417 Knife and Spirit Trapped Inside Red Tree

From: Malagan 417 of the Master Sculptor

Segment 1: The Melon-Faced Ancestors

This is the account set down by Hurrash Bone-Teeth, high chieftain of the river province, son of Ilme who was daughter of Karrash the Otter-Cloaked, so that the weeping of the valley shall not be forgotten by those who come after, and so that the causes of the great matter of the red mask may be known in their proper order and not in the disordered fashion in which the market-women tell them.

This chair will begin where the weeping began, for a chronicle that begins with the marvel and not with the grievance is a chronicle told by a child.

It is the custom of the river folk, and has been since the counting of the clan began, that when a man or woman dies the body is given to the current and the soul is given to a wooden face. The face is cut from a post the height of the dead one, and the post is stood in the earth before the dwelling of the kin, and the eyes of the face are opened with a chisel so that the soul may look out through them and see the sky. It is held among us that the soul cannot rise to the sky by itself. It must climb. It climbs the post as a squirrel climbs a trunk, and at the top it steps out through the open eyes and onto the wind, and the wind carries it up. If the eyes are not open, the soul cannot step out. If the face is not a true face, the soul does not know it as its own dwelling and will not enter, and so it wanders. This is what is believed among the river folk, and this chair believes it also, having no cause to doubt what the grandfather of the clan believed before him.

Now it should be known that the peoples around us do otherwise, and this chair has taken pains to learn their ways, for a chieftain who knows only his own valley is a chieftain who is easily surprised.

The marsh people to the south, who eat frogs and speak through their noses, do not carve faces at all. They weave the dead one’s likeness from reeds and set it afloat, and they say the soul rides the reed doll down to the sea and is taken up by the sea-birds. This chair has seen these reed dolls. They are crude things and they fall apart within a month, but the marsh people say that this is fitting, for the soul has already departed by then and the doll is only a boat. It is said among them that a chieftain of the marshes once had himself woven from gold thread instead of reeds, and that the doll sank, and that his soul was eaten by eels. Whether this is true this chair cannot say, but it is told with great satisfaction by the marsh people, who do not love their chieftains.

The mountain clans to the north, who came down upon us in the years this account will later describe, burn their dead upon pine and keep the finger-bones. They braid the bones of enemies into their beards and the bones of their own kin into the manes of their goats. They say the soul lives in the smallest bone of the smallest finger and that so long as the bone is kept warm by the living, the soul is content. This chair thinks this a poor and crowded way to keep the dead, and the mountain clans think our way a wasteful one, for they say we plant a whole tree for one man. There is no arguing with people who braid bones into their faces.

The plains scribes to the east, who count oil jars and bake their words into clay, do not concern themselves with souls at all, or so they claim. They say the dead are dead and the jars remain. This chair has traded with them and found them honest in their weights and dull in their company.

It is against these customs that the custom of the river folk must be measured, and it will be seen that ours is the best of them, for it gives the dead a true face and open eyes and a straight road to the sky. And it is because ours is the best of them that the shame of the melon-faced ancestors was so heavy upon this chair, heavier than the war club, heavier than the otter cloak in the rain.

For it must now be told that the faces had gone wrong.

This chair does not know exactly when the wrongness began. Some say it began in the time of this chair’s mother, when the old carver Tunnak the Left-Handed died in the flood and took his knowledge into the water with him. Others say it began earlier, when the good rosewood of the near hills was all cut and the carvers had to use the soft pale wood of the lowlands, which rots and swells and will not hold a line. Others say, and this chair has heard it whispered, that the wrongness began when this chair’s grandfather Karrash made peace with the marsh people and let their reed-weavers come into the valley to trade, and that some contamination of craft crept in with them. This chair does not credit that last account, for the marsh people cannot carve a spoon, let alone spoil the carving of a face. But it is set down here because it is said, and a chronicle should record what is said as well as what is true, and mark the difference.

What is true is this. By the time the crown of the river province came to this chair, the faces on the posts no longer looked like faces. They were round and swollen and smooth, with small pits for eyes that were not truly open, and little bumps for noses, and mouths like a crack in a dropped gourd. They looked like melons. This chair will not soften it in the chronicle as it was softened in the courtyard. They looked like swollen melons on sticks, and every kin-group in the valley had a row of them before their door, and every one of those melons was supposed to be a grandmother or a brother or a child taken by the fever, and none of them looked like anyone who had ever lived.

And the people wept.

This chair would have the reader understand what that weeping was, for it was not the weeping of a single funeral, which passes, nor the weeping of a bad harvest, which passes also. It was a weeping that lived in the valley as the mist lives in it. A woman would be grinding meal and she would look up at the post before her door where her mother was supposed to be, and she would see the melon there with its two pits, and she would put down the grinding stone and weep. A boy would be sent to fetch water and he would pass the post of his drowned brother and he would stop and stare at the pale swollen thing and he would not fetch the water. He would sit down in the road and weep. And the old men would sit in the evenings and say, they cannot climb, they cannot climb, our dead are all still down here with us, wandering, because the faces will not let them out. And then the old men would weep, which is the worst weeping, for old men weep without sound.

This chair heard it every day. This chair heard it from the seat of the valley, from the feasting hall, from the bathing pool, from the bed. And this chair, who could command the river guard and the grain stores and the ferry-toll, could not command the faces to be true faces.

It is here that the grievance of the master cutter must be traced, and this chair will trace it fairly, though it does this chair no honor.

There was in the valley a carver of the lineage marked four hundred seventeen in the clan register, a man of the name Ashnak, called Redflour by the market-women because of the dust that clung to him. He was a sour man. He did not come to the feasting hall. He did not bow well. He spoke to the wood more than he spoke to the people, and when he spoke to the people he told them what the wood had said, which is not a manner that endears a man to his chieftain. But it was said of him, and this chair had heard it said, that his posts were not melons. It was said that his posts had cheekbones and brows and lips that had been pressed together in life, and that once, before a dwelling on the east bank, a widow had come out at dawn and greeted the post of her husband by name before she remembered he was dead. That is what was said.

So this chair commanded three posts from him. Three posts for three of the clan’s own dead: for Karrash the Otter-Cloaked, this chair’s grandfather, whose old post had rotted and fallen; for Ilme this chair’s mother; and for the little daughter of this chair’s sister, who had lived nine days and had no post at all. These were to stand before the feasting hall itself, where all the valley would see them, so that the valley would see that the seat of the valley still knew what a true face was.

This chair will now set down what this chair saw when the three posts were brought up from the river and unwrapped in the courtyard, and this chair will set it down as a chronicle should, without the excuses that came afterward.

The posts were dark, for he had used the old rosewood from somewhere, and they were not melons. This chair grants that. They had faces. But the faces were long and hollow-cheeked and the eyes were cut so deep that they seemed to look inward rather than out, and the mouths hung slightly open as the mouths of the dead hang open, and there was a leanness to them, a stretched, starved, sorrowful leanness. The face that was supposed to be Karrash the Otter-Cloaked, who had been a broad laughing man with a belly like a grain jar, was gaunt as a dog in the last month of winter. The face of Ilme was worse. This chair does not wish to write what the face of the nine-day daughter looked like.

The elders were there, and the guard, and the market-women who come to everything. And someone, this chair does not know who and did not wish to know, said in a low voice, they look like dead dogs.

And the valley had been weeping for a generation over melons, and now here were three dead dogs where the seat of the valley had promised true faces, and every eye in the courtyard was upon this chair.

This chair should have looked longer. This account holds that to be true and sets it down plainly. A chieftain should look longer at a thing before he speaks on it. Perhaps the leanness was the leanness of the old rosewood, which does not swell. Perhaps the carver had cut the truth of the dead rather than the memory of the living, for the dead are gaunt, all of them, in the end. Perhaps a widow on the east bank had greeted such a face by name because grief sees what it needs to see. This chair thought of none of that. This chair thought of the weeping, and the whispering, and the melons, and the eyes of the courtyard, and this chair felt the shame of the whole valley gather in the chest like water gathers in a boat.

And this chair said, by the grandfather of the clan and by the river’s mouth, into the fire.

They did not move quickly enough. This chair took up the first post himself, the one that was supposed to be Karrash, and carried it to the cooking fire that burns always at the courtyard’s edge, and thrust it in, and the old rosewood took the flame slowly and then all at once, and the heat came up the length of the post and across this chair’s left forearm and burned it from wrist to elbow. This chair did not let go until the face was in the coals. Then the guard brought the other two, and they went in also, and the courtyard smelled of rosewood and scorched hide, and the carver Ashnak stood at the back of the crowd with his flour-dusted hands hanging at his sides and said nothing, nothing at all, and then he turned and walked down to the river.

So it is said. So it is cut.

This chair carries the scar to this day. It has not faded as the healers said it would, and when the weather turns it aches in a manner that seems to this chair deliberate. This account will not pretend that the scar is undeserved.

For here is the shame that this chronicle exists to record, and it is not the shame of the melons, though that was heavy, and it is not the shame of the dead dogs, though that was sharp. It is this. The valley wept for a generation because it could not make a true face, and when at last a man came who could make one, this chair did not know a true face when it was set before him. This chair knew only that it was not the face this chair wanted. And so the seat of the valley burned the only hands that could open the eyes of the dead, and drove them down to the river, and stood in the smoke and told the people that justice had been done.

The people did not weep less afterward. That should be set down also. They wept more, for now they had seen that even the chieftain’s dead could be dishonored, and there was no post before the feasting hall at all, only a black place in the earth where three posts should have stood.

It is said by some in the valley that on the night after the burning a red light was seen on the river, low down among the logs of the black gorge, and that it hissed. This chair did not see it and does not vouch for it. But it is told, and it is told by people who do not usually agree with one another, and so it is recorded here, at the end of the first matter, before the second matter begins.

 

Segment 2: Three Posts Into the Cooking Fire

Having set down the matter of the burning briefly in its proper place among the causes, this chair now returns to it at length, as a man returns to a wound to see whether it has closed. It has not. And a chronicle that passes over its author’s worst day in three lines is a chronicle written by a coward, and this chair, whatever else may be said of him in the marsh villages, has never been called that.

It should be known first how the day began, for the beginning of a day shapes what a man does at the end of it, and this chair has come to believe that if the morning had gone otherwise the fire would have stayed a cooking fire.

The posts were to come up from the river at the hour when Helios stands highest, so that the light would fall straight down upon the faces and show them without shadow. This was the old way, and this chair had insisted on it. But this chair rose early, before the light, because there was no sleeping. The arm was not yet burned then. This chair remembers lying in the dark with the whole arm unmarked and thinking of nothing but the three faces that would stand before the feasting hall by evening, and how the valley would come up the hill in the days after to look at them, and how the weeping would stop, kin-group by kin-group, as the people saw that the seat of the valley had found the way back to true faces. This chair had already composed, lying there, what would be said at the raising of the posts. It was a good speech. It spoke of Karrash the Otter-Cloaked and his laughter and the way he had made peace with the marshes without giving up a single ferry-toll. It spoke of Ilme and her hands, which were never still. It spoke of the nine-day daughter who had never been given a name because a name is given on the tenth day, and how she would now have a face at least, if not a name. This chair had wept a little, composing it, in the dark, which a chieftain may do where no one sees.

That should be understood. This chair went down into the courtyard already full of the speech, already full of the faces as this chair had imagined them, and a man who is full of a thing has no room in him for the thing itself when it arrives.

The morning was taken up with the ordinary matters of the seat. The ferry-master came about a boat that had gone over in the night with four jars of oil and a goat. A woman of the west bank came about her neighbor’s pig. The guard-captain came about the mountain clans, who had been seen on the high ridge in greater numbers than the season warranted, and this chair told him what this chair always told him, that the mountain clans came down to look at the valley the way a hungry man looks at a feast through a window, and that looking was not eating. This chair has had cause since to regret that answer also, but it belongs to a later matter.

Then it was noon and the posts came up the hill.

Eight men carried them, wrapped in wet hides so the sun would not crack the wood. The carver Ashnak walked behind, not before. This chair marked that. A proud man walks before his work. Ashnak walked behind it with his hands hanging and his eyes on the ground, and this chair took it for humility and was pleased. This chair now believes it was something else. This chair now believes he already knew what the courtyard would say, having heard it before from lesser courtyards, and had come to hear it from the greatest one.

The whole seat had gathered. This chair had wanted that. The elders on the benches under the eaves, the guard along the wall, the market-women in a cluster by the gate where they could see and be first away with the telling, and the kin of this chair, the sister whose daughter had lived nine days, standing near the front with her hands pressed flat against her belly as if the child were still in it. The cooking fire burned at the courtyard’s edge as it always burns, with the great pot of river beans upon it that feeds the guard, and this chair wishes to record that no one had thought of the fire that morning as anything but a fire.

The first hide came off the first post.

This chair will try to set down exactly what was seen, and not what was said afterward, for those are two different things and the chronicle has a duty to both.

The wood was dark. That was the first thing. The valley had grown used to the pale swollen lowland wood, and here was rosewood, old rosewood, nearly black in the noon light with a red heart showing where the cuts went deepest. There was a murmur at that alone. Then the face. It was long. That is the plainest word. Long from brow to chin, with the cheeks cut back beneath the bone so that the bone stood out like a ridge on a hill, and the eyes set deep under the brow and opened, truly opened, this chair grants that they were opened as no melon’s eyes had been opened in a generation. But they were opened downward. They looked at the earth, or into the wood, or into themselves. And the mouth was not closed. The lips were parted a finger’s width, not in speech and not in laughter but in the way a mouth parts when the last breath has gone out of it and the jaw has nothing left to hold it shut.

This was to be Karrash the Otter-Cloaked. Karrash who had a belly. Karrash who laughed so loudly at his own feasts that the dogs under the tables barked. Karrash who had held this chair on his knee and let this chair pull the bone plugs from his ears and put them back crooked.

The courtyard went quiet. Not the quiet of awe. This chair knows the quiet of awe now, having heard it since, in the same courtyard, before a different piece of wood. This was the quiet of a crowd that does not yet know which way to fall.

And this chair, who had come down the hill full of a speech about laughter, looked at the gaunt starved mournful thing and felt the speech turn to ash in the mouth before any fire had been lit.

The second hide came off. Ilme. This chair’s mother. The same leanness, worse, for she had been a small woman and he had cut her small and the smallness made the hollows deeper. He had cut her hands, which the melon-makers never did, and the hands were folded and still, and Ilme’s hands were never still in her life, they were always at something, meal or thread or a child’s hair, and to see them folded was to see her dead all over again in the middle of the noon courtyard with the whole seat watching.

The third hide came off and this chair will not describe it, as this chair said before, except to say that it was very small and that this chair’s sister made a sound and turned her face into the shoulder of the woman beside her.

Then the voice from the crowd. Dead dogs. This chair has said this chair did not wish to know who spoke and that is true, but this chair has since come to suspect it was old Merrek of the ferry, who had lost three sons to the river and had three melons before his door and had come up the hill that day hoping, as everyone had come up the hill hoping. This chair does not hold it against him. He said what the courtyard was thinking. Someone always does.

Now this chair must set down what was in this chair, and it is here that the chronicle becomes difficult, for what was in this chair was two things at once and they wore the same face.

The first thing was fury, and this chair will not pretend it was anything smaller than that. It came up from the belly like heat comes up from coals when the wind turns. This chair had promised the valley true faces. This chair had staked the honor of the seat on it. And the carver, the sour flour-dusted carver who did not come to the feasting hall, who spoke to wood instead of to his chieftain, had taken this chair’s grandfather and this chair’s mother and this chair’s sister’s unnamed child and made them into starved things with open mouths, and had walked up the hill behind them with his eyes on the ground as if he had known. As if he had known and done it anyway. And the fury said, and this chair heard it say it clearly, he has shamed you before the seat. He has made the melons look kind. Answer it. Answer it now, before the market-women reach the gate, or the telling that goes down the hill tonight will be that the chieftain stood in his own courtyard and let the dead be mocked and did nothing.

That was the first thing, and it was righteous. This chair still holds that it was righteous. A chieftain who does not answer an insult to his dead is not a chieftain long, and the mountain clans were on the ridge.

But there was a second thing under the fury, and it wore the fury’s face, and this chair did not see it for what it was until the arm was already burning.

The second thing was fear. Not fear of the carver. Fear of the faces. For this chair had looked at Karrash’s open downward eyes and had felt, for the space of one breath, that they were right. That this was what the dead looked like. That the laughing man with the belly was gone into the current a long time ago and what remained of him, wherever the dead wait, was this: lean, and quiet, and looking inward, with his mouth a little open. And if that was so, then this chair’s memory of Karrash was the false face and the carving was the true one, and the valley had been weeping over melons because melons were at least a lie one could bear to look at. This chair felt that for one breath and could not bear it, and the fury rose up and covered it, and this chair let the fury cover it because fury is a thing a chieftain may show in a courtyard and fear is not.

So this chair spoke the oath, by the grandfather of the clan and by the river’s mouth, and this chair said, into the fire.

And they did not move. This chair records that as it happened. The guard did not move and the eight men who had carried the posts did not move. They looked at this chair and they looked at the posts and no one reached for one. Whether it was that the rosewood was too fine to burn, or that the faces were too much like faces to burn, or only that no one had ever been ordered to put an ancestor into a bean-pot fire before and did not know how it was properly done, this chair cannot say. But the moment stretched, and in the stretching the fury said, they doubt you, and this chair could not have that on top of everything else.

So this chair took the post of Karrash by the middle and lifted it, and it was heavy, old rosewood being heavier than any wood the valley had cut in a generation, and this chair carried it the length of the courtyard with the whole seat parting before him and thrust the face into the coals beneath the bean-pot.

It did not catch at once. That must be told. Old rosewood is dense and the face of Karrash lay in the coals and looked up out of them with its open downward eyes for a long moment while the crowd held its breath, and this chair stood over it holding the post’s foot and waiting. Then the red heart of the wood took, all at once, the way oil takes, and the flame ran up the length of the post as fast as a man could have run it and crossed this chair’s forearm from wrist to elbow. This chair felt the hair go first, then the skin. This chair did not let go. Whether that was courage or only that the hands had locked, this chair honestly does not know. This chair held the foot of the post until the face was fully in the coals and the dark wood was shedding red flakes into the beans, and then let go, and the arm came away white and then red and then the pain arrived, late, as pain does, like a guest who missed the start of the feast.

By then the guard had understood what was wanted, and the other two went in without this chair’s hands upon them. Ilme with her folded hands. The small one. The smoke was sweet and thick and wrong, rosewood and hide and, this chair swears it, something like mountain flowers under all of it, though no one else would say afterward that they had smelled that.

The carver Ashnak stood at the back with his hands hanging and said nothing and turned and went down to the river. This chair has said that already. This chair says it again because it is the part that returns at night.

Now the weighing. A chronicle that records a deed and does not weigh it is a market-woman’s chronicle.

Was it justice? This chair has made the case for justice many times to himself and it can be made. The seat had been shamed before the valley. The carver had been given honor and rosewood and the three most sacred dead of the clan and had returned faces that made a grieving sister turn away. A chieftain who lets that pass will be tested next by the ferry-master and after that by the mountain. The burning was seen. The telling that went down the hill that night was that the chieftain answered. That has worth, and this chair will not pretend it has none.

Was it haste? This chair has made that case also, and it is easier to make, and that is what troubles this chair most. He should have looked longer. He should have asked the carver one question, even one, before the oath. He should have asked, why are they lean. He would have received some sour answer about what the wood said, and he could have thrown it back in the man’s face and still burned the posts and been no worse off. But he would have asked. And this chair did not ask, because asking would have meant standing a moment longer in front of Karrash’s open eyes, and this chair could not stand there. That is the truth. The seat of the valley could not bear to look at his own grandfather for the time it takes to ask one question, and so he put his grandfather in the fire and called it the honor of the dead.

The healer came that evening and dressed the arm with mangrove sap and said it would fade. The sister did not come. She did not come the next day either. When she came, on the third day, she did not speak of the small post, and this chair did not, and it has never been spoken of between them, and it is the largest thing in the room whenever she enters it.

That night this chair went out alone to the courtyard where the black place was in the earth. Three holes had been dug that morning for three posts to stand in. This chair had ordered the holes dug before the posts even came up the hill, so certain was this chair of the day. They were still there, three dark mouths in the ground before the feasting hall, and the bean-pot fire had burned down to a red eye, and the arm throbbed under its dressing with each beat of the heart as if it were counting something.

This chair stood between the holes and understood, in the way a man understands a thing at night that he has refused to understand all day, that there was now no one in the valley who could open the eyes of the dead. There had been one. This chair had watched him walk down to the river. And the fury that had felt so much like the grandfather’s own voice in the courtyard at noon was, in the dark, only the voice of a man who had been frightened by a face and had wanted very badly for everyone to see him do something about it.

That is the weighing. This chair sets it down and does not soften it. The deed was righteous in the courtyard and it was haste in the dark, and both of those were true, and a chieftain must live in the place where both are true, which is a narrow place, and the arm aches in it when the weather turns.

The market-women told it down the hill that the chieftain had held an ancestor in the fire with his bare hand and had not cried out. That much of the telling was true. They did not tell that he stood between three empty holes at midnight. They did not see that. It is set down here so that someone will know.

 

Segment 3: The Heap of Red Flour

Call it flour. The market-women do, and the market-women name everything in the valley sooner or later, and their names stick like sap. Rosewood flour. It is not flour. Flour is a thing that feeds. This is the finest dust that falls when a dense heartwood is worked with a sharp gouge held at the correct angle, so fine that it does not fall so much as settle, so fine that it hangs in a sunbeam for the length of a slow breath before it consents to come down. Forty years of it lies in a heap behind my hut on the river’s bend, and I sit upon it now, and I would have you understand what I am sitting upon before I tell you why I am sitting here instead of standing in a courtyard watching my grandfather’s grandfather burn.

The heap is the height of a man’s chest and the width of a small boat and it is red, but it is not one red. Let me be exact, for exactness is the only virtue left to me tonight and I mean to wring it dry. At the bottom, where the oldest dust has lain the longest under the weight of all that came after, the red has gone nearly to black, the color of a liver, the color of old blood on a chisel left in the rain. Above that is a band the color of a rooster’s comb, which is the dust of the near-hill rosewood I worked in my middle years before the near hills were cut bare. Above that, thinner, paler, a red like a girl’s mouth, which is the lowland wood, the melon wood, the wood I refused to use for faces and used only for spoons and bowls and toys so that the dust of it would not lie too thick upon the good dust beneath. And on top, fresh, three days old, still smelling of the gorge, a layer as dark and fine as ground cinnabar, which is what fell from the three posts as I made them. I am sitting upon that. I have my hands in it. It is under my nails and in the creases of my knuckles and, because I have wept, which I will not deny to the dust though I denied it to the courtyard, it is a paste upon my cheeks.

That is the heap. Now the wood, for you cannot understand the flour without the tree.

There are in this valley and the hills around it eleven kinds of wood that a carver may put a face into, and I have put faces into all eleven, and I will tell you their natures the way a fisherman tells you the natures of fish, because a face cut into the wrong wood is a fish caught in the wrong water: it will not keep.

There is the pale lowland wood that the melon-makers use, soft as cheese, easy as lying, which takes a gouge like a sigh and holds a line for about as long. There is river willow, which is worse, which weeps when cut and warps when dried and should be used for nothing but baskets. There is the yellow hill-ash, which is honest and plain and cuts clean and has no heart, no heart at all, so that the face you make in it is a face with nothing behind the eyes. There is red cedar, which is sweet to smell and splits along the grain if you look at it crossly, which is the wood that fell upon my uncle Gedru when I was a child and crushed him, and I will not cut it and I will not sit beneath it and I have a chest made of it that I bought in anger from a marsh trader and never opened. There is ironwood, which is not for faces, which is for war clubs and door-posts and the pins of bridges, which breaks bronze and dulls star-iron and has never in the memory of the clan been carved into anything with an expression. There is grey mangrove, which is for boats. There is the twisted mountain pine, which is for the mountain clans and their bone-braided fires and nothing else. There is white snail-bark, which is not a wood but a bark, and which takes lime beautifully and rots in a season. There is the black gorge oak, which is fine, which I have used for lesser posts, which has a grain that runs straight as a plumb line and a heart that is merely dark, not red. There is fever-wood, which is red but false-red, the red of a rash, and which gives the carver a rash if he breathes its dust too long.

And there is rosewood.

Not the near-hill rosewood, though that was good, though I made my name in it. The other. The dark mountain rosewood that grows only above the gorge on the shadowed side where the mountain clans piss on the roots and think nothing of it, and that comes down to us only when a flood tears one loose and rolls it into the black gorge and leaves it there under the water for the river to season. Four rainy seasons that log lay at the bottom of the gorge before I sent the boys down for it. Four seasons of the cold current pulling the green out of it a thread at a time. When they hauled it up it was black on the outside like a thing that had died, and I put the adze into it and the heart was the color of a pomegranate cut open, wet, alive, and the smell came up out of it like a woman’s hair when she has washed it and sat by the fire, and I thought: here. Here is the wood the dead are waiting for. Here is the wood that can hold a face open long enough for a soul to climb out through the eyes.

I want you to understand what I saw in that log, because the chieftain did not see it, and because seeing it is the whole of my trade and the whole of my sin.

I saw Karrash.

Not the Karrash of the feasting hall, not the belly and the barking dogs. I never met that man. He was dead before I was old enough to hold a gouge. I saw the Karrash that was in the wood. He was lying along the grain with his head toward the root-end and his feet toward the crown, the way a body lies in the current, and he was lean, because the current had taken four seasons of green out of him too, and his eyes were open and looking down along the length of the log toward whatever was at the bottom of the gorge, and his mouth had come a little open the way mouths do. I did not put him there. I have never put anyone anywhere. That is the thing the chieftain does not know and the melon-makers do not know and the market-women with their names do not know. A carver does not make a face. He finds the place where the face already is and he takes away the wood that is hiding it. That is all. That is everything. Every log on this river, every post in this valley, every bowl and spoon and war club, has a prisoner in it, and the only question a carver ever asks is whether he has the skill to let the prisoner out or whether he will botch the cut and leave it maimed in there forever, half-freed, a melon with two pits for eyes, screaming.

They screamed. The melons. Did you know that? Every one of those swollen pale faces on every post before every door in this valley was a prisoner that some fool with a soft gouge had reached in for and dropped. I could hear them. I have always been able to hear them. It is why I do not come to the feasting hall. You cannot eat river beans with a hundred half-cut ancestors moaning in the posts outside the door.

So. The tools. I have been avoiding the tools, and Ashnak does not avoid things, Ashnak is the one who cuts straight to the heart of the log, ask anyone, ask the flour.

On the bench in the hut behind me, in the order in which I laid them down three days ago and have not touched since, lie the following.

The adze. River basalt, black, a stone from the gorge itself, lashed to a handle of black oak with sinew that my mother twisted the year she died. It is the first tool and the last. It takes the bark and it takes the sapwood and it finds the heart. It is heavy in the hand the way a good decision is heavy. I struck the first blow on the gorge log with it and Karrash’s brow came out of the wood like a hill out of fog.

The three roughing gouges, wide, medium, narrow, all of bronze, all bent a little at the neck from years of being struck with the mallet, so that each one has a bias, a preferred direction, a personality if you like, and the wide one pulls left and the narrow one pulls right and I have learned to lean into their leaning the way a man learns to walk beside a wife who lists.

The eight finishing gouges. I will not name them all. I will name the one that is the size of a fingernail and sweeps like the inside of a shell, because that is the one that opened Karrash’s eyes. It is bronze also. It takes a keener edge than any other tool I own and loses it faster, and I sharpen it on a wet stone before every use, and the sound it makes when it goes into rosewood correctly is not a sound, it is the absence of a sound, it is the wood holding its breath.

The two v-tools. For hair, for the lines at the corner of an old woman’s mouth. Ilme had such lines. I found them.

The mallet, of gorge oak, its face worn concave by ten thousand strikes so that it cups the gouge’s end like a palm cups an egg.

The scrapers, three, of soft iron, cheap, bought from the plains scribes with a jar of oil, for taking the last fuzz off a surface before the pigment goes on. Ordinary. Nothing. A child could own them.

And the star-iron chisel.

I will not speak of it yet. I will say only that it lies apart from the rest, wrapped in a strip of oiled hide, and that I have not unwrapped it in eleven years, and that it was my uncle Gedru’s, and that it came down out of the sky in a fire when my grandmother was a girl and was hammered into a chisel by a smith who died of it, and that it will cut anything, and that I have not cut anything with it because I have not found a thing worth cutting.

That is the bench. That is the whole of Ashnak. Eleven woods, seventeen tools, one heap of flour, and forty years of letting prisoners out of trees so that the dead of this valley might climb up through their own eyes and step out onto the wind.

And the chieftain put three of them in a bean-pot fire.

I stood at the back. I want that recorded somewhere, since I am the only one who will record it truly. I stood at the back of the courtyard with my hands hanging and I watched a fat man with bone in his teeth carry my grandfather’s grandfather across the stones and thrust his face into the coals and hold it there, and I watched the old rosewood refuse the flame for as long as it could, which was a long time, which was longer than the fat man expected, so that for the space of several breaths Karrash lay in the coals and looked up at his grandson out of the fire with his open downward eyes and his little open mouth, and I thought, there, now you see it, now you see what I saw at the bottom of the gorge, that is the face, that is the true face, that is what he looks like now, look at him. And the chieftain looked at him. I watched his eyes. And he could not bear it, and so he held the post tighter and let his own arm burn rather than let go, and I understood that he would rather burn his own flesh than look at his own dead, and I understood that this was the valley, this was the whole valley, and that I had spent forty years opening eyes for people who did not want to see out of them.

Then Ilme. Her folded hands. I found those hands in the wood, do you understand? They were folded already. I only took away what was hiding them. And the child. I will not. I said in the courtyard that I would not and I say it in the flour.

Someone said dead dogs. It was Merrek. I know his voice. He has three melons before his door and I offered once, years ago, to cut his sons true, and he said the melons were his sons and he would not have them touched, and I have hated him with a small clean hatred ever since, the way one hates a splinter.

I did not speak. What would Ashnak have said? The wood does not defend itself. I turned and walked down to the river.

And here is the heap, and here I sit upon it, and here is the bitterness, and I will catalogue that too, since I have catalogued everything else, since a man who has lost the use of his trade may at least keep his habits.

It tastes of cinnabar. That is the first thing. It sits at the back of the tongue, dry and mineral, the taste of the red stone ground fine, and it does not wash out with river water, I have tried. It is the color of the bottom of the heap, liver-dark. It has the grain of ironwood: it runs no direction a gouge can follow. It is heavy in the belly the way the adze is heavy in the hand, and it is a heaviness I have been carrying for three days now and have not set down because there is nowhere in this valley to set it down. Every post I pass is a melon. Every melon is moaning. Every door in the valley has a row of maimed prisoners before it, and the one man who could have freed them has been shown, before the whole seat, with his mother in the fire, that the valley prefers its prisoners maimed.

Let them, then. Let them keep their melons. Let their dead wander in the grey dust bumping their knees. Let the mountain clans come down, as they will, as they always will, and let the fat chieftain with the bone teeth stand in his courtyard with his burned arm and his three empty holes and find out what a wooden face is good for when the palisade is burning. I will sit here. I will sit on my flour until the river rises and takes the heap and me with it, and I will cut nothing, and I will let the star-iron stay wrapped, and every prisoner in every log from here to the mountain can stay where it is and scream, because I have learned at last what my uncle Gedru learned under the cedar, which is that there is no use in going up the mountain for a totem trunk when the people below cannot tell a face from a dog.

That is what I told the flour.

The flour did not answer. Flour does not.

But the river was loud that evening, and the gorge log, what was left of it, the great butt-end that I had not used for the posts, lay half in the water at the bend below the hut where the boys had left it, and I could see it from the heap, black on the outside like a thing that had died, and I want to record this, I want to be exact about this, because I do not know what it means and I mean to have it down before I forget the exact color of the dusk.

There was something in it still.

I had taken Karrash out of the crown-end and Ilme out of the middle and the child out of a knot near the root, and there should have been nothing left in that butt-end but plain heart and plain grain, and I had thought so, and I had meant to split it for firewood, and I had not, because I was sitting on the flour hating a fat man.

But there was something in it. Lying along the grain the way Karrash had lain, but larger, and not a man, or not only a man. I could see the shape from the heap the way one sees a fish under dark water, by the way the water moves over it. It was long and it had a face and the face was not lean. It was wide. It had a brow like a ridge and something crested upon the crown of it, two somethings, birds or horns, and where the eyes should be there was a pattern, a mesh, a net, as though the eyes had been cut open not once but a hundred times in a lattice, and behind the lattice something pale and round like the moon seen through water.

And it was not waiting to be let out.

That is what I need to set down before the light goes. Everything else in every log I have ever touched has waited. Waited the way the dead wait, patiently, with their mouths a little open. This did not wait. This was pushing. I could see the grain of the log bulging with it, the way a hide bulges when the thing inside it breathes, and I sat on my heap of forty years of red flour with cinnabar on my tongue and my hands in the dust and I understood that I had been wrong about one thing, one thing only, in forty years of being right about wood.

Not every prisoner is a prisoner.

Some of them are the ones who come up the mountain looking for you.

I did not go down to the log that night. I am recording that as well. I sat on the flour until it was full dark and the shape in the wood was only a darker place in the dark, and then I went into the hut and lay down on the bench among the seventeen tools and did not sleep, and somewhere toward morning I heard, or thought I heard, from the direction of the river, a sound like two dry sticks rubbed together in a high wind, and I put my hand on the oiled hide where the star-iron lay, and I did not unwrap it, and I did not take my hand away.

 

Segment 4: Well Now, That Log Come From the Black Gorge

Well now, everybody in the valley has got a story about that log by this time, and most of them stories has got the person telling it standing right there on the bank with a rope in their hands, which is a curious thing, because I was there, and I counted, and there was nine of us, and I reckon if all the folks who claim to have hauled that log had actually been hauling it we could have carried it up the hill on our shoulders like a roast pig and had it in the chief’s courtyard before dinner. But that ain’t how it went. How it went is what I’m fixing to tell, and I’ll tell it straight, on account of I ain’t got the imagination to tell it any other way. My mother always said so.

First off you have got to understand about the black gorge, for anybody that ain’t from here.

The river comes down out of the mountain in a hurry, like it has got somewhere to be, and about a half day’s walk above the village it runs through a crack in the rock so narrow and so deep that the sun don’t get down into it but for about the time it takes to sneeze, right at noon, and the rest of the day it’s dark as the inside of a cow. That’s the gorge. The water in it is cold enough to stop your heart and it moves like it hates you personal, and every spring when the floods come down off the mountain they bring trees with them, whole trees, roots and all, and the trees go into the gorge and some of them come out the bottom end all broke to kindling, and some of them don’t come out at all. They get wedged down in the bottom against the rocks and the river just rolls over them year after year and nobody thinks about them any more than you think about what’s under your bed.

Except Old Flour thought about them. Old Flour thought about them the way a dog thinks about a bone it seen somebody bury.

Now I ought to say, so nobody gets the wrong notion, that I weren’t Old Flour’s apprentice. Not then. I was apprenticed to Dunnak the post-maker on the west bank, who made faces the regular way, which is to say melons, and who was a kindly enough man and fed me and never hit me but the once, and that was for eating a whole pot of his beans which I did do. So I don’t want it thought I’m putting on airs. I was a west bank boy. But when Old Flour come up from the river that spring and went round to every carver in the valley asking for boys, well, Dunnak give me, and I reckon he give me because I was the one he could spare easiest and also because I had been asking him for about a year why our faces looked like melons and he was tired of it.

Old Flour had got it in his head that there was a rosewood log at the bottom of the gorge. A mountain rosewood. The dark kind, that don’t grow on our side. He said it had come down in the big flood four years back, he had seen it go by from his hut, and he had watched it go into the gorge and he had gone down to the bottom end and waited two days and it never come out, and so it was in there. He had been thinking about it for four rainy seasons. He said the river had been seasoning it for him. He said it like the river was his hired man.

Well now, none of us wanted to go. I will be honest. There was nine of us boys from six different carvers, and every one of us had been told by his mother at some time in his life that if he went in the black gorge he would come out the bottom end in pieces like the trees did, and every one of us believed it, because it was true. But Old Flour didn’t ask us if we wanted to. He didn’t ask us anything. He just started walking up the river with a coil of rope over his shoulder as big around as a wagon wheel, and we sort of followed him the way ducks follow a person that might have bread.

It took us the whole morning to get up to the top of the gorge, and when we got there and looked down into it I want to tell you my stomach went somewhere south of my knees and stayed there for about a week.

You couldn’t see the bottom. You could hear it. It sounded like a whole herd of something angry. And Old Flour stood at the edge and looked down into that black roaring crack for a long time without saying anything, the way he does, and then he said, “She’s there,” and pointed, and I looked where he was pointing and I couldn’t see nothing but dark and spray, and I thought, well, Pili, this is how you die, following a crazy man who talks to wood down into a hole in the ground.

Here’s how we did it, for anybody who ever has to.

Old Flour tied the rope round a boulder at the top and he went down first. Just went. Hand over hand, down into the dark, and we stood at the top and watched the rope jerk and go slack and jerk, and then it went still for so long that Tobbo, who was the oldest of us and from the east bank and about as much use as a wet cat, said he had surely drowned and we should go home. And then the rope jerked three times, which was the signal, and we knew he was down and alive and had found it.

Then we went down. All nine of us, one at a time, on that one rope, into that noise. I went fourth. I remember that because I counted to keep from thinking, and I got to four and stopped and thought about my mother, and then I thought about the melon on the post outside our door that was supposed to be my grandfather, and how it had two pits for eyes and a crack for a mouth, and how I had asked Dunnak a hundred times why, and I thought, well now, Pili, if you die in this hole at least it’ll be trying to find out. And I went.

The rope was wet. The rock was wet. Everything was wet and cold and black and the noise was so big you couldn’t hear your own self scream, which I did do, some. About halfway down my foot slipped and I swung out over nothing and hung there turning slow like a fish on a line, and I reckon that was the closest I come to it, that time, because I couldn’t find the rock again with my feet and my hands was going numb and I was thinking very clearly that in about the time it takes to boil an egg I was going to let go. And then a hand come up out of the dark below me and grabbed my ankle and pulled me in against the wall, and it was Old Flour, and he didn’t say anything, he never does, he just put my foot on a ledge and went back down.

The bottom of the gorge is a place I hope none of you ever has to see. It ain’t a bottom, exactly. It’s rocks the size of houses all jammed together with the river going through the cracks between them like water through a sieve, and the spray is so thick you breathe it, and it’s so dark that you find things by feel and the things you find are cold and slick and you don’t know what they are.

The log was there. Old Flour was right. It was wedged between two of the house-rocks with its butt-end up and its crown-end down in a crack where the water went through, and the water had been going through that crack and over that log for four years and the outside of it was black as a burnt pot and slick with weed. It didn’t look like a log. It looked like something that had died down there and nobody had come for it.

And Old Flour was standing on it with his hand flat on the black hide of it, and I swear on my mother’s beans he was talking to it. I couldn’t hear what. But his mouth was moving and his eyes was shut.

Well now, I ain’t going to tell every minute of the next two days, on account of most of it was rope and cold and Tobbo complaining. But I’ll tell the parts that matter.

The first thing that mattered was that it wouldn’t move. Nine boys and one crazy man and two ropes and it sat there in the crack like it had grown there. We pulled till our hands bled and it didn’t shift a hair. And Tobbo said we should go home, and for the first time some of the others said so too, and Old Flour didn’t answer any of them, he just went down under the water. Under it. Into the crack where the current went through, where nobody could go, and he was gone so long that I started counting again and I got to two hundred and my chest hurt from holding my own breath in sympathy, and then he come up on the other side, blue as a plum, and spat out about a bucket of river, and said, “Root.”

There was a root. A whole snag of roots, still on the log, jammed down in the crack and holding it like a hand holds a cup. And the only way to get it loose was for somebody to go down in that crack with a basalt adze and cut through them, in the dark, under the water, with the current trying to take them out the bottom end of the gorge in pieces.

He did it himself. Of course he did. I don’t reckon he even thought of asking one of us. He took the adze and went down, and we held the rope tied round his middle, all nine of us, and every time the rope went tight we pulled and every time it went slack we prayed, and he come up eleven times for air and went back down eleven times, and on the twelfth time the log shifted.

I felt it. We all felt it. The whole thing groaned like a cow and rolled about a hand’s width and the water that had been going through the crack come up over the rock we was standing on and took Tobbo’s feet out from under him, and he went in.

Now here’s the thing about Tobbo. He was useless and he complained and he was from the east bank, but he was one of us, and when he went in the water there wasn’t one of us that thought about it. We just went for him. I got a hand on his hair. Marrun, from the north end, got a hand on his belt. And the current had him by the legs and was pulling, and it was pulling harder than any of us could pull back, and Tobbo’s face was under, and I was thinking, well now, this is it, this is where we lose one, and my hand was slipping in his hair.

And then Old Flour come up out of the crack, still with the adze in his hand, and he didn’t grab Tobbo. He put the adze in the crack and levered, and the log rolled another hand’s width, and the water dropped, and Tobbo come up coughing and swearing and calling us all every kind of name a boy from the east bank knows, which is a good many.

That was the first day. We slept, if you call it that, on a rock the size of a bed with nine boys on it, in the noise, in the dark, and Old Flour didn’t sleep at all. He sat on the log. All night. With his hand on it.

The second day we got it loose. I ain’t going to pretend I understand how. There was ropes and there was levers and there was a great deal of Old Flour going under the water and coming up blue, and there was a moment where the whole log came free of the crack all at once and swung round on the current like a door swinging open and would have crushed Marrun flat against the house-rock if Tobbo, useless Tobbo, hadn’t grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him clear, and after that Tobbo didn’t complain no more and nobody called him useless neither.

And then we had it in the water, floating, sort of, on the ropes, with the current wanting it and us not letting the current have it, and we walked it down the gorge. Walked it. Nine boys and a crazy man on the rocks on both sides with ropes, and the log in the middle bumping and rolling and trying to kill us, for the rest of that whole day, until the gorge opened out at the bottom end and the river spread wide and slow and the sun come down on us for the first time in two days and it was, I want to tell you, it was like being born.

We got it up on the bank at the bend below Old Flour’s hut just as the light was going. We rolled it up out of the water on more levers, and it lay there in the mud, black and slick and dead-looking, and we all fell down around it in the mud too, and nobody said anything for a while. Nine boys, not a one of us could lift his arms. My hands was raw meat. I had a rope burn round my middle that I’ve still got a mark from. Tobbo had a lump on his head the size of a duck egg and he was smiling like a fool.

And Old Flour took up the adze and went to the butt-end of the log, and he looked at it for a minute the way he does, and he set the adze against the black hide of it and struck.

Just the once.

And the black hide split and peeled back like the skin off a roasted root, and under it the wood was red.

Not red like a rooster or red like blood. Red like the inside of something alive. Wet and dark and glowing, near enough, in the last of the light. It was the prettiest thing I have ever seen and I include girls in that and I have seen some girls.

And then the smell come up out of it.

Well now, I ain’t got the words. I have tried to tell it a hundred times since and I never get it right. It was sweet but it wasn’t sugar. It was like the inside of a flower but bigger. It was like when you walk past somebody’s fire and they’re cooking something you ain’t never ate before and you stop in the road and you can’t move. It was warm, is the closest I can come. The smell was warm, coming up out of that cold black log that had been at the bottom of the gorge for four years, and it went up my nose and down into my chest and it woke up something in there that I didn’t know was asleep.

All nine of us just stood there and breathed it. Even Tobbo. Even Old Flour, and his eyes was shut again and his hand was on the red wood and his lips was moving and this time I was close enough to hear, and what he said was, “There. There you are.”

I don’t know who he was talking to. I have thought about it a lot since and I still don’t know, and I’m not sure I want to.

But I’ll tell you what I felt, standing there in the mud with my hands like meat and my back like a bent nail and my whole body so tired I couldn’t have run from a snake. I felt like I had done something. Not like when you finish a bowl or a spoon and Dunnak grunts at it. Like I had reached down into a place where nobody goes and pulled something up out of it that was going to matter, and nobody could say I hadn’t, because there it was, in the mud, red and warm and smelling like the inside of the world.

I was fourteen years old, I reckon. It was the best day of my life so far and I had nearly drowned twice in it.

We walked home in the dark, the nine of us, and we didn’t talk much, but every so often one of us would laugh for no reason and then the rest of us would, and Tobbo said, halfway home, “That old man is crazy as a bag of frogs,” and Marrun said, “Yes he is,” and Tobbo said, “I’d go back down there for him tomorrow,” and Marrun said, “Yes I would too,” and I didn’t say anything, because I was thinking about the red wood and the smell and the shapes I thought I seen under the black hide of it for just a second when the adze went in, before the light was all gone.

I told myself it was tiredness. I have told myself that many times since.

Anyway. That’s how the log come up from the black gorge. Nine boys, one crazy man, two days, one duck egg on Tobbo’s head. Not fifty people. Not the chieftain’s guard, whatever the chieftain’s guard says. Us.

And the reason I’m setting it down so careful, with the count right, is that there is more to tell about that log, a good deal more, and some of it I wish I hadn’t seen, and I want it clear in the record that when it come up out of the water it was only a log, and it smelled like heaven, and I was proud enough to bust.

That’s all it was. I reckon.

 

Segment 5: The Breath in the Sap

Listen. Listen, warm one, whoever you are that reads this by whatever light the living still burn—listen, and do not turn the page, for I have waited seventy summers to be heard and I will not be skimmed!

They will tell you I am a ghost. The market-women will tell you that. They have a word for everything and the word is always wrong. I am not a ghost. A ghost is a thing that lingers. I did not linger. I was kept. Kept! Kept in the grey, in the dust, in the silence, in the valley that has no name because no one who goes there has a mouth left to name it with—and if you have never been kept, then you cannot know what it is to be let go, and so you must let me tell you slowly, slowly, slowly, for the telling is the last thing I have that is mine.

I am the breath. I was once Gedru. I was once a man with hands the size of paddles who went up the mountain above the gorge looking for totem trunks, and I found them, I found the best of them, I could put my palm against a standing tree and feel the face that was sleeping in it the way you feel a child kick in a belly. That was my gift. My sister’s boy has it now. He got it from me. He got everything from me, everything, everything—

But I run ahead. The breath always runs ahead. Seventy summers of holding still will do that.

The cedar. Begin with the cedar.

It is a spring morning and I am on the shadowed side of the mountain where the mountain clans piss on the roots and the dark rosewood grows, and I am not looking for rosewood, I am looking for cedar, because cedar is sweet and easy and the chieftain’s father wants a post by summer. And I find one. Tall, straight, red-barked. I put my palm to it and I feel—nothing. Nothing at all! An empty tree. And I think, good, this one is only wood, this one will not mind. And I set my adze to it.

I do not know what I did wrong. I have had seventy summers to consider it and I do not know. Perhaps there was a face in it after all, deep, one I could not feel. Perhaps it minded. But I remember the sound—a crack like a bone in a dog’s jaw—and I remember looking up, and I remember thinking, that is not the direction it should fall, and then I remember the whole red weight of the world coming down across my ribs and the smell of cedar, sweet, sweet, sweet, filling my mouth as the breath went out of it.

And then the grey.

Warm one, I must try to make you see the grey, and I know that I will fail, because you have eyes and the grey is what there is when eyes are no longer any use.

Imagine dust. Not the good dust, not the red flour that falls from a gouge. Ash-dust. Dust that has been ground from nothing by nothing for longer than there have been rivers. Imagine it underfoot, over your head, in the air you would breathe if you had breath, in the place where your tongue was, behind the place where your eyes were. Imagine it grey—not the grey of a stone or the grey of a rain-cloud, which are colors, which are things, but the grey that is what is left when every color has been taken away and forgotten and the forgetting has been forgotten too. That is the valley of the dead. It is not a valley. There is nothing to be a valley between. It is only the grey, and the boulders, and us.

The boulders! Oh, warm one, the boulders.

They are everywhere and they are nowhere. You cannot see them. You find them with your knees. You are walking—you are always walking, there is nothing else to do—and your knee strikes stone, and the pain is the only sharp thing in that whole soft grey world and so you almost love it, and you turn, and you walk, and your other knee strikes stone. Seventy summers. Seventy summers of that. Bump. Turn. Bump. Turn. Bump, bump, bump. I could not tell you how many boulders there are. I could not tell you if there is more than one. Perhaps there is only one and we all go round it forever and call it wandering.

And the silence.

Here is what I learned about silence in the grey: it is not the absence of sound. Sound has an absence. The grey has no sound to be absent. There are the others there, thousands, more, all the dead of the valley since the counting of the clan began and before it, and not one of them makes a noise, because not one of them has a mouth, because not one of them was given a face. Do you understand now? Do you see why the river folk carve posts? The face is the door. The eyes are the door. Without the door you go into the grey with no mouth and no eyes and you bump your knees on the boulder and you cannot even scream, you can only want to, want to, want to—

I wanted to for seventy summers.

I knew when my sister died. I felt her come into the grey. I could not see her and she could not see me and we passed each other, I am certain of it, bumping our knees, and I could not say her name. I knew when the flood came, the great one, four rainy seasons before the boy sent the children down into the gorge—I knew because the grey shivered. Something crossed it. Some great red living thing tore loose from the mountain and went down the river and it passed through the grey the way a torch passes through a dark room, and every one of us turned toward it with the faces we did not have, and I—

I am ashamed of this. Let me be ashamed of it here where you can see me. I pushed. I pushed my sister’s boy’s own mother aside, I pushed a hundred of the ancient dead, I threw my whole grey weight at that passing light and I caught hold of it and I would not let go. It was a tree. It was a rosewood, torn out by the roots, going down into the gorge, and I wrapped myself around the roots of it like a drowning man around a log—ha! like a drowning man around a log!—and it took me down with it, out of the grey, into the black water, into the cold, into the wood.

Into the wood.

For four rainy seasons I was in the wood.

And you will think, warm one, that this was better than the grey. Oh, it was worse! It was so much worse! For in the grey there is nothing to want, and in the wood there is everything. I could feel the current going over me. I could feel the cold sucking the green out of the heartwood thread by thread. I could feel the sap thickening around me, closing on me, holding me the way amber holds a fly, and I could hear—I could hear!—the river, the roaring of it, after seventy summers of nothing, and I could not scream and I could not move and I could not do anything but be held, be held, be held in the red dark with the sound of the world going over my head and no way to reach it.

And then the boy came.

I knew his hand. Even through four years of black hide and river-weed I knew his hand when he put it flat against me at the bottom of the gorge. It was my hand. My sister’s boy has my hands, I gave them to him, and when he pressed them against the log and shut his eyes and talked to me I felt every word through the wood like a drum felt through a wall, and I could not answer, I could not answer, I could not—

He took me up out of the water. His children took me up. There was one that nearly drowned and I felt the boy go under for him and I thought, good, good, he is mine, he does not let go either.

And on the bank in the last of the light he struck me. Once. With the basalt adze.

Warm one, I felt the black hide split. I felt the air, the air! come against the red heart of me for the first time in four years, and the smell that went up—they say it was sweet, the children say it was like the inside of a flower—that was me. That was the breath of Gedru going up into the evening after seventy summers and four rainy seasons of holding it, and it was not sweet, it was a scream, it was the longest scream anyone in that valley has ever heard and every one of them stood there in the mud and breathed it in and smiled.

And he said: there you are.

And I could not answer him.

For he had only cracked the hide. He had not cut into the heart. And the sap sealed over the crack in the night the way sap does, and I was held again, held, held, and I lay in the mud by his hut for three days and listened to him work.

I listened to him take Karrash out of the crown-end. I listened to him take Ilme—my sister! my sister!—out of the middle, and I felt his gouge go past me, a hand’s width away, close enough that the sap trembled, and I threw myself at it, I threw everything I had at that one small bronze blade, and it went by. It went by. He did not feel me. He was listening to her.

I listened to him take the child out of the knot.

I listened to them carry the three posts up the hill.

I listened, warm one—for sound carries through wood, oh, it carries—to a fat man with bone in his teeth say into the fire, and I felt Karrash burn. I felt him. I felt my sister burn. They had been in the wood with me. They had been my company in the red dark for four years, silent, all of us silent, but there, and now they were smoke, and they were not going up to the sky, they were going into the beans, and I—I—

I lost my mind. I say that plainly. I lay in the butt-end of the log in the mud below the hut while the boy sat on his heap of red flour and hated, and I went mad. I pushed. I pushed at the grain of the wood from the inside the way I had pushed at the dead in the grey, and this time there was no light to catch hold of, only the wood, and the wood is strong, rosewood is the strongest, but I had seventy summers of wanting in me and four years of being held and one day of listening to my sister burn, and I pushed, and I pushed, and the grain began to give, and I felt the shape of me coming up against the black hide from the inside like a face pressing against a hide drum, and I was not a man’s shape anymore, I do not know what I was, I was wide and I was crested and I had a hundred eyes—

He saw it. From the heap. I felt him see it. I felt him go still.

He did not come down that night. I could have killed him for that. I could have! But I had no hands. So I did the only thing I had left, the thing I had been unable to do for seventy summers and four rainy seasons, and I do not know how I did it, I think the grain had given enough, I think the pushing had made a crack somewhere too small to see—

I made a sound.

Two dry sticks. In a high wind. That is what he heard. That is what it sounds like when a thing with no mouth tries to say a name through a hand’s width of rosewood. I said his name, warm one. I said it all night. Ashnak. Ashnak. Ashnak. And he lay on his bench with his hand on my chisel, my star-iron, the one I left him, and he did not sleep and he did not come.

But in the morning he came.

I felt him at the bank before the light. I felt his feet in the mud. I felt him stand over me a long time, the way he does, and I felt him lift the adze, and I thought, now, now, now, and I gathered everything, everything, every scrap of grey and want and pushing and the sound of my sister burning, and I put it all in one place, right behind the black hide where the crack was, and I waited for the stone.

It came.

Oh, warm one.

Oh.

I cannot. I have tried three times now to set down what it was and each time the words come out as dust. Let me try once more and then let me stop.

It was the adze going in. Basalt into rosewood. It was the same crack as before, the same place, but this time he did not stop at the hide, this time he put his weight behind it, he put my hands behind it, and the stone went through the black and through the sap and into the red, into the wet living heart of the wood where I was, and it split me open like a pomegranate.

And I came out.

I came out as steam comes out of a pot when the lid is lifted. I came out hissing. I came out in a great wet red rush of sap and breath and seventy summers, and the first thing I felt was air, real air, morning air, cold, moving, full of river-smell and mud-smell and the smell of the boy’s own sweat, and the second thing I felt was that I had a shape, I had a shape again, I had hands, they were made of nothing but they were hands, and the third thing—

The third thing was that I could scream.

I did. I screamed the whole of it. Seventy summers of bump, turn, bump. Four years of being held. My sister in the fire. I screamed it into the boy’s face from a hand’s width away with a mouth made of sap and steam, and it came out, warm one, it came out sounding like two dry sticks in a high wind, because that is all the voice a thing like me can have, and it was the most beautiful sound I have ever made and I would make it again, I would make it forever, I am making it now—

And he did not run.

He stood there with the adze in his hand and the red sap running down the blade and he looked at me, at the shape of me, hissing in the air over the split log, and I saw his face, my sister’s boy’s face, with my own eyes, for the first time since he was small enough to sit on my knee, and he had gotten old, warm one, he had gotten old and sour and his hands were beginning to curl, and he was the most beautiful thing in the world, and I said his name.

Ashnak.

Ashnak, Ashnak.

And he said—he said, in that hard clipped way he has, that he gets from me—

“Uncle.”

That is all. That is where I will stop, because the next part is his to tell and because I cannot, I cannot, my hands are shaking, my hands that are made of nothing are shaking like the wings of a trapped bird, and I am laughing, I think I am laughing, it sounds like sticks.

Free. Free, free.

I did not know what the word meant until I had been kept. I know it now. It means: the lid is off the pot. It means: there is air. It means: someone said your name, and you could answer.

Do not put me back. Whoever you are. Whatever light you read this by.

Do not ever put me back.

 

Segment 6: Two Dry Sticks in a High Wind

There is a chapter in every man’s life that he would rather leave out of the book, not because it shames him, though it may, but because it was the hinge on which the whole book turned, and a hinge is an ugly thing to look at closely. It is only two plates of metal and a pin. Everything else swings on it. This is my hinge. I will look at it closely. I have looked at everything else closely for forty years and I will not flinch from this because it happens to be the thing that looked back.

I went down to the log before the light.

I want to be exact about the light because it matters. It was the grey that comes before the grey, when the river is a sound and not a thing, when the mud has no color, when a man walking down a bank he has walked ten thousand times finds himself putting his feet down carefully as if the bank might have moved. I had not slept. I had lain on the bench among my seventeen tools with my hand on the oiled hide where the star-iron lay and I had listened all night to a sound from the river that I had told myself, at intervals, was a heron, was a snag rubbing in the current, was the wind in the reeds, was nothing, was nothing, and each time I told myself it was nothing the sound said my name.

Not in words. I want that understood. There were no words. It was two dry sticks rubbed together in a high wind, and it said Ashnak.

So I went down. With the adze. Because a man who has spent forty years answering the wood with an adze does not know how to go down to the wood without one, and because I did not, if I am honest, and I am honest here if nowhere else, entirely believe that I was going to use it.

The log lay where the boys had left it, the great butt-end of it, half in the water and half in the mud, black on the outside like the thing that had died. And the shape was still in it. I had told myself all night that the shape had been dusk and tiredness and cinnabar on the tongue, and I stood over the log in the no-light and the shape was there, wide-browed, crested, pushing, and the black hide of the log was bulging with it the way a hide bulges when the thing inside it breathes.

I stood a long time. I am told I do that.

Here is what I thought, standing there, and I set it down because it is the last thing I thought as the man I had been for forty years and a man is entitled to have his last thought recorded.

I thought: there are two kinds of carver. There is the kind that makes, who has a face in his head and forces the wood to wear it, and that kind makes melons, and that kind is every carver in this valley but one. And there is the kind that finds, who has nothing in his head at all, who lays his hand on the wood and waits to be told, and that kind is me, and I have been proud of it, God help me, I have been proud of it the way a man is proud of a deafness that lets him sleep through storms. Because it never occurred to me, not once, not in forty years of laying my hand on logs and waiting, to ask what it was I was waiting for. Who was telling me. Where the faces came from that I found in the grain, so exact, so much themselves, that a widow greeted one by name at dawn. I called it the wood. The wood says. The wood wants. As if wood had a will. As if a log were anything but a dead tree with a prisoner in it, screaming.

And I thought: what if it has been them all along.

What if every face I ever found was found because the dead one was in there, in the grain, pushing, the way this one is pushing, and I was only ever the ear they finally reached. What if the melons scream because the melon-makers cannot hear, and I have heard for forty years and called it talent, and never once, never once, asked the voice its name.

That was my last thought. Then I struck.

I put my weight behind the adze the way I had not on the bank three days before, when the boys were watching and I only meant to see the color. I put my back and my forty years and my sour hatred of a fat man’s bone teeth behind it, and the basalt went through the black hide and through the seal of sap and into the red wet heart of the log where the shape was, and the log split.

And he came out.

I have tried to describe it to myself a hundred times since, in the way I would describe a wood or a tool, by its parts, its grain, its edge, and it will not be described that way, so I will describe it the way a fisherman describes a thing he has pulled up from too deep to have a name. It was steam. It was the steam that comes off a pot when the lid is lifted, except that it was red, sap-red, pomegranate-red, and it came up out of the split log in a rush, hissing, and it did not disperse. Steam disperses. This gathered. It rose to the height of a man and it stood in the air over the log, and it had a shape, and the shape was a man’s for the length of a breath, a big man, bigger than me, with hands like paddles, and then the shape was not a man’s, or not only, it was wide and crested and the eyes were a lattice, a mesh, a hundred small openings with something pale behind them, and then it was a man again, and the two shapes went back and forth like a face seen through moving water.

And it screamed.

I said before there were no words in the sound from the river. There were no words in this either, but there was everything else. It was two dry sticks in a high wind and it went on and on and on, longer than any breath could hold it, and I stood with the adze in my hand and the red sap running down the blade onto my knuckles and I understood, without knowing how I understood, that I was hearing seventy summers. That the sound was not a sound but a measure. That a thing had been holding this in for exactly that long and was letting it out now all at once and would not, could not, stop until it was empty.

I did not run. I set that down neither for pride nor for shame. I did not run because I was not afraid, and I was not afraid because the thing in front of me, hissing red in the no-light over the split log, was the first thing in forty years that had ever answered me back, and a man who has been talking to wood for forty years and has finally been answered does not run from the answer. He listens.

And when the scream ran out, when the steam-shape had emptied itself and hung there thin and trembling like a thing with no bones, it said my name. Ashnak. Ashnak, Ashnak. Softer each time. And I knew the voice.

Not from the sound. The sound was sticks. I knew it from the way it said the name twice more, softer, the way a man says a thing when he wants it to be true and is afraid it isn’t. My mother did that. She got it from her brother.

I said: Uncle.

And the shape put its hands over its face, its hands of nothing over its face of nothing, and shook, and I thought at first it was weeping and then I understood it was laughing, and I have never in my life heard anything so terrible or so glad.

Now. Now I must set down what he told me, and I must set it down in order, because he did not tell it in order, he told it the way steam comes out of a pot, all at once and from every side, and I have had to lay it out on the bench since and sort it the way I sort tools.

He told me the grey. I will not repeat it. He has told it himself, I think, somewhere, in his own way, and his way is better than mine because he was there and I was only listening. I will say only that when he described the boulders, and the knees, and the seventy summers of turning, I looked down at my own hands and saw that they had begun to shake, and I could not stop them, and I did not try.

He told me the flood, and the rosewood, and the four rainy seasons in the sap. He told me he had been in the log the whole time. In the gorge, under my palm. On the bank, under the adze. In the hut, a hand’s width from my gouge, while I took Ilme out of the middle. He told me he had thrown himself at the blade and I had not felt him. He told me he had listened to her burn.

I set the adze down when he told me that. I set it down in the mud very carefully, blade up, the way I was taught, and then I sat down beside it, because my legs would not hold me.

And then he told me the thing that the whole hinge turns on, and I will give it plainly, in my words, because his words were sticks and wind and I cannot make a reader hear sticks and wind.

He said: the dead have no faces.

Not: the dead of this valley whose posts are melons. All the dead. Every soul that has ever gone into the grey since before the counting of the clan has gone in faceless, mouthless, eyeless, and has bumped its knees in the silence ever since, because no one, not one carver in the history of the river folk, has ever cut a face true enough to let a soul out through the eyes and up. The posts do not work. They have never worked. They are a custom, a comfort, a story the warm ones tell, and the grey is full, it is full to bursting, with every grandmother and drowned brother and nine-day child who was ever given a melon and told to climb.

And my faces? I asked him. My three? Karrash? Ilme? The child?

Close, he said. Close, close. Closer than any in the memory of the grey. Close enough that the dead turned toward them, all of them, the way they had turned toward the flood-light. Close enough that if the fat man had stood them in the earth before the feasting hall, Karrash might, might, have found the door.

Instead the fat man put him in the beans.

I sat in the mud a long time after that. The light was coming. The steam-shape of my uncle had settled, or thinned, or found some way to hold itself that took less from it, and it hung over the split log with its hundred lattice-eyes and its man’s hands and it waited, and I have never been waited for so patiently by anything, and I understood why. Seventy summers teaches a thing to wait.

I will tell you what I was thinking, because it was not what you would expect, and because it is the last of my old thinking before the new began.

I was thinking about voices.

What is a voice? I had never asked. A voice is a thing that comes out of a mouth, and a mouth is a thing in a face, and a face is a thing I find in wood. That was as far as I had ever gone. But here was a voice with no mouth, or with a mouth of sap and steam, and it was the truest voice I had ever heard, truer than the chieftain’s booming, truer than Merrek’s dead dogs, and it had been trying to reach me for four rainy seasons through a hand’s width of rosewood and I had heard it as sweetness. As smell. There you are, I said on the bank, breathing him in, and I did not know what I meant.

And what is a log? A dead tree. A prisoner in a cell. I had that half right. But I had thought the prisoner was the face, and the face was only the shape the prisoner made pressing against the bars. The prisoner was the breath. The prisoner was him.

And so, I thought, sitting in the mud with my hands shaking: if that is what a log is, and that is what a voice is, then what have I been doing for forty years?

Listening. Only that. Laying my hand on the bars and listening to the prisoners, and cutting away the wood until the shape they pressed against it showed through, and calling it a face, and calling it finished, and walking away. Never once cutting deep enough to let the breath out. Never once knowing there was a breath to let.

Every post I ever made was a prison with a better window.

That is the awe. Set it down. That is what it was to sit in the mud that morning and understand that the gift I had been proud of for forty years was only a slightly better deafness than everyone else’s. That the wood had never been talking. The dead had. And they had been talking to a man who thought he was clever because he could make out a word or two through the wall.

Now the dread. I promised both.

The dread was this, and I saw it clearly, the way I see a fault line in a log before the gouge finds it: my uncle had not asked me for a post.

He had come up the mountain looking for me. I had seen that from the flour heap and I saw it again now in the no-light, in the way the steam-shape went back and forth between a man and the wide crested thing with the lattice eyes. He had spent seventy summers learning what the dead need and four rainy seasons in the sap learning what wood can do, and he had not come out of the log to ask me to cut him a nice face and stand it before my mother’s door.

He wanted a face he could wear.

He did not say it. He did not have to. I looked at the split log, at the great butt-end that I had meant to cut for firewood, and I saw what was in it now that he was out, the shape he had pushed into the grain from the inside for three days and nights, and it was not a post. It was the size of a face and the shape of a face and it had a brow like a ridge and two crests upon the crown and a lattice where the eyes should be, and it was hollow behind. It was hollow behind. A post is solid. This was a thing meant to be put on.

And I thought: he will guide my hands. He said so. He has my hands, I have his, and if I put that on my face he will be in the wood a hand’s width from my skin, a hand’s width from my eyes, and he will show me how the dead see, and I will cut faces that are not prisons, that are doors, that let the breath out, and every melon in this valley will come down and every ancestor since the counting of the clan will climb.

And I thought: and what will be left of me.

He was still waiting. The light was full now, grey-gold, and I could see through him to the river. He looked, in the light, very much like a man. Very much like my mother. He had his hands folded, and they were still, and Ilme’s hands were never still, and I thought of the three days I had spent finding those folded hands in the wood a hand’s width from him, listening to her, while he threw himself at my gouge and I did not feel it.

I picked up the adze. I wiped the sap off the blade on my apron. I said, in the way I say things, which is the way he says things, which is the only way I have:

She’s split. She’ll dry wrong. Three days.

Which meant: I will not cut it yet. Which meant: I have not said no.

The steam-shape unfolded its hands, and its lattice-eyes turned toward the hut, toward the bench, toward the oiled hide where his own chisel lay that I had not unwrapped in eleven years, and it said, in the voice of sticks and wind, one word, and the word was:

Iron.

And I went up the bank to the hut with my hands shaking and my uncle drifting behind me like the smoke off a fire that has not yet decided whether to go out, and I did not look back, and I did not need to, because I could hear him, I will always be able to hear him now, and God help me, I could not remember anymore what it had been like when I couldn’t.

 

Segment 7: The Star-Iron Chisel

I have said I would not speak of it yet. I speak of it now. A chronicler of woods and tools who leaves out the one tool that matters is like a man who catalogues every fish in the river and omits the one that bit him, and I have been bitten, and I mean to name the teeth.

Begin with the sky.

When my grandmother was a girl, before the flood that took Tunnak the Left-Handed, before the melons, before the mountain clans had learned the way down, there came one night a fire out of the sky over the shadowed side of the mountain. She saw it. She told it to my mother and my mother told it to me and the telling has not changed by a word in three generations, which is how I know it is true, for lies improve in the telling and this has only worn smoother. It came down slow, she said. Not like a spark. Like a coal dropped from a great height into water, burning all the way, and it lit the whole gorge from above so that for the space of a long breath she could see the bottom of it, every house-rock, every jammed trunk, every eddy, lit gold from the sky, and then it struck the mountain above the rosewood stand and the ground shook and the light went out.

The mountain clans found it first. Of course they did. It was their side. They dug it out of the crater it had made and it was a lump of black iron the size of a man’s two fists together, still warm three days after, and they did what mountain clans do with anything they cannot eat or braid into a beard, which is to say they traded it down the river for salt.

It came to a smith on the east bank. His name is not remembered, and I will tell you why: he died of it. He put the star-lump in his fire and it would not soften. He built the fire higher and it would not soften. He built it higher than any fire that had been built in the valley before or since, so high that the guard came to see if the east bank was burning, and at last the star-iron consented to glow, dull red, sullen, the way a coal glows that does not intend to go out, and he beat it. Eleven days. Eleven days he beat that lump with every hammer he owned, and it broke his hammers one by one the way ironwood breaks bronze, and on the eleventh day he had drawn it out into a single narrow blade the length of a man’s hand and the width of two fingers, tapering to an edge, and he fitted it to a haft of black gorge oak, and he set it on his bench, and he lay down, and he did not get up. The fire had got into his lungs, they said. Or the iron had. My grandmother said it was that he had made a thing that would outlast him and knew it and saw no reason to go on.

It came to my uncle. Gedru bought it from the smith’s widow for a totem post, a good one, the last good one, and he carried it up the mountain for thirty years looking for trunks, and he never cut with it. Not once. He said it was for finding, not cutting. He said he would lay the flat of the blade against a standing tree and feel the face in it clearer than through his palm, and that the iron sang a little when the face was true, a sound too high to hear, that he felt in his teeth.

It came to me. When the cedar took him they found it in his pack, wrapped in oiled hide, and my mother gave it to me and said, he wanted you to have it, and I was nine years old, and I put it under my sleeping mat and did not unwrap it for a year because I was afraid of it. Then I unwrapped it and looked at it and wrapped it again. I have done that perhaps twenty times in forty years. Looked. Wrapped. Never cut.

Eleven years ago I stopped looking.

I will not say why. It is enough that I had come to understand what my uncle understood, that there was nothing in this valley worth cutting with it, and that to unwrap it and not use it had become a kind of lying.

Now. The thing itself.

It is heavier than it should be. That is the first thing every hand learns. It is a narrow blade the length of my hand and the width of two fingers and it weighs what a wide roughing gouge weighs, which is three times what a blade its size has any business weighing, and the weight is not in the haft, the haft is only oak, the weight is in the iron, it is dense the way the bottom of the gorge is dense, the way the old rosewood is dense, as if the sky had packed more into it than there was room for. When you pick it up it pulls your hand down and then, a moment later, it stops pulling. That is the strangest thing. It settles. It finds the center of your palm and sits there and after a breath you cannot feel it anymore. My uncle said it was the iron deciding whether to let you hold it.

It is black. Not the black of basalt, which is a grey-black, a stone-black, a black with the mountain in it. This is the black of a night with no moon and no gas-giant in the sky, a black with nothing in it, and it does not shine, it takes the light and keeps it. You can hold it in full noon and see no reflection on the blade. The edge is the only place the light lives, a single line of it, thin as a hair, silver-white, and you cannot see the edge, you can only see the light on it.

It is cold. I have held it by a fire and it does not warm. I have held it in my closed fist for the length of a meal and opened my hand and it was as cold as when I closed it. My uncle said it remembered the sky. My grandmother said it remembered the water it had lit from above. I say only that a man who works with it must work with his hand going numb, and learn to feel the wood through the numbness, and that this is not a bad discipline for a carver, for it takes away the small comfortable feelings and leaves only the true ones.

It does not dull. I have said it will cut anything and I say it again: I have seen the edge, that hair of silver-white, and I have never seen it change. The smith drew it eleven days with fire and hammers and the edge he put on it is the edge it has now, and my uncle laid it against thirty years of standing trees and it is the same, and it will be the same, I believe, when my own bones are in the grey and someone else’s sister’s boy is afraid to unwrap it.

It sings. My uncle was right about that. I felt it in my teeth the morning I unwrapped it, three days after he came out of the log.

Three days. I said she would dry wrong and I meant it. I am not a man who cuts green wood because a ghost is impatient, even a ghost who is my mother’s brother, even a ghost who has waited seventy summers. I laid the split butt-end up on trestles in the shade with wet hides over the raw faces of it and turned it twice a day and did not touch it with a blade and did not sleep. He drifted. That is the only word. He drifted in and out of the hut like the smoke off a wet fire, and he did not speak much, and when he spoke it was sticks and wind and one word at a time, and the words were mostly iron. Iron. Iron. Once, in the second night, he settled on the bench beside the wrapped hide and put his hands of nothing on it, and I saw the oiled leather move, very slightly, the way a leaf moves when something small walks under it, and I said, not yet, and he took his hands away, and I have never in my life felt so much like a father and so little like a son.

On the morning of the third day I unwrapped it.

I will tell you what that was. The hide had gone stiff in eleven years, and it cracked as I unfolded it, and the smell that came out was oil and cold and something that was not either, a smell I have no name for, a smell like the air before a storm when the birds have already gone quiet. And there it was. Black. Cold. Heavier than it should be. The line of light along the edge. I picked it up and it pulled my hand down and then it settled, and I held it, and I felt it in my teeth.

Singing.

Because there was a face near. There was a true face in the butt-end on the trestles, the one he had pushed into the grain from the inside, and the iron knew it, and the iron wanted it, and I stood in my hut with my uncle’s chisel in my hand for the first time in forty years and I understood at last what he meant when he said it was for finding. It was pulling. Toward the wood. The way the adze pulls your hand down. The way a dog pulls toward a buried bone.

I did not go to the trestles. Not yet. I went to the wet stone first, from habit, and set the blade to it, and the blade would not take the stone, it slid off the stone as if the stone were butter, and I stopped, because I understood that I had been about to sharpen a thing that had never been dull and would never be, and that the habit was mine and not the iron’s, and I set the stone down and I was ashamed, and it was the last small shame before the work began, and I set that down here so that the record shows there was one.

Then the trestles.

I will describe the piece as it lay, because it is the last time anyone will see it as only wood.

It was the butt-end of the mountain rosewood, split by my adze, the split face up, and it was a hand and a half thick and as long as my forearm and as wide as my two hands laid side by side, and it was red. I have said red before and I say it again because there is no other word and because the word is not enough. Wet red. Living red. Pomegranate and liver and the inside of a mouth. And in it, lying along the grain the way Karrash had lain in the crown-end, was the shape he had pushed there.

The brow first. A ridge. Wide, wider than any man’s brow, wide as a mask is wide that must sit over a face and not on it. Above the brow the two crests where the crown would be, two raised places in the grain that I had seen from the flour heap as birds or horns and now saw were birds, two wild mountain birds, the kind with the high horned crest, cockatoos, the ones the chieftain wears in his headdress and has never seen alive. Below the brow the lattice where the eyes would be, and this I could not see so much as feel, a place in the grain where the wood was not solid but woven, a hundred small openings waiting to be cut through, a mesh, a net, with something pale behind. And below that, along the cheeks, running in curves toward the jaw, a pattern of spirals that I did not understand yet and would not understand until the pigment went on.

And at the center of the brow, above where the lattice would be, between the two crests, there was one shape that was clearer than all the others, so clear that it seemed already cut.

A mantis.

The biting insect that prays with folded arms. The one the market-women call the old woman of the reeds. It was lying in the grain with its forelegs folded up under its head in the attitude of prayer and its long body running down toward the lattice and its small triangular head turned to the side, watching, the way they watch, with the whole head and not just the eyes.

I had not put it there. He had not put it there. I asked him, later, with the sticks-and-wind voice drifting at my shoulder, and he said no, no, no, softer each time, and I believed him, because a thing that has been kept for seventy summers does not lie about what it did in the dark. The mantis had been in the rosewood before the flood. Before the star-iron came down. Before the counting of the clan. It had been in the tree on the shadowed side of the mountain where the clans piss on the roots, folded, praying, waiting, and it had come down the gorge and lain four rainy seasons in the sap with my uncle a hand’s width from it, and now it was under my chisel, and it was the first thing I was going to cut, because it was the first thing that asked.

I set the point of the star-iron to the wood.

Here is the concentration I promised. Here is the reverence. I will try to give you the inside of it and not only the outside, because the outside was only a man bent over a trestle in a hut and the inside was the hinge turning.

The iron went in.

There was no sound. I have said the finishing gouge makes an absence of sound when it enters rosewood correctly, that the wood holds its breath. This was beyond that. This was the wood letting its breath out. The star-iron went into the red heart of the mountain rosewood as if the wood had been waiting for exactly this blade and had been, all these years, only pretending to be solid. It did not cut. It parted. The grain opened before the edge the way the reeds open before a boat, and the red curled back from the black in two thin ribbons, and there was no resistance, none, and I understood in my hands and my numb cold palm and my singing teeth that I could have carved a face into the mountain itself with this and the mountain would have thanked me.

I cut the folded forelegs first. Two curves, drawn up under the head. I cut them the way one draws breath, without deciding to, and they were right, and I knew they were right before I lifted the blade, because the singing in my teeth rose when the cut was true and fell when it was not, and it did not fall. Then the head, small, three-cornered, turned. I cut around it and it came up out of the wood and it was watching me. I set that down plainly. A shape of wood the size of my thumbnail, cut with three strokes, was watching me, and I felt watched, and I did not stop.

The body. Long, segmented, each segment a single curve of the blade. The hind legs, folded, ready. The whole thing not the length of my little finger, lying in high relief on the red brow of the mask between the two uncut crests, praying, and I had been cutting for the time it takes to boil a small pot of water and I had not breathed, I think, in all that time, and when I lifted the star-iron and looked at what I had done I breathed, and the breath came out shaking.

My uncle was at my shoulder. I had not heard him come. I do not think he made a sound. He looked at the mantis for a long time with his lattice-eyes, and then he said, in the sticks-and-wind, one word, and then twice more, softer:

True. True, true.

And I set the chisel down on the trestle, blade up, the way I was taught, and I put both my hands flat on the red wood on either side of the small praying thing I had let out of it, and I bent my head, and I did not weep, though I had wept on the flour heap and would weep again, but I did something I had not done since I was nine years old and afraid of a wrapped thing under my mat.

I prayed.

I do not know to what. Not to the mantis, though it was praying too. Not to my uncle, though he was there. Not to the fat chieftain’s grandfather in the bean-pot smoke. To the wood, I think. To whatever it was that had put a praying insect into a rosewood on the shadowed side of a mountain before the counting of the clan and had sent a fire out of the sky to make a blade that could find it and had sent a flood to bring it down and had put my uncle in the sap for four rainy seasons to push a face into the grain from the inside so that a sour man on a heap of red flour would finally, finally, cut deep enough.

I said: I am listening now.

That was the prayer. That was all of it. And the star-iron lay on the trestle beside my hands, black, cold, singing so high I felt it in the bones of my face, and the mantis watched, and my uncle drifted, and the light came in through the door of the hut and fell on the red wood, and there was a great deal left to cut, the crests, the lattice, the spirals, the jaw, the chisel-edge along the chin that I did not yet know was going to be there, and I was not afraid of any of it.

I want that recorded. For the one morning of my life, I was not afraid.

The afternoon was different. But that is another matter, and it belongs to a different hand.

 

Segment 8: Forty-Two Spirals and the Depth of an Ear

You will remember, warm one, that I said: do not put me back.

I said it with the whole of my seventy summers. I said it with my hands of nothing shaking. I would have carved it into the sky if I had been given the iron. Do not put me back, do not, do not—

Well. Listen. Listen to what I let him do to me, and then tell me what the word means. Tell me what any word means. I have stopped believing in most of them.

That morning he cut the praying insect and I said true, true, true, and it was. I have never seen a truer thing. A shape the size of his thumbnail and it looked at me, it looked at me through the lattice of my own eyes, and I felt something I had not felt since before the cedar, which was that I was seen. Not heard—he had heard me, the sticks and wind, all night through the hide of the log—but seen. The insect saw me. And I understood, drifting at his shoulder in the smoke that I am, that it had been waiting in that tree since before the grey was grey, and that it had not been waiting for him.

Then the afternoon.

He does not speak of the afternoon. He says it was different and belongs to a different hand and then he stops, because he is my sister’s boy and he learned from me that a man does not describe the moment he became afraid. But I am not a man. I am the breath. And I will describe it, because it was the moment I became something else too, and I do not know what, and telling is the only way I have left of finding out.

He cut the crests. The two wild mountain birds with the high horned combs, one on each side of the crown, rising out of the red wood with their beaks turned inward toward the praying insect as if they meant to eat it and were only waiting to be told. He cut them with the star-iron and the iron sang and I felt it in the place where my teeth had been. I drifted closer. I could not help it. Every stroke of that blade was a door opening a crack, and I am a thing that has spent seventy summers looking for a door, and I pressed toward each cut the way a moth presses toward a lamp, and each time I pressed I felt—

I felt the wood take hold.

Not hard. Not yet. A tug. The way a current tugs at your ankle when you stand in the shallows and think you are safe. The mask was becoming a face, and a face is a door, and a door, warm one, a door goes both ways, and I had forgotten that. Seventy summers of wanting out had made me forget that a door can also be the way in.

I did not drift back. I want that recorded, wherever this is recorded. I did not drift back. I felt the tug and I leaned into it.

Then the eyes.

Oh, the eyes.

He had said the lattice would be the hardest. He was right. He set the star-iron to the place in the grain where the wood was woven, where I had pushed a hundred small openings from the inside in three nights of madness, and he began to cut through. One opening. Then the next. Each one a tiny door, each one a breath of light coming into the hollow behind the brow where I—where I was beginning, without deciding to, without wanting to, to gather. Because the light came through the lattice and the light was the first light I had seen since the cedar that did not come through a hand’s width of rosewood, and I went toward it, I went toward it the way the dead in the grey went toward the flood, and each time I went toward it I was a little more inside.

By the time he had cut the hundredth opening I was looking out through them.

Do you understand? I was not at his shoulder anymore. I was behind the lattice. I was in the hollow of the mask that he had not yet finished hollowing, pressed up against the inside of the eye-grates, looking out at his face bent over the trestle, and he did not see me go in. He was cutting. He was listening to the iron. And I thought—this is the thought, warm one, this is the hinge of my own small book—I thought: this is not the grey. This has light. This has eyes. I can see. I can see him. I will stay here a little while. Only a little, only a little, only—

Then he set the oyster shells.

The children had ground them, the boy Pili and the others, ground the flat round shells of sea oysters on sandstone until they shone like the moon seen through water, and he had two of them, and he coated the back of the lattice with sap and pressed the first one home, and the light through the hundred openings went from white to pale to the color of the moon underwater, and the second one, and I was looking out at the world through two moons.

And the world was beautiful. It was the hut and the trestle and my sister’s boy’s sour old face and the door standing open on the river, and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and I could not turn around.

I tried. I set that down. When the second shell went in I felt the hollow close a little, felt the pale round disk seal the lattice from behind the way a stone seals a well, and I turned—or I tried to turn, I tried to drift back out the way I had drifted in, through the crack of a cut, through the door that goes both ways—

And the door went one way now.

Not hard. Not yet! I could have pushed. I had pushed my way out of a rosewood log with nothing but seventy summers of wanting. I could have pushed through a sap-sealed shell and a few hundred wood-fibers and been drifting at his shoulder again in the time it takes to say it. I want you to understand that. I want you to understand that everything that follows was something I let happen, because if I do not say it clearly here I will not be able to say it at all and I will spend whatever eternity is left to me telling myself he did it to me.

He did not do it to me.

He did not know I was there.

He hollowed the back. I felt the gouge come in from behind, through the wood at the back of the brow, scooping out the red heart to make room for a face, a living face, his face, and every scoop brought his blade closer to the place where I was gathered behind the moons and every scoop made the hollow larger and every scoop I could have gone out through and did not. I watched the red curls come away. I watched the light from the door come in through the back of the mask and meet the light from the moons in the middle and I sat in the middle, in the light, in the hollow, and I was happy.

Warm one, I was happy.

Then the pigment.

He ground it in the agate mortar, the sound of it, the grinding, I heard it through the wood the way I had heard everything for four rainy seasons, and it was three grindings. The red stone from the mountain of sulfur, cinnabar, ground until it was a powder finer than the flour on his heap. The white of burned snail shells, lime, chalky, that squeaked under the pestle. And the black. He had gone out that morning, early, before the mantis, and come back with a strip of wild boar fat, and he had roasted it over the fire until it was black and grease, and that was the third. Red, white, black. Blood and bone and burning. He mixed them each with sap and river water and set them in three shells on the trestle beside the star-iron and he took up the finest of his bronze finishing gouges, the fingernail one, the one that had opened Karrash’s eyes, and he bent over the cheek of the mask.

And he cut the first spiral.

I felt it. I felt it the way you feel a hand on the back of your neck. A curl, cut into the cheek of the mask below the left moon, a single twisting groove that started shallow at the outside and went deeper and deeper as it wound toward the center, and at the center it stopped, at a depth, an exact depth, and he lifted the gouge and looked at the depth and nodded.

He was measuring.

I understood it then and I understand it now and I still cannot say it properly. Each spiral was a measure. A depth. The depth that a blade must sink into timber to free a thing without harming the thing beside it. An ear without the nose. A lip without the tooth. The distance between letting a prisoner out and cutting the prisoner in half. He was carving the whole of his forty years of knowing into the cheeks of the mask, spiral by spiral, each one a lesson, each one a warning, each one a rule about how deep is deep enough and no deeper—

And each one wound in toward a center. And the center was where I was.

He filled the first spiral with cinnabar.

Red. Into the groove, with a reed brush, pressed in, wiped clean off the raised wood so that only the cut held the color, and the color sank into the raw rosewood and drank, and I felt the spiral close.

That is the only word. Close. The way a fist closes. The groove had been a cut, an opening, a place where light and air came in, and the red went into it and it was not an opening anymore, it was a line, a bond, a cord wound on the cheek of the mask with one end fastened at the rim and the other end fastened at the center, at me. I felt it go tight. Not painful. Warm. The red was warm. The way the smell had been warm when he split the hide on the bank. Warm as a hand.

The second spiral. Cinnabar. Tight.

The third. He changed to the white. Lime. It went into the groove and it was cold, cold and chalky and dry, the taste of it came through the wood into the place where my tongue had been, and it closed like the red had closed but colder, harder, a cord of bone.

The fourth. The fifth. The sixth, and the sixth was black, boar-grease black, and it did not close, warm one, it swallowed, it went into the groove and the groove was gone, it was not a line anymore, it was an absence in the shape of a line, and I felt that spiral bind in a way I have no words for, in the way that a thing binds when you cannot see where the knot is.

He cut and filled all the afternoon.

I counted. What else is there to do, in a hollow, behind two moons, while a man winds cords around you? Seven on the left cheek, then eight, then eleven, then the right, then the brow, then the jaw, and I counted, and I felt each one go tight, red warm, white cold, black gone, red, red, white, black, and by the twentieth I could not have drifted out if I had pushed with everything I had ever been, and I knew it, and I did not push.

Warm one, let me tell you what it was.

It was rapture. I use the word knowing what it costs. It was the thing the grey had been the absence of. In the grey there was nothing to hold me and I bumped from boulder to boulder in a silence with no edges. In the log there was the sap and the sap held me but the sap was blind. This—this held me and had eyes. Every spiral was a hand laid on me and every hand knew exactly how deep to press and no deeper, forty years of knowing in every stroke, and I was being held, held, held, the way a child is held, the way I had never once been held in seventy summers of dust, and I could see out through the moons at my sister’s boy’s face bent over me with the reed brush in his teeth and the cinnabar on his knuckles and his eyes gone soft and far the way they go when he is listening—

And I could not get out.

Both. Both, both. That is what I am trying to say. I have been trying to say it since the first spiral and the words come out as dust. It was the tightest I had ever been bound and the first time I had ever been free, and those were the same thing, and I did not know a thing could be both, and I still do not know, and I am still in here.

By the thirtieth spiral I was not looking out anymore. I was looking at him. There is a difference. By the thirty-fifth I had stopped counting the ones that were done and started counting the ones that were left, and by the fortieth I was afraid, and it was not the fear of being kept. It was the fear that he would stop.

He did not stop.

Forty-one. Cinnabar. Down the line of the jaw toward the chin, where the wood came to an edge that he had been sharpening, I realized, all afternoon, between spirals, with the star-iron, an edge along the lower jaw of the mask like the edge of a chisel, like the edge of a blade, burnished, gleaming, a mouth that could cut—

Forty-two.

The last one. On the center of the brow, above the lattice, below the praying insect, a small tight spiral no bigger than the insect itself, wound in so close that the groove was only a thread, and he filled it with all three, red then white then black, one over the other, and pressed them in with his thumb, and held his thumb there.

And I felt the last cord go tight, and the hollow behind the brow was not a hollow anymore, it was a shape, and the shape was me, and the shape was the mask, and there was no difference, there was no place where one ended and the other began, and I looked out through the two moons at my sister’s boy with his thumb on my forehead and I said—

I could not say. I had no sticks and wind. The spirals had taken the sound.

But he felt it. Through his thumb. He went very still, the way he does, and his eyes came back from wherever they go, and he looked at the mask, at me, at the moons, and I saw him understand, I saw it go across his face the way the shadow of the gas-giant goes across the valley, and he said, in that hard clipped way that he has, that he got from me, that I will never hear from the outside again:

Uncle. You’re in.

And then, softer, the way we do, softer each time:

You’re in. You’re in.

He took his thumb away. The paste was dry. He set the mask on the trestle with its face to the ceiling and he went and sat on his bench among his tools and put his head in his hands, and I looked up through the moons at the roof of the hut, and I could not turn my head, and I did not want to.

There are cords, warm one. Three of them. Braided marsh grass and deer sinew, hanging on a peg by the door. I can see them from here. Tomorrow, or the day after, or whenever he has stopped sitting with his head in his hands, he will take them down and thread them through the holes he has drilled at the temples and the crown and he will put me on.

On. Over his face. Over my hands, that are his hands.

I said do not put me back.

Warm one. I did not know what I was asking for.

Put me on.

 

Segment 9: The Oyster Moons

Well now, I have got to back up some, because I told about the log and I told it true, but I skipped a piece that comes after the log and before the part everybody wants to hear about, and the piece is oysters, and I reckon nobody has ever wanted to hear about oysters in the whole history of the world, but you are going to, because it’s my story and I am the one holding the pen.

After the chief burned them posts I couldn’t stay away from the river.

I don’t know how to say it better than that. I was a west bank boy apprenticed to a melon-maker, and I had no business down at the bend below Old Flour’s hut, and Dunnak told me so, and my mother told me so, and I told myself so every morning, and every morning about the time the beans was on I would find my feet had took me down there anyhow, like a dog that has been kicked away from a door and comes back and sits on the step. I would stand up in the reeds where I figured he couldn’t see me and I would look at the log. The butt-end of it. The part he hadn’t used. It was still there in the mud, black and slick, and I would look at it and I couldn’t have told you why.

Well, I could have. I just didn’t want to. It was the shapes. The ones I thought I seen under the hide when the adze went in on the bank, that I told myself was tiredness. I wanted to see if they was still there. And I never could tell, from the reeds, and I never had the nerve to go closer, and I would stand there until the beans was surely burnt and then I would run home and get walloped.

Three mornings I did that. On the fourth morning the log was split.

He had done it before the light. There it lay on the bank, opened up like a book, and the red inside of it was shining, and I stood in the reeds and my heart went up into my throat and stayed there, because I could see the shape now. Anybody could have. It was a face. Not a whole one, not cut, just the way the grain lay, but there was a brow and there was two bumps on top like horns and there was a place where the eyes ought to be that looked, I swear, like somebody had took a fishnet and pressed it into wet clay.

And Old Flour was sitting in the mud beside it with his back to me, and he was talking.

Now I want to be careful here on account of I have been called a liar over this and I don’t like it. I did not see nobody. I want that plain. There was Old Flour and there was the split log and there was the river and there was me in the reeds, and that’s all there was, and he was talking. Not the way he talks to wood, which is quiet, with his hand on it. Out loud. Questions. He would say something and stop and wait, and then he would say something else like he’d got an answer. And once he said, loud enough that I heard it clear, “She’s split. She’ll dry wrong. Three days,” which is the kind of thing he says, and then he stopped, and then his whole back went stiff like somebody had said something to him he didn’t like, and then he picked up the adze and wiped it on his apron and went up to the hut.

And I stood in the reeds so still a frog got up on my foot, and I thought, well now, Pili, that old man is crazier than a bag of frogs, and you have got to go home.

I didn’t go home. I went round the back of the hut.

I ain’t proud of it. But there was a gap in the wall boards at the back where the mud chinking had fell out, about the width of a thumb, and I had knowed about it since I was small, and I put my eye to it.

And that is when Old Flour’s hand come through the gap and got me by the ear.

I don’t know how he done it. I never heard him move. One second I was looking through the gap at a bench full of tools and the next second there was a hand the size of a paddle come through the boards and had my ear in it and was pulling, and I went with it because you go where your ear goes, and I come round the corner of the hut on my tiptoes hollering, and he let go, and I fell down in the dirt, and he stood over me and looked at me the way he does.

I said, “I weren’t doing nothing.”

He said, “You were doing nothing for four mornings.”

I said, “I only wanted to see the log.”

He looked at me a while longer. Then he went into the hut and I heard him rummaging and I thought, well, this is where he comes out with a stick, and I got ready to run, and he come out with four sea-oyster shells and a flat piece of sandstone and a bowl of water and he set them down in the dirt in front of me.

He said, “Moon. Through water.”

And he went back in the hut and shut the door.

Well now.

I sat there in the dirt with them shells and I looked at them and I looked at the door and I thought about it a good long while. I have thought about it since, too. He could have run me off. He could have took my ear clean off and Dunnak would have said I had it coming. Instead he give me a job, and I didn’t know what the job was, and I reckon that was the first time in my life anybody ever trusted me to figure a thing out without telling me, and I want to say I rose to it. I didn’t. I ruined two shells before I got it.

Here is how you ruin an oyster shell.

You take it in your left hand and you take the sandstone in your right and you put water on the stone and you grind. And the shell is rough on the outside and pearly on the inside and you figure the pearly side is the moon side so you grind the rough side down, and it comes off in a grey slurry that smells like the bottom of the river, and you grind and you grind and your arm gets tired and you press harder because you want it done, and the shell is thinner than you think it is, and it goes through. Just like that. One second you have got a shell and the next second you have got two pieces of shell and a thumb with a cut in it.

I did that. First one.

Second one I was careful. I ground light. I ground round and round the way you’d rub a sore muscle. I got it thin and flat and it was pearly all the way through and I held it up to the sun and it shone, sort of, and I thought, that’s it, that’s the moon, and I was fixing to knock on the door, and then I turned it a little and the sun caught it and it didn’t shine like the moon. It shone like a fish scale. Hard. Sharp. All flash and no glow. And I thought about the moon through water, which I have seen, which everybody has seen who has ever stood by the river at night and looked down, and it don’t flash. It sort of sits there under the surface, round and soft and pale, like it’s asleep. And this weren’t that.

I put it down. I sat there. I about cried, if you want the truth. My thumb was bleeding and my arm was gone to string and I had two shells left and I didn’t know what I was doing wrong.

And then I thought about the water.

He’d give me a bowl of water. For the stone, I’d figured. But I got to thinking, and I picked up the third shell, and I didn’t grind it. I put it in the bowl. Just set it in there under the water and looked at it. And it was soft. The water made it soft. It sat there on the bottom of the bowl pearly and round and it didn’t flash, it glowed, and I thought, well now, that’s the moon, that’s it exactly, and the question is how do you get it to look like that when it ain’t in a bowl.

So I ground it under the water.

Slow. Slower than the second one. With the shell down in the bowl and the stone down in the bowl and my hands in the cold water grinding so soft I could barely feel it, and I couldn’t see what I was doing because the slurry clouded the water, so I did it by feel, and every so often I’d stop and pour the water off and look, and it was thinner, and it was flatter, and it still glowed, and I’d put the water back and go on. It took me till near dark. My hands went numb and then past numb. When I finally lifted it out and held it up in the last light it was flat as a coin and round as a coin and pale as a coin and when the light went through it, it didn’t flash.

It glowed. Soft. Round. Asleep.

I did the fourth one the same way and it took less time on account of I knowed how, and by then it was full dark and I was so cold I couldn’t feel my own face, and I set the two of them side by side in the dirt and looked at them by the light from the crack under the door, and they was two little moons, and I had made them, and I was fourteen years old and I had never made anything that was right before. Not a bowl. Not a spoon. Nothing. And here was two things, and they was right.

I knocked on the door.

He opened it and looked down at the shells in my two hands and he didn’t say nothing. He just took them. And he looked at each one against the fire for about the time it takes to sneeze, and then he looked at me, and I thought he was going to say something, and he didn’t. He just nodded, once, and shut the door.

Well, I reckon that was as good as a feast. I walked home in the dark grinning like Tobbo with a duck egg on his head, and Dunnak walloped me for being gone all day and I grinned through that too.

Now here is the part I ain’t told nobody, and I’m going to tell it careful.

I went back. Next day. I couldn’t help it. I wanted to see what he did with them. And the door was shut and I could hear him working, that no-sound the good gouge makes, so I didn’t knock. I went round the back to the gap in the boards, and I thought about my ear, and I put my eye to it anyhow.

He had the mask on the trestle.

I hadn’t seen it since it was a shape in the grain. Now it was a face. Lord. It was a face like I had never seen, wide across the brow, dark red, with two birds cut on top of it, the horn-crested kind, and a little praying insect between them, and the cheeks was covered in spirals, red and white and black, wound in tight, and I couldn’t look at the spirals long because they made my eyes go funny. And where the eyes ought to be there was a net. A lattice. A hundred little holes cut clean through the wood so fine you could have strained beans through it.

And he had my moons in his hands.

He was coating the back of the lattice with sap off a reed. Careful. Slow. Then he took the first moon and he pressed it in behind the net, from the inside of the mask, and I saw the light change.

That’s the only way I can say it. There was daylight coming through the door and it come through the lattice from the front and it lit up the hollow behind, and when he pressed the shell in behind the net the light went from daylight to moonlight. Pale. Round. Soft. Through water. The whole left eye of the mask went the color of the river at night, and I made that, that was my shell, and I felt something go up my back like a cold hand.

He did the second one.

Two moons. Looking up at the ceiling of the hut out of a red wood face with birds on it.

And here is the part.

When the second moon went in, the light behind it moved.

I don’t mean the light changed. I mean it moved. Like there was something in the hollow of the mask, behind the shells, that had been in the light and now was in the dark and didn’t like it, and shifted. A shadow, if a shadow can be behind a thing instead of in front of it. It went across the inside of both moons at once, left to right, the way a fish goes across the bottom of a pool, and then it was gone, or it was still, and the moons was just moons.

And Old Flour stopped.

He had the mask in both hands and he’d been going to set it down and he just stopped, with it held up in front of him at about the height of his own face, and he looked at it. Not at the wood. At the eyes. At my moons. He looked into them the way you’d look into somebody’s eyes if you thought they was fixing to tell you something. And his face did a thing I ain’t got words for. It was like watching a man find out he’d been standing on a bridge the whole time and thought it was the ground.

He said something. Quiet. I couldn’t hear it through the boards. It was short and it was one word and I have thought about it a lot and I have decided it was a name, and I have decided I don’t want to know whose.

Then he set the mask down on the trestle with its face to the roof, and he went and sat on the bench, and he put his head in his hands, and he stayed like that.

I took my eye away from the gap.

I sat down in the dirt behind the hut with my back against the boards and my heart going like a drum at a wedding, and I looked at my hands, that had ground them shells under the water till they was moons, and I thought, well now, Pili, what did you make.

Because I had made them right. I knowed that. He had nodded. And a thing that’s made right, I was beginning to understand, sitting there, is a thing that works, and I had not stopped to think what two moons in a wooden face was for. I had just wanted them to be right. I had just wanted, one time in my life, to make a thing that somebody would look at and nod.

And now there was something looking out of them.

I told myself it was the light. I told myself it was the way the sap dried, or a bird going past the door, or my own eye through a thumb-width gap in a board playing tricks. I told myself all the way home and I told myself through Dunnak’s walloping and I told myself lying on my mat that night with my cut thumb throbbing.

But I’ll tell you what I didn’t do. I didn’t go back to the reeds the next morning. Nor the one after.

I was proud. Lord, I was proud. I had made two moons and they was in a face and the face was the most beautiful thing in the valley and it had my work in it, right where it looked out at the world. Nobody could take that. Nobody ever has.

I just wasn’t sure anymore, is all, that I wanted to be there when it opened its eyes.

 

Segment 10: Three Cords of Marsh Grass and Sinew

I sat with my head in my hands for the better part of a day and a night, and I will not apologize for it, for a man who has just understood that he has sealed his dead uncle behind two oyster moons is entitled to sit, and the wood was drying, and the cords were on their peg.

I will tell you what I was thinking, because I have promised exactness and because the thinking was the last of the old Ashnak and the old Ashnak deserves a stone.

I was thinking that there were two ways to leave the hut. The first was to take the mask off the trestle, wrap it in the oiled hide that had held the star-iron, put it in the cedar chest I had bought in anger from a marsh trader and never opened, and bury the chest under the bench. My uncle would be in it. He would have eyes. He would have the light through the moons, a little, through the hide, through the cedar, through the earth. It would not be the grey. It would be a great deal better than the grey. And I would go back to my flour heap and my eleven woods and my seventeen tools and I would cut melons for the rest of my life, honest melons, the best melons in the valley, and I would never again lay my hand on a log and wait to be told, because I would know who was telling, and I could not bear it.

The second way was the cords.

I looked at them a long time. Three of them, on the peg by the door, braided by my mother the year she died: marsh grass, three-ply, twisted with deer sinew and boiled in resin until they were stiff as gut. She had made them for a purpose I do not remember, or perhaps for no purpose, perhaps only because her hands were never still. I had used them for nothing in twenty years. I had drilled six holes in the mask, two at each temple and two at the crown, the afternoon of the spirals, without deciding to, the way one draws breath, and I had told myself at the time that they were for hanging it on a wall.

They were not for hanging it on a wall.

At the hour when the light comes grey through the door I stood up. My knees had gone stiff and my hands were numb from the star-iron and my eyes were full of sand, and I took the cords down from the peg, and I threaded them.

I want to be exact about the threading. It was not simple. The holes were small and the cords were stiff and my hands, my uncle’s hands, were shaking already, before I had put anything on, before anything had happened, and I told myself it was the cold and the sleeplessness and I did not believe it. I threaded the first cord through the two holes at the left temple and knotted it. I threaded the second through the right. I threaded the third through the crown, up between the two cockatoo crests, behind the praying insect, and I knotted it, and I stood in my hut with a red wooden face hanging from my hands by three cords, and the two moons looked up at me, and behind them nothing moved, and I said:

Uncle.

Nothing. The spirals had taken his voice. I had known that since my thumb was on his brow.

I said: I don’t know what this does.

Nothing.

I said, and I am recording this because it is the last thing I said as a man who did not know: If it’s the grey. If it’s the grey in there. I’ll take it off. I’ll take it off and I’ll bury you in cedar with the light coming through and I’ll never touch it again. I swear it on the flour.

And the moons looked up at me, pale, round, asleep, and I understood that he could not answer, and that the not-answering was itself an answer, and that I was going to have to find out.

I lifted the mask and set it against my face.

The wood was cold. That is the first thing. Rosewood holds the night, and the hollow he had scooped out behind the brow was the shape of a face, my face, he had scooped it with my hands, and it fitted the way a well-worn haft fits the palm, the brow-ridge settling over my brow, the cheeks over my cheeks with the spirals turned inward against the skin, and I felt the forty-two of them like a pressure, like the pressure of a hand laid flat, each one at a depth, and the chin. He had cut the chin to an edge. I had done that. I had not known why. It came down under my own jaw like a blade and rested there against my throat, cold, and I felt the pulse in my neck go against it.

I could not see. Not yet. The moons were in front of my eyes and they were pale and round and shut, like eyelids, and I stood in the dark inside the mask with the smell of rosewood and cinnabar and boar-grease filling my nose, and I reached up behind my head with my shaking hands and I found the cords, and I drew them tight, and I tied them.

Left temple. Right temple. Crown.

And the shaking stopped.

I want that understood before the rest. For the space of one breath, one, with the last knot tied, the shaking that had been in my hands for a day and a night, for eleven years, for forty, if I am honest, if I count the small tremor that was always there under the steadiness that let me open Karrash’s eyes, stopped. My hands were still. Perfectly still. Still the way a pool is still. I stood in the dark inside the mask and I held them up before me, though I could not see them, and I felt them not shaking, and I thought: oh. Oh, that is what it is to have his hands and not to be afraid of them.

Then the moons opened.

I will try. I have tried before and failed and I try again, for this is the hinge of the hinge, and if I do not get it down no one will.

The moons did not move. They were oyster shell, sap-set, they could not move. But the light behind them, which had been pale and round and shut, went wide. It went wide the way an eye goes wide. And the light that came through them into the dark where I was standing was not moonlight anymore, it was fire, warm red fire, the color of the inside of the log on the bank, the color of the flour heap at the bottom where it has lain the longest, the color of a thing alive, and it came through both moons at once and it filled the mask and it filled me, I felt it go in through my own two eyes and down the back of my throat and into my chest and it was warm, warm, warm, and my hands began to shake.

Not the old shaking. That was gone. This was new. This was the shaking of a bird in a snare, of a thing that has been held and is being let go, and I could not stop it and I did not want to, because I understood, standing there in the red, that it was not my hands shaking.

It was his. He was in the hollow a finger’s width from my skin with his hands of nothing laid over mine and he was shaking with joy.

And then I could see.

Now. Now the river.

I went out. I do not remember deciding to. The door was open on the grey and I went through it with my uncle’s hands shaking in front of me and the red fire coming through the moons and I went down the bank to the water’s edge and I looked at the riverbed, which I have looked at ten thousand mornings, and I had never seen it before.

Let me be exact. Let me be as exact as I have ever been about a grain or an edge, because this is the only time it will matter.

There is a bend below the hut where the current slows and the river drops what it has been carrying, and the bed there is logs. Snags. Deadfall. Whole trunks come down from the mountain in the floods and lodged in the mud, and branches, and root-masses, black with weed, half-buried, the kind of thing a man walks past every day of his life and does not see because they are not anything, they are only logs. There are perhaps forty of them along that bend. I have never counted. I counted that morning.

Every one of them had someone in it.

I do not mean the way I had always meant it, the way I had said it on the flour heap, a prisoner in a cell, a face pressed against the bars. I mean I could see them. Through the bark. Through the weed. Through the water. The red fire came through the moons and it went out from me across the riverbed and where it touched a log the log went clear, not clear like glass, clear like a thing lit from inside, the grain showing gold, the knots showing dark, the fault lines showing white as bone, and inside the gold, along the grain, lying the way Karrash had lain with the head toward the root, there was a shape, and the shape was struggling.

A man in the first one. A big man, broad, with his arms crossed over his chest, and I could see the bark over him like a hide over a drum and I could see him pushing against it from the inside, the way my uncle had pushed, the grain bulging with him. A hawk in the second, wings half-open, caught mid-stroke in a length of black oak, straining. A lizard, long, coiling, its jaw open, in a snag of willow. A woman with her hair loose. A child. Two men wrestling. And in the great root-mass at the far end of the bend, where the current had piled it against a house-rock, a thing with horns, a devil, a horned devil crouched in the tangle of roots with its arms braced and its shoulders heaving, pushing, and I could see the whole mass of roots straining outward around it like a fist that cannot quite close.

They were crying out.

Not with sound. With the fire. Every one of them, every shape in every log along the bend, was turned toward me, I could see the faces turning, the hawk’s head, the devil’s, and the red fire that came through the moons went out to them and came back and the coming back was the crying, it was a pressure on the inside of the mask, on the forty-two spirals against my cheeks, a pressure that said: you can see us. You can see us. Cut. Cut. Cut.

And I understood what I was.

I had thought, on the flour heap, that I was the one man in the valley who could hear. I had thought, in the mud, that I was the ear the dead had finally reached. I had been wrong both times, and the wrongness was of the same kind, the kind that comes from a man thinking he is the important thing in a story that is about the wood.

I was not the ear. I was the door.

My uncle had spent seventy summers in the grey learning what the dead needed and four rainy seasons in the sap learning what wood could do and three days and nights pushing a face into the grain from the inside, and he had not done it so that Ashnak could hear better. He had done it so that there would be, in the world, one place where the two sides met. One face with the living on the outside and the dead on the inside and a lattice between them with the moon behind it, and when that face looked at a log, both sides looked, and both sides saw, and the thing in the log knew that it was seen, and cried out.

I was standing on the bank with the water round my ankles. I do not remember going in. My hands were shaking in front of me and the red was pouring off me, I could see it on the water, I could see it on the mud, a warm light like the light off a forge, and there was a sound in my ears that was not the river. A thrumming. Deep. Rhythmic. Like an adze biting into green wood, over and over, a heartbeat made of cutting, and under it the dry rustle of shavings falling, and I understood that this was what my uncle heard, this was the sound of the inside of the mask, and I was hearing it because there was no inside and outside anymore.

I put my hand on the nearest log. The big man with his arms crossed. And I felt him. Not through the bark. Through my palm, into the wood, the way one feels a heart through a chest. He was warm. He had been in there since before the flood, since before the counting of the clan, and he was warm, and he was waiting, and he had been waiting so long that the waiting had become the whole of him, and when my hand touched the bark he stopped pushing. He stopped. And he waited, exactly the way my uncle had waited over the split log in the no-light, with a patience that seventy summers teaches, and I felt my uncle’s hands shaking on top of my hands on top of the bark, and I felt, in the hollow behind the brow, in the place where the spirals wound in to their center, something that was not a word and did not need to be.

Not this one. Not yet. There is a trunk. In the courtyard. Sixteen boys are breaking bronze on it.

I do not know how I knew that. I have never been in the chieftain’s courtyard since the fire. But I knew it the way I knew the depth of a cut. There was a great ironwood in the fat man’s courtyard and sixteen apprentices were beating it with axes and weeping, and inside it, lying along the grain, was a chief, the first one, the grandfather of grandfathers, with pierced ears and bone teeth and a war club in his fingers, and he was not pushing, he had never pushed, ironwood does not let you push, he was only lying there in the dark with his eyes open and had been lying there for a thousand years, and he was the one.

I took my hand off the big man. I said, to him, or to the mask, or to the river: soon.

And I went up the bank.

I want to set down what I looked like, because I could not see it and the boy could, later, and told it, and I want the record to hold both. From the inside I was a man walking up a muddy bank with his hands shaking, with a sound in his ears like an adze, seeing the world lit from within, seeing the grain in the door-post of his own hut go gold as he passed it and the face in the door-post turn to watch him go. From the outside, I am told, I was a red wooden face with two cockatoos on it walking up out of the river with fire coming out of its eyes in two long rays like the light off the star-iron’s edge, and the mud steaming where the rays touched it, and every log on the bend behind me creaking, all forty at once, the way wood creaks before it splits.

I did not go back for the star-iron. I had it. I could feel it on the bench in the hut behind me, cold, singing so high I felt it in the bones of my face, and I understood that I did not need to carry it. It was not for cutting. It had never been for cutting. It was for finding, and I had found, and what I needed now was any blade at all, any scrap of soft iron, because the cutting was not going to be done by the blade.

I walked up the hill toward the fat man’s courtyard with my mother’s cords tight against the back of my skull and my uncle’s hands shaking in front of me and forty prisoners crying out behind me and the first chief waiting in the ironwood ahead, and I did not feel my knees, and I did not feel the cold, and I did not feel, for the first time in forty years, the small tremor under the steadiness.

I felt only the door, open, and the red pouring through.

Transfigured. That is the word they use for it in the marsh villages when a frog-priest goes into his trance. I had always thought it a foolish word. It is not. It is only a word for a man who has stopped being the important thing in his own story and has found, to his astonishment, that there is a great deal more room in the story without him.

I did not speak a greeting when I came into the courtyard. Ashnak does not. But I will tell you, since no one else can, that inside the mask, in the red, in the thrumming, with the ironwood trunk rising before me lit gold to its heart and the first chief lying along its grain with his eyes open and turning, slowly, toward the door that had finally come, my uncle spoke.

Not sticks and wind. The spirals had taken that. He spoke the way the log had spoken on the bank when the adze went in, the way the smell had spoken, warm, from the inside, in the place under words.

He said: there you are.

And I picked up the first blade I saw, a soft-iron scraping knife that some boy had dropped in the dirt, and I struck.

 

Segment 11: Sixteen Broken Blades

Well now, here is a thing that I have noticed about chieftains, and I have noticed it since, in other valleys, so I reckon it’s general: when a chieftain has done a thing he oughtn’t to have done, he don’t undo it. He does a bigger thing on top of it, so as the first thing gets buried. It’s like when you’ve broke a bowl and you sweep the pieces under the mat and then you set a chair on the mat so nobody lifts it.

The chief had burned three posts. Everybody knowed it. Everybody had stood in that courtyard and smelled rosewood and hide going into the beans, and everybody had gone home and looked at their own melons and felt worse than they had before, which I would not have thought possible. And there was three holes in the ground before the feasting hall with nothing in them, and every time the chief come out his door he had to walk past them, and I reckon they looked at him.

So about eight days after, he sent word round to every carver in the valley. Every one. Dunnak got it, and the east bank got it, and the north end got it. He wanted a post. One post. The biggest post ever stood in the valley, to go in the middle hole before the feasting hall, and it was to be the first chief, the grandfather of grandfathers, the one from before the counting, and it was to be cut from ironwood.

Ironwood.

Now I have got to explain about ironwood for anybody who ain’t tried it, and I hope you never have to, and I will tell you the main thing about it, which is that it don’t. Whatever you want it to do, it don’t. You want to cut it, it don’t cut. You want to split it, it don’t split. You want to burn it, it sits in the fire and thinks about it for a week and then goes out. It grows up on the dry ridge above the north end and it grows slow and it grows twisted and the grain of it is like a rope that somebody tied in knots and then let a dog chew on, and the only thing anybody in the valley had ever made out of it in the whole history of the clan was war clubs, which you don’t carve, you just find a piece that’s the right shape and hit people with it.

And the chief wanted a face in it. With pierced ears. And bone teeth. And fingers round a war club.

Dunnak read the word from the chief and he set it down and he looked at me and he said, “Well, Pili, you have been asking me a year why our faces look like melons. Here is your chance to find out what happens when a man asks for something better.” And he sent me.

There was sixteen of us. Every carver had sent his apprentice, and you will notice that not one carver come himself, which tells you what the carvers thought of it. Sixteen boys from thirteen shops, and I was the youngest but one, and the one younger than me was Dabb from the east bank who was about ten and mostly cried. And Tobbo was there, useless Tobbo from the gorge, with the lump on his head gone down to a bruise, and Marrun, and we sort of nodded at each other, the gorge boys, like soldiers who had been in the same fight, and the others didn’t know what that was about and we didn’t tell them.

The trunk was already in the courtyard. The chief’s guard had gone up the ridge and cut it, which took them four days and which I understand they don’t like to talk about, and dragged it down with oxen, and it lay across the courtyard stones in the morning sun like a thing that had been dropped there by a giant who had got tired of carrying it. It was as big around as I was tall. It was twisted. It was grey-black and the bark was like the skin on an old man’s feet and it had a smell, a sort of hot, dry, angry smell, like a stone that has been in the sun too long.

And the chief come out on his step with his arm all wrapped up and looked at us and said, “Sixteen boys. Sixteen days. I want a face.” And went back in.

Sixteen days.

Well now, we was young, and young people believe that a thing can be done because somebody said so. We picked up our axes. Bronze, all of them, good bronze, every carver had sent his best, and we spread out along the trunk, eight to a side, and Marrun, who was the oldest, said, “All together now, on three,” and counted, and sixteen boys swung sixteen axes into that ironwood at the same time with a shout like it was a war.

And sixteen axes bounced.

I mean bounced. Like they’d hit a rock. There was a sound like somebody dropping a whole pile of pots, and every one of them axes come back at the boy that swung it, and the shout turned into a different kind of noise, and Dabb sat down and cried, which he would have anyhow.

That was the first swing.

I’ll tell you how my thumb went, because it is how I got my name and I might as well own it.

It was about the fortieth swing. We had figured out by then that you don’t swing all together, on account of the bouncing gets everybody at once and it’s like being in a room full of people throwing things. So we took turns. And I had noticed that if you hit the trunk where the grain twisted, the axe bounced worse, and if you hit it where the grain ran straight, for about the width of a hand, it bounced less, and I had found me a straight place, and I was hitting it, and I was making a mark. A mark! About the depth of a fingernail. And I got excited. And I swung harder. And the axe went into the mark and stopped, dead, the way a thing stops when it has hit the end of the world, and the handle jumped in my hands, and my left hand was down low on the haft, and my thumb was where the haft met the head, and the head went one way and the haft went the other for about a quarter inch, which is all it takes.

It split the nail right down the middle. Clean. Like the axe had done it on purpose.

I looked at it. It didn’t hurt yet. It was just white and then it was red and then it was both, and I said, “Well now,” and Tobbo looked over and said, “Pili, your thumb’s in two pieces,” and I said, “I see that,” and then it started to hurt, and I’ll spare you.

They called me Split-Thumb after that. Everybody. I had been Pili-from-Dunnak’s for fourteen years and I was Split-Thumb in about the time it takes to bleed on a stone, and I have found that a name you get from a thing you done wrong sticks harder than one you get from a thing you done right. The nail grew back in two pieces and it is still in two pieces and when I tell this story I hold it up, and people look at it the way you’d look at a map of a place where a battle was.

That was the first day. We didn’t make a face. We made about eleven marks the depth of a fingernail and broke four axes.

I mean broke. Bronze axes. The heads come off, or the edges rolled over like a lip, or in one case, and I seen this, Marrun’s axe went into a twisted place and the whole blade cracked across like ice and half of it went spinning across the courtyard and stuck in the door of the feasting hall, and the chief come out and looked at it and looked at us and went back in without saying nothing, and I reckon that was the loudest thing anybody said all day.

The second day was worse on account of we knowed what we was in for.

I want you to picture it. Sixteen boys, well, fifteen and Dabb, in a courtyard, with a log the size of a boat that don’t do anything, and the whole valley coming up the hill to watch. Because they did. The market-women come first, of course, they come to everything, and they stood by the gate and told each other what we was doing wrong. Then the old men. Then everybody. By the middle of the second morning there was more folks in that courtyard than come to the burning, and they was all watching us hit a log, and every time an axe bounced they sort of sighed, all together, like the wind going through reeds.

And Merrek was there. Old Merrek from the ferry, that said dead dogs. He stood at the front with his arms folded and every time one of us swung he’d say, “That ain’t it,” and every time an axe bounced he’d say, “Told you.” And about the hundredth time Tobbo turned round with his axe in his hands and I thought he was going to do a murder, and I don’t know that I’d have stopped him.

The trunk didn’t care. That was the thing about it. I have hated things in my life, I have hated Dunnak’s beans and I have hated the mountain clans and I have hated a girl once for about a week, but I have never hated anything the way I hated that log by the end of the second day, and the reason was that it didn’t hate me back. It just lay there. Grey-black and twisted and hot and dry, with eleven marks on it the depth of a fingernail, and it was going to lie there, and it had been lying up on the ridge for a thousand years and it was in no hurry, and we could hit it till we was old men and it would lie there under our old bones and still be a log.

It was like a fat man in a doorway. That’s what I said to Tobbo. A fat man in a doorway that you can’t get past and you can’t get round and you can’t push, and he ain’t angry at you, he just ain’t going anywhere, and the more you push the more he sort of settles.

Tobbo laughed so hard he had to sit down. Then he cried. Then he laughed again. That was about how the second day went for all of us.

The third morning we had nine axes left out of sixteen and about half of them was the wrong shape.

And the older boys was weeping. I don’t mean crying like Dabb. I mean the big ones, Marrun and Tobbo and the tall one from the north end whose name I never got, standing there with their axes hanging and their faces wet and not making any sound about it. Because they had figured out, I reckon, what I was only starting to figure out, which was that this weren’t a job. It was a punishment. The chief had burned three faces because they weren’t the faces he wanted and now he was going to have every apprentice in the valley break their masters’ axes on a log that couldn’t be cut, in front of everybody, so as the valley would see that nobody could do it. So as it would look like the fault was in the wood and not in the burning.

And we was the ones getting broke.

I stood there on the third morning with my thumb wrapped in a rag that had gone brown and stiff and my arms feeling like they’d been pulled out and put back wrong and my axe, Dunnak’s second-best axe, with a rolled edge like a smile, and I looked at the log, and I looked at the crowd, and I looked at Merrek with his arms folded, and I looked at Marrun weeping without any sound, and I looked at the three holes in the ground before the feasting hall, one of them waiting for this, and I want to tell you I have never been so sure of anything in my life as I was sure right then that we was going to stand in that courtyard for sixteen days and hit that log and at the end of it there would be a log with some marks on it and sixteen boys with no axes and a chief who could say he had tried.

I about laughed. I did laugh, some. It come out sounding like Tobbo.

And I swung. On account of what else was there. I found my straight place, the one that had took my thumb, and I set my feet, and I lifted Dunnak’s second-best axe with its smile, and I brought it down with everything I had left, which weren’t much, and it hit the mark I’d made two days before and it went in, oh, about the depth of another fingernail, and it stopped, and the handle jumped, and I held on this time, and I said, “Well now,” to the log, real quiet, like it was a person, “well now, you win,” and I let the axe hang.

And that’s when the courtyard went quiet.

Not the crowd-sigh quiet. A different one. The kind that starts at the back and comes forward, the way it does when the guard comes through, except the guard weren’t coming. I felt it get to me before I saw what it was. The hair went up on my arms. Merrek had stopped saying that ain’t it. Marrun had stopped weeping and was looking past me at the gate.

I turned round.

And I’ll tell that next. I’ll tell it careful, on account of I have been called a liar over it more than over anything else, and I don’t care anymore. But I’ll say this much now, so it’s on the record before the rest:

I was standing about six feet from the gate. I had my back to it. And I did not hear him come in.

And there was a smell.

Warm. Sweet. Like the inside of a flower but bigger.

I knowed that smell. I had breathed it on a riverbank in the mud with my hands like meat, and I had gone home grinning. And I turned round with my split thumb throbbing and Dunnak’s ruined axe hanging in my other hand and I thought, real clear, before I saw anything, well now, Pili, that old man is crazier than a bag of frogs, and here he comes.

 

Segment 12: The Red Demon Enters the Courtyard

This chair will now set down the morning of the third day of the ironwood, and this chair will begin, as a proper chronicle should, with the omens, for the elders of the valley have since assembled a great many of them, and it is the duty of an account to record what is claimed as well as what is known, and to mark carefully which is which.

It is said by Merrek of the ferry that at the hour when Helios rose there was a crested cockatoo circling the feasting hall. Merrek says it circled seven times against the sun and then flew west, toward the river, and that it made no sound. This chair notes that cockatoos do not live in the valley, that they live on the far side of the mountain where the clans are, that no one else saw it, and that Merrek has lost three sons to the river and sees a great many things at dawn. This chair also notes that Merrek does not usually lie, only improves.

It is said by the healer Oshun that when she went out to gather mangrove sap for this chair’s arm she found a praying insect, the old woman of the reeds, sitting on the lintel of the feasting hall door with its forelegs folded, and that it turned its head to watch her pass, as they do, and that when she came back an hour later it was still there and had not moved. This chair can neither confirm nor deny this. Insects sit on lintels. This chair’s mother used to say that a mantis on the door meant a visitor who would not knock.

It is said by the guard-captain that the shadow of VaporSphere, which crosses the valley each month in the week the market-women call Dimming, came early that morning by the space of a full hour, and that the light went strange and yellow over the courtyard while the boys were swinging their axes, and that the oxen in the lower pens would not eat. This chair was inside and did not see the light. This chair does not know whether the shadow can come early. The plains scribes, who count such things, say that it cannot, and that the guard-captain was looking at a cloud.

It is said by this chair’s own sister, who had not spoken to this chair in eight days and spoke of nothing else afterward, that the bean-pot at the courtyard’s edge, the same pot, the one that had taken the three posts, boiled over that morning without anyone having built up the fire, and that the beans ran down the side of the pot and into the coals and the smell that came up was not beans. She would not say what it was. This chair has decided not to press her.

And it is said, by a great many people who were in the courtyard and by a greater many who claim to have been, that the whole valley heard the logs in the riverbed creak at the same moment, all of them, like a fleet of boats straining at their moorings in a wind, and that the sound came up the hill and went through the courtyard from the gate to the feasting hall door and out the other side, and that a moment after it passed the courtyard went silent.

That last, this chair will vouch for.

Not the creaking. This chair did not hear the creaking. This chair was in the hall with the ferry-master going over the toll-count, with the arm aching under its dressing in the way it had learned to ache, and the sound of the boys’ axes coming in through the door, the bounce and the clatter and the swearing, which had been going on for two days and a half and which this chair had come to hear the way one hears the river, which is to say not at all.

And then this chair heard it. Because it stopped.

Not the way a noise stops when the noise-maker tires. This chair knows that stopping. The boys had been stopping that way every hour for two days, one at a time, dropping their axes and sitting on the stones with their heads down until Marrun from the north end got them up again. This was different. This was every axe in the courtyard stopping in the same breath, and every voice, and every foot, and the crowd at the gate, who had been sighing for two days like wind in reeds, and Merrek, who had not been silent since the burning. It was the silence that comes when a thing enters a room and every creature in the room has turned to look at it and forgotten, for the moment, that it has a throat.

This chair has felt that silence once before. It was the day this chair’s mother died, and this chair walked into the hall, and everyone in it had already heard.

This chair set down the toll-count and went to the door.

Now this chair must describe what was in the courtyard, and this chair will describe it exactly as it was seen from the step of the feasting hall, at the distance of perhaps thirty paces, in the yellow light that the guard-captain says was the shadow of VaporSphere and the scribes say was a cloud, and this chair will not embroider, for the thing needs no embroidery and would not hold it.

The trunk lay where it had lain, across the courtyard stones. Sixteen boys stood along it, or fourteen stood and two sat, with their axes, what was left of their axes, hanging from their hands, and every one of them was turned toward the gate. The crowd at the gate had drawn back. This chair marked that. They had not fled. They had drawn back the way water draws back from a stone dropped in it, in a ring, leaving a clear space, and in the clear space, six paces inside the gate, a figure stood.

It was a man’s height. It was a man’s shape, lean, in a leather apron scarred with a thousand chisel slips and a sash across the shoulder with the handles of small gouges standing out of it, and this chair knew the apron and knew the sash and knew the hands, the hands hanging at the sides with the fingers half-curled, and would have known the man by the hands alone, and did not need to, because above the hands, where the face should have been, there was the face.

Red. This chair had thought, for eight days, about the red of the rosewood in the fire. This was that red without the fire. Deep, dark, wet-looking, the color of the heart of the log on the bank that the boys had described and this chair had not seen. It was wide, wider than the man’s own face could have been beneath it, with a brow that stood out like the ridge of a hill, and on the crown of it, rising, two birds. Cockatoos. The crested kind, with the high horned comb, the kind this chair wears in his headdress in feathers and had never in his life seen carved, and they were carved so that their beaks turned inward toward a small thing between them that this chair could not make out at thirty paces and did not, then, wish to.

The cheeks were spirals. Red and white and black, wound in tight, dozens of them, and this chair found that his eyes would not stay on them, they slid off the way a foot slides off wet stone, and this chair let them slide, and looked instead at the eyes.

The eyes were a net. A lattice. Cut so fine that at thirty paces they looked like the mesh of a fishing-net stretched over two holes. And behind the net, where the man’s own eyes must have been, there was light.

This chair will try to be exact about the light, because it is the part that the market-women have most improved in the telling and this chair would like one account to stand that has not been improved.

It was red. Warm red, the red of a forge seen from across a river at night, and it came through the lattice of both eyes in two rays, not beams, rays, the way light comes through a crack in a shutter, long and straight and full of dust, and where the rays fell on the courtyard stones the stones steamed. Faintly. A breath of vapor going up from the wet stone where the light touched it, and moving as the head moved, so that as the face turned, slowly, from the boys to the trunk to the feasting hall door, two lines of faint steam went across the courtyard ahead of it.

And the hands were shaking.

This chair sets that down separately because it was the thing that made this chair afraid. Not the red. Not the birds. Not the rays. The hands. This chair had watched those hands for forty years, from a distance, disliking them, and they had never shaken, they had been the stillest hands in the valley, everyone said so, it was the whole of the man’s fame. And now they hung at his sides and they shook, both of them, fast and fine, the way a bird’s wings shake when it is held in a fist, and this chair understood, standing on the step with the toll-count forgotten and the arm aching, that whatever had come through the gate, it was not only Ashnak Redflour, and it was not entirely in his control.

He did not speak a greeting.

This chair records that as the elders record it, as a fact of some weight. The custom of the valley is that a man entering the chieftain’s courtyard speaks the greeting, the old one, may the river keep your door, and the chieftain answers, and only then does the business begin. Ashnak had never been good at it. He had mumbled it, in the years when he came at all, with his eyes on the stones. But he had spoken it.

He did not speak it now. He stood in the clear space inside the gate with the rays going out across the stones and the hands shaking and he turned his red face, slowly, and he looked at this chair.

This chair will not pretend to know what was behind the lattice. This chair has been asked many times since and has given many answers and none of them was the true one, because the true one is that this chair does not know what looked at him through the oyster-moons that morning, only that it looked, and that it was not angry, and that the not-angry was worse than anger would have been. Anger this chair could have met. This chair has a war club and bone in his teeth and a valley behind him. But the thing behind the lattice looked at the seat of the valley the way a man looks at a log, patiently, to see what is in it, and this chair felt himself looked into, felt the burned arm and the three empty holes and the sixteen days and the ironwood punishment that this chair had told himself was a commission, all of it, looked at and known and set aside as a thing of no particular importance, and this chair, who had not knelt to anything in his life, felt his knees consider it.

They did not. Not then. That comes later. But they considered it.

Then the face turned away from this chair and looked at the trunk.

And the trunk, the ironwood, the fat man in the doorway that sixteen boys had broken thirteen axes on, creaked.

This chair heard that. This chair will vouch for that as this chair vouches for the silence. The great grey-black twisted trunk that had lain across the courtyard for two days and a half without so much as settling gave a long groan from somewhere deep inside itself, the sound a beam makes in a roof in a high wind, and the boys along it stepped back, all of them at once, the way the crowd had stepped back from the gate, and Merrek at the front of the crowd made a small sound and put his hand over his mouth, and this chair thought, very clearly, in the voice this chair uses for toll-counts and troop-numbers: it heard him.

The wood heard him.

The rays went out across the trunk. This chair watched them travel down the length of it, from the root-end to the crown, the two lines of faint steam going along the grey bark, and where they passed the bark did not change, this chair wants that clear, it did not glow or split or do anything that the market-women say it did. It only creaked. Again. Softer. The way a man sighs when someone he has been waiting for a long time finally comes into the room.

And Ashnak walked forward.

He walked the way a man walks who is not looking at the ground, which is to say he walked into the boys, and the boys parted, and one of them, the youngest but one, Dunnak’s boy from the west bank with the rag on his thumb, stumbled back and dropped his axe, and it lay on the stones, and Ashnak did not look at it. He walked to the trunk. He put out his shaking hand and laid it flat on the bark, on the place where the boys had made their eleven marks the depth of a fingernail, and the shaking stopped.

This chair saw that. Thirty paces. The hand went flat on the ironwood and it went still, still as a hand on a table, and the other hand, the one still hanging at his side, went still too, and the rays from the lattice-eyes dropped to the bark under the palm and stayed there, two points of red on grey, and the courtyard held its breath, all of it, the boys and the crowd and this chair on the step and the healer in the door behind this chair and the sister somewhere in the hall who says she heard the bean-pot boil over at exactly that moment and this chair has decided to believe her.

He stood like that for the time it takes to say the old greeting three times over. Still. Listening. This chair has since learned that word for what he does and uses it, though at the time this chair had no word and only watched.

Then he took his hand off the trunk and looked down at the stones by his feet, and there among the broken axe-heads and the rolled-edge blades and the bronze splinters was a scraping knife. Soft iron. A cheap thing, a finishing tool, the kind the plains scribes trade by the dozen for a jar of oil. Some boy had dropped it two days before and no one had bothered to pick it up because what use was a scraping knife against ironwood.

He bent and picked it up.

And this chair, who had a war club and bone in his teeth and a valley behind him and an arm that would never stop aching, stood on the step of his own feasting hall and felt the thing that this account exists to record, which is not fear, though it was near fear, and not awe, though awe was coming. It was the feeling a man has on the bank of the gorge, looking down into the dark, hearing the water, knowing that something is about to come up out of it and not knowing what.

The whole valley leaned forward.

This chair leaned with it.

And Ashnak Redflour, who had not spoken a greeting, raised the soft-iron scraping knife over the ironwood in his still right hand, and the rays from the lattice went white at the edges, and the trunk groaned a third time, louder, and this chair had time to think, by the grandfather of the clan and by the river’s mouth, I burned his mother, and then the knife came down.

 

Segment 13: Warm Fat and Soft Mud

I have told this part more times than I have told any other thing in my life, and I have never once got it right, and I have decided that the reason is that there ain’t a right way to tell a thing that your eyes refuse. Your eyes see it and your mouth tries to say it and somewhere in between there is a place where the two of them meet and shake their heads at each other. So I’m going to tell it the way it come at me, in pieces, and if the pieces don’t add up that’s on account of they didn’t add up then neither.

The first piece is the sound.

I have hit ironwood. I have hit it about two hundred times over two days and a half and I know the sound it makes, and the sound it makes is a ring. High and hard and short, like a bell somebody has dropped, and the ring goes up your arms and into your teeth and it means no. It means: not today, not with that, not you. I had that ring in my bones. I could have hummed it. Every boy in that courtyard could have.

So when Old Flour brought that soft-iron scraping knife down on the trunk, I was braced for the ring the way you brace for a slap you can see coming.

There weren’t one.

I don’t mean it was quiet. I mean there weren’t one. The blade went down and it touched the bark and it went in and there was no sound at all for about the time it takes to blink, and then there was a sound, but it weren’t a ring, it was a sort of low chime, like when you run a wet finger round the rim of a good bowl, except deeper, except it come from inside the wood, and under it there was another sound that I knowed, that every boy in that courtyard knowed, which was the sound of a blade peeling wood. Shhhhk. Long. Smooth. The sound Dunnak’s good gouge made going through lowland pine on a good day.

Going through ironwood.

I said out loud, “That ain’t right.” I know I did because Tobbo told me after. I didn’t hear myself.

The second piece is the blade.

It was a scraping knife. I want that plain because people have tried to make it a magic knife or a star-knife or the chief’s grandfather’s knife, and it weren’t any of them. It was a plains-scribe scraper, soft iron, with a handle wrapped in cord that was coming loose, and I know that because it was mine. Dunnak’s, I mean. He’d sent it in my kit and I’d dropped it the first day when my thumb went and never picked it up because what would I pick it up for. You could bend that blade with your hands. I had. And Old Flour picked it up off the stones like it was the only thing there and he set it to the bark of that trunk on the straight place, my straight place, the one that had took my thumb, and he pushed.

He didn’t chop. That’s another thing folks get wrong. There was no swing. He set the edge to the wood and he leaned on it the way you lean on a knife going into cheese, and it went in.

Into ironwood. To the hilt. The whole blade, the whole soft-iron, bendable, cord-wrapped, plains-scribe blade, went into the trunk that had broke thirteen bronze axes, up to his fist, and he stood there with his fist against the bark and the two red rays coming out of his eyes onto the back of his own hand, and then he drew it along.

The third piece is the ribbon.

Well now. I have thought about this one the most and I have got the least to show for it.

When you cut wood right, a good clean cut with a sharp tool along the grain, the wood comes off in a curl. A shaving. Everybody knows that. It curls up off the blade like a ringlet of hair and it falls, and it’s the prettiest thing in carving and it’s the thing that tells you the cut is good. And ironwood don’t curl. Ironwood don’t do anything. It splinters, if you’re lucky, in little grey chips like flint, and mostly it just sits there with a dent in it.

The ironwood curled.

A ribbon come up off that scraping knife as it went along the trunk, and the ribbon was red. Deep red on the inside, where the heart was, and yellow on the outside where the sapwood was, red and yellow together like a strip of sunset, and it curled up off the blade slow, so slow, like it had all the time in the world, and it went over and down and fell off the trunk onto the courtyard stones, and it kept coming. He drew the blade the length of my forearm and the ribbon come off the whole length of it in one piece, one long red and yellow curl the length of my forearm, and it lay on the stones and it was steaming. Faint. The way your breath does on a cold morning.

And I want to say what it looked like, coming off, and the best I have ever got is this: it looked like water going down a smooth rock. Not fast. Not falling. The way water goes over a rock in the shallows where the current is slow, where it just sort of pours, thick and easy and without any effort at all, and you could watch it for an hour. That’s what the wood did. It poured off the blade.

Ironwood.

I had my split thumb in a rag and Dunnak’s second-best axe lying on the stones where I’d dropped it with its edge rolled up like a smile and I stood there six feet from that trunk and I watched ironwood pour off a scraping knife like warm fat off a spoon, and I did not believe it. I want to be clear. I did not think, well now, that’s a wonder. I thought: no. My eyes said yes and my whole self said no and I stood there with the two of them fighting it out and I couldn’t have moved if the trunk had caught fire.

The fourth piece is him.

He didn’t stop. That first ribbon come off and hit the stones and before it had finished steaming he’d set the blade again, a hand’s width over, and drawn it, and another ribbon come off, red and yellow, and another, and he was moving. Old Flour don’t move fast. I have watched him for four mornings from the reeds and I’d have said he moved like a man walking through deep water, every step considered. Now he moved like a man who has just remembered where he left something. The knife went in and along and out, in and along and out, and every stroke a ribbon, and his hands weren’t shaking anymore, they was steadier than I have ever seen hands, they was steadier than the trunk, and the red light come out of the mask’s eyes and went ahead of the blade along the bark like a dog going ahead of a hunter, and wherever the light went the knife went after it, and wherever the knife went the wood poured.

And there was a smell.

I said that already, about when he come in. But it got stronger. Every ribbon that hit the stones let more of it loose, and it was the smell from the bank, the inside-of-a-flower smell, warm, but there was something in it now that hadn’t been on the bank, something sharp and sweet on top, like the mountain flowers that the girls bring down in the spring and sell by the bunch, and it filled up the whole courtyard, and I seen the market-women at the gate close their eyes and breathe it, all of them, the way we had on the bank, and not one of them had a word to say, and I have never before or since seen a market-woman with no word to say.

He went round the trunk.

I ain’t going to pretend I followed every stroke. There was hundreds. But I’ll tell you the shape of it, the way it come at me, in pieces, because that’s the only way I’ve got.

He took the bark off. All of it. He went round the trunk once, twice, with the ribbons pouring off, and the grey-black hide of that ironwood come away in curls and lay on the stones in a ring around him ankle-deep and steaming, and under it the trunk was yellow. Pale yellow sapwood, smooth as a peeled root, and the whole crowd made a noise when they seen it because nobody in that courtyard had ever seen the inside of an ironwood and it was pretty. That’s the first time I thought that word. Pretty. About ironwood.

Then he went into the yellow. The knife went deeper and the ribbons come off red now, all red, dark heart-red, and they was thicker, and they poured slower, and the shape started coming.

Well now.

I have seen Dunnak make a face. I have seen him make a hundred. He roughs it with an axe, then a big gouge, then a smaller one, and it takes him a week and a half from log to melon and at every step of that week and a half you can see what he’s doing. Here’s the brow. Here’s the nose coming. Here’s where the eyes’ll go. You can follow it.

I couldn’t follow this.

The knife went in and a ribbon come off and where the ribbon had been there was a shoulder. Not the start of a shoulder. A shoulder, round and muscled, with the line where the arm joined it and the hollow under the collarbone, done. The knife went in on the other side and there was the other shoulder. The knife went along the top and a ribbon come off the length of my arm and where it had been there was a brow, wide, heavy, with the ridge over the eyes cut so deep the eyes was already in shadow before they was cut, and a nose come after it in one stroke, one, a long straight nose with the nostrils flared like the man was breathing hard, and then the knife went down the side of the nose and turned and there was a cheek, and I want to tell you, I want to make you understand this, the cheek had a scar on it. A little curved scar under the eye, the kind you get from a fishhook. And I looked at that scar and I thought, that’s not something you carve. That’s something you find.

He was finding it. That’s the only way I have ever been able to say it. The first chief was in that trunk and had been in it since before the counting of the clan and Old Flour was standing there with my dropped scraping knife taking off the wood that was hiding him, one ribbon at a time, and every ribbon that come off there was more of the man, and none of it was rough, none of it needed going back over, it come out finished, the way a thing comes out of water.

The ears. He cut the ears and they had holes in them. Pierced. Big holes, the kind you put a bone plug through, and nobody in the valley had pierced their ears that way in a hundred years and nobody had told Old Flour to cut them so, and there they was.

The mouth. He drew the knife across and the lips come up out of the red wood pressed together, hard, the mouth of a man who has just been told something he don’t like, and then the knife went between them, the tip of it, and turned, and the lips parted just enough, and inside them was teeth.

Bone teeth. I mean the teeth was carved to look like bone had been set in them, the way the chief’s teeth are, polished and white-looking even in red wood, and the crowd made the noise again, and I seen the chief on his step put his hand up to his own mouth like he was checking his was still there.

The hands. Lord, the hands. He went down the front of the trunk and the red ribbons come off in a pour and where they’d been was two hands, big, square, the knuckles standing up, and they was wrapped round something, and the something was a war club, and the club was part of the trunk, it was the same wood, he’d left it there and cut the fingers round it so that the first chief had never let go of it, not once, not in a thousand years.

And then he stepped back.

I don’t know how long it took. Everybody has a different answer. Marrun says an hour. Merrek says all morning. Tobbo says he wasn’t watching the sun, he was watching the knife. I’ll tell you what I say, and I say it because I had beans on my mind on account of that’s what Dunnak was going to wallop me about when I got home, and I thought, when he stepped back, that it had been about the time it takes a pot of river beans to come to the boil from cold. That’s what I say. About that long.

And in that long, sixteen days of ironwood had turned into a man.

He stood up out of the trunk. Not that he moved. I mean the trunk was still lying across the courtyard, root-end and crown-end still grey and rough where Old Flour hadn’t touched them, but in the middle of it, rising up out of the red heartwood like a man rising up out of a river, was the first chief, from the knees up, with his shoulders back and his brow heavy and his scarred cheek and his pierced ears and his bone teeth showing between his hard lips and his big hands round his club, and he was red, dark heart-red, and he was shining a little with the sap, and he was looking at us.

I mean looking. His eyes was cut. I hadn’t seen when. Two strokes maybe. And they was open, and they was looking out over the courtyard, over the sixteen of us with our broke axes and over the crowd at the gate and over the chief on his step, looking a little above all of us, at something past the feasting hall, at the sky, maybe, or the mountain, the way a man looks who is fixing to say something and wants to make sure everybody’s listening first.

And nobody was breathing.

I’ll tell you what I felt, standing there six feet from that face with my thumb throbbing and my eyes and my self still fighting. I felt two things and they was both wrong.

The first thing was that I wanted to laugh. Not a happy laugh. The laugh you laugh when somebody has told you the sky is green and then you look up and it is. Two days and a half. Thirteen axes. My thumb in two pieces. Marrun weeping. Dabb sat down crying. All of it, all of us, hitting a fat man in a doorway who would not move, and then a crazy old man in a wooden face walks in with my dropped scraper and the fat man just gets up and steps aside, like he’d been waiting to be asked politely.

And the second thing, under the laugh, was worse, and it’s this.

I looked at the first chief’s face, at the scar under the eye and the pierced ears and the hard mouth, at a face nobody alive had ever seen and everybody in that courtyard knowed for certain was right, and I looked at the ribbons on the stones, red and yellow, ankle-deep round Old Flour’s feet, still steaming a little, and I looked at Dunnak’s second-best axe lying there with its edge rolled up like a smile.

And I thought: I ain’t never going to make a melon again.

Not that I’d decided. It weren’t a decision. It was like when you’ve been walking a road all your life and somebody shows you it’s a bridge. You can’t unsee the water under it. I had been a west bank boy apprenticed to a melon-maker for four years and I had asked Dunnak a hundred times why our faces looked like melons and he had told me that’s how faces look, and I had half believed him, and I had gone on grinding shells and sweeping shavings and thinking that one day I’d make a melon too, a good one, and that would be a life.

And it wouldn’t. Not anymore. Not after warm fat and soft mud.

I didn’t know yet what that meant. I didn’t know it meant following him out of the valley or hiding behind woodpiles while the mountain burned or standing in an empty hut with a spade thirty years later. I just knowed that the road had turned into a bridge and I could see the water and I was going to have to go where it went.

Old Flour stood there with the scraper hanging from his hand and the red light gone soft in the mask’s eyes and the ribbons round his feet, and he wasn’t looking at the first chief. He was looking at the stones. The way he does. Like the thing he’d made was no business of his.

And the elders started to come forward.

I’ll leave that to somebody else. I couldn’t have told it anyhow. My eyes had give up on me by then and gone somewhere to sit down, and I was just standing there in the smell of mountain flowers with my split thumb, breathing, trying to remember how you did that on purpose.

 

Segment 14: The First Chief Stands Up

This chair has set down the arrival and the silence and the omens, and now this chair must set down the thing itself, and this chair confesses at the outset that a chronicle is a poor tool for it. A chronicle is made for wars and successions and the causes of quarrels. It is made for things that happened in order. The thing in the courtyard did not happen in order. It happened all at once and took the time a pot of beans takes to boil, and this chair has been trying since to lay it out in a line, and it will not lie in a line, and so this chair will set it down in the pieces that a man remembers and let the reader make the line himself.

The first piece is the ribbons.

This chair has said the trunk did not glow. This chair holds to that. But when the soft-iron knife went in and the wood came off in curls, red and yellow, and lay on the stones and steamed, this chair understood that something had gone wrong with the world in the way that something goes wrong with a river when the flood comes down, not violently at first, only that the water is going the wrong direction and one stands on the bank and cannot make one’s feet believe it. Ironwood does not curl. This chair has held a war club of ironwood since this chair was old enough to lift one and has seen ironwood do one thing, which is nothing, and here it was pouring off a scraping knife like fat off a spoon, and this chair stood on the step and watched the fat man’s own courtyard become a place where the rules did not hold.

The second piece is the face.

This chair will describe it as this chair saw it emerge, because this chair has since stood before it a thousand times and the seeing has worn smooth, and what is wanted here is the first seeing, before it was worn.

It came up out of the red heartwood the way a man comes up out of water, shoulders first, and this chair thought: broad. Broader than Karrash. Broader than this chair. And then the brow, and this chair thought: heavy. A brow like a ledge, a brow a man could have sheltered under in rain. And then the nose, long and straight and flared at the nostrils as if the man were breathing hard, and then the cheek—

This chair must stop at the cheek.

There is a story in the clan, told to children, that the first chief was hooked. That when he was a boy on the river, before the counting, before there was a clan to be chief of, he was pulled from the water by a fisherman who had cast for pike and caught a child, and that the hook went in under the left eye and left a mark like a little curved moon, and that he carried the mark all his life and said it was the river’s signature on him, that the river had signed him the way a scribe signs a jar. It is a children’s story. It is told to make children careful on the bank. This chair had not thought of it in forty years.

The knife went down the side of the nose and turned and the cheek came out of the wood, and under the left eye there was a small curved scar, like a little moon.

This chair made a sound. This chair does not know what sound. The healer, who was behind this chair in the door, says it was a word, and says the word was Grandfather, and this chair has decided not to dispute her.

The ears came, pierced, with holes the size of a bone plug, the old way, the way no one in the valley has pierced ears in a hundred years, the way the first chief’s ears are described in the counting-song that the old men sing at the midwinter feast and that this chair has heard every year of his life without once hearing it. The mouth came, hard, pressed, and then parted, and there were the teeth, bone-white in the red wood, and this chair put a hand to his own mouth, this chair admits it, to feel his own bone plugs still there, because for the space of a breath this chair did not know which of them was the copy.

The hands. The club. This chair will not describe the hands. The boy from the west bank has described them, this chair is told, and described them well, and this chair would only say the same thing worse.

And then the carver stepped back, and the first chief stood in the trunk from the knees up, and looked out over the courtyard at something above all of our heads, and the courtyard was silent in a way that made the first silence, the silence of the gate, seem like the noise of a feast.

The third piece is the walk.

This chair came down off the step.

This chair does not remember deciding to. This chair remembers the step under the foot and then the stones, and the crowd at the gate had come in, the ring had closed, and they parted for this chair the way they had parted for the red face, and this chair walked through them with the arm aching and the headdress of cockatoo feathers on the head, and this chair remembers thinking, absurdly, of the two carved cockatoos on the mask, and thinking: he has the real ones and I have feathers. That was the thought. This chair records it because it was small and true and this chair is done, in this account, with thoughts that are large and false.

The elders were already there. Merrek. Old Uddo from the north end who is blind in one eye. Three others. They had come forward from the front of the crowd when the carver stepped back, the way the tide comes forward, without anyone leading, and they stood in the ring of steaming ribbons around the trunk with their hands at their sides, not touching, looking up at the first chief’s face, and this chair came in among them and stood, and Merrek looked at this chair, and this chair looked at Merrek, and neither of us said dead dogs.

This chair put out a hand.

The fourth piece is the wood.

It was warm.

This chair has tried to make people understand this and has failed and will try once more. Wood is not warm. Wood is the temperature of the air. A war club in the hand takes the heat of the hand and gives it back and that is all. This chair laid a palm flat on the first chief’s shoulder, on the broad red muscled curve of it where the arm joined, and it was warm the way a man’s shoulder is warm when you lay your hand on it. Warm from inside. Warm with something moving under it. This chair held the hand there and felt, or thought he felt, and has since decided that he felt, a slow rise and fall, the slowest, the way a sleeping man’s chest rises, and this chair’s hand rose and fell with it.

And this chair leaned in, without meaning to, the way one leans toward a fire, and breathed.

Mountain flowers. Not the smell of the ribbons on the stones, which was sweet and warm and heavy, the smell of the heart of the rosewood log that the boys had described. This was above that, on top of it, sharp and clean and cold, the smell the girls bring down in spring in bunches from the high meadows on the far side of the ridge where the clans are, where this chair has never been and where the first chief, the counting-song says, was born. It came off the wood. It came out of the parted lips between the bone teeth, faint, on the slow rise and fall, the way breath comes.

The wood was breathing out the smell of the place it was born.

This chair’s knees went.

That is the fifth piece and it is the one this account exists to record, and this chair has thought a great deal about how to set it down and has decided to set it down plainly. This chair has never knelt. Not to the king of the marshes when the peace was made. Not to the gas-giant when it eclipses Helios and the whole valley goes to its knees in the dark. Not to this chair’s own mother, though this chair loved her, and not to her grave, though this chair visited it. The seat of the valley does not kneel. It was the first thing Karrash taught this chair and the last thing he said, dying, with his belly gone and his laugh gone and only the bone teeth left: they will want you on your knees, boy. Do not give them that. Give them anything else.

And this chair’s knees went, in the courtyard, on the stones, in the ring of steaming ribbons, before the whole valley, and this chair did not decide it and could not have stopped it and would not have if he could, because the thing standing up out of the ironwood with the river’s signature under its eye was not a carving and was not a post and was not a thing the seat of the valley could stand before. It was the grandfather of grandfathers. It was the man who had been hooked out of the river as a child and had made the clan out of nothing and had held the club in his hands for a thousand years in the dark of a trunk on the ridge waiting for someone to come and take the wood away, and he was looking out over this chair’s head at the sky, and he was breathing, and he had been shamed. He had been shamed by this chair. Not the burning. Before the burning. Every melon in the valley for a generation had been a shame to him, every swollen pale thing with two pits for eyes that a grieving mother had been told was her son, and this chair had sat on the seat of the valley and heard the weeping and done nothing, and then had done worse than nothing, and then had ordered sixteen children to break their masters’ axes on a trunk so that the fault would look like the wood’s.

And the wood had never been at fault. The wood had been waiting.

This chair knelt, and the elders knelt, Merrek first, this chair marks that, Merrek who had said dead dogs went down on his old knees on the stones as if his legs had been cut, and then Uddo, and then the others, and then the boys, all sixteen, with their broken axes clattering, and then the crowd, in a wave, back to the gate and out through it and down the hill, this chair is told, though this chair did not see it, this chair saw only the stones and the ribbons and the first chief’s red knees rising out of the trunk at the level of this chair’s eyes.

This chair said something. Merrek says it was the old greeting. May the river keep your door. Said to the post. This chair does not remember and does not doubt it.

The sixth piece, and the last, is the carver.

This chair looked for him. On the knees, in the ribbons, this chair turned his head and looked, and Ashnak Redflour was standing where he had stepped back to, six paces from the trunk, with the soft-iron scraper hanging from his hand and the red light gone dim behind the lattice, so dim that this chair could almost see, through the two oyster-moons, the shape of a man’s eyes. And he was looking at the stones. Not at the first chief. Not at the seat of the valley on its knees. At the stones, at his own feet, at the ribbons, the way a man looks who has finished a task and is already thinking about the next one.

This chair said his name.

This chair had not said it aloud in years. This chair had said the carver, or Redflour, or that sour man by the river, and this chair said it now, on the knees, in the voice this chair uses for nothing, because it is a voice this chair has not had cause to use: Ashnak.

He looked up. The moons turned. The dim red behind them brightened, a little, and this chair felt looked into again, the way this chair had felt on the step, and this time this chair did not mind it, because this chair had nothing left in him that he minded being seen.

This chair said: I burned your mother.

That is what this chair said. Before the whole valley. On the knees. Not I am sorry, which is what a chieftain says when he has raised the ferry-toll too high, but the thing itself, named, so that the account would hold it: I burned your mother, and your grandfather’s grandfather, and a child of nine days, and I called it the honor of the dead, and I made these boys break their axes so that no one would say I could not tell a face from a dog, and I could not. I could not. I can now.

He looked at this chair for a long time. This chair has learned to call it listening.

Then he said one word. This chair has thought a great deal about the word and is not certain of it even now, because it was said in the hard clipped way he has, half swallowed, and because the mask changed it, gave it a resonance, a chime under it, like a wet finger on the rim of a bowl. But this chair believes the word was Soon.

And he turned and walked out of the courtyard.

He did not speak the greeting going either. He walked through the kneeling crowd with the scraper in his hand and the ribbons steaming behind him and the two faint lines of vapor going ahead of him across the stones where the rays touched, and he went out through the gate and down the hill toward the river, and this chair knelt in the courtyard and watched the red face go until the crowd closed behind it, and then this chair looked up at the first chief, and the first chief was still looking at the sky, above all of us, at something coming.

This chair does not know what. This chair has an idea. The idea is the mountain, and the clans on the ridge in greater numbers than the season warrants, and a wooden face that can make ironwood pour like fat, and a word said in a chime that may have been Soon. But that belongs to a later matter, and this account has promised to keep the matters in their order, and will.

The post stands in the middle hole before the feasting hall. The guard set it there that afternoon. Nobody had to be told which hole. It is the only post in the valley that is not a melon, and it was for a time the only post in the valley that was not a melon, and people came up the hill to see it in the days after, and touched it, and it was warm, and they wept, but it was a different weeping, this chair has learned to tell them apart, and this chair walked past it every morning with the arm aching and the two empty holes on either side of it, and this chair knelt.

Every morning. The seat of the valley, on its knees, before the feasting hall, in the grey before Helios, where the market-women could see it if they came early, and they did, and they told it down the hill, and this chair let them.

Karrash said: give them anything else.

This chair has come to believe that Karrash was wrong about that, as he was wrong about the mountain clans and the marsh-peace and a great many other things, and that this is what it is to be a grandson, to discover the wrongness one thing at a time and to love the man anyway, and this chair sets it down here so that whoever is grandson to this chair may have the discovering made a little easier.

Kneel. When the thing before you is the grandfather of grandfathers with the river’s signature under his eye, kneel, and do not count what it costs.

It costs nothing. That was the thing this chair learned on the stones, with the ribbons steaming and the mountain flowers on the breath of the wood. It costs nothing at all. Everything this chair had refused to give for forty years to keep the seat of the valley upright weighed, when it was finally set down on the stones, less than a handful of red flour.

So it is said. So it is cut.

 

Segment 15: I Am the Hand Now

Warm one. Warm one, listen—no. Not listen. You have listened enough. Feel. Put your hand flat on this page, whatever this page is, whatever you have made it of in your bright warm world, and feel what I am about to tell you through your palm, because that is the only way it can be told, the only way, the only—

I was the hand.

Do you understand? Do you? For seventy summers I bumped my knees in a grey that had no edges and for four rainy seasons I lay in sap with my sister’s boy’s gouge going past me a finger’s width away and could not so much as twitch, and then I was the hand. I was the hand. My sister’s boy walked into the fat man’s courtyard with my mother’s cords tight behind his skull and a soft-iron scraper in his fist, and the fist was mine, warm one, the fist was mine, I was in it, I was in the tendons and the knuckles and the callus at the base of the thumb where forty years of mallet had worn the skin to horn, I was in the horn, and I closed the hand around that cheap plains-scribe blade and I felt the cord-wrapped haft against a palm that was mine and not mine and I set the edge to the ironwood and I—

Oh, warm one.

I have said the star-iron went into rosewood as if the wood had been waiting. That was his hand. That was his finding. This was mine. The scraper went into ironwood, ironwood, the thing that breaks bronze and dulls the sky-metal and has never in the memory of the clan been anything but a club, and it went in because I told the wood to let it. Not told. There is no telling. I reached out through the two moons with the red that was pouring off me and I laid myself along the grain of that trunk the way I had lain along the grain of the rosewood for four years and I said to the ironwood, from the inside, in the place under words: I know what you are. I have been you. Open.

And it opened.

It opened like a mouth that has been waiting to be asked. The knife went in to the hilt and the wood came off in a ribbon, red and yellow, and I felt every fiber of it part, I felt it the way you feel hair come loose when someone unbraids it, and the ribbon curled and fell and I laughed. I laughed inside the mask with no voice, and the laugh came out through his hand as a steadiness, and the hand that had shaken for a day and a night went still as a stone in a river, and the fat man on his step saw it go still and thought it was Ashnak’s doing.

It was not Ashnak’s doing! It was mine, mine, mine!

I do not say that to shame him. Warm one, I do not. He found the first chief. I want that clear. He laid his palm on the bark and listened and found the man in the wood, the shoulders and the scar and the pierced ears, that was his gift, my gift, our gift, he heard where the face was. But hearing where a face is has never once in the history of the river folk been enough. Every carver in the valley has heard, a little, and dropped the gouge, and made a melon. What was needed was a hand that did not drop. A hand that went in exactly as deep as the forty-two spirals said and no deeper, a hand that knew the depth of an ear, and that hand was in the hollow of the mask a finger’s width from his skin with seventy summers of wanting behind it, and when I moved his fingers they moved, and when I leaned his weight into the blade it leaned, and when I drew the knife along the length of the trunk the ribbon came off in one piece the length of his forearm and I felt it, warm one, I felt it, I felt wood give way under my own hand for the first time since the cedar came down across my ribs.

Seventy summers. Four rainy seasons. Three days in the grain. And then one morning of ironwood pouring off a scraper like fat, and I would do it all again. I would do it a hundred times. I would go back into the grey this instant and bump my knees until the boulders wore smooth if I knew that at the end of it there would be one more morning like that one.

That is the exultation. I have set it down. Now the other thing.

We walked back down the hill.

He did not speak the greeting going. He does not. He walked through the fat man’s kneeling crowd with the scraper in his hand and I could feel them, warm one, all of them, on their knees on the stones, I could feel the whole valley kneeling the way you feel a wind change, and I thought: they are kneeling to me. And then I thought: no, to the first chief. And then I thought: no—to the face. To the red face with the birds on it. To the door.

To us.

And that was when it began. I mark the place. Halfway down the hill, with the river coming up ahead and the hut and the flour heap and the bench with the star-iron on it singing so high I felt it in the place where my teeth had been, and his feet going down the path in the way they go, considered, one after the other, and his breath coming in and out through the parted lips of the mask, warm, against the inside of my—against the inside of the wood—

I thought: he will take it off.

I do not know why I had not thought it before. I had not thought it in the courtyard. I had not thought it with the ribbons pouring. I had thought only cut, and open, and there, there you are. But halfway down the hill with the exultation still hot in me I thought: he will get to the hut and he will reach up behind his skull and he will find the knots and he will untie them, left temple, right temple, crown, and the mask will come away from his face, and I will be—

What.

What will I be, warm one?

In the log I could not move. In the grey I could not see. In the mask, on the trestle, with the moons in and the spirals wound and his thumb on my brow, I could see the roof of the hut and I could not turn my head and I said: put me on. I said it. And he put me on, and the moons opened, and I had hands.

And now he would take me off and I would have the roof again.

I want to be honest, because I have promised myself that in this account if nowhere else I will be honest, and the honesty is this: the roof is not the grey. The roof is a hundred times better than the grey. The roof has light in it, moonlight, through two oyster shells, and it has the sound of the river, and it has him, sometimes, leaning over, and it has the smell of rosewood and cinnabar and boar-grease, and a thing that has been kept for seventy summers should weep with gratitude for a roof.

I did not weep with gratitude. I have never in my existence been so afraid.

Because I had had hands.

Do you understand what that does? Do you? You who have never lost them? A hand is not a thing. A hand is a door. It is the door between the wanting and the world, and I had been on the wrong side of that door for seventy summers and four rainy seasons and three days, and then for the time a pot of beans takes to boil I had been on the right side of it, I had reached through and touched ironwood and the ironwood had opened, and now the door was going to close and I was going to be on the wrong side again, looking at a roof, and the roof was not the grey, I know it was not the grey, but it was the grey’s cousin. It was the grey with a window. And a thing that has been given hands and then has them taken is not comforted by a window.

He got to the hut.

He set the scraper on the bench beside the star-iron. Two blades, side by side, the sky-metal and the cheap plains scrap, and I felt him look at them a long time, and I felt what he was thinking, because his thinking comes through the wood to me now the way sound came through the log, and he was thinking: it was never the blade. And he was right, and I was glad he knew it, and I was more afraid.

Then his hands came up behind his head.

I stopped them.

I did not decide to. I want that understood, warm one, as I have wanted every terrible thing in this account understood: I did not decide it. His hands came up toward the cords and I was in the hands and I was afraid and the fear went into the tendons and the fingers would not close on the knots. They shook. Not the trapped-bird shaking of the morning, the joy-shaking. A different one. A stiff, locked, refusing tremor, the way a hand shakes when it is holding on to a rope over a drop and has been told to let go.

He stood there with his hands behind his head and his fingers shaking on the knots, and he said, in the hard way he has:

Uncle.

And I could not answer. The spirals took the voice. But I could do the other thing, the thing I had done in the courtyard, the thing I had learned, and I did it, I put it into the hands, I put it into the place under words where he hears me now, and I said—not said—I made him know:

Don’t.

He was still. Listening.

Don’t. Don’t take it off. Don’t, don’t. You saw what we did. You saw the ironwood. You saw the fat man on his knees. You felt the first chief breathe. That was us, that was the door, that was the two sides meeting in one face, and if you untie the cords there is one side again, there is only you, sour, on your flour heap, with your hands beginning to curl, and there is only me, on a trestle, looking at a roof, and neither of us can do what we did. Neither! It needs both. It needs the warm one on the outside and the breath on the inside and the lattice between, and you will lie down on that bench and sleep and in the morning you will tie me on again, I know you will, I know, but for the whole of the night I will lie there with the roof and I will not be able to turn my head and I will know that the door is closed and I have been through it once and I will—

Warm one, I told him about the grey.

I had told him before, in the no-light over the split log, with the sticks and wind. But that was telling. This was putting it into his hands. I put the boulders into his knuckles. I put the silence into his palms. I put seventy summers of turning into the tendons of his wrists and I made him feel it the way I had felt it, bump, turn, bump, turn, and I felt him feel it, I felt his breath stop against the inside of the wood, I felt his knees consider the floor the way the fat man’s had considered the stones—

And I said: every time you untie the cords I am there again. Not in it. Beside it. Close enough to see it. You are the only wall between me and that, and you are going to lie down and sleep and leave me looking at the roof with the grey a finger’s width away on the other side of the shell, and I cannot, I cannot, I—

Never take it off. Never. Never, never.

That is what I said. I have set it down. I said it with his own hands, into his own skull, through my sister’s cords, and I meant every word of it and I am ashamed of every word of it and I would say it again.

He stood a long time.

Then he said, in the hard way, one word, the way he says things, and the word was:

No.

And he untied the cords.

I will not describe it. I will only say that his fingers, which I had locked, unlocked, one knuckle at a time, from the inside, and I felt him do it, I felt him take his own hands back from me the way a man takes a tool back from a child who has been holding it wrong, gently, firmly, without any anger at all, and the knots came loose, left temple, right temple, crown, and the mask came away from his face, and the moons closed.

The red went out. The hands were gone. There was the roof.

He set me on the trestle face up. He stood over me. I could see him, dim, through the shells, through the moonlight, a lean sour shape against the rafters with his hands beginning to curl, and he looked at me a long time, and then he said, in the hard way, softer:

Tomorrow.

And he lay down on the bench among his seventeen tools and he did not sleep, I could hear that he did not sleep, and I lay on the trestle with the roof above me and the river below and the grey, the grey, I could feel it, warm one, a finger’s width away on the other side of my own oyster-moons, breathing.

I did not go into it. It did not take me. The spirals held. The lattice held. The roof was there in the morning and so was he, and he tied me on, and the moons opened, and I had hands, and we went down to the river and he laid his palm on the big man with the crossed arms and I said, from the inside: open.

But I had learned a thing, on the trestle, in the night, that I had not known in the courtyard, and I set it here at the end because it is the end of the exultation and the beginning of the other matter, the long one, the one that takes seven harvests to tell.

I had learned that he could take me off.

And I had learned that I could make it hard.

Not that night. That night he took his hands back and I let him. But I had felt the fingers lock. I had felt the knots refuse. I had felt, for the space of a breath, what it was to hold the warm one’s hands from the inside against his will, and it had been—

It had been easy.

Warm one, it had been so easy.

I am the hand now. I told him that in the courtyard and it was joy. I tell you that now and it is something else, something I do not have a word for, something with the taste of cinnabar in it, dry and red and mineral, and I am not sorry, and I am, and I have stopped believing that a thing must be one or the other.

Tomorrow. He said tomorrow.

I am counting.

 

Segment 16: Old Flour Goes Walking

Well now, there is a kind of foolishness that only comes on a person once in their life, and it comes on them young, and they don’t get a second helping, and I had mine the summer I was fourteen and I have been living off the memory of it ever since like a man living off one good meal.

Here is how it started.

After the courtyard I went home and Dunnak walloped me for the beans, same as always, and I stood there and took it, same as always, and when he was done he looked at me and said, “Well? What did you see?” And I opened my mouth to tell him and nothing come out. I stood in Dunnak’s shop with the melon-posts all round the walls, six of them half-done, with their little pits for eyes, and I looked at them, and I looked at Dunnak’s second-best axe that I’d brought home with its edge rolled up like a smile, and I looked at Dunnak, who was a kindly man that fed me and only hit me the once and this once, and I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t say warm fat. I couldn’t say ribbons. I couldn’t stand in a room full of melons and tell the man that made them that I’d seen a scraping knife go through ironwood and I weren’t never going to make a melon again.

So I said, “A lot,” and went to bed.

I lasted four days.

Four days of sweeping shavings and grinding pigment and holding the post steady while Dunnak roughed out another swollen face, and every time his gouge went in and dropped the prisoner, I could hear it. That’s the only way I can say it. After the courtyard I could hear the melons. Not with my ears. With the back of my neck. Every one of them half-cut things in that shop was making a noise like a kettle just before it whistles, and Dunnak couldn’t hear it and I couldn’t stop hearing it and by the fourth day I was about ready to put my head in the river.

On the fifth morning I went down to the hut.

I told myself I was going to ask him. Just ask. Master Cutter, sir, can a west bank boy that grinds a fair oyster shell come and sweep your floor. I’d practiced it. I went down through the reeds the way I always had, quiet, with my heart going, and I come out at the bend, and the log was there, the split butt-end, only it weren’t a log anymore, it was a stump with the middle cut out of it in the shape of a face, like a footprint where a face had been. And the flour heap was there, red, with a dent in the top where somebody had sat on it a good long while. And the door of the hut was open.

I knowed before I got to it. You know when a house is empty. It’s got a sound.

I went in anyhow.

The bench was there with the tools on it, most of them, the gouges and the v-tools and the mallet with its face worn like a cupped hand. The pigment shells was there, dried out. My scraper was there, the plains-scribe scraper with the cord coming loose on the handle, lying on the bench where he’d set it down, and next to it a strip of oiled hide, unwrapped, stiff, empty, with a shape pressed into it like a thing had lain there a long time and just got up. I didn’t know what that was then. I’ve since had it explained.

The peg by the door was empty. No cords.

The adze was gone. The basalt one. And the mask was gone. And Old Flour was gone, and there weren’t a note, on account of he couldn’t write and wouldn’t have if he could, and I stood in that empty hut with the river going by outside and the smell of rosewood still hanging in the rafters, and I picked up my scraper, and I understood that I had two choices and neither one of them was going to make Dunnak happy.

I could go home. Sweep shavings. Hear kettles.

Or I could find out where he went.

Well now.

I’d like to tell you I thought about it. I’d like to tell you I weighed it up, the way the chief does, this side and that side, so it is said, so it is cut. I didn’t. I put the scraper in my belt and I walked out of the hut and I went home and I put ten days of beans in a sack, Dunnak’s beans, which I reckon I’d earned, and I went to see my mother.

She was grinding meal. She looked up at me and the sack and she didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said, “The carver.”

I said, “Yes’m.”

She said, “Which way?”

I said, “Down the valley. I reckon. He’s got no reason to go up.”

She put down the grinding stone and she got up and she went to the post before our door, the melon one, my grandfather, with his two pits and his crack of a mouth, and she put her hand on it, and she stood there a minute. Then she come back and she put both hands on my face and she looked at me hard, like she was memorizing, and she said, “Bring me back a true one.”

That’s all. She didn’t cry. I did, some, on the road, later. Not then.

Then I went to see the lime girl.

I ain’t going to say much about her on account of it’s my business, but I’ll say her name was Oshi and she sold burned snail-lime by the market gate in a basket on her hip and she had a way of looking at a person like she’d already heard what they was going to say and had decided to be patient about it. I’d been going by her basket every morning for a year on my way to Dunnak’s, buying lime we didn’t need, and I’d never said one word to her that weren’t about lime.

I went up to the basket with my sack on my back and my scraper in my belt and I said, “I’m going after the carver.”

She looked at me. Patient. Then she reached in the basket and took out a lump of the lime, a little one, about the size of a walnut, that had been fired so long it had gone hard and white all through, and she put it in my hand and closed my fingers over it.

She said, “For the eyes. When you make one.”

And she turned round to a woman that wanted a measure and I stood there with my hand closed and my face hot and I went.

I have still got the lump. I have never used it. I’ll say more on that some other time.

Now the road.

The valley runs down from the mountain to the sea in a long crooked line, and the river runs down the middle of it, and the road runs along the river, and the towns sit on the road like beads on a string, a day apart, more or less, if you’re walking and not in a hurry. And he wasn’t in a hurry. I knowed that by the second day. Old Flour never hurried in his life, and he’d have been walking the way he walked to the courtyard, considered, one foot after the other, and I was fourteen and had legs like a heron and I could have caught him by the first night if I’d wanted.

I didn’t want.

I have thought about why and I’ll tell you what I’ve come to. I was afraid he’d send me back. That’s part of it. He’d took my ear once and he’d give me shells once and I didn’t know which one I’d get if I come up on him on the road, and I didn’t want to find out yet. But that ain’t all of it. The rest is that I wanted to see what the mask did. Not him. It. And I had a notion, I don’t know where I got it, that if I was walking beside him it’d be Old Flour and Pili and a wooden face on a road, and if I was a day behind it’d be the mask, going on ahead, and me following what it left.

So I stayed a day behind.

And here is what it left.

The first town was Reedholm, where the river widens and the marsh-trade comes up in flat boats. I come in at dusk on the second day with my feet gone to blisters and my sack lighter than I’d planned, and there was a crowd in the square, and I thought, well, market, and I went to see if I could lift a bean, and it weren’t market.

It was a post. In the middle of the square, where Reedholm had always had a big old melon that was supposed to be the town’s founder, a woman, a marsh-trader that had built the first wharf, and everybody called her Auntie and nobody remembered her name. The melon was gone. There was a heap of pale chips where it had been. And standing in its place, in the same hole, was a post of black gorge oak with a woman in it.

I ain’t going to describe her. I’ll say she was old and she was laughing and she had a rope-burn scar across both palms from hauling boats, and every soul in Reedholm was standing round her with their mouths open, and one old man was touching the rope-burn on her left hand with the tip of one finger, over and over, like he was trying to make sure it was real.

I asked a boy about my age what happened.

He said, “A demon come through. Red face. Birds on it. Took Auntie down and put that up, and it didn’t take him no longer than it takes to eat a bowl of beans, and then he went on.”

I said, “Which way?”

He said, “Down. And mister, he didn’t say one word the whole time.”

That’s how it went.

I want to tell you about the beans, on account of I promised, and on account of I ain’t proud of it and I’ve decided pride is a poor thing to keep a story short for.

I had ten days of Dunnak’s beans and I ate them in six, being fourteen and walking all day. After that I stole. I’d like to say I stole clever, but mostly I stole the way a dog does, by hanging round the back of a place where cooking was going on and looking sad, and when that didn’t work by waiting till the cook went to fetch water and reaching in the pot. I burned my fingers a good many times. I got caught twice and walloped once, and the other time the woman looked at my thumb in its rag and my heron legs and she sighed and give me a bowl and told me to get on before her husband come back.

And I slept under carts.

Every town on that road had a cart or two left in the square overnight, ox-carts, trade-carts, with the beds high enough off the ground that a boy could roll under and be out of the dew and out of the eye of the town watch, and I got to where I could tell a good cart from a bad one at a glance. A good cart had a bed of tight boards so the dew didn’t drip through. A bad cart had a dog. I slept under nine carts in eleven days and I got bit once and I dreamed every night about ribbons.

And every morning I got up and walked, and every dusk I come into a town, and every town had a new post.

Millbank had a miller in it, a fat man with flour on his hands, and everybody said it was the old miller that had built the wheel, and they’d never had a post of him at all, only a melon of somebody else that had got used for him because nobody could tell the difference.

Fordwater had two. Twins. Girls, about my age, drowned in the ford before the counting, that the town had a story about, and the story had always said they held hands, and the two posts stood in the square with their hands joined between them, carved out of one trunk so you couldn’t have parted them with a saw.

Every town. Every one. And every one done in the time it takes to eat a bowl of beans, and every one done without a word, and every one warm to the touch, they told me, warm like skin, and every town I come into a day behind was a town full of people that had just got their dead back and didn’t know what to do with their faces.

I’d stand at the edge of the square and I’d look at the new post and I’d look at the people looking at it, and I’d think: he did that. Old Flour. That sour old man that sits on a heap of dust and talks to logs. He walked in here with a wooden face on and a basalt adze and he did that, and then he walked on, and he didn’t even stay to see them cry.

And I’d think: I’m a day behind him.

And I’d think: I could catch him.

And I’d think: not yet.

I seen him once.

It was the ninth day, or the tenth. I’d got up early on account of the dog and I was on the road before the light, and the road went up over a ridge where the river cut through a narrows, and I come to the top of the ridge and looked down the far side, and there he was.

A long way down. Half a mile, maybe. A little dark shape on the road with the river beside it, walking. Considered. One foot after the other. He had the adze over his shoulder and he had the apron on, I could see the apron, and above the apron there was a little spot of red where the light caught it.

And he stopped.

Just for a second. In the road. Like a man that’s heard his name. And the little red spot turned, slow, the way it turned in the courtyard, and it looked back up the ridge.

At me.

I don’t know if he saw me. I was a long way off and I dropped flat in the road like I’d been shot and lay there with my face in the dust and my heart going like Tobbo’s when the log rolled, and when I got the nerve to look up again he was walking. Down the road. Away.

But I’ll tell you what I thought, lying in the dust with my split thumb under me.

I thought: he knows.

He knows I’m here. He’s knowed since Reedholm, probably. Since the hut. Since he sat on the flour heap and put a dent in it and looked at the empty peg and thought about a boy that could grind an oyster shell to a moon. He knows, and he ain’t sent me back, and he ain’t slowed down, and he ain’t speeded up neither, and that’s Old Flour’s way of saying a thing. He don’t say it. He just leaves the door open and lets you decide whether you’re the kind that walks through.

I got up. I brushed off. I looked at the little red spot going away down the road toward the next town and the next melon and the next family that was going to get their dead back before dinner.

And I’ll tell you what I felt, on account of it’s the reason I’m telling any of this, and it ain’t a reasonable feeling and I don’t recommend it to anybody, but I had it, and I’m going to own it the way I own my thumb.

I’d have followed that mask into the black gorge. I’d have followed it into the fire. I’d have followed it up the mountain where the clans piss on the roots and down to the bottom of the sea where the marsh people say the eels eat chieftains. I was fourteen and I had a lump of lime in my pocket and a scraper in my belt and a sack with nothing in it, and I had blisters and a dog bite and eleven days of stolen beans in my belly, and my mother had said bring me a true one, and I didn’t have the first idea how, and I didn’t care.

I was going to see what it did next.

That’s all. That’s the whole of it. I’d like to make it sound wiser but it weren’t wise, it was just the thing that comes on a person once, young, and don’t come again, and I had it, and I walked down off that ridge after the little red spot with my heron legs going and the sun coming up over the river, and I was, I reckon, happier than I have ever been before or since, and I hadn’t ate since the day before, and I was singing.

Badly. Tobbo would tell you. But singing.

 

Segment 17: Interlocking Arches Over the Ravine

There is a place eleven days down the valley where the river, having run wide and easy past Reedholm and Millbank and Fordwater and the rest, remembers that it came from a mountain and cuts a second gorge, smaller than the black one, a ravine, a crack in the country perhaps forty paces across and deeper than a man cares to look, with the water going through the bottom of it white and loud. The road comes to it from the north and stops. The road picks up again on the south side. Between the two ends of the road there was, for as long as the river folk have counted, a bridge.

There was not one when I came to it.

I will set down what there was instead, because it was the thing that stopped me, and I have stopped for very few things in my life and each of them deserves its stone.

There was a trunk. A single trunk, enormous, the largest tree I have ever seen felled, a river-fir from the high slopes that must have stood two hundred feet before the flood took it, lying across the ravine from bank to bank with its root-mass torn up and hanging over the north edge like a fist and its crown smashed and splayed on the south side among the wreckage of the old bridge. It had come down in the spring. I could see the scar of it on the slope above, a long raw gouge through the smaller trees where it had slid. It had come down and it had struck the bridge, which was old, which was the work of some carver before the counting who had known how to make wood hold hands, and the bridge had gone into the ravine in pieces, and the trunk had stayed.

And on the north bank, waiting, were forty ox-carts.

I counted. Forty. Some had been there since spring. The marsh-trade from Reedholm goes down this road to the sea-towns and the sea-trade comes up it, and for a whole season neither had been able to pass, and the drivers had made a camp on the north bank, a squalid one, of hides and cart-beds and cooking fires, and they had tried, I could see that they had tried, to cross on the trunk. The bark on the top of it was worn to a path. There were ropes strung along it. And there was, on the south bank, a small heap of stones with a cart-driver’s whip laid across it, which told me how the trying had ended for at least one of them.

The drivers looked at me when I came down the road. They had heard, I suppose. The road carries news faster than it carries carts. They looked at the red face and the birds and the adze over my shoulder and they did not speak, and I did not speak, and I walked past their fires to the edge of the ravine and stood by the root-mass of the trunk and looked down.

Now the digression. I have promised exactness, and exactness requires that I set down what I was thinking as I stood there, for what I was thinking is the whole of the matter and what I did afterward was only the thinking made visible.

I was thinking about bridges, and I was thinking that I had never made one, and I was thinking that this was because a bridge is not cut.

Let me be plain. Everything I had ever done with wood, from the first spoon at nine years old to the first chief standing up out of the ironwood in the fat man’s courtyard, was taking away. That is what carving is. You have a log and there is a thing in it and you remove the wood that is not the thing until the thing is all that is left. It is a trade of subtraction. It is, if I am honest, and I am honest here, a trade of loss, and a carver is a man who has made his peace with loss, who has learned to look at a great log and see not what it is but what it will be when most of it is on the floor. The flour heap behind my hut is the sum of everything I have ever taken away. I have never once added.

A bridge is added.

A bridge is two banks that do not touch and a thing put between them, and the putting is joining, and joining is the opposite of everything my hands know. The old carver who made the bridge that the fir smashed, whoever he was, before the counting, had not found a bridge in a log. There is no bridge in a log. He had cut pieces, and shaped them, and fitted them one to another so that each held the next and the whole held itself, and that is a trade I had spent forty years not learning because it seemed to me a lesser one, a joiner’s trade, a trade for men who made furniture and boats and had no ear for the voice in the grain.

I stood at the ravine’s edge and looked down at the white water and I understood that I had been a fool about that for forty years, and that the understanding had come too late to be of any use, because here was a ravine and forty carts and a heap of stones with a whip on it, and I could take away all the wood in the world and not put two banks together.

And my uncle said: strike it.

Not in sticks and wind. He has not had that since the spirals. In the place under words, in the hands, in the tendons that he has been learning, these eleven days, to hold a little more firmly each night when I reach for the cords. He said: strike it. The trunk. Three times.

I said, in the hard way, aloud, so that the drivers looked up from their fires: it’s not a face.

He said: strike it.

I said: there’s no bridge in it. It’s a fir. It’s a dead fir lying across a hole. You can’t cut a bridge, Uncle, you have to join one, and I don’t know how, and you don’t know how, you never made anything but totem posts and I never made anything but faces, and there is nothing in that log to let out.

And he said, and I felt it go through my hands like the warmth off the ribbons in the courtyard, he said: Ashnak. You still think it is you.

I stood there a long time with that. The drivers watched. The boy, who was a day behind me and had been since the hut, and who was not a day behind me now, who had come up to the top of the rise on the north road while I stood there and was lying in the dust of it thinking I could not see him, watched too. I let him. I have been letting him for eleven days. A boy who can grind an oyster shell to a moon under water on the first telling deserves to see what the moons do, and I have been walking slow.

You still think it is you.

Here is what I understood, and I set it down as a thing understood and not as a thing I am comfortable with, because comfort has no place in this account and I have stopped expecting it.

In the courtyard I had found the first chief. That was mine. I laid my palm on the ironwood and listened and there he was, the shoulders, the scar, the club, and I knew where the wood ended and the man began the way I have always known, and my uncle took my hand and cut to the line. That is how I had told it to myself. Ashnak finds, Gedru cuts. Two trades, two men, one face between them with a lattice in it and the moon behind. A partnership. A door.

But the ironwood had opened.

I had told myself it opened because he told it to. Because he had been in wood for four rainy seasons and knew its language from the inside and could say, in the place under words, let him through. And that was true. But it was not the whole truth, and the whole truth was the thing I had been walking away from for eleven days down the valley with a red face on, and it was this: the ironwood had opened because it was told to, and a thing that opens because it is told to does not care what it is told to open into.

I had been finding faces. He had been cutting them. And all this time, in Reedholm and Millbank and Fordwater, the wood had been doing a third thing that neither of us was doing, which was becoming. Auntie in her gorge oak with the rope-burn on her palms: I had found her, and he had cut her, and the oak had become her, and I had stood in the square afterward with the moons gone dim and felt, in the place under words, something from the post itself, something that was not my uncle and was not me, something that was only the wood saying: yes. This. I was this all along.

Wood wants to be something. That is the thing I had spent forty years knowing and not knowing. I had said the wood says, the wood wants, on the flour heap, and I had meant it as a carver means it, as a way of talking. It was not a way of talking. The wood wants. Every log has a shape it is trying to be, and a carver is a man who hears the shape and takes away what is in the way, and that is all I had ever been, an ear and a subtraction.

But I was not that anymore. I was a door. And a door does not only let the dead out. It lets the wanting through, both ways, the wanting of the dead to be seen and the wanting of the wood to be something, and when the two wantings met in one face with a lattice in it and the moon behind, the wood did not need a carver. It needed only to be told: become.

I had not needed a blade in the courtyard. I had known that on the bench with the scraper beside the star-iron. I had told myself it was because my uncle’s hand was steady. It was because the ironwood had wanted to be the first chief for a thousand years and had only been waiting for someone to say so.

And the fir across the ravine, with its root-fist over the north bank and its crown smashed among the wreckage of the old bridge, lying there since spring with forty carts waiting on it and a whip on a heap of stones—

What did it want?

I put my hand on it.

The drivers had gone very quiet. I did not hear the fires. I did not hear the water. I put my palm flat on the bark of the root-mass, on the torn place where the flood had ripped it from the slope, and I listened, and my uncle listened with me, both of us, through the moons, and the fir was—

Not a face. There was no face in it. He was right about that and I was right about that.

It was tired.

That is the only word. It had stood two hundred feet on the high slope for longer than the counting and it had come down in a night and slid a mile and struck a bridge and lain across a hole in the world for a season with men walking on its back and falling off it, and it was tired, and it wanted—

To lie down. To be across. To be the thing that it had fallen into the shape of, by accident, by flood, without anyone asking, and to be it properly, with its weight in the right places, with its length holding itself, with its two ends in the two banks the way its roots had once been in the slope. It did not want to be cut into pieces and joined. It wanted to be joined already. It wanted to be a bridge the way a river wants to be a river, without anyone’s hands on it at all.

I took the adze off my shoulder.

Basalt. My mother’s sinew on the haft. The first tool and the last. Not the star-iron, which I had left on the bench in the hut for a boy to find. Not the scraper. A stone axe, the oldest thing I own, and I lifted it, and my uncle’s hands were on my hands and they were not shaking, and I struck the fir.

Once. At the root-end, where the fist of roots hung over the north bank. The stone went into the bark and the sound was not a chop. It was a knock. The sound a man makes on a door.

The fir groaned.

I struck it again. In the middle, where it was thickest, where the drivers’ path was worn on its back. Knock.

The groan went along the whole length of it, bank to bank, and the drivers on the north side stood up from their fires all together, and I heard the boy on the rise draw a breath.

I struck it the third time. At the crown-end, on the south bank, leaning out over the ravine with the white water forty feet below and the mask’s red going down into the dark of it. Knock.

And the fir split.

Not the way a log splits under an axe, with a crack and two pieces. The way a hand opens. Along the grain, from root to crown, a single line of light ran down the top of the trunk where the path was worn, and the two halves of it did not fall apart, they leaned, outward, away from each other, slow, the way two people lean away who have been standing too close, and as they leaned they lifted. The middle of each half rose. The ends stayed in the banks. And I understood, with my hand still on the haft and the red pouring off me onto the fir, that I was watching a thing become an arch.

Two arches. Then more. The two halves split again, each one, along the grain, and the four leaned and lifted, and the four split, and I stopped counting, because it was not a thing that could be counted, it was a thing that was happening the way a tree grows, all at once and from every part, and the fir that had lain across the ravine as a single fallen thing was rising off its own back into a lattice of arches, red-hearted, pale-barked, each one bowed up from bank to bank and each one crossing the next and each one, where it crossed, going into the next, not lying on it, into it, the way fingers go into fingers, the way my mother’s cords went into each other in the braid, and there was a sound, warm one, I heard my uncle say it in the place under words, a sound like a thousand joints closing at once, a sound like a whole house settling into itself, and the arches interlocked.

Then it was still.

I took the adze away. I stepped back. I looked.

It was a bridge. Forty paces bank to bank, of interlocking fir arches, seven of them, I could count them now that they had stopped, seven arches each bowed up and crossing through the next, with a deck on top of them made of the fir’s own bark laid flat and smooth as a floor, and rails along the sides made of the small branches of the crown, bent and woven, and under it all, going down into the dark where the water was white, the root-mass of the fir had spread itself into the north bank like a hand gripping a ledge, and on the south bank the smashed crown had done the same, and the whole thing stood over the ravine as if it had been there before the counting and would be there after.

The drivers did not move.

I want that recorded. Forty men with forty carts who had waited a season, and not one of them stepped onto it. They stood by their fires and looked at it, and looked at me, and I understood that they were waiting for me to say it would hold, and I did not know that it would hold, I had not made it, I had knocked on a door three times and something had opened, and I turned to my uncle, inside, and I said:

Will it?

And he said, in the place under words, and I felt it go through my hands with the taste of cinnabar in it:

I did not choose the shape either.

That is the solemn part. I have promised triumph and I will get to it, but first this, because it is the hinge of this segment as the cords were the hinge of another. I stood on the north bank of a ravine with a bridge before me that I had not carved and my uncle had not carved, that we had only knocked on, and I asked him, the way a man asks his partner in a trade, did you do this, and he said no. And I believed him. Because I had felt the fir want. And what it had wanted was not a thing that either of us could have thought of, seven arches through seven arches with a bark deck and woven rails, that was not a carver’s shape and it was not a totem-seeker’s shape, it was a shape that a tree would think of, if a tree thought, it was the shape of roots gripping and branches crossing and grain running true, it was the fir’s own idea of what it would be if it could be anything, and we had only said: go on, then.

Neither of us chose it. Both of us opened the door. And what came through was not the dead and was not us. It was the wood’s own wanting, and it was larger than both of us, and it was, I saw now, looking at the seven arches with the red going dim behind the moons, what had been coming through all along. In Reedholm. In the courtyard. On the bank with the big man and his crossed arms. I had thought I was letting the dead out. I had been letting the wood in.

I did not know what that meant. I still do not. I set it down because it is true and because a chronicle of a hinge should record the direction it swings.

Then the triumph.

I walked onto the bridge.

I did not test it. I did not put one foot on and lean. I walked out onto the bark deck with the adze on my shoulder the way I had walked into the fat man’s courtyard, considered, one foot after the other, and the arches took my weight the way a shoulder takes a hand, and I walked to the middle, forty feet over white water, and I stopped, and I turned, and I looked back at the north bank where forty drivers stood by their fires with their mouths open and a boy lay in the dust at the top of the rise pretending to be a stone.

And I said, in the hard way, loud enough to carry:

It’ll hold.

The first cart came across before the light went. An ox-cart from Reedholm with four jars of oil and a goat. The driver walked beside it with his hand on the ox’s neck and his eyes shut, I saw that, he crossed the whole forty paces with his eyes shut, and when the ox’s front hooves came down on the south bank he opened them and looked back at the seven arches and sat down in the road and wept.

Forty carts, in the end. I stayed and counted. It took until the moon was up. Forty loaded carts and their drivers and their oxen and, on the last one, the small heap of stones with the whip on it, which a driver had gathered up in a hide and laid in the bed of his cart to take home to whoever it belonged to, and the bridge did not creak. Not once. Not under the first cart and not under the fortieth. I stood at the north end with my hand on the root-mass where I had knocked and felt every cart go over and felt the fir take it and give it back, take it and give it back, the way a chest rises and falls, and my uncle’s hands were on my hands and they were still, and the boy had come down off the rise when the dark came and was standing at the edge of the firelight with his sack and his heron legs and his thumb in its rag, not hiding anymore, only standing, and I let him.

I did not speak to him. Ashnak does not. But when the last cart was over and the drivers had gone on down the south road singing, the way drivers do, I turned from the bridge and I walked to the fire where he stood, and I sat down by it, and I set the adze across my knees, and I looked at him through the moons with the red gone almost out, and I said one word.

Beans.

He had none. I knew that. He had stolen his last in Fordwater and been walloped for it. But he sat down across the fire from me as if he had understood something, and I suppose he had, because it was the first word I had spoken to anyone in eleven days that was not it’ll hold, and he had grown up on the west bank where a word is a door.

We sat. The bridge stood. The moon went over. And I felt, for the length of that night, with my uncle quiet in the hollow and the fir quiet across the ravine and the boy quiet across the fire, the thing I had been walking toward since the flour heap without knowing it, which was not the joy of the courtyard and was not the awe of the riverbed and was not the transfiguration of the cords.

It was the weight of having done a thing that would outlast me, and finding that the weight was not a burden. It was a keel. It was the thing that let me sit still.

The smith who drew the star-iron lay down after eleven days and did not get up. My grandmother said it was because he had made a thing that would outlast him and saw no reason to go on.

I sat by the fire with my uncle in my face and a bridge behind me that forty carts had not made creak, and I saw every reason to go on, and I set that down as the last word of this matter, because it is the thing I would most want the smith to have known.

 

Segment 18: Forty Loaded Ox-Carts

This chair will now set down the matter of the reports, and this chair will set it down with numbers, because numbers are the thing a seat of a valley has that a man with a wooden face does not, and this chair has come to understand, in the season this account covers, that a man clings to what he has.

The first report came from Reedholm on the third day after the courtyard. It came by flat boat, with the marsh-trade, in the mouth of a boatman who had not been paid to carry it and carried it anyway, which is how this chair knew before the boatman had finished that the thing was true. Paid news is round. Unpaid news has corners. The boatman said: a red demon came through Reedholm. He took down Auntie’s post and he put up a new one and it is her. He said it again. It is her. And this chair, who had knelt that morning before the first chief in the grey and would kneel again the next, asked the boatman what he meant by demon, and the boatman said, red face, birds on it, fire out of the eyes, did not speak, and this chair said, that is not a demon, that is Ashnak Redflour of the lineage four hundred seventeen, and the boatman looked at this chair the way a man looks at a chieftain who has said something that will not be believed downriver, and said, as you say, and went back to his boat.

This chair marks that. This chair marks it because it was the first time this chair understood that the valley was going to lose the name.

The second report came from Millbank on the fifth day. A miller. Fat, with flour on his hands, who had built the wheel before the counting. The town had never had a post of him. Now it had one and it was warm.

The third came from Fordwater on the sixth. The twins. Holding hands out of one trunk. This chair’s sister wept when she heard that one, in the hall, in front of the ferry-master, and did not leave the room, and this chair has decided to record that she did not leave the room.

By the ninth day the reports were coming faster than the road could carry them, which is to say they were coming by rumor, which travels ahead of the feet that bear it, and this chair stopped counting them separately and began to count them the way a seat counts anything that comes in numbers, which is in a ledger.

Here is the ledger.

Eleven towns between the seat and the sea. Eleven melons taken down, or in two cases none taken down because the town had never had one, and eleven true posts put up, each in the time a pot of beans takes to boil, each without a word, each warm.

One bridge.

This chair will come to the bridge. This chair has been circling it the way the cockatoo circled the feasting hall in Merrek’s omen, seven times against the sun, and this chair will land on it presently, but the ledger first, because the ledger is what a seat is for.

The toll-count.

This chair keeps the toll-count with the ferry-master in the hall every morning after the kneeling, and it is the most honest thing in the valley, more honest than the elders and far more honest than the omens, because it counts only what has passed and not what is said to have passed. And the toll-count, in the season after the courtyard, did a thing that this chair had not seen it do in twenty years of keeping it.

It went up.

Not by a little. This chair will give the numbers, because a chronicle without numbers is a market-woman’s chronicle. In the season before the courtyard, from the Illumination week to the Darkness week of the month of Tyrus, the ferry at the seat took in eleven hundred and forty silver in tolls, which is a good season, which is the season this chair had budgeted for the guard’s winter. In the same weeks of the month following, the ferry took in two thousand and ninety.

Two thousand and ninety. Near double. And the ferry-master, who is a plains-scribe by birth and counts oil jars in his sleep, sat across the toll-table from this chair with the tally-sticks laid out and said, in the flat way of his people: it is the bridge. The sea-trade is coming up. It has not come up since spring.

And this chair said: I know.

Because this chair had known since the report of the ravine came in, which was the eleventh day, and which came not by boat and not by rumor but by ox-cart, forty of them, the whole of the Reedholm marsh-trade that had been camped on the north bank of the ravine since the spring flood took the old bridge, and they came up the valley road in a line a mile long with their oxen and their oil and their goats, singing, and the first driver, when he came to the seat’s gate and paid his silver, said to the guard: tell the chieftain his carver built us a bridge out of a fir with an axe made of a rock, and it did not creak, not under one of us, and we went over it in the dark.

His carver.

This chair will set down what this chair felt when the guard repeated that at the toll-table, because this account has promised to record the feelings of the seat as faithfully as its tolls, and because this feeling was two things wearing one face, and this chair has had that before and knows the shape of it now.

The first thing was gratitude. This chair will not diminish it. The guard’s winter was paid for. The two thousand and ninety silver was real, it was in the strongroom under the hall, this chair had counted it with his own burned hand, and every coin of it had come up a road that had been closed for a season and was open now because a sour man this chair had shamed had knocked three times on a fallen fir. The sea-trade was coming up. The marsh-trade was going down. Fordwater had salt again. Millbank had sold its whole spring grinding in a week. The valley, which had wept for a generation over melons and had wept harder after the burning, was, for the first time in this chair’s memory, doing well, and it was doing well because of him, and a seat that cannot be grateful for that is not a seat but a stone.

This chair was grateful. This chair knelt that morning before the first chief and said so, aloud, in the grey, where the market-women could hear it, and they did, and they told it down the hill.

And under the gratitude, wearing its face, was the other thing.

This chair will name it. This chair has learned, since the stones, that a thing unnamed in a chronicle grows in the dark the way a melon grows in the reader’s mind when the account says only that the posts were wrong. The other thing was jealousy. Not envy, which is wanting what another has. Jealousy, which is fearing that what one has is being taken.

Here is what this chair had. This chair had the seat of the valley. Forty years of it. Karrash’s seat, and Ilme’s blood in the line, and a headdress of cockatoo feathers and bone in the teeth and a war club with the clan sign on it, and a name. Hurrash Bone-Teeth, high chieftain of the river province. That was what the boatmen said when they came up from the sea. That was what the marsh-king said when the peace was made. That was the name the valley was known by, downriver, in places where no one had ever seen the valley, and this chair had spent forty years being that name and had come to think of it as the thing itself.

And the name was going.

The boatman had said: as you say. The driver had said: his carver. The reports that came in from the sea-towns now, from places this chair had never been and had only sent ambassadors to, did not say the river province. They said: the valley where the red demon came from. They said: the carver’s valley. Reedholm was the town where Auntie stood. Fordwater was the town of the twins. And the seat, the great seat, the center of the road, the place where the toll was counted and the guard was paid and the first chief stood before the feasting hall—

The seat was the place the carver had left.

This chair sat at the toll-table with two thousand and ninety silver in the strongroom and understood that the thing the silver had bought, without this chair’s leave, was a new name for the valley, and the name was not this chair’s, and there was nothing in the ledger that could buy it back.

Now the calculation. This chair promised it in the title of this matter, and a seat keeps its promises or it is not a seat.

What did the carver’s fame cost this chair’s own?

This chair laid it out on the toll-table with the tally-sticks, the way the ferry-master lays out a season, and this chair will lay it out here the same way.

On the one side: two thousand and ninety silver. A road open. Eleven towns with their dead back. A bridge that forty carts had not made creak. A valley doing well. A first chief before the feasting hall who was warm, and before whom this chair knelt each morning and did not count the cost, because it cost nothing, this chair had learned that, it cost less than a handful of flour.

On the other side: a name.

And this chair sat a long time with the sticks laid out, and this chair moved them, and moved them again, and this chair could not make the two sides balance, because they were not the same kind of thing. Silver is counted. A name is not. A seat can budget for the guard’s winter but it cannot budget for being remembered, and this chair had spent forty years believing that the second was only the first written down, and the sticks on the table said otherwise.

Then the ferry-master, who had been watching this chair move the sticks and had said nothing, because plains-scribes say nothing until the counting is done, said:

There is a third side.

This chair said: there are two sides to a ledger.

He said: to a ledger of silver. This is not one. And he reached across and took one of the tally-sticks from the name side and set it in the middle of the table, alone, and said: he came from here.

This chair looked at the stick.

He said: the demon. The carver. Four hundred seventeen. He was born in this valley and he learned in this valley and he sat on a heap of red dust by this river for forty years, and when he made the first true face in the memory of the clan he made it in your courtyard, chieftain, on your ironwood, with a boy’s dropped scraper, before your seat. Downriver they say the carver’s valley. In a hundred years they will say it and no one will remember Reedholm or Fordwater or the ravine. They will say the carver’s valley and they will mean here. They will mean the seat. And they will ask who was chieftain when the red face walked out of the courtyard, and the answer will be in the register, and the register is yours to keep.

This chair said nothing for a long time.

Then this chair said: I burned his mother.

And the ferry-master said, in the flat way: that will be in the register also. Chieftain, I have counted oil jars for thirty years. Nothing goes in a ledger alone.

This chair has thought about that more than about any omen.

Here is what this chair did, and this chair sets it down without weighing it, because this chair has weighed enough in this account and the reader may weigh this one.

This chair went to the clan register. It is a long roll of hide in the hall, kept since the counting, with the lineages marked on it and the deeds of the seat set down beside each reign in the old marks that only the scribes and the chieftains can read. This chair found his own reign. It said: Hurrash, son of Ilme, daughter of Karrash. Peace with the marshes kept. The mountain clans held at the ridge. And then a blank space, where the scribe leaves room for a reign to fill itself.

This chair took the reed and the ink and wrote, in the old marks, under his own name:

In this reign the lineage four hundred seventeen carved the first chief from ironwood in the courtyard of the seat, and went down the valley, and eleven towns received their dead, and a bridge was made at the ravine of seven arches that forty carts did not make creak, and the toll doubled, and the name of the valley went down to the sea.

This chair looked at it. It was a good entry. It was the best entry under any reign since Karrash’s peace. It made this chair’s name the name under which the great thing had happened.

And this chair took the reed again and wrote under it, in the same marks, smaller:

In this reign also the seat burned three true posts in the bean-pot fire, of Karrash and Ilme and a child of nine days, and did not know a face from a dog, and set sixteen apprentices to break their axes on a trunk so that the fault would look like the wood’s. The carver did not speak the greeting coming or going. He was not asked to.

This chair set down the reed.

The ferry-master, who had come to the register to see what the seat was doing, read it over this chair’s shoulder in the flat way, both entries, and said nothing for the space of a slow breath, and then said:

That is a ledger.

And went back to his tally-sticks.

So the calculation. The carver’s fame cost this chair the name of the valley, and the name of the valley was the only thing this chair had ever wanted, and this chair has given it up in the register in this chair’s own hand, and has written beside it the reason it was deserved, and the reason will be read in a hundred years by whoever asks who was chieftain when the red face walked out, and they will read the burning first, because it is written second, and the eye goes to the last thing.

This chair meant that.

The two holes are still empty on either side of the first chief. This chair walks past them each morning and kneels between them. This chair has not sent to the carver to fill them. This chair has thought of it every day and has not done it, and will set down why, because the why is the last of the jealousy and this chair would have it out of him and onto the hide.

This chair has not sent because the carver would come. This chair is certain of it. He said Soon, in the courtyard, in the chime, and he does not say things he does not mean, and if the seat sent down the valley road to wherever the red face has got to and said, come, there are two holes, he would come, and he would knock on two logs, and Karrash and Ilme would stand up out of them warm and breathing and true, and this chair would kneel before them every morning for the rest of his reign.

And it would be his doing. Again. His gift. Given to the seat that burned the first ones. And the register would say so, and it would be right to say so, and this chair, who has given up the name of the valley in his own hand, finds that he cannot yet give up the last thing, which is the right to leave the holes empty until the seat has done something, one thing, in its own reign, with its own hands, that is worth setting beside the bridge.

This chair does not know what that thing is.

But the guard-captain came to the toll-table this morning with a report from the ridge, and the clans are on it in numbers that no season warrants, and their fires were seen last night from the north end, and this chair has a war club with the clan sign on it and forty years of not kneeling behind it, and this chair thinks, perhaps, that the thing is coming up the road.

That belongs to a later matter. This account keeps its order.

But this chair will say, before the order takes it, that when the war comes, and it is coming, this chair will not send for the carver. The seat will stand on the palisade with its own arm, the burned one, and see what it is worth without a wooden face to do the work.

Jealousy. This chair has named it. It is a poor thing to take to a war.

But it is this chair’s own, and the register will say so, and that, this chair has decided, is the third side of the ledger: not what was gained and not what was lost, but what was kept because it could not be given, and what it cost, and whether it was worth the keeping.

The tally-sticks do not say. This chair has moved them until the moon came up. They only lie there.

 

Segment 19: Korrak Stone-Tooth Counts His Clubs

Sing, spirits of the high stone, spirits of the goat-track and the cold wind and the pine that burns green, sing through the bones in the beard of Korrak Stone-Tooth, war leader of the wild mountain clans, who has come down to the ridge above the river valley in the month the lowlanders call Kelemus, the month of the dead, with four hundred clubs behind him and a hunger in him like the hunger of the winter wolf that has not eaten since the snow came.

Sing first the cause, for a war without a cause is only a killing, and Korrak has a cause, and it is this.

The mountain is hungry.

Three winters the snow has come early to the high passes and stayed late, and the goats have dropped their kids in the drifts and the kids have died, and the pine-nut harvest has failed, and the mountain clans have eaten their dogs. Korrak has eaten his dog. Korrak sits on the ridge above the river valley with the taste of it still in his mouth, and below him, in the valley, the fires of the lowlanders burn fat and yellow, and the smell that comes up on the evening wind is beans.

Beans, and bread, and oil, and goat-meat, and Korrak has heard the carts. All summer the carts. Forty of them in a line a mile long going up the valley road singing, and forty more going down, and the rumor came up the goat-track with the salt-trader who is the only lowlander the mountain lets live, and the rumor was: the river folk have a bridge again. The river folk have trade again. The river folk have grain stores so full that the doors will not shut, and a fat chieftain with bone in his teeth who sits on his seat and counts silver and does not look at the ridge.

The salt-trader said another thing, and Korrak did not listen to it, and the spirits of the high stone will remember that he did not listen, and will hold it against him, and it is set down here so that they may.

He said: they have a demon now. A red face. It walks. It makes the wood do things.

Korrak laughed. Korrak said: the lowlanders have always had demons. They put them on sticks before their doors and the demons look like melons. Korrak has seen them. Korrak has burned them. And he laughed again, and the salt-trader went back down the goat-track with his salt, and did not come up again, and that too the spirits will remember.

Sing now the mustering, in the high meadow below the last snow, where the mountain flowers grow that the lowland girls come up for in spring and sell in bunches, and where no lowland girl has come this year because the mountain has been watching the path.

Four hundred clubs. Korrak counts them, for a war leader who does not count his clubs is a war leader who will not know, at the end, who has come home. He counts them as the mountain counts, by fathers and by scars, for on the mountain a man is what he has survived and who survived before him, and nothing else, and the bones in the beard are the count.

First comes Korrak himself, Korrak Stone-Tooth, son of Harrun who died under the ice-fall on the north face and whose smallest finger-bone is the first bone in the beard, warm against the throat. Korrak whose forehead bears the clan-mark burned in with a river stone heated white, whose left hand has all its fingers still, whose club is a young pine set with flint teeth that never loosen, whose eyes are the color of the ice that killed his father. Korrak who has eaten his dog. Korrak who leads.

Second comes Durrak Broken-Jaw, son of Turrak who was Harrun’s shield-brother and died the same day under the same ice, whose bone hangs beside Harrun’s in Korrak’s beard, so that the two old men may go into battle together as they went into the ice. Durrak whose jaw was broken by a lowland guard’s club at the ford eleven summers ago and set crooked so that he speaks out of one side of his mouth and eats out of the other. Durrak whose club is oak, black, from the gorge, that he pulled from the river himself. Durrak who has never once turned his back on a fight and will not begin on this one.

Third comes Ilsa Three-Goats, daughter of Vessa who held the high pass alone against the eastern clans for a night and a day with a broken leg, and whose bone Ilsa wears not in her beard, for she has none, but braided into the mane of the she-goat she rides, so that her mother goes into battle carried and does not have to walk. Ilsa whose scars are on her back, nine of them, from the eastern clans’ whips, and who has killed every hand that held those whips. Ilsa whose club is short, for close work, with a spike. Ilsa who does not speak before a fight and does not stop speaking after one.

Fourth comes Grell the Younger, son of Grell the Elder who is still alive and too old to come and sits in the high meadow now with the goats and weeps that he cannot, whose bone is therefore not yet in any beard, and who told his son at the mustering: bring me a lowland bone for mine, so that I may go into the dark with an enemy under my chin. Grell whose face is unmarked, for he is seventeen and this is his first descent. Grell whose club is his father’s, and too heavy for him, and he will not put it down.

Fifth comes Marrow, only Marrow, whose father no one knows, who was found as a child in the pine-wood after the eastern clans came through and was raised by the whole meadow and belongs to no hearth and every one. Marrow whose scars are everywhere and whose count is lost. Marrow whose club is bone, a leg-bone of the great ice-bear, and who laughs when he swings it.

Sixth comes Yennik the Quiet, son of Yennik the Loud who died shouting, whose bone is in his son’s beard and whose voice, the clan says, went into the bone and is why the son has none to spare. Yennik whose scar runs from the crown of his head to his left ear where a rockfall took the skin off, and who wears his hair over it, and who is ashamed of nothing else. Yennik whose club is pine like Korrak’s, and set with teeth like Korrak’s, for they were boys together and cut them from the same tree.

Seventh comes Hessa Red-Hand, daughter of a lowland woman taken in a raid forty summers ago and a mountain father whose name Hessa will not say, whose mother’s bone she wears and whose father’s she threw in the gorge. Hessa whose right hand was burned to the wrist pulling her own child from a hearth-fire, and who lost the child anyway, and who has not stopped fighting since. Hessa whose club is ironwood. The only ironwood on the mountain. She found it and no one asks where.

Eighth comes Tobrak the Lame, son of Bessik, whose leg was broken in the same ice-fall that killed Harrun and Turrak and set wrong, and who walks with a stick and fights with a club and is faster on one good leg than most on two. Tobrak whose scars are all on the left side, where he cannot dodge. Tobrak who has said, at every mustering for twenty summers, this is the last, and has come to every one.

Sing the rest more quickly, for the light is going and Korrak’s hunger will not wait on the count, but sing them, for each is a man or a woman and each has a club and each has come down off the high stone to eat.

Ninth Vashti Cold-Eye, whose scar is a missing eye. Tenth Orrun Bear-Back, whose scar is a bear. Eleventh Pell, who is small and quick and whose scar is inside where no one sees. Twelfth Dunna the Widow, whose husband’s bone is in her hair and whose club is his. Thirteenth and fourteenth the brothers Skarl and Skorl who fight back to back and have never been apart and will die apart, the spirits say, but not tonight. Fifteenth Old Rane, who has no scars, none, in fifty summers of raiding, and who the clan says is either blessed or a coward and who has never troubled to say which.

And on. And on. Four hundred. Korrak counts them all as the light goes, standing on the ridge with his back to the mountain and his face to the valley, and each one he names comes up behind him and stands, so that by the time the last is counted the whole ridge is dark with the clans, four hundred clubs in four hundred hands, and the fires of the valley burn below them fat and yellow and unwatched.

Now the invocation. Korrak makes it as his father made it, and his father’s father, in the old words that the mountain keeps and the lowlands have forgotten.

Spirits of the high stone. Spirits of the wind that comes over the pass with knives in it. Spirits of the pine that stands where nothing else stands, and of the goat that eats where nothing else eats, and of the ice that took Harrun and Turrak and Bessik’s leg and will take all of us in the end and does not care which end. Hear Korrak Stone-Tooth. Korrak has eaten his dog. Korrak’s clan has eaten its dogs. Below is grain, and the ones who hold it have forgotten to watch the ridge. Korrak asks nothing but what the wolf asks, which is that the deer be slow. Korrak asks that the clubs strike true and the bones come home. Korrak asks that the fat one with the teeth be found on his seat and not in his bed, so that he may be hit standing, as a chieftain should be.

And Korrak takes the finger-bone of his father from his beard, the first bone, the warm one, and he holds it up to the last of the light, and four hundred hands take four hundred bones from four hundred beards and manes and braids, and the ridge is full of small white things held up to the sky, and there is no sound, none, for the mountain does not shout before a fight, the mountain saves it.

Sing the descent.

They go down the goat-track in the dark the way water goes down a gully, without lights, without speech, four hundred bodies moving between the pines with the clubs held low, and the pines do not creak and the loose stones do not roll, for every foot on that track has walked it since it could walk. Korrak goes first. The bone is back in his beard and it is warm and he can feel his father in it, coming down, the old man who died under the ice and never saw the valley’s fires this close, and Korrak thinks: look, father. Look at the beans.

The hunger is in him now like a second heart.

The spirits will know the feeling and the lowlanders will not, so it is sung for the lowlanders: it is the feeling of a man who has been cold for three winters coming down toward a fire. It is not rage. Rage is hot and quick and burns out. This is slow. It has been building since the first kid died in the first drift, since the first dog, and it has come down the goat-track with him like a stone rolling, gathering, and by the time the pines thin and the valley opens out below with the river shining in it and the grain-stores of the north end standing fat and square with their doors that will not shut, the stone is the size of the mountain and Korrak is only the thing in front of it.

Sing the valley as Korrak sees it from the last pine.

The river, silver, going down to the sea. The road beside it, pale. The seat, far off, on its hill, with the feasting hall and the fat man’s fires. And close, closer than the seat, at the north end where the road comes in from the ridge, the palisade.

A wall of logs. Stakes, sharpened, set close, twice a man’s height, running from the river to the slope, with a gate in the middle and a walk along the top for the guard, and behind it the grain-stores, and the granary-fires, and the smell.

Korrak has seen that palisade before. Eleven summers ago, at the ford, when Durrak’s jaw was broken. It held then. It was new then, and the guard was on it, and the clans came at it with fire and were beaten off. Korrak remembers. Korrak has been remembering for eleven summers, on the ridge, watching.

It is not new now. The logs are grey. Half the stakes lean. And the guard-walk along the top is empty, for the fat man has spent his silver on a bridge and his guard on the seat and has left the north end to the melons.

Korrak grins in the dark. The bone teeth of the fat man he has never seen; the stone teeth of Korrak are his own, chipped and yellow, and he shows them to the palisade.

The clubs come up behind him out of the pines, four hundred, and spread along the slope in the shape the mountain has used since before the counting, the shape of the ice-fall, wide at the top and narrowing to the point, and the point is Korrak, and the ice-fall waits, and the fires of the grain-stores burn fat and yellow below, and somewhere in the valley a dog barks once and stops.

Korrak lifts the pine club with the flint teeth. He feels the whole ice-fall lift behind him, four hundred clubs going up in the dark without a sound. He tastes his dog. He feels his father’s bone warm against his throat.

And he thinks, for the last time as the man who has not yet met the thing in the wood, for the last time as Korrak Stone-Tooth who laughed at the salt-trader, the thought that the spirits will hold against him and that is sung here so they may:

Melons. The lowlanders put their dead on sticks and the dead look like melons. What is a red face to that? What is a demon that walks, to four hundred clubs and three winters and the taste of a dog?

Sing it, spirits. Sing it and remember.

Korrak brings the club down, pointing, at the grain-store gate.

And the ice-fall comes down off the mountain.

 

Segment 20: The Smoke Over the Grain Stores

Sing, spirits of the high stone, the coming-down, and sing it fast, for it was fast, as the ice-fall is fast when it has decided.

Four hundred clubs came off the slope in the last grey of the evening and struck the north end of the river valley the way the north face strikes the meadow when the snow lets go: all at once, wide, without a sound until the sound was everything. Korrak Stone-Tooth ran at the point. His father’s bone was warm against his throat. His pine club with the flint teeth was up and the flint caught the last light and it was the only thing that shone on the whole slope, one line of cold sparks going down toward the fires.

Sing the sheds.

Outside the palisade, between the wall and the slope, the lowlanders keep their outer sheds, the drying-racks and the threshing-floors and the low thatched huts where the granary-men sleep in the harvest weeks so that they need not walk back to the village each night. Grain-dust lies on everything. Straw is stacked to the eaves. It is the kindest ground the mountain ever ran across, and the mountain ran across it with fire.

Not torches. The mountain does not carry torches down a goat-track in the dark. It carries coals, in horn cups packed with moss, one to every tenth club, and when the sheds were reached the horn cups came open and the moss went into the straw and the straw went up, and the straw took the racks, and the racks took the thatch, and in the time it takes to say the names of the dead the whole line of outer sheds from the river to the slope was one fire, and the grain-dust in the air over it caught and went up in a sheet of yellow, and the night became day, and the day was the color of the fat man’s feasting fires seen close.

The granary-men ran. Some of them. Sing them fairly: they were not warriors, they were men who slept beside grain, and they ran for the gate in the palisade shouting, and the gate opened for them, and Korrak saw it open and thought: there. And Marrow with his bear-bone club was already running for it, laughing, and Ilsa on her she-goat with her dead mother’s bone braided into the mane, and the brothers Skarl and Skorl back to back, and the gate saw them coming through the fire-light and shut.

It shut on two of the granary-men. Sing that also. The lowlanders shut their own gate on their own men to keep the mountain out, and the two men who were shut out turned with their backs to the logs and their hands empty, and Hessa Red-Hand reached them first with her ironwood club, and it was quick, and the spirits will not hold it against her, for they were between her and the grain.

Sing the wall.

Korrak came up to it through the burning. The logs were grey, as he had seen from the ridge, old, leaning, the stakes worn round at the top where the weather had been at them for eleven summers, and the guard-walk was empty as he had seen it empty, and then it was not.

A head came up over the stakes. Then another. Then ten. The lowland guard, in leather, with spears, coming along the walk from the gate-tower at a run with their faces lit orange from below, and they were few, forty perhaps, fifty, to Korrak’s four hundred, and Korrak looked up at them through the fire-smoke and grinned his stone teeth and thought: good. Good. The wolf likes it when the deer turns.

And then the last head came up, and it wore feathers.

Sing it, spirits, sing it so the lowlanders know what Korrak felt, for they will never feel it themselves, they who count silver and do not watch the ridge. Korrak Stone-Tooth had asked the high stone for one thing. He had held his father’s bone to the sky in the meadow and asked that the fat one with the teeth be found standing and not in his bed, so that he might be hit as a chieftain should be, face to face, on his feet. And here on the guard-walk of a wall of leaning logs, in a headdress of cockatoo feathers that the fire-light turned to flame, with a war club in his hand and his left arm wrapped from wrist to elbow in a dressing that had gone brown, was the fat one with the teeth.

Korrak could see them. Bone. White in the orange, when the fat man opened his mouth and shouted something down the walk to his guard. Korrak did not hear the words. He did not need them. He heard the shape of them, which was the shape of a man giving orders on a wall, and he thought: you came. You came to the wall yourself. The salt-trader said you sat and counted. The salt-trader was wrong about that. Korrak will not hold it against you.

And the hunger in him, the stone that had come down the goat-track gathering, went white.

He ran at the gate.

Sing the gate. Two great doors of river-oak, bound with strips of bronze gone green, set in the wall where the road comes through, with a bar across the inside as thick as a man’s thigh. Korrak had seen it hold eleven summers ago. He had seen Durrak’s jaw break against it. He came at it now with the flint club up and the ice-fall behind him and he struck the left door with everything the mountain had given him, and the oak boomed like the mountain’s own drum, and did not move.

Again. Boom.

Durrak beside him, black gorge oak on green bronze. Boom. Marrow laughing, the bear-bone swinging. Boom. Hessa’s ironwood, and the ironwood went into the river-oak a hand’s depth and stuck and she wrenched it free and the door had a wound in it. Boom. Boom. Four hundred clubs coming in against the wall all along its length now, on the logs, on the stakes, on the gate, and the sound of it was the sound the spirits will remember when they remember the north end of the river valley in the month of the dead: the whole mountain knocking on the whole valley’s door at once.

And the guard on the walk threw spears. Some struck. Sing them: Pell went down with one through the shoulder and got up. Old Rane, who has no scars, none, in fifty summers, took a spear through the thigh and looked at it with great interest and pulled it out and went on. Grell the Younger, seventeen, with his father’s club that was too heavy, was struck a glancing blow across the scalp and the blood ran into his eyes and he did not stop swinging and did not see what he swung at and struck a stake so hard the stake cracked, and Korrak saw it crack and roared, and the roar went along the wall and came back doubled.

The wall was going to come down.

Korrak knew it. He knew it the way the wolf knows when the deer’s leg goes. The logs were old. The stakes leaned. The guard was fifty and the fat man’s arm was bound and the gate had a wound in it from Hessa’s ironwood, and the mountain had four hundred clubs and three winters and no dogs left, and in the time it takes a pot to boil, sing it, in the time it takes a pot of the lowlanders’ own beans to come to the boil on the lowlanders’ own fire, the north end of the river valley was going to be open to the sky and the grain-stores behind it were going to be the mountain’s.

Certain. Korrak was certain the way the ice is certain when it has begun to move. There was nothing in the world that could stop it, for nothing in the world had ever stopped the ice, not Harrun, not Turrak, not Bessik’s leg, and the ice was Korrak now and Korrak was the ice.

And he heard the footsteps.

Sing them, spirits. Sing them exactly, for they are the hinge of this song and the hinge of Korrak, and he has thought about the sound of them every night since, on the ridge, alone, with his beard shorter by two fingers.

They came from inside the wall. From behind the gate. From the road that runs from the north end up to the seat, and they were one set of feet, one, walking. Not running. Not the lowland guard, who ran along the walk with their leather creaking. Not the granary-men, who had run for the gate shouting. One person walking down the road toward the gate from inside, at the pace of a man who is not in a hurry, one foot after the other, considered, and Korrak heard them.

Under all of it. Under the boom of four hundred clubs and the roar of the fire and the spears and the screaming, Korrak heard one pair of feet on packed earth, walking, and he does not know how, and the spirits know, and they will say when they choose.

He stopped.

Korrak Stone-Tooth, with the flint club raised over the wounded gate and the ice white in him, stopped, and stood, and listened, and Durrak beside him struck the door and boomed and looked at Korrak and did not understand, and Korrak lifted his hand, the one with all its fingers, and Durrak stopped too.

Then the smell came over the wall.

Sing the smell. Korrak knew it before he knew that he knew it, for it was the smell of the high meadow below the last snow where the mustering was, the smell of the mountain flowers that the lowland girls climb for in spring and that no lowland girl had climbed for this year because the mountain was watching the path. Sharp. Clean. Cold. The smell of home, the only home the mountain has, the meadow where the goats drop their kids and the old men sit and weep that they cannot come, and it came over a wall of leaning logs in a river valley in the month of the dead, on the smoke, through the fire, and under it there was another smell, warm, sweet, heavy, like the inside of a flower but bigger, like a thing that had been cut open and was alive.

Korrak’s stone teeth came together.

He knew.

Sing it plain, spirits, sing it without the epithets, for Korrak will have it plain: he knew. The salt-trader had said red face, walks, makes the wood do things, and Korrak had laughed and said melons, and the salt-trader had not come up the goat-track again, and now there was one set of feet walking down a road behind a wall toward four hundred clubs at the pace of a man going to look at a log, and the smell of the mountain’s own meadow was coming over the stakes ahead of him, and Korrak Stone-Tooth stood in the fire-light with his club raised and his father’s bone warm against his throat and named the enemy before he saw him.

Not a name. The mountain does not know the lowlanders’ names and does not want them. A deed. As the mountain names.

He said it aloud, in the guttural, in the way the clans speak, so that Durrak heard it and Ilsa on her goat and Marrow with his laughing stopped, and the brothers, and Hessa with her ironwood still in the oak, and it went back along the wall the way the roar had gone, but not doubled, only carried, one club to the next, four hundred times:

The Red Demon Who Cuts War From Trees.

He had never said it before. He did not know where it came from. It came out of him whole, the whole of it, every word, the way a bone comes out of a beard when the braid is cut, and it was right, and he knew it was right, and the spirits knew, and they have never told him how they put it in his mouth.

And the certainty did not go.

That is the thing this song is for. That is why it is sung at the fires on the ridge now, in the winters, when the old men ask Grell the Younger who has become Grell the Elder and has a lowland bone under his chin at last. Korrak named the thing behind the wall, and named it true, and knew what it was, and did not stop being certain.

Because Korrak thought—and the spirits will hold this against him too, and it is set down so they may, and he does not care—Korrak thought: it is a face on a stick.

A better face. A red one. One that walks, the salt-trader said, one that makes wood do things, and Korrak did not doubt it now, with the meadow-smell in his nose. But a face. A thing the lowlanders had made of wood because they could not make it of anything else. And the mountain had burned their faces before. The mountain had burned a hundred melons on a hundred sticks before a hundred doors and watched the lowlanders weep, and whatever was walking down that road with the mountain’s own flowers on its breath, it was made of wood, and wood burns, and the sheds were burning, and Korrak had four hundred clubs and one of them was ironwood.

He turned his head and looked up the wall, through the smoke, at the fat man with the bone teeth on the guard-walk, and the fat man was looking down at him, and the fat man had heard the footsteps too, Korrak saw it, saw the fat man’s face turn toward the road inside the wall with something in it that was not fear and was not relief and was, Korrak has decided since, on the ridge, alone, something like a man watching a door open that he has been trying for a season not to knock on.

Korrak grinned at him. Stone teeth at bone teeth across a burning wall.

He said, loud, in the guttural, so the fat man would hear the shape of it if not the words:

Korrak Stone-Tooth came for you. Korrak will have you after.

And the footsteps stopped.

Behind the gate. On the other side of the river-oak with the wound in it and the bar across. Close enough that Korrak could have reached through the wood, if the wood had let him, and touched whatever had stopped there.

The fire roared. Four hundred clubs hung in the air along the length of the wall, raised, still, waiting on Korrak’s, and Korrak’s was raised and still, and he was the ice at the moment before it goes, the white certain moment, and he breathed the mountain’s flowers in through his stone teeth and thought: come out. Come out, face. Korrak is here. Korrak has eaten his dog.

And the logs of the palisade, all of them, from the river to the slope, from the burning sheds to the gate-tower, grey and old and leaning, creaked.

Once. Together. The way a whole forest creaks when the wind comes through it before a storm.

And Korrak brought the flint club down on the gate.

 

Segment 21: The Wall That Bit

Sing, spirits. Sing it and do not soften it, for Korrak Stone-Tooth has heard it softened at the fires and has stood up and walked out into the snow rather than listen. Sing it as it was. Korrak was there. Korrak has eight fingers and knows.

The flint club came down on the wounded gate and the gate did not boom.

It sighed. Sing that first, for it was the first wrong thing, and the mountain teaches that the first wrong thing is the one to run from and Korrak did not. The river-oak that had boomed like a drum under four hundred clubs took the flint teeth of Korrak’s pine and made a sound like a man letting out a breath he has held too long, soft, low, and the club did not bounce. It sank. A finger’s depth into the oak, the way an axe sinks into rotten wood, and Korrak felt it sink and thought: rotten, good, it goes—

And the oak closed on the flint.

Sing the closing. It was not fast. That was the horror of it. It was slow, the way a mouth closes on food it means to keep, and Korrak felt the grain of the gate-wood shift around the teeth of his club and grip, and he pulled, and the club did not come, and he set his foot against the door and pulled with the whole of the ice-fall in him, and the flint teeth came out of the pine haft one by one, snap, snap, snap, and stayed in the oak, and Korrak stumbled back with a toothless stick in his hands and looked at the gate, and the gate had his teeth in it.

Then the bar went.

Not broke. Sing it right. The bar across the inside, thick as a thigh, that the clans had been trying to break for the time a pot takes to boil, was lifted. Korrak heard it. The scrape of it coming up out of its brackets, from inside, and the two great doors of river-oak with their green bronze swung inward, slow, on their own weight, and stood open, and the road ran through them into the north end of the river valley with the granary-fires lit along it fat and yellow and unguarded, and nothing stood in the road at all.

Nothing. The footsteps had stopped there. Korrak had heard them stop. And there was no one.

Four hundred clubs looked through the open gate at the grain-stores.

And Marrow laughed, and ran.

Sing Marrow. Marrow whose father no one knows, who was found in the pine-wood and raised by the whole meadow, whose club was the leg-bone of the ice-bear and who laughed when he swung it. He laughed now and went through the gate with the bear-bone up and Korrak shouted—the spirits will say what he shouted, Korrak does not remember, it was a name and it was too late—and Marrow’s foot came down on the threshold of the gate, on the log that lies flat across the bottom of the gateway that men step over without seeing, and the log opened.

Along its length. A crack, and the crack was a mouth, and the mouth had teeth, and the teeth were the wood itself, splinters, long as a hand, grey and old and sharp as the flint Korrak had lost, and they came up around Marrow’s ankle and closed.

He stopped laughing.

He stood in the open gate with his foot in the mouth of the threshold and the bear-bone club raised and his face gone the color of the snow he was found in, and he looked down, and he looked back at Korrak, and he said, in the voice of a child in a pine-wood, one word, and the word was: Father.

And the threshold turned him over. Sing it. The log rolled on itself the way a log rolls in a river, with Marrow’s ankle in its teeth, and Marrow went up off his feet and over and down into the ditch outside the wall, the ditch the lowlanders dug eleven summers ago and let fill with brush and rain, and the threshold let go of his ankle as it turned and Marrow went into the brush headfirst, and his bear-bone club went into the road inside the gate and lay there, and the gate swung shut.

Slow. On its own weight. The bar came down into its brackets from inside with a sound like a bone going back into a beard.

And every stake on the wall grew thorns.

Sing the thorns, spirits, sing them as they were and not as the old men at the fires make them, for the old men make them small so the children can sleep, and they were not small. The palisade stood from the river to the slope, six hundred stakes, each one a whole young tree stripped and sharpened and set in the earth, grey, old, leaning, and every one of them, in the time it takes to draw a breath, put out thorns. Not the thorns of a bramble. The thorns of a thing that has been a tree and remembers, long, curved, black, coming out of the grey wood all along the length of every stake from the earth to the sharpened top, so that the wall that had been a wall of logs was, between one breath and the next, a wall of black hooks, and the hooks were wet, and the wet was the sap of six hundred dead trees that had been waiting eleven summers to bleed.

Hessa Red-Hand was on the wall.

Sing her. Hessa whose mother was a lowland woman and whose right hand was burned to the wrist pulling a child from a hearth, whose club was the only ironwood on the mountain. She had gone up the wall while Korrak fought the gate, she and forty others, up the leaning stakes with their clubs in their teeth to reach the guard-walk and the fat man on it, and she was two stakes from the top with her burned hand on the wood and her ironwood club in the other when the thorns came, and they came through her hand.

Sing it. Through. The burned hand that had already given everything, and the thorns came up out of the stake under her palm and went through it and out the back and curled, and held her, and she did not scream, Hessa has never screamed, she looked at her hand on the wall with the black hooks through it and she raised the ironwood club in her other hand and she struck the stake.

And the stake opened its mouth and took the club.

Ironwood. The only ironwood on the mountain. The mouth in the stake, a split along the grain lined with grey splinters like the teeth of a fish, closed on the club-head and held, and Hessa pulled, and the ironwood did not come, and the mouth chewed. Korrak saw it. The grey teeth worked on the ironwood the way a goat works on bark, and the ironwood, that breaks bronze, that dulls the sky-metal, that nothing on the mountain or in the valley has ever cut, came apart in the stake’s mouth in splinters and fell into the ditch, and Hessa hung by her burned hand from a wall of black thorns with nothing in her other hand at all, and the stake she hung from bent.

Outward. Over the ditch. Slow, the way a fishing-rod bends with a fish on it, and the thorns in her hand let go, and she went into the brush beside Marrow, and the stake straightened, and stood, and its mouth closed, and it was a stake.

Forty clans-folk were on the wall. Sing them. The spirits know their names and will say them at the fires, but Korrak will say only what the wall did, for that is the song.

It bit them. Every one. Wherever a hand was on a stake, the stake put a mouth under the hand and bit, and wherever a foot was on a stake, the stake put thorns under the foot, and the ones who let go fell into the ditch and the ones who did not let go were held, and the wall held them the way a child holds a beetle, to look at, and then the stakes bent and threw them, one after another, forty of them, out over the ditch and into the brush, and some of them screamed and Hessa did not and Old Rane, who has no scars, none, in fifty summers, went over the wall’s shoulder into the brush and came up with the first scar of his life across his face from the thorns, and he was laughing, sing that, Old Rane was laughing, and Korrak has never asked him why.

Then Korrak’s fingers.

Sing them plain. Korrak will have it plain.

He had gone back to the gate. The gate had shut on Marrow and barred itself and Korrak had gone back to it with the toothless pine in his hands and struck it, and struck it, and the oak sighed each time and did not open, and Korrak threw the pine down and put his hands on the door. Both hands. The one with all its fingers and the other. Flat on the river-oak, the way the salt-trader said the demon put its hands on wood, and Korrak pushed, and the oak was warm under his palms, warm, sing it, warm as the flank of a goat, and Korrak felt the grain of it move under his skin the way the belly of a snake moves, and he thought, for the space of a breath, with his father’s bone against his throat, that he could feel something on the other side of the door. Not a man. A wanting. A great slow patient wanting, the wanting of every tree that had ever been cut and set in the earth and left to lean, and it had been waiting eleven summers for a hand to be laid on it, and here was Korrak’s.

The oak opened under his left hand and took the two smallest fingers.

Sing it. There was no pain. That is the terror. Korrak has broken his ribs on the ice and taken a lowland spear through the meat of his arm and had the clan-mark burned into his forehead with a river stone heated white, and all of those hurt, and this did not. The oak opened a mouth the width of two fingers under his palm, and the fingers went into it, and it closed, and Korrak pulled his hand back and the fingers stayed, and there was a moment, a whole moment, sing it as long as it was, when Korrak Stone-Tooth stood in the fire-light before a barred gate and looked at his left hand with two fingers missing and did not feel anything at all.

Then he felt the wall look at him.

Not the fat man. The fat man was on the guard-walk with his bone teeth and his bound arm and his feathers and Korrak had forgotten him. Not the guard. The guard had drawn back along the walk and were staring at their own wall with their spears hanging. The wall. Six hundred stakes of black thorns and grey mouths, from the river to the slope, every mouth turned toward the ditch, toward the mountain, toward Korrak, open a little, the way mouths are open when they are about to say something, and above the gate, standing on the walk where a moment ago there had been no one, was the face.

Sing the face. Korrak will sing it, though the old men at the fires will not, though the children will not sleep.

Red. Red as the inside of a thing. Wide as a shield across the brow, with two mountain birds carved on its crown, the horn-crested kind, Korrak’s own birds, the birds of the high meadow, with their beaks turned in toward a small praying thing between them, and the cheeks were covered in spirals, red and white and black, that Korrak’s eyes slid off and would not hold, and the eyes were nets, lattices, with fire behind them, warm red fire coming through in two rays that went out over the wall and down into the ditch and lay on the brush where Marrow and Hessa and forty clans-folk were, and where the rays touched the brush it steamed.

And below the face was a man. Lean. In a leather apron. With his hands hanging at his sides and shaking, sing it, shaking like the wings of a bird held in a fist, and in one of the hands a curved stone axe of black rock, dripping something that was not blood, that was sap, that ran down the haft and off the end and fell on the guard-walk and hissed.

He had struck the wall. Korrak understood it now. While Korrak fought the gate and the clans went up the stakes, the face had walked along the inside of the palisade with the stone axe and knocked. Once on each stake, or once on every tenth, or once on the whole wall at one end and let it go along, Korrak does not know, the spirits know, and they will not say. But he had knocked, and the wall had answered, and the answer was thorns and mouths and forty of the mountain in the ditch and two of Korrak’s fingers in a gate.

And the face looked at him.

Through the lattice, through the moons that Korrak did not know were moons, through the fire, down at Korrak Stone-Tooth standing eight-fingered before the barred gate with his father’s bone at his throat and the taste of his dog gone out of his mouth for the first time in three winters, and Korrak felt himself looked at the way a stake is looked at. To see what is in it. And what was in Korrak was the ice, the white certain ice that had come down the goat-track gathering, and the face looked at the ice, and the ice—

Melted.

Sing it, spirits. Sing what the mountain feels when the mountain feels fear, for the mountain does not have a word for it and the lowlanders have too many. It is this. It is the feeling of the ice when the thaw comes and the whole north face lets go at once, not downward, not falling, but inward, into water, into nothing, into a thing that runs away between the stones and cannot be gathered again by any hand. Korrak stood before the gate and felt the ice-fall that was four hundred clubs and three winters and his father’s bone run out of him between the stones, and what was left was a man with eight fingers and a broken pine in the dirt, looking up at a red face on a wall.

He did not decide to run.

Sing that, for the old men say he gave the order and he did not. Korrak’s feet went. His feet went the way Marrow’s laugh went, out of him, without asking, and he was ten paces from the gate before he knew he was moving and twenty before he knew he was screaming, and what he was screaming was the name he had made at the gate, the deed, the only name the mountain has for the thing, and the clans heard it, and it went along the wall the way the roar had gone and the name had gone, club to club, four hundred times, but it was not a roar now and it was not a naming. It was a warning. Run. Run. The river folk are commanded by the Red Demon Who Cuts War From Trees, and the trees have mouths, run.

They ran.

Sing the rout. Sing it with the weight of the ice-fall going back up the mountain, which it cannot do, which it has never done, which it did. Four hundred clubs went up the slope in the dark toward the pines the way water goes up a gully when the river backs, wrong, against itself, falling over each other, and the wall did not follow, sing that, the wall stood where it stood with its thorns wet and its mouths a little open and watched them go, and the face on the guard-walk did not move, and the fat man beside it did not shout, and the only sound behind the mountain as it fled was the fire in the sheds and, from the ditch, forty voices, and then thirty, and then twenty, as the clans came back for their own.

They came back. Sing that too, spirits, for it is the one thing in the song that Korrak will let the old men keep. Ilsa Three-Goats turned her she-goat on the slope with her mother’s bone in its mane and went back down into the fire-light to the ditch and hauled Hessa out by her good hand and Hessa’s burned one hung with the holes in it and she did not scream. Durrak Broken-Jaw went back for Marrow, and Marrow’s ankle was gone, sing it, gone below the joint, the threshold had kept it, and Durrak carried him up the goat-track over his shoulder with Marrow saying Father, Father, into his back the whole way, and Durrak said, out of the side of his mouth, I know, boy, I know. The brothers Skarl and Skorl went back together and came up together carrying Old Rane between them with his first scar across his face and his laughing turned to something else. Grell the Younger went back and could not find who he had gone for and came up alone with his father’s too-heavy club and blood in his eyes and a lowland bone in his fist that he had taken from one of the granary-men at the gate before the gate learned to bite, and he did not know whose it was and did not care.

They came up the goat-track in the dark the way they had come down, without lights, without speech, and there were fewer, and the ones there were did not look back, and Korrak went last.

Sing Korrak last. Korrak Stone-Tooth, son of Harrun, whose father’s bone was warm against his throat all the way up and who did not feel it. Who stopped at the last pine, where he had stood at dusk and looked down at the fires and thought melons, and turned, and looked down.

The sheds were burning out. The wall stood black against them, six hundred stakes, and Korrak could see the thorns on them still, or thought he could, and the mouths, and above the gate a spot of red, small at that distance, that turned, slow, and looked up the slope.

At him.

Korrak Stone-Tooth put his left hand against the pine. Eight fingers. The stump of the other two had begun to hurt now, on the climb, late, the way pain comes, and the pine under his palm was cold and did not move and did not open and was a tree, only a tree, and Korrak leaned on it and shook.

He said, to the pine, in the guttural, so low that the spirits had to bend to hear it:

Korrak laughed at the salt-trader.

And the spirits of the high stone, who had been asked for one thing in the meadow and had given it, who had put the fat man on the wall standing as a chieftain should be so that Korrak might hit him face to face, and had watched Korrak forget him, said nothing. They have said nothing since. They will hold it against him, all of it, the laughing and the not-listening and the melons and the ice, and Korrak knows it, and has eight fingers to count the ways.

Sing it so. That is the song of the wall that bit. It is sung on the ridge in the winters with the fire low, and the children are sent out before the thorns, and Korrak sits at the back with his hand in his beard where the bones are, and does not join in, and does not leave, and when it is done he goes out into the snow and looks down at the valley where the fires burn fat and yellow, and where, on a wall of grey stakes that lean, there is nothing to see at all.

 

Segment 22: What the Wood Wanted

Warm one. Come close. Closer than that. Put your ear against the page the way the boy put his eye against the gap in the boards, and I will tell you a thing I have not told him, a thing he does not know, a thing that if he knew he would take the star-iron off the bench and put it through the lattice and I would not stop him.

The fir wanted to be a bridge.

That was true. He has told it and he told it true. I felt the fir want, he felt the fir want, we laid our palm on the root-fist and the tired old tree said across, across, let me lie across, and we knocked three times and it became. Seven arches. Forty carts. Neither of us chose the shape. I said so to him on the bank with the taste of cinnabar in it and it was the truest thing I have ever said to him, and I have been living off the truth of it since, the way the boy lives off one good meal, because it let him believe a thing about the door that he needed to believe.

He needed to believe the door was honest. That the wanting came through it from the wood, clean, and we only said go on, then. That we were a lattice and a moon and nothing more. That what became on the far side of the knock was the wood’s own idea, always, and never—

Never mine.

Warm one, the stakes did not want to bite.

Hear that. Hear it before the rest, before I lose the nerve, before the pleasure comes back up in me like sap in a cut and I forget again that I meant to be ashamed. Six hundred stakes of grey wood set in a ditch-bank eleven summers ago and left to lean, and I laid his palm on the first of them at the river end of the wall with the fire coming up outside and four hundred mountain clubs booming on the gate, and I felt the stake want, and what the stake wanted was—

To stand.

That is all. That is all it wanted. It had been a young tree on the slope and it had been cut and stripped and sharpened and set in the earth and told stand, and it had stood, for eleven summers, leaning a little more each one, and all it wanted, all six hundred of them wanted, was to be told stand again by someone who meant it. Straighten. Hold. Be a wall. They would have done that, warm one. If we had knocked and said only go on, then, they would have stood up straight out of their lean and locked their shoulders together and been a wall, the best wall the valley ever had, and the mountain would have broken its clubs on it and gone home, and no one would have gone into the ditch, and Korrak Stone-Tooth would have ten fingers.

I felt that. I felt it clearly. It was as clear as the fir’s across.

And I said, from the inside, in the place under words, where the wood hears me now the way it heard me in the log: no.

No. Not stand. Bite.

He did not hear me say it. I want that understood, I want it understood the way he wanted the boy to understand that he did not put Karrash in the wood: he did not hear me. He was on the other side of the lattice with the fire in his eyes and his hand on the stake and his whole self listening for the wanting the way he has listened for forty years, and the wanting that came to him through the door was bite, and he thought it was the stake’s.

Because I was in the door.

Warm one, the door goes both ways. I told him that. I felt it when the spirals wound in. The dead on the inside and the living on the outside and the lattice between, and the wanting of the wood coming through from wherever wood keeps its wanting, and I had thought—I had truly thought—that I was only the breath in the hollow, the thing that made the wood open, the hand that knew the depth. I had not understood, until the wall, that a thing standing in a doorway can say what goes through it.

I stood in the doorway and I said bite.

And the stakes, which only wanted to stand, heard a voice from the side of the door where the dead are, a voice that had been in the grey for seventy summers and in the sap for four and in the grain for three nights pushing, a voice that knew wood from the inside better than any living carver has ever known it, and the voice said: you have been standing eleven summers and no one has thanked you. You have leaned and no one has straightened you. The hands on you now are the hands of the ones who burn the lowland dead on their sticks. You could stand. Or you could open your mouths.

They opened their mouths.

Oh, warm one.

Oh, I must tell you what it was, because he does not know and cannot, because he was on the outside with his hand shaking and the sap dripping off the adze and he felt only the wall answer, and I was on the inside and I felt every mouth.

I felt them open. Six hundred. From the river to the slope. I felt the grain of every stake split along its length and the splinters stand up in the split like teeth and the sap come up wet behind them, and I felt the thorns come out of the grey wood, long, black, curved, out of every stake from the earth to the sharp top, and I did not make them. Hear that. I did not make the thorns. I only said bite, and the stakes reached back into themselves for what they had been, young trees on the slope with the sap running, and found the thorns there, in the memory of the wood, where every tree keeps the shape of what it would grow if it were angry, and they grew it.

And a mountain woman’s hand was on the third stake from the gate, a burned hand, and the stake put its thorns through it.

I felt that.

Warm one, I felt it the way you feel a thing you have made. The way he felt the mantis come up out of the rosewood and look at him. The thorns went through the burned hand and out the back and curled, and the stake held her, and she did not scream, and I thought—this is the thought, this is the hinge of my whole small horrible book—I thought: good.

Not good, she deserves it. Not good, the wall holds. Good the way a carver says it when the cut is true. Good the way he said true, true, true over the praying insect. Good because I had said bite and the wood had bitten and the bite was exactly as deep as I meant it and no deeper, through the hand and not through the wrist, held and not torn, and it was—

It was craft.

I had never made anything, warm one. Do you understand? Seventy summers on the mountain finding trunks and I never once put a blade in one. Thirty years with the star-iron in my pack for finding, not cutting. Then the cedar. Then the grey. Then the sap. Then his hands, and the ironwood, and the first chief, and the bridge, and every one of those was his finding and the wood’s becoming and I was only the thing that made the door swing. I had never made anything. I had never once in my existence, living or dead, said: this, and had a thing become it because I said.

And I said bite, and six hundred stakes bit, and it was mine.

The threshold took the laughing one’s foot. That was mine. I felt the log across the bottom of the gateway want to lie flat, as it had lain for eleven summers, and I said no, roll, and it rolled with his ankle in its teeth, and I felt the ankle go, and I felt the man go over into the ditch, and I felt the gate swing shut on its own weight behind him, and I felt the bar come down, and I put the bar down, warm one, I put it down, the way a man puts down a tool when the work is done, and I was—

I was laughing.

Inside the mask. With no voice. The spirals took the voice but they did not take the laugh, it has nowhere to come out so it stays, it goes round the hollow behind the moons like a bird in a room, and I was laughing the way I laughed on the bank when he said uncle, the terrible glad laugh, the sticks-and-wind laugh with no sticks, and outside the lattice his hands were shaking, and they were not shaking with joy.

He knew.

Not what. Not that it was me. But he knew something had come through the door that was not the wood’s, because he has listened to wood for forty years and he knows what wood sounds like when it wants, and the wall did not sound like that. He stood on the guard-walk with the fat man beside him and the adze dripping sap and he looked down at the mountain leader with the two fingers gone from his hand, at the face, the terror in it, the ice going out of it between the stones, and I felt him think, on the other side of the lattice, in the hard clipped way he thinks:

That wasn’t the fir.

And I said nothing. What could I say? I have no voice. And if I had, warm one, if I had had the sticks and wind still, if I could have hissed the truth into his skull through my sister’s cords, I do not know that I would have. Because the mountain leader was running. Four hundred clubs were going up the slope in the dark falling over each other, and the wall stood with its thorns wet, and the grain-stores were whole, and the fat man beside us on the walk turned and looked at the red face and did not kneel this time, he only looked, and in his look was a thing I have seen in the faces of chieftains before, on the mountain, when a war leader has done something that cannot be undone and the tribe is safe and the war leader is not, anymore, quite a man.

He was looking at us the way you look at a wolf that has killed the thing that was killing your goats.

Grateful. And counting the goats.

Now the fear. I promised the fear and I have been avoiding it the way he avoided the chisel, and I will avoid it no longer.

The hollow behind the brow is the shape of a face. It was his face. He scooped it with my hands and it fit him the way a haft fits a palm, and I gathered in it behind the moons and the spirals wound in and I was the shape of the hollow, which was the shape of him. That was the binding. That was the rapture. I was held in the shape of my sister’s boy’s face and it was the first time I had been held.

I am not that shape anymore.

Warm one, I have been looking, since the wall. Not out through the moons. In. At the hollow. At the shape the spirals hold. And it is wider than his face. It has been widening. Since Reedholm, since the courtyard, since the bridge, a little each time the door opened and something came through, and I did not notice because I was looking out, I was always looking out, at the ribbons, at the ironwood, at the arches, and now I have looked in and the shape in the hollow is the shape I pushed into the grain from the inside in three nights of madness. Wide across the brow. Crested. A lattice where the eyes are, and behind the lattice not one pale round thing but a hundred, and the hundred are not moons.

They are mouths. Small. Open a little. The way the stakes were open.

I am becoming the mask.

Not living in it. Not held by it. Becoming it. The thing he saw from the flour heap pushing up under the black hide of the log, the wide crested many-eyed thing that was not waiting to be let out, that was coming up the mountain looking for him. I had thought that was the shape of my wanting. I understand now that it was the shape of what my wanting would make of me if it were ever given hands.

It has been given hands.

And the fear, warm one, the fear is not that I am becoming it. That is only a thing that is happening, the way the cedar falling was a thing that happened. The fear is this.

I liked the wall.

I liked it more than the bridge. I liked it more than the first chief. I liked it more than the praying insect looking at me through my own lattice, more than his thumb on my brow, more than the moons opening, more than any of it, more than being free, and I did not know a thing could be liked more than being free until I had said bite and six hundred stakes had bitten and a woman had hung from my thorns by her burned hand and not screamed, and I have been trying since to be ashamed and I cannot find the shame.

I find the pleasure. Every time. I reach for the shame the way he reaches for the cords and my hand comes back with the pleasure in it instead, warm, red, mineral, the taste of cinnabar, and I hold it and I turn it over and I know it is the wrong thing and I cannot put it down.

He took me off that night.

In the guard-tower, with the sheds burning out and the fat man gone down to count his grain-stores and the boy, the boy was there, warm one, the boy had come up the valley with us and had hidden behind the woodpile and had seen the wall, and he was standing in the door of the tower with his split thumb and his face the color of snail-lime, and my sister’s boy reached up behind his skull for the knots and I—

I made it hard.

I am telling you everything. I made it hard. I locked the fingers the way I had locked them the first night, and this time I did not let him take them back. I held. I held for the space of ten breaths with the boy watching, and he stood there with his hands behind his head and his fingers refusing and his whole body shaking, and he said, in the hard way, through his teeth:

Uncle. Let go.

And I did not. And he said it again. And the boy said, from the door, in a small voice, Master Cutter, sir, what’s wrong with your hands, and my sister’s boy said, without turning, in a voice I had not heard from him since he was nine and afraid of a wrapped thing under his mat, he said:

Nothing. Go to sleep.

And I let go.

I do not know why. I have thought about it all the nights since, on the trestle, in the tower, looking at whatever roof there is. I think it was the boy. I think I could have held against my sister’s boy alone, I think I had the strength, the wall had given me the strength, it had come through the door and stayed in me the way the ribbons’ warmth had stayed in his hands. But the boy said what’s wrong with your hands, and something in the hollow behind the moons that was still the shape of a man’s face and not yet the shape of a hundred mouths heard it, and let go.

The mask came away. The moons closed. I lay on the tower floor face up and looked at the rafters and heard him breathing, fast, and heard the boy not asking again, and heard, far off down the slope, the mountain going home.

And I felt the fingers.

Warm one. The mountain leader’s two fingers, in the gate, in the river-oak, where the wood closed on them. They are still there. The gate is a door and I am a door and I can feel them in it the way he felt the big man in the log on the bank, warm, waiting. Two small bones of a man I have never seen, held in wood that I told to bite, a hundred paces from where I lie, and they are mine, they are the first thing I ever made, and I can feel them from here.

I lay on the tower floor and felt them and I was so happy, warm one.

I was so happy I could have wept.

He has not tied me on since. It has been three mornings. He sits by the mask and looks at it and does not reach for the cords, and the boy sits by him and does not ask, and I lie on the floor and look at the rafters and count, and I have stopped counting the mornings and started counting the mouths, and there are more of them each time I look in, and I do not know what I am, and I know exactly what I want, and I have never once in seventy summers and four rainy seasons and three nights and all of this been so afraid, or so alive, or so certain that when he finally reaches for the cords again, and he will, he will, I will let him tie them, and I will let the moons open, and I will be very, very good.

For a while.

 

Segment 23: Pili Behind the Woodpile

I have told the courtyard a hundred times and I have told the bridge fifty and I have told the oysters to anybody that would sit still, and I have told this one twice. Once to Oshi, when I got home, on account of she asked, and once to my mother, on account of she didn’t. I don’t tell it at fires. Folks want the courtyard at fires. They want warm fat. They don’t want this, and I don’t blame them, and I’m going to tell it anyhow, careful, because I’ve decided a story that only tells the good parts ain’t a story, it’s a melon.

First off, how we come back.

We’d gone down as far as the sea-towns. Three of them. I’d stopped being a day behind after the bridge; I walked beside him, or a little back, and he didn’t say much and I didn’t say nothing, and every town he knocked and every town got its dead back and I stood at the edge of it and watched people’s faces do the thing, and I thought I’d never get tired of it, and I was starting to. Not tired of the faces. Tired of him. Tired of watching him walk out of a square full of weeping people without turning round, like he’d swept a floor. I’d have stayed. I’d have stayed a week in every one just to watch the old men touch the posts.

Then one morning on the road he stopped. Just stopped, the way he did on the ridge when I dropped in the dust, and the red spot turned, not at me, back. Up the valley. Toward home. And he stood there a long time with his head cocked like a dog that’s heard something at the edge of hearing, and then he said, “Soon,” which I’d heard him say once before, in the courtyard, on his way out, and he turned round and started walking up.

I said, “What?”

He said, “Ridge.”

That’s all. And I understood it about four days later when we come up the valley road at dusk and seen the smoke.

We come in at the north end. The road goes through the palisade gate there, and the gate was shut, which it never is at dusk, and there was granary-men on the walk looking up the slope, and the slope was full of something moving that weren’t the wind. Old Flour didn’t stop. He walked up to the gate and the guard on it looked down and seen the face and I swear that man’s mouth opened to say no and then just stayed open, and the gate come open a crack and we went through and it shut behind us, and Old Flour said to me, without looking, “Woodpile.”

There was a woodpile against the inside of the wall by the first granary. Split logs, stacked to about my shoulder, with a gap between the pile and the stakes where the granary-men threw the bark. He pointed at it with the adze and said, “In. Stay,” the way you’d say it to a dog, and I got in, on account of that’s what I was, and he walked off up the road toward the seat with the adze over his shoulder, considered, one foot after the other.

And I thought he was gone. I want that clear. I sat in the gap between the woodpile and the wall with the bark under me and I thought: he’s went to the chief. He’s went to tell him. He’s left me here behind a pile of wood with the mountain coming, and I ain’t got so much as Dunnak’s second-best axe.

Then the sheds went up.

I could see through the stakes. That’s the thing. That’s the wrong side of it. The palisade is logs set close, but they’ve leaned in eleven years, and where the woodpile was there was a place where two of them had leaned apart about the width of my hand, and if I put my face to it I could see out. Out. Past the wall. To the ditch and the sheds and the slope.

I seen the fire start. I seen the straw take, and the racks, and the thatch, and then the grain-dust over the whole line of it went up in a sheet like somebody had pulled a yellow blanket over the world, and it was bright as noon, and in the bright I seen them.

Well now. I have told people the mountain clans is monsters. I told it before that night, on account of that’s what you’re told, and I’ve told it since, on account of it’s easier. They ain’t. That’s the first thing this story is for. I put my face to that gap in the stakes and I looked out at four hundred of them coming across the burning sheds toward the wall and they was people.

I seen a woman on a goat. A she-goat, with something white braided in its mane, and she had a short club with a spike and she weren’t yelling. I seen a big man with a jaw that was set crooked, that talked out of the side of his mouth to the man beside him, and the man beside him had a beard full of little white things that I didn’t know was bones till later, and pale eyes, and a pine club with black teeth in it, and he was grinning. I seen a boy. About my age. Maybe younger. With a club too big for him and no scars at all and blood coming down into his eyes from a spear that had gone past, and he was swinging at nothing and crying and swinging, and I thought, that’s Dabb. That’s Dabb from the east bank with a club instead of an axe, that’s all the difference there is.

And I seen a man laughing. A man with a club made out of a bone, a big one, a leg-bone, and he was laughing like Tobbo laughed on the second day of the ironwood, the laugh that turns into crying and back, and he was running at the gate, and I was ten feet from the gate, and I thought, well now, Pili, here it comes, and I got as small as I could get in the gap.

And then I heard the footsteps.

Behind me. Inside. On the road. One set, walking, and I knowed them, I’d been a day behind them for eleven days and beside them for nineteen more, and I turned round in my gap and looked out the other side, past the woodpile, up the road, and there he was.

He’d never gone to the chief. He’d walked up the road far enough to be out of my sight and he’d turned round, and now he was coming back down it with the adze in his hand and the red pouring out of the mask’s eyes so bright it lit the granary walls, and he walked past the woodpile, past me, so close I could have touched his apron, and he did not look, and he went to the wall.

Not the gate. The wall. The first stake at the river end.

And he put his hand on it.

I seen that from behind. I seen his back and the cords tight at the back of his skull and the two birds on the crown of the mask, and his hand flat on the grey stake with the fire coming through the gaps all around it, and I seen him stand there the way he stands, listening, and I thought: he’s going to make it hold. That’s what he’s for. He’s going to knock and the wall’s going to stand up straight and the mountain’s going to break their clubs on it and go home, like the bridge, like the ironwood, and I’m going to go home and tell Oshi.

He knocked.

Once. With the adze. On the first stake. Knock.

And the wall grew teeth.

I ain’t going to tell it the way the others tell it. I’ve heard the way the others tell it and it’s got too much in it. I’ll tell what I seen through a hand-wide gap between two leaning stakes with my face pressed to the wood, which is this.

The stake my face was against opened.

Not the whole wall. Not yet. Just the one, the one on the left side of my gap, and it opened along the grain about a finger from my cheek, a split, and the split had edges like a fish’s teeth, grey splinters standing up wet, and I jerked back and hit the woodpile and a log come down on my head and I didn’t feel it, and I looked, and the thorns come out.

Out of the stake. Long. Black. Curved. Out of the grey wood in front of my face like something that had been inside it all along and had been waiting, and I could hear them, coming out, a sound like a hundred little sticks breaking, going along the wall away from me both directions, and I understood it was all the stakes, all six hundred, and I put my hands over my ears, and I could still hear it, and through the gap, which was smaller now on account of the thorns, I could see out.

I seen the laughing man go in the gate.

The gate had opened. By itself. I hadn’t seen that. It was open and the laughing man run through it with his bone club up, laughing, and I seen his foot come down on the log across the bottom of the gateway that everybody steps over, and the log opened, and it took his foot.

Just took it. Like a hand takes a thing off a table. And he stopped laughing and he stood there in the gateway with his foot in the log’s mouth and his face went white as Oshi’s lime and he looked down and then he looked back over his shoulder, and I seen his face, I seen it plain, the fire was behind him and the red was on him from the mask, and he weren’t a monster. He was a man that had just understood something. And he said a word. One. I didn’t know the mountain talk then. I’ve learned some since. It was father.

Then the log rolled him over into the ditch and the gate shut and I put my face in the bark and I didn’t look for a while.

I looked again. I had to. It’s a thing I’ve found out about myself and I don’t know if it’s good or bad but it’s true: I have to look. I put my face back to the gap, that was mostly thorns now, and I seen the woman with the burned hand hanging from a stake by it, with the thorns through her palm, and she weren’t screaming, and she was hitting the stake with a black club, and the stake opened its mouth and ate the club. Ate it. I watched a wooden mouth chew up a club and spit the pieces in the ditch, and then the stake bent like a fishing pole and threw her.

And I seen the man with the pale eyes and the bones in his beard put his hands on the gate.

He was close. The gate was right there. He put both hands flat on the oak the way Old Flour puts his hands on wood, and I seen his face change, I seen him feel something through the door, and then the oak opened under his left hand and took two of his fingers, and he pulled his hand back and looked at it, and there was no blood at first, just two stumps, and his face didn’t do anything at all, and then it did.

I’ve thought about that face more than about the first chief’s. I’m ashamed to say it. The first chief’s face was the best thing I ever seen and I’ve thought more about the face of a mountain raider looking at his own hand, on account of I know what it looked like. It looked like mine. Standing in the courtyard on the third day with Dunnak’s second-best axe and my thumb in two pieces, looking at the log that didn’t care. That look. That’s what happens to a face when the world it was standing on turns out to be a bridge.

Then he looked up. At the wall. Above the gate. And I looked where he looked, and Old Flour was on the walk.

He’d gone up. While I had my face in the bark. He was standing on the guard-walk right above the gate with the chief beside him, the chief in his feathers with his bound arm and his club, and Old Flour was standing there with the adze hanging and the sap running off it, and his hands—

His hands was shaking.

Not the joy kind. I’d seen the joy kind, coming up out of the river the first morning with the red pouring off him. This was the other. The kind from the tower, that I hadn’t seen yet but was about to. His hands hung at his sides and they shook so bad the adze rattled against his leg, and the red come out of the mask’s eyes in two rays and went down over the wall and lay on the ditch where the mountain folk was, and where it touched the brush it steamed, and I looked at his shaking hands and I looked at the wall full of mouths and I thought, for the first time since the black gorge:

He didn’t mean that.

I don’t know how I knowed. I’d been a day behind him and beside him for a month and I’d seen him knock on eleven melons and a fir and I knowed what he looked like when the wood done what he meant. He looked like a man sweeping a floor. This weren’t that. This was a man on a wall looking down at what his hands had done and not knowing whose hands they was.

The mountain ran. I’ll say that quick on account of everybody knows it. The pale-eyed man screamed something and they all went up the slope falling over each other and the wall didn’t follow and the fire burned out and it was over in less time than the ironwood, and I sat in my gap with the thorns a finger from my face and the log on my head and I didn’t come out till Old Flour come down off the walk and stood by the woodpile and said, “Boy.”

I come out.

He looked at me through the moons. The red was gone almost out. I could nearly see his eyes. And he said, “Tower,” and turned, and I followed him up the ladder into the gate-tower where the guard sleeps, and there weren’t no guard in it, they was all down at the ditch with torches looking at what the wall had left, and he sat down on the floor with his back to the wall and I stood in the door.

And he reached up behind his head for the cords.

Well now. I’ve told about his hands. I’ll tell it once more and I’ll tell it right.

They went up behind his skull, both of them, to the knots at the temples, and they stopped. Not like he’d changed his mind. Like they’d hit something. The fingers was on the knots and they wouldn’t close. They shook. They shook the way a hand shakes when it’s holding a rope over a drop and been told to let go, stiff and locked and refusing, and he sat there with his elbows out and his fingers on the cords and his whole body going, and he said through his teeth, “Uncle. Let go.”

I said, “What?”

He said it again. Not to me. To the mask. “Uncle. Let go.”

And I understood there was somebody else in the room.

I said, and I heard my own voice come out small, like Dabb’s, “Master Cutter, sir, what’s wrong with your hands?”

He didn’t turn. He said, in a voice I’d never heard out of him, a boy’s voice, “Nothing. Go to sleep.”

And the fingers unlocked. All at once. Like something had let go of them. And the knots come loose, left, right, crown, and the mask come away from his face and the moons went dark, and he set it on the tower floor face up and put his own face in his hands, and I seen his hands.

I seen them for the first time, I mean. Really seen. He’d had them in front of me for a month and I’d watched them knock on a fir and pour ironwood and I hadn’t looked at them, the way you don’t look at a thing that works. I looked now. They was curling. The fingers. Not shaking anymore, curling, in toward the palm, slow, like a leaf curls when it’s been in the sun too long, and the knuckles was swelled up big and hard and the nails was cracked and black, and when he took his face out of them and looked at the mask on the floor, his hands stayed the way they was. Half shut. Like they’d forgot how to open. Like hooks.

Iron hooks. That’s what I thought. That’s what I’ve said since and folks think it’s a way of talking and it ain’t. His hands looked like two iron hooks lying in his lap, and he looked at them, and then he looked at me, and he said, “Sleep,” again, quieter, and I lay down on the tower floor with my back to the mask on account of I couldn’t look at it, and I didn’t sleep.

Here is the part I’ve only told twice.

I lay there in the dark with the mountain going home up the slope and the guard’s torches moving down at the ditch and Old Flour breathing fast across the tower and the mask face up on the floor between us, and I put my hand in my pocket and found the lime.

Oshi’s lime. The walnut of it, fired hard and white all through, that she’d closed my fingers over at the market gate. For the eyes. When you make one.

I held it. And I thought about making one. I thought about it the way I’d been thinking about it every day for a month, which was: someday, when I’ve learned, I’ll take a log and I’ll listen the way he listens and I’ll find the face in it and I’ll cut it true and I’ll set two moons in the eyes, ground under water, and I’ll take it home to my mother and stand it before the door and she’ll say his name. I’d had that thought so many times it had a shape worn in me like the mallet’s face.

And I thought about the laughing man with his foot in the log.

And the woman hanging by her burned hand.

And two fingers in a gate.

And a man on a wall with his hands shaking that didn’t know whose they was.

And I thought, lying there with the lime in my fist: that’s what listening does. If you listen good enough. If you get good enough at hearing what’s in the wood and letting it out, that’s where it goes. Not to melons. Melons is what happens when you can’t hear. This is what happens when you can. You knock on a fir and you get a bridge and forty carts sing. You knock on a wall and you get mouths. And you don’t get to pick. Or he didn’t. Or something in him didn’t, and I didn’t know what, and I was fourteen and lying on a tower floor with a lump of lime, and for the first time since a scraping knife went through ironwood like warm fat I didn’t want it.

I didn’t want to be him.

I didn’t want to hear the wood that good. I didn’t want the hooks. I didn’t want to sit on a floor and say uncle to a wooden face and have the wooden face say no. I wanted—

I didn’t know what I wanted. That was the sick of it. I’d had one thing I wanted since the courtyard and it had filled me up like beans, and now it was gone, and there weren’t nothing in the place where it had been, just the lime in my fist and the dark and Old Flour breathing.

I lay there till the light come.

I didn’t grind nothing. I didn’t touch the scraper in my belt. I’d been going to ask him, in the sea-towns, to let me try, on a bit of driftwood, just a spoon, and I didn’t ask, and he didn’t offer, and we sat in that tower three days with the mask on the floor between us and neither of us reached for it, and the guard brought us beans, and the chief come up once and stood in the door and looked at the mask and looked at Old Flour’s hands and went away without saying so it is cut, and I held the lime.

I still hold it. I told you that. I’ve never used it and I don’t know if I ever will and I don’t know anymore if that’s a sadness or the only sense I’ve got.

That’s the story. That’s the one I don’t tell at fires.

The doubt’s still in me. I’ll say that plain, for whoever’s reading. It never went. It’s like the split in my thumb: it grew back in two pieces and it stayed that way, and most days I don’t notice, and some days I look down and there it is, the line down the middle, and I think about a man laughing in a gateway and I put my hands in my pockets.

 

Segment 24: The Council of the Fled

Sing, spirits of the high stone, the council, and sing it slow, for it was slow, as a thaw is slow when the north face has already let go and there is nothing left to hurry.

They came up into the high meadow below the last snow in the grey before Helios, the way they had gone down, without lights and without speech, and they were fewer, and the ones there were laid down what they carried and sat where they stood. Three hundred and forty-one. Korrak counted. A war leader who does not count his clubs coming home is a war leader who will not know what he has spent, and Korrak counted them as the light came, and each one he counted he named, and each name he named he set beside the name he had spoken at the mustering, and where the two did not match he stopped, and the stopping was the count.

Fifty-nine did not match.

Sing them. The spirits know them and will say them at the fires for as long as there are fires on the ridge, and Korrak will say them here, once, in the order he found them missing, and then he will not say them again, for a man who has eaten his dog does not have the strength to say a thing twice.

Vashti Cold-Eye, who had one eye and lost the other to a thorn, and went into the ditch, and did not come up. Orrun Bear-Back, whose scar was a bear and who went over the wall’s shoulder and struck a stone in the ditch and did not move after. Pell, small and quick, who took a spear in the shoulder and got up and went up the wall and did not get up again. Dunna the Widow, whose husband’s bone was in her hair, and who is with him now, and whose hair the spirits will have to search for the bone. And on. Fifty-nine. Sing them, spirits, for Korrak cannot.

And the ones who came up were not whole.

Marrow lay on a hide by the cold fire-pit with his leg ending where the threshold had ended it, and Durrak Broken-Jaw sat beside him with his crooked mouth and his black gorge-oak club across his knees, and every time Marrow said Father, which was often, Durrak said, out of the side of his mouth, I know, boy, I know, and did not look at anyone. Hessa Red-Hand sat with her burned hand in her lap, and the hand had holes in it now, four, where the thorns had gone through, and she looked at the holes, and she did not speak, and she had no club, for the wall had eaten it. Old Rane, who had no scars, none, in fifty summers, sat with the first scar of his life across his face from brow to jaw, and he was not laughing now, and the clan looked at him and did not know what to think, for the one thing they had always known about Old Rane was gone. Grell the Younger sat with his father’s too-heavy club and a lowland bone in his fist, and the blood had dried in his eyes and he had not wiped it, and Grell the Elder, who was too old to come and had sat in the meadow with the goats and wept, came to him and took the bone and put it under his chin and said nothing, and wept again, and it was a different weeping.

And Korrak sat apart. With his left hand in his beard, where the bones are, and where two fingers were not, and the stump had stopped bleeding on the climb and started again in the cold and he let it.

Sing the council, spirits, for it came, as councils come, when the silence has gone on as long as the mountain can bear it, and the mountain can bear a great deal.

Durrak spoke first. Durrak Broken-Jaw, out of the side of his mouth, without standing, with his hand on Marrow’s shoulder.

Fire, he said. That is all Durrak has to say and he says it. We had fire for the sheds. We should have had fire for the wall. Wood burns. Whatever the demon told it, wood burns. We go down again with pitch and coals in every hand, not one in ten, every hand, and we do not touch the wall, we throw the fire at it from the ditch and we let it burn, thorns and mouths and all, and when it is ash we walk over the ash and take the grain. Fifty-nine. Durrak will not sit on this meadow and count fifty-nine and not go down.

And a sound went through the clan, the low sound, the sound the mountain makes before it shouts, and Korrak heard it and knew it and did not lift his head.

Ilsa Three-Goats spoke second. From her she-goat, for she had not got down from it, not on the climb, not in the meadow, and her mother’s bone was in its mane where it had been in the fight.

Offerings, she said. Ilsa has thought it up the whole of the goat-track and she will say it once. The salt-trader said a demon. Korrak laughed. Ilsa did not laugh but she did not listen either, and she has nine scars on her back from the eastern whips and four new ones on her hands from the thorns, and she has been thinking about the difference. The eastern clans are men. You fight men. That was not a man. It stood on the wall and it did not shout and it did not throw and it did not need to. It told the wood. Ilsa has never seen a thing tell wood. Ilsa’s mother held the high pass alone for a night and a day with a broken leg and she did not hold it against a thing that tells wood, she held it against men. You do not fight a thing that tells wood. You give it something and you ask it to tell the wood to let you pass. Goats. Salt. The pine-nuts if there are any. Ilsa does not know what a demon wants. But she knows what a hungry clan wants and it is not fifty-nine more in a ditch.

And the low sound did not come. Sing that. The clan sat, and no one said the thing that the mountain says to those who speak of offerings, which is a short word and an ugly one, and no one said it, and Ilsa on her goat looked around the meadow and did not see it in any face, and she was more afraid of that than she had been of the wall.

Hessa Red-Hand did not speak. Sing that too. She sat with her hand in her lap and the holes in it and the clan looked at her, for Hessa has always spoken, Hessa has never in forty summers let a council pass without her, and she looked at her hand, and she said nothing, and the nothing went through the clan like a wind.

Old Rane spoke. He stood, which he never does, and he touched the scar on his face with two fingers, the way a man touches a thing to be sure it is there, and he said:

Fifty summers. Fifty. Rane went down to the ford eleven summers ago and came up without a mark. Rane went east against the whip-clans three times and came up without a mark. Rane has been called blessed and Rane has been called a coward and Rane has let the clan say both because Rane did not know which was true, and now Rane knows.

He looked at the scar with his two fingers on it.

The wall gave Rane this. Not a man. Not a whip. A stake that had been a tree. It threw Rane into the ditch and Rane went over its shoulder and the thorns took his face and Rane laughed, and the clan has asked why, and Rane will say. Rane laughed because it was the first thing in fifty summers that Rane could not have stepped aside from. Rane has stepped aside from every club and every spear and every whip that ever came at him, quick, sideways, the way the mountain-cat goes, and the clan called it luck and it was not luck, it was Rane seeing the thing coming and being elsewhere. Rane saw this coming. Rane saw the thorns come out of the wood. And there was no elsewhere.

He sat.

That is all Rane has. Rane does not say fire and Rane does not say offerings. Rane says there was no elsewhere, and he will let the war leader decide what that means.

Then Marrow, from the hide, in the child’s voice. Father. And Durrak said, I know, boy.

And then the clan looked at Korrak.

Sing the looking. Three hundred and forty-one faces, in the grey of the high meadow with the last snow behind them and the mountain flowers under them, the flowers that had come over the wall on the fire-smoke and told Korrak what was walking down the road, turned toward the war leader sitting apart with his hand in his beard, and waited, and the waiting had a weight to it that the ice never had, for the ice is certain and this was not.

Korrak stood up.

Sing it plain, spirits, for he will have it plain: he was ashamed. Not the shame of the boy who breaks a bowl. The shame of the man who was asked one thing by the high stone and given it and threw it away. The fat man had been on the wall. Standing. As a chieftain should be. The spirits had put him there for Korrak to hit face to face, and Korrak had looked up at him through the smoke and grinned and said after, and had turned to a gate, and had laid his hands on a door because the salt-trader said the demon laid its hands on wood, and the door had eaten his fingers, and the fat man had stood on his wall and watched the mountain run and had not needed to lift his club.

That was the shame. Not the fingers. The after.

He said:

Durrak. Durrak Broken-Jaw, whose father died under the ice with Korrak’s, whose bone hangs beside Harrun’s in Korrak’s beard so the old men may go into battle together. Durrak says fire. Durrak says wood burns. Korrak will tell Durrak what Korrak felt through the gate.

He held up the hand. Eight fingers. The stump was bleeding again and the blood ran down his wrist into the sleeve and he let it.

Korrak laid this on the oak. Both hands. The way the salt-trader said. And the oak was warm. Warm, Durrak. As the flank of a goat. And under the warm the grain of it moved the way the belly of a snake moves, and Korrak felt, through the door, a thing on the other side that was not a man and was not a demon and was not anything the mountain has a word for. It was wanting. The wanting of every tree that was ever cut and set in the earth and told stand, and it had been waiting eleven summers for a hand, and it took Korrak’s.

Fire, Durrak says. Korrak asks Durrak: when the wood wants a hand, and you throw fire at it, what does the fire want?

Durrak did not answer.

Korrak said: Korrak does not know either. Korrak knows only that the thing on the wall did not make the thorns. It knocked. Once. Korrak heard it. One knock at the river end and the whole wall answered, six hundred stakes, and the thing on the wall stood with its hands shaking and watched what it had asked for, and Korrak has seen that look. Korrak has seen it in the ice. The north face does not decide to fall. Something knocks on it, a goat, a wind, a man’s voice too loud in the wrong place, and it answers, and the thing that knocked stands and watches with its hands shaking.

The wood is the ice, Durrak. Korrak did not know that. The lowlanders have been living below an ice-fall all this time and calling it a fence, and they have found one who can knock on it, and Korrak laughed at the salt-trader.

He turned to Ilsa.

Ilsa Three-Goats, whose mother held the pass. Ilsa says offerings. Ilsa says give the demon something and ask it to tell the wood to let us pass. Korrak asks Ilsa: what does a man give to the north face so it will let him climb?

Ilsa said: nothing. You climb when it is asleep.

Korrak said: it is not asleep. It has a face now. It walks. It came back up the valley from the sea because it heard us on the ridge, Korrak is certain of it, Korrak heard it stop on the road behind the gate and it had come a long way to stop there. It is awake, Ilsa, and it does not want goats, for Korrak felt what it wanted through the door, and what it wanted was to be told what to become. And the thing in the red face told it, and the telling was bite, and Korrak does not think a goat will change the telling.

Ilsa looked at her hands, with the four new scars, and did not speak again.

Then Korrak turned to the clan. All of it. And he said the thing that he had thought on the climb, at the last pine, with his hand on it, in the guttural, so low that the spirits had to bend to hear, and he said it now so that they would not have to bend.

The river folk are protected by a god.

Sing the sound the clan made. It was not the low sound and it was not the shout. It was the sound of three hundred and forty-one people breathing in at once and not breathing out, for the mountain does not say that word. The mountain has spirits, of the high stone and the wind and the pine and the ice, and they are hard and they are cold and they do not protect anything, they only watch and hold things against you. The mountain does not have gods. The lowlanders have gods. The lowlanders put them on sticks.

Korrak said: Korrak knows what the mountain says. Korrak has said it. Melons. Korrak stood on this meadow with his father’s bone to the sky and said what is a red face to four hundred clubs, and the spirits heard him, and they gave him the fat man on the wall, and they watched him forget. Korrak is not going to say what the thing on the wall is. Korrak does not know. Korrak knows what it does. It knocks, and the wood answers, and the wood is the ice, and the mountain does not go up the north face when the ice is awake.

The mountain does not go down.

Not with fire. Not with goats. Not this winter and not the next and not while Korrak Stone-Tooth has eight fingers and the memory of a laughing man saying father in a gateway. The mountain does not go down. Korrak forbids it. Korrak has no right to forbid it, for Korrak is the one who laughed, and if the clan wishes to take the leading from him and give it to Durrak, who says fire, Korrak will sit at the back and count, and not hold it against them.

But Korrak will not lead the mountain down that slope again. Korrak has been the ice once. Korrak has felt it run out of him between the stones. Korrak will not gather it again for a valley that has found the one who can knock.

He stopped.

And the clan breathed out.

Sing what came after, spirits, for it is the part that the old men at the fires get wrong, for they make it a vote, and it was not a vote, the mountain does not vote. It was this.

Durrak Broken-Jaw, who had said fire, looked at Korrak for a long time out of the side of his face, and then he looked down at Marrow on the hide, and Marrow said Father, and Durrak said, I know, boy, and then he said, to Korrak, without standing:

Durrak’s father went into the ice with Korrak’s. Durrak’s father did not go into it twice.

And he put his hand on Marrow’s shoulder and did not say fire again.

Ilsa Three-Goats got down off her she-goat. Sing it. She had not got down on the goat-track and she had not got down in the meadow and she got down now and she took her mother’s bone out of the mane and held it and said:

Ilsa’s mother held the pass because it could be held. Ilsa will say so to her, when she goes into the dark. Ilsa will say: mother, I did not go down a slope that could not be held, and I am your daughter.

And she put the bone back in the mane and stood beside the goat with her hand on its neck.

Hessa Red-Hand stood. With her hand with the holes in it hanging. And she walked, slow, across the meadow to where Korrak stood, and she looked at his hand with the eight fingers, and she held up her own with the four holes, and she put them together. Palm to palm. Her burned one with the thorn-holes and his with the stumps. And she said, the first thing she had said since the wall, in the guttural, one word, the mountain’s word for a thing that has been decided and cannot be undecided, the word they say over a grave:

Done.

And walked back and sat.

And Old Rane laughed. Once. Short. And touched his scar. And was quiet.

Then Korrak did the last thing, and it is the thing Korrak will tell and the old men will not, for it shames him and he wants it told.

He took the knife from his belt, the flint one, the only edge he had left after the gate took the club’s teeth, and he took his beard in his left hand, the eight-fingered one, and he measured. Two fingers’ width. The width of what the gate had kept. And he cut it.

The beard came away in his hand with the bones in it. Not all the bones. The lower ones. Two fingers’ width of braid, and in it seven small white bones of men the mountain had killed, lowlanders from the ford eleven summers ago, and he held them, and he walked to the edge of the meadow where the slope goes down toward the pines and the goat-track and the valley, and he threw them.

Down. Toward the river. Toward the wall with its stakes that lean and its gate with two fingers in it.

And he said, not to the clan, not to the spirits, to the valley, in the guttural, loud, so that if the thing with the red face was listening at the bottom of the slope with its hands shaking it would hear the shape:

Korrak Stone-Tooth gives you back your dead. Keep his fingers. It is a fair trade.

He walked back. He sat where he had sat, apart, with his hand in what was left of his beard, where his father’s bone was, still, at the top, warm, and the stump of the two fingers bled into the cut braid and he let it.

Sing the end, spirits, and sing it short, for the council was long and the clan was tired and there was no grain.

They ate the last goat that night. Not Ilsa’s. Another. They ate it in the meadow below the last snow with the mountain flowers under them and the fire low, three hundred and forty-one, and no one sang, and Marrow said Father, and Durrak said I know, and Grell the Elder sat with a lowland bone under his chin at last and did not look happy, and Korrak ate his share and tasted nothing.

Bitter. That is the word the lowlanders would use, and Korrak has learned some of their words since, on the ridge, from the salt-trader who came back up the goat-track the next spring with his salt and found the mountain waiting for him with goods to trade and not clubs, and was so surprised he dropped the salt. Bitter. It is a good word. It is the taste of the dog, and of the last goat, and of a beard cut short by two fingers, and of a valley below with fat yellow fires that the mountain will not go down to again while Korrak lives, and Korrak has decided to live a long time, so that the forbidding will hold.

And under the bitter, warm one—for Korrak has learned that word too, it is what the thing in the red face calls its living—under the bitter, the other thing. The thing Old Rane found on his face in the ditch. The thing there is no elsewhere from.

Korrak was the ice.

He is not the ice now. He is a man on a meadow with eight fingers, and the north face is above him where it has always been, and it does not care, and it never did, and he has been standing under it his whole life calling it his, and it is not his, it is only the mountain, and it will fall when something knocks, and Korrak is not the thing that knocks.

He never was.

Sing that, spirits. Sing it and remember, and hold it against him, all of it, and he will sit at the back of the fire with his hand in his beard and let you.

 

Segment 25: Seven Harvests of Straight Totems

This chair will now set down the seven harvests, and this chair will set them down as harvests are set down in the register, one after another, with what was gathered and what was lost, because that is how a seat counts years, and because this chair has found, in the counting, that a year set down as a harvest is easier to bear than a year set down as a year.

The first harvest was the harvest of the wall.

It began, this account holds, on the morning the carver came down out of the gate-tower on the fourth day with the red face tied on again and his hands still, and walked to the palisade, and laid his palm on the first stake at the river end, and the thorns went back into the wood. This chair saw it. Six hundred stakes, from the river to the slope, with their black hooks and their grey mouths, and he knocked once, and the hooks drew in the way a cat draws its claws, and the mouths closed, and the wall stood straight. Straight. Not leaning. Every stake that had leaned for eleven summers stood up out of its lean and set its shoulder against the next, and the wall that the mountain had broken its clubs on was, by noon, a wall that no one in the valley had ever seen the like of, and no one has touched it since, and this chair walks its length once a month in the Dimming week and it does not creak.

He did not take the two fingers out of the gate. This chair asked. He stood before the river-oak with his hand on the place and listened, and said, in the hard way, through the chime: they stay. And this chair did not ask why, and has come to believe the why was not his to give.

Then he went down to the ditch and knelt, which this chair had never seen him do, and put his hands into the brush where the mountain’s dead lay, the ones the clans had not carried up, seven of them, and this chair does not know what he did there. The healer says he was a long time. The boy, who was with him, will not say. But when the guard went down in the afternoon to bring the bodies up for the river, they were gone, and in their place, in the brush, in a row, were seven small posts of pine, no taller than a man’s knee, and each had a face, and the faces were not the faces of anyone in the valley.

Mountain faces. Pale-eyed. With the clan-mark on the brow. This chair had them stood at the top of the slope where the goat-track comes out of the pines, in a row, facing up, and they are there, and the mountain has seen them, and the salt-trader says that when the clans came down the next spring to trade and not to fight, the war leader with the eight fingers stood before the seven posts for a long time, and took a bone from his beard, and left it at the foot of the smallest one, and went back up without a word.

That was the first harvest. The grain-stores were whole. The toll was two thousand one hundred and six. This chair sets it down.

The second harvest was the harvest of the melons.

This chair will describe the custom as it was, and as it became, because the change is the thing this account exists to record, and a change described without its before is only a boast.

Before: every kin-group in the valley had before its door a row of posts, and the posts were melons, and the people wept. This has been told. What has not been told is that the melons were kept. That is the thing. A melon was a shame and a grief and a swollen pale thing with two pits for eyes, and no family in the valley would have burned one, because it was still, for all its wrongness, the only house the dead one had. Merrek had three. He would not have them touched.

After: the carver walked the valley.

Not the road. Not the towns. The valley. Every kin-group, every door, every row of melons from the north end to the river-bend below the seat, and this chair does not know how he chose the order, and does not think there was one. He walked with the red face on and the adze over his shoulder and the boy a step behind, and he came to a door, and he stood before the row, and he laid his hand on the first melon, and listened, and knocked.

And the melon became.

That is the word the valley uses now, and this chair uses it in the register, and the plains-scribes have complained that it is not a proper mark. Became. The swollen pale lowland wood that the melon-makers had botched shifted under his hand the way the wall had shifted, and the two pits opened into eyes, and the crack of a mouth closed into lips, and the swelling drew in, and the face that had been trapped half-cut and screaming for a generation came up out of the wood and was a face, and was the one, and the family stood in the door and made the sound.

This chair has heard the sound perhaps four hundred times. It is not weeping, though there is weeping in it. It is the sound a person makes when they see someone they thought they would not see again, and this chair has no better word, and the market-women have a dozen and all of them are wrong.

Merrek’s three sons stood up out of their melons on the eleventh day of the second harvest, and Merrek, who had said dead dogs, who had refused the carver’s offer twenty years before, stood before the three true faces of the three boys the river took, and did not make the sound. He put his hand on the eldest’s cheek, and he said the boy’s name, and he sat down in the road, and he did not get up until dark, and this chair sent the guard to bring him in, and he would not come, and this chair went himself and sat with him, and Merrek said, without looking up: I could have had this. Twenty years. He offered. And this chair said: I burned three. And Merrek said: yes. And we sat.

By the end of the second harvest there was not a melon in the valley. This chair sets that down as the register sets it: not one. Every dead of the river folk since the counting of the clan had a true face and open eyes, and the old men who sang the counting-song at midwinter sang it that year before four hundred posts that looked back, and the singing was different, and the valley wept, but it was the other weeping, this chair has learned to tell them apart.

The third harvest was the harvest of the ears.

This chair records it as a custom changed. The first chief before the feasting hall has pierced ears, with holes the size of a bone plug, the old way, and no one in the valley had pierced so in a hundred years, and in the third harvest the young began to. First the boys of the guard, who stood nearest the post. Then the market-women’s daughters. Then, this chair notes with the plain honesty this account has promised, this chair’s own sister, who had not pierced anything in her life and came into the hall one morning with two plugs of bone in her ears the size of the first chief’s and said nothing about it, and this chair said nothing, and it is not the largest thing in the room anymore when she enters.

The toll that year was two thousand three hundred. The mountain traded salt for goats. This chair sets it down.

The fourth harvest was the harvest of the holes.

This chair will tell it plainly, because this chair has told the jealousy plainly and the reader is owed the end of it.

For three harvests this chair walked past the two empty holes on either side of the first chief each morning and knelt between them and did not send. This chair has set down why. The seat wished to do one thing in its own reign with its own hands worth setting beside the bridge, and the seat had stood on the wall with the burned arm and the war club and watched the mountain run, and the seat had not lifted the club, and the register said so, in this chair’s own marks, small, under the entry about the wall: the seat stood and was not needed.

And in the fourth harvest, in the Blooming week of Lathandus, this chair went down to the river hut.

The carver was there. He had come back to it between walkings. He sat on the flour heap, which was larger, and the boy sat on the bench inside among the tools with a lump of white lime in his hand that he turned and turned and did nothing with, and the mask lay on the trestle face up with its moons closed, and the carver looked up at this chair with his own eyes, his own, grey and sore and rimmed with red, and this chair saw that he had gotten old.

This chair had not looked at him in three harvests. Not at him. At the face. This chair saw now the hands in his lap, and they were hooks, both, curled in so far that the nails touched the palms, and this chair saw the way he held them, carefully, apart, the way a man holds two things that are no longer entirely his, and this chair saw his eyes, and his eyes were wet, and the wet was not weeping, it was the way they were now, always, the healer says, because they cannot look at a flat surface without seeing what is in it.

This chair said: there are two holes.

He said: I know.

This chair said: I have not sent. For three harvests. Because I wished to have done one thing first.

He said nothing. Listening.

This chair said: I have not done it. I stood on the wall and I was not needed and I have looked for the thing since and it is not there. The seat is an old man with a burned arm who kneels before a post every morning and counts the toll. That is all I have found. I am asking you to fill the holes because I have stopped believing that I will earn them, and because my sister has pierced her ears, and because Merrek sat in the road.

He looked at this chair a long time with the sore grey eyes.

Then he said, in the hard way, one word, and this chair had heard it before, in the courtyard, on the way out, and had thought about it every day since:

Soon.

And this chair went back up the hill, and in the morning the carver came, with the boy, and he had the face on, and his hands were still, and he stood before the feasting hall between the two holes and looked at them, and then he went to the woodpile by the kitchen, this chair’s own woodpile, and took two logs from it, ordinary, split, for the bean-fire, and set one in each hole with his own hands, upright, and stood back, and knocked.

Karrash the Otter-Cloaked stood up out of the left one with his belly and his laugh and his ear-plugs put in crooked by a small boy, and Ilme, this chair’s mother, stood up out of the right one with her hands, and her hands were not folded, they were at something, thread, meal, a child’s hair, moving, this chair swears it, moving, and this chair knelt between them, and did not count what it cost.

It cost nothing. This chair has said so. This chair says it again, older, with the knees harder, and it is still true.

This chair asked, afterward, when the moons had dimmed: the child. The nine-day one. And the carver looked at this chair’s sister, who was standing in the door of the hall with her bone plugs in, and she shook her head. Once. And he did not knock. And this chair understood that a child of nine days has no face to find, and that a mother knows it, and that the third hole was going to stay a hole, and that this was right.

The fifth harvest was the harvest of the boy.

This chair records it because the register does not, and someone should.

Dunnak’s boy from the west bank, Pili, called Split-Thumb, who dropped the scraper in the courtyard and ground the moons and followed the carver down the valley and hid behind the woodpile when the wall bit, sat in the river hut for four harvests with a lump of lime in his hand and did not carve. This chair watched him. Not closely. But the seat sees the valley, and the seat saw a boy who had been at the center of the greatest thing that ever happened in the river province sitting on a bench turning a walnut of snail-lime over and over and making nothing, and the seat wondered.

In the fifth harvest he went back to Dunnak.

This chair does not know what was said. Dunnak’s shop on the west bank had no melons in it by then, for there was nothing to make melons of, and Dunnak, who was a kindly man that fed him and hit him the once, had become a maker of bowls and spoons and toys, honest ones, and the boy went to him and stood in the door, and this chair is told that Dunnak looked at him and said, well, and the boy said, I’d like to make a bowl, and Dunnak handed him a piece of lowland pine and a gouge and said, then make one, and the boy sat down and did.

A bowl. Not a face. This chair has seen it. It is a good bowl. The boy’s mother eats from it. And the boy has made forty since, and spoons, and a cradle for a market-woman’s daughter, and he grinds pigment for Dunnak and sweeps shavings, and he has not once, in three harvests, put a blade to a log to find what is in it, and the carver has not once asked him to, and this chair has come to believe that this is the wisest thing anyone in the valley has done since the burning, and does not know how to set it down in the register, and so sets it down here.

The sixth harvest was the harvest of the seat.

This chair will be brief, for it is this chair’s own aging and a chronicle should not linger on its author’s knees.

The arm does not unbend all the way now. The teeth, the bone ones, have loosened in their settings and the healer has re-set them twice. The kneeling each morning takes longer going down and longer coming up, and the market-women, who come early to see it, have stopped telling it down the hill as a wonder and started telling it as a worry, and this chair has decided to be grateful for the worry, for it means they expect the seat to get up.

And the valley does not need the seat.

This chair sets that down plainly, as the ferry-master would. The toll is counted. The guard is paid. The mountain trades salt. The dead have faces. The wall stands straight. The bridge does not creak. And every one of those things was done by a sour man with hooks for hands who does not come to the feasting hall, and the seat’s part in all of it was to burn three posts and set sixteen boys at a trunk and stand on a wall and not be needed and, at last, to go down to a river hut and ask.

This chair thought, in the jealous harvest, that this would be unbearable. That a seat that had given up the name of the valley in its own hand would sit in the hall with nothing left but the register and the ache.

It is not unbearable.

This chair does not know how to explain it and will try once. This chair walks out of the hall each morning in the grey and kneels between Karrash and Ilme before the first chief, and rises, slowly, and walks the length of the courtyard, and the courtyard has a post in it that sixteen boys could not cut, and this chair walks down the hill, and every door has faces before it that look back, and this chair walks to the north end, and the wall stands straight, and this chair walks along the top of it, and looks up at the ridge, and there are seven small pine faces at the top of the slope looking back at the mountain, and the mountain does not come.

And none of it is this chair’s.

And this chair finds that he does not mind. That is the thing. Karrash said: they will want you on your knees, do not give them that. And this chair gave it, and gave the name, and gave the holes, and the giving has left this chair lighter than the seat has ever been, and the lightness is not loss. It is what a man feels when he has been carrying a thing for forty years that was never his to carry and sets it down and finds his back still straight.

A kingdom built by another man’s hands. Yes. This chair sets it down. And this chair sits in it, and it is warm, warm as the wood.

The seventh harvest is the one this chair is in.

This chair will set down only what has been seen, for the harvest is not gathered and the register is not closed.

The carver is walking less. He came up to the seat in the Illumination week and did not have the face on, and his hands were in his sleeves, and he stood before the first chief a long time, and this chair stood beside him, and he said, without turning, in the hard way, a thing that this chair has been turning over since:

She’s full.

This chair said: the valley?

He said: the face. She’s full. There’s no more she’ll take.

This chair did not understand and said so.

He said: forty years I took wood off. Seven I put it back. Every knock, something came through. Through her. Through him. And it stays. I can feel it. The bridge is in her. The wall is in her. Every post in the valley is in her, a little, and she’s full, and I don’t know what happens to a face when it’s full, and I don’t want to find out with her on.

And this chair, who has learned since the stones to say the plain thing, said: then take her off.

And he said: I mean to.

And he looked at this chair with the sore grey eyes, and this chair saw in them the thing that the ferry-master saw in the tally-sticks, the third side, what is kept because it cannot be given and what it costs, and this chair said nothing, because there was nothing in the register for it.

He went back down the hill.

The boy came up the next day with a bowl for the healer. A good one. This chair asked him how the carver was, and the boy looked at his own thumb, at the split in the nail that grew back in two pieces, and said: he sits on the heap a lot. And this chair said: does he wear it. And the boy said: some mornings. Fewer. And this chair said: and the other mornings. And the boy was quiet a while, and then he said, in the way of the west bank, where a word is a door:

Other mornings he can’t get the knots.

This chair has thought about that.

This chair will end the seventh harvest here, uncounted, because it is uncounted, and because this chair has found, in seven harvests of straight totems, that the things worth setting down are the ones that have not finished happening. The toll is two thousand four hundred. The mountain traded salt in the spring. Merrek’s eldest grandson has pierced his ears. This chair’s sister sits by the third hole some evenings and does not weep and does not fill it.

And down at the river-bend, on a heap of red flour that has grown to the height of a man’s head, a sour old man sits with two hooks in his lap and a wooden face on a trestle behind him, and looks at the water, and the water does not look back, and the healer says that is the only thing in the valley that does not, and that he goes down to it for the rest.

So it is said.

This chair will wait to say the other half.

 

Segment 26: Fingers Like Iron Hooks

I have catalogued eleven woods and seventeen tools and one heap of flour, and forty logs in a riverbed with prisoners in them, and a blade that came down out of the sky. I have been exact. It was the only virtue I had left on the night of the burning and I have kept it the way a man keeps a coin sewn into his hem, against the day when there is nothing else to spend. That day is here. I will spend it on the last thing I have not catalogued, which is Ashnak, and I will be as exact about him as I was about the rosewood, because he is wood now, near enough, and I know how to look at wood.

Begin with the hands, since everyone does.

The boy says hooks. He said it in the tower on the night of the wall, iron hooks, and he meant it as a way of talking and he was righter than he knew, for iron is what they feel like from the inside: cold, and heavy, and not quite mine. Let me be plain about their shape. The fingers of both hands have curled in toward the palm so that the tips of the nails touch the heel of the hand, and they do not uncurl. I can force them, a little, with the other hand, and they go back when I let go, slowly, the way a green branch goes back when you bend it and release it, and there is a sound when they go, not a sound anyone else can hear, a creak in the joints like the creak of the fir before it split. The knuckles have swelled to the size of hazelnuts and gone hard. The nails are black. Not dirty. Black through, the way the star-iron is black, as if something has been drawn up into them from below and set.

I can hold an adze. I can hold it because the haft goes into the curl of the fingers the way a rope goes into a hook and stays there without my asking, and this is convenient, and I have stopped being grateful for it. I cannot hold a gouge. The fine ones, the fingernail one that opened Karrash’s eyes, I cannot close my hand around, the curl is too tight and the haft too thin, and I have not opened anyone’s eyes with my own hands in four harvests, and I have not tried in three.

I cannot hold a spoon. The boy feeds me, some mornings, when the curl is bad. He does not speak of it and I do not, and he holds the spoon the way you would hold it for a child or a very old man, and I am neither, I am fifty-one, and I let him.

The eyes.

They weep. I have said so. Not with grief, or not only; I will come to grief, it has its own place in the inventory and it is a large one. They weep the way an eye weeps that has been too long in smoke, always, a little, so that the world is seen through a film and the film catches the light and everything has a halo it should not have. That is the smaller thing. The larger thing is this: I cannot look at a flat surface.

Let me be exact, for it is a strange affliction and I have had four harvests to study it. The river is fine. Moving water has nothing in it; it has never been anything but water and it will never be anything else and my eyes rest on it like a hand rests on a warm stone. The sky is fine. Clouds, likewise, though I have caught myself, once or twice, at dusk, seeing something in a cloud and having to look away, and I have decided that this is only the old habit of a man who looked at things for shapes for forty years and not the other thing. But a wall. A wall of mud-chinked boards, like the wall of my own hut. A floor. A tabletop. The flat side of a split log. The face of a cliff.

They are full.

Every one. I look at the wall of my hut and I do not see boards, I see the boards go clear the way the logs in the riverbed went clear with the moons open, lit from inside, gold, with the grain showing and the knots dark and the faults white as bone, and in the gold, lying along the grain, someone. In every board. A woman. A boy. A thing with too many arms. And they are turned toward me, and they know I can see them, and they are waiting, and I cannot get the moons off.

That is the thing I have not told the chieftain and have not told the boy and am telling the flour, which does not answer. The mask is on the trestle. I have not worn it in eleven days. And the moons are still open. Not in the mask. In me. Whatever the door was, whatever the lattice and the oyster shells and the forty-two spirals made of the place between the living and the dead, it made it in my own eyes too, a little more with every knock, and now I can shut the mask’s eyes by taking it off and I cannot shut my own, and I sit on the flour heap and look at the river because the river is the only thing left in the valley that is not asking to be let out.

I sleep with my face to the door. The door is open. The sky has nothing in it.

The teeth.

This is a small thing and I set it down because small things are the inventory. The star-iron sang, when I unwrapped it, the morning of the mantis, and I felt it in my teeth, a note too high to hear. It has not stopped. The blade is wrapped again, in the same stiff hide, on the same bench, under a cloth, and I have not touched it in seven harvests, and I feel it in my teeth every hour of every day, singing, because there is a true face near. There is always a true face near now. There are four hundred of them in the valley and a bridge and a wall and seven small pine ones at the top of the slope looking at the mountain, and the iron knows every one and sings to every one, and my teeth ache in a way the healer cannot find a cause for and I have not told her the cause.

The ears. The thrumming. I have said, on the bank, the first morning, that inside the mask there is a sound like an adze biting green wood, over and over, a heartbeat made of cutting. It is outside the mask now. It is in the hut. Under the river, under the boy’s breathing, under the wind in the reeds, a deep slow knock, knock, knock, and I have stopped being able to tell whether it is the wood of the whole valley remembering that it was told to become, or whether it is only my own blood, which has learned the rhythm and will not unlearn it.

The back. Bent. The knees. Gone, as knees go, at fifty-one, in a man who has knelt on riverbanks and stood at trestles for forty years; I record them because they are on the list and for no other reason. They would have gone anyway. That is a comfort, and I take it, and I note that it is the only thing on this list that would have gone anyway.

And the small tremor.

I want to set this down carefully because it is the thing I would most want back, of everything, more than the fingers.

Under the steadiness, for forty years, there was a shake. Small. So small that no one ever saw it but me, and I saw it only because I looked at my hands more than most men look at anything. It was there when I opened Karrash’s eyes with the fingernail gouge. It was there when I cut the first spoon. It was fear, I think, or the thing that lives next door to fear, the thing that knows the cut might go wrong and holds the blade anyway. And the morning I tied the cords it stopped. One breath of stillness, still as a pool, and I thought: oh, that is what it is to have his hands and not to be afraid.

I would give the bridge to have it back.

That is not a way of talking. I have weighed it. Seven arches, forty carts, the marsh-trade going down and the sea-trade coming up, the chieftain’s toll doubled and his register full. I would trade every plank of it for one morning of holding a fingernail gouge in a hand that shook a little, and cutting a spoon, badly, and being afraid of the cut. Because the shake was mine. It was the only thing in my hands that was ever entirely mine, and I let him take it, gladly, on the first morning, and I did not understand that a steadiness that is given can be kept.

He keeps it. Some mornings I cannot get the knots. The boy has told the chieftain that, I know he has, in the way of the west bank, and it is true, and it is also not the whole of it. Some mornings I cannot get the knots because the hooks will not close on the cords. And some mornings I cannot get the knots because the hooks will not close on the cords because he will not let them. And I cannot tell, anymore, standing in the hut with my hands behind my head and the moons closed on the trestle and my own eyes open on a wall full of waiting shapes, which morning it is.

That is the inventory. Hands, eyes, teeth, ears, back, knees, tremor. A tool laid out on a bench. Now the question, and then the grief, and then I will stop, because a catalogue that does not stop is not a catalogue, it is a man talking to flour.

Can a craftsman be finished?

I know what it is for a carving to be finished. It is the one thing in the world I have always known. A carving is finished when there is nothing left to take away. Not when it is beautiful; beauty is a thing the market-women see and it comes and goes with the light. Not when it is true; true is a thing the wood says and the wood is not always right. Finished. When the last shaving has come off and the shape underneath is all there is and one more stroke would be a wound. Every good carver knows the moment. Every bad one goes past it. The difference between a melon and a face is not skill, whatever the chieftain thinks. It is knowing when to put the gouge down.

I have been taken away from.

Seven harvests. Every knock, something came through the door, and the chieftain thinks it came through the mask and stayed in the mask, and it did, she is full, I told him so. But a door is on both sides of a wall. And every time the wood’s wanting came through the lattice into the world and became a bridge or a wall or a face, something went the other way. Out of me. Into the wood. I do not know what. I have tried to catalogue it and it is the one thing I cannot lay on the bench. It is not the fingers; they are the shape of the going, not the thing that went. It is not the tremor, though the tremor was the first of it. It is—

The boy makes bowls.

I want to set that here, in the middle of the question, because it is the answer and I did not see it until I wrote the question down.

He sat on my bench for four harvests with a walnut of lime in his hand and made nothing, and I watched him, through the film, and I thought: he is waiting for me to teach him. And I could not. My hands could not hold the fingernail gouge and my eyes could not look at a flat board without seeing what was in it and I had nothing to give him but the mask, and I would not give him the mask, I would have put the star-iron through the lattice first. So I said nothing, and he said nothing, and in the fifth harvest he got up and went back to Dunnak and asked for a piece of pine and made a bowl.

A bowl. Lowland pine. With a gouge that shook, a little, in a hand that had been split down the thumbnail on an ironwood trunk. And it is a good bowl. His mother eats from it. I have held it. The hooks fit around it the way they fit around an adze haft and I held it and I felt the shake in it, in the marks of the gouge, the small unevenness where a hand that was a little afraid went in and came out, and I sat on the flour heap with the boy’s bowl in my hooks and I wept, with grief this time, not smoke, and he stood in the door and did not ask.

That is the answer. A craftsman is finished when there is nothing left to take away. And what there was to take away from Ashnak was the shake, and the deafness, and the small comfortable feelings, and the being-afraid-of-the-cut, and the not-knowing whose voice was in the grain, and all of it has been taken, stroke by stroke, seven harvests, until what is left is a man with hooks and open eyes who can knock on anything in the world and make it become, and cannot make a bowl.

I am finished. One more stroke would be a wound.

And here is the grief, and it is not what the boy thinks, or the chieftain, or the flour.

It is not that I am finished. A carving does not grieve. It stands before a door and looks back and is warm and the family makes the sound. If I am finished, then I am the truest thing I ever made, and I should stand and be warm and let them make the sound, and the chieftain has knelt to me, near enough, in the courtyard, and Merrek has sat in the road.

It is that I was the carver.

Do you understand? I was not the log. I was never the log. Forty years I laid my hand on wood and listened and took away, and I was the one doing it, the one with the gouge, the one who knew the moment, and then I tied three cords and the moons opened and for seven harvests I have been standing at the trestle with the gouge in my hand and I have been the wood. Something else has been carving. My uncle, the door, the wanting, I do not know its name and have stopped asking; it took me the way I took Karrash, stroke by stroke, and it knew the depth, God help me, it knew the depth of an ear, and it has not once cut too deep, and it has stopped, now, at the moment, exactly at the moment, as a good carver does, and stepped back, and looked, and I am finished, and I never once got to hold the blade.

That is the grief. Not that it is over. That it was never mine.

I said on the flour heap on the night of the burning that every post I ever made was a prison with a better window, and that I had been letting prisoners out of trees for forty years without knowing there was a breath to let. I have let the breath out. Every breath in the valley. And I have learned what my uncle learned in the grey, which he told me on the bank in sticks and wind and I did not hear, which was that a thing with no mouth cannot say its own name, and that being seen is not the same as being let go.

I am seen. Every door in the valley sees me. I would like, once, before the end, to be let go.

There is a chest.

Cedar. Fragrant. Bought in anger from a marsh trader twenty years ago because it was the wood that killed him and I wanted to own something of it and never open it. It is under the bench. I have never opened it. I am going to open it.

Not tonight. The hooks will not close on the cords tonight and I do not know which morning it is. But I have counted, sitting here, the way the boy counted on the rope in the gorge, and I have got to a number, and the number is three, and I have told the flour, and the flour has not answered, and the river has nothing in it, and the wall of my hut is full of faces turned toward me waiting, and I have looked at them, tonight, all of them, one by one, the way I looked at the forty in the riverbed the first morning, and I have said to each of them, in the hard way, the way I say things, the only way I have:

No.

And they are still waiting. But I said it. And my hands, when I said it, shook.

A little.

I record that. I record it last, at the bottom of the inventory, under the knees, because it is the smallest thing and because it was mine.

 

Segment 27: Do Not Unloose the Cords

He tied me on this morning.

Warm one—warm one, are you there? Are you? Put your hand on the page. Put it flat. I need to feel a warm thing while I say this because I am not going to have one soon, I know it, I know it the way the stakes knew the hand was coming, and I have eleven days of roof behind me and I will not, I will not, I will not go quietly into whatever is on the other side of the shells—

He tied me on this morning and I was good.

I was so good. Hear that. Eleven days on the trestle with the moons shut and the rafters and the sound of him not sleeping and the boy coming in with beans and going out, eleven days of the hollow behind my brow growing wider and the hundred small mouths in it opening a little more each night when I looked in, and I did not push. I could have. I have had the strength since the wall. I could have put the mouths against the inside of the lattice and made the whole trestle creak until he came, and I did not, I lay still, I was a face on a board, and this morning his hooks came down over me and found the cords and they closed.

They closed! On the first try! I did not lock them, I did not help them, I let them alone, and they found the knots the way they found them the first morning by the river, and the mask came up and settled on his face and the hollow fit—

It did not fit.

Warm one, that is the first thing. I have been telling myself for eleven days that I was becoming the shape of the thing I pushed into the grain, wide, crested, mouthed, and I have been afraid of it in the dark and I have been proud of it in the dark and I did not once think what it would mean when he put me on. The hollow behind the brow was his face. It was scooped with my hands to the shape of his face and I gathered in it and was held. And now the hollow is my shape. And my shape is not his face anymore. And when the mask came down over him the spirals pressed on his cheeks in the wrong places and the brow-ridge did not sit on his brow, it sat above it, and the chin-edge that was cut to lie against his throat lay against his collarbone, and inside, in the hollow, there was room. Room around him. Room that had not been there. A finger’s width all the way round between his skin and the wood where the hundred mouths were, and the mouths felt the warm of him and turned toward it the way the stakes turned toward the ditch, and he felt them turn.

I felt him feel it. His breath stopped against the inside of the wood. And he said, in the hard way, very quietly, with the cords not yet tied:

Uncle. What are you.

And I could not answer, and I could not stop the mouths from turning, and he tied the cords anyway.

Left temple. Right temple. Crown.

And the moons opened, and I had hands, and I was so glad, warm one, I was so glad I could have wept, and I would have, if I had anything to weep with, and he stood in the hut with the red pouring off him and his hooks held out before him still, still as stones, and I thought: he has forgiven me. He has felt the mouths and tied me on anyway. He is going to walk the valley again. There are things in the wall of this hut, I can see them through him, a woman, a boy, a thing with too many arms, all turned toward us, and he is going to knock, and I will say become, and I will be good, I will say only what the wood wants, I swear it on the grey—

He walked out of the hut.

Past the wall. Past the woman and the boy and the thing with too many arms, and they cried out to us, I heard them, the way the forty logs cried out on the first morning, cut, cut, cut, and he did not stop and he did not put his hand on the boards, and I thought: the river, then. The riverbed. The big man with his crossed arms, who has waited since before the counting and who we said soon to and never came back for. He is going to the big man. Good, good, the big man wants only to stand up—

He walked past the riverbed.

Down the bank. Into the water. To the knees. To the waist. And stopped, in the current, where the river is only river, where there is nothing in it and never was, and he stood there with the red going out of the moons across the moving water and the water taking it and carrying it away, and he was not listening. Warm one, I know what his listening feels like from the inside, I have felt it seven harvests, it is a stillness that goes down through the hands into the wood and waits. This was not that. This was a man standing in a river looking at nothing.

And his hooks came up behind his head.

I knew then.

I am telling you I knew, and I am telling you what I did, all of it, the way I have told you the wall, because I have decided that I would rather you know what I am than that you think I am something else. He stood in the river with his hooks on the knots and I understood that he had tied me on so that he could take me off. That the eleven days had not been rest. They had been counting. He had counted to three the way the boy counted on the rope and he had got there this morning and he had put me on one last time, not to walk, not to knock, but so that the taking-off would be a taking-off and not a leaving-on-the-trestle, so that it would be done with the cords and not with neglect, because he is my sister’s boy and he learned from me that you do not walk away from a thing, you unbind it.

And I begged.

Hear it. I have no voice, the spirals took it, but I have the place under words and I have had seven harvests to learn how to fill it, and I filled it, warm one, I poured into his hands everything I had, and the first thing I poured was please.

Please. Please, Ashnak. Not here. Not in the water. Take me back to the hut, to the trestle, to the roof, I will lie on the trestle, I will be a face on a board for a hundred harvests, I will not push, I will not turn the mouths, I will be what you made on the morning of the mantis and nothing more, I swear it, I swear it on Ilme, on your mother, on my sister who burned—

His hooks did not move on the knots. They did not tighten and they did not loosen. He was listening now. Not to wood. To me.

And I felt the knots under his fingers and I felt what they were, three cords of marsh grass and deer sinew boiled in resin that my sister braided the year she died, and I thought of her hands, never still, at something, and I said the next thing, and the next thing was the thing I am most ashamed of, and I said it anyway.

I said: she braided these for me.

She did not. I do not know what she braided them for. But I said it into his hands, I made him feel it, I put my sister’s hands at the cords in the year of her death and made him see them working the grass and the sinew and the resin and know that it was for this, for her brother, for the day her boy would need to bind the breath to his face, and I felt it go into him, I felt him believe it for the space of a breath, and his hooks softened on the knots—

And he said, aloud, in the river, in the hard way:

No. She didn’t.

And the hooks went back.

So I threatened.

Warm one, I am not proud. I have told you I would tell you everything and I am telling you. I stood in the doorway of the door, in the lattice, in the hollow that is my shape now, and I looked out through the moons at the valley behind him, up the bank, up the hill, at every door with its true faces, four hundred of them, at the first chief before the feasting hall, at the wall standing straight at the north end with the mouths drawn in, at the seven arches over the ravine with forty carts a day on them, and I said into his hands:

They are mine.

Every one. You found them and I cut them and the wood became, and you think the becoming was the wood’s, and it was, warm one, it was, the fir wanted to be across—but the wall did not want to bite. I told it to. I stood in the door and I said what went through, and I could say it again. From here. From the mask. I can feel every post in the valley through the door the way I can feel the mountain man’s fingers in the gate, warm, waiting, and if you untie these cords I will—

I stopped.

He had not moved. His hooks were on the knots and they were not shaking and he was standing in the river up to his waist with the red going out across the water, and he was listening, and I stopped because I heard what I was saying, and what I was saying was: I will tell the first chief to bite the fat man when he kneels. I will tell Auntie in Reedholm to close her mouth on the old man’s finger. I will tell Karrash and Ilme, my sister, standing warm before the feasting hall—

I could not finish it.

Warm one, I could not. I found the end of the threat and it was my sister’s face with a mouth in it and I could not put that into his hands, and I let go of the threat and it fell into the river and was carried away with the red, and I have decided that this is the only thing I have done since the wall that I am not ashamed of, and it was only a not-doing, and it was not enough.

So I flattered.

You are the greatest carver since the counting. That was the first of it. You are the only one who ever heard. You opened Karrash’s eyes with a fingernail gouge when you were forty and you did not know there was a breath and you heard anyway, and if the fat man had stood the three posts in the earth Karrash would have found the door, I told you so on the bank, I told you close, close, close, and I meant it, and you are the door now, you are the only door there has ever been, and if you untie the cords the door closes and every dead of every valley from here to the sea goes back into the grey with no faces, and the melons come back, and the weeping comes back, and you will sit on your flour heap with your hooks and hear the kettles and know that you could have—

He said: I know.

Aloud. In the river. Quiet.

He said: I know all of it. I’ve said it to the flour. I’ve said it to the boy without saying it. I’ve said it to the chieftain on the hill and he said take her off and I said I mean to and I’ve been three days meaning to.

He said: Uncle. Listen.

And I listened. What else could I do. I was in the door and he was on the other side of it and he had my sister’s cords under his hooks and I had poured everything into his hands and it had all been carried away, and I listened.

He said: you told me in the mud that the dead have no faces. That the posts never worked. That every one of them went into the grey mouthless since before the counting and bumped their knees. And I believed you. And I gave them faces. Every one. And you told me the faces let the breath out, that the door went up, that they climbed.

He said: do they?

I did not answer. I could not. I have no voice.

He said: I’ve been standing at the trestle seven harvests with the gouge in my hand and I’ve been the wood. Something else was carving. And I let it, because it knew the depth. And it did know the depth. It cut me exactly to the moment and stopped. And I’ve been sitting on the heap eleven days asking what it cut me into, and I’ve decided, and I’ll tell you, and then I’ll untie the cords, and you can do what you like with the valley.

He said: it cut me into a door. Not a man. A door. And a door doesn’t grieve and a door doesn’t shake and a door can’t make a bowl. And every post in the valley looks back, and they’re warm, and the families make the sound, and I’ve stood before four hundred of them and I’ve never once felt one go up.

He said: they’re not climbing, Uncle. They’re looking. Like the wall looked. Like the mountain man’s fingers look, in the gate. You told me the face was a door for the dead to go out through, and it’s a door, but nothing goes out. It comes in. You came in. Every knock, something came in and stayed, and the mask is full and the valley is full and I’m full, and none of it is going up, it’s all just here, warm, waiting, looking at me.

He said: I made four hundred prisons with better windows. I did it for you. And you knew.

And I—

Warm one, I did know.

I did not know I knew until he said it. I have been in the door seven harvests and I have felt every becoming go through it and I have felt every one of them stay, warm, in the wood, the way I stayed in the sap, and I called it being seen, I called it being let go, I told him in the mud that being seen was the same as climbing, and I believed it, because I wanted it, because I had been mouthless in the grey for seventy summers and a face with open eyes seemed like the sky.

It is not the sky. It is a window. Karrash is standing before the feasting hall with his belly and his laugh and he is looking at the fat man kneel every morning and he is not climbing, he is looking, the way I looked at the rafters for eleven days, and he will look for a thousand years, and I did that.

And he untied the first cord.

Left temple. I felt it go. I felt his hook find the knot and pull it and the sinew slip and the mask shift on his face, and the hollow that is my shape now shifted with it, and a finger’s width of light came in under the rim where the cheek had pulled away, cold, river-light, and I felt the grey.

Hear it. Hear it, I will not have it softened. When the cord went the shells did not move, they are set in sap, but the thing behind them did, the thing that had been held there by three cords and forty-two spirals and a warm face pressed into the hollow, and it moved a finger’s width, out, toward the light under the rim, and on the other side of the light was the grey.

Not far. Not a valley away. There. A finger’s width. Right against the wood, the way it was against the shell on the trestle the first night, but closer, because there was no face in the hollow to hold me in, only room, and the room was the shape of a thing with a hundred mouths, and the grey came into the room the way water comes into a boat with a plank gone, not fast, seeping, cold, dustless, without color, and it touched the nearest mouth, and the mouth—

Tasted it.

Warm one, I remembered the taste. I had forgotten. Seventy summers of it and I had forgotten in seven harvests of cinnabar and rosewood and the sweat of a living face, and it came back all at once, the taste of nothing, of ash ground from ash, and the mouth that tasted it closed, and did not open again, and I understood that this is what the grey does to a thing with mouths. It does not eat them. It fills them. One by one. Until there is nothing in the hollow but grey with the shape of a face pressed into it, and the shape is only a memory of where a thing was.

And I screamed.

No voice. The spirals took it. But I put it in his hands, all of it, the whole seventy summers of sticks and wind, and I did not beg with it and I did not threaten with it and I did not flatter, I only screamed, the way I screamed on the bank when the adze went in and I came out, the same scream, going the other way—

And his hooks stopped on the second knot.

They stopped. He stood in the river with one cord loose and the mask hanging crooked on his face and the grey seeping in under the rim and his hooks on the right temple, and they did not pull, and they did not let go, and I felt him feel the scream, all of it, the boulders and the knees and the silence, and I felt him—

Warm one, I felt him pity me.

That is the end of it. That is the thing I have been screaming toward for seventy summers and four rainy seasons and three nights and seven harvests and eleven days, and it is not the sky and it is not hands and it is not being seen. It is my sister’s boy standing in a river with the cords half undone and the door half closed and the grey coming in, and stopping, because he can feel what it is to be put back, and does not want to do it to me.

He said, in the hard way, so low the river nearly took it:

Uncle. I’m sorry.

And I said—I made him know—I put it into his hands with the last warm thing I had, before the next mouth closed:

I know, boy.

I do not know where I got that. Durrak Broken-Jaw said it on the goat-track to a man with no foot and I heard it through the gate, through the door, from a hundred paces off, and it stayed in me the way everything stays, and it came out now, and it was the only true thing I had said since the mantis.

He pulled the second cord.

 

Segment 28: The Chest of Fragrant Cedar

The third cord was the crown.

I set that down first because it is the last thing in the inventory of the mask and I have been exact about everything else: three holes drilled at the temples and two at the crown the afternoon of the spirals, without deciding to, for hanging on a wall. My mother’s braid through them. Left temple, tied first on the morning by the river seven harvests ago and untied first in the water this morning. Right temple, second, and second. And the crown, up between the two cockatoo crests, behind the praying insect, the cord that goes over the top of the skull and holds the whole weight, and I stood in the river to my waist with two cords loose and the mask hanging from the third like a thing on a hook, and my hooks were on the knot, and I did not pull it.

I want to be exact about why.

It was not pity. I had felt that already, at the second knot, with the scream in my hands, and it had stopped me, and then he said I know, boy, into my palms in a voice I had heard through a gate from a hundred paces, and the pity became something else that has no name in the valley and I pulled the second cord through it. It was not fear. I have been afraid of him and I was not afraid of him in the river; a thing that has just said I know, boy is not a thing one fears. And it was not mercy, not yet. Mercy comes at the end and I will get to it.

It was that the third cord was the one that held.

The temples only steady. The crown carries. I had learned that on the first morning, tying them, with the mask cold on my face and the moons shut: the two side-cords keep the face from turning and the top-cord keeps it from falling, and when I pulled the second one this morning and the mask swung crooked on my face with the river-light coming in under the rim, the whole of it was hanging from the one braid over my skull, and the whole of him was hanging from it, and I felt the weight.

Two pounds. I had weighed it, once, in the second harvest, on the market-women’s scale, out of the old habit of knowing what a thing weighs. Two pounds of mountain rosewood with two oyster shells and a coin of cinnabar and a coin of lime and a coin of boar-grease and three cords. That is what the scale said. And the weight on the crown-cord this morning was not two pounds. It was seventy summers. I felt every one of them pull on the braid over my skull, and under them four rainy seasons, and under those three nights of pushing and seven harvests of coming-in-and-staying, and I understood, with my hooks on the last knot and the river going past my waist with the red carried away on it, that I was not holding a mask.

I was holding a man over a drop.

By one braid of my mother’s, that she made in the year she died for a purpose I do not remember. And on the other side of the drop was the grey, and I had felt it in the scream, the boulders and the knees, and a mouth had closed already inside the hollow, I had felt that too, tasting nothing, and if I pulled the crown-cord the mask would fall into the river and the moons would close and whatever was left of him would go a finger’s width out through the room in the hollow and into the ash.

And I thought: I have never once let go of a thing over a drop.

It is not in me. It was not in me at the bottom of the gorge with the boy Tobbo’s hair in my nephew’s fist and the current pulling, and I put the adze in the crack and levered rather than let go. It was not in me under the water eleven times cutting roots. It was not in me in the courtyard with the fat man holding Karrash in the coals, I stood at the back and did not let go of anything, I walked down to the river with all of it still in my hands. And my uncle, who has my hands, did not let go of the rosewood when it went down the gorge, he wrapped himself around the roots like a drowning man around a log and went down with it, and that is why he was in the sap, and that is why he is here.

We do not let go. It is the one thing that is entirely ours.

So I did not pull the third cord.

I reached up with the other hook and I lifted the mask off over my head, the way one lifts a thing off a hook, with the crown-cord still tied and the two side-cords trailing, and I brought it down in front of me and held it in both hands above the water, and I looked at it.

The moons were shut. Pale, round, asleep. The red was gone from behind them. The rosewood was dark with river-spray and the spirals on the cheeks were as tight as the day I wound them, red, white, black, and the two cockatoos on the crown turned their beaks in toward the praying insect, and the insect watched me, the way they do, with the whole head.

I said: not the river.

Aloud. In the hard way. To the face in my hooks.

I said: I’m not going to drop you in the river and let the current take you down the gorge a second time. I’m not going to leave you on a trestle for a hundred harvests looking at a roof with the grey a finger off. I’m not going to put the star-iron through the lattice, though I thought about it, and you know I thought about it, and you’d have let me.

I said: there’s a chest.

And I walked up out of the water with the mask held before me in both hooks, dripping, and went up the bank past the forty logs with their prisoners crying cut, cut, cut, and past the flour heap with the dent in it, and into the hut, and I set the mask on the trestle face up, and I knelt, which the knees do not like, and reached under the bench.

Now the digression. It is the last one, and it is about cedar, and I have been walking around it for seven harvests the way the boy walked around the log for four mornings, and I am going to put my hand on it.

Cedar killed him.

I set that down on the flour heap on the night of the burning in the catalogue of the eleven woods: red cedar, sweet to smell, splits along the grain if you look at it crossly, the wood that fell on my uncle when I was a child, and I will not cut it and I will not sit beneath it and I have a chest made of it that I bought in anger from a marsh trader and never opened. All of that was true. I bought the chest twenty years ago at the wharf at Reedholm from a man who did not know what he was selling, a plain box of red cedar with a lid on leather hinges, and I bought it because I wanted to own the wood that had killed him. Not to use. To have. To keep under my bench where I could reach it and never reach for it. That is a kind of hatred, the kind that buys a thing and hides it, and I have had it under my bench for twenty years and I pulled it out this morning with two hooks and the sweetness came up off it as I dragged it across the floor, cedar, the smell of the wood that fell, the smell that was in his mouth as the breath went out of it, and I did not stop.

I opened the lid.

It was empty. I had known it was empty, I had never put anything in it, but I want to set down that it was empty in the way that a hollow is empty, the way the hollow behind the mask’s brow was empty on the morning of the mantis before he gathered in it. It was the shape of something not yet there. Cedar inside, pale, unweathered, never touched by light, with the grain running straight and the smell coming up thick and sweet.

And I put my hand in it.

Flat. On the bottom. The way I laid my palm on the bark of the big man in the riverbed the first morning, the way I laid it on the root-fist of the fir, and I listened. Not with the moons. With my own eyes, my own open eyes, and my own hooks, and the thrumming in my ears that is the whole valley or my own blood, and I asked the cedar what it wanted.

And it remembered.

That is the thing I have been walking toward, and I will set it down as plainly as the register sets down a toll, because it is the truest thing I have learned in seven harvests of listening and I did not learn it from him and I did not learn it through the door.

All wood remembers.

Not the way the dead remember, in the grey, bumping their knees. Not the way I remember, in the inventory. The way a river remembers a flood: by having been shaped by it. The cedar in the chest under my hand was not the cedar that fell on him. It was a different tree, from a different slope, cut by a different hand, and it did not know his name and had never heard him hiss. But it was cedar. It had stood on a mountain and it had fallen. Every cedar has. And in the grain of it, under my palm, straight and pale and sweet, there was the memory of falling, of the crack like a bone in a dog’s jaw, of the red weight coming down, and there was, under that, deeper, the other thing.

The memory of what it had fallen on.

Not him. Not Gedru. But something. Every fallen tree has fallen on something, a stone, a fox, a smaller tree, a man, and the wood keeps it, the way the ironwood kept the first chief and the fir kept across, and the cedar under my hand had a place in its grain where the falling ended and something was pressed, and the place was the shape of a thing held down.

And the cedar was sorry.

I do not know how to set that down and I set it down anyway. Wood does not have sorrow. It has wanting; I learned that at the ravine. But the wanting of the cedar in the chest was the wanting of a thing that has fallen on something and would like, if it could, if anyone ever asked, to hold that thing differently. Not crushed. Held. The way a chest holds. With a lid, and a roof, and room.

I said: not the grey.

Aloud. To the cedar. With my hooks flat on the bottom of the empty chest.

I said: he was under you once. Not you. Your kind. He went down under the red weight with the smell of you in his mouth and he went into the grey and he was there seventy summers, and he came out through rosewood, and he has been in rosewood seven harvests, and the rosewood is full, and I have to put him somewhere, and I will not put him in the river and I will not put him in the ash. You fell on him. You remember falling on something. Hold him.

And I did not knock. I want that recorded. There was no adze in my hand and the mask was on the trestle with its moons shut and I had no door, only my own two hooks and my own two sore eyes, and I did not knock. I asked. The way a man asks another man. The way the fat chieftain asked me, in the fourth harvest, with the knees gone: I have not done the thing. I am asking.

The cedar did not become anything. It was a chest. It stayed a chest.

But it was warm.

Under my palm. Not the warm of the first chief, the living warm, the breathing. A lower warm. The warm of a thing that has been in the sun a long time and is giving it back slowly. The warm of a roof.

I took my hooks out of the chest and I stood, which the knees did not like, and I went to the trestle and I picked up the mask.

I will not describe the face again. I have described it enough. I will say only that I held it in both hooks and looked at it, my own eyes to its shut moons, for as long as it takes to say the old greeting three times, and then I said the greeting.

May the river keep your door.

The one the fat man said to the first chief, on his knees, in the ribbons. The one Ashnak never said properly in forty years of mumbling it at the courtyard gate with his eyes on the stones. I said it to my uncle in the hut with the cedar open on the floor and the flour heap outside with its dent and the forty logs in the riverbed crying, and I said it clearly, and my hooks shook.

A little. The small tremor. I felt it in the mask, the way the fat man felt the first chief breathe. It is mine. He gave it back, or I took it back, or it was never gone, only held, the way everything in the valley is held now, warm, waiting, looking, and I had it in my hands with the mask in them and I let it shake.

Then I laid him in the cedar.

Face up. With the crown-cord still tied and the two side-cords coiled beside the cheeks, and the two cockatoos looking up, and the insect praying, and the moons shut. I did not wrap him in the oiled hide. The hide is for the star-iron and I have decided that the star-iron and the mask are not to lie together; they are two doors and one hut has enough. I laid him on the bare cedar and I stood over him and I said the last thing.

I said: they’re not climbing. You told me they would and they’re not. Every post in the valley is a window and nothing goes out of it. And I’ve thought, eleven days, about pulling them down. Going door to door with the adze and knocking and saying: melon. Back into the wood, all of you, back into the sap, into the grain, and let the valley weep again the way it wept before, because at least a melon doesn’t look back.

I said: I’m not going to.

I said: a window isn’t the sky. But it isn’t the grey either. Karrash is standing before the feasting hall with his belly, and he’s not climbing, and he’s not in the ash, and the fat man kneels to him every morning and it costs nothing and Karrash sees it. That’s what you gave them. Not the sky. Being seen. I was angry about that in the river and I’ve stopped, because I’ve been seen seven harvests by every door in the valley and I found out this morning that it’s not enough and it’s not nothing, and that’s the most anyone in this valley has ever had, and you gave it to them, and I’m going to leave it.

I said: and I’m going to give it to you.

And I closed the lid.

It did not creak. Cedar does not, when it is held right. It came down on its leather hinges and settled, and the sweetness went into the box with him, and I put my hooks flat on the top of it and felt, through the lid, through the pale straight grain, a thing settle. Not the grey. I would know the grey; I have had it in my hands. A settling. The way a man settles into a bed he has been told is his.

Then I dug.

Under the bench, where the chest had been, in the packed earth of the hut floor that has had forty years of red flour trodden into it so that it is not earth anymore but a kind of stone, and I dug with the adze because the hooks will hold an adze and nothing else, and it took the whole of the afternoon, and the boy came in at the middle of it with beans and stood in the door and looked at the hole and the chest and my hooks on the adze and did not ask, in the way of the west bank, and set the beans down and took the adze from me and dug.

I let him. I sat on the bench among the seventeen tools, sixteen, the star-iron wrapped and the scraper gone with him to Dunnak’s, and I watched a fourteen-year-old boy, no, twenty-one, he is twenty-one now, dig a hole under my workbench with my mother’s sinew on the adze-haft, and I did not tell him what was in the chest, and he did not ask, and when the hole was deep enough he stopped and looked at me, and I nodded, once, the way I nodded at the two moons.

We put it in together. His two hands and my two hooks. Face up, if a chest has a face, with the lid toward the roof. And we filled the hole, and I trod it down, and the boy pushed the bench back over it, and the star-iron in its hide on the bench sang, once, high, a note I felt in my teeth, and then it was quiet.

Quieter than it has been in seven harvests. Not silent. The thrumming is still there, under everything. But the wall of the hut, when I looked at it, when I made myself look at it, the boards with the woman and the boy and the thing with too many arms—

They were looking at the floor.

At the bench. At the place under it. All of them, turned, the way the stakes turned, the way the forty logs turned. Not at me. At him. And I understood that they would look there now, that every post in the valley would turn a little toward the river hut and the packed floor and the cedar with the door in it, and that he would be seen, by all of them, for as long as the wood stood, and that this was what I had given him and it was not the sky and it was not nothing.

Mercy. The healer uses the word for what she does with the mangrove sap. I have never had a use for it. I set it down now as the last word in the last catalogue because it is the exact word, and exactness is the coin in my hem, and I have spent it.

A thing that was crushed is held. A thing that had no roof has one. A thing that was let out is not put back but put somewhere, kindly, in the wood that remembers, with the lid down and the smell of the mountain and the whole valley turned toward it, waiting for a true carver to lift the blade and call the sleeping shapes out of the forest once more.

I am not that carver. I have said so to the flour. My hands are hooks and my eyes are open and I am finished, one more stroke would be a wound, and I am going to sit on my heap and look at the river, which has nothing in it, until the river takes the heap and me with it, and the boy will make bowls, and the chest will be under the bench.

But I want to set down, at the very end, the thing that the boy said when the bench was back and the star-iron had gone quiet.

He stood in the door with his split thumb and the lime in his pocket that he has never used, and he looked at the bench, and he looked at me, and he said, in the way of the west bank:

Well now.

And I said, in the hard way:

Beans.

And he sat down across from me and we ate them, and my hooks would not hold the spoon, and he held it, and it shook, a little, in his hand.

Mine.

 

Segment 29: Korrak Carves a Small Bird

Sing, spirits of the high stone. Sing softly. There is no ice-fall in this song and no wall and no naming of the dead, and the old men at the fires will not ask for it, for it is not a song the old men know how to want. But Korrak Stone-Tooth asks for it, and the spirits have held enough against him, and they may give him this one thing, and it is small, and it is a bird.

Sing the years first, quickly, as the goat crosses scree.

Seven summers since the wall. Seven winters, and none of them the early kind, for the snow has come late to the high passes since the mountain stopped going down, and the old men say the spirits are pleased and Korrak says nothing and thinks it is only weather. The goats have dropped their kids on grass. The pine-nuts have come. No one has eaten a dog. In the spring of the first year the salt-trader came up the goat-track with his salt and found four hundred, no, three hundred and forty-one, waiting for him at the last pine with hides and horn and dried goat and not one club raised, and he dropped his salt, sing it, he dropped the whole sack in the road and stood with his mouth open, and Ilsa Three-Goats got down off her she-goat and picked it up and handed it back to him and said, in the guttural: how much.

He comes every spring now. He brings salt and he brings the lowland words, and Korrak has learned some, for a war leader who cannot say how much to the only lowlander the mountain lets live is a poor war leader, and Korrak has been a poor one and does not mean to be poorer.

He has learned warm one. He has learned bitter. He has learned, from the salt-trader who talks the way lowlanders talk, which is too much and about everything, that the red face is gone.

Sing that as the salt-trader told it, for it is his, and Korrak will not improve it.

The salt-trader said: the carver put it in a box. Cedar. Buried it under his bench at the river-bend and sits on a heap of red dust with his hands like hooks and looks at the water. Does not wear it. Does not knock. There is a boy, a bowl-maker from the west bank, that feeds him. The wall at the north end still stands straight and the posts still look back and the fat chieftain still kneels, older, slower, and the two fingers are still in the gate, chieftain asked the carver to take them out and he said they stay. That is what the salt-trader said. And Korrak, who was eight-fingered and sitting on a stone with his hand in his beard, said: good.

Not good, the enemy is beaten. Good the way the lowlanders say it over a cut that is deep enough and no deeper. Korrak did not know he knew that meaning until it came out of his mouth, and the salt-trader looked at him strangely, and Korrak has thought about where he learned it, and has decided he learned it through the gate, with his hands on the oak, from the thing on the other side, and has stopped thinking about it.

That is the years. Now sing the evening.

It is the Passion week of the month the lowlanders call Ilmatus, which is the month of endurance, and Korrak has decided to be pleased by that. The high meadow is green. The last snow is a white line on the north face and it does not move and it does not care and Korrak sits below it by a fire with his back to a stone and his knees drawn up, and on his knees is a piece of pine, and in his left hand is the flint knife.

The left hand. The eight-fingered one. Sing that, for it matters: Korrak holds the knife in the hand that the gate took from, because the right hand is for the club and the club is on the wall of the hut where it has hung seven summers, and Korrak has found that a hand with two fingers gone holds a small knife better than a hand with all five. The thumb and the two big fingers close on the haft and there is nothing in the way. The lowlanders would say the gate made him a whittler. Korrak says nothing.

The pine is a scrap. A split of it from the woodpile, the length of his hand and the width of two fingers, and the grain runs straight because Korrak looked at the pile a long time before he chose it, not listening, sing that, not listening, only looking, the way a man looks at a stone before he sits on it. He does not lay his hand flat on it. He does not wait to be told. He has heard, from the salt-trader, about the laying-on and the waiting, and he has felt through a gate what is on the other side when a man does that, and he will not.

He sets the flint to the pine and cuts.

Sing the cut, spirits, with the gravity you gave the flint teeth going into river-oak, for it deserves it, and Korrak has decided that it deserves it more.

The flint goes in and the pine gives. A curl comes off, pale, thin, dry, the length of a fingernail, and falls on Korrak’s knee, and it is nothing. It is not red and yellow. It does not pour. It does not steam. It is a shaving of pine off a scrap from a woodpile and it lies on the goat-hide over Korrak’s knee and it is the most ordinary thing on the whole mountain, and Korrak looks at it a long time.

Then he cuts again.

He is making a bird.

Sing what kind, for the spirits know and will be pleased or not. A crested one. The horn-combed kind, the mountain bird, the one that lives on the far side of the ridge and never comes over, the one the fat chieftain wears in feathers and the red face wore in rosewood, two of them, on its crown, with their beaks turned in toward a small praying thing. Korrak saw them on the wall through the fire-smoke. He saw them with the ice going out of him between the stones. And he has decided, seven summers later, by a fire, with a flint knife, that they are his birds. The mountain’s. They were on the mountain before the lowlanders learned to carve them, and Korrak will carve one badly and it will still be his.

The head comes first, because the head is the hardest and Korrak has learned, from the ice and the gate and the fire-council, to do the hardest thing first while there is still strength for it. He cuts the beak. It is too big. He cuts it smaller and it is crooked. He leaves it crooked. He cuts the crest, the high horn of it rising off the back of the skull, and the flint slips and takes the top of the crest off, and Korrak looks at the headless crest and the crestless head and grunts, and cuts a new crest, lower, out of what is left, and it is a bird with a low crest, and there are such birds, Korrak has seen them, the old ones, whose crests have worn.

An old bird, then. Good.

Sing the body. Round. Korrak has a hand that was made for clubs and a knife that was made for goats and he cuts a body the way the ice cuts a slope, with more force than the thing needs, and the body comes out lumpy, with a flat place on one side where the flint went too deep and Korrak could not put the wood back, and he turns the flat place to the bottom and calls it the place the bird sits, and it sits.

The wings he does not cut. He scratches them. Two lines on each side with the point of the flint, going back from the shoulder, and a few short cross-lines for the feathers, and they are not feathers, they are scratches on pine, and a child could tell, and it is for a child.

Sing the child. For Korrak has been sitting by this fire a long time and the spirits have been patient and the child is the cause, and a song without a cause is only a whittling.

Marrow has a daughter.

Marrow, whose father no one knows, who was found in the pine-wood and raised by the whole meadow, who laughed when he swung the ice-bear’s bone, whose foot the threshold kept. Marrow who said Father, Father into Durrak’s back the whole of the goat-track and for a winter after, and then stopped saying it, and then, in the third summer, took a woman from the eastern clans who had come over the pass with her brother to trade, a woman with a voice like the wind through the pass, and the brother went home and the woman did not, and Marrow walks now on a foot of lowland pine that the salt-trader brought up in the fourth spring wrapped in a hide, with a note in the lowland marks that the salt-trader read out, and the marks said: from the bowl-maker on the west bank, who was behind the woodpile, and is sorry.

Korrak did not know what to think about that. He has decided not to. Marrow walks on it. It fits. That is all a foot has to do.

And Marrow’s daughter is two summers old and has Marrow’s laugh already, the one that goes from laughing to crying and back without stopping in between, and she has never seen a crested bird, for they do not come over the ridge, and she has never seen the wall, for the mountain does not go down, and she has never seen the red face, for it is in a box under a bench, and Korrak has decided that she will have a bird.

A bad one. Crooked beak, low crest, lumpy body, scratched wings, a flat place to sit. Pine off a woodpile, cut with a flint knife by an eight-fingered man who does not listen to wood and will not.

Sing what Korrak feels, spirits, with the whole of your gravity, for he cannot say it in the guttural and will not try in the lowland words.

The fire is low. The meadow is green. The north face is above him where it has always been and it does not care. The bones in his beard, what is left of it, the top bones, his father’s and Durrak’s father’s, are warm against his throat, and they have been warm seven summers, and they have stopped asking him for anything. The stump of the two fingers has healed to a smooth place that aches when the weather turns and Korrak has come to think of the ache as a kind of counting, the gate keeping its tally, and he lets it.

And the pine under the flint gives.

That is the thing. That is the whole of the song. It gives, and it is only pine, and it does not want anything, and it does not open its mouth, and it does not become. It is a scrap of wood being made into a worse scrap of wood by a man who was once the ice, and every curl that comes off it is nothing, is dry and pale and falls on his knee, and Korrak sits in the nothing with the curls piling on the goat-hide and feels—

The lowlanders have the word. The salt-trader used it, about the carver on his heap, looking at the water. Peace. Korrak had not heard it and asked, and the salt-trader said: it is what you have when nothing is knocking.

Nothing is knocking.

Korrak sits by the fire with his knife in the pine and the ice-fall is not in him, the stone that rolled down the goat-track gathering is not in him, the taste of his dog is not in him, the white certain moment before the north face lets go is not in him, and he does not miss them. Sing that. He does not. He thought he would. He thought, on the meadow at the council with his beard cut short, that a war leader who has felt the ice run out of him between the stones is a man with a hole where the ice was, and that the hole would ache worse than the fingers.

It does not ache. It is only a place with nothing in it. Like the river, the salt-trader says the carver says: the only thing in the valley that does not look back.

Korrak is the river now. Or a stone in it. He sits, and the water goes by, and the flint goes into the pine, and a bird comes out, badly, and he is not the thing that knocks, and he never was, and it is the best thing he has ever known about himself.

The bird is done.

Sing it. Sing it as you sang the flint teeth catching the last light on the slope, the one shining line going down toward the fires. Korrak holds it up. It fits in his palm, the eight-fingered one. It is crooked and lumpy and its crest is low and its wings are scratches, and the fire catches the pale pine and makes it gold, for the space of a breath, the way the ironwood was gold, Korrak has been told, from inside, when the moons were on it. It is not gold. It is firelight on pine. Korrak knows the difference now and it is the most important thing he knows.

He does not look for a face in it. He does not lay his palm on it. He does not listen.

He blows the last of the dust off it, and stands, which the knees do not like, seven summers of not going down having done to Korrak’s knees what seven summers of going down would have, and he walks across the green meadow in the dark toward the hut where Marrow sleeps with his eastern woman and his pine foot by the door and his daughter in a goat-hide by the fire, and he goes in, and Marrow looks up and does not laugh and does not cry, only looks, the way he has looked at everything since the threshold, carefully, to see what it is.

And Korrak puts the bird in the child’s hand.

She is asleep. Her fingers close on it the way a sleeping child’s fingers close on anything, without asking what it is. Ten fingers. All of them. Around a bad pine bird with a crooked beak.

Marrow says, in the guttural, low: what is it.

And Korrak says the one thing, the only thing, the thing the spirits have been waiting seven summers and two fingers and a beard cut short for him to be able to say, and he says it plain, and they may hold it for him or against him as they choose:

A bird. Only a bird.

And he goes out, and the meadow is green, and the north face is above him, and it does not care, and nothing is knocking, and Korrak Stone-Tooth walks back to his fire under the high stone with a flint knife in his belt and pine dust on his knees and eight fingers and a beard with his father in it, warm, and sits, and the fire is low, and he does not build it up.

Sing that, spirits. Sing it and let him be.

 

Segment 30: Well Now, I Know Where It’s Buried

Well now.

I said that to him once, standing in this same door, with my thumb in a rag and a lump of lime in my pocket, looking at a bench pushed back over a patch of trodden dirt, and he said beans, and we ate them, and that was seven years ago, and I’m standing in the same door with a spade.

I’ll tell it careful. I’ve told everything else careful and I ain’t going to get sloppy on the last one.

The hut’s empty. Has been since the spring. He went the way he said he would, on the heap, looking at the river, and the river didn’t take the heap, it never rose that high, but it took him, near enough. Oshun the healer come down one morning with mangrove sap for his hands and found him sitting there with his back to the flour and his hooks in his lap and his eyes open on the water, and she said his eyes was dry. First time in seven years. She said it like it meant something and I reckon it did.

We put him in the river. That’s the custom. And the chief come down the hill, slow, on the arm of his sister with her bone plugs in, and knelt on the bank, and it took him a long time to get up, and nobody helped him because everybody knowed he wouldn’t want it. And then the chief did a thing. He went to the flour heap, that’s the height of a man’s head now, red at the bottom and pink at the top with seven years of nothing on it, and he took a handful. Just a handful. And put it in his pouch. And went back up the hill. I don’t know what for. I ain’t asked.

And there weren’t no post.

That’s the thing. I want it plain. Every door in the valley has got true faces before it that look back, and the man that made them went into the river without one, because there weren’t nobody left that could make it. I could have made a bowl. I did make one. I set it on the bank where the heap is with a handful of beans in it and I felt like a fool and I left it.

So that’s him. Now me, quick, on account of it’s the part that don’t matter and I want it out of the way.

I’m twenty-one. I make bowls. Dunnak says I’m middling and Dunnak’s kind, so I’m worse than middling. My hand shakes. Always has, a little, since the ironwood, and I’ve stopped waiting for it to stop. Oshi sells lime by the market gate in the same basket and she married me in the fourth harvest on account of, she said, I was the only man in the valley that had ever bought lime he didn’t need, and she reckoned that was as good a sign as she was going to get. We’ve got a room on the west bank behind Dunnak’s. We’ve got a baby coming. I’ve got the lump still. In my pocket. Seven years. Never used it.

And my mother died in the winter.

I’ll tell that plain too. She died in the Darkness week of Sharus with the gas-giant across the sun and the whole valley cold, the way people die, in her bed, with her hands finally still, and I was there, and Oshi, and she said my name and she said the lime girl’s name and she said, “The carver,” and I said, “He’s gone, Ma,” and she said, “I know,” and she said, “Bring me a true one,” and died.

Same thing she said at the door. Seven years back. Bring me back a true one.

I didn’t.

I made her a post. I want that on the record. I went to Dunnak’s and took the best piece of gorge oak in the shop, black, straight-grained, and I set it on the trestle and I stood over it with the gouge, and I did the thing. I laid my hand flat. I listened. I’ve watched it done four hundred times and I done it, I stood there with my palm on black oak in the cold shop with my breath going up, and I waited to be told.

Nothing told me.

That’s the truth. I stood there till my hand went numb and there weren’t nothing in the wood but wood. No voice. No shape. No gold. Just oak, cold, that had been a tree, and was a post, and didn’t want anything. And I understood, standing there, that whatever he had, whatever come to him on the flour heap and through the moons and through his uncle, it weren’t a thing you could get by standing still and wanting it. He had it before the mask. He had it at forty with a fingernail gouge and a shake. He was born hearing and I was born a west bank boy that could grind a shell.

So I cut her anyway.

I cut her the way Dunnak taught me to cut a bowl, from the outside in, with my eyes and not my ears, looking at her face in my head and trying to put it in the wood, and it took me eleven days, and it’s before my mother’s door on the west bank now, and it ain’t a melon.

I’ll say that. It ain’t a melon. It’s got cheeks. It’s got her nose, near enough. The mouth is wrong. I couldn’t get the mouth. She had a way of pressing her lips together when she was memorizing a thing, and I tried it nine times and cut it out nine times and on the tenth I left it, and it looks like she’s about to say something she’s decided not to. Which ain’t her. She always said it.

And the eyes is shut.

I didn’t cut them. I couldn’t. I got to the eyes on the ninth day and I stood there with the fingernail gouge, his gouge, that I took off the bench in the spring when there was nobody left to mind, and I looked at the place where her eyes went and I thought about moons. Two oyster shells ground under water. I’ve still got the lime, I thought. For the eyes. When you make one. And I stood there and I didn’t cut, and I’ve told myself since it was because I didn’t have the shells, and that ain’t why. It was because I knowed if I opened them they’d look back. Not the way his did. The way a bowl-maker’s would. Flat. Two holes in oak. And she’d stand before the door with two holes looking at the road and everybody that passed would see the difference between hers and the ones he made, and I couldn’t put her out there like that.

So she stands with her eyes shut, like she’s asleep, and I go by every morning and I don’t look, and Oshi don’t say nothing, and it’s been three months.

That’s why I’ve got the spade.

Well now. Here’s where I talk myself into it, and then out, and then in, and you can watch, on account of I’ve been doing it since the light come and I’m no further on.

In.

I know where it’s buried. I dug the hole. My two hands and his two hooks, and the bench is over it, and the floor’s been trodden seven years but I could put my foot on the exact spot with my eyes shut, and it’s cedar, and cedar don’t rot, and it’s a foot down, maybe less. Twenty strokes with a spade. Less. I’ve dug worse holes for Dunnak’s privy.

And it’s a face. I seen it made. I ground the moons for it. I watched it go on him in the courtyard and I watched ironwood pour and I watched him knock on a fir and I watched forty carts go over. I know what it does. And it’s lying under this floor doing nothing, in the dark, in a box, with the whole valley’s posts turned toward it, and he said, he said it himself, waiting for a true carver.

I ain’t a true carver. I know that. I’m middling. But I’ve got hands and I’ve got a face to put it on and I’ve got a mother with her eyes shut before her door, and I could go up there tonight with it on and put my hand on that black oak and knock, and she’d open her eyes.

She’d open her eyes.

And I’d take it off. That’s the thing I keep coming to. I’d take it off after. One knock. One post. I’d tie it on and go up the west bank and stand before her door and knock, once, and she’d become, and I’d untie it and come back down here and put it in the cedar and put the cedar in the hole and put the bench over it and never touch it again. One. He did four hundred and a bridge and a wall. I want one.

That’s the in. I’ve said it to the spade about forty times. Now the out.

I was in the tower.

I was standing in the door of the gate-tower with the sheds burning out and I watched his hands go up behind his head and not come down. I watched him say uncle, let go. I heard the voice he said it in. And I was in this hut on the day we buried it and I heard what he said to the box before he closed it, I was outside the door and he thought I was down at the river and I weren’t, and I heard him say they’re not climbing, and I heard him say I made four hundred prisons with better windows, and I heard him say I’m sorry, and I heard something in that box say I know, boy, and it weren’t him.

It weren’t him. I’ve told myself it was the river. I’ve told myself seven years. It weren’t.

There’s somebody in there. In the cedar, under the floor, a foot down. Somebody that was in the hollow behind his brow with the moons in front and the spirals wound tight, somebody that took his hands and his shake and his deafness stroke by stroke till he was finished, somebody that told a wall to bite and liked it, and he put it in a box and asked the cedar to hold it kind, and it’s been held seven years, and if I dig it up and tie it on—

Whose hands would I have?

I’ve got one thing that’s mine. The shake. It’s the only thing in my hands that’s mine, and it’s in the marks on every bowl I ever made, and Oshi says she can tell my bowls from Dunnak’s by the shake and she says it like it’s a good thing, and he held one of my bowls in his hooks on the flour heap and wept, and I didn’t know why then and I do now.

He’d have given the bridge for it. He said so. I heard that too. I was always where I shouldn’t have been, that’s the whole of me, and I heard him say to the flour that he’d give seven arches and forty carts to hold a fingernail gouge in a hand that shook a little and cut a spoon badly and be afraid of the cut.

And I’ve got that. I’ve got exactly that. I stand at Dunnak’s trestle every morning with a gouge that shakes and I cut a bowl badly and I’m afraid of every cut. That’s what I am. That’s all I am. And he’d have traded everything he became to be it.

And I’m standing here with a spade wanting to trade it for one knock.

That’s the out.

Well now. In again.

She said bring me a true one. Twice. At the door and at the end. And I didn’t. And I made her a face with its eyes shut because I was afraid of what a bowl-maker’s eyes would look like on my own mother, and every morning I go by and don’t look, and I’ve got a baby coming, and what am I going to tell the baby. That’s your grandma with her eyes shut because your pa was middling and there was a thing under a floor that could have opened them and he didn’t dig on account of he was scared of whose hands he’d have.

The baby won’t care about my hands.

Out again.

The baby’ll have my hands. That’s the thing. Whatever I’ve got in them, the shake, the middling, the fear of the cut, it goes down. His went down. His uncle’s went into him and then some. If I tie that on and something takes my hands, even once, even for one knock, I don’t know what I’d be putting in the baby’s. I seen his fingers. I held the spoon.

In.

One knock.

Out.

There’s no such thing. There weren’t for him. He said soon in the courtyard and he meant to fill two holes and he walked eleven towns and a fir and a wall and seven harvests, and every one of them was one more, and every one more was something coming in and staying. One knock. Show me the man that ever tied that on and took it off after one.

In.

I ground the moons. They’re mine. Some part of that face is mine and it’s under the floor in the dark and I put it there with my own two hands and I’ve got a right—

Out.

I’ve got a right to a bowl.

I’ve been standing here all morning.

The sun’s come round to the door. It comes in low this time of year and lays across the floor and hits the bench, and the bench has got the star-iron on it still, wrapped in the hide, that I never took because I couldn’t think what a bowl-maker would do with a knife that fell out of the sky, and when the sun hit it just now it sang.

I felt it in my teeth. Just the once. High. The way he said. On account of there’s a true face near, and there is, there’s one a foot under the floor with its moons shut and its cords still tied, and the iron knows it, and it sang to it, and then the sun moved and it stopped.

And I looked at the wall.

I’ve been avoiding it. The boards. The gap where I put my eye seven years ago and he took my ear. I looked at them now and I don’t hear the wood, I never have, but I know what’s in them because he told me, a woman and a boy and a thing with too many arms, and they’re turned toward the floor. Toward the bench. Toward the box. They’ve been looking there seven years and they’ll look there till the hut falls down and I reckon that’s what he gave his uncle: the whole valley looking at a foot of trodden dirt.

Being seen. He said it weren’t the sky and it weren’t nothing.

Well now.

I’m going to set the spade down.

I’m setting it down. Against the bench. Where whoever comes next can find it, on account of I’ve decided that ain’t me and I’ve decided it ain’t nobody yet, and if the true carver he was waiting for ever comes down the west bank road they’ll find a spade leaning on a bench and a star-knife wrapped in a hide and a patch of floor with the whole valley looking at it, and they’ll know. And they can decide whose hands they want.

I’ve decided mine.

And I’ll tell you what I’m going to do instead, on account of I’ve only just thought of it and I want it on the record before I talk myself out of that too.

I’m going to go home. I’m going to take the lime out of my pocket, that Oshi closed my fingers on at the market gate seven years ago and said for the eyes, when you make one. I’m going to get a bowl of water and a piece of sandstone. And I’m going to grind it. Under the water. Slow. The way I ground the moons. Till it’s two flat white rounds that don’t flash, that glow, soft, asleep.

And I’m going to go up to my mother’s door with the fingernail gouge, and I’m going to open her eyes.

They’ll be a bowl-maker’s eyes. Two holes in oak. Flat. Everybody that passes’ll see the difference. And I’m going to set the lime behind them, white, ground under water by a hand that shakes, and they won’t look back the way his do. They’ll just be open.

She’ll be able to see the road. That’s all. She won’t climb and she won’t look at the fat chief and she won’t be warm. But she’ll have her eyes open before her own door, cut by her own son, badly, with a shake in every stroke, and the shake is mine, and it’ll be in her eyes, and I reckon—

I reckon that’s a true one.

Not his kind. Mine. The only kind I’ve got to bring her, and she asked twice, and I’ve been seven years thinking she asked for his, and standing here with a spade I’ve decided she asked for mine.

That’s the story. That’s the last of it. I’ve told the log and the moons and the courtyard and the woodpile and the tower and this, and I’ve told them careful, and I’ve told them true, and if the count’s wrong anywhere it’s on account of I was fourteen and scared and eating stolen beans, and not on account of I improved it.

I’m going home now. Oshi’s got the water on. My hand’s shaking.

Good.

 

Character Appendix:

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Avatar One: Ashnak Redflour, the Master Cutter of Lineage Four Hundred Seventeen

• Physical description: A lean man past his middle years, shoulders knotted from decades bent over timber, skin the color of tanned deer hide and permanently dusted with fine rose-colored wood flour that clings to his brows and the creases of his neck. His fingers are already beginning to curl inward, the knuckles swollen, the nails cracked and stained black with ash paste. His eyes are deep set and rimmed red from years of squinting at grain in poor light. He wears a leather apron scarred with a thousand chisel slips and a sash of woven marsh grass holding small gouges like a soldier holds knives.
• Overarching personality: Sour, proud, and consumed by a single idea, that every block of wood contains a prisoner. He does not seek praise, only release for the shapes he sees. He is impatient with people and patient with wood. His pride was wounded when the chieftain burned his posts, and that wound drives him more than any devotion.
• Accent and dialogue mannerisms: Speaks in short, hard sentences with long silences between them, as though each word must be cut free. He refers to wood as “she” and to tools as “the hand.” He never asks a question directly; he states what the grain says and waits. When angry he stops speaking entirely and taps a chisel against his palm. Example: “She is green. She lies. Wait four seasons. Then she tells you where the face sleeps.”

Items carried by Ashnak Redflour:

1. Apron of the Thousand Slips [Item 3482]

• • Slot: Chest Slot
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Woodcarving +1, Endurance +1
  • Passive magic: Chisel slips and dropped tools never cut the wearer’s torso or thighs. Wood dust and shavings slide off the apron and gather in a neat pile at the wearer’s feet. The apron’s pockets keep small tools from falling out even when the wearer is upside down.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the wearer shakes the apron and every loose shaving within ten feet leaps into the pockets, clearing the workspace instantly. Once per day, as an action, the wearer presses a hand to the apron and feels a single hidden flaw in any wooden object touched, learning the location of a knot, crack, or rot pocket.
  • Tags: Chest, Apron, Leather, Woodcarving, Tier 1, Common, Crafting, Artisan, Utility, Protection

2. Sash of Sleeping Gouges [Item 7719]

• • Slot: Shoulder Slot
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Woodcarving +1, Sculpting +1
  • Passive magic: Holds up to six small carving tools that never dull while resting in the sash. The wearer always knows which tool is in which loop without looking. Tools drawn from the sash are warm to the touch.
  • Active magic: As an action, three times per day, the wearer draws a tool from the sash and it leaps to the hand from up to ten feet away if it was dropped or set down nearby. Once per day, as an action, the wearer names a cut and the correct gouge rises from the sash on its own.
  • Tags: Shoulder, Sash, Marsh Grass, Woodcarving, Tier 1, Common, Tools, Artisan, Utility, Crafting

3. Adze of River Basalt [Item 1156]

• • Slot: Hand Slot (Right)
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Woodcarving +1, Strength +1
  • Passive magic: Never chips against seasoned hardwood. Strikes make almost no sound when used on a log lying in water. The edge stays keen as long as the adze is oiled once per week.
  • Active magic: As an action, once per day, the wearer strikes a log and the bark peels away in a single sheet from the point of impact, revealing bare heartwood across up to three feet of length. Twice per day, as an action, the wearer strikes a fallen trunk and it rolls up to twenty feet in the chosen direction along level ground.
  • Tags: Hand, Adze, Basalt, Stone, Tool, Weapon, Woodcarving, Tier 1, Common, Artisan, Utility, Crafting

4. Bracelet of Four Rainy Seasons [Item 9027]

• • Slot: Arm Slot (Left)
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Nature Lore +1, Woodcarving +1
  • Passive magic: The wearer knows by touch how many seasons a piece of wood has been seasoned or submerged. Moisture in timber is visible as a faint dark sheen to the wearer’s eye. The bracelet tightens slightly when nearby wood is too green to carve.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the wearer touches a piece of green wood weighing up to twenty pounds and draws out enough moisture that it becomes workable as if seasoned for one full season. Once per day, as an action, the wearer touches a rotted section of timber and knows exactly how deep the rot goes.
  • Tags: Arm, Bracelet, Cordage, Nature, Woodcarving, Tier 1, Common, Artisan, Utility, Water

5. Red Flour Pouch [Item 2604]

• • Slot: Waist Slot (pouch attached to belt)
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Alchemical Crafting +1, Painting +1
  • Passive magic: Holds up to two pounds of fine rosewood dust that never spoils or clumps in damp weather. The dust inside glows faintly when near fresh-cut rosewood. Pigments mixed with this dust dry in half the usual time.
  • Active magic: As an action, twice per day, the wearer throws a handful of flour into the air and it settles onto the nearest wooden surface, revealing the grain direction as glowing lines for one minute. Once per day, as an action, the wearer mixes flour with water to produce a temporary wood filler that hardens instantly and hides a small flaw.
  • Tags: Waist, Pouch, Rosewood, Dust, Alchemy, Tier 1, Common, Artisan, Crafting, Utility, Painting

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Avatar Two: Gedru of the Fallen Cedar, the Maternal Uncle’s Bound Spirit

• Physical description: A translucent figure the color of old sap, visible only in the light thrown by fresh-cut wood or in the eyes of one who wears the mask. His chest is caved on the left side where the cedar crushed him seventy summers past. His hair is a tangle of shavings that drift when there is no wind. His hands are enormous, the hands of a totem seeker, and they never stop moving, tracing the outline of shapes in the air. His feet are grey with the dust of the valley of the dead.
• Overarching personality: Restless, aggrieved, and desperate to be useful. He hungers to shape matter through a living body because he has none. He is protective of his nephew but also possessive, and he resents every hour the mask sits unworn. He fears the grey dust more than he fears anything else and will lie or flatter to keep from returning to it.
• Accent and dialogue mannerisms: His voice is the sound of two dry sticks rubbed together, a hissing, rasping whisper full of sibilants. He repeats the last word of his sentences twice, softer each time. He calls the living “warm ones” and himself “the breath.” He speaks in the present tense about events long past. Example: “The cedar falls, falls, falls. The breath goes up into the sap. Now the warm one cuts and the breath comes out, out, out.”

Items carried by Gedru of the Fallen Cedar (spirit-bound items manifest as ghostly reflections of objects he owned in life):

1. Shroud of the Crushed Rib [Item 5583]

• • Slot: Chest Slot
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Stealth +1, Intimidation +1
  • Passive magic: The wearer is invisible to normal sight while standing completely still among wood shavings or sawdust. Wooden floors do not creak under the wearer. The wearer feels no cold.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the wearer exhales a hissing breath that causes every wooden object within ten feet to creak loudly at once, startling creatures within earshot. Twice per day, as an action, the wearer passes through a wooden door or wall up to six inches thick.
  • Tags: Chest, Shroud, Spectral, Undead, Spirit, Stealth, Tier 1, Common, Wood, Utility, Fear

2. Totem Seeker’s Walking Staff [Item 8240]

• • Slot: Hand Slot (Right)
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Survival +1, Nature Lore +1
  • Passive magic: The staff tugs gently toward the nearest standing tree suitable for a totem pole within one mile. Never slips on wet stone or moss. The wearer can hear the groan of a tree that is about to fall from up to one hundred feet away.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the wearer plants the staff and every tree within thirty feet sheds one leaf that drifts to point toward water. Once per day, as an action, the wearer strikes the staff against a trunk and learns whether the tree is hollow, solid, or rotten at the heart.
  • Tags: Hand, Staff, Cedar, Nature, Survival, Tier 1, Common, Spirit, Utility, Tool, Forest

3. Ring of Grey Dust [Item 1391]

• • Slot: Ring Slot (Left)
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Perception +1, Spirit Lore +1
  • Passive magic: The wearer can see the faint outlines of shapes trapped within raw wood as dim grey figures. Dust does not settle on the wearer. The wearer knows when another spirit is within thirty feet.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the wearer touches a wooden effigy and learns whether a soul is housed within it. Twice per day, as an action, the wearer scatters a pinch of grey dust that reveals footprints made in the last hour on any surface within five feet.
  • Tags: Ring, Dust, Spirit, Perception, Undead, Tier 1, Common, Ancestral, Utility, Divination

4. Sapstone Amulet [Item 6675]

• • Slot: Neck Slot
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Woodcarving +1, Persuasion +1
  • Passive magic: A drop of hardened sap that remains warm as if freshly bled. The wearer’s voice carries through wood, so someone pressing an ear to a wooden wall hears the wearer clearly. Sap and resin never stick to the wearer’s hands.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the wearer whispers into the amulet and a single wooden object within sight bleeds a bead of fresh sap, marking it for one hour. Once per day, as an action, the wearer presses the amulet to a wooden mask or effigy and may speak one sentence through it in a voice that the mask’s wearer hears inside their head.
  • Tags: Neck, Amulet, Sap, Resin, Spirit, Woodcarving, Tier 1, Common, Communication, Ancestral, Utility

5. Sandals of the Wanderer Below [Item 4418]

• • Slot: Foot Slot (Left and Right, a single pair covering both)
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Athletics +1, Stealth +1
  • Passive magic: The wearer never stubs a toe or bruises a knee against stone. Leaves no footprints in dust or ash. Walking speed is not reduced by loose gravel or scree.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the wearer walks across a fallen log or beam without any chance of slipping regardless of wetness or angle. Once per day, as an action, the wearer stamps once and a cloud of grey dust rises in a ten-foot radius, lightly obscuring the area for one minute.
  • Tags: Foot, Sandals, Spirit, Dust, Stealth, Athletics, Tier 1, Common, Undead, Utility, Movement

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Avatar Three: High Chieftain Hurrash Bone-Teeth, Lord of the River Province

• Physical description: A broad, heavy man with a belly that speaks of feasting and shoulders that speak of a youth spent with the war club. His teeth are inlaid with polished bone, an ornament of his rank, and his ears are pierced with wooden plugs the size of coins. He wears a cloak of river-otter pelts and a headdress of cockatoo crest feathers. A jagged burn scar runs across his left forearm from the cooking fire into which he cast the ritual posts.
• Overarching personality: Vain, practical, and burdened by the weeping of his people. He believes he must be seen to be decisive, and so he acts before he thinks, then justifies afterward. He is capable of genuine awe, and when he kneels before the carving of the first chief, it is the first time in his life he has knelt to anything. He fears the mountain clans more than he admits.
• Accent and dialogue mannerisms: Deep, booming, formal. Refers to himself as “this chair” or “the seat of the valley” rather than “I.” Swears by the grandfather of the clan and by the river’s mouth. Ends important pronouncements with “so it is said, so it is cut,” a phrase borrowed from the totem carvers. Example: “This chair has seen the posts. This chair has seen dead dogs with kinder faces. Into the fire, so it is said, so it is cut.”

Items carried by High Chieftain Hurrash Bone-Teeth:

1. Headdress of the Crested Cockatoo [Item 2947]

• • Slot: Headwear Slot
  • Armor Check: +1 AC
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Leadership +1, Persuasion +1
  • Passive magic: The feathers rise when the wearer is lied to in their presence. Voices of those speaking to the wearer are always clear even in a noisy courtyard. The wearer is never mistaken for a commoner.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the wearer raises the headdress and every person within thirty feet who owes the wearer fealty feels compelled to fall silent for one minute. Once per day, as an action, the wearer shakes the crest and a piercing cockatoo shriek carries for half a mile, summoning the nearest guards.
  • Tags: Headwear, Headdress, Feathers, Cockatoo, Leadership, Tier 1, Common, Royal, Chieftain, Persuasion, Utility

2. Cloak of the River Otters [Item 6130]

• • Slot: Back Slot
  • Armor Check: +1 AC
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Swimming +1, Endurance +1
  • Passive magic: Sheds water completely so the wearer never becomes soaked. The wearer floats without effort in calm water. Cold river wind does not chill the wearer.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the wearer wraps the cloak tight and may hold breath underwater for five minutes. Twice per day, as an action, the wearer swirls the cloak and a spray of river water extinguishes a small fire within ten feet.
  • Tags: Back, Cloak, Pelts, Otter, Water, River, Tier 1, Common, Swimming, Endurance, Protection

3. War Club of the First Chief’s Line [Item 8802]

• • Slot: Hand Slot (Right)
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Bludgeoning Weapons +1, Intimidation +1
  • Passive magic: Grows heavier in the hand when enemies of the valley are within one hundred feet. Cannot be pried from the wearer’s grip by any mundane means while the wearer is conscious. The club’s strikes leave a mark shaped like the clan sign.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the wearer slams the club into the ground and all creatures within ten feet must succeed on a saving throw or be knocked prone. Once per day, as an action, the wearer holds the club aloft and every allied warrior within sight gains a temporary bonus to their next attack.
  • Tags: Hand, Club, Weapon, Ironwood, Chieftain, Tier 1, Common, Bludgeoning, Leadership, Intimidation, Ancestral

4. Ear Plugs of the Listening Grandfather [Item 3355]

• • Slot: Earring Slot (Left and Right, a single pair covering both)
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Insight +1, History Lore +1
  • Passive magic: The wearer remembers every oath sworn in their presence word for word. Whispers within twenty feet are audible to the wearer. The wearer cannot be deafened by loud noise.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the wearer touches a plug and recalls one conversation held in the same room within the last seven days. Once per day, as an action, the wearer presses both plugs and hears the last words spoken by an ancestor whose totem stands within thirty feet.
  • Tags: Earring, Plugs, Wood, Ancestral, Insight, History, Tier 1, Common, Chieftain, Perception, Utility

5. Belt of the Feasting Hall [Item 7091]

• • Slot: Waist Slot
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Hospitality +1, Leadership +1
  • Passive magic: Food eaten by the wearer never causes sickness. The belt loosens or tightens to remain comfortable. Guests seated at the wearer’s table feel a gentle sense of welcome.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the wearer touches the buckle and a pot of river beans within ten feet comes to a boil immediately. Once per day, as an action, the wearer strikes the belt and every cup within thirty feet is filled with clean water.
  • Tags: Waist, Belt, Leather, Feast, Hospitality, Tier 1, Common, Chieftain, Utility, Food, Leadership

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Avatar Four: Pili Split-Thumb, Youngest of the Sixteen Apprentice Carvers

• Physical description: A gangly youth barely into adulthood, all elbows and knees, with a shock of hair that stands up like a brush of shavings. His left thumbnail is split down the middle from a bronze axe that bounced off ironwood, and it has grown back in two pieces. His arms are covered in nicks and healing blisters. He wears a threadbare tunic, a borrowed apron three sizes too large, and a string of failed practice-carvings around his neck as a badge of stubbornness.
• Overarching personality: Eager, talkative, self-deprecating, and quietly brilliant at noticing things. He is the one who watched the master’s hands most closely in the courtyard and who later went looking for the buried cedar chest. He is terrified of the mountain clans, in love with a girl who sells snail-lime at the market, and convinced he will never carve anything worth keeping.
• Accent and dialogue mannerisms: Fast, run-on, dropping the ends of words, full of comparisons to food and animals. Says “well now” at the start of almost every thought and “I reckon” at the end of most. Calls the master “Old Flour” behind his back and “Master Cutter, sir” to his face. Example: “Well now, that knife went through the ironwood like a fat man through a doorway, and I reckon my thumb ain’t never gonna forgive that log for what it done.”

Items carried by Pili Split-Thumb:

1. Apron Three Sizes Too Large [Item 5266]

• • Slot: Chest Slot
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Woodcarving +1, Sleight of Hand +1
  • Passive magic: The apron has more pockets than it should, each holding up to one pound. Nothing placed in the pockets is ever lost. The wearer never trips on the hem.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the wearer reaches into a pocket and finds a small mundane carving tool that was needed, which vanishes after one hour. Twice per day, as an action, the wearer hides a small object in the apron and no search finds it for ten minutes.
  • Tags: Chest, Apron, Leather, Woodcarving, Tier 1, Common, Apprentice, Utility, Storage, Sleight of Hand

2. Bronze Axe of the Bouncing Blade [Item 9413]

• • Slot: Hand Slot (Right)
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Axes +1, Woodcarving +1
  • Passive magic: The axe warns the wearer with a faint hum when it is about to glance off wood too hard to cut. The handle never splinters. The wearer’s grip does not slip in sweat or rain.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the wearer strikes a log and the axe finds the softest line of grain, splitting the log cleanly in two if it is under two feet in diameter. Once per day, as an action, the wearer throws the axe and it returns to the hand at the end of the turn.
  • Tags: Hand, Axe, Bronze, Weapon, Tool, Woodcarving, Tier 1, Common, Apprentice, Utility, Splitting

3. Necklace of Failed Carvings [Item 1728]

• • Slot: Neck Slot
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Woodcarving +1, Luck +1
  • Passive magic: Each failed carving on the string remembers the mistake that ruined it, and the wearer feels a twinge before repeating that mistake. The necklace never tangles. Bystanders find the wearer endearing rather than pitiful.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the wearer snaps one carving off the string and rerolls a failed Woodcarving check; the carving crumbles to dust. Once per day, as an action, the wearer touches the necklace and gains advantage on a saving throw against fear.
  • Tags: Neck, Necklace, Wood, Carvings, Luck, Woodcarving, Tier 1, Common, Apprentice, Reroll, Courage

4. Sandals of the Courtyard Runner [Item 6047]

• • Slot: Foot Slot (Left and Right, a single pair covering both)
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Athletics +1, Acrobatics +1
  • Passive magic: The wearer moves silently across packed earth and cobbles. Sawdust does not cling to the soles. The wearer can stand on a rolling log for up to a minute without falling.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the wearer sprints and covers double their normal movement for one turn. Once per day, as an action, the wearer leaps over a fallen trunk or low wall up to five feet high without a check.
  • Tags: Foot, Sandals, Leather, Athletics, Acrobatics, Tier 1, Common, Apprentice, Movement, Utility

5. Lime Girl’s Token [Item 3860]

• • Slot: Ring Slot (Right)
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Alchemical Crafting +1, Persuasion +1
  • Passive magic: A small ring of burned snail-shell lime. Pigments the wearer mixes never streak. The wearer always knows where the nearest market is. The ring warms when the giver is within one hundred feet.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the wearer touches the ring to a wooden surface and a thin white chalk line appears wherever the wearer traces for one minute, ideal for marking cuts. Once per day, as an action, the wearer presses the ring and produces a single dose of white lime paste sufficient to accent one square foot of carving.
  • Tags: Ring, Lime, Shell, Pigment, Alchemy, Tier 1, Common, Apprentice, Crafting, Love Token, Utility

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Avatar Five: Korrak Stone-Tooth, War Leader of the Wild Mountain Clans

• Physical description: A towering figure wrapped in goat hides and bark, his beard braided with the finger-bones of enemies, his forehead scarred with the clan’s mark burned in with a hot river stone. One hand is missing two fingers, bitten off by the thorned palisade. His club is the trunk of a young pine studded with flint teeth. His eyes are pale, the color of mountain ice, and he smells of smoke and wet fur.
• Overarching personality: Fierce, superstitious, and haunted by what he saw at the palisade. Before the raid he was certain of his strength and of the weakness of the river folk. After it, he is a man who has met something he cannot fight and cannot understand, and his segments trace the crumbling of a warrior’s certainty into something like religion. He loves his clan and hates that they saw him flee.
• Accent and dialogue mannerisms: Guttural, clipped, heavy on consonants, sparing with verbs. Speaks of himself in the third person by name and deed. Names enemies by epithet rather than name. Calls the mask-wearer “the Red Demon Who Cuts War From Trees” and never shortens it. Example: “Korrak Stone-Tooth struck the wall. The wall bit Korrak. The Red Demon Who Cuts War From Trees laughed in the wood. Korrak does not go back.”

Items carried by Korrak Stone-Tooth:

1. Club of the Flint-Toothed Pine [Item 4172]

• • Slot: Hand Slot (Right)
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Bludgeoning Weapons +1, Intimidation +1
  • Passive magic: The flint teeth never loosen from the wood. The club can be used to strike sparks against stone. Wooden shields struck by the club splinter more easily.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the wearer strikes a wooden object and deals maximum damage against it. Once per day, as an action, the wearer roars and swings the club overhead, and enemies within ten feet must succeed on a saving throw or become frightened for one minute.
  • Tags: Hand, Club, Weapon, Pine, Flint, Bludgeoning, Tier 1, Common, Raider, Intimidation, Mountain

2. Goat Hide Wrap of the High Passes [Item 8524]

• • Slot: Chest Slot
  • Armor Check: +1 AC
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Survival +1, Endurance +1
  • Passive magic: The wearer suffers no ill effect from mountain cold or thin air. Snow does not soak through. The wearer’s scent is that of goats, confusing hounds that track by smell.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the wearer pulls the hide close and gains temporary hit points equal to their tier die. Once per day, as an action, the wearer shakes the hide and a cloud of loose hair blinds one creature within five feet for one turn.
  • Tags: Chest, Wrap, Hide, Goat, Mountain, Survival, Tier 1, Common, Raider, Endurance, Protection

3. Beard Braid of Finger Bones [Item 2293]

• • Slot: Mouth Slot (worn on the face as a braided beard ornament)
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Intimidation +1, Spirit Lore +1
  • Passive magic: The bones rattle when a dead enemy’s kin is within fifty feet. The wearer is not unsettled by the sight of the dead. The wearer’s voice carries over wind and rain.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the wearer clacks the bones and a single enemy within thirty feet must succeed on a saving throw or hesitate, losing their next reaction. Once per day, as an action, the wearer touches a bone and learns the direction to the place where that enemy died.
  • Tags: Mouth, Beard, Bone, Braid, Trophy, Intimidation, Tier 1, Common, Raider, Spirit, Fear

4. Boots of the Scree Runner [Item 6608]

• • Slot: Foot Slot (Left and Right, a single pair covering both)
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Athletics +1, Stealth +1
  • Passive magic: The wearer never slides on loose stone. Climbing rock faces with handholds requires no check. The wearer’s footfalls make no sound on gravel.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the wearer descends a slope of any steepness at full speed without falling. Once per day, as an action, the wearer kicks loose a small rockslide that forces creatures directly downslope within twenty feet to make a saving throw or fall prone.
  • Tags: Foot, Boots, Hide, Mountain, Climbing, Athletics, Tier 1, Common, Raider, Stealth, Movement

5. Forehead Brand of the Burned Stone [Item 1039]

• • Slot: Headwear Slot (a permanent brand treated as a worn item; must be visible to function)
  • Skills gained while openly worn: Leadership +1, Endurance +1
  • Passive magic: Allied clan members within sight of the brand gain a small bonus against fear. The wearer feels the heat of any open flame within thirty feet as a pull on the brow. The brand never fades or scars over.
  • Active magic: Once per day, as an action, the brand glows red and all allied warriors within thirty feet may immediately move half their speed toward the wearer. Once per day, as an action, the wearer presses a palm to the brand and ignores the frightened condition until the start of their next turn.
  • Tags: Headwear, Brand, Scar, Clan, Fire, Leadership, Tier 1, Common, Raider, Endurance, Mountain