Chapter 456 The Quiet Years

We came home through the arch at dusk. Mother first.

Nan Vey was at the arch on the red glass with her iron, where she’d stood for three days. She looked at Mother’s coat. It was filthy. It had been lifting a city at noon.

Nan Vey didn’t say anything about it. She just put the iron down on its plate, very carefully, the way you put down something you’ve been holding a long time.

“Long ward,” said Nan Vey. “Go on. I’ll press it later.”

I’ll write it the way it happened. Not the way it’s told now. It’s told a lot now, on Avalon. People who weren’t there tell it at weddings.

It wasn’t like that. It was a long ward with the lamps low, and Halloway with his sleeves rolled up, and the Aldri doctor very tall at the end of the bed, and young Abena with her hand on Genny’s wrist, breathing for her when she forgot to. Garnet on a stool with her board on her knee. Callum on the floor by the bed with his head on the blanket and Genny’s hand in his hair, because his legs had gone when he came down out of the sky over the long ward and he hadn’t got them back.

And Genny. Very cross. Very red. Very glad to see us.

“You took your time,” said Genny. When Mother came in.

“Three days,” said Mother. Taking her coat off. “You said that was plenty.”

“It was,” said Genny. “It was too much.” And then she said something I’m not going to write, because Mother told her off for it, and then said it herself under her breath.

He came just before the turn.

A boy. Small, red, very loud, with a lot of dark hair standing straight up off his head the way Oona’s does, the way Mother’s does when it’s wet. Halloway lifted him up and he shouted at all of us, and Callum got his legs back in one go and stood up so fast he hit his head on the lamp.

Garnet drew him. Before anyone else held him. She’d said she would, whatever was happening in the sky, and the sky was clear by then and she drew him anyway. In about a minute. Him shouting, with his fists up, and his hair.

It’s on the kitchen wall now. Beside the four hands and the two coats.

Mother held him second. After Genny. Before Callum, who didn’t mind, because his hands were shaking too much.

She looked at him for a long time.

“There you are,” said Mother.

He stopped shouting.

They named him Holt.

Genny asked him first. Holt, I mean. The old one. She sent Callum down to the red glass to fetch him, and Holt came up the hill very slowly, in his other cap, because the Overseer has the first one now and won’t give it back.

He came into the long ward and stood at the end of the bed and took his cap off.

“We’d like to call him after you,” said Genny. “If you’d let us. Because you went first. So everyone behind you could see someone not afraid.”

Holt didn’t say anything for a long time.

“I was very afraid,” said Holt. In the end.

“I know,” said Genny. “That’s why.”

Holt held him. Very carefully. Like a cap.

The baby looked up at him and took hold of his finger and didn’t let go.

Holt’s seventy-one now, and that was the first time I’ve ever seen him cry.

Dory felt it go.

That night. Very late. On the porch, with the baby asleep in the long ward and Mother asleep in her chair with her coat back on, filthy, and the queens still on Root, because they’d said they’d stay one more night with their mother and come home in the morning.

Dory was sitting on the top step with Dusk off. Not holding the net; she’d let it go small, for the first time in three days. Just sitting.

And she sat up very straight.

“Dad,” she said.

I came out. She was looking at nothing. Out past the town, past Root low in the east, past Ister’s lamp. Further. At the place her net had never been able to go. The middle.

“It’s moving,” said Dory.

“What is?”

“The hand,” said Dory. “The one over the middle. The one that’s always been there.” Her black eyes were wide open. “It’s letting go.”

I couldn’t feel it. I’ve never been able to feel the middle. Dory can. She’s said it’s like a hand over a mouth, very old, holding something shut. Since she was twelve she’s said it.

“It’s taking something,” said Dory. Very quietly. “Off the middle. Into a ship. A big one. Old.” She shut her eyes. “Lots of hearts. Very small. Very quiet. Like they’re asleep.”

I knew what they were. So did she.

Sedge. Everyone under fifty, taken in. And every stock world’s line that went in after. Into the making. The ones that weren’t finished yet. That hadn’t come out on the grey ships. That were still in there, in the middle, being made, when the houses went into the ground.

“It’s taking them,” said Dory. “All of them. The unborn ones.”

I went.

I didn’t think. I thought about the middle, the way I’d thought about the south wall, and Ister, and the Ashen over Avalon. And I went toward it.

And I couldn’t.

I don’t know how else to write it. It was like running at a wall in the dark and finding the wall had always been there, and you’d just never run at it before. The middle wouldn’t let me in. It never has. It’s not a door, Dory says. It’s a hand.

I came down on the porch again. Breathing. Dory was standing on the top step with her fists closed.

“I can’t either,” said Dory. “I tried. While you were trying.” Her nose was bleeding. Just a little. “It’s going. Dad, it’s going.”

Tiamat saw it. From the ninth station. With her ears in every moon.

“A ship,” she said. Over the silver. Not level. “Out of the middle. Very big. Round. Very old.” A pause. “The Ashen are with it. All of them. The two hundred that ran, and more. A lot more. They’re going with it.”

“Where?”

“Out,” said Tiamat. “Away. Not toward anything. Away from everything.” A long pause. “Faster than anything I’ve ever heard.”

Then: “It’s past the Watch.”

Then: “I’ve lost it.”

We stood on the porch for a long time.

Dory and me. And Mother, who’d woken up, and come out in her coat, and stood beside us without asking anything, because she knew.

“How many?” said Mother. In the end.

Dory shook her head.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I couldn’t count them. They were too quiet.” She wiped her nose. “Gran, I couldn’t get in. I couldn’t even get close.”

Mother put her arm round her.

“No,” said Mother. “Not this time.”

I’m going to write that down, because Mother says I always leave the hard bits out of the good chapters.

We won. The body of the Hungry is gone. The houses are in the ground under Root, talking to nobody. The Hands are gone. The grey ones are swaying.

And whatever held the middle shut took every child the Sorn had taken in that hadn’t been finished yet, and the Ashen with it, and went somewhere none of us can hear.

We weren’t in time.

Mother added them to the names. That night. Not one by one; nobody knows their names. She said: “And everyone who was taken in. Wherever they are now.”

Oona said: “Goodnight, love.”

The middle was empty in the morning.

Dory’s net went in. For the first time. It just went. Like a door you’ve pushed at your whole life that turns out to have been unlocked all along, the second whoever was leaning on the other side walked away.

There was nothing there. Dory says. Rooms. Very big ones, empty. The black buildings, like the one on One, but bigger, with the lines gone and the doors open. And the great dark place in the middle of it all, where the hand had been, with nothing in it.

“It’s just a place,” said Dory. “It’s just a very sad place.”

We went in anyway. The two of us. A week later, when the eldest said the place had gone quiet enough to stand in.

I’d never been there. Nobody had who came out with their own name. Ithel had seen the edges of it, from inside a ship, when he was very small, and the Overseer had sat in a room at its edge his whole life and never once looked in.

It was grey. All of it. Not the grey of the making. The grey of a thing nobody’s ever painted.

Black buildings, one after another, like the one on One. Bigger. Ramps going up into them and nothing on the ramps. Lines painted on the floors where people had stood, and nobody standing. Doors open. Rooms with low shelves, and nothing on the shelves.

Dory walked down the middle of the first one with Dusk off and her hand out in front of her, flat, the way Corin does when he’s mending something. Feeling.

“They were here,” she said. “A week ago. Just here.”

We walked for a long time.

In the last building, at the very bottom, past the place where the floor stopped being floor and started being the dark where the hand had been, Dory stopped.

“Dad,” she said. “Listen.”

I listened. With everything.

Hearts.

Nine of them. Very small. Very slow. Like rain on a roof a long way off.

They were on a shelf. The bottom shelf, in a room at the very end, where the light didn’t reach. Nine children. Small ones. Smaller than Kesh was when she first came to the heap. All different peoples; I didn’t know half of them. In grey smocks, very thin, very cold, curled up together on the bottom shelf the way the heap sleeps.

Left.

Halloway said afterward they were too sick to make. Too small, or too weak, or too far along in something the making couldn’t use. The ship took everyone it could use. It left the rest on the bottom shelf, in the dark, for whatever came.

What came was us.

Dory picked up the first one before I’d got my breath. A girl with ears like leaves and no hair at all. She held her the way she used to hold Kesh. Against her neck, under her chin.

The girl opened her eyes. Very slowly.

“There you are,” said Dory.

I carried four. Dory carried five. Don’t ask me how; she says she asked her arms if they’d mind.

We came out through the arch on the red glass at dawn, at the count, with nine children in grey smocks and the whole of the town on the glass for the names. Wren looked up from the step.

She didn’t say anything. She just wrote. Nine.

Mother was already there. Of course she was. With nine cups.

Hana breathed for them for three days in the long ward. Abena helped. Halloway didn’t sleep. All nine lived.

Ithel knew five of their worlds. Grandmothers fetched grandmothers. Five of the nine had someone by the end of the first year.

The other four went into the heap. They’re still there. One of them, the girl with ears like leaves, follows Dory everywhere, the way Dory used to follow me, and won’t sleep unless Dory’s said goodnight.

It’s not enough. Not with everyone the ship took. Mother says it’s never enough, and it’s never nothing, and you count the nine anyway.

So Wren counted them. And Konrad wrote them on the front.

Okafor wiped the slate.

The morning after we came out of the middle. Everything on it. ROOT. ISTER. AVALON. and the line round them, and Queens: when it comes, and every number she’d written in the thirty days. She wiped it with the flat of her hand, slowly, until it was black, and stood looking at it.

Then she picked up the chalk. And wrote one word. Small. In the middle.

Quiet.

She put the chalk down.

“It won’t last,” said Okafor. To Mother, at the stove.

“No,” said Mother. “It never does.” She poured. “Drink your tea.”

Okafor drank her tea.

She left the word up for four years.

The General took off his medals.

In the first spring. He came up to the porch in his old uniform with all of them on, every one, and took them off one at a time on the top step, and put them in a tin.

“I’m not going to need them,” said the General.

Small Sigmund was sitting on the step beside him. He’s always beside him now. Since the stair.

“You might,” said small Sigmund.

The General looked at him for a long time.

“Then you’ll know where they are,” said the General. And gave him the tin.

The queens came home that morning.

Through every arch. The way they’d gone. Quietly. The Scarecrow queen first, up through the red glass in front of Nan Vey, who was pressing Mother’s coat on her board at the arch and didn’t stop.

The Scarecrow queen stopped. And looked at the coat.

She lifted a city in that, said the queen.

“I know,” said Nan Vey. “There’s grass on the hem.”

The heavy queen came down out of the Ground on the north field and walked into the ground and went home under the house on the rise. Into the hall. Onto her ledge.

The children were still there. Most of them. Kwame Osei had said nobody was going up the stair until every queen was home, and old Efua had said she’d shout at anyone who tried.

The heavy queen stopped at the bottom of the stair. Where the General was. And small Sigmund.

She put her head down.

“Ma’am,” said the General. “All present.”

Yes, said the heavy queen. I counted.

Our queen from the roots came last. She went to the heap and put her head down over it, and hummed. Once. And Kesh woke up and put her hand on her nose, and said “You’re cold,” and the queen went and lay down by the far wall where she’s always lain, older than the house. And the hall was warm again.

Trevor says that’s when the children started crying. Not before. Not once in three days. Only when it was warm again.

The Scarecrow queen put the range back.

On Root. On the far south edge of the plains. She’d said she would. It took her a month. She went back to Root every evening through the arch and put her head down on the flat white field where the houses were, and sang, and every evening the mountains came up a little more. When it was done, they were exactly where they’d been. The snow too.

The eldest said it was very tidy.

Tavvan says that if you sit on the slope of the new range in the evening and very still, you can hear them. The houses. Very far down. Talking.

Nobody answers.

That was the start of the quiet years.

I’ll write them short. Not because they were short. Because Mother says nobody wants to read about people being happy, and I said that wasn’t true, and she said well, write it short anyway, then they’ll want more.

So.

The grey ones swayed.

All of them. Every finished one that was left, on every world, in every ship. Without the houses’ voice in them, they stopped. Some fell where they were. Most just stood. On the stock worlds, on the ships, in the sky over Root after the third day, very still. And then, slowly, over months, they started to sway.

Mother went to them. With Tavvan. With the grandmothers. The way she went to Ferrin’s three. With a cup.

It took years. It’s still taking years. They were finished; that’s harder than the unfinished, much harder, and some of them will never come back. Halloway says some of them will. Tavvan says all of them will, if someone sits with them long enough.

Mother sits with them. Every morning. After the names.

The tall one from the unfinished, the one who held his hand out to me on the south wall, came home in the second year. His grandmother found him. She’d been on Avalon the whole time, in the forest city, in the end rooms. She’d come by herself, years ago, on one of the colony ships, with nobody left. She saw him at the dawn count on the red glass and walked straight across the glass to him and didn’t say anything at all.

He put his hand on his chest. And held it out.

She took it.

The stock worlds.

Ithel’s two thousand eight hundred and six. Every one with people on it in collars, in lines. The collars the houses’ voice went through. With the houses in the ground, the collars went quiet.

Grandmothers fetch grandmothers. That’s what Mother wrote on the slate once. It was still on there.

So that’s what we did. For four years. Ithel named a world. Dory found the hearts. Kyria’s cutters cut. A smith held the arch. A grandmother walked out first. And then everyone else. Every collar on every neck on two thousand eight hundred and six worlds, opened by Teel’s family’s way, three short and one long, by smiths who’d once worn them.

I didn’t do much of it. I want that written down. I built. Mostly. Houses. Cities. For everyone who came. The opening was for other people. Ossel opened more collars than anyone. He says it’s the only smithing he’s ever done that he’s sure was worth it.

Wren counted. Every morning. On the step. The number went up so fast Konrad had to start a new sheet every week.

Two billion, at the end of the second year.

Three, at the end of the fourth.

Konrad says the sheet’s the size of a field now. He keeps it face up.

Halvane stopped saying good morning in the evenings.

He says it at dawn now. On the red glass, every morning, with Mother. He pours the first cup out, and drinks the second, and says good morning, and it is.

The children grew up.

I’ll do them properly. They’d want it right.

Dory’s twenty-one.

She builds with me. Most days. Cities, for the people coming home from the stock worlds. She’s faster than me now. She’s been faster for a while. She asks the ground a different way, more the way the eldest does, as if the ground’s an old friend she hasn’t seen in a while, and it answers her before it answers me.

She doesn’t hold the net all the time any more. She says she doesn’t need to. She says it’s like a house you know: you don’t have to keep every room lit to know where everyone is.

She goes to Root every week. To sit with the eldest. They talk. I don’t know what about. Dory says it’s mostly the eldest asking questions. About everything. About people. She says the eldest has been alone so long she doesn’t know how anything works, and she’s very curious, and she asks about the strangest things.

“She asked me what a birthday was,” said Dory. “I told her. Now she wants one.”

So the eldest has a birthday. It’s the day the queens came to her. Everyone on Root has a party. Mother bakes.

I’ll write the first one. Because it was the first birthday the eldest ever had, in all the time there’s been days.

Mother baked for a week. Not one cake. Hundreds. Maura helped, and Abbe, and every grandmother on every arch who’d stood there during the three days, because they’d all asked to come. The kitchen was full of cake for a week. Small Holt, who was nearly one, ate most of one off the bottom shelf of the larder on the fourth day and wasn’t sorry.

We went through the arch on the morning. Everyone. The queens went first, the way they had. And stood round the plateau in the ring again. Not facing out. Not pressing in. Just there.

Mother put the first cake on the green ground at the top of the plateau. In the middle. Where Dory had stood.

There was one candle in it. Ash made it. Iron, with a wick. She said a candle that size should be something that lasts.

Mother lit it.

The eldest didn’t say anything for a long time.

What do I do? she said. In the end. Very quietly. To Dory.

“You make a wish,” said Dory. “And then you blow it out.”

I cannot blow.

“Then you just wish,” said Dory. “And I’ll blow it out for you.”

A long pause. The whole plateau waited. The queens, and the grandmothers, and Holt in his cap, and the Overseer in his, and all of us.

I have wished, said the eldest.

Dory blew the candle out.

“What did you wish for?” said small Holt. Very loud. From Genny’s hip.

“You’re not supposed to ask,” said Genny.

I wished, said the eldest, before anyone could stop her, that next year there would be another one.

Mother wiped her eyes on her sleeve.

“There will be,” said Mother. “Every year. That’s how it works, love.”

Then I would like to wish for something else next year, said the eldest. If that is allowed.

“It’s allowed,” said Mother.

The ground under the plateau warmed. All the way out to the ring of queens.

There was a lot of cake.

Trevor’s nineteen. As tall as Luna. Quiet. Still sees the oxygen in everything, and still says so.

He and Teva go to the park. Every week. Since the second year. Holding hands on the wheel, Luna says, though I’m not supposed to know. Teva still asks him what he can see. He still tells her. Luna says it’s the most she’s ever heard him talk.

Small Sigmund is seventeen and lifts things without asking, and Tovi has stopped swapping places with her sister to fool him, because he always knows, and she says it isn’t any fun any more. They go to the park too. On different days. They say they don’t want to be seen with Trevor and Teva because it’s embarrassing.

Risa says that means they’re very serious.

Ash is a smith. Properly. Odra took her on, on Hyrran, in the third year, after she watched Ash forge a ring on her own. Odra struck it on the anvil three short and one long and it rang. She said: you’ll do. Ash came home and didn’t say anything for a whole day and then cried in the kitchen and then went back to Hyrran.

Elin and Goldie still act like twins. They aren’t. They still make doors. The four of them, Corin and Thessaly and Elin and Goldie. Nobody asks them anything. They make doors when they want to, which is mostly to the park.

Kwame builds, like his grandfather. Efua shouts at birds. Abena breathes for people in the long ward, with Halloway, every day now. Halloway says she’s better than him. He says it like it’s a complaint.

Corin’s twelve.

He still hums. Two notes. Every hour, if he’s thinking about something. Tiri’s fifteen and a head and a half taller than him, still, and still breaks her message-bird about once a month, and he still mends it every time.

He still says he’s going to marry her. He said so at dinner in the third year, in front of Halvane, who’d come to dinner, and Halvane said I believe you, and Mother said later, and Corin said I know, Gran, I’m just saying, and Tiri went the colour of Ister’s sky and didn’t say anything at all.

Andraste says he’s got that from Dory. The I’m just saying.

Dory says he’s got it from Mother.

Kesh is eleven. Lio’s eleven. Oona’s twelve.

They’re inseparable. They make the warm rain in the courtyard every morning still, though nobody’s coming home through the arches to stand in it. Kesh says somebody might.

Lio does her knot. Every morning. Her own. In her own hair, with Sefa beside her doing hers. Sefa’s very old now. She moved into the end room by the garden wall in the third year, so she could be near. She sits on the bench by the kitchen door with Ilas and Abbe, and the three of them watch the courtyard and say very little and miss nothing.

Ilas is a hundred and ninety-four. She says she’s going to be two hundred and then she’ll think about it.

Oona lifts the porch at the turn. Every evening. With Mother. Mother doesn’t need her to, now. Neither of them mentions it.

She’s grown out of the coat. Maura made her another. Exactly the same. With a hand-wide hem to let down.

Vessa doesn’t turn.

Not for the Ashen. Not for anything. For four years she hasn’t turned once. Andraste says she sleeps all night now. Every night. She never has before.

Holdfast hums, sometimes, very quietly, on its hook by the kitchen door. Andraste says it’s just humming. Corin says it’s humming two notes.

Genny’s boy is four.

Holt. Small Holt. He has his great-grandmother’s hair, standing up, and he shouts at everything, and he follows the other Holt everywhere. Round the town. Down the hill. To the red glass, where the old Holt sits with Crane at the end of the line in the mornings and watches the trains.

Old Holt has stopped wearing a cap. He says he’s waiting for small Holt to be old enough to give one to.

Garnet had a girl in the second year. Rowan nearly flew into a station. They named her Pell, for Miss Pell, who cried and said it was a very old-fashioned name and she’d never been so happy in her life.

Dinraal and Isolde have three now. Ithel, Bahamut, and a girl in the second year, with silver hair like her brother’s. Isolde wants seven. She’s said so every year. Dinraal says he’s getting used to it.

Ithel doesn’t hold doors any more. He doesn’t need to. He’s at Miss Pell’s school and he says the best thing about school is that nobody needs him to remember anything.

He still remembers. All of them. Every world. Two thousand eight hundred and six. He says he’ll forget them one day. He says he’s looking forward to it.

And my wives.

Luna still doesn’t sleep the first night of anything. Sera doesn’t say sorry any more when she burns, but she still says it when she treads on someone’s foot. Risa still never lets anyone in to her storm, except Dory. Hana still lies awake when she’s said something important, keeping it. Andraste still hangs her blade by the kitchen door, with the one white ribbon on the hilt, and the third on her wrist, and goes to Hyrran once a month to see her mother.

We go to the park. All six of us. Every year, on the day I won Andraste the first ribbon under the stars. Pip still runs her stall. The bread-dough balls and the tin cups. She lets me win. She says she always has.

And Mother.

Mother’s the same.

That’s all I can write. She’s the same. Every morning, the names. Every morning, the first cup out and the second drunk. Every evening, the turn. Sixty years old or seventy or more; Avalon’s been taking years off her since the moss woman noticed, and she won’t tell anyone how old she is any more, and Halloway’s stopped asking.

She sits with the grey ones. She sits with the queens. She goes to Root once a month to pour for the eldest and tell her what everyone’s doing. The eldest says it’s the best day of her month.

She told me in the third year, on the porch, at the turn, that she thought Father would have liked the quiet years.

“He’d have been bored,” I said.

“Yes,” said Mother. “For about a week. Then he’d have started building something nobody asked for, and painted it, and made everyone come and look.”

“That’s what I do.”

“I know,” said Mother. “That’s how I know he’d have liked it.”

I thought it was over.

I want that written down too. Because it’s true, and because Mother says I should put down what I thought, not just what happened.

In the fourth year, on a summer evening, on the porch, with Mother lifting the porch at the turn and Oona lifting the step, and small Holt asleep on Genny’s knee, and the town lit up below us all the way down to the red glass, and Root low in the east and Ister’s lamp beside it, and three billion people on the sheet, I thought: it’s over. It’s finally over.

I thought: now I just build.

I thought that for about four years.

Then Dory sat up.

On the top step. In the dark. With Dusk off.

She hadn’t been holding the net. Not all of it. Just the edges, the way she does now, like knowing where everyone is in a house. And something came through the edge of it. From very far away. Further than she’s ever reached.

She put her hands over her ears.

It didn’t help. It wasn’t coming through her ears.

“Dad,” said Dory.

Her face had gone white.

“Someone’s screaming.”

Days 7044–8526. The Quiet Years.

Nan Vey: long ward; I’ll press it later. Genny: you took your time. A boy just before the turn, hair straight up, shouting; Garnet drew him in a minute; Mother: there you are, and he stopped. They called him Holt. I was very afraid. I know; that’s why. He held his finger. Seventy-one, and the first time I’ve seen him cry. That night the hand let go of the middle and took every one of the unborn, the ones taken in and not yet finished, into an old round ship, and the Ashen went with it, all of them, faster than anything Tiamat’s heard, past the Watch; lost. I couldn’t get in. Neither could Dory. Not this time. Mother: and everyone who was taken in, wherever they are now. In the morning the middle was empty: just a very sad place. On the bottom shelf, nine left behind, too small to make; there you are; Mother had nine cups. Okafor wiped the slate and wrote: quiet. It won’t last. Drink your tea. The General gave small Sigmund his medals in a tin. The queens came home; Nan Vey: there’s grass on the hem. The General: all present. The heavy queen: I counted. Our queen from the roots made the hall warm, and the children cried for the first time. The Scarecrow queen put the range back in a month; you can hear the houses under it, talking; nobody answers. The quiet years. The grey ones swayed, and Mother sits with them every morning. The tall one’s grandmother walked straight across the glass. Two thousand eight hundred and six worlds; every collar opened three short and one long, Ossel more than anyone. Two billion, then three; Konrad keeps the sheet face up. Halvane says good morning at dawn now. Dory is twenty-one and faster than me; the eldest has a birthday. Trevor and Teva on the wheel; Sigmund and Tovi on different days. Odra told Ash: you’ll do. Abena’s better than Halloway. Corin, twelve: I know, Gran, I’m just saying. Kesh, Lio and Oona make the warm rain anyway; Sefa in the end room; Ilas at a hundred and ninety-four. Vessa hasn’t turned in four years; Holdfast hums two notes. Small Holt is four; Garnet’s Pell. Isolde has three, wants seven. Ithel is looking forward to forgetting. Pip lets me win. Mother: he’d have built something nobody asked for and painted it. I thought it was over. Then Dory sat up: someone’s screaming.