Chapter 431 Houses for Everyone

Wren counted at the dawn count on the ninth day after One, and stopped in the middle.

She doesn't stop. She says the number in the voice that doesn't break, and Konrad writes it, and that's the dawn count. On the ninth day she got to the end of the morning's arrivals, the last of the stragglers from the plains who'd come in to the long ward or the town hall overnight, and then she went on. Not counting arrivals. Counting everyone.

She'd never done that. Not all at once. She told me afterward she'd always been afraid to.

"Nine hundred and six million," said Wren.

A pause.

"And four hundred thousand, give or take. On Avalon. Today."

Nobody on the red glass said anything.

Konrad didn't write it down. He looked at the sheet in his hand and then at Wren and then out at the plains past the north field, where the fires that weren't fires were still burning. Sera's warm. Over seventy-four million people who had been lying on the grass under the sky for nine days.

"That's not a number," said Konrad. In the end. "That's a world."

"It's this one," said Wren.

I'd known. Everyone had, more or less. Hearth, all four hundred and twelve million, in the new country in the west. The tithe worlds, every one of Konrad's sixty-four, in Thera and the town under the garden wall and the long road and every crooked house on every crooked street. Isca on its Hill. Halcro's yard people in Shell. The children from the pens. The peoples from the Hands, years ago, the Ulu and the Sef and the Nivi and the Karst and all the rest. Earth, everyone who came from the domes.

And now One. Seventy-four million more. Lying on the plains.

I'd known. I'd never heard it said.

"They need houses," said Mother.

On the porch. That evening. With the teapot. As if it were the simplest thing in the world.

"Yes," I said.

"All of them," said Mother. "Not tents. Not hollows. Not the plains with Sera walking up and down." She poured. "Houses. With doors that are theirs. And a kitchen. And somewhere for the children to sleep that isn't a box or a field."

"Seventy-four million."

"And the ones in Thera who've been in crooked houses they built themselves for two years and are very proud of them and would like a roof that doesn't leak," said Mother. "And the ones in the town who've been sharing. And the ones in Shell." She looked at me over the cup. "Nine hundred million, Wren says."

I didn't say anything.

"You made a country for Hearth," said Mother. "In nine days."

"And my nose bled," I said. "And Hana didn't speak to me for a week."

"So don't do it in nine days," said Mother.

So I didn't.

It took two hundred and eleven days.

I want to write that first, because people on Avalon say Lucas built the cities now, the way they say Lucas made the ground for Thera, as if it were a thing that happened one night. It wasn't. It was seven months. And I didn't build them. Not on my own. Not most of them.

I'll write who did.

Wren first.

She did what she did for Thera. She sat on the long ward with Rafe, who's walking now and pulls himself up on the end of the bed, and Rhiannon's hand on her arm. And listened. Not to hearts. To where people stood.

On the plains. Seventy-four million of them. Lying on the grass, and then sitting up, and then, after a week, beginning to walk. Gathering. The way people gather. Not by where anyone told them to; by who they were. Peoples finding peoples. Families finding families. The ones who hold the rain finding each other across a plain the size of a sea, by the smell of the water on each other's wrists.

Wren listened to where they stood. And told Keir.

Keir drew it.

On the floor of the map room, the way he drew the Open Hand on the floor of the workshop years ago and stood back and saw it. Not a map. Not yet. Circles. Hundreds of them. Where Wren said the people were standing closest together. Each circle a people, or a part of one. Or a village of families from a world nobody had a name for yet, who'd found each other on the spokes and walked into the same frame and lain down on the same patch of grass and decided, without saying anything, that they'd stay together.

Then he drew lines between the circles.

"Where they go," said Keir. On his knees, with the chalk. "Not where they'll go. Where they already go. Wren says they walk to each other. Every day. Across the plains." He drew another line. "Ossel's mother goes to Tavvan. The ones from the ring on the seventh spoke go to the long ward to see Suri. The tall ones go to the river at dawn because they used to see water at dawn, on their world, and they miss it."

He sat back on his heels.

The floor of the map room was covered.

"That's the roads," said Keir.

Then Enna said: "It's too far for roads."

She was standing in the doorway with her arms folded. The way she stands. The way she stood on the bridge over the canyon with Keir's drawings weighted down with her tools, telling him which line was wrong.

"It's a continent," said Enna. Through Dot. "More than one. Nine hundred million people and the distances between them are the distances between cities on Hearth." She came in and looked down at the floor. "On Hearth we didn't walk between cities."

"What did you do?"

Enna knelt down beside Keir.

And took the chalk out of his hand. And drew, over one of his lines, a second line. Parallel. Very close.

And then, across both of them, at intervals, very short marks.

Like a ladder laid down flat.

"Rail," said Enna.

That was the beginning of the high-speed trains, much faster than the ones we had.

Hearth had them. Of course it did. On the old Hearth, Dinraal says, there were trains under every city and between them, very fast, silver, held up off the ground by nothing at all. He showed me once, through the silver. A long smooth shape going through a valley faster than an interceptor, without a sound.

"Silver that holds its own shape," said Enna. "That's what the track was made of. On Hearth. Since the eighth day." She looked at me. "Since you."

I didn't say anything.

"We can ask the silver to make more of itself, but it’s not endless" said Enna. She tapped the floor. "But the track doesn't need to be silver all the way through. Only a skin." She looked at Keir. "Like the grey on the hulls. The second skin. Over Odra's stone."

Keir looked at her for a long time.

"Odra's stone," he said. "And the grey. And a skin of silver over that."

"And iron for the bones," said Enna. "From Kiln."

So that's what the trains are.

Iron from Kiln, forged in the deep halls under the ridge on Hyrran by Ossel's people and Odra's together, three short and one long. Stone from Odra's quarries. The grey over it, that the queens grew walls out of and Keir taught to hold. And a skin of silver on top, very thin, that holds its own shape, from every one of Hearth's people who could spare a strand.

And me.

I laid the track.

That part was mine. Not the iron, not the stone, not the silver. The ground. A line across a plain, hundreds of miles, perfectly level. Through hills, where Keir's lines went through hills. Under rivers. Over the canyon, beside Dinraal's bridge, in a long curve that Enna made me redo four times because it wasn't the right curve.

"It goes faster than an interceptor," she said, the fourth time. "If the curve's wrong, it goes into the canyon."

"It's a very small amount wrong."

"Then it goes into the canyon a very small amount," said Enna.

I did it a fifth time.

Hana came with me. Every day. Every mile.

She didn't say much. She walked beside me with her hand on my back, and every evening she looked at my face for a long time, and if she didn't like what she saw, we stopped. Wherever we were. In the middle of a plain, sometimes, with the track running out ahead of us into nothing.

"It'll be there tomorrow," she said, the first time I argued.

It was.

My nose bled twice in seven months. Both times Hana saw it before I did. Both times we stopped for a week, and she sat with me on the porch, and Kesh rained on us.

The first train ran on the fortieth day.

From the red glass to the far side of the plains, where the tall ones were standing by the river at dawn. Four hundred miles. Enna drove it. She said nobody else was allowed until she'd been sure.

I was on it. So was Keir. So was Okafor, who said she wanted to see what forty days of not having a map room looked like.

It didn't make a sound.

It went across the plains in the early morning very fast and very low, silver on grey on stone on iron, and the people on the plains, sitting up on the grass, turned their heads to watch it go past. Seventy-four million people who'd come out of a line on One where nothing ever moved but the line.

Some of them stood up.

Some of them waved.

At the far end, by the river, the tall ones were standing at the water, the way Wren said they did every dawn. They turned round when it stopped.

And Enna opened the doors.

They didn't get on. Not that day.

But the next day, three of them walked from the river to where the train had stopped and stood beside it for a long time. And the day after that, nine. And on the fourth day, one of them, very tall, grey-blue, with a face like a mask, stepped up into it and sat down on the floor.

Enna drove her back to the red glass.

She got off and looked at the interceptor field and the north field and the house on the rise and the town and the garden wall. And then she got back on, and Enna drove her back to the river.

She didn't say anything. Their people don't, much.

But the day after that, she brought her family.

Crane ran the trains.

Nobody asked him to. He came to the map room on the forty-first day, the morning after the first train, with his spanner and a slate covered in very small writing, and put it on the long table in front of Okafor without saying anything.

She looked at it for a long time.

"What is it?"

"A timetable," said Crane. "For the red glass line. Every train. When it leaves. When it gets there. Where it waits for the one coming the other way." He didn't sit down. "Enna's driving every one herself. She can't. Somebody has to know where they all are."

Okafor looked at him.

"I laid house rails at nineteen," said Crane. "On every sorting world in the ninth line. I know how many trains a line can take before they start hitting each other." He looked at the slate. "I know how to make them not."

He's run them since.

From a room at the red glass end of the line that Keir built him, with a window onto the track and a board on the wall with every train on Avalon on it, very small, moving. He stands at the board all day with his spanner in his pocket. He doesn't sit.

Holt goes and sits in the room with him in the afternoons. On a stool by the window. Not saying anything. Watching the trains go out.

"Every one of them comes back," Crane said, once. To Holt. Without turning round from the board. "That's what a timetable's for. So you know when they're meant to come back, and they do."

Holt didn't say anything for a long time.

"Good," he said.

Then the houses.

I made them. Not all of them, not the way they are now, but the first of every one. The bones. That was what Mother said, on the porch, on the first night: houses, with doors that are theirs. And I couldn't wait for seventy-four million people to build their own out of the plains with nothing in their hands.

So I made the bones.

And they made the houses.

Wren said where. Keir drew it. And I went out with Hana, and put my hand on the ground, and asked it.

And it came up.

Walls. Roofs. Floors. Doors. Out of the plain itself, the way the walls of Shell came up out of the ridge. Not one at a time. A street at a time. Then a quarter. Then a city.

And the people from the plains walked into them.

They weren't all the same.

That's the thing I'm proudest of. I want to say it.

Every circle on Keir's floor was a people. And every people lived differently, on their own world, before the Sorn. And Wren listened to every one of them, standing on the plains, and told me how.

The tall ones by the river live in towers. Very narrow, very high, with nothing on the ground floor but a door and a stair, because on their world the ground flooded every spring and nobody ever lived low. So I made them towers. Narrow. Very high. Along the river. With nothing on the ground floor but a door and a stair.

The small furred ones who held onto each other's fur on the spoke live underground. In burrows, very warm, very close, all joined. So Kwame Osei and the grandfathers from the hollows went out with me, and we made them a city that's all hollows, under a hill, with doors in the hillside and the warm going sideways the way Maura taught it.

The six-legged ones with riders don't live in anything. They walk. Their whole lives. Across their world, in herds, with the small ones on their backs. So I made them nothing. A plain, very wide, with water in it and grass on it and shelter from the wind every few miles, and no walls at all. They walk across it every day, the length of it and back. And the small ones on their backs wave at the train.

And the ones who hold the rain.

Suri's mother came to me on the long ward. On the hundredth day. With Suri, who's out of the long ward now and lives with her mother and the rest of the ring in a house on the edge of Thera. Except it isn't a house, really. It's a tent. Because there wasn't anywhere wet enough.

"She says," said Dot. "It's very kind. The houses. The trains." A pause. "She says her people can't breathe in them."

I didn't say anything.

"Not dying," said Dot. "Just not breathing properly. The way you don't breathe properly in a room with the windows shut." A pause. "She says on their world it rained every day. Not hard. Always. The air was always water. Their houses didn't have roofs. They didn't need them."

Suri said something.

"She says," said Dot, "can you make it rain?"

I can't make it rain.

Nobody can. Not on purpose. Not forever. Risa can bring a storm; Kesh can bring a cloud. Suri can bring a small one over a corner of a garden. But a city where it always rains, gently, every day, forever, in a world that has its own weather and its own winds and doesn't want to—

I couldn't do that.

So I asked Risa.

Risa came out with me to the edge of Thera. Where Suri's people were. With Kesh on her hip.

She looked at the sky for a long time.

"I can't do it forever either," she said. "Nobody can hold weather forever." She looked at Kesh. "But weather can hold itself. If you put it somewhere it wants to be."

She looked at me.

"Make me a valley," said Risa.

So I did.

North of Thera, where the hills are. A long deep valley between them, running east to west, very narrow, with the hills very high on either side. So that when the wind comes in off the sea in the west, full of water, it goes up the valley and can't get over the hills and stays there.

And Risa stood at the western end of it with her hands out and called the sea.

It took her nine days. Halloway made her stop at night. Kesh frowned at the sea the whole time.

On the ninth day, the wind came in off the western ocean and up the valley and hit the hills. And stayed.

And it rained.

Not hard. Gently. The way Suri's mother said. All the time.

It's still raining.

Suri's people walked into it on the tenth day. All of them. The ring from the seventh spoke, and every one of their people who'd come through a frame on One. Eleven thousand. Into the valley. Into the rain.

They didn't build houses. They didn't need roofs. They built something else, out of the water and the air, that Hana can almost see and I can't, and they live in it.

Suri came back to the house on the rise on the twentieth day. To see Hana. And stood on the porch, dripping.

And held out her hand to Kesh, in Risa's lap.

And the water on Suri's wrist went off it, very slowly, and across the air, and onto Kesh's.

Kesh frowned at it.

And then her cloud, over her head, went very white. And very still. And rained on the water on her wrist, very gently.

Suri laughed.

It was the first time anyone on Avalon had heard her laugh.

Miss Pell put a school in every one.

Before I'd finished the bones. Before the people from the plains had walked in. She'd go out on the train ahead of me, with Voss, and stand in the middle of wherever the next city was going to be, on the bare plain, and point.

There.

And I'd put a school there. Not a building; she still doesn't want walls. A place. A wide flat space in the middle of every city with shade on one side and a tree, if the people there grew trees, and a lot of room to sit.

The tall ones' school is at the top of the tallest tower, open to the sky. The furred ones' is the biggest hollow under the hill, with the warm going sideways. The walkers' school walks; Miss Pell says she's never had a classroom that moved before and it's the best one she's ever had.

"Each other," she said, on the first day of the first school, to a plain full of children from a hundred worlds who didn't share a single word. "That's the lesson. That's always the lesson."

Dot translated it a hundred times.

And Voss built a shed in every city.

The same shed. The one on the long road, with TEODOR'S painted over the door. A small square shed with a bench and tools, where anyone can come and fix anything, and Voss or someone Voss taught will show them how.

She paints the same name over every door.

Nobody ever asked her why until Hana. She told Hana, on the train, very late, when everyone else was asleep.

"My brother fixed things," said Voss. "Every broken thing in the street. He had a shed." She looked out of the window at the dark. "Somebody should, in every city. And it should be his."

Bahamut was born on the thirty-fourth day.

I wasn't there. I was four hundred miles west, laying track. Hana felt it through the silver and stopped me in the middle of a mile, and we went back on the train Enna was driving that day, faster than she says she's ever driven it, and got there an hour after.

But I'll write what Isolde told me.

It was the ordinary way. Nine months. In the grey stone house on the hill in the old quarter of New Hearth. In the room at the back, the nursery, next to the window, with the jar of the old woman's soil on the sill and something green coming up in it that nobody planted.

Halloway was there. And Rhiannon, and Tiamat, and Mother, who'd come over on the first train the moment Isolde sent word. And Ithel on the floor outside the door, because Isolde said he could come in after but not during, and he'd sat down in the passage and wouldn't move.

And Dinraal.

Isolde says he held her hand the whole time and didn't say anything. She says it took all day. She says at one point, very late, she told him she was going to put him in the river if he didn't stop looking like that, and he said I know, and didn't stop.

And at dusk, in the room with the window, with the light going gold on the roof garden outside, and the sapling from his father's tree, waist-high now, turning in the wind off the mountains—

Bahamut.

Small. Very red. With his mother’s curly locks, colored silver like his father's and silver round his eyes already, and very large hands. Isolde says she knew he'd have large hands; she says she wrote it in the notebook at twenty weeks.

He didn't cry at first. He opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling.

Then he cried. Very loudly. For a long time.

Rhiannon said something very satisfied in her own language that nobody translated.

Tiamat held him first.

Halloway put him in Isolde's arms. And Isolde held him for a long time. And then she looked up at Tiamat. Standing by the window. Very straight. Looking at the edge of things.

"Mother," said Isolde. In Hearth's language. And held him out.

Tiamat didn't move.

Then she did. Across the room. Very slowly. And took him.

And held him the way she held Thessaly on the plain past the canyon, the first time. As if she wasn't sure how it was done.

She looked at him for a long time.

"Bahamut," said Tiamat. Very quietly.

And he stopped crying.

Dinraal opened the door for Ithel.

Ithel came in and stood at the foot of the bed and looked at his brother in his grandmother's arms for a long time, very seriously. The way he looks at everything.

Then he went to Tiamat. And reached up. And put his hand flat on the baby's chest.

"Warm," said Ithel.

That night, Dinraal stood between the beds.

Isolde told me. The nursery, with the window and the jar. And the room next to it, Ithel's, with the warm walls. Two beds. Two sons.

He stood in the passage between the two doors, both of them open. Very late. When everyone was asleep. In the dark.

And said something. Out loud. In Hearth's language. So that it was said.

Isolde was awake. She heard it.

She wouldn't tell me what it was. She said it was his. She said it was the thing nobody ever said between his beds.

She said he's said it every night since.

Ione rode the train on the hundred and sixtieth day.

With Ingrid and Konrad. Because Konrad said he'd been reading names off the back of a sheet for two years and he'd like to see where some of them lived, now. And Ingrid said if he was going, she was going. And Ione said if they were both going, she wasn't staying in the little room at the top of the stairs on her own, lamp or no lamp.

So the three of them got on at the red glass at dawn. Crane had them on his board; he told me afterward he watched their train go all the way out and all the way back, the whole day, and didn't look at anything else.

Ione sat by the window.

She didn't say anything. Ingrid says she didn't say anything for nine hours. She sat with her hands in her lap and her face very close to the glass, and looked out.

At the sky.

Not the towers. Not the cities going past, or the rain valley, or the plain where the walkers were, with the small ones on their backs waving. The sky. All nine hours. Over everything.

At the far end, at the forest city in the east, she got off. And stood on the platform Keir built there, in the trees, and looked up through the branches. For a long time.

Then she got back on.

"She asked me something," said Ingrid. That night. On the porch. "On the way back. Near the end."

"What?"

Ingrid looked at her hands.

"She asked if the sky went on," said Ingrid. "Past the end of the line." A pause. "I said yes. I said it goes on past everything. Past the end of every line there is."

"What did she say?"

"She said: good," said Ingrid. "And then she went to sleep. Against Konrad. On the train." She was quiet. "He didn't move for an hour. He said he wasn't going to wake her if it took all night."

Konrad wrote something on the back of the sheet that night. Very small. In the margin, where there's still a little room.

Ingrid showed me. Afterward. When he was asleep.

Ione asked if the sky goes on. It does.

Mother said the names every morning.

The three grey ones on the red glass. The ones who came through behind Ferrin. They didn't go anywhere. They stood at the edge of the interceptor field, all those months, swaying. In the rain, when Kesh made it. In the sun. Tavvan sat with them every day, and Ossel's mother, and sometimes Hana.

Nobody knew their names.

Except that Mother had been standing at the twelfth frame when Ferrin walked out onto the spoke and said three words to them.

She'd heard.

She didn't tell anyone for a month. She said she wasn't sure. She said she'd been holding a hundred yards of spoke in the air at the time and wasn't listening properly and didn't want to say a name that wasn't right, to someone who'd been somebody, before.

Then one morning she walked down the hill with the teapot. To the edge of the interceptor field. And stood in front of the first of them.

And said it.

Nothing happened.

She said it again the next morning. And the next. One name to each of them. Every morning. The way she says the names on the porch at night. The way she's said them since I was small.

On the hundred and fortieth morning, the second of them stopped swaying.

Not out of the grey. Nobody was there to bring it out; I was four hundred miles away laying track, and anyway Halloway said not without their own people. It just stopped. And stood very still. And turned its head.

Toward Mother.

She stood in front of it for a long time with the teapot.

Then she poured a cup. And held it out.

It didn't take it.

But it didn't turn away either.

"I'll keep saying it," Mother told me. On the porch. "Ferrin said it for sixty years. I can say it for a while."

The last city was finished on the two hundred and eleventh day.

Not finished. Cities aren't. Started. The bones of it, up out of the ground, with the people from the last circle on Keir's floor walking into it with their bags. A people from the third spoke, very small and very quick, who live in trees; so it's a forest, mostly, with houses in it, and the train goes through it on a long silver curve that Enna redid six times.

That was the last one.

I stood at the edge of it with Hana and watched them walk in.

And then we got on the train. And went home.

It takes nine hours, on the train, from the forest city in the far east to the red glass. Through forty cities. Past the rain valley, where it's always raining. Past the tall ones' towers by the river, and the hill with the hollows in it, and the plain where the six-legged ones walk with their riders waving. Over the canyon beside Dinraal's bridge, on the curve Enna made me do five times. Through Thera, which has new roofs now that don't leak, on the crooked houses people built themselves, because they asked for roofs, not new houses.

Through New Hearth's edge, where the line comes in from the west across the sea on a bridge I made in the last month, longer than any of the bridges in the city, and the wind off the mountains makes it sing.

I sat by the window the whole way and looked at it.

At the lights coming on in the dusk, city after city, all the way west. At the people on the platforms, getting on and off, carrying bags and children and, once, a very large bundle of something green that turned out to be a whole tree in a pot, going from the forest city to someone's roof in New Hearth. At a boy of about ten on the platform at the furred ones' hill, standing on his toes to watch the train come in, with nothing round his throat at all.

He waved.

I waved back. Until the platform was gone behind us in the dark.

Hana fell asleep against my shoulder.

Wren counted at the dawn count the next morning.

Not arrivals. Everyone.

"Nine hundred and nine million, one hundred and four thousand," she said. "Give or take."

A pause.

"Every one of them has a door," said Wren.

Konrad wrote it.

Not on the back of the sheet. There wasn't room on the back of the sheet any more; there hasn't been for a long time. He wrote it on the front. At the very top. Above all the worlds. Above Imber and Orrin and Halcro and One. Where the title of a list goes.

Avalon.

And under it:

Home. All.

Days 4861–5072. Houses for Everyone.

Wren counted everyone for the first time: nine hundred and six million. Konrad: that's not a number, that's a world. Mother: so don't do it in nine days. Two hundred and eleven days. Wren listened to where people stood; Keir drew circles and the lines between them; Enna drew rail. Kiln iron, Odra's stone, the grey, a skin of Hearth's silver. I laid the track; Enna made me do the canyon curve five times. Hana stopped me twice. The first train ran on the fortieth day; the tall ones watched it, and one got on and brought her family. I made the bones; they made the houses. Towers for the tall ones, hollows for the furred, nothing for the walkers. Suri's people couldn't breathe; Risa: make me a valley; nine days; it's still raining. Bahamut came on the sixty-third day; Tiamat held him first and he stopped crying; Ithel: warm. Dinraal stood between the beds and said it. The last city is a forest. Nine hundred and nine million. Every one of them has a door. Avalon. Home. All.