water doesn't need a title to know where it's going."

Voss sat at the other end.

Not as a seat. As a clerk. With her book. Writing everything down.

The table asked her to. On the first evening it sat. Kwame said it, from the head, before anything else. "Renata. Will you write it? Every word. Right."

Voss looked at him for a long time.

"Yes," she said. "I'd like to."

The first thing the table ever decided was about a road.

Not a big road. A small one. The one I'd laid from the new city east toward the Reach, just enough to walk on. It went round the Hesk sunning ground. I'd made it go round, the way the council on the green had said, the season before, when the Hesk asked why there were roads across the place where their young lay in the first light and grew.

The Reach wanted it straight.

Their seat said so. A big man, a shepherd, with his hat in his hands. He said the road went eleven miles out of its way round the sunning ground, and the Reach had sheep to move, and old people who couldn't walk eleven extra miles, and he didn't see why it couldn't go through. Just a narrow road. Just for walking. The Hesk wouldn't notice.

Kwame, at the head, said, "Your turn," to the Hesk seat.

The Hesk seat was a boy.

Eleven or twelve. From the third crossing. Born on Avalon to a mother Ruth had finished on the ward, with silver round his eyes and markings up his arms like the scales on a Hesk's back. He'd been able to hear the Hesk queen since he could walk. He sat very straight in the big chair at the long table with his feet not touching the ground.

He shut his eyes. For a long time.

Then he opened them and looked at the shepherd from the Reach.

"She says she understands about the old people," he said. "She says her old ones can't walk far either." He paused. Listened. "She says a road through the sunning ground would be like a road through a cradle." Another pause. "She says if the Reach needs a straight road for its old people, she'll carry them."

The shepherd stared at him.

"Carry them," he said.

"Across the sunning ground," said the boy. "On their backs. In the morning, when the young are lying out and it's warm and everyone's slow." He listened again. "She says the Hesk like being warm and slow. She says having an old person on your back in the morning sun would be very pleasant. She says her young would like to meet them."

Nobody at the long table said anything.

Then the shepherd from the Reach put his hat back on his head. Very slowly.

"Well," he said. "I'll ask them."

Voss wrote it down.

The Hesk carried the old people of the Reach across the sunning ground every morning after that, for as long as anyone could remember. In the first light. Slowly. With the young lying out all round them in the warm. The old people said it was the best part of the day. Some of them started going even when they didn't need to cross.

And then there was the rest of it.

Okafor had said it. Roads and schools and water. Three and a half million people on a world with a sky, in a hundred crooked towns, with almost nothing between them but the first roads I'd laid, just enough to walk on.

Luna stood in front of the big map in the map room on the night after the table first sat. With her pen. Looking at all of it.

"We need everything," she said.

"I know."

"No," said Luna. "Everything. Lucas. Look." She put her pen on the map. On Carver, far in the north, past the ninth lake. "Carver can grow food. They were farmers before the dome. They've got seeds from the ark and the best soil on Avalon. But they're nine hundred miles from anyone who needs the food." She moved the pen. To Ashby, in the west, by the sea. "Ashby can dig. They're miners. There's iron in their hills. And something else, they say, black, that burns. But they can't eat iron." She moved it again. To Stillwater. "Fish. Reeds. Boats." To the Reach, on the far eastern plains. "Grazing. Hana's horses. The sheep from the last crossing. Wool." She put the pen down. "And none of them can get to each other. It's three weeks on foot from Carver to Ashby. More."

I looked at it.

At all of it. At the hundred towns. At the empty space between them.

"I could make it," I said. "Roads. All of them. In a season."

"I know you could," said Luna. "And then what?"

I knew what she meant.

Pell had taught me. With her hand on a doorframe that was too perfect. Ruth had taught me, with two hundred identical clamps and a hospital that had to work when I wasn't in it. Kwame had taught me at the top of the canyon. Make the big ones. The ones nobody else can. Then show the pipe man where they are. And let him make the rest.

I'd be on the Scarecrow soon. When the Hands came. For however long it took. And after that, the place under the ring. Fifty-eight thousand children. And after that, the war, which wasn't over. Which Okafor said would take twenty years.

And every road I made would need mending. Every bridge would need someone who knew how to fix it. Every cart would break.

"The big ones," I said. "Just the big ones. And then we teach everyone else."

"Yes," said Luna. And picked up her pen.

So I made the big ones.

Not roads. Not first. Luna said roads were for carts, and carts were for horses, and there weren't enough horses on Avalon for three and a half million people if Hana bred them for a hundred years. Keir said that was true. Keir said roads would come. But first, something that could carry a whole town's grain in one go, from Carver to the coast, without a single horse.

"Rails," he said.

He drew it in chalk on the red glass. The way he'd drawn the Scarecrow, and the Ground. So big you had to stand on the porch to see it. Two long lines of iron, side by side, a little more than a man's stride apart, going away across the plain toward the horizon. And on them, a box on wheels. And in front of the box, an engine, which was a fire in an iron belly that boiled water, and the steam pushed, and the wheels turned.

"No queen," he said. "No silver. Nothing you need to ask. Just fire and water and iron. Anybody can run it. Anybody can fix it." He looked at me. "I found the drawings in the old suit bay. Odell had them. From before the war. From before the domes. He said his grandfather drove one."

"Where does the fire come from?"

"Ashby," said Keir. "The black stuff in their hills. That burns."

I made the first line in eleven days.

From the city, across the plain, past the seventh lake, north. Toward Carver. Nine hundred miles. Not all at once. A hundred miles a day, more or less, flying low over the red glass and the grass and the scrub beyond it, asking the iron under the ground to come up and lie down in two long straight lines on a bed of stone, exactly a man's stride apart, all the way to the horizon. Bridges over the rivers. A cut through the hills past the ninth lake, through the old grey-black rock that didn't mind. Every hundred miles, a station. A platform, and a water tower, and a store for the black fire from Ashby.

Bram walked the first hundred miles behind me with his list.

"Your water towers are too tall," he said. At the first one.

"How tall should they be?"

"Shorter," said Bram. "So a man can climb them with a spanner when they leak. Which they will." He made a note. "And the next one."

I made them shorter.

Odell built the engine.

In the old forge. Father's forge, the one I'd built a copy of at the edge of Scarecrow a long time ago, the one with the floor Dot had looked under. Odell stood in it with his burned hands and his grandfather's drawings and three hundred people from the north rim mining domes who knew iron, and built an engine.

By hand.

Not by asking. With hammers. With files. With a furnace Sera stoked when it needed to be hotter than coal could make it, and then stood back from and let them do the rest. It took them two months. It wasn't perfect. The boiler leaked at one seam. Odell said that was fine. Odell said the first boiler he ever built leaked at the same seam, and he'd known exactly where to look for the rest of its life.

"Like Keir's gear," I said. "With the wide tooth."

"Like suit three," said Odell. "With the holes."

The first train left the city on a morning in late summer.

Everyone came. Of course they did. Everyone came to everything. They stood along the line for miles out of the city, on the red glass, on the grass, on the low hills past the seventh lake, to watch it go. Thousands. Tens of thousands. The broods came too. The Teeming along the rim. The Kethri overhead in their ranks. The Hesk, lying in the sun beside the rails with their jaws on the ground, very interested.

The engine was black. Iron. Odell's. With the leaking seam. With a long line of boxes behind it, empty, because the first train was going north to Carver to bring back grain.

And on the side, in gold, in Garnet's hand, a name.

Nobody had told her what to call it. She'd climbed up on Keir's tallest ladder the night before, with the old brown dog barking at the bottom, and painted it.

THE PIPE MAN.

Bram stood at the foot of the platform and looked at it for a long time.

"That's not funny," he said.

"It's a little funny," said Garnet.

Bram's face did something complicated.

"It's a little funny," he admitted.

Odell drove it.

Of course he did. In his old coat, with his burned hands on the levers, and a girl from the north rim beside him to learn. Her name was Mira Lisk, and she'd worked the ore lifts in the north rim mines since she was twelve, and she'd asked Odell, on the first day in the forge, very bluntly, whether she could drive it when it was done. Odell had looked at her for a long time and said you'll have to learn it first, and she'd said then teach me.

He'd taught her.

She stood beside him in the cab with her hand on the brake lever, very straight, very serious. Hana stood on the platform below, with Efua and Kwame, and called up to her.

"Are you frightened?"

"No," said Mira Lisk. Then: "Yes. A little."

"Good," said Hana. "That means you'll pay attention."

Odell pulled the whistle.

It screamed. Long and high and enormous, across the plain, off the rim, off the canyon walls. Every bird on Avalon went up at once. Every Kethri in the ranks overhead flinched. The Hesk lying beside the rails all lifted their heads at the same time.

And from under the plain, very faint, very far down, through the ground, I heard the Karst young sing it back.

The train went north.

Slowly at first. Then faster. Then very fast, faster than anything on wheels I'd ever seen, faster than a horse, with the steam pouring out of the top of the engine in a long white plume and the boxes clattering behind. Along the rails I'd made, across the plain, past the seventh lake, toward the hills.

People ran beside it. Children, mostly. Dory with Pebble. Ash, who ran with her hinge face on, deciding whether the train deserved an explanation. Pip Calder, who ran faster than any of them, all the way to the first bend, shouting.

It went out of sight past the first hill.

The plume of white steam went on for a long time after.

"Three days," said Keir. Beside me on the platform. Watching it go. "To Carver. Three days, instead of three weeks." He wiped his hands on the rag that always made them worse. "And back with enough grain for the whole city for a month."

"And then?"

"And then another line," said Keir. "To Ashby. For the black fire. And the iron. And then one to Stillwater, for the fish. And one to the Reach, for the wool." He looked at me. "You make the big ones. The rails. The bridges. The cuts through the hills." He smiled. "And then Odell builds the engines. And Mira Lisk learns to drive them. And she teaches the next one. And when you're on the Scarecrow, they keep running."

That was the season.

Not the war. Not the Hands. The Hands were coming. The heavy queen listened every night, through her young, and every morning she told Dot, and every morning Dot told Okafor, very quietly, at the foot of the steps of Scarecrow, before the count.

They have not left the ring. They are slow. They are old. The keeper is waking them a little at a time.

Not yet.

Not yet.

And in between, Avalon built.

I made the big ones. Rails, north and west and east and south. Four lines going out from the city like the spokes of a wheel. Like Garnet's drawing of the nine. Bridges over every river. Cuts through every range. Stations every hundred miles.

And at every station, people came and built a town round it.

The broods built too. That was what I hadn't expected. The Hesk came down to the line to Ashby on the third week and lay beside the rails in the sun. And then got up, one morning, all at once, and went down into the cut through the western hills and started digging. Not for me. Not because anyone asked. The Hesk queen's kiln-glow, the heat she'd carried in her since her world, went into the clay at the bottom of the cut. And when the Hesk came up again, there were bricks. Hundreds. Thousands. Baked hard and red in the queen's heat, stacked very neatly beside the line, waiting.

The people of Ashby built their station out of them.

The Karst helped too. Under the ground. Where Bram's pipes went. The Karst young could hear water through rock. They could hear where it was, and where it was going, and where it was leaking. Bram started taking a Karst young with him every time he went to look at a pipe. It rode on his shoulders, its fine hairs all turned toward the ground. It would tell him, through the girl from Carver who could hear the Karst queen, exactly where to dig.

"Thirty-one years," said Bram, "I spent looking for leaks with a lamp and a stick." He reached up and patted the Karst young on his shoulders. It hummed. "I've been wasting my life."

The Kethri carried the post. Every morning, from the city, in every direction, along the rails, faster than any train. Messages from the table. Letters. Small parcels. Seeds. Sesh organized it. She said her people had carried things for the Sorn for a very long time, in collars, because they were told to. She said they'd like to carry things now because someone asked.

And the salt young, on their terrace, found that if you dried the fish from Stillwater in their salt, it kept. All winter. All year. Without anyone needing to ask the cold rock to stay cold.

Ruth sent hospitals.

Not buildings. People. She stood in the records room with the big map Luna had copied for her, and put a pin in every town on it that had more than ten thousand people, and then went down the ward and asked.

Neve Ashworth went to Carver. With a crate of the brood books, blue and grey and green, and the new grey book about housings with G. Dask, G. Dask at the bottom of every page, and two of the young doctors from the Program floors, and the woman from the lower floors who'd been answering forty-one questions a night since she was twenty. She stood on the platform at the city with her coat buttoned wrong and her crate at her feet and waited for the train.

Ruth came to see her off.

"You'll get it wrong," said Ruth.

"I know," said Neve.

"Write it down. What you did, and what you forgot. Read it every year."

"I know."

Ruth looked at her for a long time. Then she reached out and undid the top button of Neve's coat, and did it up again. Wrong. In the same hole as before.

"There," she said. "Now go."

Hana bred horses.

Not just bred. She went to the long low barn past the orchards by the seventh lake, every morning, where the eleven horses with hair on their feet had come off the last crossing with the old woman whose family had kept them for four generations. She worked with the old woman. And with Rory's sheep. And the goats. She learned the names of every animal on Avalon. She wrote them down in a book, the way Ruth wrote everything. And when the line to the Reach was finished, and the far eastern plains opened up, green and empty and going further than the Hesk had ever gone, she took Bess and four of the others out there on the train, and stood on the platform at the first station, and looked at all that grass.

"There's room," she said. To me. With Efua on her hip and Kwame in his sling. "There's room for a thousand horses. Ten thousand." She looked at Bess, standing on the platform with her hairy feet very square, looking at the grass with great interest. "Somebody needs to be out here. To start it. To make it work when nobody's there to ask."

I didn't say anything.

"I'd like it to be me," said Hana. "For a while. A season. With the old woman, and the children." She looked at me. "You'll be on the Scarecrow. When they come."

"Yes."

"Then I'll be here," said Hana. "Making something that runs without you." She almost smiled. "Ruth taught you that. Pell taught you that. I'm learning it too."

On the last evening of the season, the long table sat under the silver tree.

All of it. Every seat. Every town. Every brood. Kwame at the head, saying your turn. Voss at the foot, with her book.

And I stood at the edge of the green and listened.

They talked about the rails. About Ashby's black fire, and whether there was enough. About a school in the Reach that didn't have a teacher. About the moth young, who'd asked through the boy from the new city who could hear the moth queen, very politely, whether the trains could stop blowing their whistles past the dark grove at night. The table said yes. Voss wrote it down.

About a girl in Stillwater who'd been born with silver round her eyes and markings up her arms and could talk to the clear lake. About the Drenn, who'd asked whether there was anything on the new eastern plains that needed standing in front of. About a man from Carver who'd built the first windmill on Avalon out of the iron from the old Carver filter, the one Father fixed, that they'd brought with them after all, in pieces, because the old man with the cane had said leave it running and then, on the ramp, changed his mind.

He'd died in the spring. The old man. Carver said. In a chair in the square, in the sun, under the sky. Looking up.

The table was quiet for a moment.

Then Kwame, at the head, said, "Your turn," to the next seat.

And it went on.

I walked home late.

Down the street to the crooked house at the end, with its five beds and the extra rooms we'd added and the extra rooms after that. Past Father's house, at the end of the next street, with its field, and its scarecrow, and the blue scarf at its neck, faded nearly white.

Dot was at the foot of the steps. Counting everyone up.

"Operator," she said. "This unit has a message. From the heavy queen."

I stopped.

"She says," said Dot. Very quietly. In the heavy queen's slow way. "They have left the ring."

I didn't say anything.

"The three Hands," said Dot. "Old. Slow. Heavy. Full of children who have been taught not to want to go anywhere." A pause. "They are going to the human world. Where the tokens called." Another pause. "They will take a long time. They are very heavy. But they are moving."

"How long?"

"Not long enough," said Dot. For the heavy queen. "She says: not long enough. But long enough to be there first."

Dot's grille brightened, very slightly.

"This unit would like to add something," she said. "From this unit."

"Go on."

"This unit has counted everyone up the steps of Scarecrow every evening since the hut," said Dot. "This unit has counted forty, and then more, and then two hundred thousand, and then three and a half million, because the steps of Scarecrow are now every door on Avalon." Her hands unfolded. One. Then another. "This unit will be counting them all every evening the operator is away. This unit would like the operator to know that. So the operator does not worry about who is counting."

"Thank you, Dot."

"This unit would also like," said Dot, "to count the operator up the steps. At the end. When it is done."

"Yes," I said.

Not I will.

Yes.

Days 2325–2410. The long table.

Wren counted three million four hundred and eighty-one thousand two hundred and nine; we were forty-one in the canyon, with Okafor. Okafor stepped down from everything but the war. After three weeks of argument on the green, a long table under the silver tree: a seat for every town, and, Hana's idea, a seat for every brood with someone who can hear its queen. Kwame sits at the head saying your turn and won't take a title; Voss writes it all down. Luna asked what comes after I make the roads. So: the big ones only. Rails north to Carver; Odell built the first engine by hand from his grandfather's drawings, boiler leaking at one seam; Garnet named it The Pipe Man; Mira Lisk from the north rim drives it. The Hesk bake bricks, Karst young find Bram's leaks, the Kethri carry the post, the salt young keep the fish. Hana is starting horses on the eastern plains. Then the heavy queen, through Dot: the Hands have left the ring. Not long enough, but long enough to be there first.