Chapter 487 Early

The first one who asked wasn’t frightened.

I want to put that first. Because every queen who’s ever called the eldest, since I’ve known her, has called because something was being done to her. Ysse on her frame. Arreth on hers. Thole’s queen, shaking, with the dark coming for her sun.

This one wasn’t.

Dory woke at the turn. In the heap. With Sorrel. She sat up in the dark the way she does, and Sorrel woke and didn’t cry this time, she’s used to it now, she just held onto Dory’s coat and waited.

“Gran,” said Dory. Very quietly. “Another one.”

Mother was there. With her shawl.

“Is she hurt, love?”

Dory listened. With her hands flat on the floor of the heap, and her eyes shut.

“No,” said Dory. Slowly. As if she couldn’t quite believe it. “She’s not hurt. She’s not frightened. She’s just—” Dory stopped. “She’s just asking.”

We sat on the red glass. Dory and me. With our hands flat. And the thread came. Very thin, very far, into the Collective’s web, past its middle, out towards the edge where it thins. To a star that was yellow and steady and not yet afraid of anything.

And a queen under a world. Holding the thread out. Very carefully. The way you’d hold out a cup to someone you’d never met, not sure if they’d take it.

I was told to ask, said the queen. To the eldest. Through Dory. A woman on my world bought a box from a trader. And the trader said four words. And she came home and told her town. And her town told the next one. And they told me. A pause. They said: if your sun goes dark, ask.

Your sun is not dark, said the eldest. Low and bright, from the east.

Not yet, said the queen. It will be. In eight turns of my world round it. My people can count. They looked at the list the Collective sent, years ago, about the phenomenon. Their town is on it.

A long pause.

They said: we don’t want to wait for the ships that make light and go home, said the queen. They said: we’d like to ask now. While there’s time.

Dory opened her eyes. On the red glass. And looked at me.

“Eight months,” said Dory.

“Eight months,” I said.

Lantern’s engine took eight and a half. With every engineer on Ister.

“They came early,” said Dory. Her voice was very odd. “Dad. They came early. They didn’t wait to be dying.”

We met her before we met anyone. Sallow’s queen. On the way down the thread.

She was waiting for us, very deep, under the widest river. Not holding anything out. Not shaking. Just there. The way someone waits at a landing for a boat they know is coming.

You are the two, she said. Straight to me. Not through Dory. The second queen to do that, after Thole’s.

“Yes,” I said.

The eldest said you would come. She said you always come. A pause. I have never called anyone before. I did not know if I was doing it properly.

“You did it properly,” said Dory.

My people taught me, said Sallow’s queen. They do not know I can hear them. They talk on the rivers at night, in their boats, between the towns. They have talked about nothing else for a month. About the four words. About whether to ask. Another pause. I have listened to them for a long time. Longer than they have had boats. I have never once been asked anything by them. They do not know I am here.

“Do you want them to know?” said Dory.

The queen was quiet for a while. Under the river. The water above her moved, very slowly, very brown.

Yes, said Sallow’s queen. When it is safe. When we are somewhere warm. I would like to be poured for. Once. Into the water. The way they pour for each other.

“I’ll tell Orra,” said Dory.

Not yet, said the queen. She has enough to carry. Tell her when the river is safe.

The world is called Sallow.

It’s a river world. That’s the first thing you know about it when you come up the thread, before you know anything else. The sound. Water. Everywhere. Big slow brown rivers, wider than the eastern plain, wandering across low green land under a wide pale sky, splitting and joining and splitting again, so that from very high up, Aune says, Sallow looks like the back of an old hand.

The people live on the rivers. In towns on stilts, and towns on rafts, and towns on the high banks where the water doesn’t reach. They fish. They grow rice in the shallows. They ferry. Everything on Sallow goes by water, and everyone has a boat, and the children learn to row before they learn to walk.

We came up the thread at dawn. Dory and me. Quietly. Nobody else. Okafor said that was right; she said if the Collective was watching Sallow, the fewer of us there were, the less they’d see.

We came down on a wide flat bank of a brown river, in the mist, in a town on stilts. And a woman was waiting at the bottom of a ladder. With a lamp.

Her name is Orra.

She’s a ferry-woman. Not old, not young. Brown and lean and very quiet, with the kind of arms you get from forty years of pulling a boat across a river against the current. She doesn’t have a title. Sallow doesn’t really have titles, she says; the towns talk to each other by boat, and whoever’s been told the most things decides.

She was the one who bought the last crate.

From Mattick. On the bank of her river. At dusk. She said he’d come up the river in his brown patched ship, very slowly, the way the ore boats come, and stopped at the town, and opened his hatch, and the children came down to the water with every coin they had. And he sold every crate by dark. And she bought the last one. Not for herself. For the girl at the end of her landing, whose mother was sick and couldn’t come.

And at the bottom of the ramp, when he gave her the crate, he leaned down and said, very quietly, four words.

If your sun goes dark, ask.

“I asked him who,” said Orra. “He said, the Table. I said, what table. He said, the one with room.” She looked at me. “I didn’t know what it meant. I went home and thought about it all night.”

“And then?”

“And then I got in my boat,” said Orra, “and rowed to the next town. And told them. And they rowed to the next one.” She shrugged, very slightly. The way ferry-people shrug, Dory says, as if they’re adjusting an oar. “Sallow’s all rivers. News goes fast on a river. Faster than on a band. By the end of the month every town on Sallow had heard the four words. And every town said the same thing.”

“What?”

“Why wait,” said Orra.

Before the river, Orra took us to the girl.

The one at the end of her landing. Whose mother was sick and couldn’t come down to the water when Mattick’s ship came, so Orra bought the last crate for her. She was about Fen’s age. Very thin, very quiet, with river-brown hair cut short and a soft Mother tucked under her arm, the one with the chipped teapot, that she’d been holding so long the brown of its coat had gone darker where her hand was.

Her mother was on a mat in the back of the stilt house. Breathing very badly.

Dory looked at her. All the way down. Then she looked at me.

“Her lungs,” said Dory. Quietly. “Something in the river mud. It’s been in her for years. Getting worse.”

“The river-cough,” said Orra. “Half the old ones on Sallow have it. The Collective sent a doctor once. Forty years ago. He said there was nothing to be done and went home.”

I asked Dory if she could.

Dory knelt down by the mat. And put her hand, very gently, on the sick woman’s chest. And asked. Not the woman; the things in her. The small hard bits of river mud that had been sitting in her lungs for years, making scars. She asked them to be something else. Something soft. Something that would go.

It took a long time. Dory’s very careful with people. She says it’s not like asking a stone. She says you have to ask so quietly that the person doesn’t even notice they’re being asked, or they hold on.

The woman coughed. Once. Very deep. And then breathed in.

All the way. For the first time, the girl said afterwards, since before she could remember.

The girl didn’t say anything. She just held the soft Mother very tight and looked at Dory with her mouth open.

“It’s all right,” said Dory. “Your mum’s going to be all right.” She stood up. “And we’ll send someone. A real doctor. For the others. The old ones on the river. Her name’s Halloway and she’s very cross and she’ll fix all of them.”

The girl looked at the soft Mother in her arms. Then at Dory.

“Is she real too?” said the girl. “The one with the pot?”

“She’s real,” said Dory. “She’s probably pouring right now.”

The girl thought about that for a long time.

“Will she pour for us?” she said.

“She pours for everyone,” said Dory.

She took us to see the river.

Not a town. Just the river. She rowed us out in her boat, in the mist, into the middle of the widest brown water I’ve ever seen, so wide you couldn’t see either bank. And stopped. And shipped the oars. And we sat there on the water in the quiet.

“My grandmother rowed this river,” said Orra. “And hers. And hers. For as long as there’ve been boats.” She put her hand over the side, into the brown water. “There are fish in here that only live in this river. Nowhere else in the sky. There are birds that only nest on these banks. There’s a kind of rice that only grows in this mud.” She took her hand out. “If we go through your holes in the air, we can come. All of us. I know that. I’ve heard about Thole. And Lantern.”

“Yes.”

“But the river can’t come,” said Orra.

She looked at me. Very steadily. The way you look at a current before you push off into it.

“Unless it can,” said Orra.

I didn’t answer that one either. Not on the river. I said it wasn’t mine to answer.

I said there was a Table.

The Hedge Table met for the third time two nights later. On the rise. At dusk. With the river of blue lighting up down the middle of it.

And Orra sat at it.

Dory brought her through the arch in the afternoon. She’d never been through an arch. She’d never been off Sallow. She came out onto the eastern plain, onto the grass, in her ferry-woman’s coat, with her lamp still in her hand from habit, and stopped. And looked at the plain. At the Lenn-woven houses, and the people of Lantern and Thole on their doorsteps, and the long table on the rise with its river of blue.

Ebb poured a cup of tea out on the ground for her.

She didn’t understand. Nobody does the first time. Then she watched the tea go into the grass and the steam come up off it.

“On Sallow,” said Orra, slowly, “when someone comes to your landing from upriver for the first time, you pour a cup into the water. So the river knows them.”

Ebb looked at her for a long time.

Then he poured another one. For the river.

She sat at the Table. Between Mira Tannock and Wenna. Mother poured her a cup and turned the handle round, and Orra watched her do it with the same face she’d had when she watched the tea go into the grass.

Then she asked.

She asked plainly. Ferry-people ask plainly, Orra says; there isn’t time to be clever in the middle of a river. She said Sallow was on the Collective’s list. She said its sun had eight turns left. She said Sallow had a queen who had never once called anyone, because she’d never needed to. And she said: We’d like to join the Hedge. Now. Before the dark. Before the ships. Before we’re dying.

Then she said the other thing.

“And the river,” said Orra. “If it’s possible. The river, and the fish that only live in it, and the birds that only nest on it, and the rice. Our grandmothers. We’d like to bring them.” She put her lean brown hands on the Table. Next to the river of blue. “I don’t know if it’s possible. I’m a ferry-woman. I don’t know about engines. But I was told to ask.”

The Table was quiet.

Then Mira Tannock laughed.

Not unkindly. Not loudly. A short surprised laugh, the way miners laugh, Mira says, when the rock gives way where they thought it wouldn’t.

“You came early,” said Mira.

Orra looked at her.

“You came early,” said Mira again. “Eight months. Do you know what that means?” She put her blue hands on the Table beside Orra’s brown ones. “Thole came with three. Less, by the end. We dug by hand four miles down with the dark over half the sky and lost Hesk at the back of the gallery and made it by the width of a breath. Lantern had about eleven and needed eight and a half of them.” She shook her head. “You’ve come with eight. Before anyone’s frightened. Before anyone’s grieving on any band.”

“Is that enough?” said Orra.

Mira looked down the Table. At Ilas. At Ilas, who’d come for Ister, very small in her chair, very old, with her stick across her knees.

Ilas didn’t say anything for a long moment.

“My husband’s people,” said Ilas, “have been waiting eleven thousand years for someone to ask early. So has he, I think. All his life.”

The Table said yes.

All of it. Every world. Before the kettle went cold. The Caddi grandmother said it in two words, the way she does, yes, good. The walker made the mountain sound. Kyria put her scarred hand flat on the river of blue and said that on the ridge, the ones who come to the line before the fight are the ones who live.

Then the Kiln smith with the burned arms, who’d said not them at the first Table and it’s wrong and I’ll do it anyway at the end of it, stood up.

“Kiln will send iron,” said the smith. Very loudly. “For the engine. As much as it needs. Struck right.”

And Mira Tannock stood up beside him.

“And Thole will send miners,” said Mira.

Nobody said anything.

“We know how to dig under water,” said Mira. “Half of Thole’s deep galleries flood. We’ve been pumping and shoring and digging in the wet for four thousand years.” She looked at Orra. “And we know what it’s like to be on a list. And to have someone come.” She stopped. “Hesk would have been the first to go. He’d have said, Mira, they came for us, and we owe them, and anyway it’s warm there.”

She sat down.

“Five thousand,” said Mira Tannock. “To start. With picks. We’ll dig your river’s engine under its own bed.”

Orra didn’t say anything for a long time. She put her hand over her mouth.

Then she did the thing ferry-people do. She lifted her cup. And poured it out. Not on the ground. On the Table. On the river of blue down the middle.

So the river would know them.

Halvane went to Sallow the next week. With Asha and Crane and Bell. And the five thousand from Thole, through Dory’s arches, quietly, at night, onto the high banks where the water doesn’t reach. With their picks. And the Kiln smiths, with their iron.

He stood on Orra’s landing in the mist and looked at the river for a long time.

“Under the bed,” said Halvane. “The engine goes under the bed. Like Lantern’s under its lake. The river stays on top. The fish don’t even notice.”

“Can it be done?” said Orra.

“In eight months,” said Halvane, “with five thousand Thole miners who can dig in the wet and every Kiln smith who isn’t striking blades for the Standing and the queens, who already know how to sing an engine ready because they’ve done it twice.” He turned round. Very slowly. On his stick. “It can be done properly. For the first time. Not by the width of a breath. Properly.”

Then he sat down on the end of Orra’s landing, with his long legs over the edge, above the brown water. Which he never does.

Ilas says he sat there for an hour. She says he didn’t say anything. She says she thinks he was trying out what it was like to not be in a hurry.

The five thousand came through at night. Onto the high banks of Sallow’s widest river, where the water doesn’t reach. Through three of Dory’s arches, very quietly, in the dark, with their picks on their shoulders and their lamps turned down.

Orra met them at the bottom of the bank. In her boat. With a cup.

And as every one of them stepped down off the bank onto the landing, she leaned over the side of her boat and poured a little water from the cup into the river.

Every one. Five thousand. It took her most of the night. She refilled the cup from the river itself, every time, and poured it back.

Brom’s mother was one of them. Mira says she asked to come; she said she’d been carried once, and she’d like to do some carrying. She stopped at the bottom of the bank and watched Orra pour for her, and didn’t understand, and then Orra told her: so the river knows you.

Brom’s mother knelt down on the landing. And put her blue hand in the brown water. Just for a moment.

“On Thole,” she said, “when you go down a new shaft for the first time, you put your hand on the rock. So it knows you.”

Orra looked at her for a long time.

“Then the river knows you twice,” said Orra.

It’s secret. I should say that. Sallow hasn’t been banished. The Collective doesn’t know. Not yet.

Okafor said it had to stay that way as long as it could. She said if the Collective found out a world on its list had asked for help eight months early, it would know about the Word, and the traders, and Mattick. She said it would come for Sallow with ships before the engine was built, just to make an example.

So the five thousand dig at night. Under the river. With the queens singing quietly. And the listening ring has a new post, past Sallow’s star, very small, that Asha put there herself. And Aune and four Cerens sit on the far side of Sallow’s moon, where nobody can see them, and watch.

And Orra rows her ferry every morning, across the wide brown river, the way she always has. So that anyone looking down from the dark sees exactly what they’d expect.

A ferry-woman on a river.

The third of Trevor and Teva’s nine meetings was on Hyrran.

At Kyria’s. On the ridge. Because Kyria counts as Trevor’s grandmother, by Hyrrani counting, through Andraste, who counts as his mother too, the way every wife of the house is every child’s mother. Teva’s father had to have that explained to him twice. Then he wrote it down. Then he crossed it out and wrote it again with an arrow.

I’ll put down the main thing. Which is that Teva’s father met Kyria’s six husbands.

They were standing in a row at the bottom of the shelf. Where the husbands stand. Very tall Hyrrani men, with their braids and their folded arms and their faces like the ridge. And Taveth at the end, with the great iron pot.

Teva’s father stopped. Very tall himself, for an Aldri, but thin, the way they are. He looked at the six husbands for a long time.

The oldest one looked back.

“You’re the father,” said the oldest husband.

“Yes,” said Teva’s father.

“Of the girl who’s marrying the First Blade’s grandson.”

Teva’s father looked at his slate. Then at the arrow.

“Yes,” he said.

The oldest husband nodded. Very slowly. Then he unfolded his arms. And stepped aside. And there was a gap in the row. Between him and the next one.

“Stand there,” said the oldest husband.

Teva’s father looked at the gap.

“Why?”

“Because that’s where the fathers stand,” said the oldest husband. “On the ridge. When something’s happening on the shelf that’s bigger than us. We stand at the bottom. In a row.” He looked at Teva’s father very steadily. “You’ll want to know how. For the wedding.”

Teva’s father stood in the gap.

Taveth gave him a bowl.

He tasted it.

He went a very pale grey. The way Tiri did. The way every Aldri does, the first time.

Then he looked at the six husbands. Who were all looking at him.

“It’s wonderful,” said Teva’s father.

The oldest husband nodded again. Very slowly.

“You’ll do,” he said.

Teva’s grandmother met Kyria on the shelf. The two of them, very old, very straight, very slow, one on a stick and one in armour, standing on the black rock at the post with the iron sea a long way below.

Nobody heard what they said to each other. Teva says her grandmother wouldn’t tell her. Andraste says Kyria wouldn’t tell her either.

But Teva’s grandmother put her hand on the worn place on the post. Where four hundred years of First Blades have held. And kept it there for a long time.

And Kyria let her.

Kyrie shouted at Teva’s father three times during the meeting. No, every time. He asked Andraste what he’d done. Andraste said nothing; that’s just how she says hello.

He wrote that down too.

The other things. Quickly.

The eldest is still listening. To the houses.

Dory went to her last night, by the iron candle. The eldest said something she hasn’t said before. She said the houses have stopped asking the Prime about the door.

Dory said that sounded good.

The eldest said no.

They have stopped asking, said the eldest, because they do not need to. He has told them it is finished.

Dory came home and didn’t say anything. She sat on the roof all night with Holdfast across Andraste’s knees beside her, and Andraste didn’t say anything either, and in the morning they both came down and Dory wrote it on Wren’s slate herself. Under Root is listening.

Door: finished.

I sat on the porch with Mother that evening. With two cups. She’d seen the slate. Everyone had.

“It’s finished,” I said. “The door. Whatever it is. He’s got it. And he’s going to give it to them.”

“Yes.”

“And they’re going to give him what they promised.”

“Yes.”

“And then they’ll go,” I said. “Out of her. Out of the eldest. Through a door that doesn’t need an arch, or a queen, or anyone’s leave. And they’ll be out there. Somewhere. With him.”

Mother drank her tea. She didn’t say anything for a long time.

“When you were small,” said Mother, “on the farm, there was a place where the bad air got into the field. Do you remember?”

I did. Just. A grey smear at the edge of the green in the evenings, where nothing grew.

“Everyone said dig it up,” said Mother. “The whole field. Start again somewhere else. Your father didn’t.” She put her cup down. “He sat up three nights by the filter instead. With a lamp. Watching where it came in. And on the fourth day he found the crack in the wall and sealed it.”

“And?”

“And it never got in again,” said Mother. “It pressed at that crack every evening for a month. You could see it, grey against the seal. Then it gave up.” She picked the cup up again. “He said you don’t need to stop the poison being out there. You can’t. You need to know where it’s going to come in.”

I thought about that for a long time.

“The eldest knows where they are,” I said.

“The eldest is listening,” said Mother. “Dory’s listening. Wren’s writing it down. Crane’s wall’s round the plateau.” She looked at me. “You’ve been watching from the barn for months, love. Every one of you. You know where the gap is.”

“And when they come through it?”

“Then you’ll be there,” said Mother. “You always are.”

Andraste sat up with Dory on the roof that night. After the slate.

I came up later. I found them both on the slates by the chimney, with Holdfast across Andraste’s knees, humming two notes. Neither of them had said anything for hours, Andraste told me afterwards. They’d just sat.

“I want to go to Root,” said Andraste. When I sat down. “And stand on the plateau. With this.” She put her hand on Holdfast. “And wait. At the crack. For whatever comes out of it.”

“Kyria would say that’s striking first,” said Dory.

“It’s not striking,” said Andraste. “It’s standing.” She looked at the dark. “On the ridge, when you know something’s coming up the slope, you don’t go down and meet it. You stand at the top where it has to come to you. And you let it see you standing.”

Dory thought about that for a long time.

“The eldest would like that,” said Dory. “I think. Someone standing on her. Not because they have to. Because they want to.”

So Andraste goes to Root now. Every third night. She stands on the plateau by the iron candle with Holdfast in her hand, point down on the green ground, and waits. Crane’s wall goes up round her at dusk, very fine, and comes down at dawn. Kyrie goes with her sometimes, asleep in a sling. Andraste says she wants her to know what it’s like. Standing.

The eldest says she can feel her there. All night. Like a hand on her back.

And the toymakers have made a boat.

Not a big one. A small one. Brown. With a soft ferry-woman in it, lean and brown, with two oars. Orra doesn’t know. Nobody’s told her. Imre Oshan says it’s not for selling yet; she says they’ll put it out when Sallow’s safe. When it’s somewhere warm, with its river on top.

She says there’s a card already written for the box. She showed it to me.

She came early.

Mattick’s sent word again. From the second world on the list. A hill town this time, very high, very cold. He says he sold every crate by noon and gave the Word to an old man who bought a soft Taveth with a pot.

He says the old man asked: Is it true? Is there really somewhere?

Mattick says he told him there was a Table. With room.

He says the old man said: Then I’ll tell the hill.

Halloway went to Sallow the week after, quietly, at night, with Abena and a bag. She’s treated sixty-one of the old ones on the rivers for the river-cough. She says it’s the stupidest illness she’s ever seen, because it should never have been allowed to get this bad, and forty years ago somebody said nothing could be done and went home. She says she’s going to write to that doctor, if he’s still alive, and tell him exactly what she thinks.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Two hundred and eighty-seven. Sallow’s star asked to be asked, the morning after Orra sat at the Table. It said not yet very calmly, the way Orra rows.

Wren wrote it at the top of the slate.

Sallow: early.

Days 9811–9852. Early.

The first one who asked wasn’t frightened; she’s just asking. I was told to ask: a woman bought a box, and the trader said four words, and her town told the next. Not dark yet; eight turns; they counted from the Collective’s own list; we don’t want to wait for the ships that make light and go home. Dory: they came early; they didn’t wait to be dying. Sallow’s queen, waiting under the widest river, straight to me, the second after Thole’s: I have never called anyone; my people taught me; they don’t know I’m here; when we’re somewhere warm, I’d like to be poured for once, into the water. Sallow: big slow brown rivers like the back of an old hand; towns on stilts and rafts; children row before they walk. Orra, a ferry-woman with forty years in her arms, no title, the one who bought the last crate for the girl at the end of her landing; what table? the one with room; she rowed to the next town; news goes fast on a river; why wait. In the middle of the widest water: fish and birds and rice that live nowhere else; the river can’t come; unless it can. The third Hedge Table: Ebb poured a cup on the ground; on Sallow you pour one into the water so the river knows them; Ebb poured another, for the river. Orra asked plainly: now, before the dark, and the river if it’s possible. Orra took us first to the girl at the end of her landing; her mother had the river-cough, river mud in her lungs for years; the Collective’s doctor said nothing could be done forty years ago; Dory asked it so quietly the woman didn’t notice, and she breathed all the way in; is she real too, the one with the pot? Will she pour for us? She pours for everyone. Mira laughed: you came early; Thole had three, Lantern eleven, you’ve come with eight before anyone’s grieving. Ilas: my husband’s people have been waiting eleven thousand years for someone to ask early. Yes, every world; the Kiln smith: iron, struck right; Mira: Thole will send miners; we know how to dig under water; Hesk would have been the first to go; five thousand to start. Orra poured her cup on the river of blue. Halvane on her landing: under the bed, like Lantern’s; the fish won’t notice; properly, for the first time, not by the width of a breath; he sat on the end of the landing with his legs over the water, trying out not being in a hurry. The five thousand came through at night; Orra poured river water from a cup for every one of them; Brom’s mother put her blue hand in the brown water: on Thole you put your hand on the rock so it knows you; then the river knows you twice. Secret: digging at night, a new ring post past Sallow’s star, Aune and four Cerens behind its moon, and Orra rowing every morning as anyone would expect. The third wedding meeting on the ridge, because Kyria counts as Trevor’s grandmother through Andraste (an arrow on the slate). The oldest husband: you’re the father; stand there; that’s where the fathers stand; you’ll want to know how. Taveth’s bowl; he went grey; it’s wonderful; you’ll do. Teva’s grandmother put her hand on the worn place on the post, and Kyria let her. Kyrie shouted no at him three times; that’s how she says hello. The eldest: the houses have stopped asking about the door, because he has told them it is finished. Dory wrote it on the slate: Door: finished. Mother on the porch: the bad air at the edge of the field; your father sat three nights by the filter and sealed the crack; you don’t need to stop the poison being out there, you need to know where it’s going to come in; you’ve been watching from the barn for months; then you’ll be there. Andraste on the roof: on the ridge you stand at the top where it has to come to you; now every third night on the plateau with Holdfast point down, Kyrie asleep in a sling sometimes; the eldest: like a hand on her back. A soft ferry-woman in a brown boat, not for selling until Sallow’s safe: She came early. Mattick, the second world on the list, a cold hill town: is there really somewhere? Then I’ll tell the hill. Two hundred and eighty-seven. Sallow: early.