Chapter 377 The Patient One

Hana's baby didn't come at ten weeks.

Or eleven. Or twelve. Or fourteen, which was when Efua and Kwame had come, and which Ruth had written on the slate in the long ward in chalk with a question mark after it, and then rubbed out, and then written again with two question marks.

At sixteen weeks Ruth stopped writing anything at all.

"It's taking its time," said Hana. In the kitchen. By the oven. With her feet up on the General's stool and her hands folded on a middle that was round and high and perfectly ordinary, the size Maura said a woman's would be at about seven months, if she were anyone but married to me. "The queen said it would."

"The queen said it wasn't in a hurry," said Ruth. "She didn't say it was going to wait for the spring."

"Maybe it is," said Hana. "Maybe it likes spring."

Everyone else was in a hurry.

That's what I remember about those weeks. That the house on the rise was louder and faster than it had ever been, and Hana sat in the middle of it by the oven with her hands folded, very still, like a stone in a river.

Corin and Thessaly were in a hurry.

They were three weeks old and looked about four months, Maura said, and Maura's seen a great many babies. They sat up on the twentieth day. Both of them. At once. In the heap in Rory's cot, with Elin and Goldie round them, and looked round the children's room as if they'd been waiting a very long time to see it from that height.

Thessaly looked at everything once. Quickly. And then looked at her brother.

Corin looked at everything slowly.

That's the thing everyone says about him. He doesn't look at things the way babies look at things. He looks the way Mother says I used to. Carefully. One at a time. A long time on each. As if he's working out how it was made and whether it could be made into something else.

He looked at the little arch in the wall beside the cot for the whole of the twentieth morning.

Thessaly let him. She sat beside him with her grey iron-sea eyes and watched him look at it, and every so often, without seeming to, she gave him something. I felt it. Very small. Very quiet. And Corin would lean a little closer to the arch.

On the twenty-first morning the arch opened. On its own. Onto the ridge on Hyrran, where the other little arch is, in the snow. And a cold wind came through it into the children's room, and Elin went a little warmer and Goldie went a little cooler, without being asked, and the room stayed April.

Corin looked at the snow through the arch for a long time.

Then he looked at me.

And asked me for something.

I still don't know what. I've stopped expecting to. I give it to him anyway. Mother says that's the only way it's ever worked, with any of them, and that she never once knew what I was asking for either.

Mother can't stop holding him.

I should write that down. Because it's true, and because it's the kind of thing that disappears if you don't write it.

She comes into the children's room at dawn, before anyone, the way she always has. She used to go to Dory first. Then Trevor, when Trevor came. Then all of them, one at a time, in order, the way I say it on the porch.

Now she goes to Corin first.

Not because she loves him more. She told me that. On the porch, on the fourth evening, very carefully, as if she were afraid I'd think it.

"I don't love him more," she said. "I want you to know that. I couldn't. I don't have more."

"I know."

"It's just—" She turned her cup. "When I pick him up, your father's there. In the room. For a minute. Looking at me the way he used to." She looked out at the seventh lake. "I haven't had that since the night he died. I didn't think I'd ever have it again." She was quiet for a long time. "I go to him first because I can't wait. That's all. Every morning, I can't wait to see him look at me like that."

I didn't say anything.

"Is that wrong?"

"No," I said. "No, Mother. It's not wrong."

She nodded.

Then she said: "He does it with you, too. Did you know? When you come into the room. He looks at you exactly the way your father looked at you. When you were small, and you'd done something, and he was trying to work out whether to say anything about it." She almost smiled. "He usually didn't. He'd just look. And then go and fix something."

And Okafor was in a hurry.

She'd said: after they're born. All three. And then the ring.

Two of the three were born. And Okafor started getting ready.

I won't write all of it. It was too much, and most of it was slates, and Okafor says the slates belong in the map room and not in a notebook. But I'll write some.

The long table met every day now. Not just Avalon. Everyone. Through the arches. The Hyrrani, with Andraste at the end of the table and Corin and Thessaly in a basket beside her chair, because she said a First Blade brings her children to the war council so they grow up knowing what one sounds like. Kyria. Teshka and her Vaeli captains. The tide queen's people from the shallow seas, through Iselle, the young one who receives, who'd learned to speak for the Lir and was very good at it. Oya, from Ammaru, with Rain beside her. The Caddi. The terrace people from the first of the fifty-seven, whose grandmothers had tied their children to posts. Every world we'd been to that wanted to come.

Forty-one worlds, round one table, in the map room on Avalon, through the arches.

Okafor sat at the head of it with the slate.

"We are going to the ring," she said. On the first day. "Not soon. Not until we're ready. But we are going. I need to know who's coming."

Every one of them said yes.

Every one.

Okafor wrote them down. Forty-one worlds. On a slate that was too small, so she wrote on the back, and then on Garnet's sheet, round the drawing of the ring, in pencil, until the ring was surrounded.

And Garnet was in a hurry.

She went up the thread on the Meridian with Ruan and Ilka. Toward the ring. Not all the way. Ruan wouldn't take her all the way; Ruan said nobody went all the way until Okafor said so, not even Garnet. But close. Closer than anyone had been. Close enough to draw it.

She was gone nine days.

Rowan went with her. Of course he did. He sharpened her pencils the whole way, Ilka said, and didn't say anything for nine days, and on the ninth night, when Garnet came back from the Meridian's window with a drawing she wouldn't show anyone, he put his arm round her and she let him.

She showed me when they came home.

It was the ring. Closer. Much closer. So close that the towers on it weren't dots any more but shapes, and the shapes had shapes in them, and Garnet had drawn every one.

"They're queens," she said. Very quietly. In the map room. Late. With Rowan behind her. "The towers. Ilka listened. Every one of them has a queen in it. In pieces. Like the voice. Like the nine trays." She put her finger on the drawing. "Thousands of towers. Thousands of queens. All in pieces. All singing." She took her finger away. "That's what holds the ring up. That's what it's made of."

I didn't say anything.

"And the children," said Garnet. "Every child that's ever gone up the thread from every tithe world. They go there. To the ring. After the sorting." She swallowed. "Ilka couldn't hear them. Not the way she hears the queens. She said it's too loud. Too many towers. Too much singing." She looked at me. "But she said they're there. She said she could feel them. Like you feel a crowd in the next room. Millions."

"Millions," I said.

"Ilka says more," said Garnet. "She says she stopped counting."

So everyone was in a hurry.

Except Hana.

Hana sat by the oven.

With her hands folded on her middle. With Efua and Kwame on the floor beside her, building things out of bread rolls, which Maura had stopped telling them not to do. With the kettle filling itself every few hours, because Efua fills cups in her sleep and has started filling kettles awake.

And she waited.

"Doesn't it make you mad?" said Risa. On the seventeenth week. On the porch. "Everyone else is going so fast. Corin and Thessaly in ten weeks. Elin and Goldie. Andraste's already back on the field with Saska. And you're still—" She waved a hand.

"Still what?"

"Waiting," said Risa.

Hana thought about it.

"No," she said. "I like it."

"You like it?"

"I like it," said Hana. She put her hand on her middle. "Everything's always so fast. Since I came to Scarecrow. Since before. The cistern. The stipend. The squads. Running. Holding the water still while someone's being born so it doesn't go everywhere. Breathing for people." She looked out at the seventh lake. "This is the first thing in my whole life that's been slow." She smiled. "I'm not in a hurry for it to stop."

Risa looked at her for a long time.

Then she lay down on the porch boards. With her head in Hana's lap. And small Sigmund's cloud, which had been hovering over Risa all evening, drifted down very gently and rained a little on Hana's feet.

"Fine," said Risa. "I'll wait too."

Hana's mother came every day.

Abena Osei. From the third-wave houses. With a basket. Through the arch on the long road that Doctor Bell had cut for the grandparents who couldn't manage the hill any more.

She sat with Hana by the oven. She didn't say much. Abena doesn't. She's small and very straight-backed, with her hair in a scarf, and she raised five children in two rooms on Harbor Block Forty-four and she says that after that nothing is ever loud enough to bother her.

She brought her mother, most days. Efua Osei. Hana's grandmother. Who's very old and very small and shouts at birds. Who walks now, on Avalon, every morning, out to Hettie's seed rows to shout at the big brown birds, with Hana's Efua holding her hand.

Two Efuas. The old one and the small one. Walking out across the plain at dawn together to shout at birds.

And Hana's father.

Kwame Osei. Who'd had a shake, on Earth, for as long as Hana could remember. Who came to Avalon and sat on the red glass and held out his hands to me and said, very quietly, can you?

I could.

He doesn't shake any more.

He sat with Hana by the oven on the sixteenth week and held out his hands, which are very still now, and Hana put hers in them. And he looked at her middle for a long time.

"Your mother took her time with you," he said.

Hana looked at him.

"Eleven days late," said Kwame. "On Harbor Block Forty-four. In the summer. With the water off on our floor and the whole block too hot to breathe." He smiled. "Your mother sat by the window for eleven days with her hands folded. Just like that. And everybody on the floor came by and told her to walk up and down the stairs, or eat something hot, or sit in a cold bath, which we didn't have." He looked at Abena. "And she said—"

"She'll come when she's ready," said Abena. From the other side of the oven. Not looking up from her basket. "She's listening for something."

Hana didn't say anything.

"And then the water came back on," said Kwame. "On our floor. The eleventh day. At dawn. You could hear it in the pipes. All through the block." He held Hana's hands. "And you came. Ten minutes later. Like you'd been waiting for it."

The water.

I should have known.

On the eighteenth week, at dawn, Hana woke up in the big bed in the house on the rise, the one Andraste built for six, between Luna and Risa, and sat up very straight.

"Lucas," she said. Very quietly.

I was awake. I'm usually awake.

"Can you hear it?" she said.

I listened.

Not with my ears. With everything. The house on the rise. The plain. The seventh lake. The queens in the hall underneath. Every atom.

And under it all. Under the house and the hall and the rise. Under the plain. So deep I'd never thought to listen for it.

Water.

There's a river under Avalon.

Nobody knew. Not Doctor Bell, not the Hyrrani who cut the hall under the house on the rise, not the old queen, who's lived on Avalon longer than anyone. Under the plain, very deep, under the rock where the old queen's hum runs, there's water. Running. Very slowly. In the dark. A long cold river that goes from under the mountains in the north all the way to somewhere under the sea in the south, and has been going for longer than there's been anyone on Avalon to hear it.

And that morning, at dawn, for the first time, it was coming up.

Not fast. Not a flood. Slowly. Through the rock. Through cracks so fine nobody had ever seen them. Up toward the hall under the house on the rise. Toward the long shallow pool along the wall where the coral queen lives.

Toward Hana.

"It's mine," said Hana. Very quietly. Sitting up in the big bed with her hands on her middle. "Isn't it. She's calling it."

I put my hand on hers.

And felt it.

The patient one. In the taste of water and air, the way Hana is. Not asking for anything. Not building anything. Listening.

Listening to the river under the world.

And the river listening back.

"Yes," I said. "She's calling it."

Hana closed her eyes.

"Then I'd like to go down," she said. "To the water."

We went down the stairs into the hall.

All of us. Of course all of us. Luna and Risa first, because they'd been in the big bed, and Sera, and Andraste, who'd been on the roof and came down through the house so fast she nearly fell on the stairs. And the children, waking one at a time in the heap in Rory's cot as we went past, and getting up, and following, because nobody in the house on the rise sleeps through anything.

And the grandparents. Mother first. Then Abena and Kwame and old Efua, through the long road arch, because Mother sent Dory running for them before we were halfway down the stairs.

Into the warm.

The hall was full of water.

Not full. Not flooded. But the long shallow pool along the wall, where the coral queen lives, was rising. Slowly. Over its edge. Onto the red stone floor. Very clear. Very cold. Coming up from underneath, through cracks in the stone nobody had ever seen, the way water comes up into a footprint on a beach.

The coral queen was lying in it with her eyes closed.

Singing.

Not to us. To the water.

It is very old, she said. When I knelt down beside her. Older than me. Older than the old queen. It has never come up before. Not once. It has been running in the dark under this world since before there were queens. She opened her eyes. Something called it. Something small. Something that listens the way water listens.

"Hana's," I said.

Yes, said the coral queen. Hana's daughter.

Hana stopped.

At the bottom of the stairs. With her hand on Luna's arm.

"Daughter," she said.

The coral queen looked at her.

I am sorry, she said. You wished not to know. The Scarecrow queen told us. I forgot.

Hana didn't say anything for a long time.

Then she laughed. Very softly. And the water on the floor of the hall, very clear, very cold, went very slightly warmer where she was standing.

"It's all right," she said. "I think I knew. I think I've known since she started listening." She looked at the water coming up through the stone. "She was always going to be a daughter. Waiting for the water to come back on."

She went into the pool.

Not deep. The pool's shallow; it's built for the coral queen, who likes to lie with her back out of the water. Waist-deep for Hana, sitting down. She went down the steps at the end, very slowly, with Luna on one side and Abena on the other, and sat down in the clear cold water that had come up from a river nobody knew was there.

And didn't make it warm.

She could have. Hana can do anything with water. She could have made the whole pool warm as a bath. She didn't. She let it be cold. The way it had come up. From the dark. From before there were queens.

"She likes it cold," she said. "She likes it the way it is."

I knelt at the edge of the pool. With my hands flat on the red stone. Holding. Every atom of the hall. The way I always do.

Andraste stood behind me. With her hand on my shoulder. Guarding the door.

Sera sat on the edge with her feet in the water and her hands on the stone and kept the air above the pool warm, just the air, so Hana wouldn't shiver.

Risa stood at the top of the steps and hushed the hall, very gently, the way her mother hushes things, so there was nothing to hear but the water coming up.

Luna knelt in the water with Hana. In the cold. Holding her hand.

And Elin and Goldie sat down at the edge of the pool. Together. Holding hands. And put their other hands flat in the water.

And didn't change anything.

They just held it. The way it was. Cold and clear. The way the baby wanted it.

It was very slow.

That's the thing. Everything else that month had been fast. Corin and Thessaly in ten weeks, in the snow, in a heartbeat. Andraste laughing on the ridge.

Hana's daughter took all day.

Halloway came down the stairs at noon and looked at the pool and the water still coming up through the floor and Hana sitting in it, very calm, with her eyes closed, and said she'd never seen anything like it, and then sat down on the bottom step and didn't say anything else for six hours.

Abena sat on the edge of the pool beside Sera. With her hands folded. Very still.

Kwame sat beside her. His hands very still.

He'd dug the north cisterns. I should write that. When the city was new and the water from the seventh lake had to go somewhere it could be kept, Kwame Osei and four hundred people who'd worked water in the dome cut three great cisterns deep under the north, through the grey-black rock. He knows Avalon's water better than anyone alive.

"I never heard it," he said. Very quietly. Watching the water come up through the floor. "Six months under the north. Forty feet down. I put my ear to every wall." He shook his head. "I never heard a thing."

"It wasn't ready to be heard," said Abena. Not looking away from her daughter in the pool.

Kwame looked at her.

"You sound like your mother," he said.

"I've always sounded like my mother," said Abena. "You just never listened."

Old Efua, on the bottom step, laughed.

Old Efua sat on the bottom step beside Halloway and, every hour or so, without warning, shouted something at the ceiling in a language nobody in the hall except Abena understood. Abena said it was what she used to shout at the pigeons. She said it meant come on, then.

At dusk the water stopped coming up.

All at once. The river under Avalon went quiet. The cracks in the red stone closed, very gently, the way a mouth closes. The pool stopped rising.

And the hall went very still.

Hana opened her eyes.

"Now," she said.

She came at the first star.

I know because Garnet was at the top of the stairs, where the shaft of light from the roof comes down into the grove, and she saw the first star come out in it. And said, very quietly, there.

And Kwame, the small one, on Hana's other side, in the water up to his chest with Efua beside him, pointed at the pool.

And said his word.

"There."

Quiet.

Quieter than Thessaly. Quieter than any of mine. She came into the cold clear water of the coral queen's pool, from the river under the world, and didn't make a sound. Not a cry. Not a roar. She opened her eyes under the water.

And looked up at her mother through it.

Brown. Like Hana's. With the silver ring round them, very faint, very fine, like light on water.

And breathed.

Under the water.

Halloway was on her feet. Ruth was on her feet. Luna's hands were already going under.

Hana put up one hand.

"No," she said. Very calm. "Wait."

And everyone waited.

Because it was Hana. Because she's never once in her whole life asked anyone to wait for anything.

The baby breathed again. Under the water. Very slowly. Very calmly.

And I felt it. Every atom. The water in the pool going into her and out of her. Not the way water goes into a person who's drowning. The way air goes into a person who's sleeping.

She was breathing the water.

The way Hana breathes the air for other people. The way Hana takes the oxygen out of the air and gives it to the Sheln so they can keep singing.

Hana's daughter was taking it out of the water.

"She's all right," said Hana. Very quietly. Looking down through the cold clear water at her daughter looking up. "She's all right. She's mine." She reached down. Slowly. Into the pool. "She knows how."

And lifted her out.

Into the air. Into the warm Sera was keeping above the pool. Into the hall.

And the baby breathed air. Just as calmly. As if she'd been doing both her whole life.

And then she cried.

Once.

Very small. Very quiet. Like water running off a roof.

Abena put both hands over her face.

Kwame put his arm round her.

Old Efua, on the bottom step, stood up. Very slowly. Very old. With her stick. And shouted something at the ceiling of the hall so loudly that the coral queen opened her eyes and the young of four broods scattered and Corin, in Andraste's arms behind me, turned his head and looked at her for a long time, working out how she was made.

"What did she say?" I asked Abena.

Abena took her hands away from her face. It was wet.

"She said: about time," said Abena.

Her name is Abena.

After her grandmother. After the woman who sat by a window on Harbor Block Forty-four for eleven days with her hands folded, waiting for the water to come back on.

Hana named her in the pool. Sitting in the cold clear water with her daughter on her chest and Luna's arm round her and Abena on the edge with her face in her hands. She didn't ask anyone. She didn't need to.

"Abena," she said. And then, to her mother: "Is that all right?"

Abena couldn't say anything.

Kwame said it for her.

"That's all right," he said. "That's very all right."

Genny wrote it down.

In volume fifteen. In Brood: Dask. Under Corin and Thessaly.

Abena. Hana's. Eighteen weeks: the slowest of all of his. Born at the first star in the coral queen's pool, in water that came up from a river under Avalon nobody knew about. Breathed the water before she breathed the air. Hana says she knew how.

The patient one.

And under that, smaller:

Old Efua said about time. Kwame (the small one) said there. Corin looked at Old Efua for an hour.

The river went back down.

That night. While Abena slept on Hana's chest in the big bed, very quietly, with the room smelling faintly of cold clear water. The water in the coral queen's pool went back down to where it had been, through the cracks in the red stone, which opened again very gently, and closed, and were gone.

Doctor Bell came the next morning with her instrument and lay on the floor of the hall for three hours listening.

"It's still there," she said. "Under everything. Running." She took both pairs of spectacles off. "It came up because she called it. And it went back down when she didn't need it any more." She looked at the cracks in the stone, which you couldn't see. "I don't know if anyone else can call it."

"I don't think so," I said. "I think it's hers."

Doctor Bell put her spectacles back on.

"Dask," she said. "Every one of your children can do something nobody's ever done. Every one." She stood up. Her coat was buttoned wrong. "Is there going to be one who's just a baby?"

I thought about it.

"No," I said. "I don't think so."

"No," said Doctor Bell. "I didn't think so either."

She went back up the stairs. At the top she stopped, and turned round, and looked down into the hall at the coral queen's pool, very still now, with nothing in it but the coral queen and the light from the shaft.

"A river," she said. To nobody in particular. "Under the whole world. And nobody heard it until a baby wanted a bath." She shook her head. "I'm going to have to start listening to the floor."

Hana's brother and sister came on the second day.

Kofi and Esi. Through the long road arch, from the water works on the north plain where they both work now with their father, in their work clothes, with the grey-black dust of the cisterns still on their boots. Kofi's tall and quiet, like Kwame. Esi's small and quick and laughs at everything, like nobody else in the family, Abena says; she says Esi came out laughing and never stopped.

They stood in the doorway of the big bedroom and looked at their sister in the bed with the baby on her chest.

"You named her after Mum," said Esi.

"Yes," said Hana.

"Before me," said Esi. "I was going to name mine after Mum. When I had one. I had it all planned."

"You don't have one," said Kofi.

"I was planning," said Esi. And then she came across the room and climbed onto the big bed, in her dusty boots, which Maura saw from the door and said nothing about, which is the first time in her life Maura has seen boots on a bed and said nothing, and lay down beside her sister and put her face in Hana's shoulder.

"She's so small," she said. Muffled.

"She's the biggest of all of them," said Hana. "She took the longest."

"She's so small," said Esi again. And cried. And laughed. Both. The way she does.

Kofi stood in the doorway for a long time.

Then he came in. And sat down on the edge of the bed. Very carefully. And put one dusty finger out. And Abena, asleep, without opening her eyes, closed her hand round it.

Kofi didn't say anything at all.

He didn't need to.

Corin met her on the third day.

Andraste brought him. In the morning. Into the big bedroom, where Hana was sitting up in bed with Abena, and put Corin down on the blanket beside them. He's four weeks old and looks six months and sits up on his own and looks at everything the way I used to.

He looked at Abena for a very long time.

Abena looked back. Brown eyes. The silver ring very faint, like light on water. Not asking for anything. Just looking.

Corin leaned closer.

And asked her for something.

I felt it. I was in the doorway. I felt him reach out, the way he reaches out to everyone, every atom of him, very small, and ask.

And Abena didn't give it to him.

Not because she wouldn't. Because she didn't need to. She just looked at him. Patiently. The way her mother waits. The way the river waited under Avalon for longer than there were queens.

And Corin, for the first time since the ridge, stopped asking.

And just looked back.

"Oh," said Hana. Very softly.

"What?" said Andraste.

"He stopped," said Hana. "He's always asking. Every time he looks at anyone." She looked at the two of them on the blanket, side by side, looking at each other. "She didn't answer. And he stopped."

Andraste watched them for a long time.

"On Hyrran," she said, "we would say she has taught him to wait."

"On Avalon," said Hana, "we'd say she's an Osei."

Thessaly, in Andraste's other arm, made a very small sound.

It was, Dory said afterward, very definitely a laugh.

Okafor came through the courtyard arch on the fourth afternoon.

She stood at the door of the big bedroom. And looked at Hana in the big bed with Abena asleep on her chest. And at the rest of us. All of us. In the room and on the floor and in the doorway. The way we always are, now.

She took the black slate out of her pocket.

And wrote one line at the bottom of the left column.

And put it away.

Then she took out the other slate. The long-table one.

And wrote one word on it. At the top. Above the forty-one worlds and the drawing of the ring.

She showed it to me.

Three.

"All three," she said. "Born and held and named." She put the slate under her arm. "I said after."

"I know."

"It's after," said Okafor.

She looked at Hana. At Abena. At Corin and Thessaly in Andraste's arms, and Elin and Goldie asleep together at the foot of the bed, and Dory sitting on the floor with Pebble holding the room.

"Not tomorrow," she said. "Not next week. I'm not a monster." She turned to go. "But it's after. And we're going to the ring."

I said it that night.

In the big bedroom. Not on the porch. Because Hana couldn't get to the porch and nobody wanted to be anywhere she wasn't.

In order.

When I got to Hana, I knelt down by the bed. And said it to her. And then to Abena, asleep, very small, very quiet, on her mother's chest.

Abena opened her eyes.

Brown. Like Hana's. With the silver ring very faint, like light on water.

She didn't ask me for anything.

She just listened.

And then she closed her eyes again.

Days 4045–4110. The Patient One.

Hana's didn't come at ten weeks, or fourteen, or sixteen. Everyone else was in a hurry: Corin and Thessaly sat up on the twentieth day; Corin looks at everything the way I did; Mother goes to him first every morning because Father's there for a minute. Forty-one worlds round the long table said yes to the ring. Garnet went close: towers of queens in pieces, millions of children. Hana sat by the oven: the first slow thing in my life. Her father: your mother waited eleven days for the water to come back on. At dawn of the eighteenth week a river nobody knew was under Avalon came up into the coral queen's pool. At the first star, Abena, who breathed the water before the air. Old Efua: about time. Okafor: three. It's after.