Chapter 437 Grandmothers Fetch Grandmothers

Mother said it first, the way she says most things that end up on the slate.

At the long table, the morning after IN. With everyone there and nobody eating. Okafor at the end with the chalk. Ithel in his nightshirt under the points in the map room doorway, because he hadn't been able to sleep. Tiamat on the silver from New Hearth. Kyria through the arch from Hyrran. Konrad with the sheet.

They were talking about the middle. About the hand. About what the Sorn were making out of two thousand, eight hundred and six worlds of stock, and how soon, and what it would be when it came out.

Mother put the teapot down in the middle of the table, quite hard.

"And the old?" said Mother.

Nobody said anything.

"On Sedge there were four thousand," said Mother. "Every one over fifty. Nobody to carry water to the ones who can't walk to the edge. Nobody to mend the planks. They'd been forty days on their own and they were already putting the oldest in the boats at night so the young-old didn't have to watch them go." She looked round the table. "Abbe told me. On the platform. She'd have been in a boat herself by the end of the month."

She poured. Into nobody's cup. Just poured, and set the pot down.

"Two thousand eight hundred and six," said Mother. "Every one of them like Sedge. Today. This morning."

Okafor looked at her.

"The Sorn are making something," said Okafor. "Out of everyone they took. In the middle. Behind a hand Dory says is older than the houses. When it comes out—"

"Then it comes out," said Mother. "And we'll be there. We always are." She picked up the teapot again. "But the old are dying now. On every one of those worlds. In the rain and the cold and the dark with nobody young left to carry them." She looked at Okafor. "You said it, Maris. Years ago. Not one person. Not one world."

"It's two thousand eight hundred and six worlds."

"Yes," said Mother.

Konrad looked down at his sheet.

"If the Sorn took everyone under fifty," he said. Slowly. Working it. "On a stock world, most people are under fifty. The Sorn saw to that, for a thousand years. The old are the ones they didn't get round to." He looked up. "One in six, maybe. One in eight." He looked at Ithel. "Of whatever that number was."

Ithel didn't say it again. He didn't have to. Everyone had heard it the night before.

Konrad did the sum on the back of the sheet. He didn't say it out loud either.

He wrote it very small, and turned the sheet face down.

"Who goes?" said Okafor.

She'd decided. You could see it. She'd decided the moment Mother said Sedge. She just wanted to hear what Mother would say.

"Us," said Mother.

"Who's us?"

Mother looked round the table. At Ingrid, by the window with Ione. At Kyria, through the arch. At Tiamat's voice in the silver. At Maura, who'd come up the hill with a loaf because Maura always knows when there's a long morning.

"Grandmothers," said Mother. "Grandmothers fetch grandmothers."

That's how it started. That's what it's called now. On the slate, under IN, in Okafor's capitals:

GRANDMOTHERS FETCH GRANDMOTHERS.

Keir wanted a shorter name. Nobody let him.

I'll write how it worked, because it was Mother's plan, and it was a good one, and she won't write it down herself.

The old don't trust the young. Not on a stock world. Not now. Everyone young they ever knew was taken, or came with a collar, or came with a black ship. If you walk out of an arch onto a stock world with forty Kasrai in iron and a girl who looks sixteen with a silver net up her arms, the old ones there will think you've come for them too.

So nobody walked out first but the old.

Ithel said the worlds. One at a time. Under the points, at bedtime, with his hand out. Cold. Sand. Tall trees. A ring round it. Two suns. He'd been to every one in his box, and he remembered every tower he'd opened.

Dory found the hearts. On the net, from the red glass, every morning. Not checking everyone this time. Checking for the shape of the old. She said it was easy. She said old hearts beat like rain on a roof.

Kyria's cutters cut to the net.

Odra's smiths held every arch, with a hammer, the way they've held arches since the Hedge.

And through each arch, first, before anyone else, walked a grandmother.

Not always ours.

That was the part I didn't expect. On the first day it was Mother, through the first arch, to a cold world of grey moss where the old were sitting in a ring round the foot of their tower waiting to die. On the second day it was Abbe, from Sedge, at ninety-four, on Holt's arm. On the third day it was Eska from Ostry, with the nine children who aren't hers holding her sleeve.

By the second week there were three hundred of them.

Grandmothers from everywhere.

From Earth. From Hearth. From Imber, from Orrin, from Isca's Hill, from the hollows under Caddoc's salt. The tall woman from the river towers who brought her daughter back out of the grey. Suri's grandmother. Ossel's mother. Teel's. Ingrid. Maura. Abena Osei, with a basket. Old Efua, who shouted at the sky of the first world she walked out onto, and the old ones on it laughed.

Rhiannon. Tiamat, who says she isn't a grandmother in the way that counts and then goes anyway.

Nan Vey.

Varra, with her rope tied round her waist.

And the grandfathers. Because Kwame Osei said if it was going to be grandmothers fetch grandmothers, somebody had better be carrying the blankets, and that was a grandfather's job on every world he'd ever heard of. So he went. And Rory. And Aske, Wend's father, who poured out the first cup on forty worlds before he came home. And the General, in his old uniform, who stood at the side of every arch like a door-post and said nothing and held out his arm to anyone who needed it.

And Holt.

Holt went to every one.

I asked him about it. On the fortieth night. On the porch.

He was very tired. He's sixty-one. He'd been through eleven arches that day.

"First in," said Holt.

"Ezra."

"I know," said Holt. He rubbed his knee. "Maris says the same. Mother says the same. Abbe says I work like someone who's late for something." He looked out at the dark. "I was late, once. For a lot of children. I closed the ramps." He was quiet. "These ones aren't children. They're old. Like me. And there's nobody else coming for them."

He picked up his stick, the one he doesn't need.

"I'll stop when there's somebody else," said Holt.

There isn't anybody else. There's us.

So he doesn't stop.

Crane stopped him.

On the sixty-first day. Holt came down to the red glass at dawn as usual, with his stick, for the first arch. And Crane was standing at the foot of the arch in front of him. Not in the room at the end of the line with his board. On the glass. With his spanner in his pocket.

"You're on my board," said Crane.

Holt looked at him.

"Every train on Avalon," said Crane. "When it goes out. When it comes back." He didn't move. "I put you on it. The day you started this. Every arch you go through, I move you out. Every arch you come back through, I move you back." He swallowed. "Sixty days. You've been out four hundred and nine times, sir."

"Hal."

"You told me what a timetable's for," said Crane. "On the first day. So you know when they're meant to come back, and they do." He took the spanner out of his pocket and looked at it. "You haven't got a time to come back, sir. Not one. You just keep going out."

Holt didn't say anything.

"Today you're coming back," said Crane. "At noon. I've written it. On the board." He put the spanner back. "And you're sitting in my room for the afternoon. On the stool. Watching the trains. Like you used to."

Holt looked at him.

Then he looked at Okafor, who'd come down behind him and was standing at the edge of the glass with her arms folded and her mouth in its line, not saying anything at all. And at Mother beside her, with the teapot.

"Noon," said Holt.

"Noon," said Crane.

He came back at eleven minutes past. Crane says it's the first time anyone's been late on his board, and he's going to let it go.

Holt sits in the room in the afternoons now. Most days. He goes out in the mornings. Crane moves him out, and moves him back.

I'll write some of the worlds. Not all. There were too many, and most of them were the same, and the same is the worst part.

The cold world of grey moss. The first one. Mother's.

They'd made a ring round the foot of the tower. Six hundred of them. Sitting. In blankets, in the moss, in the cold, very still, in a ring facing outward. Mother said she thought at first they were already dead.

They weren't. They were waiting. They'd decided, Mother said, together, the week after the ships went, that they'd sit at the foot of the tower that took their children and grandchildren until they were taken too, or until they weren't anything.

She walked out of the arch and across the moss and sat down in the ring.

In the gap. Between two of them. The way she sat down beside the grey ones on the red glass. The way she sat down beside Abbe.

She didn't say anything for a long time.

The old one on her left was a woman. Very thin, very straight, with grey moss growing in the creases of her blanket because she'd sat so long. She didn't look at Mother. She looked out, at the moss, the way the whole ring did.

"She says," said Dot. Dot was very quiet that first day. "You've come for us."

"Yes," said Mother.

"She says they came for the children with collars," said Dot. "She says what have you brought."

Mother thought about it.

"Tea," said Mother.

The old woman turned her head. Slowly. For the first time. And looked at the teapot in Mother's lap.

"She says," said Dot, "that's not what she meant."

"I know," said Mother. "But it's what I've got. And it's hot. And there's a step, where I live, wide enough for two, where you can sit and drink it with someone who isn't going anywhere." She lifted the lid. "That's all, love. That's all I've got. It's more than they left you."

The old woman looked at her. The moss in her blanket moved a little in the wind.

Then she held out her hands. Both of them. Cupped. Because there weren't any cups left on that world; the Sorn took everything that could carry water.

Mother poured into them.

All six hundred came home that night. The moss came too, in the creases of their blankets. It's growing at the end of a street in the forest city now, where Kwame put their hollows, and the old woman who held out her hands waters it every morning, out of a cup.

A world of sand. Two suns. Abbe's.

The old there hadn't waited. They'd walked. Out of their town, into the desert, in a line, the way they'd walked in the lines for the Sorn. They didn't know where. Away. Dory found them on the net in the middle of the dunes, eleven hundred of them, walking very slowly toward nothing, and Kyria cut to the front of the line.

Abbe walked out of the arch onto the sand. Very small. Very bent. Ninety-four. In her blanket, in the heat, with Holt's arm.

She stood in front of the line.

The line stopped.

Abbe held out a cup. Empty.

The old woman at the front of the line looked at it. She didn't know what it was for. Nobody on that world pours anything out; there isn't enough water.

But she knew an old woman holding out a cup in the desert when she saw one.

She took it.

A world with a ring round it. Eska's.

Very green. Very wet. Like Ostry, a bit, Eska said. They'd hidden. In the forests, up the trees, in the hollows under the roots, in small groups, very quiet, the way Eska hid the nine on the fifth hill. Dory could feel them. Hundreds of little knots of old hearts, all over the forest, not moving, frightened.

Eska walked out of the arch with the nine holding her sleeve.

And called.

Not loudly. A small sound. The Ostry make it, Eska says, when they're in a line holding sleeves and someone's let go. Where are you, where are you. Very soft.

Out of the trees, one at a time, the old came down.

They'd never heard it before. It isn't their sound.

They came anyway.

A world of stone forts on every hill. Varra's.

Varra chose it. She stood under Ithel's points on the twentieth night with her rope tied round her waist and listened to him say walls, walls everywhere, on every hill, and said that one was hers.

The old there had fought.

Not the Sorn. Nobody fights the Sorn with walking sticks and wins. But when the ships went, and the Hungry came sniffing at the edges of their world, a small piece of the body, the way they sniff at anything left alone, the old had gone up into the forts their grandparents built and shut the gates and stood on the walls. With whatever they had. Old spears from the walls. Kitchen knives. Fire.

They'd held for nineteen days. When Kyria cut to them, there were two thousand left on the last fort on the highest hill, and the Hungry all round the bottom of it.

Varra went through first. Then the General, in his old uniform. Then forty Kasrai, and Andraste with Holdfast, and me.

We cleared the hill. I won't write it. It didn't take long.

Then Varra climbed the wall.

She's very old. She went up it slowly, with her rope tied round her waist, on the stones, the way she says she used to climb the last wall on her own world every morning to see what had come in the night. At the top, an old man stood in the gate with a spear that had been his great-grandmother's. Very thin. Bleeding from one arm. He'd been standing there for nineteen days.

Varra stopped in front of him.

And knelt. On one knee. With her head up. Looking at him.

The old man didn't know what it meant. Nobody on that world kneels like the Kasrai. But Andraste said he understood it anyway. She said his face did the same thing Varra's did on the north field when I knelt.

Then the General came up the stair behind Varra and held out his arm.

The old man looked at it. Then he put the spear down against the gate, very carefully, the way you put something down that you've been holding for a very long time.

And took the arm.

Varra tied a knot that night. Not for anyone who died. Andraste says she's never seen a Kasrai do that before. She says it was for the old man. For nineteen days on the wall, and then putting the spear down.

And some of them we were late for.

I'm going to write one, because I've written every time we were late since the canyon, and I'm not going to stop now.

The Hungry found a world before we did.

Not the body. A piece of it. Out past the Watch, where the body had turned after Caddoc. A cold world with long low hills and a town of stone houses with turf on the roofs, and nine thousand old people in it, who'd stayed in their houses with the doors shut, because the houses were all they had left.

Dory found them on the net on the morning of the fifty-third day. She sat up at the long table and said there, and then she said no, and went white.

Kyria cut in the time it takes to say a name.

Ingrid went through first. That day it was Ingrid's turn. She went through with her hands already up.

I went through behind her. I'm not a grandmother. I went anyway.

The Hungry were on the turf roofs. Not many. Enough. Coming down through the roofs into the houses, one at a time, the way they do, not hurrying, because there was no one young to fight them and they knew it.

Ingrid stood in the street.

And hushed.

I've written the Hush before. I've written what Risa says it is. The moment before lightning, when everything goes still.

I'd never seen Ingrid do it all the way. Not like this. Not the whole town.

Everything stopped. The wind. The rain. The Hungry on the roofs, every one, mid-step, mid-dig, mid-air. The sound of them. The sound of anything. A whole town of stone houses on a cold hill, silent, as if someone had put a hand over it.

And then the lightning.

Not Risa's. Not Dory's column on Caddoc. Ingrid's. Small and white and exact. One for every one of them on every roof. All at once. In the silence.

The silence went on after. For a long time.

Then the rain started again.

Then we went into the houses.

Four thousand, one hundred and twelve, Wren said. Of nine thousand.

We'd been late by about a morning.

Ingrid sat on the step of the last house we went into, after. In the rain. With her hands in her lap.

She'd done the whole town. Every roof. Every one of them. And when we went into the houses, half of them were empty already, or worse than empty, because the Hungry had been there since before dawn.

I sat down beside her.

"I was the Hush," said Ingrid. Very quietly. Not to me. "For a whole war. Three hundred handlers at the ford, and everything went still, and I lit them." She looked at her hands. "And I've never once been in time for anything."

I didn't say anything.

"Not the ford," said Ingrid. "Not my children, when they put me in the ward. Not Risa, all those years. Not this." She shut her eyes. "Always a morning late. Always a little bit."

Konrad came through the arch.

He doesn't go through arches to other worlds. His knees. He came through that one. Holt told him, on the red glass, when we sent word back, and he came through on his own, with his sheet under his arm, very slowly, across the cold hill in the rain, to the step.

He sat down on Ingrid's other side.

He didn't say anything either. He put his hand on hers.

They sat like that. Konrad and Ingrid. At the Kesh ford he stood behind her with a slate, writing the report, and his name went on it, and he got the medal, and years later she got a ward.

"Four thousand and twelve," said Konrad, in the end. "Four thousand, one hundred and twelve, Wren says." He didn't look at her. "You were in time for them."

Ingrid didn't say anything.

"Kyria says count the ones you held first," said Konrad. "Out loud. She says it to Dory."

A long time.

"Four thousand, one hundred and twelve," said Ingrid.

"Good," said Konrad.

I went to Root on the sixtieth day.

With Dory. Because she asked me to. Because she'd been pushing the net in every night, very gently, with me sitting on the floor beside the heap, and the hand was still there, and she wanted to ask someone who might know.

There's only one person who might.

The eldest queen was singing when we came through.

She's always singing. To all of us. To every queen, every brood, every one of us with silver in us. She has been since before there were days. Dory says if you stand on Root and listen properly you can hear your own name in it, very far down, with everyone else's.

Dory stood on the green ground under the threads in the sky and listened for a long time.

Then she asked.

The middle, said Dory. Through the silver. Not out loud. There's a hand over it. Older than the houses. Do you know whose?

The eldest queen stopped singing.

I've never heard her stop. Not on Root. Not ever.

The whole world went quiet. The ground. The threads. The broods on the ledges, thousands of them, who never stop humming.

I know it is there, said the eldest queen.

Very slowly.

It was there when I woke. Before I sang the first note. Before there was anything to sing to. A long pause. I have never sung toward it. Not once. In all the time there has been.

Why not? said Dory.

Because it does not answer, said the eldest queen. Everything answers me, child. Every seed. Every stone with silver in it. Every one of you, even when you cannot hear. The Hungry answer, in their way; that is how they find me. The threads trembled. It does not answer. It has never answered anything.

Dory was quiet.

Is it bad? she said.

I do not know, said the eldest queen. I have never known. A pause. But the houses went in to it, a long time ago, when they were young. And came out with a voice. And have been taking children in to it ever since.

And now they've taken everyone.

Yes, said the eldest queen. Now they have taken everyone.

Then she started singing again.

Not the same. Lower. Dory says it was a song she'd never heard on Root before. She says it sounded like the one Mother sings on the porch, when she says the names, very quietly, after everyone else has gone to bed.

She said the eldest was singing it toward the middle.

For the first time.

We came home.

Wren counts them every morning now. The ones who came home. On Konrad's step, at the dawn count, with Ingrid's sheets beside her, because there's a new sheet now, and Ingrid keeps that one too.

Came home old.

Three hundred and four worlds, in the first ninety days. Grandmothers fetch grandmothers. Fourteen million, two hundred and eleven thousand old people from three hundred and four worlds, come home to Avalon through Kyria's arches on the arms of other old people. Some carried. Most walking.

We were late for nineteen worlds. On eleven of them it was the Hungry. On eight it was the cold, or the sand, or the waiting. I've written one. I won't write the others. Ingrid has every one on her sheet, and the number we were in time for, written first.

And then the thing I didn't expect.

On the seventh day, an old man came through the arch from a world of tall trees.

Very tall himself. Long-necked. Brown, with spots. He came down off the arch onto the red glass on the General's arm, and looked round at the interceptors and the house on the rise and the line of the Standing on the north field, and stopped.

Because there was a boy on the north field.

In the line. Waiting to join the Standing. He'd come out of a frame on One, the boy, a year and a half ago. He was sixteen now. Very tall. Long-necked. Brown. With spots.

They stood and looked at each other across the red glass.

Then the boy left the line.

Varra let him. Varra was at the front with the slate. She watched him go and didn't say anything.

He walked across the red glass. Then faster. Then he was running.

That's when I understood what we'd done. Not on One. Now.

On One, we'd brought home seventy-four million. Most of them young. Taken off the stock worlds over years, into the lines, onto the spokes. We'd brought them out of the building and home, and they'd built cities and got on trains and joined the Standing and found each other on the plains by the way they stood.

And none of them had their grandparents.

Because the grandparents were still on the stock worlds. Old. Left behind. The ones the Sorn didn't get round to.

Until now.

It happened thirty-one times on the first day the boy found his grandfather. Two hundred times the next week. Then thousands. Wren started counting them separately, at the dawn count, after the arrivals.

"And nine hundred and four found," said Wren. "Give or take."

A grandmother from a cold world, walking down off the arch, and a girl from the furred ones' hill coming across the glass at a run. A grandfather from a world of sand, and three brothers from the forest city who'd been in different lines on One and never knew the others were alive. A very old woman from a world with two moons, sitting down on the red glass because her legs went when she saw her grandson in the uniform of the Standing.

Mother stands at the bottom of the arch every morning now. With the teapot. In case.

She says she isn't crying. She says it's the steam.

Ione comes down with her sometimes.

With Ingrid, holding her hand. She stands at the bottom of the arch beside Mother and watches the old ones come through, very seriously, the way she watches everything.

She doesn't say anything to them. She hardly says anything to anyone except Konrad. But on the forty-fourth day an old man came through on Kwame Osei's arm who couldn't stop shaking. Not from cold. Just shaking. He'd sat in a room on his own world for sixty days with the door shut, waiting for the black ships to come back for him, and they never did, and he couldn't stop waiting.

Ione let go of Ingrid's hand. And went to him. And stood in front of him.

"Nobody's coming," said Ione.

The old man looked at her. Dot gave it to him.

"Nobody's coming," said Ione, again. "I waited too. In a box. For a long time. Every day I thought they were coming." She held out her hand. "Nobody's coming. You can stop."

He took her hand. He was still shaking.

She held it until he stopped.

Konrad wrote it on the back of the sheet that night. In the margin, where there's hardly any room. Ione: nobody's coming. You can stop.

There are fourteen million new old people on Avalon. And more every day.

So I built.

Not cities. Not this time. Mother said no, and Abbe said no, and Eska, and Ingrid, and Varra, and three hundred other grandmothers, at the long table, all at once.

"They don't want cities," said Mother. "They've had towns. They lost them." She put the teapot down. "They want to be near their grandchildren. That's all. They want to be able to walk to them."

So I made rooms.

In every city. On the end of every street. A small house, or a room, or a hollow, or a tower floor, or a bit of wet ground with planks over it, depending on who'd be in it, on the end of every row in all forty cities. Near the schools. Near Voss's sheds.

Mother calls them the end rooms. Everyone does now.

Every end room has a step outside it. Mother asked for that. A step, wide enough to sit on with someone, facing the street.

Hana came with me. Every day. My nose didn't bleed once.

It's easier, making a room for someone's grandmother. I don't know why. I asked the queen at the garden wall. She said it's because I always knew what they were for.

Kwame Osei made the hollows.

Not me. I made the ground. He made them. In every city where the people from a cold world or a dark one were going to live, he went out ahead with the grandfathers from the hollows under the furred ones' hill and dug. The way he dug on Earth under the dome all his life, Hana says, turning a river. The way he dug the first hollows on Avalon. He's not young any more either. He digs very slowly now and very well.

"An old man needs somewhere warm to put his feet," Kwame Osei told me, on the eightieth day, in a hollow at the end of a street in the forest city, with mud to his elbows. "Nobody ever thinks of it. They think of beds. Beds are easy." He patted the floor. "It's the feet."

So every end room has warm floors now. Maura did the warm. Kwame did the floors. Rory went round after both of them and fixed every door so it shut properly, because Rory says an old person shouldn't ever have to lean on a door to make it close.

Abena brings a basket to a different end room every day.

Konrad's sheet is still face down on the step, most nights.

Dory turned it over once. I saw her. She looked at the number he'd written very small on the back, the sum he did at the long table on the first morning, of how many old there were on two thousand, eight hundred and six worlds.

She didn't say anything.

Then she turned it back over, carefully, the way she puts everything down.

"Fourteen million," she said. To me. Not to the sheet.

"So far."

"So far," said Dory. She looked at the sheet. "Kyria says count the ones you held first."

She didn't say the other number. Neither have I.

Dory came down to the red glass with Mother on the ninetieth morning.

She does most mornings. She stands beside the third grey one, the last of Ferrin's three, who still sways very small as if he doesn't know what he's walking toward. Tavvan sits on his stool on the other side. Mother says his word.

And every morning Dory takes his sway out on the net. Through the whole billion. Through all fourteen million who came home old. Through every world we've fetched them from.

On the ninetieth morning, the arch on the red glass opened at dawn as it does every morning, and the first of the day came through. From a world of low grey cliffs over a cold sea, three hundred and fifth. On Nan Vey's arm.

An old woman. Very small. Grey-skinned, with wide flat hands, and a long coat of something woven.

She walked down off the arch onto the glass. And stopped.

And swayed.

Very small. Side to side. The way you sway on a boat, standing up, when the sea's been under you all your life, and you don't know any more that you're doing it.

Dory went very still.

The third grey one, behind her, stopped.

Days 5385–5474. Grandmothers Fetch Grandmothers.

Mother: and the old? Two thousand eight hundred and six worlds like Sedge, this morning. Konrad did the sum and turned it face down. Grandmothers fetch grandmothers: Ithel says the world, Dory finds the old hearts, Kyria cuts, a smith holds, a grandmother walks out first. Mother on the moss world, sitting in the ring. Abbe in the desert with an empty cup. Eska calling in the forest. Holt at every arch: I'll stop when there's somebody else. A cold town of turf roofs: Ingrid hushed the whole of it and lit every one; we were a morning late; 4,112 of 9,000. Konrad came through on his knees and sat with her. The eldest queen stopped singing: it was there when I woke; it has never answered anything. Then she sang toward it for the first time. 304 worlds; 14,211,000 home old; late for nineteen. The boy in the Standing's line and his grandfather: the young from One have their grandparents now. End rooms, each with a step. The ninetieth morning: an old woman from a sea world, swaying like a boat. The third one stopped.