Chapter 410 The Back of the Sheet

There was nothing to read at the dawn count.

That was the first thing. The first morning after Halcro. Konrad came down from the porch with Ingrid on his arm, the way he does now, and climbed onto his stool on the red glass, and took the sheet out of his coat.

And didn't turn it over to the front.

There was nothing on the front any more. Every world had Home beside it, or a line through it, or the one word at the bottom that wasn't Home. There was no next name. For the first time since the long table, a lifetime ago, there was nobody on the sheet to go and get.

So he turned it to the back.

I should explain what's on the back. I've said it before, but not all of it.

When we started taking the tithe worlds home, Konrad started writing names on the back of the sheet. Not every name. He couldn't; there were millions. The names people told him. The names people came up to his stool and said, at the dawn count, after they'd come through: my name is this, and my daughter's is this, and my father's, who didn't make it, was this.

He wrote them all down. In his small neat Senate hand. Very small. Down the back of the sheet and into the margins and round the edges and then, when there wasn't room, on more sheets, pinned behind the first, until there was a stack of them in his coat as thick as a book.

And at the very bottom of the first sheet, under all of it, the forty-one he wrote yesterday. The ones Wren heard on the ramp.

He stood on his stool and looked at the back for a long time.

Then he looked out across the red glass. At the interceptor field, and the north field, and past it the grass going all the way to the river, where sixty thousand children from the pens at Halcro had slept their first night under a sky, in rows, in blankets, with the Hyrrani walking between the rows all night in their iron so that anyone who woke up would see someone standing there.

Sixty thousand children. From everywhere.

From worlds that were on the front of Konrad's sheet.

"Wren," said Konrad.

Wren was on the long ward. With Rafe. She's always on the long ward at the dawn count; it's where she hears best, and Halloway says it's where she should be anyway, with a baby that young.

"I'm here," said Wren. Through the silver.

"The children from the pens," said Konrad. "Can you hear them?"

"I can hear all of them," said Wren.

"Can you hear where they're from?"

Wren was quiet for a long time.

"Some of them," she said. "The older ones. They say it to themselves. When they're falling asleep. The name of the place, and the name of their mother." A pause. "Some of them have been saying it for two years. So they wouldn't forget."

Konrad looked at the back of the sheet.

"Then tell me," he said. "And I'll read them."

That was the longest dawn count there's ever been.

It lasted nine days.

He read from his stool. From dawn until it was too dark to see the page, and then by Ingrid's lamp, which she held for him, standing beside the stool, with her thin arm up, until Teshka took it from her, and then Maura, and then Nan Vey.

Wren said the names. Through the silver. Into Konrad. A child's name, and a world, and a mother's name, or a father's, or a grandmother's. Whatever the child had been saying to itself in the dark in the pens.

And Konrad found the name on the back of the sheet. If it was there. In the thousands and thousands of names people had told him at the dawn count since Imber.

And read it out.

The first one was a boy from Orrin.

I should have known it would be. I think Konrad knew. Orrin was the first world the houses took every child from. Four hundred thousand. Outward. We got three hundred and ninety-eight thousand, nine hundred and forty-one of them home from the pens round the tower at Merrow, and Konrad wrote it under Not again.

And one thousand and fifty-nine we never found.

"Tobiah," said Wren. "Of Orrin. Of the potters' street in the second ring. His mother is Hesper."

Konrad found the name.

On the back of the sheet. In the first column, near the top, where he'd written the names of everyone from Orrin who'd come up to his stool after Merrow and told him who they were still waiting for. Hesper, of the potters' street. Waiting for Tobiah, seven.

He read it out.

"Hesper," said Konrad. On the red glass. Not loud. He's never loud. But everyone heard; Dot made sure. Through every arch. Into Thera, into every house on every crooked road. "Of the potters' street. Tobiah is here."

She came from Thera.

Down the long road from the river, past Voss's shed with TEODOR'S over the door, past the schools with no walls, across the north field, running. In her apron. With flour on her hands. Because she'd been baking, at dawn, the way she'd baked every dawn for two years, a small loaf, the size a seven-year-old eats, and put it on the sill of the front window of her new crooked house in Thera. Every morning.

Ysolt told me that afterward. Everyone on her road knew about the loaf. Nobody ever said anything.

He was in a row near the river. Sitting up. In his blanket. Very grey still. Nine now, not seven. Tall. Thin. Watching the Hyrrani walk past.

She stopped at the end of his row.

She didn't run the last bit. Ysolt says she couldn't. She walked. Very slowly. Down the row. Between the blankets. With her floury hands out in front of her as if the air between them might break.

And knelt down.

He looked at her for a long time.

Then he said, very quietly, in Orrin, the thing he'd been saying to himself in the pens every night for two years. So he wouldn't forget.

"Hesper. The potters' street. The second ring."

"Yes," she said. "Yes. Yes."

That was the first.

There were four hundred and twelve more from Orrin. Over nine days.

Konrad read every one.

And from Imber. And from Vantle. From Cassel and Kessen and Ebbery and Ostrel and Tiran. From worlds I'd never heard of until Konrad read them out. From worlds where we'd taken everyone home, every single person, the whole world through an arch in a day, and been glad, and gone on to the next one.

Except for the ones who'd already gone.

To Halcro. To the pens. Before we ever knew their names.

Wren said a name. Konrad found it. Konrad read it out.

And somewhere on Avalon, or in Thera, or on the grass by the river where the people of Ostrel were still sleeping in Kwame's hollows, somebody stood up.

Over and over. For nine days.

I didn't hear all of it. I couldn't. I had other things to do; there's always the ground, and there were a million and a third people from a moon who'd never seen a sky. But I'd stop. Wherever I was. When Konrad's voice came through the silver with a name, I'd stop, and wait, the way everyone on Avalon stopped and waited.

To hear who stood up.

On the ninth morning, Hesper came to the stool.

With Tobiah holding her hand. Not grey any more. Still thin. Taller than she was used to, Ysolt says; she kept reaching down for his hand at the height of a seven-year-old and finding his elbow.

She had a loaf.

Small. The size a seven-year-old eats. The one she'd baked every dawn for two years and put on the sill.

She held it up to Konrad on his stool.

He didn't take it at first. He looked at it for a long time. Ingrid, beside the stool with the lamp, didn't say anything.

"I bake one every morning," said Hesper. In Orrin. Dot gave it to him. "I always have. For the sill." She looked down at her son. "He doesn't need it on the sill now." She held it up again. "So it's yours."

Konrad took it.

He held it in both hands. On his stool. With the back of the sheet folded under his arm and the second sheet in his other pocket, already very full.

"I used to take the bread," he said. Very quietly. "Up the hill. Once a week. To a house where I was let in for supper, and not for anything else." He looked at Ingrid. "I'd stand on the step with it first. For a long time. Every week. In case that was the week she changed her mind."

"I didn't change my mind," said Ingrid. "I just stopped counting the weeks."

Konrad looked at her for a long time.

He put the loaf in his coat. Beside the sheets. Over his heart.

And read the next name.

Not everyone did.

I have to write that too.

Wren would say a name. A child's. A world. A mother.

And Konrad would look. Down the back of the sheet. Through the columns. Through the stack of pinned sheets behind it.

And not find it.

And look again. Very slowly. With Ingrid holding the lamp. Every column. Every margin.

And then he'd turn round on his stool. And look at Wren's silver, wherever it was, as if he could see her through it.

And Wren would say, very quietly:

"She was on Vantle. In the second city. When the Ashen came."

Or: "Thale."

Or: "Varrow. At the back of the line."

Or: "The ninth tower."

Or nothing. Just a long quiet. Because sometimes the name the child had been saying in the dark for two years was the name of someone the houses had taken somewhere else. Or someone who'd died in the sortings. Or someone the child had been too small to remember properly, and the name was wrong.

And Konrad would write it down anyway. On a new sheet. A separate one. That he kept in his other pocket.

By the end of the nine days, it had twenty-nine thousand names on it.

Twenty-nine thousand children from the pens at Halcro. Who'd said their mother's name in the dark every night for two years.

And nobody stood up.

Mother called the slate.

Not the long table. Not Okafor. The slate. On its nail by the kitchen door. With the ten names on it in ten languages, and HONORY at the bottom in Ash's big careful letters, and Soon in Isolde's hand.

She took it down off the nail. And carried it out onto the porch. And sat down in Father's chair. And put it on her knee.

And they came. All ten. And Isolde, who isn't on the slate, who came anyway, with Dinraal behind her carrying a crate of something nobody asked for, because Gilgamesh had taught him that.

"Twenty-nine thousand," said Mother.

Nobody said anything.

"Twenty-nine thousand children," said Mother. "Who've had nobody to stand up for two years. Who've been lying in rows in the dark with the note in them, saying a name." She put her hand flat on the slate. "And now they're lying in rows on the grass. With a sky over them. Saying it."

She looked down the porch.

"That's not good enough," said Mother.

"No," said Teshka.

Teshka, who stood in rows for eleven generations with other people's children. Who has one granddaughter. Who doesn't sit down.

She sat down.

On the top step. Very straight. With her blade across her knees.

"Not good enough," said Teshka. Through Dot. "On Hyrran, a child with no one to stand up is the whole house's child. The First Blade's. Everyone's." She looked at Kyria. "We know how to do this."

"So do we," said Maura. Who has three, and lost a nephew to the fire fever, and fed a line of men at the Varran pass when the soup froze. "In the Calder house nobody was ever the only one at the table."

"Nor in ours," said Rhiannon. Through Dot. Very sharp. With her basket. "Nobody on Hearth has ever not been fed."

Mother looked at them. All of them.

And then past them. Out across the porch rail. Down the hill. At the town under the garden wall, and Thera beyond it, and the grass by the river.

"Not us," said Mother. "Not only us. There aren't enough of us." She picked up the chalk. "Them."

She meant the grandparents.

I'll explain. Because Mother didn't, at the time. She just wrote it on the slate, under the ten names and HONORY and Soon, in big letters, and hung it back on the nail, and went inside to put the kettle on.

EVERY CHILD A GRANDMOTHER.

And under it, smaller, because Konrad was standing in the doorway watching her write it, in his coat, with the second sheet in his pocket with twenty-nine thousand names on it:

Or a grandfather.

There are more old people on Avalon than anyone counts.

From the tithe worlds. From Earth, the first year, when the domes emptied. From Imber and Orrin and Ostrel and Tiran. From the walls of a moon. Grandmothers and grandfathers whose own grandchildren were home, and grown, and busy, and didn't need them on the porch every evening any more. Grandmothers whose grandchildren didn't come home. Grandfathers who took the drills in the hollows because they had nothing else to do with their hands. Old men who'd been shipwrights for fifty years and had never once been asked to hold a child.

Mother didn't send anyone to ask them.

She didn't have to.

It went round the way things go round on Avalon. Through Dot. Through the silver. Through Maura's kitchen and the schools with no walls and the line at Voss's shed. Through the grandfathers in the hollows, who told each other at the drill. Through the Hathri, who told each other through the rock.

Every child a grandmother. Or a grandfather. Go down to the river.

And they went.

The first morning, there were nine hundred of them on the grass.

Old women in shawls. Old men in coats. Walking very slowly down the long road from Thera, past the shed, across the north field, with sticks, with each other's arms, with bread in their pockets because Maura had said that's how you start.

They walked out among the rows. And stopped. And looked. And knelt down, slowly, the way old people kneel, with a hand on the ground first.

And said, hello. What's your name?

By the end of the first week there were twenty thousand.

By the end of the second, there were more grandparents on the grass by the river than there were children with nobody to stand up.

Wren counted.

The last of the twenty-nine thousand was a girl from Vantle. Four. Very small. Who didn't know her mother's name, only the word for mother, which she'd been saying in the dark for two years over and over because it was the only word she had.

An old shipwright from Halcro sat down beside her.

The one with the burned arms.

Her name is Ama Sollen.

Wren told me. Wren knows everyone's name. She'd come down out of the walls of the moon first, and carried the first child to the arch, and gone back for another one, and another, and come through last, carrying nobody. And sat on the red glass and cried with Maura's bread in her hands.

She hadn't eaten it. Maura says she ate it on the ninth day. When the girl from Vantle took a piece of it out of her hand and ate it first.

"I built the ramps," Ama Sollen said. To the girl. In Halcro. Which the girl didn't speak. "The ones they walked you up."

The girl didn't understand. She held out the rest of the bread.

Ama Sollen took it.

And ate it. On the grass. In the sun. With the girl from Vantle leaning against her burned arm.

"Mother," said the girl. The only word she had.

Ama Sollen didn't correct her.

That's how it went. Two weeks. Twenty-nine thousand.

I'm not going to say it was all like that. It wasn't. Some of the children wouldn't let anyone near them, not for days. Some of the grandparents sat beside a child for a week before the child said a word. One old man from Tiran sat beside a boy from Ebbery for eleven days, every day, from dawn until dark, not saying anything, just sitting, until on the twelfth morning the boy got up off his blanket and walked away across the grass and came back with a cup of water and gave it to him.

And some of them didn't work. Some of the grandparents went home after a day because it was too much, or the wrong child, or because they'd lost their own and couldn't. And the next morning someone else came.

But nobody on the grass by the river was the only one at the table.

Not one.

Mother checked. Mother walks down to the river every evening now, with Pebble and the old brown dog, and goes along the rows, one after another, the way Dory checks everyone.

And counts.

The people from the walls didn't go down to the river.

Not at first. They couldn't.

A million and a third people who had lived their whole lives on the inside of a moon. With the shell over them in every direction. With the little white sun hanging in the middle where they could see it from every window, and the far side of the yard curving up and over their heads, so that wherever you stood, there was something above you.

They came through the arch onto the red glass at dawn and looked up.

And there was nothing there.

Halloway says it's a real thing. She says there was a word for it on Earth. She says some of the Program children had it, the first year, the ones who'd only ever known the white rooms. You come out under a sky that doesn't stop, and your body doesn't believe it, and you can't stand up.

Half of them sat down on the red glass. Some of them lay flat. Old shipwrights with their arms over their faces. Children holding onto the glass with both hands as if they might fall upward.

Ama Sollen was the only one who looked up for long. She said afterward it was because she'd been looking at the pens every morning for fifty years, and she'd decided, coming through the arch, that whatever she looked at next she was going to look at properly.

So Kwame Osei took them down.

Into the hollows. Under the north field. Where it's warm, because Maura told the warm to go sideways, and the air goes round, because Hana taught it. Where there's rock over your head. Where there's somebody at the bottom making bad soup.

They went down the long stairs very fast. Some of them ran.

And at the bottom, under the rock, with a ceiling, they sat down on the floor of Kwame's first hollow and breathed.

"They're not wrong," said Kwame Osei. At the long table. That night. "They're the only people on Avalon who already know how to live in a hollow. They've been doing it all their lives." He spread his big hands. "They just don't know how to come up."

So they came up slowly.

The grandfathers in the hollows taught them. The ones who took the drills. Every morning, a little way. Up the stairs. To the top step. To the door. To the edge of the north field, with the door behind them, open, so they could go back.

An hour. Then two. Then a morning.

And on the ninth day, an old shipwright from the walls of the moon walked all the way across the north field, a long way from any door, and stood in the middle of it with his arms at his sides and the sky over him in every direction, very still.

And then he lay down on his back on the grass.

Kwame Osei says he lay there until dark. Looking up. And when the stars came out, he cried, because he'd built ships to go out among them for fifty years and never seen one.

I asked them where they wanted to be.

The way I asked Thera. At the long table, with Keir's maps, and Wren counting where people stood.

They didn't want a city. They'd had a city. They wanted the ridge to the east of the north field, where the ground goes up into broken rock and there are hollows already, natural ones, the Hathri said, and you can live half in and half out. With a door at your back and a sky in front.

So I made them that. One night. The way I made Thera. Water and roads and the hollows opened up into the ridge, with doors. And stopped.

And they built the rest themselves. Out of the black stone. Very well. Better than anything on Avalon. They're shipwrights. They've never built anything badly in their lives.

They named it Shell.

Ama Sollen says it's so they remember. And so that when they stand at their doors with the rock behind them and the sky in front, they know which side they're on.

Callum was on the long ward for all of it.

In the bed by the window. With his left side wrapped. With Maura's hands on it every evening, the way they were on his hand after the sea, warm, telling the burned skin to come back slowly, sideways, the way she tells the hollows. With the trays humming beside his bed, and Bell humming loudest, and the thirty-eight new pieces of the eldest in their own tray at the end of the ward, very quietly, singing in their own young voice.

And Rowan in the chair beside him. Not leaving.

And Nan Vey.

Nan Vey ironed his sheets.

Every morning. On the long ward. With her iron. She'd bring an ironing board in from the porch and set it up at the foot of his bed and iron the sheet he was lying on, a corner at a time, very carefully, round him, without making him move.

Halloway let her. Halloway says she stopped trying to stop Nan Vey from doing anything the week of the weddings.

"You'll do," said Nan Vey. Every morning. When she'd finished. And put the iron back in her bag.

On the eleventh morning, Callum said: "Nan. Leave the corner."

She looked at him.

"The one by my hand," said Callum. "Leave it creased. I want to see if I can do it."

So she left it.

And he lay there the whole morning with his burned hand on the creased corner of the sheet, trying. With Rowan watching. With Nan Vey ironing nothing at the end of the bed, very slowly, so she'd have a reason to stay.

At noon, very slightly, the crease went flat.

Not all the way. Not like Nan Vey does it. But flat.

Rowan made a sound I'd never heard him make.

Nan Vey didn't say anything. She came round the side of the bed. And looked at the corner of the sheet for a long time.

Then she said, "Badly."

And kissed him on the forehead. On the side that isn't burned.

Halloway says he'll fly.

Not soon. Not this year. Halloway says it's too early to say, and then she says it anyway, because she says she's tired of saying the first thing.

The woman whose son was outward came on the fifth day.

I knew she'd come. Everyone did. There were forty-one names at the bottom of the first sheet, and Konrad had read them out the morning after Halcro, before the long dawn count began. Not to call anyone. Just so that the names had been said out loud on Avalon. Under a sky.

Nobody had come to his stool that morning.

On the fifth day, someone did.

She was from Vantle. One of the million who came home through Dinraal's silver when the Ashen wave went dark on it. Not old. Not young. With a scar across one hand from the second city.

She waited until Konrad had finished the morning's names. Until the last of them had stood up, or not stood up, and Ingrid had put the lamp down.

Then she came to the stool.

And said a name.

Konrad didn't have to look for it. He knew where it was. At the very bottom of the first sheet. The thirty-fourth of the forty-one. In letters so small you could hardly read them.

Danel. Of Vantle. Eight. Saying it on the ramp to the boy behind him.

Konrad got down off the stool.

He doesn't, usually. He stands on it. That's what it's for. But he got down, very carefully, the way old men get down off things, with Ingrid's hand on his arm. And stood in front of her on the red glass. And showed her the sheet.

She looked at it for a long time.

"He was taken before," she said. "Before the Watch. Before any of it. Two years ago. At the sorting." She didn't cry. "I thought he was eaten. I've thought it every night. I thought he went outward and the far yard was eaten and he was eaten with it." She put her scarred hand on the sheet. On the name. "He was in the pens. All the time. At Halcro. And I was here."

Konrad didn't say anything.

"And now he's gone," she said. "Again."

"Not gone," said Konrad.

She looked at him.

"Outward," said Konrad. "That's what the sheet says. That's what I wrote." He put his finger on it. Under the forty-one names. On the line he'd never written before. "I've been signing things for thirty years. I know the difference between a word that means a thing is over and a word that means it isn't."

He looked at her.

"I didn't write lost," said Konrad.

She held onto the sheet for a long time.

Then she said, "Will you go?"

And she didn't say it to Konrad.

She said it past him. Across the red glass. To the long ward, and the interceptor field, and the map room in the house on the rise. To me. To Okafor. To everyone.

Okafor answered.

She'd come down from the map room. She does, at the end of the dawn count, most days now. She stood at the edge of the red glass with her hands behind her back.

"Yes," said Okafor.

So that's where we are.

Ama Sollen came to the map room on the fourteenth day.

Not invited. Nobody's invited to the map room. People just come. Crane came, the first time, with his collar on. Voss came with his shed. The Overseer comes and stands in the doorway and has never once been asked.

Ama Sollen came with the girl from Vantle on her hip. And stood at the end of the long table in her shipwright's apron, which she still wears, which she says she'll wear until it falls off. And looked at the slate on the wall. At Okafor's map. At the grey edge of it, and THE HUNGRY, and Garnet's three circles.

And the door. The small square, at the very edge, past everything. With 1,960 beside it.

"That's the third ship," she said. In Halcro. Dot gave it to us.

"Yes," said Okafor.

"It didn't go up the thread," said Ama Sollen. "Your boy felt it. I saw his face." She looked at me. "It went somewhere else. A door, opening, a long way off. And shutting behind it."

Okafor didn't say anything.

"I built it," said Ama Sollen.

The long table went very still.

"Not the door," she said. "The ship. The ribs and the plates and the ramps. Fifty years of them. Every outward ship that ever left the slips at Halcro." She shifted the girl on her hip. "But there's a place in the bow of every one. Forward of the crew decks. A room. Sealed. Lined in black metal, very thick." She put her burned hand flat on the long table. "We built the room. We were never allowed to see what went in it."

"What went in it?" said Okafor.

"It came from outward," said Ama Sollen. "On the ships that came back empty. In a box. Sealed. Small. The size of a child's coffin." Her voice didn't change. "The crews called it the key. They'd carry it up the ramp and into the room in the bow and seal the room and nobody went in after." A pause. "And when the ship went outward, it didn't go up the thread like a Hand. It went through the key."

Nobody said anything.

"I heard it once," said Ama Sollen. "One night. On the slips. When I was young. Working late on a bow plate, right up against the room." She looked at the girl on her hip. "It was singing."

The Overseer, in the doorway, with the dog against its legs, said nothing at all.

But Crane put his hand on his spanner. And held it very hard.

And at the end of the long table, very quietly, so quietly that only the ones who were listening for it heard, the Scarecrow queen said, from the hollows under the garden:

Find the ones who make new doors.

I went up to the porch that night.

Late. After everyone had gone in. With the stars out over the north field and the lamps going out one by one in Thera and the grass by the river very quiet, with twenty-nine thousand children asleep on it and twenty-nine thousand grandparents asleep beside them.

Risa was on the bench. With Kesh asleep against her shoulder. Ingrid beside her, with her hand on the baby's cloud, very still. Konrad on the step, with his coat off for once, folded on his knee, with the sheets in it.

I sat down beside Risa.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

"A box," said Risa, in the end. "The size of a child's coffin."

"Yes."

"Singing."

"Yes."

She looked down at Kesh. At the small white cloud over her head. Very still under Ingrid's hand.

"Every one of them," said Risa. "Every outward ship. For as long as there've been outward ships." Her voice was very level. "They'd need a lot of keys."

I didn't say anything.

Konrad, on the step, unfolded his coat. And took out the first sheet. And turned it over, to the back, to the very bottom, to the forty-one. And looked at them in the light from the kitchen window for a long time.

Then he took the pen out of his pocket.

And under Outward. 1,960., very small, he wrote one more word.

Yet.

Days 4575–4589. The Back of the Sheet.

Nothing on the front. Konrad read the back for nine days and Wren said the names the children had been saying in the dark. Tobiah of the potters' street; Hesper's loaf on the sill. 29,000 with nobody to stand up. Mother wrote it on the slate: every child a grandmother. Or a grandfather. They went down to the river and nobody was the only one at the table. Ama Sollen and the girl from Vantle. Callum flattened the crease, badly. Danel's mother: will you go? Okafor: yes. Konrad: I didn't write lost. Ama Sollen built the room in the bow; the crews called what went in it the key. It was singing. Yet.