Arrow That Learned to Breathe

From: TCM 681 of the Balanced Quillwright

Segment 1:

The Ledger That Ate the Forest

There are some men, and some boars, and a good many creatures between the two, who are born with a ledger already open in their hearts. They come into the world counting their own toes before they have properly learned to wiggle them, and they go out of it, when their time arrives, still wondering whether the undertaker has been overpaid. I was one of these creatures, and I say so plainly at the outset, so that no reader will mistake me for a hero, or a villain, or anything grander than what I was: a quartermaster-sergeant with brass rings on his tusks, ink on his fingers, and a terrible fear of running short.

I had kept the supply yard at Cinderford Crossing for eleven years when the trouble began, and in those eleven years it had been, I flattered myself, the most orderly yard in all the river valleys of the east. It sat in a low elbow of land where the river bent to admire itself before hurrying on to the sea. It had three long sheds of good timber, a drying barn with slatted walls where the wind could do its slow honest work upon the wood, a cooper’s corner, a glue house, a feather loft, and a little office of whitewashed stone where I kept my ledgers on shelves so straight a carpenter’s level would have wept with envy. Every shaft that entered that yard was entered also in my books. Every shaft that left was crossed out with a single line, never two, for two lines are the mark of a creature who has doubted himself, and I did not hold with doubt.

We made arrows at Cinderford. That was the whole of our business and the whole of our pride. We made them at a sensible pace, which is to say a pace I had arrived at through eleven years of tallying, and which produced, in a good month, some six hundred and forty shafts of first quality, two hundred of second, and a regrettable but unavoidable forty that went to the kindling bin. The fletchers were paid in silver every seventh day, which was a Conjursday, and the wood was given the whole of a season to dry before a blade ever touched it. It was not glorious work. Nobody ever wrote ballads about a drying barn. But the arrows we sent out came back, more often than not, in the bodies of the things they had been sent to stop, and that, I maintained, was ballad enough.

Mark well what I have just told you about the drying barn, because I am about to describe how I emptied it.

It was the first Conjursday of the week of Illumination, in the month of Tyrus, when the rider came. I remember the date because I wrote it at the top of a fresh page, as I always did, and I remember the hour because the clock the World Bank had given me, a squat brass thing with a face like a disappointed owl, struck nine just as the hoofbeats reached the gate. The rider was a lean, grey hare-folk in the livery of the war council, mud to the knee and sweat to the ears, and he slid down from his horse in a manner that suggested the horse had been glad to be rid of him.

“Quartermaster-Sergeant ‘Arrowtusk?” he said, and he said it wrong, which was the first bad sign. Nobody who knew anything about Cinderford said my name wrong.

“Harrowtusk,” I said. “With an aitch. Which I don’t use, but I’m entitled to it. Snrk. What’ve you got?”

What he had was a letter, sealed in black wax with the triple-arrow crest of the council, and wrapped in an oilcloth that had evidently been through a river or two on its way to me. He held it out with both paws, the way a man holds out a dead thing he has been told to deliver to its relatives. I did not like that either.

I want to describe for you exactly what that letter said, and I find, even now, so many years after, that I cannot copy it out without my tusks beginning to ache. So I will give you the substance, and you may imagine the flourishes for yourself. The council, in its wisdom, had determined that the campaign against the coastal raiders would commence at the next dimming week, when the shadow of VaporSphere would darken the sky and give our archers the advantage of the eclipse. The council required, for that campaign, ten thousand arrows of serviceable quality, to be delivered to the muster at Harrowgate Ford no later than the first Conjursday of Dimming. The council was confident that the supply yard at Cinderford Crossing, being the most orderly in the river valleys, would not disappoint it. The council remained, with every assurance of its esteem, the council.

Ten thousand arrows. Thirty-five days.

I read it twice. Then I took off my spectacles, polished them on the hem of my apron coat, put them back on, and read it a third time, in case the numbers had been put there by mischief and might have wandered off while I wasn’t looking. They had not. They sat on the page like a pair of creditors at the foot of a sickbed, patient and immovable.

Now, I do not know whether my reader has ever had the experience of doing a sum in his head and arriving at an answer that he would very much prefer not to have arrived at. If he has, he will understand me. If he has not, I envy him, and I will try to explain.

At our sensible pace, Cinderford made six hundred and forty arrows of first quality in a month of forty-nine days. To make ten thousand in thirty-five days, we should have to make, as near as I could reckon with the brass rings clacking on my tusks, something over two hundred and eighty-five arrows every single day. That was not double our pace. It was not triple our pace. It was a pace that bore no more relation to our sensible one than a landslide bears to a man walking downhill. And all the while, the rings on my tusks, which I had worn for nine years and which had never troubled me before beyond a dull and dutiful ache when the glue ran low, began to throb, slow and heavy, like a second heart that had learned the news before the first one could.

The hare-folk was watching me. “The council will want a reply, Sergeant.”

“The council’ll ‘ave one,” I said. “Tell ’em… tell ’em Cinderford ‘as never yet failed the council, and it won’t begin now.”

He went away satisfied. I watched him go. Then I sat down on the step of my whitewashed office, which I had never once in eleven years done in the middle of a working morning, and I put my great head in my inky hands, and I felt the dread come up through the soles of my iron-shod boots like water rising in a cellar.

But dread, my friends, is a poor quartermaster. It counts nothing and issues nothing and is no use whatsoever at the bottom of a requisition form. So I stood up, and I clapped my tusks together so that the rings rang out across the yard, and every head in Cinderford turned toward me, and I began.

I will tell you how it went, in the order in which it went, though in truth it all went at once.

First, the drying barn. We had in it, that morning, some four thousand shafts’ worth of ash and birch and good straight cane, in various stages of their long slow seasoning. Some of it had been hanging since the previous year and was as dry and sweet as a biscuit. Some of it had been hanging since the week before and was as green and sullen as an unripe pear. In the sensible days, I would no more have put a blade to green wood than I would have put a saddle on a calf. On that first Conjursday, I walked into the barn with my ledger under my arm and the dread under my ribs, and I said to old Mudge the sawyer, who had been sawing at Cinderford since before I had my tusks:

“All of it.”

Mudge blinked at me. He was a mole-folk, broad and velvet-grey, nearly blind in the daylight, and he had a way of tilting his head when he did not understand you that made you feel you had said something unforgivably foolish. “All of it, Sergeant?”

“All of it. The dry an’ the green an’ everything between. Split it. Today.”

“The green won’t hold, Sergeant. It’ll warp in the quiver. It’ll check down the grain the first time it’s loosed in cold weather. You know that better’n I do.”

“I know there’s thirty-five days,” I said, “an’ ten thousand arrows wanted at the end of ’em, an’ a council that’s never been told no by Cinderford. Split it, Mudge. Chop-chop.”

He split it. He tilted his head at me one last time, very slowly, the way a creature looks at a friend who has just announced he means to swim to the far shore in his boots, and then he went and fetched his wedges, and by sundown the drying barn was empty and the floor of the first shed was heaped high with raw billets, green and dry together, smelling of sap and a little of something sour, like milk on the turn.

Second, the hands. Cinderford had, in the sensible days, nineteen fletchers, six sawyers, four glue-boilers, two feather-sorters, and one clerk, Mr. Tibbet Scrapple, a mouse-folk of enormous diligence and very small handwriting, who had been my right paw for seven years and who could not, I think, have been more alarmed by the news if I had told him the river was on fire. To make ten thousand arrows in thirty-five days we should need, I reckoned, something over a hundred pairs of hands, and so I set Mr. Scrapple to write a notice and nail it to every post and door and tree trunk within a day’s walk of the yard. It said, in large letters that he made with great difficulty and a borrowed brush:

WANTED AT CINDERFORD. HANDS. ANY HANDS. FOUR SILVER THE WEEK AND YOUR DINNER.

It was the “any hands” that did it. I see that now, and I saw it then also, but at the time I did not care.

They came the very next morning, and they came in such numbers and in such variety that I could not have catalogued them properly if I had kept three ledgers at once. There were farmhands who had never held anything sharper than a pitchfork, and fishwives who had never held anything blunter than a gutting knife. There was a family of hedgehog-folk, seven in number, who announced themselves as experienced in fletching on the strength of being covered in quills. There was a pair of goblin twins named Nib and Nob, who could not have been out of short trousers above a year. They proved the quickest workers in the yard and the most dangerous, for they treated every knife as an invitation and every thumb, including each other’s, as a target. There was a retired drummer from the coastal levies with a wooden leg and an exhaustive knowledge of military songs, all of them about dying, which he sang without pause from dawn to dusk until the glue-boilers threatened to boil him. There was a tall, melancholy goat-folk who gave his name as Mr. Absalom Crouch and claimed to be a scholar of the higher mathematics. He wanted to know whether an arrow might be considered a line or a ray, and when he discovered that it was neither, but a stick, he went into the far corner of the second shed and sulked there for three days, making very good arrows indeed, but only very slowly, and with a sigh between each one.

I took them all. I took them all and I put knives into all their hands, and I stood at the head of the first shed with my ledger in one fist and my tally-rings ringing and I roared, and they began.

Third, the feathers. You cannot make an arrow without fletching, and you cannot make fletching without feathers, and Cinderford had, in its loft, perhaps enough good goose and swan and heron flight-feather for two thousand shafts. Where the other eight thousand were to come from, I did not know. That is to say, I did know, and I knew it from the very first sum, and I simply would not look at it, the way a man in debt will not look at the letters piling up beneath his door.

On the third day, a person named Mr. Silas Flitch presented himself at my office. He was a lean, sharp, long-nosed weasel-folk with a coat of rusty black and a smile that arrived several moments before he did and stayed on several moments after he had left. He said he understood that Cinderford was in want of feathers, and that he and certain associates were in a position to supply them, in any quantity, by night, at very reasonable rates.

“Where from?” I said.

“From where feathers grow, Sergeant,” said Mr. Flitch, and smiled. “From the birds.”

“Bought from the birds?”

“Collected,” said Mr. Flitch, and smiled again.

I knew what he meant. Every quartermaster in the river valleys knew what it meant when a feather-man said “collected.” It meant ladders against the rookery trees in the dead of night, sacks over the nests, and the old fen herons woken in their reed beds by quick cold hands that plucked them half bare before they could cry out. It meant the birds limping and flapping in the morning, unable to fly, and some of them never flying again. I had always refused such men. I had refused them for eleven years. I had refused them with some pride, and with some pleasure, and once with a well-aimed bucket.

Mr. Flitch held out a requisition form already filled in, in a neat, slanting hand. Ten thousand primaries, mixed, for fletching, at five copper the score. I looked at it, and my tusks throbbed, and I took up my pen.

I would like to say that my hand trembled. I would like to say that I hesitated, and wrestled with my conscience, and made a long and noble speech before I signed. I did not. I hesitated exactly as long as it took the ink to settle on the nib, which is to say not at all, and then I signed my name in the round, firm, unhesitating hand of a creature who has eleven years of orderly ledgers behind him and thirty-two days before him, and I handed it back.

Mr. Flitch folded it into his coat and smiled his way out of my office, and the smile hung in the room for some while after, like smoke.

That night, from far up the valley, where the rookery woods grew thick on the hillside, I thought I heard a great many birds crying all at once. I told myself it was the wind. I went back to my sums.

Now I must tell you about the spectacles, because they are important, and because I have never told anyone about them before.

I had bought them years earlier from a traveling artisan, for more silver than I care to record. They were soot-black, heavy, and ugly, and they possessed a quality which I had found, until that month, nothing but useful. When I looked through them at any piece of hastily made work, at a cracked shaft or a badly seated point or a fletching glued crooked, the flaw glowed a faint and unmistakable red, as if it were blushing for itself. I had used them for years to cull the bad from the good, and in the sensible days, I seldom saw more than one red glow in twenty arrows.

On the eighth day of the great haste, I put on my spectacles and walked down the length of the first shed, where a bundle of the morning’s work lay waiting for my approval.

I will not dwell on it. I will tell you only that the bundle looked, through those black lenses, like a pile of embers. Red ran down the grain of the green shafts where they had already begun to twist. Red pooled at the points where the hedgehog-folk had seated them crooked. Red blushed along every fletching the goblin twins had glued, because the twins had been racing each other, and at least one of them had glued his feathers on backward. There was scarcely an arrow in that bundle that did not glow, and I stood there in the middle of the shed with the singing drummer singing behind me about a young soldier drowned at sea, and I felt the dread come up again, and this time it did not stop at my ribs. It came all the way up to my throat.

And then I did a thing which I am more ashamed of than of the feathers, more ashamed even than of the drying barn. I took off the spectacles. I folded them carefully and put them in the inmost pocket of my apron coat, the one that sits over the heart, and I left them there. I did not put them on again for the rest of the month.

“Good,” I said to the bundle, loudly, so that the hedgehogs could hear. “Good. Count ’em, Mr. Scrapple. Into the crates. Chop-chop.”

Mr. Scrapple looked at me with his little dark eyes, and he counted them, and they went into the crates.

By the second week, the yard no longer slept. We had brought in lanterns by the dozen and hung them from every rafter, and the sheds glowed through the night like three long kilns, and the smoke from the glue-house fires lay so thick upon the river that the barge folk began to call Cinderford “the Chimney.” The hiring notices brought more hands every morning, and the more hands came, the faster the wood went, until we had split every billet in the barn and started on the timber stacked against the walls for repairs, then the timber of the old cooperage, then a stand of young ash behind the feather loft that I had been nursing for nine years against exactly this kind of emergency and that was not yet ready for any kind of emergency at all.

I tell you, I felled those young trees myself. I took an axe to them on the eleventh night, by lantern light, and every stroke rang through me like a coin dropped into an empty well. When I was done, the little grove behind the loft was a row of white, weeping stumps, and the whole of that hillside, which in the sensible days had been a green and pleasant shoulder of the valley, looked as though somebody had taken a great ledger to it and run a single straight line through every living thing upon it. That, I suppose, is exactly what somebody had done.

I wrote it down. Of course I wrote it down. Ash, young, eighty-three trunks, felled. A single line through the column marked Reserve.

I wish I could convey to you, reader, the particular quality of that month, its peculiar mingling of noise and fear and pride. The yard was louder than any yard I have known before or since. The splitting of wood, the hiss of glue, the ring of hammers on points, the shouting of foremen, the squeal of a goblin who has cut his twin, the singing of the drummer, and over it all, every hour on the hour, the clacking of my tally-rings as I counted and counted and counted again. And beneath all that noise, which I made as loud as I possibly could, the way a frightened child sings in the dark, ran the dread, steady and patient, like the slow seep of a river into a cellar wall.

Because I knew, you see. That was the whole of it. I knew, with every throb of my tusks, that we were making not arrows but the likenesses of arrows. They had the look of the thing, and none of its virtue, and at the muster at Harrowgate Ford ten thousand of them would be loaded into ten thousand quivers and carried into battle on the strength of the yard’s good name, which was to say, on the strength of my good name, which was to say, on nothing at all.

The tallies rose. That is the cruelest part. They rose beautifully. One thousand at the end of the first week. Two thousand eight hundred at the end of the second. Five thousand at the end of the third, and Mr. Scrapple ran into the office with the figures that night with his whiskers trembling, and we stood together over the page and looked at that great round number. I am sorry to say I was proud. I had never in my life seen a column of my own hand rise so fast, and there is something in the rising of a column, as any shopkeeper or moneylender will tell you, that goes straight to the blood like brandy and makes a creature forget, for one warm moment, what the numbers are counting.

It was on that same night, the night of the five thousand, as I stood on my office step to clear my head, that I noticed the lamp at the far end of the third shed.

All the lamps of Cinderford were burning that night, so it was not that a lamp was lit that caught my eye. It was that this lamp was steady. All the others were swinging and flickering in the draughts of a hundred moving bodies, but this one at the very end of the very last bench burned perfectly still, as if nobody near it were moving at all.

I walked down to look. It took me some while, for the sheds were crowded, and I was stopped along the way by three foremen with three emergencies, and by Nob, or perhaps Nib, wishing to report that his brother had glued himself to a sack of feathers. When I came at last to the end of the third shed, I found sitting at that last bench a tortoise-folk I had hired the previous spring, before the haste, and had nearly forgotten. Mossback, shell all over lichen, with a long wrinkled neck and a red thread tied about one wrist. It was sitting perfectly still with a single shaft of bamboo across its knees, doing, as far as I could tell, nothing whatsoever.

On the floor beside it lay a bundle of perhaps a dozen finished arrows. A dozen. In the same time, the goblin twins had produced six hundred and spoiled a bale of feathers into the bargain.

“You,” I said. “What’s your name?”

The tortoise turned its head toward me. It did so slowly, taking the whole of its body round along with it. It looked at me for a long while with heavy-lidded amber eyes, and I heard it draw in a breath, a long, slow, perfectly audible breath, before it answered.

“Shu,” it said. “Shu Manbang.”

“What’s it mean?”

Another breath. “Some say, One Who Binds Slowly. (breath) Some say, The One Who Keeps Missing.”

“Well, Mister Shu Manbang, whichever you are, you’re not binding fast enough, and if you keep missing your tallies I’ll ‘ave you out of this yard and back in whatever pond you came from. Twelve arrows. Twelve! Snrk! There’s a council waiting at ‘Arrowgate for ten thousand, an’ you’re sitting there ‘olding a stick like it owes you money.”

The tortoise looked at me. It did not argue. It did not apologize. It did not, as far as I could see, feel any of the things I had expected my words to make it feel. It simply looked, and breathed, and then it looked back down at the bamboo across its knees, and drew one long, slow, unhurried line along the shaft with the point of a little carving knife.

I stood there. I had a great many more things to say. I had at least eleven years’ worth of them. But I found, to my surprise, that they would not come out, because something about that steady lamp and that slow line and that long, maddening, audible breath had reached in past my ledgers and laid one cool finger upon the dread itself. For one moment, one terrible moment, the dread stopped seeping and stood perfectly still, and I could see it for exactly what it was.

I did not like it. I turned on my iron heel and went back up the shed to my office, roaring at everyone I passed, and I did not go down to the third shed again for some days. But I could not help noticing, every night thereafter, as I stood on my step with the column rising and the dread rising alongside it, that one steady lamp at the very end of the very last bench, burning without a flicker in the middle of all our noise.

We made the ten thousand.

I want to be clear on that point, because it was the point on which I had staked everything, and it came in exactly as I had promised. On the thirty-fourth day, one full day ahead of the council’s deadline, Mr. Scrapple came into the office with the final tally and wrote it in the ledger, in his small and trembling hand: ten thousand and twelve. The twelve were the tortoise’s. I did not know that at the time. I learned it later, and it has troubled me ever since.

We loaded the wagons by lantern light. Forty wagons, two hundred and fifty arrows to the crate, a guard on every wagon and a song from the drummer for every guard. I walked down the line at dawn with my ledger and checked every crate against the manifest, and every crate was correct, and I crossed out each entry with a single, firm, unhesitating line, never two.

I did not put on my spectacles. They stayed in the pocket over my heart, where they had been for twenty-six days, and they weighed, I remember, a great deal more than spectacles ought to weigh.

When the last wagon had gone rattling out of the gate and down the river road toward Harrowgate Ford, I stood in the middle of my empty yard and looked about me. The drying barn was bare, its slatted walls letting the morning wind blow through nothing at all. The grove behind the loft was a field of stumps. The feather loft was stuffed to its rafters with sacks that Mr. Flitch had delivered and that I had not once opened to look at, because I knew what I would find in them. And the hundred new hands, who had made ten thousand arrows in thirty-four days, were sleeping where they had dropped, on the floors of the sheds, among the shavings, their knives still in their fists. The goblin twins were curled together like puppies. The drummer, for once, was silent. Mr. Absalom Crouch lay with his long goat face turned to the rafters, still sighing in his sleep.

And at the far end of the third shed, the steady lamp still burned.

The council sent a letter of thanks some weeks later. It was sealed in red wax this time, and it was very handsome, and it spoke of Cinderford’s unfailing service and of my own unfailing efficiency. It enclosed a second order, for fifteen thousand arrows by the following dimming week, and it noted that the council had the fullest confidence that the most orderly yard in the river valleys would rise once again to the occasion.

I read it twice. I took off my spectacles, or rather I did not, for they were still in the pocket over my heart, and I read it a third time. I felt the rings on my tusks begin to throb, slow and heavy, and I knew, the way a creature knows the first cold breath of winter, that this throbbing would not stop again. It would not stop for the second order or the third or the tenth. Every yard in the valleys would hear of Cinderford’s ten thousand and be ordered to match it. Every forest on every hillside would feel the axe before its time. Every rookery would hear Mr. Flitch’s ladders in the dark. The sensible pace was dead, and I had killed it, and I had written down the date of its death at the top of a fresh page in my own round, firm, unhesitating hand.

I took up my pen. I dipped it in the ink. I drew, at the foot of that page, a single straight line.

I am told that the scholars of later ages call what followed the age of haste, and that they speak of it as though it were a sort of weather that blew in from nowhere and fell on everyone alike. I do not believe a word of it. I believe it began on a Conjursday morning, in the month of Tyrus, in an orderly little supply yard in the elbow of a river, when a frightened boar-folk with ink on his fingers and brass on his tusks read a sum he did not like and decided, rather than look at it, to make it come out right.

It was the ledger that ate the forest. I know because I fed it.

 

Segment 2:

Wobble Song

One

A name is given before the one who wears it can refuse.

It is spoken over the cradle, and the child grows into it, the way water grows into the shape of a bowl.

This one was given a name with two faces.

In the old river speech, Shu means to bind, to tie, to hold a thing to another thing so that they become one. Man means slowly. So the name means One Who Binds Slowly.

But in the hill speech, which is older and more stubborn, the same sounds mean something else. Shu means to throw away. Man means to go astray. So the name also means One Who Keeps Missing.

The mother who gave this name was a river tortoise.

The father who gave this name was a hill tortoise.

Neither would explain which name was meant. Each one smiled when asked.

This one has worn both faces for forty-one years and still cannot say which one looks out.

Two

The yard does not sleep now.

Before the letter came, the yard breathed. In at dawn, out at dusk. The drying barn breathed with the wind through its slats. The wood hung there a whole season and let the wind take its water slowly, the way an old one lets go of grudges.

Now the barn is empty, and the wind blows through nothing.

When a breath is held too long, the chest burns.

When a breath is pushed out too fast, the body is left gasping.

The yard is pushing all its breath out at once.

This one can hear it gasping.

Three

The boar came again this morning. Harrowtusk, the quartermaster, the one whose tusks are ringed with brass and whose hands are black with ink.

He did not shout this time. That was strange. He stood at the end of the bench and looked at the arrows this one had finished, eleven of them, lying in a row on the sackcloth, and he clacked his tusks together once, softly, as if he did not want anyone else to hear.

“Proofing,” he said. “Today. Every bench sends a dozen to the field. Sergeant Reedwhistle looses ’em at the butts, an’ Mr. Scrapple writes down what ‘its an’ what don’t.” He snorted. “You’ve got eleven. You’ll send eleven, an’ I’ll write you down a dozen short. Snrk.”

This one said nothing.

He waited.

This one drew a breath, slow, the way breath has always come to this one, the way a turtle’s breath comes, which is to say slower than other creatures think is right.

Then this one said, “These hands will bring them.”

He looked at this one for a long moment. He opened his mouth. Then he closed it again, and went away up the shed, roaring at someone else.

The one who shouts at everyone is often shouting at himself.

Four

The practice field lies east of the sheds, past the stumps where the young ash grove used to stand.

This one walked there slowly. Everything this one does is slow. It is not a virtue. It is only a shell.

There were eighty creatures at the field already, from every bench in the yard. They stood along the low fence in a long uneven line, each holding a bundle of arrows wrapped in twine.

The goblin twins were there, Nib and Nob, with two bundles each, each bundle twice as fat as it should have been. They were arguing about which of them had made more.

The hedgehog family was there, all seven, quills bristling with nerves.

The goat scholar, Mr. Crouch, was there, holding his single bundle as if it were a newborn, sighing.

Old Mudge the sawyer was there, though he makes no arrows. He had come, he said, to listen. He cannot see far in daylight, so he hears most things before he sees them.

This one stood at the end of the line, beside him.

“You’ll want to cover your ears, Shu,” Mudge said quietly. “It’s going to be ugly.”

This one did not cover them.

What is ugly should also be heard. Otherwise how will we know what we have made?

Five

Sergeant Reedwhistle was a lynx-folk with one eye and a bow taller than herself. She had served in the coastal levies and had loosed more arrows than this one had ever cut. She stood at the line with her single eye half-closed against the morning, and she did not look at anyone.

Mr. Scrapple, the clerk, sat on an upturned crate behind her with a ledger on his knees and a pen behind his ear, as small and anxious as a mouse is supposed to be.

The butts stood at sixty paces. Twelve straw targets painted with rings of red and white.

“First bench,” said Mr. Scrapple.

The first bench handed over a bundle. Reedwhistle cut the twine with one claw, drew an arrow, nocked it, raised the great bow, drew to her cheek, and let go.

That was the first time this one heard the song.

Six

How to describe a sound to one who has not heard it?

When a good arrow flies, it makes almost no sound. Perhaps a whisper, the faint breath of feathers parting the air, like a fish passing in deep water. You hear the bowstring and then you hear the arrow strike. Between the two there is only a soft hush.

This arrow did not hush.

It sang.

It left the string with a whine, high and thin, like a mosquito near the ear. Halfway to the butts the whine began to waver, up and down, up and down. The arrow’s tail was swinging from side to side in the air like a fish that has been hooked and is trying to tear itself free. The note went up when the tail swung left and down when it swung right, and it never settled, never resolved, never agreed with itself.

It sounded like two people arguing in the next room. You cannot hear the words, only the rise and fall of the voices, the sharp edges, the interruptions, the way neither one will let the other finish.

Then it struck the straw. Not the red ring. Not the white ring. The very edge of the target, so far to the left that it nearly missed the butt entirely, and it hung there quivering, still humming faintly, like an argument that goes on after one of the speakers has left the room.

Reedwhistle said nothing. She drew the second arrow.

It sang too.

Seven

They all sang.

The first bench’s arrows sang. The second bench’s arrows sang a different song, lower and more sullen, a grumbling note, like a creature muttering about the injustice of the world. The third bench’s arrows sang high and frightened. The fourth bench’s arrows did not so much sing as cough, a dry stuttering rattle, because the green wood had already begun to twist inside them and they tumbled end over end before they reached the butts.

The goblins’ arrows sang loudest of all. They screamed. One of them flew backward, or so it seemed, though Mudge said afterward that it had only turned sideways and been carried by the wind. Nib said it was Nob’s arrow. Nob said it was Nib’s. They argued about it while their remaining arrows argued in the air above them, and the two arguments braided together until no one could tell which was which.

Reedwhistle loosed six hundred arrows that morning. This one counted. Counting is a thing a slow creature can do while it waits.

Of six hundred, perhaps forty flew quietly.

Of those forty, perhaps twenty struck the red ring.

Mr. Scrapple wrote every one of them down in his very small hand. As the morning went on, his hand began to shake, and the figures grew smaller, as if they were trying to hide.

Eight

What does it mean, that the arrows sang?

The wood was split before it was ready. The wood remembered the tree, and the tree did not want to be an arrow yet, so the wood twisted, trying to grow back the way it was going.

The feathers were cut without asking the birds. The birds did not want to give them, so the feathers fought the air instead of riding it.

The points were seated by hands that were thinking of the next arrow, not this one. So the points were never quite here. They were already reaching for the next shaft on the pile, leaning a little ahead, and the arrows flew leaning.

The glue was boiled too hot and spread too fast. So it held, but it held the way a fist holds, tight and angry, and anger does not fly straight.

Everything in those arrows was in a hurry to be somewhere else.

So when they flew, they flew everywhere at once.

That is what the singing was. It was every part of the arrow going in its own direction, and arguing about it.

This one understood this.

This one did not understand anything else.

Nine

“Last bench,” said Mr. Scrapple. He did not look up. “Manbang.”

The line turned to look. Eighty pairs of eyes, and the goblin twins grinning.

This one walked to the line slowly. There was no other way to walk.

Reedwhistle held out her paw without looking. This one gave her the bundle, eleven arrows, tied with ordinary twine.

She cut the twine. She drew the first arrow and looked at it. For the first time that morning, she opened her one eye fully and looked at an arrow before she nocked it. She turned it in her claws, ran a pad along the shaft, held the fletching to her ear and flicked it, and listened.

Then she nocked it, raised the bow, drew, and loosed.

Ten

It did not sing.

It whispered.

It left the string with a soft hush, like breath on a cold morning, and for the first twenty paces it flew so straight and so quietly that this one felt the chest open and the heart lift. It was a good feeling. This one has not felt it often.

At thirty paces, it was still quiet.

At forty paces, it was still straight.

At fifty paces, something happened.

There was no singing. There was no whine or stutter. But at fifty paces, the arrow lifted. Only a little, the width of a finger, perhaps two. It rose as if it had remembered something above it, and it went over the top of the butt, through the air where the target was not, and on into the field beyond. It struck nothing. It fell somewhere in the long grass at the edge of the willows, and no one saw where.

There was silence along the fence.

Then Nob laughed. Then Nib laughed, because Nob had. Then the whole line was laughing, not cruelly, or not only cruelly, but the way creatures laugh when they are frightened and have just been given something that is not their fear to look at.

Mr. Scrapple did not laugh. He wrote something small in his ledger.

Reedwhistle did not laugh. She looked after the arrow for a long time with her one eye. Then she drew the second arrow, and loosed it, and it did the same thing.

It whispered. It flew straight. At fifty paces it lifted, and it went over the butt into the grass.

So did the third.

So did the fourth.

All eleven.

Eleven arrows that did not sing.

Eleven arrows that missed.

Eleven

The one who hurries misses.

The one who does not hurry also misses.

Then what is the way?

This one stood at the line with nothing in the hands and the laughter of eighty creatures washing past like water around a stone, and did not know.

This one had thought, all through the long nights at the steady lamp, that slowness was the answer. If the others were missing because they rushed, then the one who did not rush would not miss.

But slowness is not the answer.

Slowness is only slowness.

A stone is slow, and a stone does not fly at all.

Twelve

The quartermaster was standing at the end of the fence. This one had not seen him arrive. He had his ledger under his arm and his tusks shut tight, so the rings did not clack, and he was looking at the long grass where the eleven arrows had fallen.

He did not shout. That was the second strange thing that day.

He said, quite quietly, “Well, Mister Manbang. Which is it, then? The one ‘oo binds slow, or the one ‘oo keeps missing?”

This one breathed in.

This one breathed out.

“These hands… do not know,” this one said. “Perhaps both.”

He grunted. It was not quite a laugh. He looked at the long grass, then at the butts, where six hundred arrows hung singing in the straw, and then back at this one. Something passed over his broad bristled face that this one did not understand. It might have been anger. It might have been something else.

“Eleven,” he said, “an’ all of ’em straight, an’ all of ’em missed.” He shook his great head slowly, so that the rings on his tusks swung and caught the light. “Eleven quiet ones that missed, an’ six ‘undred loud ones that ‘it. Tell me, Mister Manbang, ‘oo do you suppose the council wants?”

He did not wait for an answer.

He turned and walked away up the field, past the stumps, toward the roaring sheds.

But he walked slowly.

This one noticed that.

Thirteen

When everyone had gone, this one went into the grass to find the arrows.

The grass was tall at the edge of the willows, as high as this one’s shell, and wet underneath, though the sun was well up. It took a long time. It is always a long time.

Mudge came too, though he could hardly see. He moved through the grass beside this one with his broad velvet hands held out in front of him, feeling, and he said nothing for a long while.

Then he said, “They flew well, Shu. I heard them. Best arrows I’ve heard in a month. Hardly a sound.”

“They missed,” this one said.

“Aye. They missed.” He was quiet again. Then he said, “Do you know why?”

“No.”

“Nor do I,” Mudge said. “That’s two of us, then. That’s a start.”

Fourteen

This one found the first arrow buried halfway to its fletching in the soft earth under a willow root.

It was not broken. It was not warped. It was perfectly straight, as straight as when it left the bench. The feathers lay smooth, the binding was tight, the point was seated true.

There was nothing wrong with it that this one could see.

This one held it in both hands and turned it slowly, the way Reedwhistle had turned it, and looked along it, and listened to it, and smelled the bamboo and the resin and the faint sweetness of the glue.

It was a good arrow.

It had flown well.

It had gone straight to the place where it was going.

It simply had not gone to the place where it was sent.

Fifteen

This one sat down in the long wet grass with the arrow across the knees, the way this one sits at the bench.

The willows moved above.

The wind came across the field from the east, from the stumps, carrying the noise of the sheds, the splitting and hammering and shouting and the faint, endless singing of the goblins’ arrows as someone tested another bundle somewhere out of sight.

This one breathed.

There is a question that has been asked many times in many lives, and this one asks it now:

When an arrow flies straight and misses, is the fault in the arrow, or in the one who sent it, or in the one who made it, or in the place it was sent to?

When the arrow is straight, the maker is pleased.

When the arrow strikes, the archer is pleased.

When the arrow is straight and strikes, everyone is pleased, and no one asks why.

When the arrow is crooked and strikes, the quartermaster is pleased, and the arrow sings, and no one listens to the song.

When the arrow is straight and misses, no one is pleased.

So the one who made it sits in the grass and does not understand.

Sixteen

Here is what this one knows.

The arrow was made slowly.

The wood was dry, because this one had kept back a little dry wood from the barn before the boar emptied it, hidden under the bench in a sack, and had used only that.

The feathers were good. This one had picked through the loft for the ones that were shed, not plucked, though there were very few of those now.

The binding was tight.

The point was true.

The arrow did not argue with itself.

Here is what this one does not know.

Why, at fifty paces, it lifted.

Seventeen

Perhaps the arrow was straight, but the hands that made it were not.

Perhaps the arrow carries something of the hands, as a cup carries the shape of the potter’s palm long after the clay has dried.

Perhaps these hands, which work slowly, are slow not because they are calm but because they are afraid. Afraid of the boar, of the quota, of the laughter along the fence, of being One Who Keeps Missing.

Perhaps the arrow remembered this fear and rose away from it at fifty paces, the way a bird rises from a hand that is about to close.

Perhaps.

This one does not know.

It is a strange thing to be slow, and to be called slow, and to be laughed at for slowness, and then to learn that slowness was never the point.

It is like walking all your life toward the river and arriving to find the river was behind you.

Eighteen

Late in the afternoon, Mudge found the last of the eleven arrows. He held it up into the sunlight, though he could barely see it, and turned it in his velvet fingers.

“Here’s the last of your missers,” he said. He laid it in this one’s hands. “What’ll you do with ’em?”

This one looked down at the eleven straight, quiet, useless arrows lying across the knees.

“Keep them,” this one said.

“Whatever for?”

This one drew a breath.

“To ask them,” this one said, “what these hands did wrong.”

Mudge tilted his head the way he does, that slow tilt that makes you feel you have said something foolish, or perhaps something wise, and you cannot tell which.

Then he laughed, very softly, and patted this one’s shell.

“One Who Binds Slowly,” he said. “That’s the name, Shu. I’m sure of it. A creature who keeps missing would’ve thrown ’em away.”

Nineteen

The sun went down behind the willows.

The sheds lit their lamps, all of them swinging and flickering, the whole yard glowing like a kiln.

This one walked back to the third shed slowly, with eleven arrows wrapped in twine under one arm.

This one sat at the bench.

This one lit the lamp.

The lamp did not flicker.

The question did not go away.

Twenty

The arrow that sings flies everywhere at once and strikes the target by accident.

The arrow that does not sing flies one way only and misses on purpose, though no one can say whose purpose it was.

The one who rushes and the one who waits stand at the same fence. Both are laughed at. Both are wrong.

Somewhere between the shout and the silence there is a breath.

This one has not found it yet.

Perhaps that is why the mother smiled.

Perhaps that is why the father smiled.

They knew a name is not an answer.

A name is a question that one must spend a whole life asking.

Bind slowly.

Keep missing.

Begin again in the morning.

 

Segment 3:

The Month of Thin Rain

Departure from the Reed Marsh

In the river country they say that in the month of Tyrus the rain grows thin. It does not fall so much as linger, hanging in the air like a thought one has not quite finished. It beads on the sleeve and the eyelash and the tip of the beak, and one walks through it as through a curtain of very fine silk. The old cranes of my marsh say that a healer should set out on a journey only in such weather, because thin rain teaches the traveler to be patient with what cannot be stopped and gentle with what cannot be hurried.

I did not set out because of the weather. I set out because of a letter.

It came in the hand of a young messenger-swift, so tired she fell asleep on my doorstep before I had broken the seal. It was written by the surgeon of the field hospital at Harrowgate Ford, a badger-folk named Hollin Greaves whom I had trained many years ago, when his paws were too heavy for needles and his heart too quick for patience. He wrote that the army had returned from the coast. He wrote that the arrows had failed. He wrote that he did not know what to do with the hands.

He said only that: the hands. He did not say whose. I understood that he meant everyone’s.

I packed my needle case of seven seasons, my moxa lantern, my mugwort and dried ginger, three spare robes, and a small bag of rice. I tied the grey bands about my ankles. I settled the scarlet ribbon upon my crown, which I confess I did with more care than was needed. Then I stood a long while at the edge of the reed beds, watching the mist move upon the water.

Herons still in the reeds / they too have learned to wait / for what the river brings.

The morning I left, a young egret watched me go from the top of a dead alder. She did not call. I bowed to her, hm, and she bowed back, or perhaps she was only shifting her weight. One can never be certain with egrets.

The Road South Along the River

The road from the marsh to Harrowgate Ford runs four days along the river, through willow country and low farmland. In other years it is a pleasant road. In the month of thin rain the fields lie green and soft, the farmers walk slowly behind their oxen, and the rooks quarrel in the elms about matters of great importance to rooks.

This year the road was mud.

Not the ordinary mud of the season, which one may walk upon with a little care, but a deep, churned, sucking mud, cut by hundreds of wagon wheels into ruts as deep as my knee. The grey bands about my ankles kept it from holding me, but they could not keep it from my sight, and what I saw troubled me.

Along both edges of the road, at every bend and crossing, lay stacks of wood.

Ash, birch, young cane, even a little hornbeam, which no fletcher with any sense would ever use. It was split into billets the length of my wing and stacked in great untidy towers, some taller than I am, waiting by the roadside for wagons to carry them downstream. Every stack wept. Sap ran from the cut ends in amber threads and pooled in the mud below. The rain beaded upon it and would not soak in, because the wood was too full of its own water to drink any more.

I stopped by the first stack and laid my hand against a billet. It was cold and wet, and beneath the wet I felt something I had felt many times in the bodies of the sick but had never expected to feel in a piece of wood.

It was resisting. Every fiber of it was drawn tight, the way the muscles of a frightened animal draw tight before it bolts. The wood did not wish to be what it was about to become.

Green wood weeping / in the thin rain of Tyrus / sap where tears should be.

A carter came past while I was standing there. He was a big, mud-coloured ox-folk with a long whip he did not use and a face like a rained-out field. He stopped his cart beside me and looked at the stack and then at me.

“Healer?” he said.

“Hm.”

“Thought so. Seen the ribbon.” He spat into the mud. “Going down to the Ford?”

“Then to Cinderford,” I said. “I am told the hands there are unhappy.”

He laughed, a short, hard sound. “The hands. Aye, you could say that. They’re cutting that.” He nodded at the stack. “Cutting it the same week it’s felled. Lord of the Yard down at Cinderford, Harrowtusk, he’s got orders for fifteen thousand now. Fifteen thousand. Every forest from here to the hills is coming down to feed him.” He gathered his reins. “I’ve been hauling timber twenty years. I never hauled it wet before. Feels wrong in the hands. Feels like hauling bodies.”

He clicked to his oxen and drove on. I stood there with my palm against the weeping wood until the rain had soaked my sleeve through, which the robe of thin rain does not usually permit.

The Rookery Wood

On the second day, the road passed beneath a long, wooded hill where the rooks have nested for as long as anyone remembers. In other years, one hears them from a mile away: a great clamor of voices, quarreling and courting and gossiping all at once, the noise of a city of birds. This year, as I came beneath that hill, I heard nothing.

I stopped. I listened. The rain hissed softly in the leaves. Somewhere far off a dog barked. But the rookery was silent.

At the edge of the road, in the wet grass beneath the elms, a goose was walking.

She was a grey wild goose, not a farm goose, and she walked the way wild geese never walk, with her head low and her wings held a little away from her body, as if they hurt her. I went closer. She did not fly. She hissed at me, not with anger but with a kind of exhausted warning, and I saw that the long flight feathers of both her wings were gone. Not molted, for the season was wrong for molting. They had been pulled out from the roots, and the skin where they had been was raw and swollen.

I knelt in the mud. I spoke to her in the old soft way, hm, and after a while she let me near. I took a needle from the case and laid it very lightly in the place below her wing where the pain of such a wound gathers, and I warmed the moxa lantern and held it close until the smoke curled about her. She settled. She closed her eyes. She did not fly away, because she could not.

When I stood, I looked up into the elms. Many of the nests were empty. Some had ladders still leaning against the trunks below them.

Wild goose walking / along the road to the south / her sky taken from her.

I did not understand, then, who had done this, or why. I understood later. At that moment I only knew that something which should not be taken had been taken, and that the taking had not been asked for, and that the wood, and the goose, and the rain all seemed to be grieving the same grief.

Harrowgate Ford

The field hospital at Harrowgate Ford lies in the old barracks by the river, a long low hall of grey stone. When I arrived on the evening of the fourth day, it was so full that soldiers lay on pallets in the yard beneath sailcloth, with the thin rain beading on the canvas above them.

Hollin Greaves met me at the door. He had grown stout and grey since I last saw him, and the heavy paws that had once been too clumsy for needles were now very skilled and very tired. He bowed to me, deeply, the way a student bows to the teacher he hoped never to have to call for.

“Sensei,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”

“Show me the hands,” I said.

He showed me.

There was a young lynx-folk archer named Sorrel, not yet twenty, lying on a pallet near the door. Her right hand, the hand that holds the bow, was wrapped in linen, and when Hollin unwound it I saw that the palm and the inside of the fingers were full of splinters. Not one or two, but dozens. Fine, sharp slivers of green ash had driven deep into the flesh, and the flesh around them was red and hot and very angry.

“They shattered,” she whispered. Her voice was hoarse; she had been shouting, or weeping, or both. “The arrows. On the draw. You pull to the cheek and the shaft’s still green inside, and it twists, and you feel it go, and then it just… comes apart. In your hand. Before you’ve even loosed.” She stared at the ceiling. “I lost nine. Nine arrows, nine times. The tenth one held. I don’t know where it went.”

I sat beside her. I took her wrapped hand in both of mine, very gently, and I spoke to it, not to her.

“Good evening, hand,” I said. “You have had a terrible journey. I am sorry no one asked you first.”

She laughed, a startled, broken sound, and then she began to cry, and I let her, and I worked the splinters out one by one by the light of the moxa lantern while the thin rain whispered on the roof. It took most of the night.

Splinters by lamplight / each one a small green arrow / that never took flight.

In the morning I walked the long hall with Hollin and looked at the others. Shoulders torn from drawing bows that would not draw true. Wrists swollen from holding the string against arrows that fought the hand. Fingers with the nails split back from fletchings glued so carelessly that the feathers had sliced the skin on release. And something I had never seen before, in all my years: deep in the shoulder, below the blade, a knot of muscle in each of the archers, hard as a walnut. It was not from any wound. It was from fear. Every one of them had learned, somewhere between the first arrow and the tenth, that the arrow in their hand might betray them, and their bodies had drawn tight around that knowledge and would not let it go.

“The campaign was won,” Hollin said quietly as we walked. “That’s the strange part. The raiders were driven off. The council has declared a victory.” He gestured down the hall at the pallets, the bandaged hands, the shoulders bound in linen. “This is what a victory looks like, when the arrows are made in a hurry.”

“And the ones who made them?”

He was silent a while.

“I am told,” he said at last, “that they are worse.”

The Upstream Road to Cinderford

I stayed three days at Harrowgate, until the worst of the splinters were out and the fevers had begun to cool. Then I left Hollin with instructions and a bundle of mugwort and walked upstream toward Cinderford.

It is only half a day’s walk. In the thin rain it felt longer.

The stacks of green wood grew more numerous as I went. Near the ford they were a few here and there. By midmorning they lined the road on both sides, unbroken, like the walls of a narrow street. The road between them was churned so deep that wagons had sunk to their axles and been abandoned, and the oxen had been led away. The abandoned wagons stood in the mud with their loads of weeping wood, and the rain beaded on them, and nothing moved.

Then the walls of wood ended, and the land opened. I came over a low rise and saw the river valley spread out below me, with Cinderford in the elbow of the river.

I had been told it was a pleasant place. Perhaps it had been once.

What I saw was smoke. Three long sheds glowed through the rain like kilns, though it was midday. A great grey pall from the glue-house chimneys lay along the river, so thick I could not see the far bank. The hillside behind the sheds, which I suppose had once been woodland, was a field of pale stumps, each one wet and shining in the rain, like the bared bones of something that had died lying down.

And over it all came a sound I will not forget.

It was not one sound but many: splitting and hammering and shouting, carts groaning, someone singing a dreary song, and every so often, from somewhere east of the sheds, a high wavering whine, like a mosquito near the ear, that rose and fell and rose again and never settled. I did not know then what it was. I know now. It was the arrows, being tested. It was the arrows, singing.

Smoke in the valley / the hillside of white stumps / even the rain is gray.

I stood a long time on that rise. I am not ashamed to say that I wished, very much, to turn around and walk back north to my reed marsh and my egret on her dead alder, and my mornings of mist upon the water. I did not. I have been a healer for sixty years. One does not choose the bodies that need one. One goes where the pain is.

I went down.

The Yard

No one stopped me at the gate. There was no one to stop me; every creature in the yard was working.

I walked between the sheds with the mud sucking at my ankles and the rain hissing on the canvas awnings, and I looked at the hands.

A family of hedgehog-folk sat in a row at a long bench, seven of them, seating points on shafts. Every one of them had linen bound about the base of the thumb, and the eldest was working with her left hand only. Her right lay in her lap, curled, the fingers drawn in like the legs of a dead spider. When she saw me looking, she tucked it under her apron.

Two goblin children, young enough that they should have been at their lessons, sat back to back on an upturned crate, gluing feathers. Their small green fingers were raw and blistered from the hot glue, and they had wrapped them in strips torn from their own shirts. They were laughing at some private joke, but their eyes were red-rimmed and their shoulders were hunched up about their ears. I recognized the walnut knot of fear, already forming in bodies so young.

An old mole-folk with a sawyer’s broad hands sat on a stump by the splitting yard. He was not working. He was simply sitting, turning his palms up and down in the rain, as if he did not know what they were for anymore.

I knelt before him. “May I?”

He tilted his head at me, slowly. “You’d be the healer. The one they sent for at the Ford.”

“Hm. I am Aoi.”

“Mudge,” he said. He held out his hands. “Can’t hold the wedge right anymore. Forty years I’ve held it. Now it slips.”

I took his hands in mine. The joints were swollen. The thick muscles at the base of each thumb were hard and hot, and below that, in the forearms, I felt the same tightness I had felt in the green wood by the roadside. Every fiber was drawn tight against a thing it did not want to do.

“Good afternoon, hands,” I said softly. “You have worked for forty years without complaint. Now you are complaining. It is right that you should.”

The old mole was quiet. Then he made a sound, a small, cracked sound, and I realized he was laughing. Or perhaps not laughing. With moles it is hard to be certain.

“Nobody’s spoken to ’em in a while,” he said. “Nice of you to ask.”

Old sawyer’s hands / speaking for the first time / in the thin rain.

I took out the needles. I worked there in the open yard, in the rain, with the mud about my knees, and the yard roared on around us and did not pause. I set needles in the old mole’s forearms and held the moxa lantern beneath them, and slowly, very slowly, the heat went out of the joints and the fibers began to loosen. He closed his eyes. His breathing changed.

When I was done, he opened and closed his hands three times, slowly, wonderingly, the way a child opens and closes its hands when it first discovers that it has them.

“Better,” he said.

“For now,” I said. “Tomorrow they will be tight again. They will be tight every day, until the work changes.”

“It won’t change,” said Mudge. “Not with fifteen thousand on the ledger.”

I did not answer. There was nothing to answer.

The Quartermaster

Toward evening the master of the yard came to find me. I heard him before I saw him: the clack of brass on tusk, the heavy ring of iron-shod hooves on wet stone, and a great hoarse voice shouting at someone about glue. Then he came around the corner of the second shed and stopped before me. He was a big boar-folk, broad as a barrel, with a soot-streaked coat of a hundred pockets, a ledger chained at his waist, and ink on his fingers. He looked at me, at my needles, and at the line of creatures that had formed behind me while I worked: the hedgehogs, the goblins, the scholarly goat who sighed, and twenty others besides, each holding out their ruined hands in the rain.

“You’d be the crane,” he said. “Greaves sent word you were coming.”

“Hm.”

“Right. Good. I’ll be plain with you, madam, because I’m a plain creature and there’s no time for anything else. I’ve fifteen thousand arrows wanted at ‘Arrowgate in thirty-one days. I’ve a ‘undred and twelve ‘ands to make ’em with, and a good third of those ‘ands are seizing up on me like rusted ‘inges. I’ll pay you two silver a day and your board to keep ’em working. Needles, smoke, whatever it is you do. I don’t need ’em mended, madam. I just need ’em moving. Can you do that?”

I looked at him for a long while. The rain beaded upon the scarlet of my crown. The ribbon there showed me what my eyes alone could not: the lines of tension in his body, which ran like taut ropes from his shoulders down his arms to his inky fingers, and from his jaw up into the base of his tusks, where the brass rings were. There was a knot in him, too, deep beneath the ribs, larger than any I had felt in the archers at the Ford, and hotter. It was the oldest knot I had ever felt, and it was made entirely of fear.

“I can keep them moving,” I said at last. “For a while. But a hand that is only kept moving, and never allowed to heal, is like a river that is only dammed and never allowed to flow. One day it will break, and when it breaks, it will take everything downstream with it.”

He looked at me. His small, sharp eyes narrowed. The rings on his tusks clacked once, very softly.

“Two silver,” he said. “And your board.”

“Hm,” I said.

He took it for a yes, and went away to shout at someone else.

It was not a yes. But it was not a no, either. I have learned that there is a great deal of room between the two, and that a healer can do much good in that room if she is patient.

The Steady Lamp

That night I was given a cot in the corner of the glue house, where the fires kept the damp away and the smell of boiling hide was so thick that I tied a mugwort cloth across my beak. I did not sleep. I lay listening to the yard. It did not stop for the night but only changed its voice, the hammering slower, the shouting lower, the singing drummer finally silent. Under it all, from the east, came that terrible, wavering whine of arrows being tested in the dark.

Near midnight I rose and walked out into the rain.

All the sheds were lit, their lanterns swinging in the draughts so that the light inside them jumped and shivered and the shadows of the workers leapt along the walls like frightened animals. I walked past the first shed, and the second, and came to the third, the longest and the farthest from the gate.

At the very end of the very last bench, one lamp was burning perfectly still.

I stood in the rain outside and watched it through the open side of the shed. Beneath it sat a tortoise-folk, mossy-shelled, with a long, wrinkled neck and a loop of faded red thread about one wrist. In front of it on the bench lay a row of finished arrows, perhaps eleven, perhaps twelve, I could not count from where I stood. And across its knees lay a single shaft of bamboo.

It was not working. It was not sleeping. It was sitting very still, with its eyes half-closed, and it was breathing. I could see its long throat move, slowly, slowly, in and out, the way the reeds of my marsh move when there is no wind at all and only the water breathing beneath them.

I put my hand to my crown, to the scarlet ribbon, and looked again.

In every other creature in that yard, the lines of tension had run like taut ropes, knotted, burning, drawn tight against the work. In the tortoise, the lines were still there. I could see them, running from the shoulders down the arms to the old, flat-nailed hands. But they were not taut. They hung loose and quiet, the way a fishing line hangs when the fish has not yet come, and they moved, very faintly, with every breath.

All except one.

Deep in the tortoise’s chest, beneath the shell, where the heart lies, there was a small hard knot. It was not the walnut of fear that I had felt in the archers, nor the great burning stone I had felt in the quartermaster. It was something else. It was smaller and quieter and very old, and it seemed to me, watching through the rain, that it was a question.

One lamp unshaken / among a hundred trembling / a question breathing.

I did not go in. It was not yet time. One does not set a needle in a body before it has asked for one, and the tortoise had not asked. But I stood in the thin rain a long while, until the cold had crept up through the grey bands into the bones of my legs, and I watched that steady lamp and that slow breathing and that small, quiet knot of a question. For the first time since leaving my marsh, I felt something in my own chest loosen a little, like a fist that has been closed so long it has forgotten it can open.

Then I went back to my cot in the glue house and lay down and listened to the arrows singing in the dark.

Before dawn the rain changed, as it does in Tyrus. It grew thinner still, so fine that it no longer fell at all but only hung in the air, waiting. In the reed marsh, far to the north, my egret would be standing on her dead alder, watching the mist upon the water. Here, there was only smoke.

Thin rain at daybreak / a hundred hands still working / one hand still at rest.

 

Segment 4:

Of Feathers Unasked

You will say that grief has unhinged me. You will look at the notches upon my beak, the pale and crooked feathers of my left wing, the tattered cloak I wear, sewn of a thousand molts, and you will say that Corvane Ashquill, Keeper of the Molted Rookery, has gone mad among his birds. You will say that no creature in its right mind would carve its own face with a record of theft, would sit night after night upon a dead branch counting, counting, counting, or would hear in the rasp of a fletcher’s blade the cry of a living thing. Say it, then. I do not mind. I have heard worse things said by better creatures in darker hours than these. But hear me first. Hear me to the end. Then judge, if you can, whether it is madness to remember what others have chosen to forget.

It was the third night of the week of Illumination, in the month of Tyrus. I know the date as I know the shape of my own talons, because it is carved upon me.

The rookery wood stands on the long hill above the river road, two days north of Harrowgate Ford. It is an old wood, older than the road and older than the valley’s first farms, a wood of elms and beeches grown so tall and close that their crowns knit together overhead into a single vaulted roof. Beneath that roof, for as long as the oldest rook can remember, and rooks remember a very long time, the rookery has made its city. There are four hundred nests, perhaps five, built one upon another in the great forks of the elms, layer above layer, generation above generation. In the season of nesting, the noise of that city can be heard from the river, a vast and ceaseless clamor of quarreling and courting and gossip that the farmers below call the Parliament of the Hill.

I am not a rook. I am a raven-folk, larger, darker, and more solitary than those quarrelsome cousins. But I was raised among them, and when the old Keeper died, they asked me, and I said yes. The rooks do not keep much ceremony. A Keeper of the Molted Rookery has only two duties: to gather the feathers that fall in the molt, so that none go to waste, and to remember. That is all. To gather what is given freely, and to remember what is not.

In my seven years as Keeper I had gathered, from the moss and leaf-litter beneath the elms, enough shed feathers to sew a cloak that reached from my shoulders to my heels: rook and crow and jackdaw, heron and egret and goose, owl and kite and swallow, each one dropped of its own accord at the end of its season and each one sewn into my cloak with a small knot of gratitude. I wore it on cold nights. It was warm. It smelled of the wood.

As for remembering, in seven years I had had very little to remember. A fox, once, that took a fledgling and was chased off by twenty rooks. A boy from the valley, once, who climbed for eggs and fell and broke his arm, and whom I carried down the hill to his mother. A storm. A hard frost. Small sorrows, the ordinary sorrows of a wood.

Then came the third night of Illumination.

The great planet hung low in the east that night, VaporSphere, enormous and banded, its pale face streaked with storms the color of old bone. The rooks call it the Watcher. It filled a quarter of the sky, and its light lay over the wood like a cold grey sheet drawn over a sleeping face. There was a little wind, enough to stir the high branches and make the elms creak softly against one another, like old doors in an old house. The rookery was asleep. I was not. I seldom sleep on nights when the Watcher is low. The light gets into my eyes.

I was sitting on my dead branch at the edge of the wood, the high branch of a lightning-blasted beech that overlooks the river road, when I heard the bell.

It is a small bell of silver, no larger than an acorn, and I wear it on a cord about my throat. It was the old Keeper’s, and before that it was the Keeper’s before him, and it does one thing only. It rings when something has been taken from a living creature that was not given. In seven years it had rung exactly twice: once for the fox, once for the boy and his eggs.

That night it rang, very softly, a single silver note, so quiet I thought at first I had imagined it. I turned my head and listened. The wind moved in the elms. The Watcher stared. The river ran far below in the dark.

The bell rang again.

And again.

And then it did not stop.

I have tried many times since to describe that sound, and I cannot. It was a single note, small and silver and clear, but it came again and again and again, faster and faster, until the notes ran together into one long, thin, trembling shriek. It was like the cry of a creature that has seen something too terrible to name and can only scream the same high note over and over. The bell shook against my throat. It burned. I felt it through my feathers like a coal.

Then, beneath the bell, I heard the ladders.

You do not know, I think, what a ladder sounds like when it is laid against an elm in the dead of night by a hand that does not wish to be heard. There is a small dull knock as the top rung settles into the bark, and a faint creak as it takes the weight, and then the soft scrape of feet upon the rungs, climbing, climbing. One ladder, perhaps, would be nothing. One ladder might be a boy after eggs.

There were forty.

I counted them. Even then, with the bell shrieking against my throat, I counted. It is my nature, or perhaps my curse. Forty ladders knocked, one after another, against forty elms. Forty creaks. Forty soft scrapes of forty pairs of feet climbing through the cold grey light toward the sleeping city above.

I rose from my branch. My wings were open before I knew I had opened them.

What happened next I must tell plainly, or I shall not be able to tell it at all.

They came up into the high forks of the elms, where the nests are built, with hooded lanterns that let out only a narrow slit of light. They were weasel-folk and stoat-folk mostly, lean and quick, with soft-soled boots and dark coats. Each one carried a sack over the shoulder and wore a pair of thick leather gloves, and each one moved with the swift, quiet certainty of a creature who has done this many times before and expects to do it many times again. They did not speak. They did not need to. They had a method, and the method was this.

The climber would reach a nest. The climber would open the sack and drop it over the nest and the sleeping birds inside, all at once, so that the birds woke in darkness, tangled in coarse cloth, unable to see or fly. Then the climber would reach in through the mouth of the sack with one gloved hand, find a wing, draw it out, and pull.

Not cut. Pull.

A flight feather is not like the down on a bird’s breast, which comes away easily. A flight feather is rooted deep, in a socket of flesh and nerve, the way a tooth is rooted in a jaw. When a bird molts, the old feather is loosened slowly over many days and pushed out gently by the new one growing beneath it, and the bird feels nothing but an itch. When a feather is pulled from a living bird before its time, the bird feels it as you would feel a tooth torn from your jaw with pliers, and there are ten primaries on each wing, and they took them all.

I heard the first rook scream.

I will hear it, I think, until the day the great planet falls out of the sky. It was not a rook’s caw, which is a coarse, cheerful sound, the voice of a creature that enjoys an argument. It was something I had never heard come out of a rook before. It was high and shrill and wordless, the cry of a creature that does not understand what is being done to it, or why, or by whom, and can only cry out against the darkness of the sack.

Then the second rook screamed, and the third, and then the whole wood.

Four hundred nests. Five hundred, perhaps. Every one of them waking in darkness to coarse cloth and gloved hands and that terrible tearing, and every one of them screaming. The sound rose through the vaulted roof of the elms and out into the cold grey night until it filled the sky, until it filled the whole valley, until I thought it must reach the great planet itself and that the Watcher, for all its vast indifference, must turn its storm-streaked face away.

And beneath it, small and silver and unceasing, my bell rang and rang and rang.

I flew at them.

I am not a warrior. I want you to understand that. I am a Keeper. I gather what falls. I have a strong beak and strong talons, as ravens do, but I had never in my life used either against another creature, and I did not know how. I only knew that the wood was screaming and the bell was burning and that I could not sit upon my dead branch and count.

So I flew at the nearest climber, a stoat-folk on a ladder against the great double elm at the heart of the wood, with a sack over the oldest nest in the rookery, a nest that had been built upon and rebuilt for longer than the valley had had a name. I struck him from behind with my talons open, and he cried out and swung his lantern at me, and the narrow slit of its light flashed across my eyes so that for a moment I saw nothing but white. I struck again, blindly, and felt my talons catch in the cloth of his coat, and heard it tear, and heard him curse.

Then hands caught me.

There were two of them. One had come up the far side of the elm while I fought the first, and he took me by the left wing, at the wrist, where the long flight feathers grow. He held it with a gloved grip so practiced and so strong that I knew, even in my terror, that he had held a thousand wings exactly so.

“Big one,” he said. His voice was soft and almost kind. “Good long primaries on this one. Hold him still.”

The first one held me still.

Then the second one pulled.

I will not describe it. I have told you what it is. I will tell you only that I did not scream, because I could not. My voice had gone somewhere I could not find it, and I hung there in their hands in the cold grey light with my beak open and nothing coming out, while one by one, slowly, expertly, with a little twist of the wrist at the end of each pull to free the quill from its socket, they took the flight feathers from my left wing.

One.

Two.

Three.

I counted them. I could not stop myself. I counted every one.

When they had taken six, the soft-voiced one said, “That’ll do. He’s a Keeper, by the bell. Mr. Flitch said leave the Keeper fit to walk, or there’ll be questions.” He laughed quietly. “Let him keep the other wing. Something to remember us by.”

And they let me go.

I fell. A raven with one wing whole and the other half bare does not fly; he tumbles. I tumbled down through the branches of the double elm, striking limbs and twigs as I fell, and landed at last in the soft black leaf-litter at the foot of the tree, where in the molting season I had gathered so many freely given feathers. I lay there, and I could not rise, and I listened.

The screaming went on for a long time.

It went on until the Watcher had swung halfway across the sky. It went on until the slit-lanterns began to come down the ladders, one by one, swinging, and the climbers dropped to the ground with their sacks bulging on their shoulders. It went on until the forty ladders were taken down from the forty elms and carried away into the dark, toward the river road where, I suppose, a cart was waiting. It did not stop when they had gone. It only changed. The terrible high shrieking sank, little by little, into something lower and more dreadful, a vast soft sobbing, the sound of five hundred birds sitting in five hundred nests in the dark, holding out wings that would not fold properly, trying to understand what had happened to them.

I lay at the foot of the double elm and listened to that sobbing until dawn.

And the bell, small and silver against my throat, rang on in a long, thin, unbroken note, until at last, near daybreak, it cracked.

In the grey of the morning I rose.

I could not fly. I walked. I walked through the wood beneath the vaulted roof of the elms, through the soft black leaf-litter, and I looked up at the nests. In some of them, birds sat hunched and silent, their wings held out a little from their bodies at that terrible angle. In others there were no birds at all, only empty nests and a few scattered down-feathers drifting in the morning air. I do not know where those birds went. Some, I think, fell, as I fell, and crept away into the undergrowth. Some, perhaps, did not survive the night. Some, I hope, simply flew away on what feathers they had left, and are flying still.

At the edge of the wood, where the trees give way to the long wet meadows that run down to the river, I found the herons.

There had been nine of them, fen herons, tall and grey and solemn, who nested every year in the reeds at the meadow’s foot. The gatherers had found them too. They stood now in the reeds in the grey morning light, all nine, perfectly still, as herons stand when they are fishing. But they were not fishing. They were simply standing. Their great wings hung half open from their shoulders like broken umbrellas, the long grey primaries gone, the skin where they had been raw and red and beaded with dew. They did not move when I came near. They did not look at me. They only stood, and the thin rain of Tyrus, which had begun to fall at dawn, ran down their stripped wings and dripped into the reeds below.

Beyond the herons, walking slowly in the wet grass by the road, was a single grey wild goose. Her wings, too, were bare. She did not hiss at me. She did not seem to see me at all.

I stood among them in the rain. The cracked bell hung silent against my throat. My stripped wing hung at my side, and I could feel the blood beginning to crust in the empty sockets.

Then I said aloud the words that I have said so many times since that they have worn a groove in my throat, like water wearing a groove in stone:

“No one asked them.”

The herons did not answer.

“No one asked them,” I said again. “No one asked them. Asked.”

The thin rain fell.

I would have stayed there in the meadow, I think, until I died of the cold or the grief or simply the weight of it. But something caught my eye in the wet grass at the edge of the road, where the cart had stood in the night. It was something pale, something square and flat, half sunk in the mud. I went to it, and I bent, and I picked it up in my talons.

It was a paper. It had been folded and then dropped, and the rain had soaked it through, but the ink upon it had been laid on firmly, and much of it was still legible. At the top, in a neat slanting hand, it said:

Requisition. Ten thousand primaries, mixed, for fletching. Five copper the score. To be delivered to the Supply Yard at Cinderford Crossing.

And at the bottom, in a different hand, round and firm and quite unhesitating, there was a signature.

Harrowtusk.

I read it once. I read it twice. I read it a third time, standing in the rain among the stripped herons, with the long soft sobbing of the rookery coming down from the hill behind me. Something rose in me then that was not quite grief and not quite rage, but a cold, clear, terrible thing made of both. It was the feeling of a creature who has been given, at last, a name to remember.

Cinderford. Harrowtusk. Ten thousand.

And beneath those, the slanting hand. Flitch.

I folded the paper and placed it beneath my cloak, against my breast, where it lay cold and wet against my heart. Then I walked back up the hill into the wood, slowly, on foot, because I could not fly. I climbed the trunk of the lightning-blasted beech with my talons and my one good wing, a long and painful climb, and sat down at last upon my dead branch overlooking the river road. There I did the thing that you will call madness.

I took from my talon one of the small silver rings that the old Keeper had given me, rings meant for gripping branches. With its sharp edge, very carefully, I carved a notch into the side of my own beak.

It was not deep. It did not bleed. But it was there, a small clean groove in the black horn, and when I touched it with my tongue I could feel its edges. I knew that it would never wear away, and that I would carry it until the day I died. It was the record of a single night: the third night of Illumination, in the month of Tyrus, when forty ladders came to the rookery wood and the Keeper heard five hundred birds screaming in the dark and could not save a single one.

That was the first notch.

It was not the last.

I sat upon my branch, and I began to count.

I counted the nests that had been robbed. I could see them from my branch, a great many of them, and I counted them one by one through the falling rain: three hundred and eighty-one. I counted the herons in the reeds below, nine, and the goose by the road, one. I counted the feathers that had been taken from my own left wing, six, and I touched the places where they had been and counted them again. Then, from the nests, from the herons, from the goose, from myself, I reckoned up, as near as a raven can reckon such a thing, the number of feathers that had been carried down the hill in the bulging sacks: something over seven thousand, in a single night, from a single wood.

Seven thousand feathers that had not been given.

Seven thousand feathers that no one had asked for.

And the requisition said ten thousand.

They would come back. I knew it as I knew the shape of my own talons. They would come back to the rookery wood when the birds had healed enough to be worth robbing again. They would go to the wetlands downriver and the cliffs by the coast and every reed bed and rookery and heronry within a week’s walk of Cinderford. They would go wherever there were wings, until the ledger at Cinderford was satisfied. And I knew, with a cold and certain knowledge that sat in my breast beside the wet requisition, that a ledger of that kind is never satisfied. It only grows hungry again.

Very well, then. If they were going to count, I would count too.

I would count every feather. Every night. Every ladder. Every sack. Every wing. I would carve a notch for every theft, and I would remember the place and the hour and the thief. I would carry the count on my own face, in my own beak, where no one could take it from me and no one, looking at me, could pretend not to see it. And one day I would carry it down to Cinderford, down to the supply yard in the elbow of the river, where the arrows were made. I would stand before the creature whose round, firm, unhesitating hand had signed away the wings of the rookery wood. I would show him the notches. And I would say to him what I have said to the herons and the goose and the wind and the uncaring stars:

No one asked them.

Not for vengeance. Understand that, you who think me mad. Vengeance would be easy. A raven is patient, and a raven remembers, and a raven can find a weasel’s sleeping place as easily as a weasel can find a rook’s. I could have hunted Flitch and his climbers through the long dark nights of the valley, one by one, and left them as they left my herons. I thought of it, in the rain on my dead branch. I thought of it for a long time.

But a Keeper does not take. A Keeper gathers what is given. If I had become a thief of their sleep and their peace and their lives, I would have been no Keeper at all, only another pair of gloved hands in the dark, pulling what was not mine to pull. No. What I wanted, what I want still, sitting here with my notched beak and my crooked pale-regrown wing and my cracked silver bell, is something far harder to win than vengeance.

I want them to ask.

That is all. I want them to ask. Ask the heron. Ask the goose. Ask the rook and the crow and the swan. Ask the raven. Ask, before you take. Is that madness? Is it madness to want that? Then I am mad, and I will stay mad, and I will count.

The rain fell all that day upon the rookery wood. The sobbing in the elms grew softer as the hours passed, though it never quite stopped, not that day, nor the next, nor for many days after. Toward evening, as the great planet began once more to rise in the east, pale and banded and enormous, I heard far down the valley, from the direction of Cinderford, a sound I had never heard before.

It was high and thin and wavering, like a mosquito near the ear, rising and falling and never settling. It was the sound of arrows being loosed at some distant target, arrows fletched, I knew, with the stolen feathers of my rookery. They were not flying. They were screaming. Seven thousand stolen feathers, crying out in the air above the valley in the same high, shrill, wordless voice my rooks had used in the dark beneath the sacks.

The feathers remembered.

Even cut and glued and bound to a stranger’s shaft, even far from the wing that grew them, the feathers remembered being taken, and they would not ride the air. They fought it. They cried out against it. And the arrows that carried them flew everywhere at once, and sang.

I sat upon my dead branch in the gathering dark with the cold requisition against my heart and the first notch upon my beak, and I listened to my rookery singing in the arrows of the enemy.

I was not mad. I was the only one in all that valley who could hear what they were saying.

No one asked them.

No one asked them.

Asked.

 

Segment 5:

A Preface Written After the Ending

Chapter the First, in Which a Promise Is Made

I shall tell this story in order.

There. I have written it down, in black ink, in a fair round hand, at the top of a clean sheet of vellum, and I have underlined it twice, which is once more than any honest promise requires and once fewer than this particular promise is likely to need. I shall tell this story in order: beginning at the beginning, proceeding through the middle at a decent and unhurried pace, as befits a tale about patience, and arriving at the end only when the end has properly earned it, and not one page before.

I make this promise to you, Madam, and to you, Sir, and to you also, small reader in the back with the jam on your fingers, whom I can see perfectly well and who will please not touch the margins. I make it in the full knowledge that I have never yet kept such a promise in the whole of my long and argumentative life, nor in the life before it, nor, if the reincarnation-scholars are to be believed, in any of the several lives before that. But I make it anyway. A scribe who does not believe, at the top of every fresh page, that this time it will all come out right is no scribe at all, but only a bookkeeper, and of bookkeepers, as you shall see, this story already has quite enough.

There.

Now I shall begin.

Chapter the Second, in Which I Do Not Begin

Except that I cannot begin, Madam, until I have told you where I found the beginning, because the beginning was not where it ought to have been. It was at the bottom of a crate, beneath a great deal of the end. You will understand, I think, that a creature in my position, finding the end of a story lying on top of its beginning like a cat asleep upon a letter, can hardly be expected to begin anywhere at all until the cat has been moved.

So I shall move the cat.

—No, strike that. There was no cat. The cat is a figure of speech, which some of my mites insist upon introducing whenever we are agitated. The Blue-Ink Mites in particular, who are romantics and would put a cat on every page if we allowed it.

See margin.

—The margin says that there was, in point of fact, a cat in the library on the day in question, a large orange one belonging to the Under-Archivist, and that it was asleep, though not upon the crate.

Ahem. Ibid.

Very well. There was a cat. It was not on the crate. It was elsewhere. Let us leave it there, asleep, and go on without it, as I am sure it would prefer.

Chapter the Third, in Which I Introduce Myself, Which I Had Meant to Do in the First

I am Brother Errata.

That is to say, we are Brother Errata. Or rather, some of us are Brother Errata, and the rest are The Marginalia, and there is a small but vocal faction near the left sleeve who wish to be known collectively as Professor Ibid. They have not yet persuaded the majority, and I do not think they ever will.

I am a swarm. I tell you this frankly, at the outset, so that you will not be alarmed later on when I mention in passing that I have crawled into the spine of a book to read it from the inside. I am, by the last census I conducted, which was inconclusive, some eleven thousand paper-mites, each about the size of the dot on this letter i, each stained some particular color by whatever ink it first fell into as a nymph. We are held together in a vaguely respectable shape by a brown scribe’s habit several sizes too large, which keeps the wind from scattering us. We are held together in a single mind, more or less, by the soul of a copyist who died, in some other world and some other century, with a pen in his hand and a sentence unfinished. That soul fell, as so many souls fall, into Saṃsāra. It looked about for a body to inhabit, and found, in the damp lower stacks of the Guild Library at Harrowgate, a great hungry colony of mites eating its way through the collected sermons of a minor bishop. The mites were very glad of the company, being sentient but bored, and the bishop’s sermons, being what they were, did not object.

So we became one.

Mostly one. You will notice, as we go along, that we do not always agree.

The Red-Ink Mites are doubters. Whenever we are uncertain of a fact, they rush to the tip of our quill and color the ink red, so that every page we write is spotted with little red blushes of hesitation, like a schoolboy’s face when asked about his homework. The Black-Ink Mites are literalists who believe only what is written down, and only the first time it is written down, which makes them very poor company for a scribe whose whole trade is writing things down a second time. The Blue-Ink Mites, as I have mentioned, are romantics, and supply the cats.

I keep the peace among them as best I can. I am not always successful.

Chapter the Fourth, in Which the Tablets Are Found, More or Less

They were found on the second day of the week of Warming, in the month of Helmus, in the year 9,014a, at a quarter past the hour of four, which is to say, in the old reckoning, 9014a6.2.2@4:15. I write it so, Madam, in the proper form, so that the historians of later ages may not quarrel about it. Though I know perfectly well that they will, because historians, like rooks, are never so happy as when quarreling about a date.

They were found in the deepest of the lower stacks of the Guild Library at Harrowgate, beneath the Hall of the Bowyers and Fletchers. That is very nearly the deepest place in the city, deeper even than the wine cellars of the Guild Masters, and much damper, and much better stocked with mites. They were found by me, or rather by a forward scouting party of about two hundred of my Black-Ink Mites, who had gone ahead into a crack in the wall behind a shelf of tax rolls in search of something more nourishing than tax rolls, which is not difficult to find. They came back in a state of considerable excitement and reported, in the small dry chirping voices that mites use among themselves, that there was a crate.

A crate, they said. A wooden crate, very old, very damp, with a broken lid, wedged behind the shelf, and full of something that was not tax rolls.

I went to look.

That is to say, the whole swarm went to look. I squeezed out of my habit, which I do not do lightly, since it leaves me feeling dreadfully exposed, and flowed through the crack in the wall like a little river of colored dust, behind the shelf of tax rolls and into the dark. There, by the light of my cracked reading lamp, which I had pushed through the crack ahead of me with considerable effort, I found it.

It was a crate. The mites had told the truth, as Black-Ink Mites generally do, being incapable of anything else. It was of oak, iron-banded, black with age and soft with damp, and on its side, burned into the wood, faded almost to nothing, there was a mark.

It was a single word, and below it a single line.

The word was CINDERFORD.

The line was perfectly straight, and drawn once, not twice.

Chapter the Fifth

I have left this chapter blank.

—No, I have not left it blank. I meant to, because my lamp went out at this point in the proceedings, and for some minutes nothing whatsoever happened except that eleven thousand mites sat in the dark behind a shelf of tax rolls, breathing. It seemed to me that the proper record of such an interval would be a perfectly empty page.

But the Red-Ink Mites objected that a blank chapter would confuse the reader. The Black-Ink Mites objected that a blank chapter was not, strictly speaking, a chapter, but merely the absence of one. The Blue-Ink Mites wished to put a cat in it.

So I have compromised. This chapter contains only this explanation of why it was meant to be blank, and you may consider the blankness implied.

Chapter the Sixth, in Which I Describe the Tablets, and Am Overcome

Madam, I wish you could have seen them.

No. I take that back. I do not wish it at all. I wish you could have seen them as they must have been when they were made, whole and fresh, the clay still faintly warm from the kiln, the letters pressed into them crisp and clean, every stroke of the stylus standing up out of the surface like the furrows of a newly plowed field. That is what I wish. What I would not wish upon you, or upon anyone of delicate sensibility, is to have seen them as I saw them that day, by the light of a cracked lamp in a damp hole behind a shelf of tax rolls, six hundred years after they had last been read.

There were thirty-one tablets, more or less. I say more or less because eleven of them were in more than one piece, and four of them were in so many pieces that it would be generous to call them tablets at all, and more honest to call them gravel.

They were of fired clay, a reddish-brown clay of the kind dug from the riverbanks of the old valley, and they had been made by someone who was clearly in a great hurry. I could see it at once, in the uneven thickness of the clay, in the slanting and crowding of the letters, which grew smaller and more cramped toward the edge of each tablet as if the writer had realized too late that he was running out of room. I could see it too in the long cracks that ran through almost every one of them from corner to corner, where the clay had been put into the kiln before it was properly dry.

You will appreciate the irony of this, Madam, when you have heard the story. I did not appreciate it at the time. At the time I was too busy weeping.

—Mites do not weep. Strike that.

See margin.

The margin says that a small party of Blue-Ink Mites did, in fact, weep, or did something that for mites is functionally equivalent, involving a great deal of agitated circling. Very well. Some of us wept. The rest of us looked at the margins.

Chapter the Seventh, on Margins

For the tablets, Madam, were not merely cracked and crumbling and crowded and unreadable in a dozen places. They had also been copied.

More than once.

Down the ages, at intervals of perhaps fifty years, perhaps a hundred, someone had come to that crate in that damp hole, by whatever lamp they had, and had sat down and made a copy of what the tablets said. Then, having made the copy, these copyists, every last one of them, a whole long procession of scribes stretching back through six centuries, had not been able to resist writing in the margins of the tablets themselves what they thought of the copyist who had come before.

I should explain that the tablets had wide margins. Whoever made them had left a broad band of plain clay around the edge of each one, perhaps meaning to decorate it later, perhaps simply because they had seen better tablets made that way. The copyists, finding all that empty clay, had filled it.

They had filled it with argument.

I give you a few examples, so that you may judge for yourself, Madam, the quality of the scholarship to which this poor story has been subjected.

On the second tablet, beside the line which says that the fletcher’s name may be translated as One Who Binds Slowly, someone had scratched with a sharp point, in small, neat, furious letters: NO. THE ONE WHO KEEPS MISSING. ANY FOOL KNOWS THE HILL SPEECH. And below that, in a different hand, larger and rounder: THE HILL SPEECH IS A BARBAROUS DIALECT AND THE TRANSLATION IS ONE WHO BINDS SLOWLY, AS ANY SCHOLAR KNOWS. And below that, in a third hand, very small and cramped and almost apologetic: perhaps it means both? And below that, in the first hand again, pressed so deep into the clay that it had nearly cut through: IT CANNOT MEAN BOTH, IDIOT.

On the fourth tablet, beside a passage concerning a boar-folk with brass on his tusks, someone had drawn a small, unflattering picture of a pig. Someone else had written beneath it, with evident indignation: DISRESPECTFUL. HARROWTUSK WAS A GREAT REFORMER. And a third had written: HARROWTUSK FELLED THE ASH GROVE BEHIND THE LOFT. SEE THE LEDGER. And a fourth had written: WHAT LEDGER? And no one had answered, for perhaps two hundred years, until at last someone had written, in a hand so shaky and faded I could barely read it: I have seen the ledger. There is a line at the bottom of a page. Only one line. I think he was sorry.

That last note, I confess, gave me pause. I shall come back to it.

—No. I shall not come back to it. I shall come to it in order, when the story reaches it, as I promised.

See Chapter the First.

On the seventh tablet, beside a line concerning a raven, someone had carved a small notch into the edge of the clay, and nothing else. Just the notch. No word. No explanation. And beside it, in a later hand: WHAT IS THIS MARK? And beside that, in a still later hand: it is a count. And beside that: OF WHAT? And then nothing at all for a very long time, until, near the very bottom of the margin, almost lost in a crack: of what was not asked for.

I sat a long while looking at that, Madam. A long while.

On the eleventh tablet, there was a verse. I do not know who wrote it. It was not in the main text but in the margin, in a hand quite different from all the others, small and graceful and precise, every stroke laid down as carefully as a needle. It said only: Thin rain at daybreak / a hundred hands still working / one hand still at rest. Beneath it, someone had written, crossly: THIS IS NOT IN THE ORIGINAL. And someone else had written, more crossly still: IT IS NOW.

And on the very last tablet, the thirty-first, the one that holds the end of the story and the moral that comes after the end, the margins were so crowded with argument, with correction and counter-correction, with scratched-out words and words scratched in over the scratches, with little pictures of arrows and tortoises and birds and one very fine drawing of a lamp, that I could not at first find the original text at all. It had been buried, Madam, entirely buried, beneath six hundred years of other people’s opinions about it.

I had to read it with the lamp held very close, using its glow to find what had been written beneath what had been written beneath. And when at last I found the original words, worn almost smooth, at the very heart of all that furious scratching, they said simply:

That which is shaped in balance remembers its path, but that which is rushed forgets even why it flies.

And all around them, the margins raged.

Chapter the Eighth, in Which I Lose My Temper

You will forgive me, Madam, but I lost my temper.

I am a copyist. I have been a copyist through more lives than I can easily count. And I have never, in any of them, seen so much ink, or so much clay, or so many hours of careful scholarly labor spent by so many careful scholarly creatures upon the single, simple, endlessly repeated task of telling the creature who came before them that they were wrong.

Thirty-one tablets. Six hundred years. A dozen copyists at least, perhaps twenty. And not one of them had sat down before that crate and simply read the story through, slowly, from beginning to end, without stopping to correct it.

Not one.

They had all been in such a hurry to be right.

I said as much aloud, in the dark behind the tax rolls, at some considerable volume. Eleven thousand mites can make a surprising amount of noise when they all speak at once. The Under-Archivist’s cat, I am told, woke on the floor above and left the library in some haste and did not return for two days.

—That is not the margin. That is the Blue-Ink Mites again.

—It is perfectly true. Ask the Under-Archivist.

—We do not have the Under-Archivist’s testimony. It is hearsay.

—It is a cat. Cats do not testify.

Ahem.

Ibid.

Chapter the Ninth, in Which a Resolution Is Formed

So I resolved, Madam, there in the dark, with my lamp flickering and my mites in an uproar and thirty-one crumbling tablets stacked about me in the damp, that I would do what not one of my predecessors had done.

I would read the story slowly. All of it. From the beginning to the end, in order, without stopping to quarrel with anyone.

Then I would copy it out fair, for you, Madam, and for you, Sir, and for you, small reader with the jam. I would not add to its margins. I would not subtract from its text. I would not decide, on behalf of the fletcher, whether the name meant One Who Binds Slowly or One Who Keeps Missing. I would set down everything that has come down to us, and let the story speak for itself, in the voices of those who were there.

For it is a strange thing, Madam, and I discovered it only as I sat there with the lamp held close: the tablets were not written by one hand.

The main text, the story of the fletcher and the arrow and the small carved object, was written by one hand, a cramped and hurried one. But woven in among the cracks and margins, there were other voices. There was the voice of a quartermaster, in fragments of what seem to be his ledger. There was the voice of a healer, in verses scattered in the margins. There was the voice of a raven, in notches and a few dark, grieving lines. And beneath them all, here and there, was a voice that I can only suppose was the fletcher’s own, in short plain sentences that do not argue and do not explain, but only breathe.

I shall give you all of them. In order.

Chapter the Tenth, in Which I Discover That I Have Already Broken My Promise

Madam, I have just reread the foregoing nine chapters, and I find, to my very great embarrassment, that I have broken my promise in every one of them.

I have told you the end before the beginning. I have quoted to you the moral of the story, the very last line of the very last tablet, in Chapter the Seventh, before you have so much as heard the fletcher draw a breath. I have told you that the quartermaster was perhaps sorry, before you have learned what he had to be sorry for. I have shown you the raven’s notch before you have seen the raven. I have read you the healer’s verse before you have met the healer. I have given away, through my own impatience, all the patience the story has to teach.

I have, in short, done precisely what every copyist before me did. I have rushed to the margins, and forgotten why the story flies.

—The Red-Ink Mites wish it noted that they warned me.

—They did. I acknowledge it. Every word I wrote in Chapters the Seventh and Eighth came out of my quill a deep and blushing crimson, and I ignored it entirely.

There is nothing for it, Madam. I could tear these pages up and start again. But I have been a copyist long enough to know that a scribe who tears up his errors only makes new ones on the fresh sheet, and the same ones over again besides.

So I shall leave them.

Let them stand, these ten chapters, as a preface written after the ending, a warning, and a confession. Let them stand as proof that even I, who was so very angry with all those quarreling copyists, could not sit before that crate for a single morning without becoming one of them.

And let us begin, now, for the second time.

Chapter the Eleventh, in Which We Begin, for the Second Time, and I Breathe

There is a thing that I have noticed in the copying of these tablets that I have not yet mentioned, because I did not notice it until just now.

When I first took up my quill to copy the fletcher’s own lines, the short plain ones that do not argue, my mites were in their usual uproar. Red and Black and Blue were each rushing to the nib to color the ink in their own fashion, quarreling and correcting and interrupting, so that the first lines I wrote came out a sort of muddy purple and were very difficult to read.

But as I went on, slowly, line by line, something happened that I cannot well explain.

The mites grew quiet.

Not all at once. A few at first, then more. The Red-Ink Mites stopped blushing. The Black-Ink Mites stopped objecting. The Blue-Ink Mites, I am very sorry to report, did not stop introducing cats, but they introduced them more gently, and fewer of them. By the end of the third tablet, the ink on my nib was running clear and black and steady, and my eleven thousand voices, for the first time in all the time we have been together, were speaking very nearly as one.

I do not know why.

I think, Madam, though I cannot be sure, that the story was teaching us to breathe.

So let us begin.

Let us begin, for the second time, at the beginning, with a boar-folk and a ledger and an orderly little supply yard in the elbow of a river. Let us go on, at a decent and unhurried pace, through the long nights of the haste and the screaming of the rookery and the thin rain of the month of Tyrus, to a tortoise at the end of the last bench with a steady lamp and a question. And let us arrive at the end only when the end has properly earned it, and not one page before.

I promise.

—See margin.

—The margin says I have promised before.

—I know, I know.

I promise anyway.

 

Segment 6:

Needles by Permission

One

The proofing field again, three days after the missing.

Again the line along the low fence. Again the bundles. Again Sergeant Reedwhistle at the mark with her one eye and her great bow. Again Mr. Scrapple on his crate with his small trembling ledger.

Again the singing.

This one did not bring arrows that morning. The eleven that missed were wrapped in twine beneath the bench, waiting to be asked their question. No new ones had been made. These hands would not make new ones until they understood the old ones.

This one came only to listen.

Listening is not idle. A pond that is still can see the whole sky.

Two

The fourth bench sent its bundle.

Reedwhistle cut the twine. She drew an arrow and looked at it, and this one saw her eye narrow. She had begun, since that morning, to look at every arrow before she nocked it. No one had told her to. Her eye simply did it, the way a hand that has been burned looks at the stove.

She did not like what she saw. This one could see that from the fence. But the quartermaster was standing at the end of the line with his ledger, and the ledger wanted counting, and so she nocked the arrow and raised the bow and drew.

The wood was green inside.

This one heard it before this one saw it. A small sound, like a twig stepped on in a quiet room. Then a louder sound, like many twigs.

The arrow did not fly.

It broke in her hand.

Three

When green wood is bent, it does not break as dry wood breaks.

Dry wood snaps clean. It makes one sound and is two pieces.

Green wood tears. It splits along its length into many thin pieces, long and sharp, still held together at one end, and they spring apart like the fingers of a hand that has been struck.

When an arrow of green wood is drawn to the cheek, the bow pulls one way and the wood pulls the other. If the wood is not ready, it tears in the middle, and the torn pieces go where the force sends them.

The force sent them into Reedwhistle’s arm.

Four

She did not cry out.

That is what this one remembers first. Eighty creatures along the fence cried out. Mr. Scrapple dropped his ledger. The goblin twins screamed. The quartermaster roared. But Reedwhistle did not make a sound. She only stood there with her bow still raised and the shattered arrow hanging from her fist, and looked down with her one eye at her left forearm, the bow arm, where nine or ten long pale splinters of green ash stood out of the fur like the quills of a hedgehog.

Then she lowered the bow, very slowly, and set it on the grass.

Then she sat down beside it.

Then she said, quite quietly, to no one: “Well. That’s that, then.”

Five

The healer came.

This one had seen her before only from far off. A crane, very tall, white as morning fog, with a crown of scarlet and a robe of indigo, damp at the hem. She had been in the yard three days, going from bench to bench with her needles. The fletchers said she spoke to hands. Some of them laughed when they said it. Some of them did not.

She came across the proofing field with her long grey legs stepping high through the wet grass, not hurrying, but not slow either. She moved the way water moves downhill. It does not hurry. It does not stop.

The quartermaster met her halfway. “Get it out of ‘er,” he said, “an’ get ‘er back on the line. I’ve four more benches to proof before noon.”

The crane did not stop walking. She said, “Hm,” and went around him the way a stream goes around a stone.

Six

She knelt in the grass beside Reedwhistle.

She did not touch the arm at once. This one noticed that. Every other healer this one has seen, and there have been several, for fletching is a trade of small wounds, goes straight to the hurt. Pulls, presses, binds. Quickly, because a wound is an emergency and an emergency must be met with speed.

The crane did not.

She knelt. She folded her long white wings back against her robe. She put her hands together in her lap. And she looked at the arm for a long time without touching it, the way this one looks at a piece of bamboo before cutting.

Then she spoke. Not to Reedwhistle. To the arm.

“Good morning, arm,” she said. “You have had a very bad surprise. I am sorry. May I come in?”

Seven

The line along the fence went quiet.

Not because the crane said anything remarkable. She said it so softly that only those nearest could hear, and this one was among the nearest, having come slowly down along the fence while everyone else was shouting. They went quiet because Reedwhistle laughed.

It was a small laugh, short and startled, the laugh of someone who has been hit very hard and then told a joke. But it was a laugh, and her shoulders, which had been drawn up about her ears, came down a little.

“Ask it yourself,” Reedwhistle said. “It’s not speaking to me.”

“Hm,” said the crane. “That is often the way.”

She opened a lacquered case at her belt. Inside, on dark silk, lay needles. Many needles, long and short, fine as hairs, bright as frost. She chose one. She held it up to the light. Then she laid her other hand very gently on Reedwhistle’s arm, high up, near the elbow, far from the splinters, and she waited.

This one does not know what she was waiting for.

This one watched her face. She was listening to something.

Eight

Then she set the needle.

Not into the wound. Not near the wound. High on the arm, near the elbow, in a place where there was no hurt at all. It went in so easily that this one could not tell where the fur ended and the needle began. Reedwhistle did not flinch.

The crane set a second needle, near the wrist.

A third, in the web of the hand between thumb and finger.

A fourth, in the shoulder.

None of them near the splinters. All of them around the splinters, at a distance, like stones set around a pond.

Then she took up a small lantern from her belt. Smoke came from it, grey and fragrant, smelling of dry summer fields. She held it near the needles, one after another, and the smoke curled about them and warmed them.

Then she waited again.

Nine

Something changed in the arm.

This one cannot say what. This one does not have the crane’s eyes. But this one has spent forty-one years watching wood, and has learned to see when a thing that was resisting stops resisting.

The arm had been held stiff. Every muscle in it was pulled tight against the splinters, the way a fist closes around a thorn. The fur along it stood up. The fingers were curled.

Now, slowly, it softened.

The fur lay down. The fingers uncurled, one by one, the smallest first. The long cords of the forearm, which had stood out beneath the skin like the strings of a bow drawn too far, loosened, and sank, and went quiet.

Reedwhistle let out a breath she had been holding since the arrow broke.

“Oh,” she said.

Ten

Then the crane began to take out the splinters.

This one expected pain. This one expected that the quiet arm would draw tight again the moment she touched the first splinter. That is what a body does. That is what this one’s own hands do, every time the knife slips.

It did not.

She took the first splinter between two long fingers and drew it out, slowly, along the line it had gone in, as one draws a thread back out of a needle’s eye. The arm did not tighten. It let the splinter go.

She drew the second. The arm let it go.

The third, the fourth, the fifth, all the way to the ninth, which was the deepest, a long pale sliver as long as this one’s thumb, buried nearly to its end. She drew it out with the same slow care as all the others. The arm let it go as if it were giving it, not losing it.

The blood came. Not much. She pressed a cloth to it.

Reedwhistle was crying now, silently, tears running down from her one eye into the fur of her cheek. But she was not crying the way creatures cry when they are hurt. This one knows that kind. This was something else.

Eleven

The pain had been invited out.

That is what this one saw. That is the only way this one knows to say it.

The crane had not dragged the pain out. She had not fought it or forced it or beaten it into leaving. She had gone around it, asked the arm, warmed the arm, waited for the arm, and then the arm had opened its hand, as a fist opens, and let the pain go of its own accord.

It was not that the pain was gone. Reedwhistle’s arm was still hurt. It would be hurt for many days.

But it was hurt without fighting.

And a hurt that is not fought is half healed already.

Twelve

The quartermaster came back.

He had been standing at a distance all this time, his tusks clacking softly, his ledger under his arm. This one had seen him look at the sun, and then at the benches still waiting, and then at the sun again. But he had not interrupted. This one does not know why.

Now he came and stood over them and looked down at the arm, with the needles still in it and the cloth pressed to the wounds and the nine pale splinters laid in a row on the grass beside it.

“Well?” he said. “When can she draw?”

The crane looked up at him. Her eyes were very dark.

“When the arm says so,” she said.

“An’ when’ll that be?”

“Hm.” She looked back down at the arm. “When it is no longer afraid of the arrows.”

He stood there. His tusks did not clack. He looked at the nine splinters of green ash on the grass, his green ash, from his empty drying barn. This one saw something move across his broad bristled face, the same thing that had moved across it three days before, when he had asked this one which name was true.

Then he turned and went away up the field, and he did not shout at anyone until he reached the sheds.

Thirteen

This one stayed.

The line along the fence broke up. The proofing was over for the day; there was no one else to draw the bow. The fletchers went back to their benches, talking in low voices, looking back over their shoulders at the crane and the lynx in the grass.

This one stayed at the fence. Watching.

The crane took out her needles, one by one, as gently as she had put them in. She bound the arm in clean linen. She spoke to Reedwhistle in a low voice that this one could not hear, and Reedwhistle nodded, and nodded again. Then Reedwhistle stood, holding her bound arm against her chest, and picked up her great bow with her other hand, and walked slowly away toward the barracks.

The crane began to pack her case.

Then she looked up, across the grass, directly at this one.

Fourteen

“You have been watching, hm,” she said.

This one breathed in. This one breathed out.

“Yes.”

“Since before the arrow broke.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

This one did not know how to answer. This one has never known how to answer that question. Every creature in the yard asks it, one way or another. Why so slow? Why so few? Why do you sit there looking at the wood instead of cutting it? This one has never had an answer that satisfied anyone, least of all this one.

So this one said the only true thing there was.

“These hands… do not understand something. (breath) Hoped to see it here.”

The crane tilted her long neck. Her scarlet crown caught the light.

“Did you see it?”

This one was quiet a long time.

“These hands saw you ask the arm,” this one said at last. “And the arm said yes.”

Fifteen

The crane smiled.

It was a very small smile, the way cranes smile, mostly at the corners of the eyes. But it was a smile.

“Hm,” she said. “Most people see only the needles.”

“Why ask?” this one said. The words came out faster than words usually come from this one, faster than breath. “The arm is hers. You are the healer. You know where the needles go. Why ask?”

“Because the arm is the one that heals,” said the crane. “Not I. I only open a door. If the arm does not wish to walk through it, I may hold the door open all day, and nothing happens. If I push the arm through the door, it breaks the frame.” She closed her case. “A body is not a thing to be made to do. It is a thing to be asked.”

Sixteen

A body is not a thing to be made to do.

It is a thing to be asked.

This one stood at the fence after the crane had gone, with those words lying in the chest like a stone dropped into still water, the rings going out and out and out.

Seventeen

Walking back to the sheds, this one heard the yard.

Not as before. Before, this one heard only noise: hammering, splitting, shouting, singing. The noise of a yard in haste.

Now this one heard what the noise was made of.

The hammer on the cooper’s bench, beating an iron hoop down over a barrel’s staves. The staves did not want to bend. The hammer made them.

The wedges in the splitting yard, old Mudge’s wedges, driven into green billets by heavy mauls. The wood did not want to split. The wedges made it.

The irons in the bending shed, where crooked shafts were clamped and heated until the sap boiled out of them and they could be forced straight. The shafts did not want to be straight. The irons made them.

The points being hammered onto the shafts by the hedgehog children. The glue boiled so hot it smoked. The feathers torn from wings that did not offer them.

Everything in that yard was being made.

Nothing in that yard was being asked.

Eighteen

This one stopped in the middle of the path between the second shed and the third and stood there while fletchers went past on either side.

Why?

Why is the body asked, and the tool beaten?

Why does the crane kneel in the grass and wait for an arm to say yes, while forty hammers in forty hands beat forty pieces of wood into shapes that wood does not want to take?

Is the arm more alive than the ash tree?

The ash tree grew for nine years behind the feather loft. It drank the rain. It turned its leaves to the light. It was alive.

Is the arrow less alive than the arm because it was cut?

The arm, too, can be cut. And when it is cut, the crane asks it still.

Nineteen

This one’s own knife.

This one thought of it standing there on the path. The little carving knife this one has used for twenty years. Sharp, fine, true.

This one has always thought of that knife as gentle. Slow, careful, unhurried. Not like the mauls and the irons. The knife of One Who Binds Slowly.

But this one has never asked the bamboo.

Not once.

This one has looked at it, yes. Turned it in the hands. Felt the grain. Chosen the best of it. And then this one has put the knife to it, slowly, and cut, and the bamboo has been cut whether it wished to be or not.

Slowly. But without asking.

This one has been forcing the wood for forty-one years.

Only more politely than the others.

Twenty

This is the wonder.

Not that the crane is wise. Many are wise.

Not that the arm healed. Many arms heal.

The wonder is that this one has stood in the same yard for six years, beside the same wood, with the same knife, and never once seen what was in front of the eyes.

The answer was in a field of wet grass, in the kneeling of a white bird beside a hurt arm.

It was not hidden.

It was only not looked at.

The greatest secrets are not locked in towers. They are left lying in the open, where everyone walks past them on the way to somewhere else.

Twenty-One

This one went into the third shed.

Sat at the bench.

The lamp was not lit; it was midday. The bench was as it always is. Sackcloth. Knife. A bundle of the hidden dry bamboo. The eleven arrows that missed, wrapped in twine beneath.

This one took up a piece of bamboo and laid it across the knees.

This one took up the knife.

And this one did not cut.

Twenty-Two

This one put down the knife.

This one laid both hands on the bamboo, flat, the way the crane laid her hand on Reedwhistle’s arm, near the elbow, far from the hurt.

This one did not know what to listen for.

This one listened anyway.

The yard roared on around the shed, hammering, splitting, shouting, singing.

Under the hands, the bamboo was cool and smooth and very still. It did not speak. Bamboo does not speak.

But this one felt something.

Faint. Very faint. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps only the pulse of these own hands, beating against the shaft.

Or perhaps a thing that is very old, and has grown in rain and wind, and turned its leaves to the light, holding very still under two strange hands and waiting to see whether they would ask.

Twenty-Three

This one did not cut that day.

This one sat until the light went orange and then grey and then dark, with two hands on a piece of bamboo, listening.

When the dark came, this one lit the lamp.

It did not flicker.

From the doorway, someone was watching. This one did not look up, but knew from the faint smell of dry summer fields and smoke that it was the crane. She did not come in. She did not speak. She stood there a long while in the dark, and then she was gone.

Twenty-Four

The arm is asked.

The tool is beaten.

But who decided that the arm was a body and the tool was a thing?

The tree was a body once.

The bird was a body once.

The feather was part of the bird.

The shaft was part of the tree.

When did they stop being bodies?

When the knife touched them?

Or when the hand that held the knife stopped asking?

This one does not know.

But this one is awake now, as one is awake at dawn before the first bird sings, when the dark is still the dark but something in it has begun to turn.

The pain left the arm because it was invited out.

What might come into the wood, if it were invited in?

 

Segment 7:

Hands Beaten into Obedience

Morning in the Yard

On the fourth morning after the lynx’s arm, I rose before the yard had properly woken, if a yard that never sleeps can be said to wake. I washed my face in the rain barrel behind the glue house. I combed my crown with my fingers. Then I sat for a while on the edge of my cot with my needle case open in my lap, looking at the needles.

There are forty-nine of them. Seven for each of the seasons my teacher taught me, though the river people count only four, and the marsh people five, and the mountain people, I am told, only two: the season of snow and the season of waiting for snow. I have carried these needles for sixty years. Each one has its own place on the silk, and each one goes back to its place when its work is done. In sixty years I have never once put a needle back in the wrong place.

That morning I could not remember which needle I had used on the old sawyer’s thumb the night before. I sat with the case in my lap and looked at the silk and could not remember.

I do not know why this troubled me so much. But it did.

Forty-nine needles / one out of place on the silk / even I hurry.

I closed the case. I tied my sleeves back. I decided that today I would not wait for the hands to come to me, as I had been doing, sitting by the glue-house door while the line of swollen fingers grew longer and longer. Today I would go to them. I would walk the whole yard, shed by shed, bench by bench, and look. And I would write down what I saw.

A healer who only treats the wounds that come to her door is like a fisherman who only catches the fish that leap into his boat. She will be busy, but she will never understand the river.

The Splitting Yard

I began where the wood begins.

The splitting yard lies between the empty drying barn and the first shed, a broad trampled space of mud and chips, ringed with stacks of green billets. In the sensible days, I am told, the wood came here only after a season in the barn, and the sawyers split it at their leisure, with wedges and light mallets, finding the grain and following it.

There was no leisure now.

Twelve sawyers stood in a line along the stacks with heavy iron mauls, and before each of them stood a billet of green ash set on end on a chopping block, with a wedge driven into its crown. They swung, all twelve, in a rhythm a burly ox-folk foreman called out from the end of the line, a rhythm much too fast for green wood. The mauls fell. The wedges shrieked. The billets did not split cleanly along the grain, as dry wood does. They tore, ragged and fibrous, and clung to themselves, and had to be struck again and again, three times, five times, eight, until they gave.

With every stroke, the shock of the maul ran back up the haft into the sawyers’ hands, and from their hands into their wrists, and from their wrists into their elbows and their shoulders. I could see it. I did not need the ribbon on my crown to see it. Every time a maul struck a green billet and did not split it, the sawyer who held it flinched, a small flinch, the length of a heartbeat, but it was there.

Twelve sawyers. Eight blows for every billet. Two hundred billets in a morning.

I took out my small book and my brush. I wrote: Splitting yard. Twelve. Elbows hot in nine. Shoulders knotted in all. One young stoat-folk with the bone of the wrist already shifting.

Then I looked at the mauls.

I had not thought to look at the tools. I am a healer of bodies, not of things. But my eye fell, between one swing and the next, on the maul in the hands of the young stoat-folk, and I saw that its haft was cracked from end to end and bound around with wire in three places to keep it from splitting apart. I looked at the next maul. Its iron head had worked loose on the haft and been wedged back with a sliver of oak. I looked at the wedges. Their crowns, where the mauls struck them, had spread and flattened and curled over at the edges like the petals of an ugly iron flower. In the sensible days, Mudge told me later, a wedge would last a sawyer five years. Now they lasted a month.

The tools were being beaten too.

Iron wedges flowering / under a hundred hammer-blows / even iron weeps.

The Bending Shed

The bending shed is a low, hot, steaming building at the back of the second shed, built over a long trench of coals. I am told that in the sensible days it was used only now and again, for the occasional shaft that had come out of the drying barn with a slight crook in it. Such a shaft would be warmed gently over the coals until the wood grew supple, then pressed straight by hand and allowed to cool.

Now there was no time for warming gently.

The shafts came in from the splitting yard green and twisted, and went straight onto iron clamps set over the coals. There were thirty clamps in two long rows, each one a pair of heavy iron jaws worked by a screw. A worker would lay a crooked shaft in the jaws, turn the screw, and crank the jaws together until the shaft was forced straight between them. The coals beneath would heat the iron, and the iron would heat the wood, until the sap inside it boiled and hissed and spat out of the ends in little bubbling gouts. Then the worker would crank the screw back and pull the shaft out, straight and steaming, and throw it on a pile, and reach for the next.

The air in that shed was so thick with steam and smoke and the sour reek of boiling sap that I could not see to the far end. The workers wore wet cloths over their mouths. Their arms were bare to the shoulder, and every arm I looked at was striped with burns. Some were old and healed pale, some new and raw and weeping. There were long red stripes where the iron jaws had caught them, and small round blisters where the boiling sap had spat.

A young otter-folk at the nearest clamp could not close her right hand. She worked the screw with her left. Her right hung at her side, the fingers drawn in, the palm a single blister.

I stopped beside her. “May I?”

She looked at me through the steam with eyes red-rimmed from the smoke. Then she looked at the ox-folk foreman standing at the end of the row with his arms folded, and she shook her head very slightly.

“Can’t stop, healer,” she whispered. “Thirty to the hour. If I stop, I’m short.”

I stood there with my needle case in my hand.

Then I went on.

I wrote: Bending shed. Thirty. Burns on all. Lungs heavy with smoke in perhaps half. One otter-folk, right hand, will not close. Would not let me look.

And under that, after a moment, I wrote: The shafts too are burned.

For they were. I had looked at the pile of straightened shafts by the door, and every one of them was scorched along one side where the iron jaws had pressed it, and every one of them, when I laid my hand upon it, was tight. It was the same tightness I had felt in the green wood by the roadside, in the old sawyer’s forearms, in the lynx’s arm before the needles. The wood had been made straight, but it had not agreed to it. It was holding itself straight the way a frightened creature holds itself still, waiting for its chance to bolt.

Shafts pressed straight / in jaws of red-hot iron / longing to be crooked.

The Benches

In the three long sheds where the arrows are finished, I walked slowly down every bench, one after another, from the first shed to the third. I did not speak to anyone unless they spoke to me. I only looked, and wrote.

At the first bench, the hedgehog family, seating points. The eldest had stopped trying to hide her curled right hand. It lay on the bench beside her now, and she worked around it, as one works around a sleeping cat. The youngest of the seven, a child with soft new quills, could not hold the small point-hammer properly in her little fist, so she held it in both hands, and with every blow the hammer bounced and caught her knuckles. The knuckles of both her small hands were split and bleeding. She was humming.

At the fifth bench, the goblin twins, gluing feathers. The glue pots were kept so hot to make the glue set faster that they smoked. The twins had wrapped their fingers in rags, and the rags were stiff and brown with dried glue and stuck to the skin beneath. When the smaller twin pulled one away to show me, the skin came with it.

At the ninth bench, a goat-folk with a long melancholy face and very good, very slow hands, who sighed between every arrow. He was not much hurt. But his eyes, when he looked up at me, were the eyes of a creature who has been told for weeks that everything he values is a waste of time, and has begun, against his will, to believe it.

At the fourteenth bench, a farm girl of perhaps sixteen, who had never fletched before the haste, holding her binding thread between her teeth because her fingers had gone numb.

At the twentieth bench, a fisherman who had cut his thumb to the bone three days before and bound it himself with sailcloth, and gone on working.

At the twenty-sixth bench, nothing. An empty stool. The worker who belonged there, someone told me, had simply walked away in the night, out of the gate and down the river road, and not come back.

I wrote it all down. My brush moved very slowly. I wrote every one.

The knives at those benches were whetted so often that their blades had thinned to slivers, and some had snapped. The hammers had loosened on their hafts. The awls were bent. The glue brushes were worn down to their ferrules. The work-benches themselves were scarred and splintered and stained with blood and glue and something darker. In one place on the long bench of the second shed, someone had struck so hard and so often in the same spot that they had worn a hollow into the oak, deep as a soup bowl.

Hollow in the oak / where a hammer fell and fell / the bench has a wound.

At the very end of the third shed, at the very last bench, sat the tortoise.

It was not working. It sat as I had seen it on the night of my arrival, with a single piece of bamboo across its knees and its two hands laid flat upon it, very still, its eyes half closed, breathing. It did not look up as I passed. I did not stop. I wrote nothing in my book. But I looked at the tortoise’s hands, flat and quiet upon the bamboo. Then I looked at its knife, lying on the sackcloth beside it, an ordinary small carving knife, worn thin from long use but whole and bright and quite unbroken.

It was the only tool in the yard that had not been beaten.

The Feather Loft

Last of all, I climbed the ladder to the feather loft.

I had been told that the feathers were sorted here, and I had thought to look at the hands of the sorters. There were two of them, an old dove-folk and her grandson, and their hands were cut all over with fine shallow cuts like paper cuts, from the sharp edges of the quills. I wrote that down.

Then I looked at the sacks.

There were perhaps sixty of them, piled along the walls of the loft, each one bulging, each one tied at the neck with twine. Some had been opened, and the feathers spilled out of them onto the floor in grey and black and brown drifts. Rook, crow, jackdaw, goose, heron. I knelt and took one up.

It was a heron’s primary, long and grey and beautifully made, the vane smooth as silk. At the base of the quill, where it had been rooted in the wing, there was a small dark crust.

I took up another. A rook’s. The same dark crust.

Another. A goose’s. The same.

These feathers had not been molted. A molted feather comes away clean, its quill dry and empty, the bird’s body having already withdrawn from it. These had been pulled from the living wing, and they had brought the bird’s blood away with them.

I knelt there in the dim of the loft with a goose’s flight feather in my hand. I thought of the wild goose on the road below the rookery wood, walking with her wings held out from her body, unable to fly. I had sat with her in the wet grass. I had set a needle under her wing and warmed it with smoke until she closed her eyes.

Perhaps this was her feather. Perhaps it was not. It did not matter. It was someone’s.

Grey goose feather / with a crust of dried blood / no one asked the goose.

I laid it back on the pile very carefully, the way I lay my needles back on the silk. Then I climbed down the ladder.

I did not write anything in my book about the feathers. I could not find the right words, and I have learned in sixty years not to write the wrong ones.

The Office of the Quartermaster

In the late afternoon, I went to the quartermaster’s office.

It is a small whitewashed building of stone near the gate, very clean, very orderly, with ledgers ranged on the shelves so straight and even that it was almost painful to look at them after the rest of the yard. The quartermaster was there, behind his desk, with his great inky hands spread flat upon an open ledger. His mouse-folk clerk sat at a smaller desk in the corner. And there were four others standing about the room. One was the ox-folk foreman of the splitting yard. One was a bull-folk with burned forearms who ran the bending shed. One was a stout badger-woman with a stained apron who kept the glue house. The fourth was a long-nosed weasel-folk in a rusty black coat, who smiled when I came in and went on smiling after, as though the smile were something he had put on with the coat.

They had been talking. They stopped when I entered.

“Madam,” said the quartermaster. He did not rise. “What can Cinderford do for you?”

“I have walked the yard,” I said. “I have looked at the hands. I should like to tell you what I saw.”

The ox-folk shifted his weight. The badger-woman folded her arms. The weasel smiled.

The quartermaster’s tusks clacked once, softly. “Go on, then.”

So I told them.

I did not raise my voice. I have never in my life found it useful to raise my voice. I opened my small book and I read to them, plainly and slowly, everything I had written that day, from the splitting yard to the last bench of the third shed. Twelve sawyers, elbows hot in nine. Thirty in the bending shed, burns on all. The otter-folk who could not close her hand. The hedgehog child with split knuckles, humming. The goblin twins with skin coming away with the rags. The fisherman’s thumb. The farm girl’s teeth. The empty stool at the twenty-sixth bench. I told them about the wedges flowering under the mauls, and the shafts straining in the iron jaws, and the hollow worn into the oak of the bench. I did not tell them about the feathers. I could feel the weasel’s smile on me as I read, and I did not tell them about the feathers.

When I had finished, I closed the book.

“This is the cost,” I said. “Not in silver. In bodies. A hand that is driven past what it can bear does not simply tire. It begins to break. First the soft parts, the cords and sinews, which grow hot and swell. Then the joints, which grind. Then the bones themselves, which shift. A sawyer who swings a maul eight times where once he swung it twice will have the hands of an old creature in a year. A child who learns to hold a hammer in both fists because it is too heavy for one will learn her whole body around that weight, and will carry it crooked all her life. These are not wounds that heal with a needle and a night’s rest. They are wounds that heal only when the work that made them stops.”

There was a silence.

Then the ox-folk laughed. It was not a cruel laugh, exactly. It was the laugh of a creature who has heard something so far from his own world that it has no more weight for him than a story about a country across the sea.

“Stops?” he said. “Nothing stops, healer. There’s fifteen thousand wanted at the Ford.”

“Then slow,” I said. “Let the wood dry. Let the hands rest between strokes. Let the—”

“Let the council wait?” said the bull-folk from the bending shed. He held up his own burned forearms. “You think I don’t know what the irons do? I’ve worked those irons twenty years. They do what they do. And the council don’t count burns, madam. It counts arrows.”

“Then it counts badly,” I said.

That was the only time my voice changed that afternoon. Not louder. Only colder. I felt it change, and I did not take it back.

The quartermaster had not spoken. He sat behind his desk with his inky hands flat on the open ledger and looked at me with his small dark eyes, and I could not read what was in them. The scarlet ribbon on my crown showed me the great hot knot beneath his ribs, burning as it had burned that first evening in the rain, and burning hotter, I thought. But his face showed nothing.

At last he said, “Mr. Scrapple.”

The mouse-folk clerk looked up.

“Write it down,” said the quartermaster. “What the lady said. All of it. In the book.”

“In which book, Sergeant?”

The quartermaster was quiet a moment. “The back one,” he said. “The one for… remarks.”

The mouse took down a small, thin ledger from a high shelf. It was dusty, I noticed; I do not think it had been opened in a long time. He began to write in his very small hand.

The quartermaster looked back at me.

“Thank you, madam,” he said. “It’s been noted. You’ll go on keeping ’em moving, I trust? Two silver and your board.”

The weasel’s smile widened very slightly.

I looked at them all. The ox-folk was already turning away, back toward the splitting yard. The bull-folk was rubbing his burned forearms absently, as though he had forgotten the burns were there. The badger-woman was studying the ceiling. The weasel was smiling. Only the little mouse-clerk in the corner was still writing, bent over the dusty ledger, his whiskers trembling, his small hand moving very fast.

“Hm,” I said.

I bowed, exactly as low as courtesy requires and not one hair lower. Then I left.

Written in the back / of a book no one opens / the price of the hands.

Evening

I did not go back to my cot.

I took my needle case and my lantern and I went back out into the yard, where the lamps were being lit one by one in the long sheds, and I began, as I had begun every evening since I came, at the first bench.

The hedgehog child with the split knuckles was asleep with her head on the bench beside her hammer. I did not wake her. I knelt beside her stool and took her small hand very gently in mine and set a needle at the base of her thumb, so fine she did not stir. I warmed it with the lantern, and spoke to her hand, softly, so that only it could hear.

“Good evening, small hand,” I said. “You have worked very hard today. You were not asked if you wished to. I am sorry. I will ask you now. May I come in?”

I do not know if the hand said yes. Hands do not speak. But the fingers, which had been curled tight around the haft of the hammer even in sleep, slowly uncurled, one by one, the smallest first.

That is what I do. I cannot stop the yard. I cannot stop the council, or the ledger, or the weasel with his sacks. I spoke plainly to the masters of the yard, and they wrote my words in the back of a dusty book and went back to their quotas. They will not read it. I know that. I have known it since I saw the stumps on the hill.

But I can ask the hands. One at a time. Every evening. For as long as I am here.

It is not enough.

It is what there is.

I went from bench to bench until very late, until the thin rain had begun again outside and the lamps in the sheds were burning low. At the very end of the third shed, the steady lamp still burned. The tortoise was still sitting with its hands flat upon the bamboo, as it had been at midday, as if it had not moved at all.

I did not go to it. It has not asked.

But as I passed, on my way back to the glue house, I heard it breathe, very slowly, in and out, in the dark. It sounded to me, though I may have imagined it, like something preparing, at last, to begin.

Thin rain on the roof / a hundred hands sleep beaten / one hand is waiting.

 

Segment 8:

The First Breath Before the Blade

One

The darkest part of the night is the part just before it ends.

Not because the dark is deeper then. The dark is the same dark it has been since dusk.

It is darkest because one has been in it so long, and has begun to believe there is nothing else.

Two

Four nights this one has sat with the hands on the bamboo.

Four nights, and four days between them, though the days were not very different from the nights. The lamp burned. The yard roared. The hands lay flat. The knife lay on the sackcloth, unused.

The fletchers at the other benches have begun to laugh again. They laugh more now than they did after the missing. Then they laughed because the arrows flew over the butts. Now they laugh because there are no arrows at all.

“Look,” says Nob, or perhaps Nib. “The tortoise is waiting for the stick to hatch.”

“Maybe it’s asleep,” says the other.

“Maybe it’s dead.”

“Maybe it’s been dead for years and nobody noticed.”

They laugh. This one does not mind. They are children, and the yard has made them old too quickly, and laughter is one of the few things left to them that does not cost silver.

The quartermaster has not laughed. He has come to the end of the third shed three times in four days and stood there with his ledger under his arm, looking at the hands on the bamboo. He has not said anything. His tusks have not clacked. Each time he has stood a little longer before going away.

This one does not know what he is waiting for.

Perhaps the same thing.

Three

What has this one been listening for?

This one does not know.

The crane knelt beside the arm and waited, and something happened. This one did not see what she heard. This one saw only the waiting, and the arm softening, and the pain going out like a guest leaving by the door.

So this one has been waiting.

But waiting for what?

The bamboo does not speak. It lies under the hands, cool and smooth and very still, and it does not soften, and it does not open, and it does not say yes.

On the second night, this one thought: perhaps it is not the bamboo that must say yes.

On the third night, this one thought: perhaps the bamboo said yes long ago, and this one did not hear it.

On the fourth night, this one stopped thinking, because thinking had not helped, and only breathed.

Four

Breathing is what this one has always done.

Slowly. More slowly than other creatures. The fletchers at the other benches breathe as they work, fast and shallow, high in the chest, the breath of a creature running. The quartermaster breathes through his nose in great snorting gusts, like a bellows. The goblins hardly seem to breathe at all; they hold their breath while they glue, and let it out in a burst when the feather is set, and gasp in the next one.

This one has always breathed slowly, because a tortoise breathes slowly. It is the shape of the shell. There is not room in it for hurry.

So this one had thought, all these years: this one’s breath is already calm. This one’s breath is not the problem.

On the fourth night, near the end of it, in the darkest part, sitting with the hands on the bamboo, this one listened to this one’s own breathing for the first time in forty-one years.

And heard that it was afraid.

Five

How can a slow breath be afraid?

Like this.

It goes in slowly. It is held. It goes out slowly.

But it is held.

Between the going in and the going out, there is a place where the breath stops and waits, and the whole body waits with it, tight, like a creature crouched in tall grass listening for the hunter’s step. It is a small place. A heartbeat long, perhaps two. This one had never noticed it, because it had always been there.

But on the fourth night, listening, this one found it.

And found that it was the same place this one had seen in the crane’s ribbon-light, perhaps, though this one did not know about the ribbon then. The same place this one had felt in the old sawyer’s hands, and in Reedwhistle’s arm before the needles, and in the green wood by the roadside, and in the straight shafts screaming in the iron jaws.

The held place.

The place that does not let go.

Six

This one had breathed slowly all these years.

But this one had never once breathed out.

Not all the way.

Every breath went out most of the way, and then stopped, and kept a little back. A small reserve. In case the hunter came. In case the quartermaster shouted. In case the arrow missed. In case the name turned out to be the wrong one.

A little held breath, kept back like dry wood hidden in a sack beneath a bench.

This one’s slowness had never been calm.

It had only been fear, moving carefully.

Seven

So, in the dark, before the dawn, this one breathed in.

Slowly.

Through the nose.

The air of the shed was cold and smelled of resin and old glue and the smoke from the glue-house chimneys that never stopped. It went in, and down, and filled the space beneath the shell where the breath lives.

Then this one breathed out.

And did not stop.

Eight

It is very difficult to breathe out all the way.

Try it. Breathe in. Then let the breath go. Let it go until it is gone. Then a little more. Then a little more than that.

There comes a place, near the end, where the body begins to be frightened. It says: stop. Keep some. You will need it. What if something comes?

That is the held place.

This one came to it, on the fourth night, in the dark, and the body said: stop.

This one did not stop.

This one let the breath go, past the held place, all the way out, until there was nothing left in the shell at all. This one sat in the dark at the bench with two hands on a piece of bamboo, and was empty.

Nothing came.

No hunter. No shout. No arrow. Nothing.

Only the dark, and the cold, and the bamboo under the hands.

And then, without being asked, the breath came back in.

Nine

That is the first thing this one learned.

The breath comes back by itself.

This one had held the breath for forty-one years for fear that it would not.

Ten

This one breathed out again, all the way, past the held place.

And in again, without reaching for it.

And out.

And in.

Slowly, slowly, the held place grew smaller. It did not vanish. It is still there, even now; this one can feel it, waiting, like a guest who has not quite decided to leave. But it grew smaller, the way a fist grows smaller when the fingers begin to open, one by one, the smallest first.

And as it grew smaller, something happened in the hands.

Eleven

The hands had been lying on the bamboo for four nights.

All that time, they had been lying there the way the breath had been breathing: slowly, carefully, and a little tight. Pressing down, very lightly, as if the bamboo might roll away. Holding.

Now, as the breath went out past the held place, the hands stopped pressing.

They did not move. They only stopped holding. They lay on the bamboo the way a leaf lies on water. Not gripping. Not pushing. Only resting, and letting the bamboo hold them up.

And then this one felt it.

Twelve

What?

This one does not know how to say it.

It was not a sound. Bamboo does not speak.

It was not a movement. Bamboo does not move.

It was something like warmth, though the shed was cold. Something like the faint change one feels when a sleeping creature, lying against one’s shell, wakes, and does not move, but is awake now, and the whole quality of its stillness is different.

The bamboo had been still because it was waiting.

Now it was still because it was ready.

Thirteen

This one did not reach for the knife.

The knife came into the hand.

That is not true. The hand reached. This one knows the hand reached. But it did not feel like reaching. It felt the way the breath had felt when it came back in by itself, without being asked. The hand was empty, and then it was not empty, and the knife was in it, and there had been no moment of wanting it there.

Fourteen

This one looked at the bamboo.

It was one of the last pieces from the sack beneath the bench, the dry wood hidden before the haste. There were only seven left. A thick culm, longer than this one’s arm, pale gold in the lamplight, with the nodes standing out along its length like the knuckles of a long finger. It was to be split. Split lengthwise into staves, and the staves shaved into shafts, and the shafts made into arrows, the way this one has made arrows for twenty years.

This one has split a thousand culms like this one.

This one set the edge of the knife on the end of it, across the grain, at the center, where the split should begin.

And breathed in.

Fifteen

In the old way, the way of forty-one years, this one would now have pressed.

Set the knife, hold the breath, press down, and drive the edge into the end of the culm until the fibers gave and the split began. Then work it down the length with a little twisting, a little levering, a little more pressure, until the culm was two halves. Slowly. Carefully. Without hurry.

But pressing all the same.

Holding all the same.

This one has always called it gentle. It was only gentle force.

Sixteen

This one did not press.

This one breathed out.

All the way, past the held place, slowly, slowly, until the shell was empty and the hand on the knife was empty too, empty of pressure, empty of pushing, empty of wanting the bamboo to be anything but what it was.

And on the very end of that breath, at the bottom of it, where there was nothing left, the knife went in.

Seventeen

It did not go in because this one pushed it.

This one is certain of that. The hand was empty. The breath was gone. There was nothing to push with.

It went in as a needle goes into an arm that has said yes.

As a key goes into a lock that was made for it.

As water goes into a crack in the riverbank, not because it is forced, but because the crack is there and water goes where there is room.

The edge touched the end of the culm, and the culm opened.

Eighteen

This one heard it.

In forty-one years of splitting, this one has heard the sound a culm makes when it tears, a thousand times. A dry, sharp, crackling sound, like a branch stepped on in a quiet wood. The sound of fibers pulled apart against their will, each one snapping a little before the next.

This was not that sound.

This was a long, soft, whispering sound, like silk drawn slowly across silk. Like a breath going out.

The split ran down the culm by itself.

The knife stayed where it was, at the end, just barely in. This one did not move it. And the split ran down from the knife, all the way down the length of the culm, past the first node, past the second, past the third. It did not jump or catch or wander. It followed the grain as a river follows its bed, all the way to the other end.

And the culm lay open on this one’s knees in two clean halves, like the two covers of a book.

Nineteen

This one did not move.

This one looked down at the two halves.

The inside of the culm was pale and smooth and very clean. Every fiber lay straight beside its neighbor, unbroken, the whole length. Where the split had passed the nodes, it had passed through them cleanly, without the little tearing knots and ragged edges this one has always had to shave away. There was not one splinter.

Not one.

This one has never in forty-one years split a culm without a splinter.

Twenty

That is the second thing this one learned.

The grain will open, if the hand stops holding it closed.

Twenty-One

This one sat there with the two halves on the knees and the knife in the empty hand.

The lamp burned without a flicker.

The dark outside the shed was not quite so dark now. At the very edge of it, in the east, beyond the stumps of the young ash grove, there was the faintest grey. Not light. Only the idea of light. The dark remembering that it would end.

And in the shell, where the held place had been, there was something this one had never felt before.

Not joy. Joy is loud. Joy wants to tell someone.

Not pride. Pride wants to do it again, at once, to be sure.

Something quieter. Something that sat in the empty shell like a single drop of water sitting in the bottom of a clean bowl, perfectly still, reflecting the whole sky.

Peace, perhaps.

But a very small peace, and very new, and this one did not dare breathe too hard for fear of spilling it.

Twenty-Two

This one did not cut again.

This one could have. There were six more culms in the sack. The knife was in the hand. The grey in the east was growing. Soon the yard would wake, or rather would roar louder, and the fletchers would come back to their benches, and the quartermaster would come to the end of the third shed with his ledger, and this one would have nothing to show him but two halves of one culm.

This one knew all this.

And still this one did not cut again.

Because this one could feel how small the peace was. How new. How easily it would spill.

The hand wanted to try again. The hand wanted to be sure. Already, sitting there in the grey, this one could feel the wanting beginning to curl the fingers, very slightly, around the knife. The held place was beginning to fill again, a little, at the bottom of each breath.

If this one cut again now, wanting to be sure, the knife would go in pushing.

And the grain would tear.

This one knew that as surely as this one knew the name of the river.

Twenty-Three

So this one put the knife down.

Laid it on the sackcloth, slowly.

Laid the two halves of the culm beside it, side by side, close together, as they had grown.

And breathed out.

All the way.

Twenty-Four

The yard woke.

The first sound was the hammer in the bending shed: one great iron clang, then another, then the whole rhythm of it starting up. Then the mauls in the splitting yard, the ox-folk foreman calling out the count. Then the shouting, the carts, the drummer beginning his first song of the day about a soldier who died of fever. Then the goblin twins, arguing about who had stolen whose glue brush.

Each sound came into the shed like a stone thrown into still water.

And with each one, this one felt the small peace shiver.

The hammer: the peace trembled.

The mauls: it trembled more.

The quartermaster’s voice, rising somewhere out by the gate, shouting about the second wagon of green wood: the peace shook so hard that this one thought it would spill entirely. This one felt the held place fill again at the bottom of the breath, quick and tight, the old fear crouching in the grass. The hands on the knees began to close.

This one breathed out.

Past the held place.

All the way.

The hands opened.

The peace did not spill.

It shook, and shivered, and trembled like a drop of water in a bowl carried across a crowded room. But it did not spill.

Twenty-Five

That is the third thing this one learned.

The peace does not stay because the world is quiet.

The world is never quiet.

The peace stays only because, every time the world throws a stone, one breathes out again.

Not once.

Every time.

Twenty-Six

Someone was standing at the end of the bench.

This one had not heard him come. That is unusual. This one hears most things. But the peace had been very loud, in its quiet way.

It was old Mudge, the sawyer. He stood there in the grey light with his broad velvet hands hanging at his sides, his nearly blind eyes half closed against even that faint dawn, his head tilted in the way he has.

“Heard that,” he said.

This one did not answer. This one was not sure what he had heard.

“From the splitting yard,” Mudge said. “Just now. Before the hammers started. I was sitting on my stump, waiting for the foreman, and I heard a culm split.” He paused. “Didn’t tear.”

He came closer. He put out one hand, slowly, feeling for the bench, and found the two halves of the culm lying side by side on the sackcloth. He ran his blunt velvet fingertips along the inside of one half, from end to end, slowly, past every node.

He was quiet for a long time.

“Forty years,” he said at last, “I’ve split wood. Ash and oak and beech and birch and every kind of cane there is. Forty years.” He lifted his hand from the culm and held it up, as though he could see it. “Never once heard it sound like that.”

This one breathed out.

“Neither had these hands,” this one said.

Twenty-Seven

He did not ask how.

That is a kindness. If he had asked, this one would have tried to tell him, and the telling would have been words, and words are loud, and the peace might have spilled.

He only stood there a while longer, with his head tilted, listening to the yard roar. Then he patted this one’s shell, once, very gently, as he had in the long grass after the missing.

“One Who Binds Slowly,” he said quietly. “Told you.”

And he went back out into the grey, toward the splitting yard and the mauls and the green wood, his broad shoulders already drawing up a little, already beginning to brace against the work.

This one watched him go and wished, very much, that there were a way to give him what this one had been given.

There was not. Not yet.

Twenty-Eight

The quartermaster came at midmorning.

He stood at the end of the bench as he had stood three times before. He looked at the two halves of the culm on the sackcloth, and at the knife beside them, and at the hands, which were no longer lying on the bamboo but resting, open, on the knees.

“One,” he said. “One culm. In five days.”

This one breathed out.

“Yes.”

His tusks did not clack. His small dark eyes moved from the culm to this one’s face and back again. He did not shout.

“Is it any good?” he said.

This one did not know how to answer. This one did not know yet whether it was good. It was only open.

So this one said, “It did not tear.”

The quartermaster looked at the culm for a long time. Then, very slowly, as if against his own will, he bent down, put out one great inky finger, and ran it along the inside of the split, from end to end, the way Mudge had.

When he straightened up, something had changed in his face. This one could not say what. It was there for only a moment, and then it was gone, and his tusks clacked once, loudly, and he turned on his iron heel and went away up the shed roaring at someone about glue.

But his finger, this one noticed, he held a little away from his body as he walked, as if it were carrying something he did not want to drop.

Twenty-Nine

The peace is still here.

It is very small. It shakes every time a hammer falls. Every time the quartermaster shouts. Every time a goblin laughs, or the drummer sings, or a cart groans past the shed with another load of green and weeping wood. It shakes when this one thinks of the eleven arrows under the bench that missed, and of the ten thousand that sang. It shakes when this one thinks of the crane’s needles, and of the lynx’s arm, and of the green splinters in a row on the grass.

It shakes all the time.

It has not spilled.

Every time it shakes, this one breathes out.

Thirty

The breath goes in by itself.

The grain opens when the hand stops holding it closed.

The peace stays only if one breathes out again, and again, and again, every time.

These are three small things. A child could learn them in a morning.

This one has taken forty-one years.

Perhaps that is what the name means.

Not slowly binding the arrow.

Slowly learning to let go.

 

Segment 9:

Requisition Number Four Hundred and Six

I have now arrived, in this unhappy history, at a passage which I would very much prefer to leave out. If this were any ordinary ledger, I should simply draw a single line through the whole of it, never two, and turn the page, and let the line stand for everything that happened beneath it. But it is not an ordinary ledger. It is the true account of the age of haste and how it began and what it cost, and an account with a page torn out of it is no better than a lie with good penmanship. So I shall set it down, all of it, the bluster and the bellowing and the contempt, exactly as it was. And if the reader thinks the worse of me at the end of it, I can only say that the reader is in excellent company, for I have thought the worse of me for a great many years.

It began, as all the worst things at Cinderford began in those days, with a letter.

It was not, this time, a letter with a black seal or a red one. It was a printed form, of the sort the war council’s clerks produce by the thousand on their new steam presses in the capital, with blanks left in it for particulars. Across the top, in heavy black type, it said REQUISITION. Beneath that, in smaller type, it said No. 406. Beneath that, filled in by hand in a cramped and joyless script, it said that the Supply Yard at Cinderford Crossing was hereby required to submit, for the inspection of the council’s appointed officer, a complete and itemized Bench Return for the preceding fortnight. This return should show the output of every bench in the yard, by name and number, so that the council might satisfy itself, in its own words, “that the yard’s resources are being employed with the utmost economy and dispatch.” The council’s appointed officer would attend in person to receive it. The council remained, as ever, the council.

I want the reader to understand what this meant. In eleven years at Cinderford, no officer of the council had ever once come to inspect my yard. They had never needed to. My ledgers were the most orderly in the river valleys, and the council knew it, and the arrows came when they were wanted, and that was the whole of our understanding. That they should now send an officer, with a printed form, numbered four hundred and six, meant one thing and one thing only. Somewhere in the capital, some clerk had looked at the size of the orders now flowing out to every yard in the valleys and the size of the arrows flowing back. That clerk had begun to suspect that the yards were not working hard enough.

The yards were working so hard that I had, at that very moment, a crane-folk healer in my glue house with a queue of crippled hands outside her door that reached halfway to the river. But the clerk did not know that. The clerk only knew numbers. And a creature who only knows numbers, as I had cause to learn that week, can make a great deal of misery out of a very small amount of ink.

The appointed officer arrived on a Transmuday. He was a Colonel Varnish Pettigrew-Hale, a greyhound-folk of extraordinary length and extraordinary thinness, so that he appeared to have been drawn rather than born, and then drawn again by a second artist who disapproved of the first. He wore the council’s grey uniform buttoned to the throat and a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses on a long ivory stick, which he held up to his face whenever he wished to look at anything, and lowered whenever he wished to look at it with contempt. He did both a great deal. He had also a small dry cough, which he employed in place of punctuation, and an aide named Mr. Blight who carried his umbrella and his cushion and his second-best eyeglasses and never once, in the three days of the inspection, said a single word.

I met them at the gate in my best apron coat, with my tusk-rings polished and my ledger under my arm.

“Sergeant Harrowtusk,” said the Colonel. He coughed. “The council sends its compliments.” He coughed again. “And its requisition.” He held up the eyeglasses and looked at me through them, as though I were a page of small print. “You have the return?”

“It’s being made up, Colonel. Mr. Scrapple’s on it now.”

“Being made up,” said the Colonel. He lowered the eyeglasses. “I see.” He coughed. “Mr. Blight, the cushion.”

Mr. Blight produced the cushion. The Colonel sat upon it on the step of my whitewashed office, which was the step I had sat upon on the morning of the first letter, and he did not rise again for most of three days. He watched the yard with his eyeglasses up, and coughed, and made small marks in a small book, and from time to time sent Mr. Blight off to fetch some particular worker. When the worker came, he asked them, in a dry, mild, perfectly reasonable voice, how many arrows they had made that morning, and wrote down the answer without comment.

I cannot describe to you the effect this had upon my yard. If I had stood over them with a whip, it would not have frightened them half so much as that thin grey creature on his cushion, coughing and writing. The pace, which was already more than the wood could bear or the hands could stand, grew faster still. The mauls in the splitting yard fell so quickly that the ox-folk foreman lost the count and simply roared. The bending shed ran so hot that two of the iron clamps cracked clean through. The goblin twins glued feathers on so fast they began to glue them to each other. And through all of it the crane went from bench to bench with her needles and her smoke and her terrible quiet, looking at me, whenever our paths crossed, with her dark unreadable eyes.

I did not look back. I had a return to make up.

Mr. Scrapple brought it to me on the evening of the second day.

He had worked on it without stopping since the Colonel’s arrival, sitting at his small desk in the corner of my office with his whiskers trembling and his pen scratching, going through the tally-sheets of every bench for every day of the preceding fortnight and copying them out fair in his very small hand, bench by bench, name by name, number by number. It was a beautiful piece of work. I have seldom seen a cleaner return. It ran to eleven pages, and every column was ruled, and every figure was in its proper place, and at the foot of every page was a total, and at the foot of the last page was a grand total, underlined once.

I read it through by lamplight while the Colonel coughed on his cushion outside the door.

The first bench, the hedgehogs, three hundred and twelve. The second bench, a family of field-mice, two hundred and ninety. The fifth bench, the goblin twins, four hundred and forty-one, of which I happened to know, though the return did not say so, that perhaps a third had feathers glued on backward. The ninth bench, Mr. Absalom Crouch, the melancholy goat, ninety-eight, which was very low, but every one of them good. The fourteenth bench, the farm girl, a hundred and sixty. And so on, and so on, bench after bench, for eleven pages, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, a great rising column of arrows like a tower built out of matchsticks.

And at the very end of the very last page, at the very last line, there was the forty-first bench.

Manbang, S., it said. Arrows, nil.

Nil. In a fortnight.

Below it, in Mr. Scrapple’s smallest and most anxious hand, there was a note: Culms split, two. Shafts made, nil. Fletchings bound, nil. Points seated, nil. Arrows completed, nil.

I looked at that line for a long time.

I want to be honest with the reader. Some part of me, when I saw that line, felt something that was not anger. I had stood at the end of that bench three times that week, and once more besides. I had seen that tortoise sitting with its hands on the bamboo, and I had heard, from old Mudge, the story of the culm that split without tearing. I had put my own finger down the inside of that culm, and felt it smooth and clean as the inside of a shell, without a single splinter, from end to end. I had walked away up the shed afterward with that finger held a little out from my body like a creature carrying something too full to spill.

Some part of me had felt that. And some part of me, reading that line in Mr. Scrapple’s anxious hand, remembered it.

But there was a Colonel on a cushion on my step, coughing. And there was a printed form numbered four hundred and six. And there was, in the capital, a clerk who only knew numbers. And there was the word nil, sitting there at the bottom of the last page of the most beautiful return I had ever seen, like a hole in the bottom of a bucket.

And so the part of me that remembered the finger went quietly into the pocket over my heart, along with the black spectacles, and stayed there. The rest of me rose, and took up the ledger, and went out.

The Colonel lifted his eyeglasses as I passed.

“Sergeant?” he said. He coughed. “The return?”

“In a moment, Colonel,” I said. “There’s an item wants correcting.”

He lowered the eyeglasses. “Indeed,” he said, and made a mark in his little book.

I went down the length of the yard toward the third shed.

I will tell you how I went, because the manner of my going was itself a part of what followed. I did not walk. I marched. I set my iron-shod boots down upon the stones of the yard so hard that they rang like hammers, and every creature I passed looked up. I clacked my tusks together as I went, not once or twice but steadily, rhythmically, so that the brass rings rang out across the yard like a drum calling a regiment to muster. I held my ledger out before me in both hands like a magistrate holding the book of the law. And I knew, as I marched, that the Colonel had risen from his cushion and was following some way behind me with Mr. Blight and the umbrella, to see what I meant to do. That knowledge put iron into my stride and brass into my voice, and something else into my heart which I did not then have a name for, and which I am not proud to name now.

By the time I reached the third shed, half the yard was following.

The tortoise was sitting at the end of the last bench, as it always sat. Its hands were not on the bamboo now. They were resting, open, upon its knees. On the sackcloth before it lay its knife and four long clean staves of split bamboo, the two culms it had split in a fortnight. Its lamp was burning, though the evening was not yet dark, and the lamp, as always, did not flicker.

It looked up as I came. Slowly. Turning its whole body round, as it did.

I stopped at the end of the bench. The crowd stopped behind me, and spread out along the walls of the shed, and stood there in a great silent mass of fletchers and sawyers and glue-boilers and hedgehogs and goblins and goats. Somewhere in among them, though I did not see her, was the crane, for I heard, in the hush, one small, soft, unmistakable “Hm.” And somewhere behind them, his eyeglasses raised, was the Colonel.

I opened the ledger.

I will give you what I said. I will give it to you whole, as near as I can remember it, which is very near indeed, for I have heard it over again in my own head a thousand times since. I do not give it because I am proud of it. I give it because it is the truest thing I ever said, and the falsest, both at once, and the reader must judge for himself which parts were which.

“Manbang!” I said. “Manbang, Shu. Bench forty-one. I ‘ave ‘ere, in my ‘and, the Bench Return for the fortnight past, made up by Mr. Scrapple in a fair ‘and an’ a true one, as required by Requisition Number Four ‘Undred an’ Six of the war council of this valley. I’ll read you, if I may, the figures. The ‘edgehogs, three ‘undred an’ twelve. The mice, two ‘undred an’ ninety. Them two,” and here I jerked my tusks at the goblin twins, who shrank, “four ‘undred an’ forty-one. Mr. Crouch, ninety-eight, an’ ‘e sighs between every one, an’ still ‘e makes ninety-eight. The girl from the ‘ill farm, as never ‘eld a fletching knife in ‘er life before this month, an’ ‘olds ‘er thread in ‘er teeth because ‘er fingers ‘ave gone, a ‘undred an’ sixty. A ‘undred an’ sixty! An’ you, Manbang. Bench forty-one. What ‘ave you made in a fortnight, while the rest of ’em was bleeding into the glue pots? Shall I tell you? Shall I read it out, for the benefit of the company? Nil! Snrk! Nil, Manbang! Not one! Not ‘alf of one! Not so much as a point seated or a feather bound! Two culms split, an’ four sticks lying on a sack, an’ a lamp burning, an’ you sitting be’ind it like a stone in a stream, letting the ‘ole valley run round you!”

The tortoise breathed in. I heard it. Everyone heard it. Slowly. Audibly.

It said nothing.

“Do you know,” I said, and I set the ledger down upon the bench with a crack like a pistol shot, “do you know what pace is, Manbang? I’ll tell you what pace is. Pace is the difference between a yard an’ a ruin. Pace is the difference between an army as can shoot an’ an army as can’t. Pace is what stands between the raiders on that coast an’ every farm an’ every ‘earth an’ every cradle in this valley, an’ it’s made, Manbang, it’s made out of ‘ands. Out of ‘ands as work! ‘Ands as work an’ keep working an’ don’t stop working when they’re tired, nor when they’re ‘urt, nor when they’re bleeding, because there’s ten thousand wanted, an’ fifteen thousand after that, an’ Lord knows ‘ow many after that, an’ every one of ’em is a life!”

My tusks were clacking now without my telling them to. I could feel the rings striking together with every word, ringing out over the heads of the crowd.

“An’ do you know what duty is?” I went on. “Duty is doing it anyway! Duty is the ‘edgehog child with ‘er knuckles split, an’ she’s ‘umming! Duty is the girl with the thread in ‘er teeth! Duty is old Mudge out there in the splitting yard with ‘is ‘ands seizing up like rusty ‘inges, swinging that maul eight times for every billet, an’ never once ‘as ‘e sat on ‘is bench an’ stared at a stick! That’s duty, Manbang! That’s what this yard is built on! That’s what the council’s paying for, an’ what the soldiers is dying for! Duty!”

I leaned over the bench. I put my face very close to the tortoise’s, so close I could see the fine wrinkles round its heavy-lidded amber eyes and smell the pine resin on its shell.

“An’ do you know,” I said, and I said this one quietly, which was worse than all the shouting, “do you know the price of slowness?”

The tortoise looked at me. It did not look away.

“I’ll tell you the price,” I said. “The price of slowness is paid by somebody else. It’s always paid by somebody else. Every arrow you don’t make, Manbang, somebody else ‘as to make for you. Every ‘our you sit there breathing, somebody else ‘as to sit there working. That ‘edgehog child is making your arrows. That girl with the thread is making your arrows. Mudge is making your arrows, with ‘is old ‘ands. You’re not slow, Manbang. You’re not patient. You’re not wise, nor careful, nor any of the things these fools ‘ave started saying about you in the sheds. You’re idle. That’s all. You’re idle, an’ you’ve made the ‘ole yard pay for it, an’ you sit there with your lamp an’ your breathing an’ your four clean sticks like you’re better than every one of ’em!”

There was a sound in the crowd. Not a word, exactly. A kind of murmur, rising, the noise a crowd makes when it has been given permission to feel something it has been feeling all along. And then, out of the murmur, a voice. I did not see whose. It came from somewhere near the back, sharp and mocking:

“The wood’ll forget your patience, tortoise!”

And another voice, from somewhere else: “Aye! It’ll forget!”

And a third, a goblin’s, high and shrill: “The wood’ll forget you!”

And then a dozen voices, laughing. I did not stop them. I wish to say that clearly. I heard them, and I did not stop them, and some part of me was glad of them.

The tortoise breathed out.

I heard that too. A long, slow, perfectly audible breath, going out and out and out. It went on so long that the laughing faltered, and stopped, and the crowd stood there in the dim of the shed listening to it, a single breath that seemed as though it would never end.

Then, at last, it ended.

The tortoise looked up at me, and said, very quietly:

“These hands… are learning.”

That was all. Three words. Four, if you count the breath in the middle.

I want the reader to understand what those three words did to me. I had marched the length of my yard with my rings ringing and my boots striking sparks off the stones. I had given the finest speech of my life, every word of it true, about pace and duty and price. I had half the yard behind me, and a council colonel watching through gold-rimmed eyeglasses. And I was answered with three quiet words and a breath, by a creature who did not argue, did not apologize, did not plead, and did not so much as lower its eyes.

I have been answered back by sergeants, by colonels, by drunken drovers and furious washerwomen, and once by a bishop. I have never been answered back so thoroughly as I was in that moment, by a tortoise who did not raise its voice.

And so, of course, I lost my temper entirely.

“Learning?” I roared. “Learning? This is not a school, Manbang! This is a supply yard! You can learn on your own time, in your own pond! In this yard, in my yard, you work, or you go! There’s a ‘undred creatures on that road out there as would give their right paws for that bench an’ four silver the week, an’ every one of ’em would make more arrows in a morning than you’ve made in a fortnight! Learning! Snrk!”

I snatched up the ledger. I tore a leaf from the back of it. I did not even notice which leaf, though I learned afterward that it was a blank page from the section of my oldest ledger marked Remarks. Mr. Scrapple had copied the crane’s words into that section only four days before, and it had not been opened before that in nine years. I seized a pen from the bench, I know not whose, and I wrote across the leaf in great round furious letters, so hard that the nib scratched through:

BENCH 41. MANBANG, S. TWELVE ARROWS, PROOFED AND PASSED, BY DIVINDAY NOON. OR OUT.

I slapped it down on the bench beside the four clean staves.

“Divinday,” I said. “Three days. Twelve arrows, proofed an’ passed by Sergeant Reedwhistle, or you can take your lamp an’ your breathing an’ your four clean sticks an’ walk them down the river road, an’ good riddance to the lot of you. Do you ‘ear me?”

The tortoise looked at the leaf. It looked at it for a long time. Then it looked back up at me.

“Yes,” it said.

“Right!” I bellowed. “Right! Then that’s settled! Mr. Scrapple, enter it! Bench forty-one, notice served! Chop-chop!”

And I turned on my iron heel, and the crowd parted before me like water, and I marched out of that shed with my rings ringing and my boots striking sparks, and the laughter of the yard rising again behind me.

The Colonel was waiting at the door.

He had his eyeglasses up. He looked at me through them for a long moment. Then he lowered them, very slowly, and coughed.

“Most efficient, Sergeant,” he said. “Most efficient.” He made a mark in his small book. “The council will be gratified. Mr. Blight, the cushion.”

He went back to my office step. I stood alone in the yard in the gathering dusk with the noise of the sheds rising all around me and the word efficient hanging in the air before my face like the weasel Flitch’s smile.

I should like to end this chapter there. I should like to end it with the Colonel’s word, and my triumph, and the whole yard laughing. But I promised the reader a true account, so I must set down two more things.

The first is this. As I stood there in the yard in the dusk, the crane came out of the third shed. She did not hurry. She walked past me on her long grey legs, so close that the damp hem of her indigo robe brushed my boot. She did not speak to me, and she did not look at me. But as she passed, I heard her say, very softly, not to me but to the evening air:

“Hm.”

That was all. A single syllable. And yet I swear to the reader that I have been less thoroughly rebuked by a court-martial.

The second thing is this, and it is the thing I have least wished to tell.

That night, after the Colonel had gone to his bed in the inn at the crossing, and the yard had settled into its long night roar, I could not sleep. I sat in my office by lamplight with the Bench Return open before me, eleven beautiful pages, every column ruled, and I read it through again. And again. And when I came to the last line of the last page, Manbang, S., Arrows, nil, I found that I could not stop looking at it.

Nil.

Two culms split.

I thought of the inside of the culm under my finger, smooth and clean, without a splinter. I thought of the eleven arrows that had missed at the proofing field, every one of them straight, every one of them silent, flying over the butts as if they had somewhere better to go. I thought of the nine splinters of green ash laid out in a row on the grass beside the lynx’s arm. I thought of the hedgehog child, humming. And I thought of my own voice, roaring down the length of the third shed, the price of slowness is paid by somebody else, and I found myself wondering, for the first time in eleven years, whether the price of haste was paid by somebody else as well. And if so, by whom.

I took off my apron coat. I reached into the pocket over the heart, where the black spectacles had lain for so many weeks, and the other thing besides. I took the spectacles out and unfolded them and held them in my inky hands, and looked at them.

I did not put them on.

Not that night.

But I held them for a long time.

Then I put them back, and took up my pen, and turned to the last page of the return, and wrote beneath that one terrible line, in my own round firm hand, a single further entry, in case the Colonel should ask:

Bench 41. Notice served. Divinday noon.

And beneath it, before I could stop myself, so small I could hardly read it myself, a second line, which I have never shown to anyone until this moment:

Culms split, two. Splinters, nil.

Then I drew a single line beneath them both, never two, and closed the book, and sat there in the dark until the dawn came grey over the stumps of the ash grove and the hammers in the bending shed began again.

 

Segment 10:

The Wood Will Forget

Chapter the First, in Which I Am Very Pleased with Myself

Madam, I have kept my promise.

You will remember, if you were paying attention, and I can see from the jam on the small reader’s fingers that at least one of you was not, that at the end of my preface I swore a solemn oath to tell this story in order. I have kept it. I have set down for you, in a fair round hand, without digression or quarrel, the haste at Cinderford, the singing of the arrows, the thin rain, the screaming of the rookery, the needles, the first breath, and the quartermaster’s great and terrible speech in the third shed. I have done it chapter by chapter, voice by voice, tablet by tablet, each in its proper place, like needles laid back on silk.

Eight chapters, Madam. Eight chapters without a single cat.

The Blue-Ink Mites have been very patient about it, and I am grateful to them.

Now we come to the ninth tablet, and the ninth tablet contains a single line of dialogue: The wood will forget your patience.

And I must tell you, Madam, with the very greatest regret, that it is quite impossible to proceed any further in this story until we have settled who said it.

Chapter the Second, in Which the Difficulty Is Explained

You will say, Sir, that it does not matter who said it. You will say that the quartermaster has already told us, in his own account, that he did not see whose voice it was. He heard it come from somewhere near the back of the crowd, sharp and mocking, followed by a second voice and a third and then a great deal of laughter. You will say that this is perfectly sufficient, and that a reader in a hurry may take the line as spoken by the crowd and get on with the story.

To which I reply, Sir, with the greatest respect: you have not seen the margins.

There are three tablets, Sir, three separate tablets of the old Cinderford fragment, which record that line. And they name three different speakers.

Three.

I set them out before you now, plainly, so that you may judge for yourself the scale of the difficulty.

The ninth tablet, the main text, the cramped and hurried hand that I believe to be the earliest, says only: This angered others. “The wood will forget your patience,” they said.

They. No name at all. They.

The fourteenth tablet, which is not part of the main text but appears to be a later addition, a sort of commentary pressed into a smaller tablet and fired separately, says: It was Foreman Mallow of the splitting yard who first said that the wood would forget. He was an ox-folk, large and coarse, and he hated the tortoise, for the tortoise’s slowness made his sawyers look slow by comparison.

And the twenty-second tablet, which is a fragment so small and so badly cracked that I first took it for gravel, says, in a hand I have never seen anywhere else among the tablets, very jagged and very sharp, as though it had been scratched with a claw and not a stylus: Nob said it. Not Nib. NOB. I was there.

Three tablets, Sir. Three speakers. They, Mallow, and Nob.

And that is before we come to the margins.

Chapter the Third, on the Margins

The margins name seven.

Chapter the Fourth, in Which I Am Forced to List Them

—The Black-Ink Mites wish me to say that I am not forced to list them. They wish me to say that I choose to list them, out of an excess of what they call antiquarian frivolity.

—The Red-Ink Mites wish me to say that they are not sure whether I am forced or not.

—The Blue-Ink Mites wish to know whether any of the seven was a cat.

None of the seven was a cat.

Here they are.

First, Foreman Mallow, the ox-folk, as named on the fourteenth tablet, and supported in the margin of the ninth by a copyist who signed himself only “Q” and who wrote, in a very firm hand: MALLOW. OBVIOUSLY MALLOW. WHO ELSE HAD THE LUNGS?

Second, Nob the goblin, as named on the twenty-second tablet. Supported by no one, and opposed in the margin of the ninth by a later copyist who wrote: THE GOBLINS COULD NOT HAVE SAID ANYTHING SO WELL PHRASED. GOBLINS DO NOT USE THE WORD “PATIENCE.”

To which a still later copyist replied, in a smaller hand: Goblins use the word patience perfectly well. My mother was a goblin.

To which the first replied: I DO NOT BELIEVE YOU.

To which the second replied nothing, but drew beside it a small, very rude picture which I shall not describe.

Third, Nib the goblin, Nob’s twin, put forward in the margin of the fourteenth by a copyist who argued, at considerable length and with diagrams, that the twenty-second tablet had been written by Nib himself, many years later, in order to blame his brother. This copyist pointed out that the words NOT NIB on that tablet are pressed in much more deeply than the rest. This, he said, was proof of a guilty conscience. I find this argument ingenious, Madam, and entirely unconvincing, but I give it to you all the same.

Fourth, Mr. Silas Flitch, the weasel in the rusty black coat, the feather-man. He was put forward by a copyist who wrote only: IT WAS FLITCH. HE WAS ALWAYS THERE WHEN THERE WAS CRUELTY. This is very likely true as a general description of Mr. Flitch, but it is not evidence that he was in the third shed that evening. There is no record that he was, and some reason to believe, from the raven’s account, that he was elsewhere, up the valley, with his ladders.

Fifth, the quartermaster himself, Obadiah Harrowtusk. This was proposed in a single margin note on the eleventh tablet, in a hand so faint and so shaky that I believe it to be one of the very latest, and it says only: perhaps he said it himself, and could not bear to remember.

I sat a long while over that one, Madam. A long while. The Red-Ink Mites went quite pale.

Sixth, Mr. Absalom Crouch, the melancholy goat-folk, the scholar of the higher mathematics. This was proposed by a copyist who seems to have been a scholar of the higher mathematics himself, and who reasoned that only a mathematician would make so precise a claim about the properties of a material. A coarser creature would have said the wood will break, or the wood will warp, or simply the wood is no good. To say that wood forgets is to make a statement about memory, about the persistence of information in a physical medium. That, he argued, was the language of the higher mathematics, and therefore of Mr. Crouch. I find this argument, Madam, the most delightful of the seven, and also the least likely, since everything we know of Mr. Crouch suggests that he admired the tortoise and was very nearly the only creature in the yard who did.

Seventh, and last, the wood itself.

Chapter the Fifth, in Which I Explain the Seventh

I do not know who wrote it. It is on the thirtieth tablet, the second-to-last, very near the bottom, almost lost in a crack, in a hand so small and so graceful that it might almost have been made by a needle. It says:

Who else would know?

Chapter the Sixth, in Which the Mites Hold a Debate

When I had gathered up all seven of these candidates and laid them out on a clean sheet before me, in the lamplight, in the damp hole behind the tax rolls, the swarm fell into an uproar.

I set down the proceedings here as faithfully as I can, in the form of minutes, since that is how the Black-Ink Mites insisted it be done.

Minutes of an Extraordinary Session of the Whole Swarm, Convened Behind the Tax Rolls

Present: approximately eleven thousand.

Absent: approximately forty, believed to be in the spine of a nearby book on heraldry, eating.

The Black-Ink Mites, speaking for the literalists, moved that the question be settled by the main text alone. The main text, being the earliest, says they. Therefore it was they. And the session should adjourn.

The Red-Ink Mites, speaking for the doubters, rose to object. They asked whether the main text could be trusted, since it was written in great haste on clay that had not been properly dried. They asked whether a text written in haste about the evils of haste was not, in some sense, a contradiction. They asked whether, if the main text could not be trusted, any of the tablets could be trusted. They asked whether anything could be trusted. Then they asked whether they themselves could be trusted. At that point they fell into a period of deep and troubled introspection, and took no further part in the proceedings.

The Blue-Ink Mites, speaking for the romantics, moved that the speaker be declared to be the wood.

Uproar.

The Black-Ink Mites objected, on a point of order, that wood cannot speak.

The Blue-Ink Mites replied that the motion did not say the wood spoke. It said the wood was the speaker. That, they argued, is a different thing entirely, as anyone who had ever heard a forest in the wind would know.

The Black-Ink Mites replied that they had never heard a forest in the wind, having lived their whole lives in a library.

The Blue-Ink Mites replied that this was precisely the problem.

Further uproar.

A small faction near the left sleeve, calling themselves Professor Ibid, moved that the question be referred to a committee.

The motion was carried. The committee consisted of the whole swarm. It has not yet reported.

The session adjourned in disorder.

Chapter the Seventh, in Which I Take the Matter in Hand

Madam, I will not leave you at the mercy of a committee.

I have resolved, therefore, to set aside for the moment the question of who said the wood would forget, which I now believe will never be settled. Instead, I shall address the question which lies beneath it like the root beneath a tree, and which seems to me, the longer I look at it, by far the more interesting of the two.

Can wood remember?

For if wood cannot remember, then it cannot forget. The line is simply a mockery, a jeer thrown at a slow creature by a crowd of fast ones, and it hardly matters who threw it.

But if wood can remember, Madam, if there is in the grain of the ash and the fiber of the bamboo some faculty that holds, however faintly, the impress of what has been done to it, then the line is not a mockery at all.

It is a warning.

And then it matters very much indeed.

Chapter the Eighth, Being the Case for the Negative

Let us first hear the Black-Ink Mites, who hold, very firmly, that wood remembers nothing.

Their case is simple, Madam, and I give it to you fairly. Wood has no brain. It has no nerves, no blood, no heart, no breath. It is a dead thing, or at least a thing that has stopped growing, and dead things do not remember. A tree that has been cut down and split and seasoned and shaved into a shaft is no more able to recall its own life than the oak of this crate behind the tax rolls is able to recall the forest it grew in. To say that wood forgets is a figure of speech, a poetic fancy, like saying that a stone is stubborn or a river is restless. It means nothing. The Black-Ink Mites have read four hundred and twelve books on the subject of trees, most of them while eating them, and not one of those books says that wood remembers.

—The Blue-Ink Mites wish it noted that not one of those books says that wood does not remember, either.

—The Black-Ink Mites wish it noted that this is a very childish argument.

—The Blue-Ink Mites wish it noted that childish arguments are frequently correct.

So it is noted, Madam. All of it.

Chapter the Ninth, Being the Case for the Affirmative

Now let us hear the Blue-Ink Mites.

Their case is not simple. It is not even, strictly speaking, a case. It is more a collection of curious observations, of the kind that a romantic mind gathers the way a magpie gathers buttons. I set them out in order, so that you may see them all at once and decide for yourself whether they amount to anything.

The first observation is this. Every one of us in this world, Madam, every creature with a Mind’s Eye, which is to say every one of us, can look upon a made thing and see its name. I do not mean the name a shopkeeper gives it. I mean its true title, its tags, and very often, written there in the shimmer of the Mind’s Eye like the maker’s mark on a plate, the words Originally made by, followed by a name. Sometimes, too, Modified by, followed by another.

Where, Madam, is that written?

It is not painted on the item. It is not carved there. A sword with Originally made by Thessaly Brightforge in its Mind’s Eye shimmer may have no mark of Thessaly anywhere upon its blade. And yet there it is, for anyone to read, and it remains there long after Thessaly is dead and her forge is cold and her name is forgotten by everyone except the sword.

Except the sword, Madam.

The sword remembers who made it.

The second observation is this. Every one of us in this world knows that a crafted item carries something of its maker. An apprentice’s first dagger, however sharp, does not feel the same in the hand as a master’s. Two bowls thrown on the same wheel from the same clay may hold water equally well, and yet one will feel warm to the touch and the other cold, and no one can say why. We say this is skill, Madam, or care, or the quality of the work, and perhaps it is. But it is also, is it not, a kind of memory? The bowl remembers the hands that made it, whether they were warm or cold, patient or hurried, kind or cruel. And it gives that memory back, ever so faintly, to every hand that holds it after.

The third observation is the strangest, and it is the one that has kept me up three nights running, and it concerns the eleven arrows that missed.

You will remember them, Madam. Shu Manbang’s eleven arrows, made slowly, of dry wood, with shed feathers, at the steady lamp. They flew perfectly straight and perfectly silent, without a whisper of the dreadful singing of all the other arrows in the yard. And at fifty paces, every one of them, as if by agreement, lifted, and went over the butts, and was lost in the long grass.

Why?

Shu did not know. The quartermaster did not know. Sergeant Reedwhistle, who had loosed more arrows than the rest of them put together, did not know. And the tablets do not say. Not yet. I have read ahead, Madam, I confess it, I could not help myself. The tablets do say, eventually, but I shall not tell you now, because I have promised to tell it in order.

—The Red-Ink Mites wish it noted that I am not keeping that promise very well.

—I am keeping it perfectly. I have not told you why. I have only told you that the tablets say why. That is an entirely different thing.

—The Red-Ink Mites wish it noted that it does not feel like an entirely different thing.

But consider, Madam. Consider the arrows of the haste, made of green wood forced straight in iron jaws, fletched with feathers pulled bloody from screaming birds. Did they not sing? Did they not wobble and twist and argue in the air? Did they not, in short, behave exactly as one would expect a thing to behave if it remembered being forced?

And consider the eleven arrows that missed, made slowly but, as Shu came later to understand, made in fear. Did they not fly straight and silent, and then, at the last, rise away from their target? Did they not behave exactly as one would expect a thing to behave if it remembered being made by hands that were holding something back?

I do not say this proves anything, Madam. I only say that if wood does not remember, it has a very odd way of showing it.

Chapter the Tenth, in Which I Conduct an Experiment

Having heard both cases, and finding myself unable to decide between them, I did what any scholar ought to do in such a position, and what not one of my six centuries of predecessors seems to have thought of doing.

I tested it.

The oak crate, Madam. The crate in which the tablets were found, behind the tax rolls, in the damp. You will remember that burned into its side was the word CINDERFORD and beneath it a single straight line, drawn once and not twice. That crate came from the supply yard itself. I am sure of it. It is very likely one of the very crates into which, on the thirty-fourth day of the first great haste, the ten thousand and twelve arrows were packed for delivery to Harrowgate. It is six hundred years old. It is oak, and oak is wood. If any wood in the world remembers Cinderford, it should be that crate.

So I ate a piece of it.

—The Black-Ink Mites wish it noted that they voted against this.

—The Red-Ink Mites wish it noted that they abstained, being still in introspection.

—The Blue-Ink Mites wish it noted that they volunteered.

It was the Blue-Ink Mites who went. Some three hundred of them, chosen by lot, which is to say by volunteering and then pretending to have been chosen by lot. They crept down from my sleeve into the darkness at the foot of the crate, and found a soft place in the oak near the burned word, where the damp had loosened the grain. They ate, very slowly, a piece of it about the size of a grain of rice.

Mites, Madam, I should explain, do not taste as you taste. We do not have tongues. But we have a sense of our own, a kind of knowing-by-eating, which tells us a great deal about what we have eaten: its age, its origin, the ink that was laid upon it, the hands that turned its pages. When we eat a book, we know, in a faint and broken way, something of the person who wrote it, and something of every person who has read it since. That is how we came to know the minor bishop so well, and to like him so little.

When the three hundred came back up my sleeve and rejoined the swarm, they brought with them what they had tasted. It went through all eleven thousand of us at once, like a shiver.

I will tell you what it was.

It was not much. It was very faint and very old and very broken, the way a sound is broken when you hear it from very far away across water. But it was there, beneath the damp and the age and the six hundred years.

It was haste.

That is the only word I have for it. A kind of rushing, a hurry, a breathlessness, as though the oak had been cut and planed and nailed together by hands that were thinking of the next crate before they had finished this one. Underneath the haste, very faint indeed, there was something else. There was the smell of brass. A ring of brass, clacking. And the taste of ink, a great deal of ink, laid down in a round, firm, unhesitating hand.

And then, at the very bottom of what the three hundred had tasted, so faint I am not sure even now that I did not imagine it, there was one thing more.

A line.

A single line, drawn once, not twice. And beneath it, something I can only describe as sorrow.

Chapter the Eleventh

Madam, I have nothing to say in this chapter. I have been sitting here for some time, with my quill in my cloud of a hand and the lamp burning low and the swarm very quiet, and I find that I have nothing to say at all.

The wood remembers.

Chapter the Twelfth, in Which I Recover My Spirits

But I cannot leave you there, Madam, with the swarm in a silence and the lamp burning low and a six-hundred-year-old crate full of sorrow. It would be unkind. And besides, I have just realized something that has quite restored me. In fact, I am so delighted by it that the Blue-Ink Mites have begun to circle, which they do only when very happy or very drunk on old glue, and we have had no glue today.

It is this.

If the wood remembers, then the line is not a mockery. And if the line is not a mockery, then whoever said it, whether Mallow or Nob or Nib or Flitch or the quartermaster or Mr. Crouch or the wood itself, said something perfectly and exactly true, and meant something perfectly and exactly false.

The wood will forget your patience, they said.

They meant: your patience is wasted. You may be as slow and careful as you please, tortoise, but the wood does not care. The wood will forget it. The arrow will fly, or it will not, and your patience will make no difference, and you are a fool to waste our time with it.

But if wood remembers, Madam, if it remembers its maker as the sword remembers Thessaly and the crate remembers the brass and the ink and the line, then the wood will not forget the tortoise’s patience at all.

It will remember it. All of it. Every breath. Every slow cut. Every split that opened instead of tearing.

And it will remember the haste of the others, too. Every hammer-blow, every iron jaw, every feather pulled bloody from a screaming bird.

The wood will forget nothing.

That is the joke, Madam. That is the wonderful, terrible, delicious joke at the heart of the ninth tablet. The jeer was a prophecy, and the jeerers did not know it. They stood in the third shed laughing at a tortoise, telling it that the wood would forget its patience, while every arrow in their own bundles hung in the crates of Cinderford, remembering.

I find, Madam, that I am laughing too.

—The Black-Ink Mites wish it noted that this is not funny.

—It is very funny.

—The Black-Ink Mites wish it noted that it is also very sad.

—Yes. That too.

Chapter the Thirteenth, in Which I Settle the Question After All

And so I shall settle, after all, the question with which I began. I will not pretend to have discovered the answer by evidence. I have discovered it by delight, which is a less respectable method but very often a more reliable one.

Who said that the wood would forget?

They said it.

The main text is right. The cramped and hurried hand on the ninth tablet, the earliest of all, did not name a name, and it was right not to. It was not Mallow alone, nor Nob alone, nor Nib, nor Flitch, nor Mr. Crouch, nor the quartermaster. It was all of them. It was the whole yard, the whole valley, the whole age of haste, speaking through whichever mouth happened to open first. It said what the age believed: that care is waste, and slowness is idleness, and the things we make are only things, and will not remember how we made them.

They said it.

And six hundred years later, the oak of a supply crate behind a shelf of tax rolls in the lower stacks of a library at Harrowgate still remembers the hand that made it, and the sorrow of the creature who drew the line.

The wood did not forget.

The wood never forgets.

—See margin.

—The margin says I have digressed for thirteen chapters on a single line of dialogue.

—I know, I know.

But Madam, it was a very good line.

And now, I promise, back to the story.

 

Segment 11:

The Bell That Rang in the Fletcher’s Yard

Have you ever lain awake in the dark and listened to a sound that you could not be certain you were hearing? A faint tick in the wall, perhaps, or a step on the stair, or a breath that might be your own and might be another’s, so near and so soft that you dare not move for fear of losing it, and dare not stay still for fear of finding it real? Then you know something of what I endured in the rafters of the third shed at Cinderford, in the last cold nights of the month of Tyrus. You know something, too, of the strange and dreadful certainty that came to me there, in the dark, above the steady lamp. It was certain, as only a thing heard alone in the dark can be. It was wrong, as only such a thing can be wrong.

I had come down the valley on foot.

I could not fly. The six sockets in my left wing where the gatherers had pulled my feathers were healing slowly, and the new quills that had begun to push through them were pale and soft and crooked, the color of old bone, quite unlike the glossy black of the rest of me. They would carry no weight. So I walked, as a cripple walks, along the muddy river road, by night, with my cloak of a thousand molts drawn close about me and the cold wet requisition pressed against my heart beneath it. It took me nine nights. I hid by day in barns and hedges and once in the hollow of a dead willow. And on every one of those nine nights, somewhere in the dark to the east or the west or the north of me, I heard the ladders.

Forty, sometimes. Twenty. Once, near a great heronry in the reed marshes south of the ford, I counted sixty. I heard the knock of the top rungs against the trunks and the creak and the soft scrape of feet. I heard what followed. I could not stop them. I was one crippled raven on foot, alone on a muddy road in the dark, and I could not stop anything.

So I counted.

By the time I reached Cinderford, there were seven notches upon my beak.

I will not tell you how I came into the yard. Ravens have their ways, and a yard that never sleeps is easier to enter unseen than one that does, for every creature in it is too busy to look up. I will tell you only that by the dawn of the tenth day, I was in the rafters of the third shed, the longest and the farthest from the gate. I had chosen it because it was the farthest from the quartermaster’s office, and I did not yet trust myself to be near the round, firm hand that had signed away my rookery. I sat upon a great crossbeam in the deepest shadow of the roof, my cloak drawn close, my notched beak tucked down against my breast, and I watched.

I watched for three days.

I watched the hedgehog child with the split knuckles, humming. I watched the goblin twins glue feathers to shafts so fast the glue smoked. I watched the farm girl with her thread in her teeth. And every feather that passed beneath me, every grey goose primary and black rook pinion and long pale heron plume, glued and bound and trimmed and sent away in crates, I knew. I knew them as you would know the faces of your own kin carried past you in a procession of the dead. I knew which wood they came from, which marsh, which cliff. I could have told you the night they were taken. Some I could have told you the very bird.

And every one of them, as it passed beneath me, made my bell ring.

I must tell you about the bell. You will remember that on the first night, the third night of Illumination, as I lay at the foot of the double elm listening to my rookery sob, the little silver bell at my throat rang and rang and rang in one long thin unbroken note until, near dawn, it cracked. I had thought it would never ring again. I had worn it nine nights on the road in silence, a dead weight against my breast, like the medallion of a drowned man.

But in the third shed at Cinderford, it rang again.

Not as it had rung before. The crack had changed its voice. Where once it had rung with a single clear silver note, small and bright, it now gave out a sound I can only describe as a sob. It was a cracked, flat, wavering tone, as though the bell itself were weeping, and it rang so softly that I alone could hear it, a thin, broken thread of sound against my throat. And it rang without ceasing. It rang for every feather on every bench in that shed, day and night, until I thought I should go mad from it. I lay in the rafters with my eyes shut and my beak pressed against my breast, and still I heard it, sobbing, sobbing, sobbing, as the stolen wings of the valley passed beneath me one by one into the crates.

I could not stop it. I could not stop any of it. I could only listen, and count.

And watch the lamp.

I must tell you now about the lamp, and about the creature beneath it, for it was they that held me in that shed, they and nothing else, through three days of the bell’s sobbing, when every instinct I had cried out to me to flee.

At the very end of the very last bench, directly beneath my crossbeam, there sat a tortoise.

It was mossy-shelled and long-necked and very old, I thought, though tortoises are hard to judge. It had about one wrist a loop of faded red thread, and before it on the bench a lamp, a small common lamp of clay and tallow such as every bench in the shed possessed. But this lamp did not flicker.

I want you to understand how strange that was. The shed was full of draughts. Wind came through the cracks in the walls and the gaps under the eaves and the great open doors at either end. Every other lamp in that shed swayed and jumped and shuddered on its hook from dusk to dawn, so that the light in the shed was never still but always moving, and the shadows of the workers leapt and shrank along the walls like startled things. All except the tortoise’s lamp. That lamp burned with a flame so steady and so perfectly upright that it might have been painted there. The shadows it cast did not move at all.

And the tortoise, beneath it, did not move either.

For the first day I watched it, I thought it was asleep. It sat with its two hands resting open on its knees, its eyes half closed, before it on the sackcloth a knife and four long clean staves of split bamboo, and it did nothing. Hour after hour, nothing. The other fletchers worked around it, laughed at it, made jests about it that I could hear quite clearly from the rafters: that it was waiting for the stick to hatch, that it had been dead for years and no one had noticed. It did not answer them. It did not seem to hear them. It only sat, and the lamp only burned.

But it was not asleep.

For it breathed.

I could hear it from the rafters. Even through the bell’s sobbing, even over the noise of the shed, I could hear it, slow and deep and steady. A long breath in, through the nose. Then a pause. Then a long breath out that went on, and on, and on, so long that I found myself holding my own breath, waiting for it to end. When at last it ended, there was a silence, and then the next breath came in, unhurried, as though the tortoise had all the time in the world and had never once in its life been afraid.

In. Out. In. Out.

On the second day, I began to count them.

I could not help it. It is my nature, as I have told you, or my curse. I lay upon my crossbeam with the bell sobbing at my throat and I counted the tortoise’s breaths, and I found, to my horror, that I could not stop. They were so slow, so regular, so perfectly even, like the ticking of a great clock in an empty house, that they got inside my head and would not leave. When I shut my eyes, I heard them. When I tried to sleep, I counted them. They seemed, in the long cold nights, to grow louder, until I fancied I could hear them over the bell, over the hammers, over the singing of the arrows in the proofing field beyond the stumps. In. Out. In. Out. A great slow heart, beating beneath me in the dark.

I began to fear it.

I will not pretend otherwise. I, a raven, a Keeper, who had sat alone through a hundred winter nights in the rookery wood with nothing but owls for company, began to fear a tortoise. It was not that it did anything. It was that it did nothing, so perfectly, in the midst of so much doing. It was the stillness of its lamp in the midst of a hundred swaying lamps, and the evenness of its breath in the midst of a hundred gasping breaths, and the cleanness of its four split staves in the midst of a yard heaped high with ragged, torn, screaming wood. It was like a single closed door in a burning house. I did not know what was behind it. I did not know whether it was the one safe room, or the room where the fire began.

On the third day, the quartermaster came.

I heard him before I saw him: the clack of brass on tusk, the ring of iron hooves on stone, growing louder, louder. Then he came marching down the length of the third shed with a ledger held out before him in both hands, and half the yard following behind him, and a thin grey greyhound-folk with gold eyeglasses trailing at a distance. I pressed myself flat against the crossbeam and drew my cloak over my head, so that only my eyes showed, and I watched.

I watched him stand at the end of the tortoise’s bench, directly beneath me.

I watched him read from his ledger.

I watched him roar.

I will not repeat what he said. I could not, even if I wished to. I heard only fragments of it, through the blood pounding in my ears, for the moment I saw that great broad bristled face, with the brass rings on its tusks and the ink on its fingers, the cold wet requisition against my heart seemed to burn like ice. I heard pace and duty and price, and nil, and idle. I heard the yard laughing. I heard a voice cry out that the wood would forget, and other voices answer it. And beneath it all, I heard the bell at my throat, sobbing, sobbing, sobbing, for every stolen feather in that shed. And I thought:

This is he. This is the hand that signed. This is the round, firm, unhesitating hand. Harrowtusk.

I could have dropped upon him then. I was directly above him, perhaps twenty feet. A raven falling from twenty feet with talons open strikes very hard, and a boar-folk’s neck is thick but not so thick as all that. I thought of it. I thought of it, I confess, for a long, long time, while he roared and the yard laughed, and the cracked bell sobbed, and the tortoise sat beneath him perfectly still, breathing.

I did not drop.

I do not know why. I have asked myself many times since. Perhaps it was the Keeper in me, who gathers and does not take. Perhaps it was cowardice. Perhaps it was only that, in the very midst of his roaring, the tortoise breathed out. It was one long, slow, endless breath, so long that the laughing faltered and stopped and the whole shed fell silent to hear it. And in that silence, I found that I had stopped counting the notches upon my beak and was counting the breath instead, and by the time it ended, the moment had passed.

The tortoise spoke three words. The boar roared again, tore a leaf from his ledger, wrote upon it, slapped it down, and marched away. The yard followed him. The shed emptied, and grew quiet, and dark.

The tortoise sat beneath its unflickering lamp, with the boar’s furious notice lying on the bench beside its four clean staves, and it breathed.

And I lay on my crossbeam in the dark, shaking.

It was the next evening, Wednesday by the river reckoning, Abjursday by the yard’s, when the bundle came.

The tortoise had sat all that day as it always sat. But toward dusk, it had risen, slowly, and gone away down the shed toward the gate, and been gone some while. When it came back, it carried in its arms a bundle wrapped in sacking and tied with twine, which it laid upon the bench beside the knife and the staves and the boar’s notice. Then it sat down again beneath the lamp, and folded its hands, and breathed.

It did not open the bundle.

But I knew what was in it. I knew before I looked. I knew because the moment the tortoise laid it upon the bench, the bell at my throat, which had been sobbing faintly all day for the feathers in the other benches, all down the long shed, changed its voice.

It did not sob.

It shrieked.

It was the sound it had made on the first night, at the foot of the double elm: one long, thin, high, unbroken note, rising and rising, so piercing that I thought the crack in it must split wide open. It burned against my throat like a coal. I clutched it with my talons, and it shook in my grip. I knew, with a terrible certainty, that the bundle on the tortoise’s bench held feathers from my own wood, from my own rookery, from the nests of the birds I had kept for seven years.

Perhaps from my own wing.

I stared down at that bundle in the light of the unflickering lamp, and the shed seemed to tilt and swim around me. A great cold thing rose in me, colder than any grief I had yet known.

Him too.

Even him. Even the still one. Even the one who breathed, the one who did not hurry, the one whose lamp burned steady in the midst of all that swaying, the one who sat silent while the boar roared and the yard laughed, the one I had begun, in some secret corner of my heart, to hope was different. Even he had gone down to the loft at dusk and brought back a bundle of stolen wings.

Now I understood the stillness. Now I understood the breathing. It was not peace. It was patience. It was the patience of a creature who knows exactly what it is doing and has no need to hurry, because no one will stop it.

The four clean staves of bamboo. The knife. The notice: twelve arrows by Divinday. And now the feathers.

He would make them. Slowly, carefully, perfectly. And they would be the most beautiful arrows in the whole of Cinderford. They would fly straight and true and silent, fletched with the stolen primaries of my rookery. Who would ever hear them screaming then? Who would ever know?

I lay there through that night, and the next day, and the next night, watching the bundle.

The tortoise did not open it.

It sat, and breathed, and once or twice I saw it put out one hand and lay it flat upon the sacking, gently, the way I have seen the old Keeper lay his hand upon a nest that had lost its fledglings. Then it took the hand away again. It did not untie the twine. It did not take out a single feather. It made no arrows at all.

The bell shrieked on.

And still it did not open the bundle.

I began to doubt myself. Perhaps I was mistaken. Perhaps the bell was cracked past use, and shrieked at nothing. Perhaps the bundle held shed feathers, gathered fairly, and the bell was only weeping for its own broken voice. Then the bell shrieked louder, and I knew I was not mistaken, and I hated myself for doubting.

Then I began to suspect a deeper and more dreadful thing. Perhaps the tortoise knew. Perhaps it knew that I was there, above it, in the rafters. Perhaps it had always known, since the first night. Perhaps all its stillness and its breathing were a kind of trap, a lure, laid out beneath my crossbeam for me alone, the bundle of my own rookery’s feathers set there on the bench like bait on a snare, to see what I would do.

I did not sleep. I could not. I lay there and counted. Notches. Breaths. Notches. Breaths.

On the third night, the night before Divinday, as the boar’s notice lay on the bench and the twelve arrows remained unmade and the bundle remained unopened, I could bear it no longer.

The great planet was high that night. VaporSphere, the Watcher, filled the open doorway at the end of the shed with its banded pallid face, and its cold grey light lay across the floor of the shed like a sheet drawn over a body. The hammers in the bending shed had paused, as they sometimes did in the deepest part of the night, while the irons were reheated, and for a little while the yard was almost silent.

It was midnight.

I rose upon my crossbeam. I unfolded my wings, the one black and whole, the other bare and crooked and pale where the new quills were pushing through. I let my cloak of a thousand molts fall open about me. And I dropped.

Not upon the tortoise. I had decided that, at least. But I dropped to the bench, to the very end of it, between the tortoise and the bundle. I landed with my talons spread on the sackcloth and my crooked wing half open, scattering the four clean staves so that they rolled and clattered to the floor. I raised myself to my full height, which is not small. I turned my head so that the lamplight fell full upon my face, upon my milky inner eyelid flickering, upon my beak and the seven notches carved into it.

And I spoke.

“Thou,” I said. My voice came out rasping, raw from disuse, from nine nights on the road and three in the rafters without speaking a word to anyone. “Thou. With thy lamp. With thy breathing.”

The tortoise looked up.

It did not start. It did not cry out. It did not reach for the knife. It turned, slowly, as I had seen it turn so many times from above, its whole body coming round with its head. It looked at me with heavy-lidded amber eyes in the light of the unflickering lamp.

And it breathed in.

I heard it. That long, slow, audible breath, so near now that I could feel the faint stir of it on my feathers.

“Dost thou know what this is?” I said. I struck the bundle with one talon, and the twine snapped, and the sacking fell open, and the feathers spilled out across the bench in the lamplight.

They were rook. Black, glossy, long, the great primaries of the outer wing. Twenty or thirty of them. And at the base of every quill, where it had been rooted in the living flesh, there was a small dark crust.

The bell at my throat screamed.

“Dost thou know whose they are?” I said. “Dost thou know where they were taken, and when, and how? I know. I know every one. This one,” and I touched a feather with my talon, “was taken from a nest in the great double elm at the heart of the rookery wood, on the third night of Illumination, by a stoat-folk with a hooded lantern. The bird it was taken from is the oldest rook in the wood, and she has not flown since. This one,” and I touched another, “was taken the same night from her mate. And this one…”

I stopped. I could not go on.

For the third feather I had touched was longer than the others, and heavier, and glossy black with a sheen of violet in the lamplight. At the base of its quill there was a crust of dried blood, and it was mine.

I knew it as I knew my own heartbeat. It was one of the six. One of the six primaries pulled from my left wing, one by one, with a little twist of the wrist at the end of each pull, by a soft-voiced weasel in the dark of the double elm.

I stood there on the bench with my talon on my own stolen feather and my crooked wing half spread and my notched beak open, and no sound came out of it. The bell at my throat screamed and screamed. Above us, through the open doorway, the great planet stared down with its banded and indifferent face.

The tortoise looked at the feather under my talon.

Then it looked up at my wing, the crooked pale left wing with its six bare stubs.

Then it looked at my face, at my beak, and at the seven notches carved into it, one by one, as though it were reading them.

And something changed in its face.

I cannot tell you what. I have tried, many times, and I cannot. It was not fear. It was not guilt, or not any guilt I recognized. It was not defiance. It was something slower than all of these, as everything about the tortoise was slower. It came up into its amber eyes the way water comes up into a footprint in the sand, slowly, from below, filling it.

It breathed out. All the way.

And then, for the first time in all the days I had watched it, the tortoise’s lamp flickered.

Only once. Only a little. The flame bent sideways, as though something had passed very close to it in the dark, and then straightened again. But it flickered, and I saw it, and so did the tortoise.

We looked at each other across the scattered feathers in the faint, unsteady light.

“No one asked them,” I said. My voice was a whisper now, broken, all the rasp gone out of it. “No one asked them. No one asked me.”

The tortoise did not answer.

It sat there, perfectly still, with its old flat-nailed hands resting open on its knees and its amber eyes on my notched beak. The bell at my throat shrieked on and on. The great planet stared. Somewhere far off in the bending shed, the hammers began again, one great iron clang, then another, then the whole dreadful rhythm of them starting up. In the field beyond the stumps, the arrows began to sing.

And the tortoise breathed in.

I waited.

I did not know what I was waiting for. I did not know whether I was waiting for a confession or a lie, an apology or a blow, the hand on the knife or the hand on the feathers. I did not know, as I stood there over the spilled rook primaries with my own stolen feather beneath my talon, whether the creature before me was the one I had begun to hope it was, or only the most patient thief in the valley.

I did not know.

I only waited, as the bell screamed and the hammers fell and the great planet watched. I counted the long, slow breath going in, and in, and in.

It was the longest breath I ever heard.

 

Segment 12:

Ask Now

One

When a stone falls into still water, the water does not argue with the stone.

It opens.

It takes the stone down into itself.

Then it closes again over the place where the stone went in, and the rings go out, and out, and out, until they reach the shore.

Two

The raven stood on the bench.

Black, against the grey light of the great planet in the doorway. Taller than this one had thought a raven could be. A cloak of many feathers hung open around him, grey and brown and white and black, every kind of bird. One wing was folded close and whole. The other was half spread, and crooked, and where the long feathers should have been there were six pale stubs, soft and bent, like the first green shoots of a field that has been burned.

His beak was open. On the side of it, in the lamplight, seven small clean grooves.

His talon was on a feather.

His own.

Three

This one had been breathing in.

The breath had begun when the raven struck the bundle and the feathers spilled across the bench. It had gone on while he spoke, while he touched the first feather and the second and the third, while his voice broke and went quiet. It was still going on now, slowly, in, in, in, as the hammers began again in the bending shed and the arrows began to sing in the field beyond the stumps.

It was a long breath.

It was the longest breath this one has ever taken.

Because this one did not know what would come out when it ended.

Four

Here is what this one knew, in that long breath.

At dusk, two days before, this one had gone to the feather loft.

The shed feathers were gone. This one had used the last of them on the eleven arrows that missed. There were no more. The dove-folk grandmother who sorts the feathers in the loft had looked at this one with tired eyes and said there had been no shed feathers in the loft for a month now. Only the sacks.

And the quartermaster’s notice lay on the bench. Twelve arrows. By Divinday noon. Or out.

So this one had taken a bundle from the sacks.

Five

This one did not open it.

This one carried it back to the bench in both arms and laid it down, and the moment it touched the sackcloth, this one knew.

Not with the eyes. The bundle was tied in sacking. The eyes saw nothing.

With the hands.

They had learned something, these hands, in the five nights with the bamboo. They had learned what a thing feels like when it is ready, and what it feels like when it is not. When this one laid a hand on the bundle, it felt the way the green wood had felt by the roadside, and the old sawyer’s arms, and the lynx’s arm before the needles.

Tight.

Drawn in on itself. Holding something it did not want to hold.

Afraid.

Six

So this one did not open it.

For two days and two nights it lay on the bench beside the knife and the staves and the quartermaster’s notice, and this one did not untie the twine. Sometimes the hand went out to it and lay on it, gently, the way the crane lays a hand near the hurt, and waited. The bundle did not soften. Its tightness did not ease.

It did not say yes.

And all that while, this one did not take it back to the loft.

That is the thing this one must say. That is the thing that was in the long breath, under everything else.

This one knew the feathers were not given.

And this one kept them anyway.

Because of the notice. Because of the twelve arrows. Because of the fear that crouches in the held place at the bottom of the breath, the fear that has been there for forty-one years, the fear of being One Who Keeps Missing, of being sent down the river road with a lamp and four clean sticks.

These hands had learned to open the grain of the bamboo.

They had not learned to let go of the fear.

Seven

The breath ended.

This one breathed out.

And did not argue.

Eight

What would arguing have been?

To say: this one did not take them from the birds. The weasels took them. The quartermaster signed for them. The dove-folk grandmother gave them from the sacks. This one only carried them from the loft to the bench.

True.

To say: this one did not open them. This one did not use them. Not one feather has been cut, not one arrow fletched.

True.

To say: the quartermaster would have sent this one away. What else was there to do?

True.

All true. All three things true, and none of them would have been an answer. For the raven was not asking who had taken the feathers. He was not asking who had signed, or who had carried, or what this one had or had not done with them.

He had said only: No one asked them.

And that was true too.

And it was the only true thing that mattered.

Nine

When a thing is true, arguing with it is like a stone arguing with the water it has fallen into.

The stone may be right about many things.

It is still at the bottom of the pond.

Ten

So this one rose.

Slowly. A tortoise rises slowly. The legs unfolding, the shell lifting from the stool, the long neck coming up and out. The raven watched. His milky inner eyelid flickered across his black eyes. His talons tightened on the bench, and on the feather beneath them, and his crooked wing came half open again, as if he thought this one might strike, or might reach for the knife.

This one did not reach for the knife.

This one stood beside the bench in the grey light of the great planet, and looked at the raven, and at the seven grooves on his beak, and at the six pale stubs on his wing.

And then this one bowed.

Eleven

A tortoise does not bow easily.

The shell does not bend. To bow, a tortoise must bring the whole body down, slowly, onto the knees. Then it must lower the long neck, and lower it, and lower it, until the head is down below the edge of the shell and the chin touches the floor.

It is not graceful. It is not quick. It takes a long time.

This one had not bowed so in forty years. Not since the mother died, and this one bowed at her grave in the river reeds.

This one bowed so now.

Down onto the knees on the cold packed earth of the shed floor. Down with the shell, until it rested on the earth. Down with the neck, slowly, slowly, through the long breath out, until the chin lay in the dust between the scattered bamboo staves, and the forehead nearly touched the ground.

And there this one stayed.

Twelve

From down there, the shed was very large.

The bench was high above. The lamp was high above. The raven was high above, a black shape against the grey light, his cloak hanging, his crooked wing half open.

The hammers fell. The arrows sang. The bell at the raven’s throat, this one could hear it now, a thin, cracked, shrieking sound, like something very small screaming very far away.

This one breathed out.

And spoke from the dust.

Thirteen

“These hands knew,” this one said.

The words came out slowly, one at a time, each one with a breath before it.

“Knew they were not given. (breath) Took them anyway. (breath) Were afraid.”

The raven did not answer.

“These hands will not use them,” this one said. “Not one. (breath) They are not this one’s to use. (breath) They are yours to keep. You are the Keeper. (breath) Keep them.”

Still the raven did not answer.

This one breathed in.

And then this one asked.

Fourteen

“Will you give one?”

That was all. Four words.

“Will you give one?”

Fifteen

There was a long silence.

Not silence. The yard is never silent. The hammers went on, and the mauls, and the singing of the arrows in the field. Somewhere far off by the gate, the quartermaster’s voice rose and fell.

But in the third shed, at the end of the last bench, there was a silence that was made of a raven not speaking and a tortoise not moving. It went on for a long time. This one does not know how long. Long enough for the forehead, pressed nearly to the floor, to grow cold. Long enough for the knees to ache. Long enough for the fear in the held place to come creeping back up, little by little, saying: he will strike. He will laugh. He will take the feathers and fly away, and in the morning the quartermaster will come, and there will be no arrows, and no feathers, and no bench.

This one breathed out.

The fear went down.

This one stayed bowed.

Sixteen

Then the bell stopped.

Seventeen

This one did not understand at first what had happened.

The thin cracked shrieking that had been going on all this time, so faint and so constant that this one had almost stopped hearing it, simply stopped. Not slowly. All at once, the way a held breath stops when it is finally let go.

And in the place where it had been, there was nothing.

Then this one heard the raven move.

Eighteen

A soft sound. The rustle of feathers. The click of talons on the wood of the bench. The sackcloth sliding.

This one did not look up. This one did not dare.

The sliding went on for a while. Then the rustle of sacking being folded, and folded, and tied. Then a different sound, the soft whisper of a heavy cloth being drawn about something.

The raven was gathering the stolen feathers. Wrapping them, one by one, into his cloak of a thousand molts.

Keeping them.

Nineteen

Then nothing again for a long time.

Then this one heard the raven breathe.

It was not like this one’s breath. It was quicker, rougher, higher in the chest, the breath of a creature that has been holding something tight for many days and nights and does not quite know how to stop. It caught, once, in the middle, the way breath catches before weeping.

Then it went out.

Long.

Longer than this one had ever heard a bird’s breath go.

All the way.

Twenty

Then there was a new sound.

This one did not know it at first. It was so small. A faint dry whisper, like a single leaf turning over in a still wood. Then a sort of soft scraping, very light, like a fingernail drawn gently along the edge of a page.

Then something touched the back of this one’s neck.

Twenty-One

It was so light this one hardly felt it. It did not press. It did not hold. It only touched, for the length of a breath, the soft skin just behind the head, where it comes out from under the shell.

Then it slid away, down the side of the neck, and fell.

It came to rest on the packed earth of the floor, just beside this one’s face, in the dust between the scattered staves.

A feather.

Twenty-Two

This one looked at it.

From so close, with the eye nearly on the ground, it was very large. Long and black and glossy, with a sheen of violet where the grey light of the great planet touched it. A primary. A flight feather from the outer wing, the kind the gatherers want most.

It was not crusted at the base.

The quill was clean and pale and dry, and the end of it was smooth, the way a feather’s end is smooth when it has been let go of, not pulled.

Twenty-Three

This one did not reach for it.

The hand wanted to. This one could feel the fingers beginning to curl.

This one breathed out.

The fingers opened.

This one turned the hands over, slowly, on the floor, palms up, and laid them there in the dust on either side of the feather, open and empty, not touching it.

And waited.

Twenty-Four

Above, the raven spoke.

His voice was very low now. The rasp was gone from it. It was only tired, and hoarse, and strangely gentle, like a voice that has been shouting into a storm for a long time and has just noticed that the storm has stopped.

“From the right,” he said. “The whole one. The good one.”

This one breathed in.

“It was loose,” he said. “It would have dropped in the molt, in a month or two. I would have gathered it from the leaves and sewn it into my cloak.” A pause. A breath. “I let it go now instead.”

Another pause.

“Thou didst ask,” he said.

Twenty-Five

This one’s hands were trembling.

They had not trembled since the morning of the first breath. Not when the quartermaster roared. Not when the yard laughed. Not when the raven dropped from the dark onto the bench and the staves went clattering to the floor.

Now they trembled.

Lying open in the dust on either side of a single black feather, they shook so hard that the dust stirred beneath them.

Not with fear.

This one did not know, then, what it was. This one has had time to think since. This one thinks now that it was the trembling a hand does when it is about to receive something it does not deserve, and knows it, and is being given it anyway.

Twenty-Six

“Take it,” said the raven.

This one did not take it.

This one let the hands come together beneath it, slowly, the two palms meeting under the feather where it lay in the dust, the way water comes together under a leaf. They lifted, very gently, so that the feather lay across them without being held.

It weighed almost nothing.

It weighed more than anything these hands have ever carried.

Twenty-Seven

This one rose.

Slowly. Knees, then shell, then neck. The feather lay across the open palms the whole way up and did not fall, though the hands trembled.

The raven was standing on the bench where he had stood before. But he was not standing as he had stood before. His crooked wing was folded now, close against his side, the six pale stubs hidden beneath the whole feathers above them. His cloak was drawn about him, heavy with what he had gathered into it. His head was low.

The grooves on his beak were still there, seven of them, clean and small in the lamplight.

The lamp was steady again.

The bell at his throat was silent.

Twenty-Eight

This one looked at him.

He looked back.

Neither of us spoke for a while.

Then this one said, “This one is Shu. Shu Manbang.”

He tilted his head. His milky inner eyelid flickered.

“What does it mean?”

“Some say One Who Binds Slowly.” A breath. “Some say One Who Keeps Missing.”

He was quiet. Then, for the first time, something that might have been the very edge of a laugh came up out of his throat. Dry and short and cracked, like the bell.

“Corvane,” he said. “Ashquill. Keeper of the Molted Rookery, on the hill above the river road.” He looked down at his own feather lying across this one’s trembling hands. “It means one who counts.”

Twenty-Nine

He did not stay.

He gathered his cloak about him, heavy with the stolen feathers, and turned toward the open doorway, where the great planet was beginning to sink in the west and the first grey of dawn was coming up behind the stumps.

At the edge of the bench, he stopped.

“The notice,” he said, without turning. “Twelve arrows. By noon.”

“Yes.”

“One feather will fletch one arrow. Perhaps not even one.”

“Yes.”

He was quiet a moment.

“Then thou wilt fail it,” he said.

This one breathed out.

“Yes,” this one said.

Thirty

He turned his head, then, and looked back over his shoulder. The grey light was behind him, so this one could not see his face, only the shape of his notched beak against the dawn.

“There are birds in this valley,” he said slowly, “who have not been plucked. Not many. A few. In places the ladders have not found. They are frightened. They will not come near a fletcher’s yard.” He paused. “But they might come near a Keeper. And if a fletcher came with a Keeper, and bowed as thou hast bowed, and asked as thou hast asked…”

He did not finish.

He spread his wings, the whole one and the crooked one, and dropped from the bench to the floor. He walked out through the doorway into the dawn, as a creature walks who cannot yet fly, with his cloak dragging behind him in the dust and the stolen feathers of his rookery held close inside it.

This one did not call after him.

There was no need. He had not finished, and he knew that this one knew.

Thirty-One

This one sat down.

Laid the feather on the sackcloth before the lamp, very carefully, in the clean place where the bundle had been.

Breathed out.

The hands were still trembling.

Thirty-Two

A thing taken is held tightly, for fear it will be taken back.

A thing given is held lightly, for it cannot be taken back; it was never kept.

The stolen feathers screamed in the arrows of the yard.

The given feather lies on the bench and does not make a sound.

The bell rang for the taking.

The bell is silent for the gift.

Thirty-Three

This one does not know whether it was the asking or the bowing or the giving back of the stolen feathers that silenced the bell.

Perhaps all three.

Perhaps none.

Perhaps the bell went silent because, for the first time in many nights, the raven breathed out.

Thirty-Four

The dawn came.

The yard roared.

The quartermaster’s notice lay on the bench beside the given feather: twelve arrows, by noon, or out.

This one had four clean staves and one black feather.

This one was going to fail.

And this one sat at the bench in the grey light with the trembling hands open on the knees, and looked at the feather, and felt something rise up in the shell where the held place had been. Not fear. Not peace exactly.

Something like the feeling of standing at the edge of a great forest one has walked past every day for forty-one years, and seeing, for the first time, that there is a path into it.

 

Segment 13:

Red Thread Where the Hands Rest

Dawn at the Glue House

I was awake before the light, as I always am. The old ones of my marsh say a crane who sleeps past the first grey has already missed the best fish. I had washed my face in the rain barrel and combed my crown and was sitting on the edge of my cot with my needle case open in my lap, counting my needles back into their places on the silk, when I heard someone at the door of the glue house.

Not a knock. A breath.

A long, slow breath, going in. Then a pause. Then going out, and out, and out.

I knew it. I had heard it every night for a fortnight from the end of the third shed. I had stood outside in the thin rain and listened to it as one listens to the sound of the sea in a shell, without quite knowing what it says.

I closed the case. I rose. I went to the door.

The tortoise was standing in the grey outside. It was holding its two hands before it, cupped, palms up, a little away from its body. Across them lay a single long black feather, glossy, with a sheen of violet in the dawn. The hands were trembling. I could see it from the door: a fine, steady trembling, as though a small wind were passing through them that touched nothing else.

It looked at me with its heavy-lidded amber eyes.

Then, slowly, it began to kneel.

I have seen many creatures bow to me in sixty years. Soldiers. Lords. Weeping mothers. I have never seen anyone bow as that tortoise bowed, on the wet stones outside the door of the glue house, in the grey before the dawn. It went down so slowly, the shell resting on the stones, the long neck lowering inch by inch, the trembling hands with their feather held out before it the whole way down, never once tipping. And when it was down, its forehead nearly touching the wet stone, it spoke without lifting its head.

“These hands,” it said, “do not know where to rest. (breath) Will you show them?”

Hm.

I stood in the doorway. Behind me the fires of the glue house hissed and the great pots bubbled. Before me the tortoise knelt, waiting, with the feather on its palms.

Two weeks I had waited for that question. I had watched the lamp, and the knot in the chest, small and quiet and very old, and I had not gone in, because it had not asked. One does not set a needle in a body before it has asked.

It had asked.

I found that I could not speak at once. My throat, which has spoken calmly to the dying, to the newly born, to the screaming and the silent, would not open. I stood there with my hand on the doorframe, and something warm rose up in my breast. It was the feeling I have when a seed I have planted and given up for lost pushes, one morning, a single green blade up through the frost.

At last I said, “Hm. Get up, Shu Manbang. Your knees are on wet stone. Come inside where it is warm. Bring your feather.”

First grey of morning / a tortoise bowing in the rain / the seed has spoken.

The Bench

I did not teach it in the glue house. A hand learns best in the place where it works. So we walked together down the length of the yard in the dawn, the tortoise slow and I slower to match it, past the splitting yard where the mauls were beginning again, past the bending shed with its steam already rising, through the first shed and the second, and came at last to the end of the third, to the last bench, and the steady lamp.

The bench was bare. Four long staves of split bamboo, a little knife, a pot of glue gone cold, a spool of plain linen thread, a few steel points in a dish. And a leaf torn from a ledger, with words on it in great furious round letters: twelve arrows by Divinday noon, or out.

Divinday was that day.

“Hm,” I said, looking at the leaf. “How many have you made?”

“None,” said the tortoise.

“And how many can you make before noon?”

It looked down at the feather in its hands. “One,” it said. “Perhaps.”

“Then we have the whole of the morning to make one arrow,” I said, “and that is more time than most arrows in this yard have been given since the month began. Sit.”

It sat. It laid the feather on the sackcloth before the lamp, very carefully, in a clean place. Then it took up one of the staves and the little knife and laid both across its knees and looked up at me.

“Work,” I said. “As you always work. I will watch.”

The Hands at Work

I want to tell this plainly, because it was a plain thing, and plain things are the hardest to tell.

The tortoise worked. It took the long split stave and began to shave it round, drawing the little knife along the bamboo from the far end toward itself in long slow strokes. Each stroke lifted away a thin pale curl of bamboo that fell, turning, onto the sackcloth. It worked slowly. Much more slowly than any fletcher in the yard. A goblin would have made three shafts in the time it took the tortoise to make one stroke. But the strokes were even and clean, and the curls that fell were as fine as paper, and the shaft beneath them grew round and straight and pale.

I sat on an upturned crate across the bench and touched my crown.

The scarlet ribbon there does not show me anything the eyes cannot see, if the eyes are patient enough. It only shows it to me faster, and more clearly, like a lamp brought close to a page. What it showed me as the tortoise worked was the lines.

Every body has them. My teacher called them rivers. They are the paths along which the body moves its strength from the place where it is made to the place where it is spent, from the breath into the shoulders, the shoulders into the arms, the arms into the hands, the hands into the work. In a body at rest, they lie quiet, like streams in a still valley. In a body at work, they flow. In a body at work too hard, they knot, and burn, and the flow stops, and the work begins to eat the body instead of the body doing the work.

The tortoise’s rivers were flowing.

They were flowing well. Better than any I had seen in that yard. Down from the slow breath into the shoulders, down the long arms, into the old flat-nailed hands, and out through the knife into the bamboo. Even. Unhurried. Not knotted.

Except at one place.

At the end of each stroke.

Where the Hands Did Not Rest

I watched it for twenty strokes before I was sure.

The tortoise drew the knife. The rivers flowed. The curl of bamboo lifted and fell. The stroke reached its end, close to the tortoise’s body, where the knife came off the shaft. And there, at that one moment, for the length of a heartbeat, all the rivers in both arms drew suddenly tight. Knotted. Clenched. Then the hand carried the knife back to the far end of the shaft for the next stroke, and the knot loosened, and the rivers flowed again until the end of the next stroke, and clenched again.

Twenty strokes. Twenty clenchings.

“Stop,” I said.

The tortoise stopped. Its hands lay still on the shaft.

“Do you feel it?” I said.

It looked at me. Slowly, it shook its head.

“At the end of each stroke,” I said. “When the knife comes off the wood. Your hands do not rest. They hurry back. They clench, very small, for a moment, and then they carry the knife back to the start, already reaching for the next stroke before this one is done.”

The tortoise was quiet. It looked down at its hands. Then it breathed in, and out.

“These hands thought,” it said slowly, “the resting was in the stroke. In the slowness.”

“Hm. Many think so. It is a good thought, and it is half true. The slowness is good. But a stroke has three parts, Shu Manbang, not two. There is the beginning, when the hand sets the knife. There is the going, when the knife moves through the wood. And there is the resting, when the knife has left the wood and the hand gives back to the body what it borrowed for the stroke. You have learned the beginning. You have learned the going. Your beginning is calm and your going is very fine. But you have never learned the resting.” I paused. “You skip it. Every time. You come to the end of the stroke and your hands are already afraid of the next one.”

The tortoise did not move. But I saw, in the ribbon-light, the small, quiet, very old knot in its chest grow suddenly brighter. It was the knot I had seen on my first night in the yard, through the rain.

“Afraid,” it said.

“Hm.”

“These hands found the held place,” it said, very low, “in the breath. Four nights ago. And breathed past it. (breath) But they did not know it was in the hands, too.”

“It is in everything,” I said gently. “Wherever the breath is held, the hand is held. Wherever the hand is held, the work is held. And wood that is held while it is cut remembers being held.” I thought of the eleven arrows that missed, which old Mudge had told me about. They flew straight, and silent, and rose away at the last, like a bird lifting from a hand about to close. “It remembers, Shu. Even when it is dry. Even when it is cut slowly.”

The Resting Places

I came round the bench and knelt beside the tortoise on the packed earth of the floor.

“Your hands,” I said. “May I?”

It held them out to me.

They were old hands, thick-fingered, flat-nailed, the skin of the palms tough and grooved from forty years of knives and bamboo. And they were still trembling, faintly, the way they had trembled at the door of the glue house, with the feather.

I took them in mine.

“Good morning, hands,” I said. “You have worked a very long time without rest. I should like to show you where to stop. May I come in?”

I felt them answer. I cannot tell you how. It was not a word. It was the smallest loosening in the thick fingers, the smallest settling of the palms into my palms, like a bird settling onto a branch after flight.

Yes.

I did not use needles. Not that morning. Needles are for opening what has closed. These hands were not closed. They were only hurrying. What they needed was not to be opened but to be shown.

So I pressed. With the tip of one finger, very lightly. First the place in the center of the palm, where the hand cups. Then the place at the base of the thumb, where the knife’s weight gathers. Then the inside of the wrist, three fingers’ width from the crease, where the river of the arm runs closest to the surface.

“Here,” I said, pressing. “And here. And here. These are the places where the hand rests. When the stroke ends and the knife comes off the wood, do not let the hand hurry back. Let it come to rest here, in these three places, for one breath. Feel the weight settle into them. Feel what the hand borrowed for the stroke go back into the arm. Then, and only then, when the breath has gone all the way out, carry the knife back for the next.”

The tortoise looked at its hands in mine, at the three places I had pressed.

“One breath,” it said.

“One whole breath. In and out, at the end of every stroke. Do not skip it, Shu. Even when you are hurried. Especially when you are hurried.”

It was quiet a long while.

Then it said, very slowly, “These hands will forget.”

Hm.

It was the truest thing it could have said. I have taught a great many hands to rest, and they all forget. Not because they are foolish, but because the hurry is old and deep and the resting is new and shallow. The hands do not mean to forget. They simply come to the end of a stroke and find themselves already reaching, the way a foot on a familiar stair finds the next step without being told.

“Yes,” I said. “They will forget. Every day. Many times every day. That is the work.”

The tortoise looked down at the bench. At the shaft, half shaved, with the pale curls of bamboo around it. At the little dish of steel points. At the spool of plain linen. At the black feather in the clean place before the lamp.

At the loop of faded red thread about its own left wrist.

Then it did a thing I did not expect.

The Red Thread

It reached across with its right hand and began, slowly, to untie the red thread from its wrist.

It was very old thread. Silk, I thought, once, though it was so faded now it was nearly the color of dust, frayed in places, the knot worn smooth by long wearing. The tortoise’s thick fingers worked at the knot a long time before it gave. When it was loose, the tortoise drew the thread off its wrist and held it up in the lamplight.

“The mother tied this,” it said. “When this one was small. (breath) Told this one: when you are afraid, touch it.”

“Hm. Did you?”

“Every day,” said the tortoise. “Forty years.” A breath. “These hands touched it so often, they stopped feeling it.”

It laid the old thread across its palm and looked at it. Then it looked at the half-shaved shaft on its knees.

“These hands will forget the resting places,” it said. “But if there were something on the wood… at the end of the stroke… something the hand would touch, every time, and remember…”

It did not finish. It did not need to.

I watched as it took up the shaft and found, near the end, a little way from where the knife came off at the close of each stroke, the place where the hand should have stopped and had not. There it wound the faded red thread once around the bamboo. Very lightly. Not tight. It tied it in a small, loose knot, so loose that the thread could slide a little on the wood.

It was not holding anything. It was not binding anything. There was nothing on the shaft yet to hold. It was only there.

The tortoise took up the knife. It set the edge on the far end of the shaft. It breathed. It drew the knife toward itself in one long slow stroke, and a pale curl lifted and fell. As the knife came off the wood at the end of the stroke, the tortoise’s thumb brushed the red thread.

And stopped.

I watched in the ribbon-light. The rivers in its arms, which at the end of every other stroke that morning had clenched tight in that small quick knot of hurry, did not clench. They came to the red thread, and paused, and settled, and the hand came to rest. Center of the palm, base of the thumb, inside of the wrist. One breath, in and out. All the way.

Then the hand carried the knife back for the next stroke.

Unhurried.

Red thread on bamboo / not to hold the shaft together / but to hold the pause.

The Morning

We made the arrow together, the tortoise and I.

That is not true. The tortoise made it. I only sat across the bench on my upturned crate and watched, and spoke now and then, and once or twice reached over and pressed a resting place on its wrist when the hand began to hurry. But it felt as though we made it together, the way a teacher feels she has helped to sing a song a student sings.

The old red thread on the mother’s wrist was not enough. It was too short to go round more than once, and there were other resting places in the making of an arrow: in the seating of the point, in the cutting of the fletchings, in the binding. So when the shaft was done, round and straight and pale, I opened my needle case. I unwound from the silk lining, where my teacher had stitched it sixty years before, a length of scarlet thread. It was the same red as my crown, and it had held my needles in their places for all those years, and I gave it to the tortoise.

It looked at the thread in its palm a long time.

“This is yours,” it said.

“Hm. It was. Now it is resting somewhere else.”

The tortoise tied the scarlet thread at every place in the arrow’s making where its hands should have rested and had not. A small loop near the head of the shaft, where the hand comes off the point after seating it. Another at the nock, where the thumb lifts after cutting the notch. And then, when it came to the fletching, which it had never done before without fear, it tied three more.

It took up the raven’s feather. It held it a long time across its trembling palms. Then it cut from it, very slowly, the vanes for three fletchings. Each cut was a single stroke of the little knife, and at the end of each, its hand came to rest on the scarlet loop it had tied at the edge of the sackcloth. It breathed, and the hand did not tremble while it was resting, though it trembled again each time it lifted the knife.

It bound the fletchings to the shaft with plain linen, wrap after wrap. Between every wrap, its fingers came to rest on a little scarlet loop tied around the shaft just above the binding, one breath, and then the next wrap.

The rest of the yard roared around us. The mauls fell in the splitting yard, faster and faster, the ox-folk foreman shouting out the count. The bending shed hissed and clanged. The goblin twins at the fifth bench argued about whose glue it was. A hundred and twelve hands made a hundred and twelve arrows while the tortoise made part of one.

I did not care. I sat on my crate and watched those old flat-nailed hands come to rest, and rest, and rest again, at every scarlet loop, and something in my breast swelled until I thought my robe would not hold it.

When I was young, my teacher used to watch me at my needles in exactly this way. She sat across from me on a mat in the reed hut by the marsh, with her own long white neck folded and her own scarlet crown faded nearly to pink with age. She said nothing for hours. And once, only once, when I had set a needle without hurry for the first time, she made a small sound in her throat, very soft, very satisfied. I did not understand it then.

I understood it now.

Hm.

Noon

The quartermaster came at noon.

I heard him coming from the far end of the shed: the brass on tusk, the iron on stone, the great hoarse voice shouting at the hedgehogs about their points. He came down the length of the third shed with his ledger under his arm. The yard went quiet as he passed, as it always did now, the fletchers bending low over their benches and not looking up. He stopped at the end of the last bench and looked down.

There, on the sackcloth before the steady lamp, lay one arrow.

It was a plain arrow, not beautiful. A shaft of pale bamboo, a steel point, three black fletchings with a sheen of violet, bound with plain linen. But all along its length, at the head and the nock and above each binding, there were small loops of scarlet thread, loose and soft, tied in little knots that held nothing at all.

The quartermaster looked at it for a long while. His tusks did not clack. His small dark eyes moved from the arrow to the tortoise, who sat with its hands resting open on its knees, and then to me, on my upturned crate, and then back to the arrow.

“One,” he said.

“Yes,” said the tortoise.

“I said twelve.”

“Yes.”

He drew a long breath through his nose, the bellows breath, and I saw the great knot beneath his ribs burn brighter in the ribbon-light. I saw, too, something I had not seen before. It was a small cold place in the knot, near its heart, like a stone at the bottom of a hot spring.

“An’ what,” he said, very slowly, “is all that?” He pointed with one inky finger at the scarlet loops.

The tortoise breathed in. Out.

“To remind the hands,” it said, “where to rest.”

The quartermaster stared at it.

Then at me.

I rose from my crate. I am taller than the quartermaster by a head and a half when I stand straight, and I stood straight. I folded my hands in the sleeves of my indigo robe.

“Sergeant,” I said. “You pay me two silver a day to keep the hands of this yard moving.”

He looked at me warily. “I do, madam.”

“This bench,” I said, “is under my care. The hands at it are learning a thing I am teaching them, and the learning is not finished. I should like you to pay one of my two silver to this bench instead of to me, for one fortnight, and let it learn. I will work for the other one. I will work the same hours. You will lose nothing but one silver a day, which is cheaper than the price of the splinters I took out of your proofing sergeant’s arm.”

The shed had gone very quiet. I could feel the fletchers at the other benches not looking at us.

The quartermaster’s tusks clacked once.

“A fortnight,” he said.

“Hm.”

“An’ at the end of it?”

I looked at the arrow on the bench. At the scarlet loops. At the old hands resting on the tortoise’s knees, no longer trembling.

“At the end of it,” I said, “you may count what you like.”

He stood there a long time. In the ribbon-light I watched the cold small stone at the heart of his great burning knot. And I saw it, very faintly, move.

Then he grunted. It was not a laugh. It was not quite a refusal. He took his ledger from under his arm and opened it, and took his pen from behind his ear, and wrote something in his round firm hand. He closed the book. He did not tell us what he had written.

“One fortnight,” he said. “Not a day more.” And he turned on his iron heel and went away up the shed.

He did not shout at anyone until he reached the gate.

Evening

That night I did not go from bench to bench with my needles as I usually do. I had given away the thread that held them in their places, and I sat a long time on my cot in the glue house with the open case in my lap, trying to set them back on the bare silk. They would not stay. They slid about, the long and the short together, the needles of the seven seasons all jumbled, autumn lying against spring.

I did not mind.

For the first time in sixty years, I did not mind at all.

Near midnight I rose and went out into the yard. The thin rain had come back. I walked down to the third shed and stood outside it in the dark, as I had stood on my first night, and looked in.

The lamp at the end of the last bench burned steady. The tortoise sat beneath it with a new stave of bamboo across its knees, shaving. Slowly. Long pale curls falling. And at the end of every stroke, its thumb came to rest on a small loop of scarlet thread, and it breathed, in and out, all the way, before it carried the knife back.

It did not see me. I did not go in. There was no need.

The knot in its chest, small and quiet and very old, the one I had first seen through the rain, was still there. But it was not a question anymore.

It was a beginning.

My teacher’s thread / tied on a stranger’s arrow / the needles roll free.

 

Segment 14:

Paths That Are Not Measurements

One

A measurement is laid on a thing from outside.

A path is found inside the thing, and followed.

The measurement says: you will be this long.

The path says: this is the way I go.

Two

In the yard there is a stick.

It hangs on a nail by the door of each shed. A straight rod of hard ash, dark with handling, as long as an arrow should be. Along its length there are notches cut at even spaces, a finger’s width apart, and at one end a deeper notch where the shaft must end.

Every shaft that leaves a bench is laid against that stick.

If it is too long, it is cut. If it is too short, it goes to the kindling bin. If the quartermaster’s spectacles were on his face, and they are not, he would look also to see whether it was straight. But he does not look. He only counts.

The stick is called the gauge.

Every arrow in Cinderford is the same length as the gauge.

Every arrow in Cinderford is different from every other in every way that the gauge cannot measure.

Three

Four days into the fortnight.

This one has made three shafts. Round and straight and pale, with scarlet loops tied loosely at the resting places. Each one took a whole day. Each one was laid against the gauge when it was done and was the right length.

Only one has been fletched. The first, with the raven’s feather.

The other two lie on the bench, waiting.

On the second night, the raven came. This one did not hear him come. In the morning, two grey goose feathers lay on the sackcloth beside the lamp, long and clean, the quills dry and smooth at the end. There was nothing else. No word. Only the feathers, and on the dusty floor beneath the bench, the print of a raven’s talons, three toes forward and one back, walking away toward the door.

A goose in the marsh had been asked.

These hands have not yet dared to cut them.

Four

The crane came each evening.

She came after her work on the other benches was done, late, when the lamps in the sheds were burning low and the hammers had slowed. She sat on her upturned crate across the bench and watched. Sometimes she spoke. Mostly she did not. When the hands forgot the resting places, she reached over, very lightly, and pressed the inside of the wrist, and they remembered.

On the fourth evening, this one asked her a question.

Five

“The rivers,” this one said. “In the body. You see them?”

“Hm,” she said. “With the ribbon, more clearly. Without it, if I am patient.”

“Where do they go?”

She tilted her long white neck and looked at this one for a while, the way she does, as though she were reading something written very small.

Then she said, “Give me your arm.”

Six

She did not use needles.

She took from her robe a small brush, very fine, and a little cake of black ink, and wet the brush in the rain barrel by the door of the shed and rubbed it on the ink. Then she took this one’s left arm and laid it across the bench, palm up, in the lamplight.

“This is the river of the lung,” she said, and drew.

The brush touched the skin at the top of the shoulder, at the front, below the edge of the shell. It moved down. Not straight. It went down the front of the arm, toward the thumb side, curving a little out around the swell of the muscle. It bent where the elbow bends, a little inward, and ran on down the forearm, along the inside, close to where the bone lies under the skin. It came to the wrist, to the place she had pressed three days before, three fingers from the crease, and passed through it. Then it ran down across the pad of the thumb to the very tip, at the side of the nail, and stopped.

A single black line on the old grey skin, from the shoulder to the thumb.

It was not straight.

It was not a measurement.

It went where it went.

Seven

“Why does it bend?” this one asked.

“Because the arm bends,” said the crane. “The river goes around the bone, not through it. Around the muscle, not over it. It finds the way that is open.” She drew a second line beside the first, a little farther toward the middle of the arm. “This is the river of the heart’s protector. It goes down the very center, between the two bones.” The line ran down the inside of the forearm, straight between the two long bones, through the middle of the wrist, into the palm, to the place where the hand cups. The center of the palm. The first resting place. And on, to the tip of the middle finger.

“And this,” she said, drawing a third, “is the river of the heart.” It ran down along the little-finger side, close to the edge, past the crease of the wrist, down the side of the hand, to the very tip of the smallest finger.

Three lines. Three rivers. Black ink on old grey skin, running down the arm from the shoulder to the hand.

None of them was straight.

All of them were true.

Eight

This one looked at the arm a long time.

The lines lay on it like the rivers on a map. They came down from the shoulder and wound between the muscles and bent around the bones, never cutting across, never going where there was no room, and passed through the three resting places one after another. The base of the thumb, where the river of the lung went. The center of the palm, where the river of the heart’s protector went. The inside of the wrist, where all three passed close together before they spread again into the hand.

The resting places were not chosen.

They were where the rivers met.

Nine

“Hm,” said the crane softly. She was watching this one’s face, not the arm. “You see something.”

This one breathed in.

This one did not answer.

This one reached across the bench, with the inked arm, slowly, and took up one of the two unfletched shafts, and laid it across the knees beside the arm.

And looked at them both.

Ten

Bamboo has rivers too.

This one has known that for forty years and never once seen it.

It is called the grain. The long fibers that run the length of the culm, side by side, from one node to the next. When a split opens without tearing, it opens because the knife has found the place between the fibers where they part of themselves, and followed it. When a split tears, it tears because the knife has gone across them, or pushed against them, or tried to make them part where they did not wish to.

This one has always thought of the grain as straight. Bamboo is a straight thing. That is why it makes good arrows. The fibers run from end to end in long even lines, like the notches on the gauge.

But they do not.

Eleven

Lying on the knees in the lamplight, beside the black rivers on the arm, the shaft did not look straight.

It was straight. It had been laid against the gauge and was the right length and true as a bowstring along its whole run. But inside the straightness, on the pale surface where the knife had shaved away the outer skin, the grain was showing. Fine lines, a little darker than the rest, running from end to end.

And they bent.

Not much. A hair’s width here. A little more there. Near each node, where the culm swells into its knuckle, the fibers did not run straight through. They curved out around it, spreading a little, the way the river of the lung curves out around the swell of the muscle. Then, past the node, they drew together again and ran on. In the long stretches between the nodes, they did not lie perfectly side by side. They drifted, very slightly, now a little to this side and now to that, wandering the way a stream wanders across a flat meadow, never leaving its bed but never quite holding to the center of it.

The shaft was straight.

The rivers in it were not.

They went where they went.

Twelve

This one sat very still.

Somewhere far off, a maul fell in the splitting yard.

The lamp burned.

And in the shell, where the held place used to be, something was opening. Not slowly, the way the breath opens or the grain opens. All at once, the way a window opens when the shutter is thrown back. The light comes in and the room is suddenly full of it, and every thing in the room that was in shadow a moment before is standing there in plain sight, exactly where it always was.

Thirteen

This one understood the eleven arrows.

The eleven that missed. That flew straight and silent and lifted at fifty paces and went over the butts.

They were made slowly. Of dry wood. With shed feathers. Without hurry.

But they were made against the gauge.

This one had laid each shaft against the stick and made it the right length. This one had shaved each one round, and true, and straight, by the eye and the hand, the way an arrow should be. And inside each of them the rivers of the bamboo had been running their own way, bending around the nodes, drifting across the meadows between, and this one had never once looked to see where they went.

This one had shaved across them.

Not much. Not as the bending irons forced them, or the mauls tore them. Only a little. Only where the shaft had to be round and the rivers were not quite round. Only where the shaft had to be the length of the gauge and the rivers did not end at the gauge’s notch. A hair’s width here. A little more there.

A little, and a little, and a little.

All the way down every shaft.

Fourteen

So the arrows were straight.

But the rivers inside them were cut.

And at fifty paces, when the force of the bow had run out, and the arrow had to carry itself the rest of the way on what was in it, the cut rivers could not carry it.

The arrow lifted.

Not because it was crooked.

Because it was lost.

Fifteen

The crane was still watching.

“Hm,” she said again, very quietly.

This one looked up at her.

“The gauge measures the shaft,” this one said. The words came slowly, but they came. “It does not measure the rivers. (breath) These hands made the shaft fit the gauge. They should have made it fit the rivers.”

The crane said nothing for a while. Then she reached over and touched, with one long white finger, the shaft on this one’s knees. Very lightly. Right at a node, where the grain curved out around the knuckle.

“In the body,” she said, “we do not cut the rivers to make the arm fit the sleeve. We make the sleeve fit the arm.”

Sixteen

That night, this one did not shave.

This one took up the little carving knife and turned it in the hand so that only the very point of it touched the bamboo. Not the edge. The point.

And this one drew.

Seventeen

It is very hard to see the grain of bamboo by lamplight.

This one had to bring the eye very close to the shaft, so close that the breath stirred the dust on it. It was hard to follow, too. The fibers are so fine, and so many, and they lie so close together. To follow one of them from end to end without losing it among the others is like following a single thread through a whole bolt of cloth.

So this one did not follow one.

This one followed the way they went together.

Where they drifted to one side, this one drifted with them. Where they curved out around a node, this one curved too. Where they drew back together past the node and ran on, this one ran on beside them. With the very point of the little knife, this one scratched a fine line in the pale surface of the shaft, so faint it could hardly be seen, following not any one fiber but the river they made together.

From the nock end, where the bowstring would sit.

Down past the first node, curving out and in.

Down across the long meadow, drifting.

Down past the second node.

Down to the place where the point would be seated.

When it was done, there was a single faint line along the length of the shaft. It was not straight. It wandered and bent and curved out around the knuckles and drew in again, and it was the most beautiful thing this one had ever made.

Eighteen

It was not a measurement.

It did not say how long. It did not say how round. It did not say anything the gauge could check.

It was a path.

It said: this is the way this shaft goes.

Nineteen

This one laid the knife aside.

This one looked at the path in the lamplight.

Then this one took up the knife again, turned it, and set the edge to the shaft to shave it, as before.

But this time, this one shaved along the path.

Twenty

It is a different thing to shave with the path than to shave against the gauge.

Against the gauge, the knife goes where the shaft must be. Round. True. The same as every other shaft.

With the path, the knife goes where the shaft already is. It does not take away anything that the river needs. It takes away only what lies outside the river, the rough skin, the loose fibers, the parts that are not on the way. It follows the path as a boat follows a current: steering a little, but never against.

The shaving went faster.

This one did not expect that. This one had thought it would go slower, since there was more to watch. But it went faster, because the knife was not fighting. The curls lifted easily and fell. The hand came to the end of each stroke and found the scarlet loop and rested, one breath, and went back. There was nothing to clench against at the end of the stroke, because there had been nothing to push against in the middle of it.

When it was done, the shaft was round, and true, and straight.

This one laid it against the gauge.

It was the right length.

It was the same as every other shaft in the yard, in every way the gauge could measure.

And the path ran down the center of it, unbroken, from end to end.

Twenty-One

The crane had not left.

She sat on her crate across the bench and had not said a word since the touch at the node. When this one laid the shaft down at last, she leaned forward and looked along it in the lamplight, very close, the way Sergeant Reedwhistle had looked along the eleven, the way the quartermaster had looked along the split culm.

She looked for a long time.

Then she sat back.

“Hm,” she said.

That was all.

This one has heard her say that sound a hundred times now. This one has learned that it means a hundred different things.

This one had never heard it mean that before.

Twenty-Two

Luminous.

That is the word for what came into the shell that night, sitting at the bench with the shaft across the knees and the inked rivers still black on the arm.

Not bright. Bright is too loud. Bright hurts the eyes.

Luminous. The way water is luminous at dawn, when the sky is grey and there is no sun, and yet the river shines, not from any light that falls on it but from some light that seems to rise up from within it. Everything this one looked at that night seemed to shine so. The lamp, the knife, the scarlet loops, the pale curls on the sackcloth, the old flat-nailed hands, the crane’s white feathers and scarlet crown. All of it plain. All of it clear. Every thing exactly where it was, and every thing, for the first time, seen.

Twenty-Three

The gauge is not wrong.

An arrow must be the right length, or it will not draw. An arrow must be round, or it will not fly true. The gauge measures these, and it is good that it does.

But the gauge does not see the rivers.

So a creature who makes arrows only against the gauge makes arrows that are the right length and round and true and lost.

The rivers are not wrong either.

But a creature who follows only the rivers and never lays the shaft against the gauge makes arrows that are beautiful and will not draw.

The arrow must be both.

The measurement from outside.

The path from inside.

And the hand that holds them both, resting, at the place where they meet.

Twenty-Four

Late in the night, the crane rose to go.

At the edge of the lamplight, she paused and looked back at this one’s arm, still lying across the bench with the three black rivers drawn on it.

“The ink will wash away,” she said. “In a day or two. The rain.”

This one looked down at the arm.

“Yes,” this one said.

“Hm,” she said. “Then you will need to find another way to remember.”

And she went out into the dark.

Twenty-Five

This one sat a long time after she had gone.

The lamp burned. The yard roared, a little softer now, in the deep of the night. The two grey goose feathers lay on the sackcloth beside the shaft with the path drawn on it, waiting.

The black rivers lay on the arm.

They would wash away.

That is the way of things. The ink washes away. The scarlet loop is untied and lost. The resting place is pressed and the hand remembers, and then the next morning the hand forgets. The crane said so herself: every day, many times every day.

And the path drawn on the shaft would go out of the yard in a crate with the arrow, to Harrowgate Ford, to the muster, to the hand of some archer on some cold morning. It would fly, and strike, or miss, and be gone, and this one would never see it again.

How does one keep a path that is always going away?

Twenty-Six

There was a piece of bamboo under the bench.

It was a strip, a little longer than a hand, from the very first culm that opened. The one split on the morning of the first breath, without a splinter, whose inside the quartermaster had touched with his finger. It had been too narrow to make a shaft. It had lain under the bench since, in the shadow, forgotten.

This one took it up.

It was pale and smooth and clean. The grain ran along it fine and close, bending a little at the one small node near its end.

This one took up the little knife and turned it to the point.

And on that strip of bamboo, by the light of the steady lamp, this one drew the rivers.

Twenty-Seven

Not the rivers of the bamboo. Those were already there.

The rivers of the arm.

Slowly. Looking from the strip to the black lines on the skin and back again. This one scratched the river of the lung, from the top of the strip, curving a little to one side, bending, running down to the bottom edge. Then the river of the heart’s protector, straight down the center. Then the river of the heart, along the far side. Three faint lines on a strip of pale bamboo, as the crane had drawn them on the arm.

And where they came close together, near the bottom, at the place on the strip that matched the inside of the wrist, this one cut one small notch.

The resting place.

Then, beneath the three rivers, this one did one thing more. Following the grain of the strip itself, very lightly, so that it lay among the other three like a fourth stream joining them in a single valley, this one drew the path of the bamboo.

Four paths. The body’s three, and the wood’s one. Side by side on one small strip, the way they had lain side by side across this one’s knees in the lamplight.

Twenty-Eight

This one had no cord.

The mother’s red thread was on the first shaft. The crane’s scarlet thread was tied in loops at a dozen resting places on the bench. There was only the spool of plain linen, for binding fletchings.

So this one took plain linen.

This one bored a small hole at the top of the strip with the point of the knife. This one drew the linen through it and tied it in a loop, long enough to go over the head.

And put it on.

Twenty-Nine

It hung against the chest.

Against the plastron, the flat lower shell, just over the place where the heart beats underneath. Pale against the grey. Light. Weighing almost nothing.

The paths on it lay over the heart.

Thirty

The ink on the arm will wash away.

The paths on the shafts will fly away.

The crane will go back to her marsh. The raven will go back to his wood. The fortnight will end, and the quartermaster will come with his ledger, and count.

This one does not know what will happen then.

But the paths will be here.

Against the heart, where the hands can touch them in the dark. Where the eyes can look down and see them when the yard roars and the hammers fall and the hands begin to hurry. Not to measure anything. Only to remember the way.

Thirty-One

A measurement is laid on a thing from outside.

It can be checked. It can be counted.

A path is found inside the thing.

It can only be followed.

This one spent forty-one years measuring.

Tonight, this one began to follow.

The lamp does not flicker.

The paths lie over the heart.

And everything, in the luminous dark before the dawn, is exactly where it was, and seen.

 

Segment 15:

An Inventory of Failures

I come now to a chapter of this history which I have always privately thought of as the Chapter of the Crates. It is a chapter in which very little happens, except that a great many broken things are counted by a boar-folk who would much rather not have counted them. I warn the reader of this beforehand, so that if he has no taste for broken things, or for counting, or for boar-folk, he may skip ahead to some livelier part of the story. But I hope he will not. For it was in the counting of those broken things, in a cold storeroom at the back of the first shed, by the light of a single lantern, over the course of one long and miserable night, that I first began to suspect that I had been wrong about everything, and that I had been wrong about it in a column of figures, which is the worst way there is to be wrong.

The crates came on a Conjursday, eleven days into the tortoise’s fortnight.

There were nineteen of them, carried up the river road from Harrowgate Ford in two wagons. They were long, low, and battered, stamped on the side with the triple-arrow crest of the council and, beneath it, the words SALVAGE — NINTH LEVY — COASTAL CAMPAIGN. They were accompanied by a short, stout, exceedingly damp beaver-folk with spectacles even thicker than mine and a ledger even fatter. He introduced himself as Mr. Lazarus Pockridge, Salvage Clerk to the Ninth Levy, and informed me, before I had so much as offered him a chair, that he had a docket requiring my signature in three places.

I should explain to the reader what salvage is, in case he has been fortunate enough never to have to know.

When an army has finished a battle, and the dead have been buried and the wounded carried off, there remains upon the field a very great number of arrows. Some of them are in the ground, where they fell short or went long. Some are in the trees. Some are in shields and saddles and the sides of wagons. And some, I am sorry to say, are in the creatures they were sent to stop. It is the custom of the war council, as it is the custom of every army that has ever had to pay for its own arrows, to send out after every battle a party of salvage-men. Their task is to gather up as many of these arrows as they can find, by whatever means are necessary, and send them back to the yards that made them. There the arrows are inspected, and those that can be mended are mended, and those that cannot are burned. It is grim work. I had always left it to Mr. Scrapple, who has a stronger stomach than his size suggests, and had never myself so much as lifted the lid of a salvage crate in eleven years.

The salvage from the coastal campaign, Mr. Pockridge informed me, was late, owing to the weather on the coast and the great number of fields to be searched. Nineteen crates. Some two thousand, two hundred arrows recovered, of the ten thousand and twelve that Cinderford had sent. The rest had been lost, burned, or broken past finding. Would I sign here, and here, and here?

I signed. I always sign. It is my besetting sin, as the reader will have observed.

Mr. Pockridge took his docket and his damp self back down the river road to Harrowgate, and left me standing in the yard beside nineteen battered crates.

“Mr. Scrapple,” I said. “Into the back storeroom with these. You can sort ’em tomorrow.”

Mr. Scrapple looked at the crates, and then at me, with his small dark anxious eyes.

“Sergeant,” he said. “I’m on the Bench Return for Requisition Four ‘Undred an’ Seven tomorrow. The Colonel wants it by Transmuday.”

I had forgotten. There was always a requisition by then. They came every week now, numbered and printed, each one wanting a little more than the last.

“Right,” I said. “Then I’ll sort ’em.”

I want the reader to mark that. I said it without thinking, the way a creature says “bless you” to a sneeze. It was the first time in eleven years that I had volunteered to do a thing myself rather than give it to someone else to do. If I had known what was in those crates, I should have given it to the goblin twins and gone to bed.

I began after supper, when the yard had settled into its long night roar.

The back storeroom of the first shed is a cold stone room with no window and a single door. In the sensible days it held our reserve of points and glue-cakes and spare bowstring. In the days of the haste, it held nothing, for we had used up every reserve we had. The nineteen crates had been stacked against its far wall. I brought in a lantern and hung it from a hook in the ceiling. I brought in a stool, and a long trestle table, and my ledger, and a fresh pen, and two pots of ink, black and red. I took off my apron coat, for it was hot work hauling crates even in a cold room, and I hung it on a nail by the door.

Then I pried the lid off the first crate.

I will not describe to the reader at length what was inside. He has stood, I think, with the healer in the field hospital at Harrowgate, and seen the splinters in the lynx’s arm, and he can imagine. I will tell him only that the crate was full of broken arrows. Shafts snapped in two, in three, in ten. Shafts split down their length into long green slivers, curled and twisted like wood shavings, still held together at one end by a binding of rotten linen. Points torn loose and gone, or bent double. Fletchings stripped away, or glued on crooked, or never glued at all. And among all of these, here and there, scattered through the wreckage like the occasional good tooth in an old mouth, a few arrows that were still whole.

I emptied the crate onto the trestle. I took up my pen. I opened the ledger to a fresh page, and at the top of it, in my round firm hand, I wrote:

SALVAGE. COASTAL CAMPAIGN. INVENTORY.

And beneath it, three columns: Whole. Mendable. Broken.

Then I began to count.

I should explain one thing more, and it is a thing of very great importance to all that follows, though at the time I thought nothing of it at all.

At Cinderford, as at every orderly yard in the valleys, it had always been the custom for every bench to put its mark on every arrow it made. This was done for accountability, so that if an arrow was found to be faulty, the yard might know whose fault it was. The mark was very small, a number scratched with the point of a knife into the shaft just below the nock, where it would not be seen by the archer or interfere with the string. The hedgehogs at the first bench scratched a 1. The goblin twins at the fifth scratched a 5, though I suspected them of occasionally scratching a 6, in order to blame the field-mice next door. Mr. Crouch at the ninth scratched a 9, very neatly, with a little flourish on the tail. And so on, all the way down the line of benches, to the last.

The reader will see at once what this meant, and will have seen it, I dare say, long before I did.

It meant that every one of those two thousand two hundred salvaged arrows, whole or broken, carried in its shaft, just below the nock, the number of the bench that made it.

I counted all night.

It was slow, miserable, cold work. I took each arrow from the heap, turned it over in the lantern light, found the bench mark, and looked it over to decide whether it was whole, or mendable, or broken. Then I made a tick in the proper column, against the proper bench. I had ruled the page into forty-one rows, one for every bench in the yard. The hedgehogs’ row filled up with ticks in the Broken column, and so did the field-mice’s, and the goblins’ most of all. Here and there a tick went into Mendable. Very seldom indeed, perhaps once in a dozen arrows, perhaps once in twenty, a tick went into Whole.

By midnight I had emptied six crates. My fingers were cut in a dozen places by the green splinters. My back ached. My tusks throbbed, steadily, the way they had throbbed every day since the first letter, with that dull dutiful ache that had settled into them like rain into an old roof.

By the hour of two I had emptied eleven. The heap of broken arrows on the floor of the storeroom was as high as the trestle. The lantern had burned down and been refilled. I had stopped counting the splinters in my fingers.

By the hour of four I had emptied seventeen. I was so tired that the ticks on the page had begun to swim before my eyes, and I had begun to talk to myself, in a low grumbling mutter, the way old creatures do when they are alone and cold. Broken. Broken. Mendable, perhaps. Broken. Broken. A bench, broken. Five, broken. Five, broken. Five, broken, an’ glued on backward, Lord ‘elp me. Nine, mendable. Nine, whole! Well done, Crouch. Broken. Broken.

It was in the eighteenth crate that I found the first arrow marked 41.

I did not notice it at first. I was too tired. I took it up as I had taken up two thousand others, and turned it over in the lantern light, and found the mark below the nock. It was a small, neat, slightly crooked 41, scratched with the point of a fine knife. I looked the arrow over.

It was whole.

Not mendable. Whole. The shaft was straight and unsplit from nock to point. The point was seated true. The fletchings, three grey feathers bound with plain linen, were clean and smooth and lay as close against the shaft as on the day they were bound. There was mud on it, and a dark stain near the point that I did not care to look at closely. But it was whole.

I made a tick in the Whole column, in the row for bench forty-one, and laid it aside.

And took up the next. It was marked 5, and broken.

And the next. It was marked 41.

Whole.

I sat up on my stool.

I took up the next. 12, broken. The next. 3, broken. The next. 41.

Whole.

I did not take up the next. I sat very still in the cold storeroom with the arrow marked 41 in my cut and inky hands, and I looked at it. Then I got up off my stool, and went to the eighteenth crate, and the nineteenth, and pulled them over to the lantern. And there in the cold dark at the hour of four in the morning, I went through every arrow left in them, one by one. I did not look at whether they were whole or broken. I looked for the mark. I was looking for one number only.

I found twelve.

The reader will remember, if he has followed this history closely, that the tortoise’s bench had made exactly twelve arrows in the whole of the first great haste. They went out with the rest in the wagons, so that the final tally stood at ten thousand and twelve. And of all those ten thousand, the salvage-men on the coast had recovered some two thousand two hundred. That is to say, rather more than one arrow in five.

From the tortoise’s bench, they had recovered twelve arrows of twelve.

Every one.

I laid them out on the trestle in a row, under the lantern, side by side. Twelve arrows. Twelve straight, silent, ordinary arrows of pale bamboo with grey feathers and plain linen bindings. I looked at them for a long time.

Then I counted them.

Whole. Whole. Whole. Mendable, a little, the binding worn on one fletching. Whole. Whole. Whole. Whole. Whole. Whole. Mendable, a little, the point bent slightly from striking something hard. Whole.

Ten whole. Two mendable. Not one broken.

I turned back to the ledger. I took up my pen. I added up the columns for the other forty benches, every one, carefully, twice, the way I had been taught. For the whole of the rest of the yard, of the two thousand one hundred and eighty-eight arrows that had come back, a hundred and nine were whole. Three hundred and forty were mendable. The other one thousand seven hundred and thirty-nine were broken past mending.

One arrow in twenty, whole.

From bench forty-one, five in six.

I sat there in the cold with the pen in my hand and the ink drying on the nib.

I want to be honest with the reader about what I felt then, because it was not what a better creature would have felt. It was not wonder. It was not joy. It was certainly not shame; that came later. What I felt, sitting there at four in the morning with my fingers full of green splinters and those twelve whole arrows lying on the trestle before me, was irritation. Deep, bristling, bone-tired irritation, the irritation of a creature who has done a long sum very carefully and arrived at an answer that will not fit in any column he has ruled.

For it was nonsense. It was perfect nonsense. That tortoise had made twelve arrows in thirty-four days, while the goblin twins made four hundred and forty-one. It had made eleven more that missed the butts entirely at the proofing, every one of them flying over the target as if it had somewhere better to be. It had sat at its bench for a fortnight doing nothing whatsoever but breathe at a stick, until I had to stand over it in front of the whole yard and a council colonel and serve it with notice. Of all the benches in Cinderford, it was the slowest, the strangest, the least productive, and the most embarrassing.

And it had made the only arrows that came back.

“Nonsense,” I said aloud, to the storeroom. “Snrk. Nonsense.”

The storeroom did not answer.

I got up. I walked round the trestle. I picked up one of the twelve and squinted down its length in the lantern light, and it was straight. I flexed it gently between my hands, as I had seen Sergeant Reedwhistle do, and felt it spring back, clean and sweet, without a creak. I held the fletching to my ear and flicked it, and it made a soft dry whisper, like a page turning. I put it down.

I picked up an arrow from the heap on the floor, marked 5, one of the few the goblins had made that had not been broken. I squinted down its length. It was not quite straight. I flexed it, and it creaked, and I felt something give, deep inside it, like a joint going out of place. I flicked the fletching, and it rattled, because one of the three feathers had been glued on half a finger’s width too high and stood up from the shaft at an angle.

I put it down too.

Then I did a thing which I had sworn, in my own heart, at the very beginning of the haste, that I would never do again until the haste was over.

I went to the nail by the door where my apron coat was hanging. I reached into the inmost pocket, the one over the heart, and I took out the black spectacles.

I want the reader to understand what this cost me. I had not put those spectacles on in five weeks. Not since the eighth day of the first great haste, when I had walked down the first shed and seen through them a bundle of fresh arrows glowing like embers, every one of them blushing red along its flaws, and had taken them off, and folded them, and put them away, and called the bundle good. I had carried them over my heart every day since. Every day they had weighed a little more. And every day I had told myself that I did not need them, that I could see well enough without them, that a quartermaster who has kept the most orderly yard in the river valleys for eleven years does not need a pair of soot-black spectacles to tell him whether an arrow is good.

I unfolded them. I put them on.

And I looked at the heap.

The reader has seen, I think, a bonfire built of old green wood, the kind that will not burn clean but only smoulders, glowing red in a hundred places through the smoke. That is what the heap of salvaged arrows on the floor of the cold storeroom looked like through those spectacles. Two thousand broken shafts, and every one of them glowing. Red along every split. Red along every crack. Red at every crooked fletching and every badly seated point and every place where green wood had been forced straight in an iron jaw and had sprung back crooked the first time it was bent in a bow. The whole heap blushed and burned and shimmered, a great dull smouldering pile of failure, from the floor nearly to the height of the trestle.

I looked away from it.

I looked at the trestle, where the twelve arrows from bench forty-one lay in their row beneath the lantern.

They did not glow.

Not one of them. Not anywhere. Not even the two that were mendable. Through those soot-black lenses, they lay on the table as pale and plain and quiet as they lay to the naked eye. There was not a single blush of red on any of them, from nock to point, as if the spectacles had looked them over carefully from end to end and found nothing whatever to complain of.

I took the spectacles off.

I put them on again.

I took them off.

“Nonsense,” I said, more quietly this time.

The storeroom did not answer this time either. But I had the strangest notion, standing there in the cold with the spectacles in my hand, that the twelve arrows on the trestle had heard me, and were waiting, very patiently, for me to say something more sensible.

I sat down again on my stool. I turned the ledger back to the beginning of the fortnight. In it, on a page of its own, Mr. Scrapple had kept, on my orders, a daily account of bench forty-one: every arrow the tortoise made, every shaft it shaved, every culm it split, and every one it threw away. I had ordered it out of spite. I had meant it to be the evidence on which I would turn the creature out of my yard at the end of its fortnight. I had not looked at it since.

I looked at it now.

It was, as the reader may imagine, a short account. In eleven days, the tortoise had split six culms of dry bamboo. I never did learn where it had found dry bamboo, in a yard where I had split every billet in the barn. It had made from them nine shafts, of which it had finished seven into arrows. Of those seven, four had been proofed by Sergeant Reedwhistle, whose arm was healed enough by then to draw, and all four had passed. Two had cracked in the making, at the binding, and been thrown into the kindling bin by the tortoise’s own hand. One had been finished but not proofed, because, Mr. Scrapple had noted in a very small, puzzled hand, “the tortoise said it was not yet sure.”

Nine shafts. Seven arrows. Four passed. Two cracked. One not yet sure.

It was, by any measure I had ever kept, an inventory of failures. A bench that in eleven days had made fewer arrows than the goblin twins made between breakfast and dinner, and broken a third of what it made.

And it was the only bench in the yard whose arrows came back.

I sat there with the ledger open on my knees and the spectacles in my hand and the lantern burning down. And I felt rise up in me, through all that bone-tired bristling irritation, something I had not felt since I was a very young boar at my father’s knee in the counting-house at Harrowgate. I had asked him then why two columns of figures that ought to have added up to the same total did not, and he had said, “Find out, boy. That’s what columns are for.”

It was curiosity.

I did not want it. I want the reader to understand that. I did not want it at all. Curiosity is a dangerous thing in a quartermaster with a requisition due on Transmuday and fifteen thousand arrows wanted at the Ford. It wants things explained. It wants to know why. And why, in my experience, is a very expensive question, because it takes time, and time is the one thing the council never sends.

But there it was, sitting in my chest like a burr in a boot, and I could not shake it out.

Why?

Why did the tortoise’s arrows come back, and nobody else’s?

Was it the wood? It was dry, certainly, while ours was green. But Mr. Crouch’s wood had been green too, and Mr. Crouch’s arrows had come back mendable far oftener than the goblins’. And there were a dozen benches in the yard, in the first fortnight before the barn was emptied, that had worked with dry wood as good as the tortoise’s. Their arrows had come back broken all the same.

Was it the feathers? Shed feathers, I had heard, not plucked. I had heard something else, too, from the crane, in a voice so low I had pretended not to hear it: that the feathers in my loft had blood on their quills. But feathers do not split a shaft. It is the wood that splits, not the fletching.

Was it the speed? The slowness? Surely not. Mr. Crouch was slow too. He sighed between every arrow. And his arrows were better than the goblins’, but not five in six better. Not anything like.

Was it the hand? The creature itself? The steady lamp, and the breathing, and the red threads tied about the shafts that held nothing, and the strange faint lines I had seen scratched along the newest shafts on its bench? Lines that were not notches, nor measurements, nor anything I could name, but wandered down the bamboo like the course of a stream drawn on a map?

I did not know.

And not knowing, for a creature who has kept the most orderly ledgers in the river valleys for eleven years, is a kind of torment.

The dawn came grey under the storeroom door.

I heard the yard begin to roar: the hammers in the bending shed, the mauls in the splitting yard, the ox-folk foreman shouting the count, the goblins arguing. Somewhere far off by the glue house, I heard the crane say “Hm” to somebody, in that soft, maddening, unreadable voice of hers.

I closed the ledger. I put the spectacles back in the pocket over my heart. I put on my apron coat. I gathered up the twelve arrows from the trestle, the twelve from bench forty-one, very carefully, the way one gathers up eggs.

Then I stood there with them in my arms, not knowing what to do with them.

At last I took them back to my office, and laid them on the shelf behind my desk, beside the oldest of my ledgers, where I could see them. Then I sat down at my desk and took out a fresh sheet of paper and wrote across the top of it, in my own round firm hand:

BENCH 41. RETURNS.

And beneath it, in a single line, the figures. Sent, twelve. Recovered, twelve. Whole, ten. Mendable, two. Broken, nil.

I looked at it for a long time. Then, below it, I wrote:

Remainder of yard. Sent, ten thousand. Recovered, two thousand one hundred and eighty-eight. Whole, one hundred and nine.

I did not draw a line beneath them. I could not think where it ought to go.

Mr. Scrapple came in at the usual hour with his whiskers trembling and his arms full of papers for Requisition Four Hundred and Seven. He stopped in the doorway, and looked at me, and at the shelf behind me with the twelve arrows on it, and at the sheet of paper on my desk.

“Sergeant?” he said. “You’ve been up all night.”

“I ‘ave.”

“Is everything… in order?”

I looked at the paper. At the two lines of figures, which would not add up to anything I understood. At the twelve arrows on the shelf, pale and plain and patient, waiting for me to say something sensible.

“No, Mr. Scrapple,” I said at last. “No, it is not.” I clacked my tusks once, softly. “Bench forty-one’s fortnight ends on Divinday.”

“Yes, Sergeant. Shall I make up the notice?”

I was quiet a moment.

“No,” I said. “Make it up for another fortnight.”

Mr. Scrapple stared at me. His whiskers stopped trembling altogether, which I had never seen before.

“Another fortnight, Sergeant?”

“You ‘eard me. An’ Mr. Scrapple.”

“Yes, Sergeant?”

“Keep a separate account,” I said. “For forty-one. Everything it makes, an’ everything it breaks, an’ everything that comes back. In its own book. Not the Return.” I hesitated. “Not for the Colonel.”

“Who’s it for, then, Sergeant?”

I did not answer him. I did not know the answer. I looked at the twelve arrows on the shelf behind me, and the curiosity sat in my chest like a burr, and the spectacles weighed over my heart a little less than they had the night before.

“Chop-chop, Mr. Scrapple,” I said. “The Colonel wants ‘is Return by Transmuday.”

He went out, shaking his small head.

I sat at my desk a while longer with the sheet of paper before me. Then I took up my pen and wrote beneath the two lines of figures, in a small hand, so small I could hardly read it myself:

Why?

I left it there, without a line beneath it.

I want the reader to know that it was the first question I had ever written in a ledger in my life.

 

Segment 16:

The Long Night of Many Failures

I have spoken already of the dread that came upon me in the rafters of the third shed, in the days before I dropped to the tortoise’s bench. I spoke of the steady lamp, and the breathing, and the bundle of stolen feathers, and the bell that shrieked. I have told how I counted the tortoise’s breaths until I could not stop, and how I came to fear that slow and even sound as one fears the ticking of a clock in an empty house at midnight.

I must tell you now of another kind of night. It was a long night, made of many nights strung together like black beads upon a thread. In it the dread was gone, and in its place there grew something heavier and sadder, which I have no single word for, though I have searched for one through many sleepless hours since. It was the feeling of a creature who watches another creature fail, and fail, and fail again, and can do nothing to help, and will not look away.

I had not meant to go back to the rafters.

When I walked out of the third shed into the dawn, after the bowing and the asking and the feather, with the stolen primaries of my rookery gathered close inside my cloak, I meant to go home. I meant to walk the long muddy road back up the valley to the rookery wood and climb my dead beech and sit there, counting, as I had sat before. I had what I had come for. I had the requisition with the boar’s name on it, and the bundle of stolen feathers, and the knowledge that at least one creature in that yard of thieves had bowed in the dust and asked.

But I did not go home.

I went instead, that first morning, to the marsh downriver, where the reeds are tall and the ladders, I had heard, had not yet come. I walked along the edge of the water with my cracked bell silent at my throat, and I looked for birds.

There were not many. The valley had been robbed a great deal by then. Where there had once been herons standing in every shallow, there was now only an empty reach of water and wind. But in a hidden pool at the far end of the marsh, behind a screen of willows, I found a family of grey geese. They were wild geese, eight of them, whole. They had not been plucked. They had not been found. They saw me coming and drew together on the water in a tight frightened knot, the gander at the front with his neck stretched low and his wings half open, hissing.

I stopped at the edge of the pool. I folded my wings, the whole one and the crooked one. I let my cloak fall open, so that they could see what it was made of: the shed feathers of a thousand birds, every one of them freely given. And I knelt, as the tortoise had knelt, in the cold mud at the water’s edge, and bowed my notched beak to the ground.

“I am the Keeper of the Molted Rookery,” I said. “I do not take. I come to ask.”

The gander hissed. The geese drew closer together. I stayed where I was, bowed, in the mud.

I do not know how long I stayed there. Long enough for the cold to creep up through my legs into my bones. Long enough for the sun to climb above the willows. And then, at last, the old gander swam slowly toward me across the pool, his neck still low, his eyes still wary. He stopped an arm’s length from the bank, and looked at me for a long time. Then he raised his great grey wing and shook it, once, hard, so that the water flew from it in a bright shower.

Two long feathers drifted down onto the surface of the pool, and floated toward me on the ripples.

They were loose. They had been ready to drop in the next molt. He had shaken them free a month early, because I had asked.

I gathered them up out of the water with my talons. I could not speak. I bowed again, lower, and the gander turned and swam back to his family, and I walked away along the edge of the marsh with the two grey feathers held close against my breast. My bell made no sound at all.

That night I climbed back into the rafters of the third shed, quietly, by the dark side of the roof. While the tortoise sat with its head bowed over its work, I dropped down without a sound and laid the two grey feathers on the sackcloth beside its lamp, and climbed back up again into the dark.

I told myself I would stay one night, to see what the tortoise did with them.

I stayed for twelve.

I must try to tell you what I saw. It was very little, and it was very much, and it was the same thing, over and over, every night, like a single dark verse sung again and again to the same slow tune.

The tortoise worked.

It worked as I had never seen anyone work. In my seven years as Keeper, I watched the old woodcutters of the valley fell their trees, and the potters at the river-crossing throw their pots, and once, at a great fair at Harrowgate, a glassblower who could make a bird of blue glass so fine you could see the light of the lamp through its wings. None of them worked as the tortoise worked.

It did not hurry. You know that. But it was not only that it did not hurry. It was that every motion it made seemed to stop, at its end, and wait, and only then go on to the next. It would draw its little knife along the bamboo in one long slow stroke. A pale curl would lift and fall. Then, before the knife went back to begin the next stroke, the tortoise’s thumb would come to rest, very lightly, on one of the small scarlet loops of thread tied about the bench and the shaft. And the tortoise would breathe.

In. And out. All the way.

Then the next stroke.

On the first night, I counted the strokes. It was my habit, my curse. I could not help it. Three hundred and eleven strokes to shave a single shaft, every one of them followed by a breath, and every one of those breaths so long and slow that by the hundredth I had begun to breathe with it myself, without meaning to, up there on my crossbeam in the dark. The great planet hung in the doorway, banded and enormous. The hammers rang in the bending shed. The arrows sang in the field. And I sat in the rafters breathing in time with a tortoise, three hundred and eleven times, until the shaft was done.

It was beautiful.

I am not a fletcher. I know feathers, not wood. But even I could see, from the rafters, that the shaft was beautiful. It was pale and round and straight in the lamplight, and down the whole length of it, faint as the trail of a snail across a stone, ran a single scratched line that wandered and curved and bent around each knuckle of the bamboo, like a stream running down a valley.

The tortoise laid the shaft across its knees and looked at it for a long time.

Then it took up one of the grey goose feathers.

It held the feather across its open palms, as it had held mine, for many breaths. I saw its hands trembling, ever so slightly, even from the rafters. Then it took up its knife and, very slowly, began to cut the vanes for the fletching. One long careful stroke, then the thumb resting on the scarlet loop at the edge of the sackcloth, then the breath. Another stroke. Another rest. Another breath.

And on the third stroke, the knife slipped.

Only a little. The width of a grain of barley. But the vane of a goose feather is a fragile thing, as fine as silk and as easily torn. Where the knife slipped, it tore across, and the fletching was spoiled.

The tortoise stopped.

I leaned forward on my crossbeam. I held my breath. I waited for it: the curse, the snarl, the flung knife, the clenched fist striking the bench. I had seen it in every creature in that yard. I had seen it a hundred times a night from the rafters, as feathers tore and glue spilled and shafts split and points bent. The goblin twins hurled their spoiled arrows at each other. The farm girl wept. The ox-folk foreman of the splitting yard roared and kicked his billets. Even the melancholy goat, Mr. Crouch, sighed so deeply over his failures that the sigh was a kind of curse. I waited for it.

It did not come.

The tortoise sat very still, looking at the torn vane in its fingers.

Then it breathed out.

All the way.

And then it laid the torn vane down on the sackcloth, very gently, in a clean place beside the lamp, as one might lay down a fledgling that has fallen from a nest. And it took up the knife again, and the feather, and began again.

The second fletching came out whole. And the third. And then a fourth, to replace the one that had torn.

The tortoise bound them to the shaft with plain linen, wrap after wrap, its fingers resting on the scarlet loops between each one. By the time the great planet had sunk halfway down the western sky, there was an arrow lying on the sackcloth, pale and straight, with three grey fletchings and a steel point. Faint along its length ran the wandering path.

The tortoise looked at it.

Then it took it up, and flexed it gently between its hands, and held it to its ear.

And I heard, from the rafters, a small dry sound. Like a twig stepped on in a quiet room.

It had cracked. Somewhere inside the shaft, near the binding of the fletchings, where the linen was wound tight, the bamboo had split. Not much. A hair’s breadth. Not enough to see. But enough to hear, and enough to spoil it.

The tortoise held the cracked arrow in its hands.

I waited again for the curse.

Again it did not come.

The tortoise breathed out, all the way. Then, slowly, very carefully, it began to unwind the linen binding from the fletchings. Wrap by wrap. It took the three grey vanes from the cracked shaft one by one and laid them on the sackcloth beside the torn one, smoothing them flat with the side of its thumb. It looked at the cracked shaft for a long while. Then it rose, slowly, and carried it down the length of the shed toward the door, and was gone a little while. When it came back, its hands were empty. I learned later that it had taken the shaft to the glue house and laid it, with a bow, on the fire, so that it would at least be warmth.

It sat down.

It took up a new stave of bamboo.

And began again.

That was the first night.

I wish I could tell you that the second was better. It was not. Nor the third, nor the fourth.

On the second night, the shaft warped. The tortoise had shaved it in the evening, three hundred and some strokes, with its slow breath and its resting thumb, and laid it on the bench to wait while it cut the next. And in the cold of the small hours, when the thin rain blew in through the gaps in the walls and the damp crept up through the floor of the shed, I watched from the rafters as the shaft lying on the bench very slowly began to bend. It bent like a stalk of grass when the sun goes off it, so slightly I thought at first it was the lamplight playing tricks. But it bent, and by dawn it lay on the sackcloth in a long faint curve, like a bow unstrung.

The tortoise looked at it. Breathed out. Took it to the glue-house fire.

Began again.

On the third night, the point would not seat. The tortoise had made a shaft and fletched it whole, with feathers from an old crow I had found the day before nesting alone in a ruined barn, who had given me three primaries without a word and turned her back. But when it came to drive the steel point onto the tip of the shaft, the bamboo split at the tip. A small split, but a split. The tortoise tried again with a second point, very gently, very slowly, with a breath at each small tap of its tiny hammer. The second split worse.

Breathed out. Took it to the fire.

Began again.

On the fourth night, it made a whole arrow, from nock to point, with no crack, no warp, no split. I watched it from the rafters in a kind of agony, hardly daring to breathe. I counted every stroke and every rest and every breath, and when at last it was done and the tortoise took it up and flexed it and held it to its ear and heard nothing, nothing at all, no crack, no creak, I nearly cried out aloud.

Then the tortoise looked along it.

It looked a long time. Its amber eyes narrowed. It turned the arrow slowly in the lamplight, and I saw the scratched path running down its length, and I saw that near the middle, where the shaft passed a knuckle of the bamboo, the path did not curve as it should. It ran straight across the knuckle, cutting it, as a road cuts a hill. The tortoise had followed the river all the way down from the nock and then, for the length of one breath, perhaps less, lost it, and cut across.

It was a very small thing. I am not certain I would have seen it if I had not been looking for it.

The tortoise saw it.

It held that arrow for a long time. Longer than any of the others. I watched it from the dark, and I thought it would set it with the others for proofing. The arrow was whole. It was straight. It had not cracked. Surely, surely, one small cut across one small knuckle could not matter so much as that.

The tortoise breathed out.

And then, very gently, it began to unwind the bindings.

I could not bear it. I turned my head away and pressed my notched beak into the feathers of my breast and shut my eyes, and for a long time I did not look.

When I looked again, the arrow was gone, and the fletchings were lying on the sackcloth with the others, and the tortoise was sitting with a new stave of bamboo across its knees. It had its little knife in its hand and its thumb on a scarlet loop.

And it was breathing.

In. Out.

Beginning again.

I must tell you now about the feathers, for it was the feathers that broke my heart.

You will have seen already, I think, what I did not at first see. Every time the tortoise failed, and it failed every night, and some nights more than once, it took the gift feathers back off the failed shaft. The grey goose, the black crow, a pale gull’s feather from a cliff at the river’s mouth, a single tawny primary from an old kite who had circled me a whole afternoon before she let it fall. It took them back, unwound them from their bindings, smoothed them flat, and laid them on the sackcloth beside the lamp.

It did not throw them away.

It did not burn them with the shafts.

It laid them in a row. A small row at first, then a longer one. Night by night it grew, until it reached almost the whole length of the bench, every feather smoothed and lying straight, every one of them a gift that had not yet found its arrow.

On the eighth night, I understood what it was.

The tortoise was keeping them.

As I keep the molted feathers of my rookery. As I gather them up from the moss and the leaf-litter, and sew each one into my cloak with a small knot of gratitude, so that none should go to waste. The tortoise was keeping every gift feather that its failures had spoiled, so that none of them should have been given for nothing.

And on the ninth night, something happened that I had not expected.

I had brought two feathers that night, from a pair of swans on the river who had been very hard to ask and had made me wait two days. I dropped them, as I always did, beside the lamp while the tortoise worked, and climbed back up into the dark. But the tortoise did not take them up. It laid down its knife instead. It turned its whole body slowly round, as it does, and raised its long wrinkled neck, and looked up into the rafters.

Directly at me.

It had always known I was there. I understood that in a moment, with a cold rush that went through all my feathers at once. Since the first night, perhaps. Perhaps before.

It did not speak. It reached out instead, slowly, to the long row of spoiled gift feathers on the sackcloth, and gathered them up in both hands. It held them up toward me in the lamplight, the grey and the black and the pale and the tawny, all of them, every one I had brought it in nine nights. It held them there, its arms raised, its old hands trembling, looking up at me in the dark.

And then it bowed its head over them.

I understood. I understood as surely as if it had spoken.

These hands are sorry. These were given, and these hands have not yet made them into what they were given for. These hands will not keep them if the Keeper wants them back.

I could not move.

I sat on my crossbeam in the dark with my crooked wing pressed to my side, and I looked down at that old tortoise holding up its armful of failures to me like an offering, and I felt something rise up through me that I had never felt for any creature but my own birds. It was not grief, though it was very like grief. It was not love, though it was something on the road to it. It was a slow, dark, heavy, aching thing, like a stone sinking down through deep water.

It was pity.

Not the thin cheap pity one feels for a beggar on the road, given in passing and forgotten by the next bend. A long pity. A brooding pity. The pity of one creature who has counted every theft in the valley for the creature who has counted nothing at all. I had carved every one of my sorrows into my own face, so that I would never forget them. This creature would not keep even its own failures, but gave them back to the one who had given them, with a bow, and began again.

I dropped from the rafters.

I landed on the bench beside the lamp. It did not flicker. I looked at the armful of feathers in the tortoise’s trembling hands, and then up at its heavy-lidded amber eyes.

“Keep them,” I said. My voice was very low. “They were given to thee. They are thine to fail with.”

The tortoise looked at me a long time. Then it breathed out, all the way. Slowly, it laid the feathers back down on the sackcloth in their row.

And it took up its knife, and a new stave of bamboo.

And began again.

I did not go back up into the rafters that night. I stayed on the bench, at the far end of it, in the shadow beyond the lamplight, with my cloak drawn about me. I watched from close at hand as the tortoise shaved, and rested, and breathed, and shaved.

Near the end of that night, toward the hour of four, when the great planet had sunk low in the west and the yard was at its quietest, a shape came into the doorway of the shed.

It was the boar.

He did not come in. He stood just inside the doorway, in the shadow, with no lantern and no ledger and his tusks pressed shut so that the brass rings made no sound. He looked down the length of the dark shed at the steady lamp at the far end of it, and at the tortoise beneath it, shaving. He looked at the long row of spoiled gift feathers on the sackcloth. He did not see me, I think. I was very still and very black in the shadow beyond the lamp.

I felt the old cold rage rise in me at the sight of him. The requisition against my heart burned like ice. Harrowtusk. The round, firm, unhesitating hand that signed away the rookery wood.

But he did not look like a creature who had signed away anything. He looked like a creature who had lost something and did not know where. He stood in that doorway a long, long time, a great broad bristled shape against the faint grey, watching the tortoise work. Once he raised one of his inky hands, slowly, as if to reach for something in the breast-pocket of his coat, over his heart. Then he let it fall again.

Then he turned and went away into the dark, without a sound.

I did not tell the tortoise he had been there. I think it knew.

On the twelfth night, I counted.

I could not help myself. It is my nature. I sat at the far end of the bench in the shadow and I reckoned up every failure I had seen in twelve nights.

Seven shafts cracked at the binding. Four warped in the damp. Three split at the tip when the point was seated. Two ruined by a slip of the knife in the shaving. One perfect in every respect but for a path cut across a single knuckle, which the tortoise had unbound with its own hands and burned. Nineteen shafts, all failed, all carried to the glue-house fire with a bow. Thirty-one gift feathers lay smoothed and saved in a row beside the lamp, every one still waiting for its arrow.

And through all of them, through every crack and warp and split and slip, through twelve long nights of failure, the tortoise had not once cursed the wood.

Not once.

Not a word. Not a sigh. Not a clenched fist. Every time, it had held the failure in its hands, and looked at it, and breathed out, all the way. And then it had begun again.

I had seven notches on my beak when I came to Cinderford. I had eleven now. The ladders had not stopped. Four more nights of theft in the valley while I sat in the rafters watching a tortoise fail. Four more notches carved with the edge of my silver talon-ring into the horn of my own face, so that I should never forget.

The tortoise had nineteen failures, and not one notch.

It did not count them. It did not carve them. It did not carry them on its face or its shell or anywhere at all. It carried each one to the fire, and bowed, and let it go.

I sat there at the end of the bench in the last dark before dawn, and I touched with my tongue the eleven grooves on the side of my beak, one after another. And for the first time since the third night of Illumination, I wondered whether the count I carried was a remembering, or only a kind of curse I had laid on myself and called it memory.

The tortoise was shaving. Three hundred and some strokes. Rest. Breath. Stroke.

I listened to that breath.

I had feared it once, in the rafters, as one fears the ticking of a clock in an empty house. Now, sitting close beside it in the shadow of the lamp, I found that it was not a clock at all. It was a tide. It went out, and out, and out, all the way, until there was nothing left. And then it came back in by itself, without being asked, as the tide comes back to an empty shore.

Some time near dawn, I closed my eyes.

I did not mean to. I had not slept, not truly slept, since the third night of Illumination. But the lamp was steady and the breath was slow and the shed was warm. Somewhere in the long rhythm of stroke and rest and breath and stroke, my head sank down against my breast, and my cracked bell lay silent against my throat.

And I slept.

When I woke, the great planet was gone from the doorway, and the grey of morning had come, and the tortoise was still at the bench.

Before it on the sackcloth lay a new shaft, pale and round, with the wandering path drawn faint along its length. The tortoise was holding it across its knees, looking at it, its hands resting open on either side of it.

It had not yet fletched it.

It had not yet seated the point.

It had not yet failed.

And it was breathing, slowly, in the grey light, like a creature at the very edge of something, waiting, very patiently, to begin again.

 

Segment 17:

The Arrow That Did Not Whistle

One

The arrow that sings is calling out.

It calls because it is lost.

It calls because it does not know where it is going and hopes someone will answer.

The arrow that knows the way does not call.

It is already there.

Two

The thirteenth night.

The raven was on the bench, at the far end of it, in the shadow beyond the lamp. He did not sit in the rafters anymore. He sat close, with his cloak drawn round him and his crooked wing folded under it, and he watched. Sometimes he slept. This one could hear his breath change when he slept: slower, deeper, the rasp gone out of it.

He was awake now.

The yard roared. The hammers. The mauls. Somewhere out in the proofing field, beyond the stumps, a bundle of arrows from the fifth bench was being tested by lantern light, because the quartermaster wanted the count by morning. They were singing. Even through the walls of the shed, even over the hammers, this one could hear them. High and thin and wavering, rising and falling, arguing with the air.

The lamp did not flicker.

Three

On the knees lay the shaft.

It was the one from the morning. Shaved in the dark before dawn, while the raven slept, three hundred and twenty strokes, with the thumb resting on the scarlet loop at the end of each, and the breath going out all the way. The path ran down it from end to end, faint and wandering, curving out around each knuckle and in again, and nowhere did it cut across.

This one had looked at it all day.

Had not touched it.

Had not fletched it.

Had not seated the point.

Had only looked, and breathed, and waited.

Four

What was this one waiting for?

This one did not know. This one has not known, through most of this. The knowing comes after, if it comes at all.

But this one knows now what it was not.

It was not waiting to be sure.

For twelve nights this one had wanted to be sure. Wanted the shaft not to crack, the point not to split, the knife not to slip, the path not to be lost. Wanted the gift feathers not to be wasted. Wanted, more than anything, not to fail the raven who had knelt in the mud at the edge of the marsh pool for each one of them.

And every night the wanting crept down into the held place at the bottom of the breath, very small, very quiet, the way water creeps into a crack in a stone. And every night, somewhere, at some stroke or some wrap or some tap of the hammer, the shaft remembered it.

And cracked.

Five

Then on the ninth night the raven said: they are thine to fail with.

This one did not understand it then.

This one understands it now.

Six

A gift that one is afraid to fail with is not yet a gift.

It is a debt.

And the hand that carries a debt carries it tightly.

Seven

So this one stopped waiting to be sure.

And when this one stopped, there was nothing left to wait for.

And then there was only the shaft, on the knees, in the lamplight, ready.

Eight

This one turned to the row of feathers.

Thirty-one of them. Smoothed and laid straight along the sackcloth beside the lamp, the whole length of the bench almost. Every one taken back from a failure. Every one given by some bird in some hidden place in the valley because a raven had knelt and asked.

This one had thought, when the raven brought new feathers, to use the new ones. Fresh and whole and never cut.

But this one did not take a new one.

This one looked along the row a long time.

And chose three that had failed.

Nine

The first was grey. Goose. The very first gift feather the raven brought from the marsh, from the old gander who shook his wing. It was the one whose vane this one had torn with a slip of the knife on the first of the twelve nights, the grain-of-barley tear. Only half of it had been spoiled. The other vane was whole.

The second was black. Crow. From the old crow in the ruined barn who gave three and turned her back. It had been fletched onto the shaft that split at the tip on the third night, and unwound, and smoothed, and laid in the row.

The third was tawny. Kite. From the old kite who circled the raven a whole afternoon before she let it fall. It had been fletched onto the arrow with the path cut across one knuckle, the one this one unbound with these own hands and carried to the fire.

Three feathers.

Three failures.

Three gifts that had not yet found their arrow.

Ten

The raven at the end of the bench made a small sound. A breath, caught.

He saw which three.

He did not speak.

Eleven

This one cut the vanes.

The thumb on the scarlet loop at the end of each stroke. The breath, all the way out. The knife going in at the bottom of the breath, when the hand was empty.

The grey goose: the torn half set aside, the whole half cut clean.

The black crow: cut clean.

The tawny kite: cut clean.

No slip.

This one did not try not to slip. That is the difference. On the twelve nights, every cut was a trying. On this night, there was no trying. There was only the stroke, and the rest, and the breath, and the next.

Twelve

This one bound them.

Plain linen. Wrap after wrap. Between each wrap, the fingers on the small scarlet loop tied about the shaft just above the binding, and the breath going out.

Grey, black, tawny.

Three birds who did not know each other, from three corners of the valley, bound together on one shaft of bamboo by a tortoise who did not know any of them, because a raven had asked.

This one did not hold the linen tight.

On the twelve nights, the linen was always tight. To hold the feathers fast. To be sure they would not loosen in flight. And it was there, at the binding, where the linen was tightest, that seven of the nineteen shafts had cracked.

This night, the linen was only firm. It held the feathers the way a hand holds a sleeping bird. Close enough that it will not fall. Loose enough that it can breathe.

Thirteen

This one seated the point.

A small steel point, plain, from the dish on the bench. This one set it on the tip of the shaft and took up the tiny hammer.

On the third night, the tip had split. On the eleventh, too.

This one did not tap.

This one laid the hammer down.

This one put the palm of the hand flat over the point. The center of the palm, where the hand cups. The first resting place. And breathed out.

All the way.

And at the bottom of the breath, the hand pressed, very gently. The way the crane presses the inside of the wrist.

And the point went on.

It did not go on because this one pushed. The hand was empty. It went on because the tip of the bamboo opened, very slightly, just enough, and let it in.

Fourteen

The arrow lay on the knees.

Pale bamboo. A steel point. Three feathers: grey, black, tawny. Plain linen. Small loops of scarlet thread at the resting places, holding nothing. And along its whole length, faint as breath on glass, the path, wandering from nock to point, curving around every knuckle, never once cutting across.

This one did not take it up.

This one looked at it.

And the raven, at the end of the bench, in the shadow, looked at it too.

Fifteen

It is very hard to say what this one saw.

It was an arrow. Like any arrow. Like ten thousand arrows in ten thousand crates.

And it was not like any arrow.

It was not tight.

Every arrow this one has ever made, every arrow in the yard, every arrow in the valley, holds itself. The shaft holds itself straight. The binding holds the feathers. The point holds the tip. Everything in it is holding on to everything else, the way a frightened creature holds itself together when it is about to be struck.

This arrow was not holding.

It lay on the knees the way water lies in a bowl. Everything in it was exactly where it was, and nothing in it was trying to be there.

Sixteen

This one took it up.

Laid it across the open palms.

It weighed almost nothing.

The hands did not tremble.

Seventeen

There was no bow.

This one has never been an archer. A tortoise’s arms are short and the shell is in the way. This one makes arrows. Others loose them. Sergeant Reedwhistle was asleep in the barracks with her healing arm. The proofing field was dark except for the far end, where a lantern swung and the fifth bench’s arrows sang.

There was no bow.

And it did not matter.

This one stood up.

Slowly. Knees, shell, neck. The arrow across the palms.

And walked toward the door of the shed.

Eighteen

The raven came too.

He dropped from the bench without a word and walked beside, his cloak dragging, his crooked wing folded. The new feathers were pushing through the six pale stubs. This one had seen them in the lamplight, grey now instead of white, a little longer each night.

We went out of the shed into the dark.

The great planet was low. Its banded face filled the eastern sky above the stumps of the ash grove, pale and enormous, and the light it gave lay over the yard like frost. The thin rain had stopped. The air was cold and very still.

We walked past the second shed, the first, the splitting yard, the bending shed with its steam rising grey into the planet-light. We walked out past the stumps, onto the proofing field.

The fence. The line. The mark where Sergeant Reedwhistle stands.

Beyond the mark, the dark.

Somewhere out in it, at sixty paces, the butts. This one could not see them. There was no lamp at that end. Only, very far off to the left, at the far corner of the field, the swinging lantern of the night-proofer, and the high thin wailing of the fifth bench’s arrows as he loosed them one after another.

Nineteen

This one stood at the mark.

The arrow across the palms.

The raven a little behind, still, his milky eyelid flickering in the planet-light.

And somewhere back toward the sheds, a sound. Soft. A shuffle, and a stop. Someone else had come out to the edge of the field, and stopped by the stumps, and was standing there, listening.

This one did not turn to look.

This one knew, by the stillness of it, who it was.

Old Mudge. Who cannot see in the light, but hears everything.

Twenty

This one breathed in.

Slowly.

The cold air, smelling of frost and smoke and stumps and the far sour reek of the glue house.

Down into the shell.

Twenty-One

This one did not aim.

How can one aim into the dark?

This one only held the arrow on the open palms and turned toward the place where the butts would be, if there were light to see them. And breathed out.

Out.

Past the held place, which was very small now, hardly there at all.

Out.

All the way.

Until the shell was empty, and the hands were empty, and there was nothing in this one at all but the cold and the dark and the arrow resting on the palms.

And at the very bottom of the breath, where there was nothing left, the hands moved.

Twenty-Two

It was not a throw.

This one has tried, since, to remember throwing it, and cannot. There was no drawing back of the arm. There was no snap of the wrist. There was no force.

The hands rose, very slightly, at the bottom of the empty breath. Only a little. The way a hand rises when it lets a bird go.

And the arrow was not on them anymore.

Twenty-Three

It made no sound.

This one listened for it.

The way one listens after a stone is dropped into a well, waiting for the splash. Every part of the shell, every part of the long neck, the hands still open in the cold air before the chest, listened.

No whine. No whisper. No hush of feathers parting the air.

Nothing.

Far off to the left, at the corner of the field, the fifth bench’s arrows were still wailing as the night-proofer loosed them. High and thin and wavering. They went out into the dark, one after another, crying, each of them calling and calling for someone to tell it where it was.

And in front of this one, straight out into the dark where the butts would be, there was a silence.

Not an empty silence.

A full one.

The silence of a thing that has no need to call, because it knows exactly where it is.

Twenty-Four

This one did not see it fly.

It was dark. The arrow was gone from the palms and into the night before the eye could follow it. There was nothing to see but the great planet’s frost-light on the grass, and the black beyond.

But this one felt it.

Not with the eyes. Not with the ears. With the empty shell, perhaps. With the empty hands. With the place where the breath had gone out and had not yet come back in.

It did not wobble.

It did not rise.

It did not rush.

It did not seem to cross the distance at all.

It was on the palms, and then it was not on the palms, and then it was there.

Already there.

As if it had been there all along. As if the flight were only the arrow remembering where it already was.

Twenty-Five

Far out in the dark, so far and so faint that this one would not have heard it at all if the night had not been so still, there was a sound.

Very small.

Softer than a heartbeat.

Like a finger laid on the skin of a drum.

Then nothing.

Twenty-Six

The breath did not come back.

This one stood at the mark with the empty hands open in the cold, and the breath that had gone out all the way did not come back in.

It was not held. There was nothing to hold. It was only that the shell was empty and the night was full and the place where the arrow had been was still warm on the palms, and the body had forgotten, for a moment, that it needed to breathe at all.

This one stood there, breathless.

A moment.

Another.

Behind, the raven did not move.

By the stumps, Mudge did not move.

Out in the dark, nothing moved.

Then, without being asked, as it always does, the breath came back.

It came in slowly. Deep. All the way down into the shell, cold and sweet. And with it came something this one has no word for, though this one has searched for a word every night since.

The nearest is this.

When one is very small, and stands for the first time at the edge of the sea, and the sea is so large that the mind cannot hold it, the mind simply stops. It does not think. It does not try to understand. It only looks, and is filled, and is quiet.

That.

Twenty-Seven

Mudge spoke first.

His voice came out of the dark by the stumps, low and cracked, hardly louder than the wind.

“Shu,” he said.

This one did not answer. This one could not.

“Did you throw it?” he said.

This one breathed out.

“Yes.”

He was quiet a long time.

“I didn’t hear it,” he said. “I heard you breathe. I heard your hands. I heard the fifth bench’s lot screaming over in the corner, same as every night.” A pause. “But I didn’t hear yours. Not leaving. Not flying. Nothing at all, till the very end.”

Another pause.

“Forty years I’ve listened to arrows, Shu,” he said. “I never heard one that didn’t make a sound.”

Twenty-Eight

The raven spoke.

He was standing just behind this one’s shoulder. His voice was very low, and there was something in it this one had not heard there before. Not the rasp. Not the grief. Something trembling, the way the hands had trembled with the first feather.

“The goose,” he said. “The crow. The kite.”

This one did not turn.

“I asked each of them,” he said, “and each of them gave. And each of them failed once, on thy bench, and lay in thy row.” His voice broke a little. “And now they are flying together into the dark, and they are not crying.”

This one breathed.

“No,” this one said. “They are not crying.”

Twenty-Nine

We did not go to find it.

Not that night.

It was dark, and the field is wide, and the arrow was out there somewhere where it had arrived. There was no need to go and see. This one did not need to see.

The three of us stood at the edge of the proofing field, the tortoise and the raven and the old blind sawyer, in the cold frost-light of the great planet, and listened to the silence where the arrow had gone. Far off to the left, the fifth bench’s arrows wailed and wailed into the dark.

Then, slowly, we walked back to the sheds.

Thirty

In the morning they found it.

This one did not go. This one was at the bench, with the hands resting open on the knees, and the lamp burning, and the long row of gift feathers on the sackcloth, twenty-eight now, three fewer than before.

Sergeant Reedwhistle found it. She went out at dawn to proof the first bundles of the day and walked down to the butts to pull the night-proofer’s arrows from the straw. There were forty of them from the fifth bench, scattered over all twelve butts and the grass around them, crooked, cracked, some broken.

And in the very center of the farthest butt, the one at the end of the line, sixty paces and more from the mark, in the red ring, standing out from the straw as straight and still as a reed in a pond, there was one arrow with grey and black and tawny feathers.

She did not pull it out at once.

They say she stood there a long time, with her one eye on it, looking.

Then she put out her healed hand and drew it from the straw. It came out clean and whole, without a crack or a creak. She stood there in the grey of the morning, turning it in her claws. When she held it to her ear and flicked the feathers, it made no sound at all.

Thirty-One

The arrow that sings flies everywhere at once, because it does not know where it is going.

The arrow that is held tight flies straight and lifts away at the last, because it remembers the hand that held it.

The arrow that is let go flies nowhere at all.

It is already there.

Thirty-Two

This one did not make it.

That is what this one understands now, sitting at the bench with the empty hands.

This one shaved, and rested, and breathed. This one cut, and bound, and seated. But this one did not make it.

This one only stopped holding it.

And then it was what it had always been, the whole time, under all the holding.

An arrow that knew the way.

 

Segment 18:

Witness Accounts, Seven, All Contradictory

Chapter the First, in Which I Am Unable to Sleep

Madam, I have not slept in four days.

I do not say this to alarm you. A swarm does not sleep as you sleep. We have no eyelids to close and no bed to lie in, only a brown habit several sizes too large, which I hang upon a hook behind the tax rolls at night while the eleven thousand of me disperse into the cracks of the shelves to rest. When we rest, some of us rest and some of us do not. There is always a night-watch of a few hundred keeping the lamp and the quill, and the Red-Ink Mites, who are doubters, scarcely rest at all, since it is very hard to sleep when one is not sure one is tired.

But for four days now, Madam, none of us has rested.

Not one.

We have been reading about an arrow.

Chapter the Second, in Which I Explain the Difficulty

You will have read, if you have followed this history in order as I have so faithfully promised to tell it, the fletcher’s own account of the thirteenth night. It is on the seventeenth tablet, in the short plain lines that do not argue and do not explain. It tells how the tortoise chose three feathers that had each failed once, and bound them loosely to a shaft that followed its own path. It tells how the tortoise walked out into the dark of the proofing field, with the raven at its side and the old blind sawyer listening by the stumps, and let the arrow go from its open palms at the very bottom of an empty breath. And how the arrow made no sound, and did not wobble, and did not rise, and did not rush. And how it seemed to fly as though it had already arrived.

It is a very beautiful account, Madam. I wept over it.

—The Black-Ink Mites wish it noted that mites do not weep.

—The Blue-Ink Mites wish it noted that they did.

It is also, Madam, only one account.

There are seven.

Chapter the Third, in Which I Confess

I found them by accident.

That is to say, I found them by an accident of the kind that is not really an accident at all, but the result of reading the same thirty-one tablets over and over, by lamplight, for many nights in succession. I read with my whole swarm crawling over every inch of every crack and margin, until one begins to see things that were there all along and had simply not been looked at.

The seventeenth tablet, the fletcher’s tablet, is not alone.

Pressed into the clay of the tablets around it, and of tablets far from it, in the margins and the cracks and once, I swear to you, on the underside of a tablet where no one would ever think to look, there are other accounts. Six of them. Each in a different hand, each from a different witness, each describing the flight of the arrow that did not whistle on the thirteenth night.

Each one is different.

Not a little different, Madam. Not the ordinary difference of witnesses who saw the same thing from different places and remember it in different words. Entirely different. Wholly, gloriously, impossibly different. In them the arrow flies forward, and backward, and through a wall, and up into the sky, and into the farthest butt in the red ring. And in one of them, I very nearly fainted to read it, the arrow never flies at all.

I have now read these seven accounts four hundred and twelve times.

—The Red-Ink Mites wish it noted that they have counted, and it is four hundred and eleven.

—The Black-Ink Mites wish it noted that the Red-Ink Mites cannot be sure of that.

—The Red-Ink Mites wish it noted that this is exactly their point.

Chapter the Fourth, in Which I Resolve to Set Them Out in Order

I shall set them out for you, Madam, all seven, one after another, so that you may see them as I see them. After each, I shall add a few modest annotations of my own, as a scholar should.

—The Black-Ink Mites wish it noted that my annotations are never modest.

—Hush.

The First Account: The Fletcher

On the seventeenth tablet, in the fletcher’s own short plain hand. I have already told you what it says, so I shall give you only its heart:

It did not seem to cross the distance at all. It was on the palms, and then it was not on the palms, and then it was there. Already there.

Annotation the First. Observe, Madam, that the fletcher does not say where the arrow went. It says only that it was there. Where is there? It does not say. Did it go forward, into the field, toward the butts? We assume so, because that is where the fletcher was facing. But the fletcher does not tell us. The fletcher says it did not see it fly, because it was dark. The fletcher says the arrow did not seem to cross the distance. The fletcher says that it heard, far off, the sound of a finger laid on a drum.

And that is all.

I find this, Madam, the most maddening of the seven, and the most beautiful, and I shall not be able to explain why until I have shown you the other six.

The Second Account: The Sergeant

On the margin of the nineteenth tablet, in a hand I have identified, after much labor, as that of Sergeant Reedwhistle, the one-eyed lynx who proofed the arrows of Cinderford. She seems to have been asked, many years later, by some early copyist, to set down what she found. She set it down, in a hard, upright, careful hand, very plainly:

Found it at dawn. Farthest butt. Red ring, dead center. Sixty-eight paces from the mark by my count. Should not have reached. No one throws an arrow sixty-eight paces by hand. Pulled it out. Whole. No crack. Flicked the feathers. No sound. Still no sound. Every arrow I ever held made a sound when you flicked it. This one did not.

Annotation the Second. Very good, Sergeant. Plain, honest, and to the point. The arrow flew forward. It struck the farthest butt, in the red ring, dead center, at sixty-eight paces, a thing no arrow thrown by hand could do. Here at last is a witness who tells us where the arrow went.

But observe, Madam, the word farthest.

There were twelve butts on the proofing field at Cinderford, set in a long line across its width at sixty paces from the mark. The farthest of them, the one at the very end of the line, stood not directly in front of the mark but well off to one side, to the right. The fletcher, by its own account, faced straight ahead into the dark, toward where the butts would be. If the arrow had flown straight from its palms, it would have struck the middle butts, or passed between them, or fallen in the grass before them.

It did not. It struck the farthest butt, at the end of the line, off to the right.

The arrow turned.

—The Black-Ink Mites wish it noted that arrows do not turn.

—The Blue-Ink Mites wish it noted that this one did.

—The Red-Ink Mites wish it noted that perhaps the fletcher did not face where it thought it faced, in the dark.

All three, Madam, are noted.

The Third Account: The Night-Proofer

On the underside of the twenty-third tablet, where I found it only on the third night of my reading. A copyist had dropped a crumb of bread and a party of Blue-Ink Mites went after it. In a coarse, sprawling hand, badly spelled, belonging to one Tobias Grubb, night-proofer, badger-folk, who seems to have been very near-sighted and very frightened:

I was in the corner with the lantern, loosing the fifth bench lot, and something come at me out of the dark. Backwards. Feathers first. No sound to it at all. Went right past my ear, I felt it go, cold, and on past me toward the sheds, and I never saw it after. I dropped the bow. I ent been back on night-proofing since.

Annotation the Third. Madam. Madam. Madam.

Backwards.

Feathers first, from out of the dark, past the ear of a terrified badger in the far corner of the field, and on toward the sheds. Not toward the butts at all. Not forward at all. Backward, sideways, and away.

I confess that when I first read this, I laughed aloud. The Under-Archivist’s cat, who had only lately returned to the library after my outburst in the preface, left again in some haste.

Mr. Grubb, I said to myself, was near-sighted, and frightened, and alone in the dark with forty screaming arrows from the fifth bench. It is the most natural thing in the world that one of those screaming arrows, wobbling and tumbling as they all did, should have come back at him feathers first out of the dark and frightened him half to death. He mistook it for the silent arrow. That is all.

But then I read it again, Madam. And I saw the words no sound to it at all.

The fifth bench’s arrows were never silent. Not one of them. Every witness to the haste agrees on that, from the quartermaster to the raven. They screamed.

Whatever came at Mr. Grubb out of the dark, feathers first, and went past his ear and on toward the sheds, it did not scream.

I have not slept since.

The Fourth Account: The Goblin

On the margin of the twenty-second tablet, the small cracked one I first mistook for gravel, the one that declared so furiously that it was NOB, not Nib, who said the wood would forget. In the same sharp jagged hand, scratched with a claw:

Me and Nib was in the glue house nicking the healer’s mugwort, never mind why, and the arrow come through the wall. The back wall. Stone. It come through the stone like it weren’t there and went across the room between us and out through the other wall and there weren’t no hole. Either wall. We looked. Nib says it was the second shed wall. Nib is a liar. It was the glue house. It smelled of mugwort after.

Annotation the Fourth. Through a wall, Madam. Through a wall of stone. Two walls of stone. In one side and out the other, without a hole, between two goblin children who were in the very act of stealing the healer’s herbs.

I give you this account exactly as I found it, without comment, because I cannot think of any comment adequate to it.

—The Black-Ink Mites wish it noted that goblins are notoriously unreliable witnesses.

—The Blue-Ink Mites wish it noted that the account says it smelled of mugwort after.

—The Black-Ink Mites wish to know what that has to do with anything.

—The Blue-Ink Mites wish it noted that they do not know either, but that it is a wonderful detail, and that no goblin would invent a detail so useless.

I find myself, Madam, very much inclined to agree with the Blue-Ink Mites.

And observe this. If the arrow went through the glue house from back to front, the glue house stands between the sheds and the proofing field. It would have been flying from the field toward the sheds.

Backward.

As Mr. Grubb said.

The Fifth Account: The Mathematician

On the margin of the eighteenth tablet, in a hand so neat and so small and so beautifully formed that I knew it at once, before I had read a word. It ended with a 9 with a little flourish on its tail, the very mark that Mr. Absalom Crouch, the melancholy goat-folk, scholar of the higher mathematics, used to scratch below the nocks of his arrows at the ninth bench. And beneath the 9, a proof:

Proposition. That the arrow made by the tortoise on the thirteenth night did not fly.

Given: that by every account the arrow, from the moment it left the hand, was “already there.”

Then: at the moment it left the hand, it was at its destination.

Then: it did not traverse the distance between the hand and the destination, for it was never at any point between them, having been from the first instant at the end.

Then: an arrow that does not traverse a distance does not fly.

Therefore: it did not fly.

Remark. I have checked this proof eleven times. It is sound. I find it the most beautiful thing I have ever proved, and I do not believe a word of it, and I would give everything I own to have been there.

Annotation the Fifth. Mr. Crouch, Mr. Crouch, I could kiss you, if I had a mouth.

—The Black-Ink Mites wish it noted that this is unseemly.

—It is entirely seemly.

For observe, Madam, what Mr. Crouch has done. He has taken the fletcher’s own words, already there, the most beautiful and most mysterious words of the seventeenth tablet, and followed them to their end with perfect logic. He has arrived at a conclusion that contradicts every other witness. It is the one account of the seven in which the arrow went nowhere at all.

And then he says he does not believe it.

And then he says he would give everything to have been there.

I have read that remark, Madam, more times than I have read anything else in all thirty-one tablets. I believe it may be the truest thing any scholar has ever written in a margin.

The Sixth Account: The Raven

On the margin of the twentieth tablet, in a dark slanting hand I have come to know very well. It is the hand that carved the notches on the seventh tablet. It wrote the dark grieving lines scattered through the account of the rookery wood. Here, it says:

I stood behind the tortoise’s shoulder and saw it go. I saw it as I see in the dark, with the inner eye, not the outer. It did not go out across the field. It went up. Straight up, into the Watcher’s light, and turned, and went north, up the valley, toward the rookery wood. The goose’s feather and the crow’s and the kite’s went home, each to its own place, to show the one who gave it what its gift had become. And then, before dawn, they came back, and the arrow came down into the farthest butt, as the sergeant found it. I did not see it come down. But I know that it did. I know because the grey goose in the hidden pool at the end of the marsh, when I went to her the next day to thank her, would not stop calling. I have never heard a goose call like that. I think she had seen something.

Annotation the Sixth. I have nothing to say, Madam.

I have nothing to say because I have so much to say that it will not come out in any order. The Blue-Ink Mites have been circling for an hour. The Red-Ink Mites, who doubt everything, have stopped doubting, which has never happened before and has frightened the Black-Ink Mites very much. And I myself have been sitting here with my quill in my cloud of a hand and the lamp burning down, reading that one sentence over and over.

I think she had seen something.

It is not proof. It is not evidence. A raven who loves his birds believes that a goose who would not stop calling had seen her own feather fly home in the dark to show her what it had become. It is the least reliable account of the seven. It is the most romantic, the most impossible, and the most likely to have been invented by grief.

It is the one, Madam, I most want to be true.

The Seventh Account: The Sawyer

On the margin of the twenty-fourth tablet, in a hand so large and so uncertain that it seems to have been made by someone who could not see the clay he was writing on. And I believe that is exactly what it was. It was made by old Mudge, the mole-folk sawyer of Cinderford, nearly blind in daylight, who heard the culm split without tearing and stood by the stumps on the thirteenth night, listening:

I didn’t see nothing. Can’t, mostly. But I heard. I heard the tortoise breathe in and breathe out. I heard its hands. I heard the fifth bench lot screaming in the corner. And I heard the arrow not go. That’s the only way I can say it. Every arrow I ever heard, you hear it go. There’s a sound when it leaves. This one, there wasn’t. It was like the arrow didn’t leave. Like the field came to it.

Annotation the Seventh. The field came to it.

Chapter the Fifth, in Which I Attempt to Reconcile Them

Madam, you will see the difficulty.

Seven witnesses. Seven accounts. One arrow.

In the first, it flew, but the fletcher did not see where.

In the second, it flew forward, and turned, and struck the farthest butt.

In the third, it flew backward, feathers first, past a badger’s ear, toward the sheds.

In the fourth, it flew through two stone walls of the glue house without leaving a hole, and smelled of mugwort.

In the fifth, it did not fly at all.

In the sixth, it flew up into the light of the great planet, and north up the valley to the rookery wood, and home, and back, and down into the farthest butt.

In the seventh, it did not leave. The field came to it.

I have spent four days and four nights trying to make them fit.

I have drawn maps of the proofing field at Cinderford from every description in the tablets, with the mark and the butts and the corner where Mr. Grubb stood and the glue house and the stumps and the sheds. I have plotted on them every path the arrow might have taken: forward, backward, sideways, up. I have tried to find one single line that would pass through all seven accounts at once. Forward from the mark, then turning right toward the farthest butt. Then up, then north toward the rookery wood, then back, then backward past Mr. Grubb, then through the glue house, then down into the butt. A line that would satisfy the sergeant and the badger and the goblin and the raven all together.

There is such a line, Madam.

I found it on the third night. It is absurd. It loops and doubles and crosses itself a dozen times, like a thread pulled out of a tangled skein. It would require the arrow to have flown some four miles in the time it took the fletcher to breathe in once.

I drew it anyway. It is the most beautiful line I have ever drawn. I have pinned it to the shelf beside the tax rolls, and I look at it constantly.

And it does not satisfy Mr. Crouch, who says the arrow did not fly at all. Nor old Mudge, who says the field came to it.

Chapter the Sixth, in Which the Swarm Divides

On the fourth night, the swarm divided.

I give you the proceedings, briefly.

The Black-Ink Mites declared for the Sergeant. She was a soldier, they said, a professional, a creature of plain facts and plain speech. She found the arrow in the farthest butt, and that is where it went, and everything else is the fancy of goblins and badgers and grieving birds.

The Red-Ink Mites declared for Mr. Crouch. If the arrow was already there when it left the hand, as the fletcher itself said, then it did not fly. The logic was perfect. The Red-Ink Mites have never in their lives been able to declare for anything, and they were so astonished to find themselves certain that they did not know what to do with it.

The Blue-Ink Mites declared for the raven, all of them, at once, in a single great blue shimmer, and would hear no argument.

Professor Ibid, the small faction near the left sleeve, declared for the goblin, on the grounds that the mugwort was the only detail in any of the seven accounts that could be checked. They proposed to send a delegation to the herb garden of the Harrowgate infirmary to sniff the mugwort. I forbade it. It is six hundred years too late, and they would only get lost.

And I, Madam, declared for none of them.

Or rather, I declared for all of them, which the Black-Ink Mites say is the same thing as declaring for none. And we have been arguing about it ever since.

Chapter the Seventh

—This chapter, Madam, is blank.

I mean it this time. The Blue-Ink Mites have promised not to put a cat in it.

The reader will please imagine here an interval of some hours, during which eleven thousand mites sat in a damp hole behind a shelf of tax rolls and looked at a tangled line pinned to a shelf, and said nothing.

Chapter the Eighth, in Which I Find the Answer, or Lose It

It was the Blue-Ink Mites, of course, who found it. They always find these things. It is their chief virtue and their chief danger, and I have never been able to separate the two.

It was nearly dawn on the fifth day. I had at last persuaded the swarm to rest, and hung the habit on its hook, and let the eleven thousand of me scatter into the cracks of the shelves. A small party of Blue-Ink Mites did not rest. They crept instead back down into the crate, the old oak crate marked CINDERFORD with its single line, to the very bottom, beneath the tablets, where none of us had yet thought to look, because there was nothing there.

There was something there.

It was lying flat along the bottom of the crate, so long and so pale and so thin that it seemed to be part of the boards. It was wrapped in a strip of linen gone brown and soft as moss with age, and tied at three places with a small loop of thread that had once, perhaps, been red. The thread was knotted so loosely that it held nothing at all.

The Blue-Ink Mites came racing back up through the crack in the wall and into the shelves and woke the whole swarm at once with a single great blue shiver. And I put on my habit, and took up my lamp, and went down.

I unwrapped it.

Very slowly, Madam. Very, very slowly. With the whole swarm holding its breath, if mites can be said to hold their breath. With the lamp so close the flame nearly touched the linen. Layer by layer. Until at last it lay bare on the bottom of the crate, in the light.

An arrow.

Pale bamboo. A small steel point, rusted. Plain linen bindings, worn to threads. Three fletchings, so old and so faded that I could not tell, and cannot tell even now, what color they had once been. They might have been grey, and black, and tawny. They might have been anything. They were the color of dust.

And down the length of the shaft, so faint I would not have seen it at all if the lamp had not been so close, a line. Wandering. Curving out around each knuckle of the bamboo and in again. Never once cutting across.

I sat there, Madam, a long time.

Then, because I could not help it, because I am a scholar and a copyist and an eleven-thousandfold creature of the most unforgivable curiosity, I reached down with a hand made of mites. Very gently, with a single Blue-Ink Mite at the tip of my finger, I flicked one of the dust-colored feathers.

Chapter the Ninth, in Which I Report the Result

It made no sound.

Chapter the Tenth, in Which I Am Very Quiet

—The Red-Ink Mites wish it noted that this proves nothing. Old feathers are brittle. Old feathers do not ring.

—The Black-Ink Mites wish it noted that we do not know this is the arrow. It is an arrow. There were many arrows at Cinderford.

—The Blue-Ink Mites have not said anything at all. They are circling. They have been circling for some time.

I have wrapped it up again, Madam, in its brown linen, and tied the three loose loops of dust-colored thread, and laid it back on the bottom of the crate, beneath the tablets, exactly where it was. I have not moved it. I do not intend to. I do not know whether it is the arrow that did not whistle. I do not know whether it flew forward or backward or up or through a wall, or did not fly at all.

I only know that I flicked it, and it made no sound. And that for one moment, sitting there by lamplight at the bottom of a six-hundred-year-old crate, I felt the whole swarm go still, all eleven thousand of us, at once. Still, and silent, and breathing together, very slowly, in, and out, all the way. And it seemed to me, though I cannot prove it, that the damp hole behind the tax rolls was not around us anymore. The crate, and the tablets, and the long centuries, had all quietly come to us.

Like the field came to the arrow.

Chapter the Eleventh, in Which I Settle Nothing, and Am Content

So I shall not choose, Madam.

I give you all seven accounts, and the tangled line, and the arrow in the crate, and I shall let you choose for yourself. Or rather, I shall do what the fletcher did with its three failed feathers. I shall not choose among them. I shall bind all seven together, loosely, as they are, onto a single shaft of story, and let them go into the dark, and see where they arrive.

Perhaps they will fly forward. Perhaps backward. Perhaps through a wall. Perhaps north, to a hidden pool where a grey goose will not stop calling. Perhaps they will not fly at all, and the reader will come to them.

—See margin.

—The margin says I have once again failed to tell the story in order, and have spent a whole segment on a single night.

—Yes. I know.

But Madam, what a night.

And now, I promise, the morning. For in the morning, the boar heard.

 

Segment 19:

Haste at Dawn

I have told the reader, in an earlier chapter of this history, of the night I spent in the cold storeroom at the back of the first shed. I counted two thousand broken arrows by lantern light, found twelve whole ones among them marked with the number forty-one, and wrote in my ledger, for the first time in my life, a question. I told him that I left that question there without a line beneath it, because I could not think where the line ought to go. And I told him, I think, that from that night onward a curious burr of a feeling had lodged itself in my chest. I could not shake it out, and I did not want it, and I did not know what to do with it.

I must now tell him what I did with it.

I am sorry to say that it does me no credit at all.

It was Sergeant Reedwhistle who brought me the news, a little before dawn, on the morning after the thirteenth night of the tortoise’s second fortnight.

I was at my desk. I had been at my desk most of the night, as I was most nights in those days, over Requisition Four Hundred and Nine, which wanted a return of all glue-cakes consumed in the preceding month by weight, and the weight of the pots they had been boiled in, and the weight of the fuel used to boil them. I was adding up the weight of the fuel for the third time when there came a knock at my door. It was not Mr. Scrapple’s knock, which is small and apologetic, like a mouse clearing its throat. It was a hard, short, soldierly knock. And then, without waiting to be asked, the door opened, and the lynx came in.

She did not salute. She never saluted me; I was not her officer. She came in and stood before my desk in the grey light of the lamp with her one eye on me. In her healed paw, the paw the crane had mended, she held an arrow.

“Sergeant,” she said.

“Sergeant,” I said. “It’s early.”

“Found this,” she said, and laid it on my desk, on top of Requisition Four Hundred and Nine.

I looked at it.

It was a plain arrow. I will say that first, because it was the first thing I thought, and because I want the reader to know that I did not see at once what it was. A shaft of pale bamboo. A small steel point. Three fletchings, grey and black and a sort of tawny brown, which I thought odd, for we did not mix our feathers at Cinderford. Plain linen bindings. And here and there along its length, at the head, and the nock, and just above each binding, a small loose loop of scarlet thread, tied in a little knot that held nothing whatever.

“Forty-one,” I said. I knew those threads. I had seen them on the tortoise’s bench. “Well? Is it proofed?”

“It was in the farthest butt,” said Reedwhistle. “At dawn. Dead center. Red ring.”

“Good,” I said. “Then it’s passed. Enter it, an’—”

“Sixty-eight paces,” said Reedwhistle.

I stopped.

“The farthest butt,” she said. “At the end of the line. Sixty-eight paces from the mark, by my count, an’ off to the right. Mudge says it was thrown, Sergeant. By hand. Last night, in the dark. By the tortoise.” She paused. “Without a bow.”

“Mudge,” I said, “is blind as a mole. On account of being one.”

“Mudge says he heard it,” said Reedwhistle. “Or didn’t. He says he didn’t hear it go.” She looked at me with her one eye, very level. “Flick the feathers, Sergeant.”

I looked at her. I looked at the arrow. Then, with a kind of grunt, half to humor her and half because I did not like to be told what to do by a lynx before breakfast, I put out one inky finger and flicked the fletching.

It made no sound.

I flicked it again. Harder.

Nothing. Not the soft dry whisper I had heard from the twelve on my shelf. Not the rattle of a goblin’s crooked feather. Nothing at all. It was as if I had flicked a shadow.

I picked the arrow up.

I want to be very careful in what I tell the reader now, because what happened inside me in the next few moments is the whole of this chapter. I do not wish to make it either better or worse than it was.

I picked the arrow up, and I held it in my two hands, and I felt it.

I had held, in eleven years at Cinderford, perhaps a hundred thousand arrows. I had held good arrows and bad, green and seasoned, true and crooked, whole and broken. I had held the twelve from bench forty-one, which had come back from the coast whole, and had felt the clean sweet spring of them when I flexed them. I knew arrows. I knew them the way a cook knows bread, by the weight of them in the hand.

I had never held anything like this.

It was not heavier than other arrows. It was not lighter. It was not stiffer, nor more supple. It was not anything I could put in a column. It was only that, lying across my palms, it seemed to be perfectly still. Not still the way a dead thing is still, but the way a pond is still at dawn when there is no wind. Everything in it rested exactly where it was, and nothing in it strained to be anywhere else.

It was, I am ashamed to say, the most beautiful thing I had ever held.

And I did not stop to wonder at it. I did not stop to ask how. I did not even stop to remember that, only a few days before, I had written the word Why? in my own hand at the bottom of a sheet of figures and left it there unlined. I held that arrow in my two inky hands, in the grey of the dawn, with the lynx watching me, and I felt something come up inside me, hot and fast and roaring, like a fire catching in dry straw.

I thought: The council.

I thought: Four hundred and nine requisitions, each wanting more than the last. The fifteen thousand at the Ford. The Colonel on his cushion, coughing, making marks in his small book. The clerk in the capital who knows only numbers, and suspects that the yards are not working hard enough. The two thousand broken arrows in the cold storeroom, red as embers through my spectacles.

And then I thought: An arrow that flies sixty-eight paces from the hand without a bow, and strikes the red ring, and makes no sound.

Lord, what an archer could do with that!

I saw it all, at once, in a single blazing instant, the way one sees a whole landscape in a flash of lightning. I saw the coastal raiders on their beaches at dusk, listening for the whine of our arrows as they had learned to listen. They hear nothing. They see nothing. Then they are struck, all along the line, every arrow in the red ring, without a sound, out of the dark. I saw the war council in its great chamber in the capital, receiving the dispatches. I saw the Colonel, his eyeglasses raised, reading them aloud in his dry voice, and stopping, and coughing, and reading them again. I saw a letter. Not a printed form, not a requisition with a number. A letter, on thick cream paper, sealed in gold wax, with the council’s triple-arrow crest. It was addressed to Quartermaster-Sergeant Obadiah Harrowtusk of Cinderford Crossing, and it began, in a fair round hand very like my own: The council has the honor.

I saw a medal. I saw it pinned to my apron coat, over the pocket where the spectacles lay. I saw my name in the broadsheets of the capital, in large black type: THE HARROWTUSK ARROW. I saw a commission. Quartermaster-General of the River Valleys, with a house in the capital, and a carriage, and a clerk of my own, perhaps two, perhaps a dozen. I saw the Colonel bowing to me. I saw yards all down the valleys, all along the coast, on every island of the realm, making the Harrowtusk Arrow by the thousand, by the ten thousand, by the hundred thousand, every one of them silent. And every one of them was entered in a ledger, in a round, firm, unhesitating hand, with a single line beneath the total, never two.

I did not see the tortoise anywhere in it.

I want the reader to mark that. I have thought of it a great deal since. In the whole of that bright, roaring, feverish vision, which could not have lasted more than three or four heartbeats as I stood there with the arrow in my hands, I did not once see the creature who had made it. I saw the arrow. I saw my name. I saw the hundred thousand. I did not see the hands.

“Sergeant?” said Reedwhistle.

I looked up. I had forgotten she was there.

“‘Ow many ‘as it made?” I said. My voice sounded strange to me, high and hoarse at once, as though I had run a long way. “Like this. ‘Ow many?”

The lynx looked at me with her one eye. For a long moment she did not answer.

“One, I think,” she said. “That I know of.”

“One,” I said.

I put the arrow down on my desk, very carefully, on top of Requisition Four Hundred and Nine. I stood up. I took my ledger from its chain at my belt, and opened it, and turned, without quite knowing why, to the back, to the separate account Mr. Scrapple had been keeping for bench forty-one. There, at the bottom of the last page, in my own small hand, was the word I had written on the night of the crates.

Why?

I looked at it.

Then I took up my pen, and dipped it in the ink, and drew a single straight line through it, never two. Above it, in my own round, firm, unhesitating hand, I wrote:

How many?

Then I closed the book.

“Sergeant,” I said to the lynx. “You’ll excuse me.”

And I went out.

I did not march, this time. I ran.

The reader has never seen a boar-folk of my size and age run. He is fortunate. It is not a graceful thing. It is a sort of heavy, lurching, thundering gallop, like a barrel rolling downhill on short legs, with a great deal of snorting and a great deal of clanging, for my tusk-rings rang with every stride and my iron-shod boots struck sparks from the cobbles. I ran out of my office and down the length of the yard in the grey dawn, past the splitting yard where the ox-folk foreman was calling out the first count of the morning, past the bending shed with its steam rising, through the first shed and the second, scattering hedgehogs and goblins and sawyers like pigeons before a cart. I did not stop until I came crashing through the open doorway at the near end of the third shed. Then I stood there, heaving, at the end of the long dim aisle of benches, with every eye in the shed turned on me.

At the very far end, at the last bench, the steady lamp was burning.

The tortoise was there.

Of course it was there. It was always there. It was sitting as it always sat, with its hands resting open on its knees and its long neck bowed a little forward, and before it on the sackcloth lay a long row of feathers, grey and black and brown and pale, smoothed and laid straight, perhaps thirty of them. Beside them was a single new shaft of pale bamboo with a faint line scratched down its length. At the far end of the bench, in the deep shadow beyond the lamp, there was something large and black. It was hunched under what looked like a heap of old feathers. I took it, in my feverish state, for a sack of glue-cake, and paid it no more mind.

I went down the aisle toward the tortoise. I did not run now. I walked. But I walked fast, and my boots rang, and my rings rang.

The tortoise looked up as I came, turning its whole body round in that slow way it had. It looked at me with its heavy-lidded amber eyes. It did not seem surprised.

I stopped at the end of its bench.

“Manbang,” I said.

It breathed in. I heard it. Long and slow.

“The arrow,” I said. “In the farthest butt. Sixty-eight paces. No bow. No sound. That was yours.”

The tortoise breathed out. All the way. I waited, with my tusks clacking, through what seemed a very long time.

“Yes,” it said.

“‘Ow?” I said.

I meant it as a real question. I want the reader to know that. For one instant, standing there at the end of that bench in the dawn, with the steady lamp before me and the long row of feathers and the new shaft with its wandering line, I meant it as a real question. I wanted to know.

But the tortoise did not answer at once. It looked at me, and breathed in again, slowly, as if it were considering how such a thing might be put into words. And in that slow considering silence, the fever came roaring back up through me, and I did not wait.

“Never mind ‘ow,” I said. “Never mind it. ‘Ow don’t matter. ‘Ow’s for later. What matters is, can you do it again?”

The tortoise breathed.

“An’ again,” I said. “An’ again, Manbang. That’s the question. Not ‘ow. ‘Ow many! Can you make another? Can you make ten? Can you make a ‘undred?”

I heard my own voice rising as I spoke, the way it rose in the old days on the parade ground at Harrowgate, when I was a young corporal shouting the count. I could not stop it. I did not want to stop it. The fever had me by the throat.

“A ‘undred, Manbang!” I said. “By noon! A ‘undred silent arrows, in the farthest butt, every one! I’ll ‘ave Reedwhistle proof ’em at sixty-eight paces an’ they’ll go in the red ring, one after another, like nails in a board, an’ not one of ’em makes a sound! An’ I’ll send ’em down to the Ford this very afternoon by fast wagon, with a letter, an’ the Colonel’ll ‘ave ’em by tomorrow, an’ the council by the day after! A ‘undred, Manbang! By noon!”

The shed had gone silent around me. I was aware of it, dimly, at the edges of my fever. Every fletcher at every bench had stopped working. The goblin twins were staring with their mouths open. The hedgehogs had drawn together in a little knot. Mr. Absalom Crouch, at the ninth bench, had put down his knife and was sitting very still, with an expression on his long goat face that I did not then understand. I understand it now. It was pity.

The tortoise looked at me.

“These hands,” it said, very slowly, “cannot make it… in haste.”

“Then they’ll ‘ave ‘elp!” I said. “That’s the beauty of it, Manbang! You don’t ‘ave to make ’em all yourself. You’ve got a yard! You’ve got a ‘undred an’ twelve ‘ands at your disposal, all of ’em idle as soon as I say so!” I swung round on the shed and flung out my arm. “You! Nib! Nob! Whichever! Get over ‘ere an’ cut feathers for this bench! The ‘edgehogs! Points! Seat ’em! Crouch! You’re slow an’ you’re good, an’ that’s the nearest thing I’ve got to ‘im! Shave shafts! Mudge, where’s Mudge, fetch Mudge, ‘e can ‘ear ’em, ‘e can tell us which ones is silent! Mr. Scrapple!”

Mr. Scrapple had come running after me from the office and was standing in the doorway at the far end of the shed with his ledger clutched to his chest, panting.

“Mr. Scrapple! The ‘ourglass! The big one, from my office! Fetch it! Chop-chop!”

He fled.

I turned back to the tortoise. My breath was coming in great gusts through my nose, the bellows breath, and my rings were clacking so hard I could feel them in my teeth.

“There,” I said. “There. A ‘undred ‘ands. Every one of ’em at your service, Manbang. You don’t ‘ave to make a ‘undred arrows. You ‘ave to make one, an’ show ’em ‘ow, an’ they’ll make the rest. You do the… the…” I waved my hand at the scarlet threads, the wandering line on the shaft, the long row of smoothed feathers. “The breathing bit. Whatever it is. You do that, an’ they’ll do the rest. That’s ‘ow a yard works! That’s ‘ow every yard in the world works!”

The tortoise did not answer.

It was looking past me. Not at me. Past my shoulder, toward the far end of its own bench, into the shadow beyond the lamp where the heap of what I had taken for glue-cake sat. I turned to see what it was looking at.

The heap moved.

It rose. It unfolded. It was not glue-cake at all, but a raven. A great black raven, larger than any I had ever seen, wrapped in a long tattered cloak sewn all over with feathers of every kind of bird. One of its wings was folded whole and glossy under the cloak. The other was pale and crooked, half grown back, with new grey quills pushing through. It stood up on the end of the bench in the dawn light and turned its head, and looked at me.

On the side of its beak, in the horn, there were notches. Small clean grooves, cut one after another. I counted them without meaning to, as I count everything. Eleven.

It said nothing. It only looked at me, with its black eyes and its milky inner lid flickering across them, and somewhere at its throat a small cracked silver bell gave a single faint sound. It was not a ring. It was more like a sob, very far away.

I do not know why that sound went through me as it did. I did not know the raven. I had never seen it in my life. I knew nothing then of the rookery wood, or the ladders, or the requisition in a slanting hand with my own signature at the bottom. But when that bell sobbed, I felt the cold small stone at the very heart of me move, the way a stone moves at the bottom of a stream when a great weight passes over it.

And then the fever rose up and covered it again, as water covers a stone.

“An’ you can keep your bird off the bench,” I said to the tortoise, more roughly than I meant. “There’s work to do.”

The raven did not move. Neither did the tortoise.

Mr. Scrapple came back down the length of the shed at a run, staggering under the weight of the great hourglass from my office. It is a thing of brass and oak and thick old glass, half as tall as he is, which I had bought at Harrowgate eleven years before. It measured six hours, a working morning, from dawn to noon. I had never once in eleven years turned it over, because I had never needed to. The yard had kept its own pace.

He set it down on the end of the tortoise’s bench with a thump, beside the steady lamp. The sand lay quiet in the lower bulb, a small grey hill.

I put my hand on it.

I want the reader to see me as I was in that moment, because I have seen myself so in my mind’s eye a thousand times since and I do not wish him to be spared it. A great broad bristled boar-folk, in a soot-streaked apron coat with a hundred pockets, his tusks ringed in brass and clacking, his small eyes bright with fever, his inky hand on the brass frame of a great hourglass. Behind him a whole shed full of silent, frightened creatures. Before him, at the end of the last bench, beneath a lamp that did not flicker, an old mossy tortoise with its hands open on its knees, and a long row of smoothed feathers, and a raven with eleven notches on its beak, watching.

“A ‘undred,” I said. “By noon.”

And I turned the glass.

The sand began to fall.

It made a sound. A small, dry, whispering sound, like the fletching of an arrow parting the air. It was the only sound in the whole of the third shed.

“Begin,” I said.

The tortoise looked at the falling sand.

It looked a long time. Its amber eyes followed the thin grey stream from the upper bulb down into the lower, the small hill already growing there. I saw something come into its face that I had not seen there before, in all the weeks I had stood at the end of its bench. It came up slowly, as everything about that creature came up slowly, from somewhere deep beneath the shell.

I did not know then what it was.

I know now. It was fear.

And then, slowly, the tortoise looked down at its own hands, lying open on its knees, as though it had never seen them before.

They were trembling.

“Begin, Manbang!” I said. “Chop-chop! The sand’s running!”

And the tortoise reached for the knife.

I will stop here, for this is the end of my part in this chapter, though it is not the end of the chapter. What happened next, at that bench, under that falling sand, belongs to another voice than mine. It is not mine to tell. But I will say this. I did not leave. I stood at the end of that bench with my hand on the hourglass and my rings clacking and the fever roaring in my ears. I watched the tortoise reach for the knife, and I counted. Not the arrows. There were none yet. I counted the grains of sand, falling, falling, falling, and in my mind I was already reading the letter on cream paper with the gold seal.

The council has the honor.

I did not see the hands.

God forgive me, I did not see the hands.

 

Segment 20:

The Crack and the Shaking

One

Water that is still reflects the whole sky.

Water that is stirred reflects nothing.

It is the same water.

Two

The sand was falling.

This one had never heard sand fall before. In the third shed, at the end of the last bench, there are many sounds. The hammers. The mauls. The shouting. The singing of the arrows in the field. This one has learned to hear each of them come in, like a stone into water, and to breathe out, and let the rings go out, and let the water go still again.

The sand was different.

It did not come in like a stone. It did not come in at all. It was there, at the end of the bench, beside the lamp, in the great glass the quartermaster had set down. A thin grey thread falling from the upper bulb to the lower. It made a small, dry, whispering sound, endless and even, like a breath that only goes out and never comes back in.

The quartermaster’s hand was on the brass frame.

“Begin,” he said.

Three

This one reached for the knife.

The hand went out across the sackcloth toward it, past the long row of feathers, past the new shaft with its path drawn faint along it. And as the hand went, this one saw it.

It was trembling.

Not as it trembled with the first feather. That was a trembling like the surface of a pond when a breeze passes: light, quick, and then still. This was something else. This came up from far below, from the wrist, from the elbow, from the shoulder, from somewhere deep beneath the shell where the breath begins. It made the fingers shake as an old branch shakes when the storm is in the root.

This one looked at it.

This one had not seen that trembling in many days. Not since before the crane. Not since before the first breath. Not since the morning of the missing, perhaps, or before that, in the long years before that, when it was always there and this one did not know it was there because it had never once gone away.

It had come back.

All at once.

The moment the sand began to fall.

Four

The hand closed on the knife.

It did not take the knife. It grasped it. The fingers wrapped around the handle and held it, tight, the way a creature on a cliff holds a root.

This one breathed in.

The breath went in fast.

That had not happened in many days either.

Five

“Shafts!” said the quartermaster’s voice, above and behind. “Crouch! Shave shafts! The ‘edgehogs! Points! Nib! Nob! Feathers! You ‘eard me! Chop-chop!”

And the bench was full.

There were hands all around it. Hedgehog hands with their small quills bristling, reaching for the dish of points. Goat hands, Mr. Crouch’s, long and slow and unhappy, taking up a stave of green bamboo from somewhere and the gauge from its nail. And goblin hands, small and green and quick, reaching across the sackcloth toward the long row of feathers.

The gift feathers.

The grey goose. The black crow. The pale gull. The tawny kite. The two swans. Twenty-eight feathers, given by twenty-eight birds in hidden places of the valley because a raven had knelt in the mud and asked.

The goblin fingers closed on them.

At the end of the bench, in the shadow, the raven’s bell made a sound.

Not a ring. A sob.

Six

“No,” this one said.

It came out too loud. Too fast. It did not come out on a breath. It came out of the held place, sharp, like a crack in a stone.

The goblin fingers stopped.

The two small green faces looked up. Nib and Nob, or Nob and Nib. Frightened. They had never heard this one raise a voice. Neither had this one.

“Not those,” this one said, more slowly. The breath was coming back, a little. “Those are… given. (breath) These hands will cut them.”

The goblins drew back their fingers. Their eyes went to the quartermaster.

“Fine!” said the quartermaster. “Fine! You cut ’em, Manbang! The twins’ll fetch more from the loft! There’s sixty sacks up there! Nib! Nob! The loft! Run!”

They ran.

The raven’s bell sobbed again, and did not stop.

Seven

This one took up the shaft.

The one from the morning. Shaved in the dark before dawn, in the hours after the arrow went into the night. Three hundred and some strokes. The thumb on the scarlet loop at the end of each. The breath going out all the way. The path drawn faint down its length.

It was a good shaft. It was as good as the one that flew.

This one laid it across the knees.

And waited for the breath.

Eight

The breath did not come.

That is not true. Breath always comes. This one has learned that. It goes out all the way and it comes back by itself.

But this time, when this one breathed out, it did not go all the way.

It stopped.

In the held place.

The held place, which had grown so small in the past days that this one had almost stopped feeling it, a guest who had not quite left, sitting quiet in a corner of the shell. It was not small anymore. It had filled the whole shell. It sat at the bottom of every breath like a stone at the bottom of a well, and the breath came down to it and stopped and would not go past.

This one tried.

Tried to breathe past it.

And that was the first mistake.

Nine

One cannot try to breathe out.

Trying is a kind of holding.

The harder one tries to let go, the tighter one holds.

Ten

The sand was falling.

Whisper. Whisper. Whisper.

At the next bench, Mr. Crouch was shaving a green stave with long unhappy strokes, sighing. The hedgehogs had laid out the steel points in a row and were waiting, their small hammers in their fists, looking at this one. Footsteps were coming back down the shed. The goblins, with their arms full of feathers from the sacks. And the quartermaster stood at the end of the bench with his hand on the hourglass, and his rings clacked, and he was counting under his breath. Not the arrows. There were none. The grains of sand.

And this one began.

Eleven

Took up a goose feather. The grey one. Not the one from the arrow that flew; that was gone. Another, from the same marsh.

Laid it across the palms.

The palms shook.

The feather trembled on them like a leaf on water in a storm.

Took up the knife.

Set the edge to the vane.

Drew.

Twelve

At the end of the stroke, the thumb should have come to rest.

On the scarlet loop, tied at the edge of the sackcloth, where the crane had shown it to rest. One breath. All the way out. Then the next stroke.

The thumb came to the end of the stroke.

And did not rest.

It went past the scarlet loop. It did not even touch it. It came off the end of the stroke already reaching back for the next, the way it had always reached in the forty-one years before the crane. The way the hand on the stair finds the next step in the dark without being told.

This one saw it go past the loop.

And could not stop it.

Thirteen

Here is what this one understood, in that moment, with the thumb going past the scarlet loop.

This one had thought the resting places were in the hands.

They are not.

They are in the breath.

The hand rests only when the breath goes out. And the breath goes out only when there is nothing to hold it.

With the sand falling, there was something to hold it.

So the breath held.

So the hand did not rest.

So the scarlet loop, which had been so bright on the bench for so many days, was only a thread. A little red thread tied in a loose knot around nothing, which the thumb passed without touching, as a hurrying foot passes a flower by the road.

Fourteen

The vane came out. Not torn. But not clean either. A little ragged at one edge, where the knife had wavered with the shaking.

This one looked at it.

Should have stopped.

Should have laid it down, and breathed, and let the hands be still.

Did not stop.

The sand was falling.

Fifteen

The second vane. The third.

The hands shook. The knife wavered. The thumb went past the loop, and past it, and past it. The breath came in fast and went out short and stopped, every time, at the stone in the bottom of the well.

Three vanes on the sackcloth. Grey, from the gift goose. All three a little ragged.

This one took up the linen.

Sixteen

The binding was tight.

This one did not mean it to be tight. This one remembered, even then, the night the arrow flew: the linen only firm, holding the feathers the way a hand holds a sleeping bird. Close enough not to fall. Loose enough to breathe.

This one remembered it.

The hands did not.

The hands wound the linen around the shaft, around the base of the vanes, wrap after wrap. Each wrap pulled a little harder than the last, because the hands were shaking and wanted to hold. Because the shaking was fear, and fear holds. Because the sand was falling, and the quartermaster was counting, and somewhere beyond the walls of the shed, in a great chamber in a city this one has never seen, a council was waiting for a hundred.

Wrap. Tighter.

Wrap. Tighter.

Between the wraps, the fingers should have come to the scarlet loops above the binding, and rested, and breathed.

They did not come to them.

Wrap. Tighter.

Seventeen

The shaft cried out.

Not loud. A small sound. Like a twig stepped on in a quiet room.

Eighteen

This one stopped.

Everything stopped.

The hands, in the middle of a wrap, with the linen pulled tight around the base of the third vane.

The hedgehogs, with their small hammers raised.

Mr. Crouch at the next bench, his knife on the green stave, not moving.

The goblins, halfway down the shed with their arms full of stolen feathers, standing still.

The quartermaster’s counting.

Only the sand did not stop.

Whisper. Whisper. Whisper.

Nineteen

This one did not need to look.

But looked.

Slowly unwound the linen from the base of the third vane. Wrap by wrap. The hands shook so hard that the linen slipped twice from the fingers and had to be found again.

Under the binding, where the linen had been tightest, there was a crack.

It ran down the shaft from the binding a hand’s width toward the point. Fine as a hair. So fine one would not see it, perhaps, without looking.

It cut straight across the path.

Twenty

The path that had been drawn so carefully in the dark before dawn, faint and wandering, curving around every knuckle, never once cutting across.

The crack went through it.

Straight.

Like a road through a hill.

Twenty-One

The quartermaster spoke.

His voice was not loud. It was strange. It sounded as if it came from very far away, from the bottom of the same well where the breath had stopped.

“Again,” he said. “Manbang. Again. There’s another shaft. Crouch is making ’em. The sand’s—”

He did not finish.

This one does not know why he did not finish. This one was not looking at him. This one was looking at the hands.

Twenty-Two

They were lying on the shaft, on either side of the crack.

And they were shaking.

Not trembling. Shaking. The way a creature shakes when it has been pulled out of cold water. Every finger. Both palms. The wrists. The forearms. The shaking went all the way up into the shoulders, into the place beneath the shell where the breath lives, and the whole body was shaking with it, slowly, steadily, like a tree in a wind that will not stop.

This one looked at them.

These old flat-nailed hands.

Forty-one years they had shaken. Forty-one years, and this one had not known. This one had thought they were steady. Slow and careful and steady. The hands of One Who Binds Slowly.

Then the crane had come. The first breath had come. The resting places had come, and the paths, and the raven, and the asking, and for thirteen nights and thirteen days the hands had learned, very slowly, what it was to be still. Not slow. Still. The way water is still at the bottom of a deep pool, where no wind reaches.

They had learned it.

This one had seen them learn it. Had felt it in the shell. Had watched them come to rest on the scarlet loops, one breath, all the way, over and over, a thousand times. Had watched them open the grain of the bamboo without tearing it. Had watched them let an arrow go from the open palms into the dark.

They had learned it.

And it had taken a single turn of a glass for them to forget.

Twenty-Three

This one wept.

Twenty-Four

A tortoise weeps without sound.

The tears come from the corners of the eyes and run down the long wrinkled neck and fall. There is no sobbing. The shell is in the way. There is only the water, coming and coming, as a spring comes up out of the ground.

This one wept.

At the end of the last bench, beneath the lamp, with the cracked shaft lying across the knees and the shaking hands lying on it, in front of the whole silent shed.

Twenty-Five

Not for the arrow.

This one has made many arrows. This one has broken many arrows. Nineteen in thirteen nights, carried to the glue-house fire with a bow. One more is not a grief.

Not for the hundred.

There was never going to be a hundred. This one knew that when the sand began to fall. A hundred arrows like the one that flew could not be made by noon. Not by these hands. Not by any hands. Perhaps not ever.

Not for the quartermaster, nor the council, nor the notice, nor the river road.

For the shaking.

Twenty-Six

For the hands, that had learned to be still, and had been made to forget it.

For the breath, that had learned to go out all the way, and had been stopped at the stone in the bottom of the well.

For forty-one years of shaking, unseen.

For thirteen days of stillness, seen, and loved, and lost.

And for this, which was the worst, and which this one understood only as the tears fell:

The quartermaster had not made the hands shake.

The sand had not made them shake.

The hundred had not made them shake.

They shook because they were afraid. And the fear was not in the quartermaster, or in the sand, or in the hundred.

It was in this one.

It had always been in this one. Under everything. Under the slowness and the care and the steady lamp. Under the first breath and the resting places and the paths. A small, hard, very old stone, sitting at the bottom of the well, waiting.

The quartermaster only turned the glass.

The stone did the rest.

Twenty-Seven

It is a terrible thing to learn that one has not changed.

It is more terrible to learn that one has changed, truly, and that the change is so thin, so new, so easily stirred, that a single falling thread of sand can make the water forget it was ever still.

Twenty-Eight

The sand was falling.

No one spoke.

This one wept, and the tears ran down the neck and fell onto the cracked shaft, onto the shaking hands, onto the sackcloth, onto the long row of gift feathers beside the lamp. They darkened the grey goose and the black crow and the pale gull.

The raven’s bell, at the end of the bench, had stopped sobbing.

Twenty-Nine

Then the quartermaster’s hand came off the hourglass.

This one heard it. The brass frame creaked a little as the weight left it.

He did not say anything.

He stood there. This one could feel him standing there at the end of the bench, a great broad shape in the corner of the eye, not moving. Breathing through his nose. Not the bellows breath. Something slower, and quieter, and uneven, catching.

Then he turned and walked away.

Not marching. Not running. Walking. Slowly. Down the long aisle of the third shed, past the benches, past the silent fletchers, out through the doorway at the far end into the grey morning.

His rings did not clack.

Thirty

The others went too.

Not all at once. One by one, as quietly as they could. The hedgehogs gathered up the points from the sackcloth and set them back in their dish, every one, and went back to their own bench. Mr. Crouch laid his knife and his green stave down very gently on the end of this one’s bench and stood a moment, with his long goat face turned toward this one. He did not sigh. Then he went. The goblin twins came slowly down the aisle and put the armfuls of stolen feathers down on the floor by the door, and stood looking at them, and did not take them back to the loft. And did not bring them to the bench.

Old Mudge came last.

This one had not known he was there. He came up out of the shadow by the wall where he must have been standing all along, listening, and he put out one broad velvet hand, feeling, until it found the edge of this one’s shell. And he laid it there, flat, and did not move it.

“Heard it go,” he said very quietly. “The crack.”

This one could not answer.

He did not need an answer. He stood there with his hand on the shell for a long while. Then he patted it, once, very gently, and went away.

Thirty-One

The raven stayed.

He did not speak. He did not come close. He sat at the far end of the bench in the shadow, with his cloak drawn round him and his crooked wing folded, and watched, the way he had watched for twelve nights from the rafters.

Toward evening, he rose. He gathered up the gift feathers from the sackcloth, all of them, the tear-darkened ones too. He did not take them away. He smoothed them, one by one, with the side of his beak, until they lay straight again. Then he laid them back in their row beside the lamp, exactly as they had been.

Then he went out into the dusk.

To ask, this one thought. To kneel in the mud at the edge of some hidden water and ask.

He did not say so. He did not need to.

Thirty-Two

The sand ran out at noon.

This one did not see it. This one was looking at the hands. But this one heard it. The whispering grew thinner, and thinner, and then there was a last small dry hiss, like a breath that has gone out all the way.

And then silence.

No one came to turn it over.

Thirty-Three

The day went.

The night came.

The lamp burned.

It did not flicker. This one does not know why. It should have. Everything else had.

The hands lay on the cracked shaft and shook.

The tears had stopped. Not because the sorrow had stopped. Because there were no more of them.

It grew cold. Colder than it had been all month. The thin rain did not come. Instead the sky over the stumps was clear and black and hard. When the great planet rose in the east, its light lay on the floor of the shed white as bone, and the breath of this one, going in and going out, short and stopping, made small clouds in the air before the lamp.

Some time in the deep of the night, the frost began.

This one watched it come. It crept in under the door and along the floor of the shed, a fine white fur growing on the packed earth. It climbed the legs of the bench. It spread across the sackcloth, around the long row of gift feathers, around the cracked shaft, around the steady lamp, until the whole bench was white with it, glittering in the lamplight.

It did not touch the hands.

They were shaking too much for anything to settle on them.

Thirty-Four

Here is what this one knows, sitting in the frost.

Stillness is not a place one reaches and stays.

It is not a lesson one learns and keeps.

It is a pond. It is still only for as long as nothing stirs it. Something always stirs it. A stone. A wind. A falling thread of sand. And then the pond is not still, and does not reflect the sky, and is only water, muddied and shaking.

One cannot stop the stirring.

One can only let the water settle again.

And again.

And again.

Thirty-Five

This one does not know if the water will settle.

This one does not know if the hands will ever be still again.

This one only knows that they are shaking, in the frost, beneath the lamp, on a cracked shaft whose path has been cut straight across. And that the shaking is not new.

It is very old.

It was always there.

It was only, for thirteen days, asleep.

And this one wept, at the last, not because it woke.

This one wept because, for thirteen days, this one had believed it was gone.

 

Segment 21:

Frost on the Workbench

The River Road at Night

I had been away from Cinderford two days.

Hollin Greaves sent for me from the field hospital at Harrowgate. A fever had broken out among the wounded from the coast, the kind that comes into old wounds when the weather turns, and he had more of it than his heavy paws could manage alone. I went down the river road in the thin rain, and sat two nights by the pallets with my needles and my lantern, and when the fever turned I came back up the road again.

I came back in the frost.

The rain had stopped at dusk. The clouds went off to the east like a flock of grey geese, and behind them the sky was clear and black and very hard, and the cold came down out of it the way water comes down a cliff. By the time the great planet rose, enormous and banded over the hills, the mud of the river road had frozen into ridges like the waves of a stopped sea. The grey bands about my ankles kept me from slipping, but they could not keep the cold out of my legs. I walked with my wings folded close under my robe and my beak tucked down and my breath going before me in small white clouds.

The stacks of green wood by the roadside had stopped weeping. The sap had frozen in the cut ends. Each billet wore a little beard of ice.

I passed the rookery wood on its long hill in the planet-light. It was silent, as it had been on my first journey. But high in the bare elms I thought I saw, in one or two of the nests, a dark shape sitting, wings folded, not moving. Waiting out the cold.

Bare elms in the frost / two or three black birds sitting / where there were five hundred.

The Gate

It was past midnight when I came to Cinderford.

The yard was quieter than I had ever heard it. Not silent, for it is never silent. But the hammers in the bending shed were slow, and the mauls in the splitting yard had stopped altogether, and no one was singing. The lamps in the sheds burned low. Frost lay white on every roof, and on the stacked billets, and on the cobbles of the yard, so that the whole place glittered in the planet-light like something carved out of salt.

Old Mudge was sitting on his stump by the splitting yard.

He was not working. He was sitting very still, with his broad velvet hands folded in his lap and frost on his shoulders and the tips of his ears, as if he had been sitting there a long time. He turned his head toward me as I came through the gate. He cannot see, but he knows my step.

“Healer,” he said.

“Mudge. You will freeze sitting there. What is it?”

He did not answer at once. He tilted his head the way he does, slowly, as though he were listening to something very far off.

Then he told me.

He told me about the arrow in the farthest butt, sixty-eight paces from the mark, that made no sound. He told me about the quartermaster coming down the third shed at dawn at a run, and the hourglass, and the hundred by noon, and the goblins reaching for the gift feathers. He told me about the tortoise’s hands shaking, and the binding pulled tight, and the sound. He made it for me with his tongue against his teeth, very softly: the small dry sound of a twig stepped on in a quiet room.

“Heard it from the wall,” he said. “Where I was standing.” He was quiet a moment. “Then it cried.”

“The tortoise.”

“Aye.” He turned his face toward the third shed, though he could not see it. “Hasn’t moved since. Not all day. Not all night. Lamp’s still burning. I went and stood by the door a while, an hour back. Could hear it breathing.” He shook his head slowly. “Not like it breathes. Short. Stopping. Like an old dog that’s been kicked.”

I stood in the frost by the old sawyer’s stump. I was very tired from two nights of fever and a long road in the cold, and my legs ached to the bone. For a moment I did not move.

Then I put my hand on Mudge’s shoulder, where the frost lay, and felt the cold come into my palm.

“Go to bed, old friend,” I said. “I will go to it.”

He nodded, but he did not rise. When I looked back from the doorway of the first shed, he was still sitting there on his stump in the planet-light, white with frost, listening.

The Quartermaster’s Window

My way to the third shed took me past the quartermaster’s office.

It is a small whitewashed building of stone, as I have said. In all the nights I had been at Cinderford, its window had never once been dark. Always a lamp burning on the desk, and the great shape of the boar bent over his ledgers, his pen scratching.

That night it was dark.

But it was not empty. As I passed, I saw through the frosted glass, by the faint grey light of the great planet, the shape of him. He was sitting at his desk. Not bent over it. Sitting straight, very still, with his great inky hands lying flat on the wood before him. Between his hands lay something long and pale and thin. An arrow. And beside it, on its side, an hourglass, half as tall as a mouse, the sand all run down into one end.

He did not move. He did not look up. I do not think he saw me.

I did not stop.

I had thought, on the road, that when I came back I would go to him first. I would stand before his desk and say to him, in my quietest voice, the words I had been saving since the day he wrote the price of the hands in the back of a book no one opens. I had them ready. They were cold and very sharp.

I did not say them. Not that night. Through the frosted glass, by the light of the great planet, he looked like a creature who had already heard them, from a voice harder than mine.

Dark office window / the boar sits with the hourglass / sand gone to one side.

The Bench

The third shed was very cold.

The doors at either end stood open as they always did, and the frost had come in through them and along the floor, a fine white fur growing over the packed earth. It had climbed the legs of the benches and spread across their tops. Every bench in that long shed was white, glittering in the light of the low lamps. The fletchers had gone to their pallets in the loft. Only the lamps were left, burning low, swinging a little in the draught from the doors.

At the end of the last bench, one lamp burned perfectly still.

I went down the long white aisle toward it. My steps made small sounds in the frost.

The tortoise was sitting where it always sat.

Frost lay over everything around it. The sackcloth was white. The dish of steel points was white. The little carving knife was white, and the scarlet loops tied at the edge of the bench, and the long row of gift feathers beside the lamp. Grey and black and pale and tawny, they were all furred over with frost, every vane outlined in white like the veins of a leaf in winter. The steady lamp had melted a small round clearing in the frost about itself, and in that small clearing, in the warmth, lay a shaft of pale bamboo. On either side of it lay the tortoise’s two hands.

They were shaking.

Not trembling. I have seen trembling, a thousand times. The trembling of fever, of cold, of fear, of age. This was not trembling. This was the shaking of a creature pulled from deep water: the whole of both hands, every finger, the palms, the wrists, shaking steadily, slowly, without pause, as a reed shakes in a current that will not stop. The frost had settled on everything else on that bench. It had not settled on the hands. They were shaking too much for anything to settle on them.

The tortoise did not look up.

Its eyes were open. Its long neck was bent a little forward over the shaft. Along the neck, from the corners of the eyes down to the edge of the shell, there were two thin lines of frost. White. Glittering. Where tears had run, and dried, and frozen.

I stood at the end of the bench a long time.

Frost on the workbench / two old hands that cannot rest / even the cold leaves them.

The Asking

I did not sit on my crate. It was white with frost, and so was the floor, and I was too old and too tired to care. I knelt.

I knelt on the frozen earth of the shed floor beside the tortoise’s stool, with my robe spread about me. I felt the cold come up through my knees into the bones of my legs. I folded my wings. I put my hands together in my lap. And I looked at the shaking hands for a long time without touching them, as I had looked at the lynx’s arm in the proofing field before the splinters came out.

Then I spoke to them.

“Good evening, hands,” I said softly. “It is very cold tonight. You have been shaking a long time. May I come in?”

They did not answer.

I did not expect them to. A hand that is shaking so cannot answer anything. It is like asking a creature in the middle of a fall whether it would like to sit down. The shaking was not the hands. It was something passing through them, something very old and very strong, the way a flood passes through a valley. While it is passing, the valley has no voice of its own.

So I did not wait for an answer. I did a thing I seldom do.

I opened my robe.

It is a robe of thin rain, as I have said. Water beads off it and it keeps out the heat of summer. In the cold it does nothing at all. But beneath it there is a crane, and a crane, whatever else she is, is warm. I drew the tortoise’s two shaking hands toward me, very gently, one at a time, and laid them inside the robe against my breast, among the feathers, where the warmth is. Then I closed the robe over them, and folded my wings around the whole of it, and held them there.

I did not press. I did not hold them still. I let them shake against me.

The tortoise made a small sound.

“I know,” I said. “I know. Hush. You do not need to do anything. Only let them be warm.”

The Long Cold

I do not know how long we stayed so.

The lamp burned. The great planet moved slowly across the open doorway at the end of the shed, and its white light moved with it across the frozen floor. Somewhere in the bending shed a hammer fell, once, and then not again. The tortoise sat on its stool with its hands inside my robe against my breast. I knelt on the frozen floor with my wings folded round them. Neither of us spoke.

The hands shook.

I felt them against my feathers. The cold of them first, hard, like stones taken from a stream. Then, slowly, the cold going out of them as my warmth went in. And under the cold, all the while, the shaking. Steady. Deep. Without pause.

I thought of my teacher.

I was very young when she first let me set a needle alone. Younger than any of the hedgehog children. A wren-girl had been brought to our hut in the reeds, a child of the marsh people, with a fever so high that her small body was shaking on the mat like a leaf in a storm. My teacher was away, two days’ walk off in the mountains, gathering roots. There was no one else.

I knelt beside that child with my needle case open and the needle in my fingers. My hands shook so badly that I could not bring the point to the place I had been taught. I tried and tried. The point danced in the air above the child’s wrist like a gnat. I could not still it. The child shook and I shook and the whole hut seemed to shake. I began to weep, because I was certain she would die and I would have killed her by being too afraid to help her.

She did not die. My teacher came back that night, early, having dreamed something. She took the needle out of my shaking fingers and set it in the child’s wrist with one small movement, and the fever began to turn. And afterward, when the child was sleeping, she took my two shaking hands in hers, the way I held the tortoise’s now. She said a thing I did not understand for twenty years.

I said it now.

The Shaking

“Shu Manbang,” I said. “Listen to me.”

The tortoise did not move. But I felt, against my breast, the smallest change in the hands. Not stillness. Attention.

“The shaking is not your enemy,” I said.

I felt the hands shake.

“You think it is,” I said. “You think it came back today because you failed. You think the stillness you found in these thirteen days was a thing you had made, like an arrow. And today, when the boar turned his glass, you think you broke it, as you broke the shaft. And now you think it is gone, and the shaking is what is left, and the shaking is the proof that you are what you always feared you were.” I paused. “One Who Keeps Missing.”

The hands shook.

“That is not what the shaking is,” I said.

“For forty-one years,” I said, “your hands have shaken. You did not know it. You thought they were steady, because they were slow. But they were shaking all along, very small, under the slowness, the way the river shakes under the ice. Why?”

The tortoise did not answer.

“Because they were afraid,” I said. “Hm. Yes. That is true. But that is not the whole of it. They were shaking because they were afraid, and no one was listening.”

The hands shook against my breast.

“A hand that is afraid,” I said, “and is heard, can be comforted. A hand that is afraid, and is not heard, does the only thing it can. It speaks more loudly. It shakes. Not to fail you. To ask you.” I breathed. “The shaking is the hands asking to be heard.”

The Hearing

The tortoise was very still on its stool. Its eyes were still open, still bent toward the shaft in the small clearing of warmth before the lamp. But I saw the long neck move, slowly, as it swallowed.

“For thirteen days,” I said, “you heard them. When they were quiet. You heard them rest on the scarlet loops, and breathe, and open the grain without tearing it. That was good. That was very good. I have never seen hands learn so much so quickly. I was proud of them. I was proud of you.”

I felt the hands shake.

“But you only heard them when they were quiet,” I said. “When they were shaking, you did not listen. You were afraid of it. You wanted it gone. And so, today, when the boar turned his glass and the old fear came up in them all at once, you did not hear them at all. You only tried to make them be still. You tried to breathe past the shaking, to rest past it, to cut past it, to bind past it. As if it were something in your way.”

I paused.

“It was not in your way,” I said. “It was your way. It was the hands saying: we are afraid. Please stop. Please listen. And you did not stop. You did not listen. And so they said it more loudly, and more loudly, until at last they said it through the shaft itself.”

The tortoise made a sound.

It was very small. It came from somewhere deep beneath the shell. Not a sob. A tortoise cannot sob. But something that was trying to be one.

“The crack,” it said. Its voice was hoarse and broken, like a voice that has not been used in a very long time. “The crack was… the hands.”

“Hm,” I said gently. “The crack was the hands. Not failing. Asking. As loudly as they could.”

The Needles

I took the hands out of my robe.

They were warm now, the cold gone out of them. But they were still shaking. Not so hard as before. Not like the reed in the current. Something softer now, like the reed when the current has slowed.

I laid them on my knees, palms up, on the folds of my robe. I reached for my needle case.

The case was open on the floor beside me. In the planet-light, the silk lining was bare where my teacher’s scarlet thread had been, the thread I had given away. The needles lay jumbled on the silk, the forty-nine of them, the needles of the seven seasons all mixed together, autumn against spring, winter against summer. I had not been able to sort them since. I had not tried very hard.

I chose by feel. I did not look at which season. It did not matter.

“May I?” I said to the hands.

And this time they answered.

Not with stillness. With the smallest settling, there on my knees in the cold, the way a frightened bird settles a little on the branch when it understands that the hand reaching toward it is not going to close.

Yes.

I set the first needle at the base of the thumb, in the web between the thumb and the first finger, where the strength of the hand gathers. Then the inside of the wrist, three fingers from the crease, the resting place I had shown it on the morning of the scarlet thread. Then a place it had not seen before: the outer edge of the wrist, on the little-finger side, in the small hollow beside the bone. This is where the river of the heart passes close to the skin before it goes down into the hand. My teacher called it the Gate of the Spirit. It is the place where fear goes in, and where, if it is asked kindly, it can be let out.

Three needles in each hand. Six fine bright points in the planet-light, standing up from the old grey skin.

I took up my moxa lantern. I blew on the embers until they glowed, and held the lantern beneath the needles, one after another. The grey fragrant smoke of mugwort curled up around them, warm, smelling of dry summer fields and long afternoons, smelling of nothing at all like frost.

And then I waited.

The Quiet

It did not stop all at once.

I want to tell this truly, because it would be a lie to say otherwise, and the tortoise does not deserve a lie. The shaking did not stop when the needles went in. It did not stop when the smoke came. It went on, there in my lap, the hands lying palms up with the needles standing in them, shaking softly, steadily, like a reed.

But it changed.

It grew slower. Not smaller. Slower. Each shake went a little longer than the last, and paused a little longer at the end, as though the hands were listening for something between one shake and the next. As though they were waiting, after each one, to hear whether anyone had heard.

And each time they paused, I said, very softly, “Hm.”

Only that. Hm. I heard you.

And each time, the next shake was a little slower.

The great planet sank toward the west. The lamp burned. The frost crept on across the floor and up the walls. The smoke of the mugwort rose and curled about the six needles and went up into the dark of the rafters. The tortoise breathed. It was not the long slow breath of the thirteen days, going out all the way. It was shorter, and caught at the bottom, and was afraid. But it was breathing. And with each breath, the hands in my lap shook, and paused, and listened, and I said hm, and they shook a little slower.

Until, some time in the deep of the night, I said hm, and the hands did not shake again.

They lay in my lap. Palms up. The needles standing in them. Not still, not as they had been still on the night the arrow flew. There was still a faint stir in them, the way a pond is never truly still. But they were quiet.

They had been heard.

Six needles standing / in two old hands, quiet now / smoke over the frost.

What the Tortoise Said

I took the needles out, one by one. I laid them back in the case among the others, without sorting them.

The tortoise looked down at its hands, lying in my lap.

It looked at them a long time.

Then it said, slowly, in that hoarse broken voice, “They will shake again.”

“Yes,” I said.

“When the sand falls. When the boar comes. When the hundred…”

“Yes. Many times. Every day, perhaps. For the rest of your life.”

The tortoise was quiet.

“Then the stillness,” it said, “is never kept.”

“Hm. No. It is never kept.” I folded my hands in my sleeves. “But it can always be found again. That is not the same thing, Shu. It is better. A thing that is kept can be lost. A thing that is found again can only be found again.”

The tortoise breathed in.

The breath went down.

I watched it go down, and down, and come to the place at the bottom where it had been stopping all day. The stone at the bottom of the well. I watched it stop there.

And then I watched it go on.

Not all the way. Not yet. But past the stone. A little.

“The hands asked,” the tortoise said, “and these hands did not hear.”

“No,” I said. “Not today. Tonight they did.”

It looked at me then, for the first time since I had come into the shed. It turned its whole body round on the stool, slowly, the way it does, and looked at me with its heavy-lidded amber eyes, with the two lines of frozen tears glittering down its long neck in the last of the planet-light.

“Thank you,” it said.

I have been thanked by a great many creatures in sixty years. Lords and soldiers and mothers and children. I have learned to bow and say hm and put the thanks away somewhere quiet, where it will not make me proud.

I could not put this one away.

It went into me like the cold had gone into my knees, all the way to the bone, and stayed there, aching. I have no other word for it. It ached the way a joint aches when the weather is about to change. It ached for those old hands and their forty-one years of shaking unheard. It ached for the thirteen days of stillness, and for the crack in the shaft, and for the tears frozen on the long neck. It ached for the boar sitting in the dark of his office with the run-down glass, and for the raven out somewhere in the frost on his knees in the mud, asking. And it ached for the wren-girl on the mat, and for my own young hands shaking over her with the needle, and for my teacher’s hands closing around mine.

It ached, and I let it.

There is no needle for that kind of ache. There is only listening to it, and saying hm.

Dawn

I stayed until the light came.

I sat beside the tortoise on the frozen floor with my back against the leg of the bench and my wings folded around myself. The tortoise sat on its stool with its hands resting on its knees. We did not speak.

Toward dawn, I heard its breathing change. It grew slower, and deeper, and the catch at the bottom of it grew smaller. Then, for the first time in all the weeks I had known it, I heard the tortoise sleep.

It slept sitting up, with its long neck bowed forward over the cracked shaft and its hands open on its knees. The steady lamp burned beside it. I did not wake it.

The grey came up over the stumps of the ash grove. The great planet faded in the doorway. Slowly, as the light came and the cold eased, the frost on the workbench began to melt. It went first around the lamp, in the small clearing where the warmth had been all night. Then outward, across the sackcloth, around the dish of points, around the knife, around the scarlet loops. And last of all from the long row of gift feathers beside the lamp. Each vane lost its edging of white and became, once more, grey, and black, and pale, and tawny, glistening wet in the dawn.

At the far end of the bench, in the last of the frost, I saw a print. Three toes forward and one back. A raven’s talon, walking in from the door.

Beside it, laid at the end of the row, there was a new feather.

It was white. Long and white and clean, with a quill dry and smooth at the end. A swan’s. I had not seen it come. I do not know when the raven came and went in the night. I only know that he had found, somewhere in the frost, by some hidden water, one more bird who would give, because he had knelt and asked.

I looked at it a long time. Then I looked at the sleeping tortoise, and its quiet hands, and the cracked shaft with its path cut straight across.

Hm.

Frost melting at dawn / a white feather at the row’s end / the hands are sleeping.

 

Segment 22:

Bamboo, Bone, and Leftover Silk

One

What is thrown away is not gone.

It is only waiting for someone to bend down.

Two

The morning after the frost, this one woke.

That is a strange thing to say. This one does not sleep at the bench. In forty-one years, this one has never slept sitting up. But the crane’s needles came, and the smoke, and the long hm in the dark. And some time near dawn the breath went down past the stone at the bottom of the well, and kept going, and this one did not notice when it stopped being breath and became sleep.

When this one woke, the frost was gone.

The bench was wet with it, glistening in the grey light. The lamp still burned. The crane was gone. Only the print of her knees on the floor beside the stool, two round marks in the damp earth, where the frost had not been able to settle while she knelt.

At the end of the row of gift feathers, there was a new one. White. A swan.

And across the knees lay the cracked shaft.

Three

This one looked at it a long time.

It was not a good shaft anymore. The crack ran down from where the binding had been, a hand’s width toward the point, fine as a hair, straight across the path. It would never be an arrow. Draw it in a bow and it would break. Throw it, and it would tumble.

On the thirteen nights, every shaft that failed went to the glue-house fire. This one carried it there, and bowed, and laid it on the coals, so that at least it would be warmth.

This one took up the cracked shaft and stood, to carry it there.

And stopped.

Four

The hands had stopped.

They were not shaking. The crane’s needles had heard them, and they were quiet. But they had stopped, on the shaft, of themselves, and would not lift it.

This one looked down at them.

They were resting. On the cracked shaft. On either side of the crack. The way they rested on the scarlet loops. The way they rested on the bamboo through the five nights of waiting, before the first breath.

They were asking.

This one did not know what. But the crane said: the shaking is the hands asking to be heard. This one thought, standing there with the cracked shaft in the grey dawn: perhaps the stillness asks too.

So this one did not carry it to the fire.

This one sat down again.

Five

The crack ran a hand’s width.

Above it, toward the nock, the shaft was whole. The path ran down that part as it had been drawn, faint and wandering, curving out around one knuckle of the bamboo and in again, never cutting across. Below the crack, toward the point, it was whole too. It was only in the middle, in the length of a hand, where the binding had been pulled tight, that the path was broken.

This one took up the little knife.

Turned it to the edge.

And, very slowly, with the thumb on the scarlet loop at the end of the stroke, with the breath going out all the way, cut the shaft. Above the crack. Below the crack.

Three pieces.

The broken middle, a hand long, with the crack running through it.

And two ends, whole.

Six

The broken middle, this one carried to the glue house.

The fires there burn day and night, under the great pots, and the badger-woman who keeps them stood stirring with a long iron paddle. She looked at this one when this one came in. All the yard had heard what happened. All the yard had been very quiet about it. She did not speak. She only stepped back from the fire a little, to make room.

This one bowed, and laid the cracked piece on the coals.

It caught. Burned. Became warmth.

And as this one turned to go, the eyes fell on the floor at the side of the fire, where the badger-woman sweeps what comes out of the pots.

Seven

Glue is made from many things.

Hide. Hoof. Sinew. Bone.

The bone is boiled a long time, until what is in it comes out into the water, and then it is fished from the pot and thrown aside, white and clean and empty, onto a pile by the wall. In the spring it is carted away and ground for the fields.

This one had walked past that pile a hundred times.

Never looked at it.

Looked at it now.

Most of it was broken. Splinters, shards, crumbled ends. But here and there among the shards there were small pieces still whole. Knuckles. Round little caps from the ends of long bones, white and smooth and hard, worn by the boiling until they were almost like stone. Some no bigger than a fingertip.

This one stood looking at them.

Then this one turned to the badger-woman.

“May this one take two?” this one said.

She stopped stirring. She looked at this one with her small black eyes, and then at the pile of bone, and then back.

“It’s rubbish,” she said.

“Yes.”

She looked a moment longer. Then she shrugged, and went back to her paddle. “Take what you like,” she said. “Nobody wants it.”

This one bent down. Chose two. Small round caps of white bone, smooth, each a little larger than the end of the shaft.

“Thank you,” this one said.

She did not answer. But this one saw, going out of the door, that she had stopped stirring again, and was looking at the pile of rubbish by the wall as though she had never seen it before.

Eight

Back at the bench.

Two ends of a cracked shaft. Two caps of bone from a rubbish pile.

And silk.

Nine

This one had not known there was silk.

But there was.

On the thirteen nights, nineteen shafts failed. Each was carried to the fire. But before it was carried, this one unwound the scarlet loops from it, the crane’s thread, the little loose knots tied at the resting places, which held nothing. This one could not bear to burn them. They were hers. Her teacher’s. They had held her needles for sixty years.

So this one had taken them off each failure and laid them in a little heap at the far corner of the bench, under the edge of the sackcloth, and forgotten them.

There were many. Nineteen shafts. Five or six loops each. Little red curls of silk, tangled together, a small soft nest of failures in the corner of the bench.

And under them, at the very bottom, where this one had laid it when it came off the first arrow, the one fletched with the raven’s own feather, the one this one was not yet sure of: the mother’s thread.

Faded nearly to dust. The knot worn smooth by forty years.

Ten

This one did not decide to make anything.

That is the truth. This one has thought about it since and is sure of it. There was no plan. There was no thought: now this one will make a thing. There was only the bench, and the two ends of bamboo, and the two caps of bone, and the little nest of silk, and the hands, which were quiet, and which reached.

They reached first for the shorter end. The piece from below the crack. A finger and a half long, round and pale, with the path running down it and one small knuckle near the top.

And the knife.

Eleven

Bamboo is hollow.

All bamboo. Between each knuckle there is an empty space inside, like a long room with no door. When the culm is split for arrows, the room is opened and the shaft is made from its wall. But this piece had not been split. It was round. Whole. And inside it, between the knuckle and the cut end, was a small empty room.

This one held it up to the lamp and looked into the cut end.

Dark inside. Empty.

Waiting.

Twelve

This one shaved it.

Not to make it smaller. It was small enough. Only to make it smooth. To take off the rough edge of the cut, and the faint marks of the bending, and anything on its surface that was not on the way. Thumb on the scarlet loop. Breath. Stroke.

And this one noticed a thing.

When the stroke was slow, and the thumb rested, and the breath went out all the way, the bamboo was warm under the fingers.

Not warm as wood is warm when it has lain near a lamp. Warm from inside. The way a stone is warm in the evening, when the sun has gone and the warmth comes up out of it.

This one stopped.

Breathed.

Took up the knife again. Stroke. Rest. Breath.

Warm.

Thirteen

This one did not understand it.

This one does not understand it now.

This one only noticed it, and went on.

Fourteen

The paths.

This one turned the knife to the point.

The path of the bamboo was already on it, drawn on the morning before the hourglass. But the crane’s rivers were not. The three rivers of the arm, drawn in black ink on the night she first showed this one the way. They had long since washed away from the skin. They were on the strip of bamboo that hung at the chest, on the plain linen cord.

This one took the strip from the neck. Laid it on the bench beside the small round piece.

And copied them.

Fifteen

It is very hard to draw on a round thing.

A flat strip lies still. A round piece turns under the point. The rivers must go around it, not across it, as the crane’s rivers go around the arm. The river of the lung curving out toward one side. The river of the heart’s protector straight down the middle. The river of the heart along the far edge. And the path of the bamboo itself, among them, a fourth stream in the same valley.

It took the whole of the morning.

This one does not remember the morning passing. This one remembers only the point moving along the bamboo, and the breath going out, and the warmth under the fingers.

Sixteen

Near noon, the quartermaster came.

This one did not see him. This one heard him: the ring of iron on stone, far down the shed, coming nearer.

He had not been to the bench since the hourglass. All the day before and all the night of the frost, this one had not heard his step. This one had heard, from the fletchers, that he sat in his office with the shutters closed and did not come out.

Now he was coming.

The hand on the knife began to move faster.

This one did not mean it to. The breath was going out, the thumb was on the loop, the point was on the river of the heart. But the ring of the iron on the stone came in through the ears and down into the shell. Somewhere at the bottom of the breath, the old stone in the well stirred. And the hand, without being told, hurried.

And the bamboo was heavy.

Seventeen

This one felt it at once.

The little round piece, no longer than a finger and a half, that had weighed almost nothing all morning, was suddenly heavy in the hand. Heavy as a stone. Heavy as a full cup that must be carried across a crowded room without spilling. The point dragged on it. The fingers had to grip to hold it.

This one stopped.

Looked at it.

The quartermaster’s step came on, down the shed, nearer and nearer.

This one breathed out.

All the way.

Past the stone.

The step came to the middle of the shed.

And stopped.

It did not come on. It stood there, in the middle of the long aisle, a long time. Then, slowly, it turned, and went back the way it had come.

The bamboo in the hand was light again.

Eighteen

Light.

Not only light as it had been, before the step came. Lighter. So light it seemed to rise a little from the palm. As a leaf rises from the hand when the breath goes out over it.

And warm.

This one sat at the bench with it in the open hand and did not move for a long while.

Nineteen

Warm when the hand is slow.

Heavy when the hand hurries.

Light when the breath goes out.

This one did not put these into it.

This one does not know how to put anything into anything. This one makes arrows. This one has never made a thing of magic. The crane has her needles; the raven has his bell; the quartermaster has his black spectacles. These are things made by others, long ago, by hands that knew how.

These hands do not know how.

These hands only cut, and rested, and breathed, and followed the rivers.

Perhaps that is how.

Twenty

This one took up the bone.

The first cap. Small and white and round, a little larger than the end of the bamboo.

It was hard. Harder than bamboo. The boiling had taken everything out of it that was soft. To shape it, the knife had to go very slowly, a hair at a time, scraping, not cutting. Thumb on the loop. Breath. Scrape.

It was warm too.

Not at first. At first it was cold, as bone is cold. But as this one worked, slowly, scraping a hollow in the underside to fit over the end of the bamboo, it warmed. The way the hands of the old sawyer warmed under the crane’s needles. As though the bone had been very cold for a very long time, lying on the rubbish pile by the glue-house wall, and had not known it was cold until something warm touched it.

Twenty-One

When it was shaped, this one fit it over the end of the bamboo.

Not with glue. The pots in the glue house were full of the boiled-out life of the bone itself. It did not seem right.

This one only pressed it on. Gently. At the bottom of the breath, with the hand empty.

And it went on. As the point went on, the night the arrow flew. As though the bamboo had been waiting for it, and opened a little, just enough, and let it in.

One end, capped.

Twenty-Two

The other end was open.

The small dark room inside, waiting.

This one took up the strip from the neck. The first one. Cut from the very first culm that opened, on the morning of the first breath, with the crane’s three rivers and the bamboo’s one path scratched on it by lamplight. Hung on plain linen. Worn against the heart for fourteen days.

It was too wide to go in.

This one took up the knife, and very slowly, along the grain, split it.

It opened. Without a sound. Without a splinter. As the culm it came from had opened, on that first morning.

Two thin strips. Each with half the rivers on it.

This one rolled them, very gently, each one around the other, as the rivers on the arm wind around each other on their way to the hand. The rolled strips slid into the dark room inside the bamboo, all the way down to the knuckle, and lay there.

The first culm. Inside the last failure.

Then this one took up the second cap of bone, and shaped it, and pressed it on.

The room was closed.

Twenty-Three

The silk.

This one drew the little nest of scarlet loops from under the sackcloth and began to untangle them.

It took a long time. They were knotted together, curl into curl, from nineteen failures. The fingers had to go slowly, finding each end, following it back through the tangle to where it began, drawing it free. Thumb on the loop. Breath. Draw.

It was the most patient work these hands have ever done.

When it was done, there lay on the bench a long thread of scarlet silk, made of many short ones, knotted end to end. Not straight. Not even. Here thicker, here thinner, here a little faded, here bright. Nineteen failures, made one.

And at the end of it, this one tied the mother’s thread.

Twenty-Four

This one bound it.

Not tight.

Around the bamboo, just below the first cap of bone. Once. Twice. Three times, slowly, with a breath between each turn, the way the fletchings were bound on the night the arrow flew. Firm. Close enough not to fall. Loose enough to breathe.

Then down along the length, following the path. Where the river of the lung curved out, the silk curved out. Where the bamboo’s own path bent around its one small knuckle, the silk bent around it too. All the way down to the second cap of bone, and three turns there, and tied off in a small loose knot that held nothing.

And from the knot, the rest of the silk, the long scarlet tail of it with the mother’s dust-colored thread at its end, this one tied into a loop.

Long enough to go over the head.

Twenty-Five

It lay on the bench in the lamplight.

A small thing. No longer than a finger and a half. A round of pale bamboo, capped at each end with white bone. Bound with scarlet silk that wandered down its length like a stream. Scratched along its surface, faint as breath on glass, with four paths. Three of the body, one of the wood. Inside it, in the small dark room, the first culm, rolled.

It was not beautiful.

The bone caps were not quite even. The silk was knotted in a dozen places, from the joining of the failures. The bamboo had a small dent near one end where the crack had been close.

It did nothing loudly.

It did not glow. It did not hum. It did not shine in the lamplight more than any other thing on the bench.

It only lay there.

And when this one put out a hand and touched it, it was warm.

Twenty-Six

This one put it on.

Over the head. The scarlet loop settling on the back of the neck where the shell ends. The small bound thing coming to rest against the plastron, over the heart, where the strip had hung for fourteen days.

It weighed almost nothing.

This one sat at the bench with the hands resting open on the knees and breathed. In, and out, all the way.

And with each breath going out, it was lighter.

Twenty-Seven

Here is what this one has learned of it, in the days since.

When this one slows, it warms. Not much. As a hand warms another hand. But always.

When this one hurries, it grows heavy. Not suddenly. The way a cup grows heavy in the hand of one who has carried it too far. A little, and a little, until the neck feels it, and the hands, and the breath, and something says: you are hurrying. Stop.

When this one breathes out, all the way, past the stone, it grows light. So light it is almost not there. So light that, sometimes, sitting at the bench in the deep of the night with the lamp steady and the yard quiet, this one has to put a hand up to the chest to be sure it has not floated away.

It is always there.

Twenty-Eight

It does not make the hands still.

The crane was right. Nothing does. The hands will shake again. When the sand falls. When the boar comes. When the hundred.

It does not stop the shaking.

It only tells.

It tells, by its weight, before the hands know it, before the breath knows it: you are hurrying.

And it tells, by its warmth, when the hands have slowed again: you are here.

And it tells, by its lightness, when the breath goes out all the way: there.

That is all it does.

It is enough.

Twenty-Nine

What is it?

This one does not know.

It is not a tool. It does not cut, or bind, or measure.

It is not a charm. This one did not speak any words over it.

It is made of things that were thrown away. A cracked shaft, meant for the fire. Two caps of bone from a rubbish pile. Nineteen failures of scarlet silk, and a mother’s thread worn to dust.

Nothing in it was wanted.

Everything in it was asked.

Thirty

The raven came that night.

He came in through the door at the far end of the shed and down the aisle, and climbed onto the end of the bench, and stood there a while, in the shadow beyond the lamp, looking.

He looked at the thing on this one’s chest.

His milky eyelid flickered.

He did not ask what it was. He tilted his head, the way the old sawyer tilts his. And then, very slowly, he leaned forward on the bench until his notched beak was close to it, so close this one could feel the stir of his breath against the plastron, and he listened.

A long time.

The cracked bell at his throat made no sound.

Then he drew back. He laid on the end of the row of gift feathers, beside the white swan, a new one. Grey. A heron’s.

And he went to his place at the far end of the bench, in the shadow, and folded his cloak about himself, and watched.

Thirty-One

What is thrown away is not gone.

The cracked shaft is warmth in the glue-house fire, and a small round room bound in silk.

The bone from the rubbish pile is a cap that keeps the room closed.

Nineteen failures are one thread.

The mother’s thread, faded to dust, is the loop that holds it all against the heart.

None of it was wanted.

All of it was waiting.

This one only bent down.

 

Segment 23:

The Object That Would Not Glow

There are some sins so small that the one who commits them does not notice he has committed them until long afterward. There are others so large that he notices nothing else for the rest of his life. I have committed both kinds. I have carried the second kind upon my face in notches, one by one, so that the whole valley might read them. But the sin I must now confess to you is neither large nor small. It is of a third and stranger kind. It is the sin of a creature who has spent his whole grief condemning a thing, and then, in the dark, with his own talons, does it.

I stole.

I, Corvane Ashquill, Keeper of the Molted Rookery, who gather only what is given, who have knelt in the mud at the edge of a hundred hidden waters to ask, who carry upon my beak the count of every theft in the valley. I stole.

And I stole from the one creature in all that valley who had bowed in the dust and asked me.

Hear me, then. Hear how it came about. Then judge me, as I have judged so many.

It began at the hidden pool.

You will remember it. At the far end of the marsh downriver, behind its screen of willows, where I found the family of grey geese, eight of them, whole, on the first morning of my asking. You will remember the old gander who swam toward me across the water with his neck stretched low and his eyes wary, and raised his great grey wing, and shook it, so that two long feathers drifted down onto the surface and floated to me on the ripples. You will remember that the first of those feathers became the first gift on the tortoise’s bench. And you will remember that the same old gander’s feather, torn once by a slip of the knife and kept in the row, became one of the three that flew into the dark on the thirteenth night and did not cry.

I went back to that pool, the night after the tortoise made its small bound thing of bamboo and bone and silk.

I had gone back there often. More often than to any other hidden water. I told myself it was because the gander’s family was the most generous I had found, and the most likely to give again. That was true. But it was not the whole truth. The whole truth was that I loved them. I loved the old gander’s wary eyes and the way he hissed at me every time, for form’s sake, before he swam over. I loved the young geese, five of them, nearly grown, who had begun to come close to the bank when I knelt there and look at my cloak of a thousand molts with their heads on one side, as if wondering where I had found so many feathers and whether they might have one. I loved the old goose, his mate, who never came close at all but watched from the far side of the pool, and called softly to him when he had been near me long enough.

I went there, that night, with nothing to ask. I only wished to see them.

I heard the ladders before I came to the willows.

There are no trees at the hidden pool tall enough for ladders. It is all reeds and willows and water. But I heard them all the same, the knock of wood on wood, as I came along the edge of the marsh in the dark. They were not ladders against trees. They were planks, laid down across the soft mud at the water’s edge, so that men in soft-soled boots might walk out over it without sinking.

And I heard the sacks.

I heard what follows the sacks.

I will not tell it. I have told it once, of the rookery wood, and once is all the telling I have in me. I will tell you only that I came through the willows too late, as I am always too late. The planks were being lifted from the mud, the slit-lanterns were going away across the marsh in a line, and the sacks were bulging on lean shoulders. On the dark water of the hidden pool, eight grey geese drifted in a tight frightened knot, every one of them holding its wings a little away from its body, at that terrible angle.

I went to the edge of the water and knelt in the mud as I always knelt.

The old gander swam toward me.

He did not hiss.

He came across the pool slowly, his neck stretched low, as he always came. But he did not hiss, and he did not raise his wing. He could not. It hung from his shoulder bare. He stopped an arm’s length from the bank, where he always stopped. He looked at me.

I have been looked at with hatred, and with fear, and with grief, in my long life. I have never been looked at as that old gander looked at me, across the dark water, in the light of the sinking planet. It was not hatred. It was not anything so simple. It was a question.

And I knew the question. I knew it the moment I saw his eyes, the way one knows the shape of a wound before one has looked at it.

How did they find us?

They had never been found before. Not in all the weeks of the ladders. Not when the rookery wood was robbed, or the heronry by the ford, or the cliffs at the river’s mouth. The hidden pool was hidden. It lay behind its willows at the far end of the marsh where no path went. No one came there.

No one but me.

Night after night. Along the edge of the marsh. To kneel in the mud and ask.

I do not know that they followed me. Hear me: I do not know it. I have asked myself ten thousand times since, and I do not know. Perhaps they found the pool by chance. Perhaps they heard the geese calling. Perhaps some farmer’s boy told them for a copper. But perhaps, some night, one of Flitch’s lean soft-voiced creatures with a slit-lantern saw a crooked raven going along the edge of the marsh in the dark, and wondered where he went. And followed. And waited. And came back with planks.

Perhaps it was my asking that led them there.

I did not know. I do not know. I will never know.

The old gander looked at me a long time across the water. Then he turned and swam slowly back to his family, and they drew close around him, and none of them looked at me again.

I carved the twelfth notch on the bank of the hidden pool, by the light of the sinking planet, with the silver talon-ring the old Keeper gave me.

It went deeper than the others.

I came back to Cinderford before dawn.

I did not walk. I flew. My crooked wing had healed enough by then, with its new grey quills, to carry me a little way: a few beats, a long glide, a few beats more, low over the frozen fields, with the cold air tearing at me and the ache in the healed sockets like a fire. I did not care. I flew because I could not bear to walk, to go slowly, to give my grief time to settle. I wanted it to burn. I wanted it to burn so hot that it would burn something.

I did not know what.

I came in through the open doorway at the end of the third shed and down the long dim aisle between the benches. The yard was in its quietest hour, the hammers slow, the fletchers asleep in the loft. At the very end of the very last bench, the steady lamp was burning.

The tortoise was asleep.

It had begun to sleep, after the night of the frost. Not lying down; I never once saw it lie down. Sitting, on its stool, at the bench, with its long neck bowed a little forward and its old hands open on its knees. Its breath was slow and deep and even, going out all the way, the catch at the bottom of it nearly gone.

And on its chest, against the flat plate of its lower shell, over its heart, the small bound thing.

I stood on the end of the bench in the shadow and looked at it.

I had listened to it the night before. I had laid my beak close against it and listened, and heard nothing. And yet it had not been nothing. It had been the kind of silence one hears inside a shell held to the ear: full, and very far away, and somehow warm. I had heard the tortoise speak of it, a little, in its slow plain way: that it warmed when the hands were slow, and grew heavy when they hurried, and became light when the breath went out. I had not wholly believed it. I had wanted to.

Now, standing there with the twelfth notch fresh and burning on my beak and the old gander’s question burning behind my eyes, I looked at it and thought:

Peace.

That thing on the tortoise’s chest is peace. It was made out of failures, out of rubbish, out of thrown-away things, and it holds peace inside it. The tortoise found it there, in that small round room of bamboo, the way a diver finds a pearl. And the tortoise wears it against its heart, and sleeps.

And I have not slept since the third night of Illumination, except once, by accident, lulled by a tortoise’s breathing. I have twelve notches on my face and a requisition against my heart and a goose’s question behind my eyes.

Why should a tortoise have peace and not I?

I will tell you plainly what I thought then. I was not mad. I thought it very clearly, as one thinks the clearest and worst thoughts in the hour before dawn.

I thought: if that thing holds peace, let it give some to me.

I thought: I will take it, only for an hour, only to see. I will hold it in my own talons, as the tortoise holds it against its heart, and I will see whether it warms for me. Whether it grows light for me. Whether the burning in me can be quenched by it.

And beneath that thought, very small, very cold, like a stone at the bottom of a burning well, there was another.

If it does not warm for me, then it is a lie. Then the tortoise is a fraud, and its peace is a fraud, and its asking is a fraud. Then there is nothing in this valley but ladders and sacks and the round firm hand. And I was right all along to count.

I did not ask.

I want you to hear that. Of all the things I have to confess, that is the heaviest. I did not ask. The tortoise was asleep, and I did not wake it. I did not kneel. I did not bow. I did not say, as I have said at a hundred hidden waters: I am the Keeper. I do not take. I come to ask.

I reached out with my talon, very softly, as the gatherers reach into the nests, and hooked the scarlet loop from behind the tortoise’s neck, and lifted it over the bowed head.

The tortoise did not wake.

Its breath went on, slow, deep, all the way out.

The small bound thing slid free of its chest and hung from my talon by its loop of knotted silk.

And at my throat, my bell rang.

Not a sob. Not a shriek.

A single note, cracked and flat and very soft, so soft that I alone could hear it. It was exactly the note it had rung, so long ago, before it cracked, on the third night of Illumination, when the first ladder knocked against the first elm in the rookery wood.

The note it rings for a thing taken that was not given.

I nearly dropped it.

I stood there on the end of the bench in the shadow with the stolen thing hanging from my talon and that cracked note ringing at my throat. For a long moment I could not move at all. I had made that bell ring. I. With my own talon. For the first time in seven years, the bell had rung for me.

The tortoise breathed. In. Out.

And then, because I am what I am, the grief rose up again and covered the shame, as water covers a stone. I thought: it does not matter. It is only for an hour. Only to see. I will put it back before the tortoise wakes and no one will ever know.

The bell would know. I would know.

I carried it up into the rafters.

I climbed to my old crossbeam, in the deepest shadow of the roof, where I had sat for so many nights watching. I sat down there, with my cloak about me and my crooked wing folded. I took the small bound thing from my talon and laid it across the palm of my right foot, the whole one, the strong one, and looked at it.

It was cold.

That was the first thing I noticed. Against the tortoise’s chest, in the lamplight, it had seemed to me warm. I had felt the warmth of it on my beak when I listened. Now, in my talons, it was as cold as the frost had been on the bench, as cold as the mud at the edge of the hidden pool. The bone caps were like ice. The scarlet silk was stiff. The bamboo was cold right through, the way a stone is cold at the bottom of a winter stream.

“Warm,” I said to it.

I said it aloud, in my old rasping voice, there in the dark of the rafters.

“Warm. Thou warmest for the tortoise. Warm for me.”

It did not warm.

I held it closer. I drew it in against my breast, under my cloak, among my feathers, where a raven is warmest. I pressed it there against my heart, where the tortoise wore it. I held it tight.

It did not warm.

It grew heavy.

Not suddenly. Slowly. As the tortoise had said: the way a cup grows heavy in the hand of one who has carried it too far. A little, and a little, and a little more, until it lay against my breast like the cold wet requisition I had carried there for so many weeks, and then heavier than that. As heavy as the twelfth notch. As heavy as the old gander’s eyes.

I could feel it pulling me down. My breast. My neck. My head, bowing toward my breast under the weight of it, so that my notched beak was pressed against the bound silk.

“No,” I said. “No. Light. Become light.”

I had heard the tortoise say it: light when the breath goes out. So I breathed. I drew in a great breath of the cold air of the rafters, and I let it out.

But I let it out as I let out everything in those days. Fast. Hard. In a rush, like a creature spitting out something bitter. And it did not go all the way. It stopped, at the bottom, where there was a stone. I could feel the stone. I had never felt it before. A hard, hot, burning thing at the bottom of my breath, made of twelve notches and a goose’s question and a requisition and a round firm hand. My breath came down to it, and struck it, and stopped.

The thing against my heart grew heavier.

I breathed again. Harder. Faster. Trying to force the breath past the stone, the way the gatherers force a feather from its socket.

Heavier.

I held it in both talons now, before my face, and glared at it in the dark. My grief was burning so hot that I could feel it in my eyes, in the healed sockets of my wing, in the grooves on my beak.

“Thou art a lie,” I said to it. “Thou art a lie. Thou warmest for the tortoise because the tortoise is a fool, and fools are easily warmed. Thou art bamboo and bone and rubbish. There is no peace in thee. There is nothing in thee at all. I will throw thee from these rafters and thou wilt break on the floor, and the tortoise will weep over thee as it wept over its cracked shaft, and then it will know what I know, that there is nothing in this valley but theft, and the count of theft, and…”

I stopped.

I stopped because I had heard myself.

I want to tell you exactly what I heard, because it was the strangest moment of all that strange time, and I have never been able to forget it.

I heard my own voice, there in the dark of the rafters, rasping and hard and full of grief, saying: I will throw thee from these rafters and thou wilt break.

And I heard, under it, very faint, from far away and long ago, another voice. Soft. Almost kind.

Big one. Good long primaries on this one. Hold him still.

It was the voice of the gatherer on the double elm. The one who held my wing at the wrist with a grip so practiced and so strong that I knew he had held a thousand wings exactly so. The one who pulled, one by one, with a little twist at the end of each.

It was the same voice.

Not the same words. Not the same creature. But the same voice. The voice of something that has taken what was not given, and holds it tight, and says to it: you will do what I want, or I will break you.

I sat in the rafters with the stolen thing in my two talons, cold and heavy as a stone. My bell rang its cracked flat note at my throat for what I had done. And I understood.

The thing was not cold.

I was.

The thing was not heavy.

I was.

The thing was not a lie. It was exactly what the tortoise said it was. It warmed when the hands that held it were slow. It grew heavy when they hurried. It became light when the breath went out all the way. It was a mirror. That was all. A small round mirror of bamboo and bone and silk, and it was showing me, with perfect honesty, in the dark, the shape of what was holding it.

And what was holding it was a creature who had taken it without asking, in the dark, while its keeper slept. Who held it too tight, and hurried, and breathed in rushes that stopped at a stone. Who said to it: warm for me, or I will break you.

It was not showing me the gatherers.

It was showing me myself.

I have told you, in an earlier part of this account, how I sat upon my dead branch in the rookery wood, on the morning after the third night of Illumination, and resolved that I would never take vengeance. A Keeper does not take, I said. A Keeper gathers what is given. I said it with great pride. I believed it.

I had not taken vengeance. That was true. I had not hunted Flitch through the dark nights of the valley. I had not dropped upon the boar from the rafters, though I had thought of it, there beneath my crossbeam, for a long, long time.

But I had carved twelve notches into my own face. I had carried the requisition against my heart for weeks, letting it burn there, cold, so that I should never forget a single name. I had counted every theft. I had counted the tortoise’s breaths, and the tortoise’s failures, nineteen of them, in my head, through twelve long nights. I had come back from the hidden pool on a crippled wing in the dark because I wanted my grief to burn. I wanted it to burn hot enough to burn something.

And it had.

It had burned away the Keeper.

It had left, in his place, a creature with a stone at the bottom of his breath and twelve grooves on his beak, sitting in the dark of a roof with a stolen thing in his talons, saying to it: warm for me, or I will break you.

I had become, in my grief, the very thing I grieved.

Not all at once. Not in a single night. A little, and a little, and a little, one notch at a time.

I did not weep. I want you to know that. I wanted to. I felt it rising in me, there in the rafters, like water rising in a cellar. But it would not come. It came up against the stone at the bottom of my breath and stopped, as my breath stopped.

So I sat there, dry-eyed, with the cold heavy thing in my talons, and the bell ringing at my throat, and the great planet sinking in the doorway at the end of the shed. And for the first time since the third night of Illumination, I did not count.

I did not know what else to do.

I came down from the rafters before dawn.

Slowly. Not dropping, as I had dropped on the night of the bundle, with my talons spread and my crooked wing open. Climbing, the long way, down the post at the corner of the shed, with the small bound thing held in my beak by its loop of scarlet silk. Not in my talons. I did not want it in my talons anymore.

The tortoise was still asleep.

Its breath went in, and out, all the way, slow and deep. The lamp burned steady beside it. Its old hands lay open on its knees.

I climbed onto the bench.

I stood there before it, very close, so close I could feel the stir of its sleeping breath on my feathers. Then I bowed my head, slowly, as the tortoise had bowed on the night of the asking. My notched beak came down until the small bound thing, hanging from it by its loop, rested very lightly against the flat plate of the tortoise’s chest, over its heart, where it belonged.

And I let go.

I do not know how to tell you what happened then. I am not sure that anything happened at all. Perhaps I imagined it. I was very tired, and my grief had burned very hot, and I had not slept, and the hour before dawn plays tricks with the mind.

But as the loop slid from my beak and the small bound thing settled against the tortoise’s chest, I felt it. Not in my talons, which had held it so tight. Not in my beak, which had carried it. In the very last instant of letting go, in the small space of air between my beak and the bound silk, as it left me.

Warmth.

Faint. So faint I could not be sure of it. But warm. As though the thing, in the very moment of being given back, had warmed, a little, for the one who gave it.

I drew back.

The bell at my throat had stopped ringing.

I stood on the end of the bench for a long time, looking at the small bound thing on the tortoise’s chest, rising and falling with its breath. Then I looked at my own talons, empty. Then, slowly, I lifted one of them to my beak and touched with the point of it the twelfth notch, the deepest. Then the eleventh. Then the tenth. All the way back to the first, carved on my dead branch above the river road on the morning after the rookery screamed.

I did not carve another.

I wanted to. I had stolen, and a theft is a theft, and the count is the count. But I stood there with the silver ring on my talon and the edge of it against my beak, and I could not do it. I did not know any longer whether the count was a remembering or only a burning. I did not know whether carving another notch would make me more of a Keeper, or less.

I did not know.

For the first time in all that long grief, I did not know, and I did not try to make myself know.

I lowered my talon.

When the tortoise woke, at dawn, I was sitting at the far end of the bench in the shadow, in my place, with my cloak drawn about me.

It woke slowly, as it does everything. Its long neck came up. Its heavy-lidded amber eyes opened. Its hands, on its knees, stirred. And then, as I knew it would, as I had been dreading it would all the long grey hour since I let go, one of its old hands rose slowly from its knee and went to its chest. To the small bound thing. And rested there, flat, over the heart.

It stayed there a long time.

Then the tortoise turned its whole body round, slowly, on its stool, and looked down the length of the bench at me.

It did not ask.

It only looked. With those amber eyes, heavy-lidded and very calm. The hand still resting on the bound thing over its heart.

And I knew that it knew.

Perhaps the thing had told it. Perhaps it had been heavier, or colder, or lighter, or warmer than it should have been when the tortoise woke. Perhaps the tortoise had not been asleep at all, and had felt my talon at its neck and the loop lifting over its head, and had let me take it. Perhaps it had sat there through the whole dark hour, breathing, while I sat in the rafters above it raging at a mirror. I do not know. I have never asked.

I only know that it looked at me, and I could not look away.

“I took it,” I said. My voice was very low. All the rasp was gone out of it. “In the night. While thou didst sleep. I did not ask.”

The tortoise breathed in.

“I wished to see,” I said, “if it would warm for me.”

The tortoise breathed out. All the way.

“Was it heavy?” it said.

I looked at it.

Of all the things it might have said, angry or grieved or wounded, I had not expected that. Not a reproach. Not a question about the theft. Only a question about the weight, as one might ask a traveler how the road had been.

“Yes,” I said. “It was heavy. It was very heavy. It was cold as the bottom of the pond where the old gander…” I stopped. “It would not warm. It would not grow light. I tried to make it. I held it tight and breathed hard and told it to warm for me. It only grew heavier.” I looked down at my talons. “It was not the thing,” I said. “It was me.”

The tortoise was quiet a long time.

Then it said, slowly: “It is heavy for this one too.”

I looked up.

“When these hands hurry,” said the tortoise. “When the boar comes. When the sand falls. When this one is afraid.” A breath. “It is always heavy then. Always cold.” Another breath. “It does not lie.”

“Then what use is it,” I said, “if it only shows thee what thou art?”

The tortoise looked down at the small bound thing under its hand.

“That is the use,” it said.

I sat there at the end of the bench in the grey of the morning with my empty talons and my twelve notches, and I could not answer.

I have thought about that answer every day since.

It is not a comfort. I want you to understand that. The tortoise did not forgive me, or comfort me, or tell me that what I had done did not matter. It only told me the truth, plainly, as it tells everything: that the thing does not lie. That it is heavy for the one who hurries and cold for the one who holds too tight, whoever he is. And that this is the whole of its use.

I came to Cinderford to find the thief who signed away my rookery. I found him. I found him in the dark of the rafters, holding a stolen thing too tight, and saying to it: warm for me, or I will break you.

I did not know until that night that he had a raven’s face.

I still carry the twelve notches. I will carry them until I die. But I have never touched them since without remembering the cold small weight of that stolen thing in my talons, and the faint warmth of it in the very last instant of letting go. And I have never since been certain, as I was once so certain, which of the two I am truly keeping: the count, or the Keeper.

 

Segment 24:

Supply Yard Reform

There is a kind of news that arrives not by rider or by letter but by silence. One morning a man looks up from his ledger and notices that the road beyond his gate, which has been loud with wagons every day for weeks, is quiet. He notices that the barge folk on the river have stopped singing. He notices that the clerk at the next desk has put down his pen and is staring at the wall. And he knows, before anyone has told him a single word, that something has happened somewhere, and that it is very bad, and that it is his.

The news of the battle at Greyhook Strand came to Cinderford in just such a silence. I give the reader fair warning that I shall not dwell on it long, because I cannot. I shall tell him only what I must, and then I shall tell him what came after. The after is the part of this history I am least ashamed of, though I did it, as he will see, with very bad grace.

It was eleven days after the hourglass.

I had kept to my office most of those eleven days, with the shutters drawn. I did the requisitions. I signed the dockets. I sent the wagons down the river road with the fifteen thousand, crate after crate of them, made in the same old way by the same hundred and twelve hands in the same roaring sheds. I did not go down to the third shed. I did not go anywhere I might pass the end of the last bench. I sat behind my desk with the arrow that did not whistle lying on the shelf behind me beside the twelve from the coast. The great brass hourglass stood in the corner where Mr. Scrapple had carried it back, the sand all run down into one end, and I did not turn it, and I did not move it, and I did not look at it.

The reader will say I was ashamed. I was. But it was not a useful shame. It was the kind that sits in the dark and does nothing, and calls its doing nothing penance.

On the eleventh morning, the road went quiet.

I noticed it at about the hour of nine, when the first wagon from the Ford was due with empty crates for refilling. It did not come. Nor did the second. By ten, the barge folk had stopped singing on the river. By eleven, Mr. Scrapple had laid down his pen and was staring at the wall.

At noon, the Colonel came.

He did not come in a carriage this time, with Mr. Blight and the umbrella and the cushion. He came alone, on a lathered horse, up the frozen river road at a hard trot. He slid down at my gate and did not wait for anyone to take the horse. He walked into my yard, and through it, past the sheds, past the splitting yard where the mauls faltered and stopped as he passed, to my office door. He opened it without knocking.

He was not wearing his eyeglasses. I had never seen him without them. His long grey greyhound face looked naked, and very old, and his eyes were red-rimmed.

He did not cough.

“Sergeant Harrowtusk,” he said.

I stood up.

“Greyhook Strand,” he said. “Four days ago. The raiders came back. They landed at dusk on the strand below the village, as we knew they would, and the Ninth Levy was waiting in the dunes with your fifteen thousand.” He stopped. He did not seem to know what to do with his hands, without his eyeglasses to hold. “They broke,” he said.

“The Levy?”

“The arrows.”

I sat down again. I did not mean to. My legs did it.

“On the draw,” said the Colonel. “Green inside. You pull to the cheek, and it twists, and it comes apart in the hand. Those that did not break on the draw broke in the air, or tumbled, or went wide. They screamed, Sergeant. The archers said the raiders laughed. They had learned the sound. They knew they could not be hit by an arrow that screams like that.” He looked at the wall where Mr. Scrapple was looking. “The Levy fell back to the village. The raiders came after. The village burned.”

I did not say anything. I could not.

“Two hundred and eleven of the Ninth,” he said. “Sixty-three of the village. And the healer at the Ford, Greaves, has more hands than he can count with splinters in them.” He paused. “Including that young lynx-folk archer he had there before, the one the crane-woman mended. Sorrel. She went back to the line. She lost her right hand on the strand, Sergeant. An arrow shattered on the draw and took it.”

He reached into his coat. He took out a printed form. Across the top, in heavy black type: REQUISITION. Beneath that, in smaller type: No. 412. Beneath that, filled in by hand in the same cramped joyless script: The council requires the immediate replacement of all arrows expended at Greyhook Strand, to the number of fifteen thousand, by the next dimming week.

He laid it on my desk.

“The council remains,” he said, “the council.” And his voice broke on it, and he turned away, and went to stand at my window with his back to me, looking out over the yard. He did not speak again for a long while.

I sat behind my desk with Requisition Four Hundred and Twelve before me, and I looked at it.

Fifteen thousand. By dimming week. Again.

And the reader will want to know, I dare say, whether I felt in that moment the fever come back up through me as it had at dawn on the morning of the hourglass. Whether I thought of quotas and wagons and commendations, and cream paper with a gold seal.

I did not.

I thought of a lynx-folk girl I had never met, whose name I had heard only once before, from the crane, on the night of the price of the hands. I thought of her right hand.

And I thought, for no reason I could name, of the twelve arrows on my shelf, and the word I had crossed out at the bottom of a page.

I stood up.

“Colonel,” I said.

He did not turn round.

“You’ll ‘ave your fifteen thousand,” I said. “By dimming week.”

He turned then. He looked at me with those red-rimmed naked eyes, and for the first time since I had known him, there was something in them other than contempt. It was something very like despair.

“Made how, Sergeant?” he said quietly. “The same way?”

“No,” I said. “Not the same way.”

And I put on my apron coat, and went out of my office, and down the yard, to the third shed.

I want the reader to understand that I did not want to go.

Every step of the way down that yard, past the splitting yard and the bending shed and the first shed and the second, I argued with myself. Loudly. Inside my own head, I roared and blustered and protested at a pitch that would have stopped the mauls in the splitting yard if any of it had come out of my mouth. It went, as near as I can set it down, something like this:

It’s nonsense. All of it. Breathing at sticks! Tying thread round nothing! A tortoise that makes one arrow in a fortnight an’ cries over a crack! You cannot run a yard on that, Harrowtusk! You cannot fill a requisition on that! You cannot make fifteen thousand arrows by dimming week by sitting at a bench with your ‘ands on your knees waiting for the bamboo to say yes! It is the most absurd, impractical, unprofitable, sentimental, unmilitary nonsense you ‘ave ever ‘eard of in your life, an’ you ‘ave ‘eard a great deal of nonsense, an’ you are going to stand in front of that tortoise an’ ask it to teach the ‘ole yard ‘ow to do it!

And then, under all that roaring, very small, from the pocket over my heart where the black spectacles lay:

Twelve of twelve. Five in six, whole. And the rest of the yard, one in twenty.

I hated it. I want the reader to know that. I hated every step. I hated that the ledger was right and I was wrong. I hated that the slowest bench in my yard had made the only arrows that came back. I hated that I had to go and stand at the end of that bench, where I had read out nil to the whole shed and served notice and turned the glass, and say what I had come to say.

But I went.

The tortoise was at its bench.

It was shaving a shaft, slowly, with its little knife, and at the end of each stroke its thumb came to rest on a small loop of scarlet thread, and it breathed. On its chest, on a loop of knotted silk, hung a small bound thing of bamboo and bone. At the far end of the bench, in the shadow, sat the great black raven with the notches on its beak, which I had learned by then was called Corvane. Beside the steady lamp lay a long row of feathers, grey and black and white and tawny.

On an upturned crate across the bench sat the crane.

She looked up when I came. So did the raven. The tortoise did not, at once. It finished its stroke. Its thumb came to rest on the scarlet loop. It breathed out, all the way, and only then turned its whole body slowly round on its stool and looked up at me with its heavy-lidded amber eyes.

I stood at the end of the bench.

The shed behind me had gone quiet. I could feel every eye on my back, as I had felt them on the morning of the hourglass. Mr. Crouch at the ninth bench had put down his knife. The goblin twins had stopped arguing. The hedgehogs had drawn together.

I opened my mouth.

And what came out, I am sorry to say, was not at all what I had come to say. It was the roaring from inside my head, all of it, at once, out loud, before I could stop it.

“It’s nonsense!” I said. “All of it! I want that understood! I want it understood by every creature in this shed, an’ in this yard, an’ in this valley! It’s nonsense! Breathing at sticks! Tying thread round nothing! Feathers from birds as ‘as been asked, as if a goose could say yes! One arrow in a fortnight, an’ a crack, an’ crying! It’s the most absurd, impractical, unprofitable, sentimental, unmilitary nonsense I ‘ave ever ‘eard of in my life, an’ I ‘ave ‘eard a great deal of nonsense, madam,” this to the crane, who had said nothing, “an’ I ‘ave kept the most orderly yard in the river valleys for eleven years without one single breath of it!”

I stopped. My chest was heaving. My tusk-rings were clacking so hard I could feel them in my teeth.

The tortoise looked at me. The crane looked at me. The raven looked at me, and at its throat a small cracked silver bell made no sound at all.

“An’ it works,” I said.

I said it much more quietly. So quietly that I do not think anyone but the three at the bench heard it.

“It works,” I said again. “Twelve of twelve. Five in six, whole. Off the coast. An’ the rest of my yard, one in twenty.” I looked down at the floor of the shed. “Greyhook Strand. Four days ago. They broke, Manbang. My arrows. Fifteen thousand. On the draw, in the air. They screamed, an’ the raiders laughed, an’ the village burned. Two ‘undred an’ eleven of the Ninth. Sixty-three of the village. An’ a girl named Sorrel lost ‘er ‘and.” I swallowed. “Because of me. Because of the ‘ourglass an’ the green wood an’ the iron jaws an’ the feathers in the sacks. Because of my ledger. Because I wouldn’t look.”

No one spoke.

“There’s another fifteen thousand wanted,” I said. “By dimming week. An’ I’ve come…” I could not get it out. I tried twice. It stuck in my throat like a fishbone. “I’ve come,” I said, “to ask.”

The tortoise breathed in.

“Will you,” I said, “show ’em?”

The tortoise did not answer at once. It never answers anything at once. It looked at me a long time with those amber eyes. I could not tell what was in them. Then, slowly, it looked down at its own old hands, resting open on its knees. Then at the small bound thing on its chest, rising and falling. Then up at me again.

“These hands,” it said, “cannot make fifteen thousand.”

“No,” I said. “I know it. I’m not asking ’em to. I’m asking…” I flung out my arm, back toward the whole silent shed, the whole yard. “I’m asking you to show them. The breathing. The thread. The… the lines on the wood. The asking. Whatever it is. Show them. All of them. All ‘undred an’ twelve. An’ they’ll make the fifteen thousand, an’ I’ll…” I stopped. “I’ll get out of the way.”

The crane made a small sound.

“Hm,” she said.

I did not know, then, what that hm meant. It was not the hm she had said to me on the night of the price of the hands, going past me in the dusk, that had rebuked me worse than any court-martial. It was something else. Something softer. I did not know what to do with it, so I pretended not to hear it.

The tortoise breathed out. All the way.

“Yes,” it said.

I will now tell the reader how we reformed the supply yard at Cinderford.

I say we, because it was not I. It was the tortoise, and the crane, and the raven, and old Mudge, and Mr. Crouch, and Mr. Scrapple, and a great many others besides. I did very little of it, except to stand at the edge of things and protest, loudly, at every turn.

I protested a great deal. I want the reader to know that. I want him to understand that I did not undergo some sudden glorious change of heart, and go about the yard with a beatific expression, breathing at sticks. I did nothing of the kind. I went about the yard roaring, exactly as I always had. Only now I roared about the new things instead of the old ones. And then, having roared, I let them be done anyway.

The drying barn first.

“You can’t season wood in a fortnight!” I roared, standing in the empty barn with the wind blowing through its slats. “It takes a season! A ‘ole season! That’s why it’s called seasoning! Where am I to get a season’s worth of dry wood by dimming week?”

“Split it thin,” said old Mudge, from his stump in the doorway. “Thin as your finger. Along the grain, not across. Thin wood dries quick. Then stack it loose, with air between, an’ let the wind do its work.” He tilted his head. “An’ the bending shed.”

“What about the bending shed?”

“Them coals,” said Mudge. “Under them iron jaws. Too ‘ot for the jaws, if you ask me. But bank ’em low, an’ take the jaws off, an’ ‘ang the wood over ’em on racks, an’ let the warm come up through it slow…” He shrugged his broad velvet shoulders. “Dries in a week, maybe. Without forcing it.”

“That’s nonsense!” I said. “That’s… take the jaws off? The jaws are the ‘ole point of the bending shed!”

“Aye,” said Mudge. “Well. They was.”

We took the jaws off.

The bull-folk who ran the bending shed protested even louder than I did, and for longer, and with a great deal of feeling about his twenty years at the irons. But he took them off. He banked the coals, and hung the thin-split wood on racks above them, and let the warmth come up through it slow. Within the week, the drying barn and the bending shed between them held enough dry wood for four thousand shafts, and not one of them had been forced.

The feathers second.

This I did myself, and I want it on the record that I did it with my own hand, though I protested the whole time.

I took down from its nail in my office the oldest of my ledgers. In it, among the contracts, was the paper I had signed on the third day of the first great haste: Ten thousand primaries, mixed, for fletching. Five copper the score. And Mr. Flitch’s slanting hand, and below it my own round firm signature. I laid it on my desk.

“This is good business,” I said aloud, to no one, to Mr. Scrapple, who was pretending not to listen. “Five copper the score. It’s the cheapest feather in the valley. Shed feathers’ll cost twice that, three times, an’ there’s not one in ten as many of ’em. It’s madness, Mr. Scrapple. It’s commercial suicide. Any quartermaster in the valleys would tell you so.”

Mr. Scrapple said nothing.

I took up my pen. I dipped it in the ink. And I drew a single straight line through the contract, never two, from the top to the bottom, through Mr. Flitch’s name and my own.

Then I wrote beneath it, in my round firm hand: Cancelled. And I sent Mr. Scrapple to nail a notice on every post and door and tree trunk within a day’s walk of the yard. It said, in large letters that he made with great difficulty and a borrowed brush:

WANTED AT CINDERFORD. SHED FEATHERS. ONLY SHED. TWO COPPER EACH, FAIR WEIGHT. ASK THE KEEPER.

I did not know, when I wrote “ask the Keeper,” what I meant by it. I had heard the tortoise call the raven that, and it had seemed right. But I learned soon enough. Within three days, the gate of Cinderford had a line before it every morning of farm children and old widows and fisher-boys and goatherds. Each of them held a little bundle of feathers gathered from the hedgerows and the reed beds and the floors of henhouses and the margins of ponds. At the head of the line, on a stool by the gate, sat the great black raven with the notches on his beak. He took each bundle, one by one, and held each feather up to his eye, and then to his ear. Once in a while he set one aside with a look so terrible that the child who brought it went white and fled. Most he laid in a basket at his feet, and nodded, and Mr. Scrapple paid out two copper each from a bag at his belt.

Mr. Flitch came, once.

He came up to the gate on the fourth morning, in his rusty black coat, with his smile arriving several moments ahead of him. He had heard, he said, that Cinderford was in want of feathers. He had a cart outside the gate, full of sacks.

The raven looked at him.

It did not say anything. It only rose up off its stool, slowly, to its full height, which is not small, and spread its wings. The one was black and whole. The other, I saw, was black now too, nearly, the new quills grown in grey and glossy where once there had been six pale stubs. It turned its head so that the morning light fell full on its notched beak. And the small cracked silver bell at its throat began, very softly, to ring.

Mr. Flitch’s smile did not quite leave. But it stopped arriving.

“Another time,” he said, and went away down the river road with his cart. I have not seen him since. I am told he went south, to the yards at the coast, where they still bought feathers by the sack. I hope the bell followed him. I think perhaps it did.

The benches third.

This was the worst, and the longest, and the loudest. I will not weary the reader with the whole of it. I will tell him only that the tortoise could not teach a hundred and twelve creatures at once. It is a slow creature, and its way is slow, and it could only sit at one bench at a time and show one pair of hands where to rest. So it chose Mr. Crouch first.

“Crouch!” I roared, when I heard. “Crouch? ‘E’s the slowest fletcher in the yard after the tortoise itself! ‘E sighs between every arrow! If you want to teach the yard, teach the goblins! They’re fastest!”

“Hm,” said the crane. “That is why.”

I did not understand. I understand now. The tortoise did not choose Mr. Crouch because he was slow. It chose him because he was already listening. He had sat at the ninth bench through all the haste, making ninety-eight arrows where the goblins made four hundred, sighing between each one. Not, as I had always thought, from melancholy. From grief. For every stroke he had been made to hurry.

The tortoise sat beside him a whole day. On the second day, Mr. Crouch’s hands came to rest on a scarlet loop at the end of a stroke, and he breathed out all the way, and did not sigh. I happened to be passing the ninth bench just then, very much by accident. I saw his long melancholy goat face change. I have seen a great many faces in my life. I had never seen one look like that.

By the end of the week, Mr. Crouch was teaching the field-mice at the second bench. By the end of the second week, the field-mice were teaching the hedgehogs. The crane went among them all, as she always had, with her needles and her smoke and her soft hm, pressing the insides of wrists. The goblin twins were the last. They took the longest, and complained the loudest, and in the end were the best of all.

I protested every step. I want it recorded. I stood at the ends of benches and roared about pace, and duty, and the dimming week. I looked at the sand I had taken to carrying in my head now that the great glass stood silent in my office. I counted.

And the arrows came.

Not fast. Not at first. In the first week of the reform, the yard made fewer arrows than it had made in any week since the first letter came. I nearly gave the whole thing up. I stood in my office on the Conjursday night with the tally before me and my tusks aching and the fever trying to come back, and I very nearly marched down to the third shed to turn the great glass over again.

I did not. I do not know why. Perhaps it was the twelve arrows on my shelf. Perhaps it was the arrow that did not whistle, lying beside them. Perhaps it was a girl named Sorrel’s right hand.

In the second week, the tally rose. In the third, it rose more. And on the evening of the fourth week, Mr. Scrapple came into my office with his whiskers trembling and his arms full of papers. He laid the tally on my desk and stood back from it, as if it might go off.

I looked at it.

I looked at it again.

I took out the black spectacles from the pocket over my heart, and unfolded them, and put them on. Not to look at the tally. To look at the crate of arrows he had brought in with it, a crate of two hundred and fifty from the morning’s work. Every bench in the yard was mixed together in it.

I looked through those soot-black lenses at two hundred and fifty arrows.

Three of them glowed. Three.

I took the spectacles off. I looked at the tally again.

The reader will forgive me if I do not set down all the figures. He has had a great many figures from me already, in the course of this history, and I fear he has grown weary of them. I will give him only the one that matters.

We had made, in four weeks, eleven thousand arrows.

Not fifteen. Eleven. Four thousand short of the requisition, with a week to go.

But of those eleven thousand, by every test Sergeant Reedwhistle could devise, ten thousand four hundred were whole and true. In the old way, in the haste, we had made fifteen thousand in thirty-four days. Of those, by the evidence of the salvage, perhaps fourteen thousand were broken or crooked or green before they ever left the yard.

I sat there a long time with that figure before me.

Then I did a sum. I am a quartermaster; it is what I do. I reckoned up how many arrows the Ninth Levy had actually been able to loose at Greyhook Strand, out of the fifteen thousand I had sent them, without the arrow breaking in the hand. And I set it beside the ten thousand four hundred.

We had met the quota.

Not the quota the council had written on Requisition Four Hundred and Twelve. That one we had missed by four thousand. The other quota. The real one. The one the council had never thought to write down, because it was not a thing the council knew how to count. The number of arrows that would actually fly.

We had met it twice over.

The reader will want to know what the council said.

The council said nothing, at first. The wagons went down to Harrowgate with eleven thousand arrows, and I sent with them a letter. It was written in my own round firm hand. It explained the shortfall in very plain terms and enclosed, at the end, the figures from the salvage of the first campaign. Twelve of twelve. Five in six. One in twenty.

And then, for six weeks, nothing.

Then, at the end of the six weeks, after the raiders came back a third time to the coast, a different salvage came up the river road. Mr. Lazarus Pockridge, damp as ever, with his docket wanting my signature in three places. Nineteen crates again. I counted them myself, in the cold storeroom at the back of the first shed, by lantern light, through the night, as I had counted before.

The reader knows what I found. I will not tell him. I will tell him only that at the hour of four in the morning, I sat on my stool with the ledger open on my knees and the black spectacles in my hand, and I did not put them on.

I did not need to.

The heap on the floor was very small. The row on the trestle was very long.

When the dawn came grey under the storeroom door, I went back to my office. I took down the oldest of my ledgers, the one with the separate account for bench forty-one at the back. I turned to the last page, where, on the morning of the hourglass, I had drawn a single line through a single word and written above it, in my round firm unhesitating hand: How many?

I looked at it a long time.

Then I took up my pen. I drew a single line through How many?, never two. And above it, in the same hand, a little less firm than it used to be, I wrote again the word I had crossed out.

Why?

And beneath it, this time, I wrote an answer.

I want the reader to know that it was not my answer. I had not found it. I had only stood at the edges of things and protested while others found it, and then gone and counted it afterward in a cold storeroom. It was the answer the tortoise gave me, when I went down to the third shed that morning and stood at the end of the last bench and asked. It was the second time I had ever asked it anything.

I asked it why. Why the arrows came back. Why the new way worked. Why, by every figure in every ledger I had ever kept, it should have been slower and was not.

The tortoise breathed in, and out, all the way, and looked at me with its heavy-lidded amber eyes. Then it said three words, the same number it had said to me on the night of the notice. I wrote them down in my ledger beneath the question, and drew a single line beneath them, never two, and closed the book.

They were not asked.

The wood was not asked. The feathers were not asked. The hands were not asked.

That was why.

I do not pretend to understand it. I am a quartermaster. I understand figures, and crates, and requisitions, and the weight of fuel used to boil glue-pots. I do not understand asking. I protested against it from the first day of the reform to the last, and I protest against it still, sometimes, at the ends of benches, out of habit.

But I have the figures. And a quartermaster does not argue with his own figures.

I respect them.

Grudgingly. Loudly. With a great deal of snorting and clacking of tusks. But I respect them. And I respect the slow mossy creature at the end of the last bench who taught them to me, though I would not say so to its face, and have never said so, until this page.

There. It is written.

I shall draw a line beneath it.

Only one.

 

Segment 25:

Students Who Came and Left

Winter, the Season of the Reform

The winter after Greyhook Strand was long, and hard, and white.

The river froze at its edges. The stacks of wood by the road wore beards of ice all season long. The rookery wood on its hill stood bare and black against the sky, with here and there a single dark shape in the high nests, waiting. In the yard at Cinderford, the frost came every night. Every morning the fletchers swept it from their benches with the sides of their hands before they began.

But the hammers in the bending shed had stopped. The jaws were gone from the coals. Over the low red glow of the banked fires hung racks of thin-split wood, drying slowly in the rising warmth. The bending shed smelled no longer of boiling sap and scorched iron, but of resin and warm bamboo, like the inside of a pine forest in summer.

I had meant to go home.

I had meant to go home at the end of the month of thin rain, when the first fifteen thousand went down to the Ford. And then at the end of the next month, when the price of the hands was written in the back of a book. And then after the frost. And then after the reform. Each time I put my needles in their case and folded my spare robes and looked north up the river road toward the reed marsh and my egret on her dead alder. Each time I found there was one more hand that needed asking.

So I stayed.

All that winter I walked from bench to bench with my lantern, as I had always walked. But it was different now. In the first weeks of the haste, I had walked past a hundred and twelve hands drawn tight against the work, and I could only ask them one at a time, each evening, and it was not enough. In the winter of the reform, I walked past the same hundred and twelve hands, and they came to rest at the end of every stroke on little loops of scarlet thread. The tortoise had begun to tie them, one bench at a time. Its own loops had run out long ago. These were new thread, bought from a dyer at Harrowgate with silver the boar had grumbled over for an hour and then paid.

I did not need to ask the hands so often.

They were asking themselves.

Snow on the shed roof / below it a hundred hands / resting on red thread.

Spring, the First Students

They began to come in the spring.

I do not know how the word went out. I know that the boar sent letters, many letters, to every yard in the river valleys and some beyond, in his round firm hand, with the figures from the salvage attached. I know that the Colonel, who came twice that winter without his eyeglasses or his cough, took the figures back with him to the council. I know that the barge folk talked, and the drovers, and the farm children who brought shed feathers to the Keeper at the gate. Word goes out from a place the way rings go out from a stone dropped in still water. No one sees it go. Then one morning it has reached the shore.

The first one came in the month of Lathandus, when the willows by the river were just beginning to show green.

He was a young otter-folk, sleek and brown, with a pack on his back and a letter of introduction from the master of a yard on the coast. He stood at the end of the tortoise’s bench, where the boar had stood so many times, and he looked at the steady lamp, and at the scarlet loops, and at the old mossy creature shaving a shaft. And he said, very politely, that he had been sent to learn the Cinderford method.

The tortoise looked up at him for a long time.

Then it breathed out, all the way, and said: “Sit.”

He sat. He stayed four days. He learned the scarlet loops on the first day, and the breathing on the second, and on the third the paths that are not measurements. On the fourth day he went home to the coast, very pleased, with a notebook full of drawings.

I watched him go, down the river road in the spring rain, with his notebook held carefully under his coat to keep it dry.

“Hm,” I said.

The tortoise, beside me at the door of the shed, breathed in.

“He will come back,” it said.

“Do you think so?”

“His hands did not rest,” said the tortoise. “Not once. In four days.” A breath. “He drew the loops very well.”

He came back in the summer. He did not bring the notebook. He sat at the end of the bench for a month.

The Otter Girl

There was another otter-folk who came that spring. She did not come from anywhere. She was already there.

You will remember her, perhaps. The young otter at the nearest clamp in the bending shed, on the day I first walked the yard. She could not close her right hand, and she worked the screw with her left, and when I stopped to ask if I might look she shook her head and whispered that she could not stop, thirty to the hour.

When the jaws came off the coals in the winter, she had nothing to do. The bull-folk who ran the bending shed set her to hanging the thin-split wood on the racks. It was easy work, but she did it slowly, one-handed, with her burned right hand held against her chest.

In the spring, she came to the third shed.

She did not ask to learn. She only came, one evening, and stood at the far end of the bench, in the shadow beyond the lamp, where the raven sometimes sits. She watched. The next evening, she came again. And the next.

On the fourth evening, the tortoise looked up from its shaving and said, without turning its head: “Your hand.”

The otter girl went very still.

“May this one see it?” said the tortoise.

She came forward, slowly, into the lamplight. She held out the burned right hand. The palm was one long scar, pale and shining, and the fingers would not straighten.

The tortoise did not touch it. It looked at it a long time. Then it said: “Will it rest?”

“It doesn’t do anything else,” said the girl. Her voice was very low. “It can’t hold. It can’t close. It just… lies there.”

“Then it already knows the hardest thing,” said the tortoise. “Sit.”

She sat.

She learned with her left hand. All of it. The breathing, the loops, the paths, the binding. And her right hand, the burned one, lay on the bench beside the work the whole time, palm up, resting. When I came by with my needles, I would kneel beside her stool and set them in it, and warm them with smoke, and say hm. And slowly, over that whole spring and into the summer, the burned fingers began, a hair at a time, to straighten.

They never closed again. But by midsummer she could lay the right hand flat on a shaft and hold it still while the left hand drew the knife. And the work that came off her bench was as fine as any in the yard.

She stayed.

She is there still, I think. She was there the last time I had word of Cinderford.

Willows turning green / a burned hand lying open / learning how to rest.

Summer, the Ones Who Left

In summer they came by the dozen.

From the river yards first. Then from the coast, and from the hill country, and once a whole party of six in a hired carriage all the way from the capital, sent by the council itself. The boar was beside himself. He roared for three days that he had no room, no benches, no wood, no time, and then he built a new shed beside the drying barn. He called it, in his ledger, the Teaching Shed. Everyone else in the yard called it the Slow Shed.

The tortoise could not sit with all of them. It was one creature, and slow, and it could sit at only one bench at a time. So Mr. Crouch sat with some, and the field-mice with others, and the otter girl with others. The goblin twins, Nib and Nob, sat with the ones from the capital, because no one else would. They had grown up a great deal that year. They had become very fine fletchers and very fierce teachers. The capital creatures were frightened of them, and learned a great deal.

Many stayed a season. Some stayed longer.

But some left.

I want to set down the ones who left, because no one else will. The boar’s ledgers record only the ones who stayed. The ones who left are a blank, like the space between two strokes of the knife where the hand should rest.

There was a fox-folk from the capital, a bowyer’s son, very handsome and very quick, with fine clothes and a fine voice and fine long fingers. He sat at the tortoise’s bench for one morning. At noon he stood up and said, “I see. It’s breathing. Very well. I’ve understood it,” and left in his carriage the same afternoon. I heard later that he set up a yard of his own in the capital and painted CINDERFORD METHOD above the gate in letters of gold. His arrows sang like all the others.

There was a council clerk, a heron-folk, grey and stooped, with a writing-box on a strap round his neck. He sat beside the tortoise for nine days and wrote down everything it did. Every breath. Every stroke. Every loop. He measured the length of the pauses with a little brass timer and wrote down the figures. He drew the paths on the shafts with a ruler. On the tenth day he went back to the capital with sixty pages. I heard later that the council had printed them on its steam presses, a thousand copies, with a number on the front. Requisition Four Hundred and Thirty. Instructions for the Production of Silent Arrows.

I asked the tortoise, when I heard, whether it minded.

It breathed out, all the way, and looked at the steady lamp a long time.

“The heron’s hands rested,” it said at last. “Every time. On the brass timer.”

Hm.

There was a young boar-folk from the hill yards, very like the quartermaster must have been when he was young. Broad, fierce, ink already on his fingers. He sat at the bench and tried, harder than anyone I have ever seen try anything. He tried to breathe slowly and his breath came out in snorts. He tried to rest at the loops and his hands clenched on them. He tried to follow the paths and cut across them every time. He tried for two weeks, and his face grew redder and redder, and on the fifteenth morning he threw down his knife. He shouted that it was nonsense, all of it, nonsense, and stormed out of the shed and down the river road.

The quartermaster watched him go from the door of the office.

I saw his face. I did not say anything.

That night, the quartermaster wrote a letter in his round firm hand to the master of the hill yard. It said, as I learned later, that the young boar-folk was to be given a bench of his own at the end of the shed, and a lamp, and left alone with it, and not counted, for as long as he needed.

He came back two years later. I was not there to see it. But I was told.

Summer grass by the road / the footprints of those who left / already growing over.

Autumn, the One Who Demanded

She came in autumn, when the willows by the river were turning yellow and the geese were gathering on the marsh to go south.

I knew her at once. I knew her before she reached the gate.

You will remember her. A young lynx-folk archer, not yet twenty, lying on a pallet near the door of the field hospital at Harrowgate, with her right hand full of green splinters. I spoke to her hand, that first night in the month of thin rain: Good evening, hand. You have had a terrible journey. I am sorry no one asked you first. And she laughed, startled and broken, and began to cry, and I worked the splinters out one by one by lamplight.

Sorrel.

She went back to the line, after. And at Greyhook Strand, an arrow from this yard shattered on the draw and took her right hand from her.

She came up the river road in the autumn with a pack on her back and her right sleeve pinned up empty at the elbow. She walked through the gate past the raven on his stool and past the line of children with their bundles of feathers. She walked down the yard past the bending shed and the splitting yard and the first shed and the second, straight to the end of the last bench in the third. She stood there.

The tortoise looked up.

“You,” said Sorrel.

The tortoise breathed in.

“You’re the one,” she said. “The one whose arrows don’t break. The one they all talk about. The one that makes them… still.” She was shaking. All of her. Not the slow shaking of the tortoise’s hands on the night of the frost. A fast, fierce, terrible shaking, like a bowstring that has been drawn too far and is about to snap. “Show me.”

“Sit,” said the tortoise.

“I don’t want to sit,” said Sorrel. “I don’t want to breathe at a stick. I don’t want to tie threads. I’ve been at the hospital at the Ford for half a year with a healer telling me to rest. I can’t rest. I don’t have a hand to rest.” She lifted the pinned-up sleeve, and let it fall. “I want what you’ve got.”

She pointed.

At the tortoise’s chest. At the small bound thing of bamboo and bone and scarlet silk, hanging there over its heart.

“That,” she said. “They said at the Ford you’ve got a thing. A charm. That makes your hands still. Give it to me.”

I was sitting on my crate across the bench. I did not move. I did not speak. It was not my place.

The raven, who had come in from the gate and was standing in the doorway at the far end of the shed, did not move either.

The tortoise looked at Sorrel for a long time. At the pinned-up sleeve. At the shaking. At the eyes.

Then, slowly, it lifted its two old hands to the loop of knotted scarlet silk at the back of its neck. It drew it over its head. And it held the small bound thing out to her, across the bench, on its open palm.

Sorrel snatched it.

I saw the tortoise’s hand close, very slightly, on the empty air where the thing had been. Then it opened again, and lay still.

The Long Autumn

She kept it all autumn.

She hung it round her own neck on its loop of silk, and sat at a bench in the Slow Shed. She did not sit at the tortoise’s bench; she would not. She tried, with her one hand, to make an arrow.

It did not work.

I watched her, every evening, with my lantern, from a distance. She held the knife in her left hand and tried to shave a shaft, and the shaft rolled away from her because she had no right hand to hold it. She tried to pin it against the bench with her knee, and her elbow, and her chin. She tried to tie the scarlet loops, one-handed, and could not make the knots. And all the while, against her chest, the small bound thing hung on its loop of silk.

She told me, much later, that it was cold.

Cold and heavy. All that autumn. She said it was like wearing a stone. She said that every morning she put it on, hoping, and every evening she took it off, and it had not warmed once. She said she began to hate it. She said she held it in her one hand at night in her bunk in the loft and squeezed it until her claws hurt and told it to warm, to work, to give her what it gave the tortoise. And it only grew heavier.

She did not give it back.

The tortoise did not ask for it.

The tortoise worked without it all that autumn. I watched. Its hands came to rest on the scarlet loops at the end of every stroke as they always had, and its breath went out all the way, and its lamp did not flicker. But once or twice, late in the night, I saw one of its old hands rise, slowly, from its knee, toward its chest. Toward the place where the small bound thing had hung. And rest there, flat, on the empty plate of its shell.

And then go back to its knee.

“Do you miss it?” I asked once.

The tortoise breathed in.

“Yes,” it said.

“Will you ask her for it?”

The tortoise breathed out. All the way. It looked across the yard, through the open side of the third shed, to the Slow Shed. There, under a swinging lamp, a lynx with one hand was trying, and trying, and trying.

“No,” it said.

Geese on the marsh / gathering to fly south / one has not yet learned.

Early Winter, the Forgetting

The geese went south. The first frost came. And one morning in the month of Kelemus, Sorrel did not put the small bound thing on.

She told me afterward that it was not a decision. She simply forgot. She had stayed up very late the night before, trying to bind a fletching one-handed, and failed, and failed again. Some time near dawn she had fallen asleep at the bench in the Slow Shed with her head on her arm. When she woke, late and stiff and cold, she went straight back to the shaft. She had had an idea in her sleep. She would use her teeth.

The small bound thing was still hanging on its nail by her bunk in the loft.

She worked all that day with the linen in her teeth and the shaft clamped under her right elbow, under the stump, against the bench, and the knife in her left hand. It was slow. It was very slow. She had to stop at the end of every wrap and let the jaw rest, and the elbow, and the hand. She had to stop, and breathe, and wait for the aching to pass before the next wrap.

She did not notice she was doing it.

She did not notice that her breath had begun to go out all the way at the end of each wrap. That her elbow had stopped clamping and begun to rest. That the stump of her right arm, which she had kept pinned in its sleeve and turned away from all the world since Greyhook Strand, was lying on the shaft, holding it, still.

I noticed.

I was passing with my lantern. I stopped at the door of the Slow Shed. I watched her a long while, and did not go in, and did not say anything.

Toward evening she finished. One arrow, one-handed, the linen bound with her teeth and the shaft held by the stump of the arm she had lost to an arrow from this yard. It was not beautiful. The binding was uneven. One fletching sat a little high.

She held it up to the lamp and looked along it.

Then she went up to the loft for her coat. I learned this afterward. The night was cold. And on its nail by her bunk, hanging where she had left it that morning, was the small bound thing.

She took it down to put it on.

It was warm.

She told me that she stood there in the dark of the loft a long time, with the thing in her one hand, warm as a living creature. She did not understand it. She had not tried. She had forgotten it entirely, all day. And it had been hanging there all the while on its nail, warming, while she sat in the Slow Shed with linen in her teeth and her stump on the shaft, breathing out.

She came down from the loft. She walked across the frozen yard to the third shed. She went to the end of the last bench, where the steady lamp was burning and the tortoise sat shaving. She held the thing out across the bench, on her one open palm.

The tortoise looked at it. Then at her.

“It worked,” she said. Her voice was very strange. “Today. When I wasn’t wearing it. When I forgot about it. It worked.”

The tortoise breathed in.

“It always works,” it said. “When it is forgotten.”

Sorrel stood there with the warm thing on her palm. Her eyes filled. I saw them, in the lamplight, from my crate. They filled, and spilled over, and ran down into the fur of her cheeks. She did not wipe them. She did not have a free hand.

“Take it back,” she said. “Please. It’s yours.”

The tortoise looked at the thing a long time. Then it shook its head, slowly.

“It was given,” it said. “Keep it.”

“But you…”

“These hands,” said the tortoise, “will make another.” A breath. “From what is left over.”

It did. That winter. From the broken end of another shaft and two more caps of bone from the glue-house rubbish pile, and silk from a dyer in Harrowgate. It was a different thing, a little longer, a little plainer. It warmed for the tortoise exactly as the first had.

And the first stayed with Sorrel.

She stayed too. She is the finest one-handed fletcher in the river valleys. She teaches in the Slow Shed. I am told she makes her students fletch their first arrow with one hand tied behind their back.

Frost on the loft nail / a small thing warm in the dark / forgotten all day.

The Second Spring

I went home in the second spring.

I was very old by then. I had been old when I came, in the month of thin rain, but I had not felt it. That second spring I felt it. In my knees, which had knelt on too many cold floors. In my neck, which had bent over too many benches. In my hands, which had set too many needles and spoken to too many other hands, and were beginning, a little, to shake.

I noticed it one evening, setting a needle in the wrist of a young goat-folk from the hill country. My fingers trembled. Only a little. A gnat’s dance above the skin. I set the needle anyway, and it was well enough, and the goat did not notice. But I noticed.

That night I sat on my cot in the glue house with my needle case open in my lap and looked at the needles. Forty-nine of them, jumbled on the bare silk, the seven seasons all mixed together. I had never sorted them again since the morning I gave away my teacher’s thread.

I did not sort them now.

I closed the case.

In the morning I went to the end of the third shed.

The tortoise was there, of course. Shaving. Resting. Breathing. The new small bound thing on its chest. The raven was at the far end of the bench in the shadow, his notched beak tucked down, asleep. He had been at the gate since dawn with the feather children and had come in to rest.

I did not sit on my crate. I stood at the end of the bench, where the boar used to stand.

The tortoise looked up.

“Hm,” I said.

It knew. I saw that it knew. It laid down its knife and its shaft. It breathed out, all the way, and looked at me with its heavy-lidded amber eyes. In them there was something I had seen there only once before, on the night of the frost, when it said thank you.

“The marsh,” it said.

“Hm. My egret will have died by now. They do not live long. But there will be another on the dead alder. There always is.”

The tortoise was quiet a long time.

Then it reached under the sackcloth, slowly, into the corner of the bench where it keeps the things it cannot bear to throw away. It took out an arrow.

I knew it at once.

The first arrow. The one made on the morning of the scarlet thread, when I sat on my crate and the tortoise tied my teacher’s silk at every place its hands should rest. Its fletchings were from the raven’s own feather, the first gift. It was made before the paths, before the stillness, before the arrow that did not whistle. The quartermaster’s records listed it as finished but not proofed, because the tortoise was not yet sure.

It had never been proofed. It had lain under the sackcloth for more than a year.

Along its length, at the head and the nock and above each binding, were the little loose loops of scarlet thread. My teacher’s thread. Sixty years it held my needles. Faded now a little, from the lamplight.

The tortoise held it out to me across the bench on its two open palms.

“It was never sure,” the tortoise said. “These hands were not sure.” A breath. “Perhaps it is sure now.”

I took it.

It was very light. Lighter than an arrow should be. And it was warm.

“Hm,” I said.

I could not say anything else.

The tortoise did not seem to need me to.

Departure

I walked north up the river road the next morning, in thin rain.

The tortoise did not come to the gate. It does not leave its bench. But the raven came, and stood beside me at the gate a while, and did not speak. Old Mudge came, slowly, feeling his way along the wall, and put his broad velvet hand on my arm. Sorrel came, and Mr. Crouch, and the otter girl, and the goblin twins, who argued about which of them should carry my bag and in the end carried it together. The quartermaster came out of his office and stood in the doorway with his ledger under his arm. He did not come to the gate. But he raised one inky hand, as I passed, and clacked his tusks together once, very softly, so that the brass rings rang.

I bowed to him. Exactly as low as courtesy requires.

And then, after a moment, a little lower.

At the bend in the road, I turned and looked back.

The yard lay in the elbow of the river in the thin spring rain. The smoke from the glue house was thin and grey. No hammers rang from the bending shed. Behind the drying barn, on the hill where the stumps of the ash grove had stood bare and white, someone had planted young trees. They were very small. Hardly more than switches. But they were green.

At the end of the third shed, I could just see it, a small steady point of light, not flickering, in the grey.

I stood there a long while.

Then I turned, and walked north, toward the reed marsh and the mist on the water and whatever egret now stood on the dead alder, waiting. My teacher’s arrow lay wrapped in silk in my pack, and my needles lay jumbled in their case.

Students come and go / the lamp at the bench’s end / does not flicker, hm.

 

Segment 26:

On the Demanding of Talismans

Chapter the First, in Which I Warn the Reader

Madam, I must warn you at once that this is going to be a very bad chapter.

—The Black-Ink Mites wish it noted that it is not a chapter. It is a segment containing several chapters.

—Very well. It is going to be a very bad segment, containing several chapters, some of them very bad indeed. One of them will contain no copying at all.

I tell you this beforehand, Madam, for the same reason the quartermaster told his readers beforehand that his Chapter of the Crates contained little but counting. So that if you have no taste for quarrels, nor for paradoxes, nor for eleven thousand mites shouting at one another in a damp hole behind the tax rolls, you may skip ahead to the next tablet. There, I promise, the raven will be very grave and very beautiful, and no one will shout at all.

But I hope you will not skip ahead.

For it was in this quarrel, Madam, the worst we have ever had, that I came nearest to understanding the thing I have been trying to understand since I first unwrapped that dust-colored arrow at the bottom of the crate. And I came nearest to it, as one always does, by being entirely and ridiculously wrong.

Chapter the Second, in Which the Matter Is Set Out

You will have read, on the twenty-fifth tablet, in the healer’s small graceful hand, the account of the student who demanded.

Sorrel. The lynx archer, one-handed after Greyhook Strand. She marched down the length of the third shed in the autumn and stood at the end of the tortoise’s bench, shaking like a bowstring drawn too far. She pointed at the small bound thing on the tortoise’s chest and said: That. Give it to me.

And the tortoise gave it.

And she wore it all autumn, and it was cold, and heavy, and would not warm for her though she squeezed it in her one hand at night and told it to. And then one morning she forgot to put it on, and worked all day with linen in her teeth and her stump on the shaft, breathing out at the end of every wrap without noticing. And that night she found it on its nail by her bunk, warm.

The healer records the tortoise’s words: It always works, when it is forgotten.

That is the matter, Madam. That is all of it.

It is a very small matter. A single sentence spoken by a tortoise to a lynx at the end of a bench six hundred years ago.

It has destroyed my swarm.

Chapter the Third, in Which the Paradox Is Stated

For consider, Madam, what the tortoise said.

It works when it is forgotten.

That is to say: it does not work when it is remembered.

That is to say: it does not work when one wants it to work.

That is to say: if one picks it up, and puts it on, and says to oneself, now I shall be still, now I shall be warm, now I shall have what the tortoise has, then it will not work. It will be cold and heavy, as it was for Sorrel all autumn, and for the raven in the rafters on the night he stole it.

And if one puts it on a nail and forgets it entirely, and goes about one’s work without thinking of it at all, then it works. It warms. It becomes light. It does, in short, everything one wanted it to do.

But one did not want it to.

Because one had forgotten it.

—The Black-Ink Mites wish it noted that this is a contradiction.

—It is not a contradiction. It is a paradox.

—The Black-Ink Mites wish it noted that a paradox is merely a contradiction that has been to university.

—Hush.

Chapter the Fourth, in Which I Discover Something on the Tax Shelf

I should not have discovered it at all, Madam, if the Under-Archivist’s cat had not knocked it down.

You will remember the cat. A large orange creature, who sleeps a great deal and has twice fled the library on account of my outbursts. It has lately taken to sleeping on top of the tax rolls, directly above the crack in the wall that leads to my damp hole. It finds the warmth that rises from eleven thousand mites very comfortable, I think. It did not know we were there. It does not know anything. It is a cat.

On the night after I first read the twenty-fifth tablet, the cat turned over in its sleep and pushed a bundle of papers off the top of the tax shelf. They fell, scattering, down the narrow gap between the shelf and the wall, right past the crack. A party of Black-Ink Mites, who had been on their way to the spine of a book on heraldry for supper, found them and brought them in.

It was a pamphlet.

It was printed, Madam, on the thin grey paper of the council’s steam presses, very old, very brittle, with the corners eaten away by some ancestor of my own. Across the top, in heavy black type, it said REQUISITION. Beneath that, No. 430. Beneath that, in a smaller type, the title:

INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE PRODUCTION OF SILENT ARROWS,

According to the Method Observed at the Supply Yard at Cinderford Crossing,

Compiled by Order of the War Council

by Mr. Thaddeus Quillsby, Clerk of the Second Grade.

Madam.

Madam.

It was the heron.

The grey stooped heron-folk clerk from the capital, with the writing-box on a strap round his neck. The healer records that he sat beside the tortoise for nine days and wrote down everything it did, every breath, every stroke, every loop. He measured the pauses with a little brass timer. Then he went back to the capital with sixty pages, and the council printed them, a thousand copies, with a number on the front.

And one of them, by what chance I cannot imagine, had ended up six hundred years later on top of the tax rolls in the Guild Library at Harrowgate, under a sleeping cat.

I read it, Madam.

I read it through, all sixty pages, by lamplight, in a single sitting. By the end of it I was so indignant that the Red-Ink Mites, who doubt everything, had turned a deep and certain crimson from my nib to my sleeve. The Blue-Ink Mites were circling so fast that they had raised a small blue dust-storm in the corner of the damp hole.

I give you a few articles, Madam, so that you may share my indignation.

Article the Fourth. The fletcher shall, before commencing each stroke of the shaving knife, inhale through the nose for a period of not less than four seconds and not more than six, as measured by a Council Pattern Timer, Brass, No. 2.

Article the Ninth. Upon the completion of each stroke, the thumb of the knife hand shall be brought to rest upon a loop of scarlet thread of Council Pattern No. 3, tied at a distance of one and one quarter inches from the end of the bench. It shall remain in contact with the said loop for a period of not less than three seconds, during which period the fletcher shall exhale.

Article the Seventeenth. The fletcher shall, before commencing the shaving of each shaft, inscribe upon its surface a line following the grain, to be known hereafter as the Path. The Path shall be inscribed with a Council Pattern Scribe, Steel, No. 1, to a depth of not more than one sixty-fourth of an inch. It shall deviate from the axis of the shaft by not more than three degrees at any point, as measured with a Council Pattern Protractor.

And then, Madam, the one that very nearly finished me:

Article the Thirty-First. The fletcher shall, upon receipt of feathers for fletching, ascertain that they have been ASKED FOR. Feathers that have been asked for shall be marked with a stamp bearing the letter A in red ink. Feathers not so marked shall be returned to the Quartermaster. The asking shall be performed in accordance with the form set out in Schedule the Second, Appendix B.

Schedule the Second, Appendix B, Madam, was a printed form.

It had blanks in it.

Name of bird: ________. Species: ________. Date and hour of asking: ________. Was the feather given? Yes / No (strike out whichever does not apply). Signature of asker: ________. Countersigned by the Keeper: ________.

They had made a requisition, Madam, out of asking.

Chapter the Fifth, in Which No Copying Occurs

I set down here the proceedings of the swarm on the night I finished reading Requisition Four Hundred and Thirty. I set them down because the Black-Ink Mites insisted that a record be kept, and I set them down in place of the copying that ought to have occupied this chapter. There was no copying. Not one word. The quill lay on the vellum all night with the ink drying on its nib, while eleven thousand of us did nothing but shout.

Minutes of a Second Extraordinary Session of the Whole Swarm, Convened Behind the Tax Rolls, Under the Cat

Present: approximately eleven thousand, and the cat, who was asleep.

The Blue-Ink Mites, speaking for the romantics, rose first. They moved that Requisition Four Hundred and Thirty be immediately eaten in its entirety, as an act of righteous protest against the conversion of asking into a printed form.

The Black-Ink Mites, speaking for the literalists, rose on a point of order. They observed that the pamphlet was a primary historical document of very great rarity and could on no account be eaten.

The Blue-Ink Mites replied that it was a very great outrage, and that outrages ought to be eaten.

The Black-Ink Mites replied that if every outrage in the library were eaten, there would be no library, beginning with the tax rolls.

The Blue-Ink Mites replied that this would be no great loss.

Uproar.

The Red-Ink Mites, speaking for the doubters, rose when the uproar had subsided a little, and asked the question that began the real trouble.

They asked: Why did it not work?

The heron, Mr. Thaddeus Quillsby, Clerk of the Second Grade, had watched the tortoise for nine days. He had written down everything it did. He had measured every breath, every rest, every stroke, every path. Everything in Requisition Four Hundred and Thirty, the Red-Ink Mites pointed out, was true. The tortoise did breathe before each stroke. It did rest its thumb on a scarlet loop. It did draw a path along the grain. It did fletch only with feathers that had been asked for. The heron had recorded all of it perfectly.

And yet the arrows made by Requisition Four Hundred and Thirty sang.

The healer’s tablet does not say so. But the twenty-ninth tablet, the quartermaster’s last, says it plainly. The yards across the valleys and the coast that followed the council’s printed instructions to the letter made arrows that wobbled and screamed and broke exactly as they always had, and no one could understand why.

Why?

The Black-Ink Mites replied at once that the instructions must have contained an error. Some breath measured wrongly, some loop tied at the wrong distance, some path deviating by four degrees instead of three. Find the error, they said, correct it, reprint the pamphlet, and the arrows will be silent.

The Red-Ink Mites replied that they had read all sixty pages twice and could find no error.

The Black-Ink Mites replied that this only proved the error was very well hidden.

The Blue-Ink Mites replied that there was no error. The instructions were perfect. And it was precisely because they were perfect that they did not work.

Further uproar.

The Black-Ink Mites demanded to know how a set of instructions could fail because it was perfect.

The Blue-Ink Mites replied: Sorrel.

Silence.

The Blue-Ink Mites went on. Sorrel, they said, wore the talisman and wanted it to work, and it did not. She forgot it, and did not want it to work, and it did. The heron’s fletchers followed the instructions because they wanted silent arrows. They breathed for four seconds because they wanted silent arrows. They rested their thumbs for three seconds because they wanted silent arrows. They asked the birds because they wanted silent arrows, and they stamped the feathers with a red A because they wanted to be sure they had asked. Everything they did, they did wanting. And so, like Sorrel’s talisman all autumn, the arrows stayed cold and heavy. They did not work.

Because they were remembered.

Because they were demanded.

At this, the Red-Ink Mites, who doubt everything, turned an even deeper crimson. They asked, in a very small voice, how anyone could possibly make a silent arrow, then. For if one wanted to make a silent arrow, one would fail. And if one did not want to make a silent arrow, why would one sit at a bench all day breathing at bamboo?

Uproar such as has never before been heard behind the tax rolls.

I could not stop it. I tried. I stood up in my habit and rapped on the edge of the crate with my quill and called for order. But the Black-Ink Mites were shouting about logic, and the Blue-Ink Mites were shouting about love, and the Red-Ink Mites were shouting that they did not know what they were shouting about. Professor Ibid, the small faction near the left sleeve, had begun reading aloud from the footnotes of a treatise on the philosophy of intention in a high monotone, to no one. I could not get a word in.

And the cat, Madam, slept through all of it.

Chapter the Sixth, in Which We Attempt an Experiment, with Disastrous Results

Toward the hour of three in the morning, when every mite in the swarm was hoarse, the Black-Ink Mites proposed an experiment.

The literalists love an experiment. It is the only thing they love.

They proposed that the swarm should attempt, collectively, to forget the arrow at the bottom of the crate.

Their reasoning was this. If the talisman worked for Sorrel only when she forgot it, and if the arrow was made by the same hands in the same way, then perhaps the arrow, too, had some quality that appeared only when it was forgotten. We had remembered it obsessively, ever since the Blue-Ink Mites found it. We had flicked it and found it silent, and then flicked it again, and found it silent again, and then flicked it some forty times more. It was, if it was anything, a thing very thoroughly remembered.

Let us forget it, said the Black-Ink Mites. Collectively. For one hour. Then let us return to it and flick it, and see whether anything has changed.

It was a very sensible proposal, Madam. The swarm voted on it, and it was carried by a large majority, with the Red-Ink Mites abstaining on the grounds that they could not be sure they would remember to forget.

And so, at a quarter past three, eleven thousand mites sat down behind the tax rolls and attempted not to think about an arrow.

I do not know, Madam, whether you have ever tried not to think about something. If you have not, I urge you never to try. It is the most exhausting labor that exists.

For the instant a mite resolved not to think about the arrow, it thought about the arrow. It thought: I must not think about the arrow. And then: I am thinking about the arrow by thinking that I must not think about it. And then: I must stop thinking about not thinking about the arrow. And then: but that is also thinking about the arrow. And so on, round and round, faster and faster, until the whole swarm was buzzing with eleven thousand tiny frantic attempts not to think of one dust-colored shaft of bamboo lying in the dark at the bottom of a crate.

It was, I believe, the most intense period of thinking about that arrow in the history of the world.

Professor Ibid declared after twenty minutes that they had succeeded. They had forgotten the arrow entirely, they said. They had not thought of it once.

The Black-Ink Mites asked how Professor Ibid could know that, without thinking of it to check.

Professor Ibid was silent for a long time.

Then they said: Oh.

At the end of the hour, the swarm went down into the crate and flicked the arrow.

It made no sound. As it always made no sound.

Nothing had changed.

—The Black-Ink Mites wish it noted that the experiment was inconclusive.

—The Red-Ink Mites wish it noted that all experiments are inconclusive.

—The Blue-Ink Mites wish it noted that the experiment was very silly.

—Yes. It was. It was the silliest thing we have ever done, and I have been part of this swarm when it tried to eat a book of sermons from the inside out while reading it aloud. It was very silly, Madam, and very funny, and I laughed until my habit shook. And underneath the laughing I was so indignant I could have bitten the vellum, though I could not have said at whom.

At the council, perhaps, for printing asking on a form.

At the heron, for his brass timer.

At Sorrel, for squeezing the poor thing in her one hand all autumn.

At the swarm, for trying to forget on purpose.

At myself, most of all.

Chapter the Seventh, in Which the Cat Settles the Question

It was the cat, Madam.

I wish it had been I. I wish it had been some fine flash of scholarly insight, worthy to be written up in a margin and argued over for six hundred years. It was not. It was the Under-Archivist’s large orange cat.

At about the hour of four, while the swarm was still sitting about in the damp hole in a state of hoarse and indignant exhaustion, the cat woke up.

It stretched. It yawned. It looked about, in the manner of cats, as if the whole library had been rearranged in the night without its permission. Then it got up off the top of the tax rolls, picked its way along the shelf, and squeezed itself, with a great deal of effort, through the narrow gap between the shelf and the wall. It came down, quite deliberately, into my damp hole behind the tax rolls, where in all the time I have lived there no cat has ever come.

The swarm went very still.

The cat did not notice us. It did not notice anything. It walked across the floor of the damp hole, its tail in the air, past eleven thousand frozen mites. It came to the old oak crate marked CINDERFORD with its single line, sniffed it once, and climbed into it.

It turned round three times on top of the tablets.

It lay down.

And it went to sleep.

Madam, I had once written, in my very first preface, that the cat was not on the crate. I had been so very particular about it. I had struck out the cat, and restored it, and moved it elsewhere, and assured you that it was asleep somewhere else entirely. And now here it was, asleep on the crate. Its great warm orange body was curled round on top of the thirty-one tablets of the oldest fragment, directly above the dust-colored arrow at the bottom, purring.

It did not want anything. It had not come to test the arrow, or to understand the tablets, or to resolve the paradox of the talisman. It had not come for any reason at all. It had come because the crate was warm and the night was cold and cats go where it is warm.

It did not know the arrow was there.

It had forgotten everything, Madam. It forgets everything. It is the greatest forgetter in the library, perhaps in the world. It forgets its own name between one meal and the next. It forgets that it has been fed. It forgets, every single night, that the tax rolls are uncomfortable to sleep on, and climbs up there regardless.

And as it lay there, purring, on top of the crate, in the dark, the Blue-Ink Mites went down very quietly through a crack in the corner of the crate, beneath the tablets, beneath the cat, to the bottom, where the arrow lay in its brown linen.

They came back up a long while later.

They did not circle. They did not shiver. They came back very slowly, and rejoined the swarm, and said nothing at all for some time.

Then they said, very softly: It is warm.

Chapter the Eighth, in Which I Am Very Quiet, and Then Very Indignant, and Then Laugh

—The Black-Ink Mites wish it noted that a cat is a warm animal, and that anything lying under a warm animal will be warm.

—Yes. They are quite right. I acknowledge it.

—The Red-Ink Mites wish it noted that we cannot be sure the arrow was not warm before.

—Yes. They are quite right also.

—The Blue-Ink Mites wish it noted that they do not care.

Madam, neither do I.

For I understood, sitting there in the dark of the damp hole at four in the morning, with a cat purring on top of my crate and eleven thousand exhausted mites about me, what had happened. It was not at all what I had expected. It had nothing to do with the arrow, and everything to do with us.

We had demanded.

Every one of us. From the very first night I unwrapped it, I had demanded that the arrow tell me what it was. I had demanded that the seven witness accounts be reconciled. I had drawn a line four miles long to make them fit. I had flicked the arrow forty times to make it prove it was silent. And then, when it would not tell me anything, I had demanded that the swarm forget it, so that I might trick it into telling me. Exactly as the heron had measured the tortoise’s breath with a brass timer, so that he might trick the silence into a pamphlet. Exactly as Sorrel had squeezed the talisman in her one hand at night and told it to warm.

I was indignant at the heron. I was indignant at the council. I was indignant at Sorrel.

I was the heron. I was the council. I was Sorrel, in the loft, squeezing.

And the only creature in that whole library to whom the arrow had given anything was a large orange cat who did not know it was there, did not want anything from it, and had climbed onto the crate only because it was warm.

I laughed, Madam.

I laughed so hard that my habit slid off its hook and the swarm spilled out across the floor of the damp hole in a long colored ribbon. The Blue and the Red and the Black and Professor Ibid were all tumbling together and laughing too, eleven thousand tiny dry voices all at once. It woke the cat.

The cat looked at us.

It was the first time, I think, that it had ever seen us. It looked at the long colored ribbon of mites spilled across the floor, laughing. It did not seem surprised. Cats are never surprised. It looked at us for a long moment with its large indifferent golden eyes.

Then it yawned, and put its head back down on the tablets, and went back to sleep.

Chapter the Ninth, in Which I Apologize to the Reader, and Resume

Madam, I have now spent an entire segment on a single sentence spoken by a tortoise to a lynx. I have produced, in the course of it, one chapter containing no copying whatsoever, the minutes of a quarrel, a failed experiment, and a cat. I have not advanced the story by a single day.

I apologize.

—See margin.

—The margin says I have apologized before.

—I know.

But I have learned something, Madam, and I should like to set it down before I go on, in case I forget it, which I very likely shall.

It is this. One cannot demand the thing. One cannot demand the stillness, or the warmth, or the silence, or the meaning. One cannot print it on a form, or measure it with a brass timer, or stamp it with a red A, or squeeze it in one hand in the dark. Not even, Madam, by very carefully and deliberately trying to forget it.

One can only do the work. Breathe at the bamboo. Bind the linen with one’s teeth. Copy the tablets, line by line, without quarreling with the margins. And let the thing lie on its nail, or at the bottom of its crate, under whatever warm and indifferent creature happens to be sleeping on it, and not look.

And then, perhaps, some night, it will be warm.

Perhaps.

—The Red-Ink Mites wish it noted that they are not sure.

—Nor am I, Madam. Nor am I.

The cat is still on the crate. I have not moved it. I do not intend to.

I have taken up my quill again. The ink on the nib has dried in the night and must be wetted fresh. The next tablet is the raven’s, and it is very grave, and very beautiful, and I promise you that no one in it will shout.

I shall copy it in order.

I shall try very hard not to try.

 

Segment 27:

Hooks, Feathers, and Other Unnecessary Things

It is a strange thing to outlive the meaning of a thing one loved.

To see it carried in the market by strangers, painted and gilded and hung with bells. To hear it called by names one does not recognize, praised for virtues it never had, sold for silver by hands that never knew the hands that made it. To stand among the stalls on a bright morning, an old black bird with notches on his beak, and watch it pass from palm to palm like a coin whose face has been worn smooth. And to know that it is still, after everything, somehow, the same coin.

I have lived to see this. I tell it to you now, plainly, as I have told you all the rest. Make of it what you will. I have made of it, in the long nights since, a great many things, and none of them have satisfied me. Perhaps you will do better.

I am very old now.

The Keepers of the Molted Rookery live long. The old Keeper who gave me my bell used to say it was the feathers that did it. A Keeper who gathers the freely given molts of a whole wood, year after year, takes into himself a little of the years of every bird that gave. He said it with a dry laugh, as if he did not believe it. But he lived to a great age himself, and so have I. It has been forty years since the month of thin rain. Forty years since I walked down the river road on a crippled wing with a cold wet requisition against my heart. Forty years since I dropped from the rafters onto a tortoise’s bench in the dark and spilled a bundle of stolen feathers across it in the lamplight.

The tortoise is still at its bench.

Tortoises live longer even than Keepers. It is very old too, now, and very slow, slower even than it was. The moss on its shell has grown thick and grey. The small bound thing on its chest has been remade four times from leftovers, and the fifth hangs there still. But its lamp does not flicker, and its hands still come to rest at the end of every stroke on a loop of scarlet thread. I go to it once in each season and sit at the far end of the bench in the shadow. We do not speak much. We have never needed to.

The boar is still alive, I am told, though I have not seen him in some years. He gave up the yard at Cinderford long ago to the otter girl, who is not a girl now. He lives in a small whitewashed house at the edge of Harrowgate and keeps, they say, a single ledger, which he writes in every day and shows to no one.

The crane is gone. She died in her marsh, in the reeds, in the month of thin rain, twelve years after she left us. The egret on the dead alder, I am told, stood watch over her the whole of the last night. I went there afterward. I found, in the moss beneath the alder, a single long white crane’s feather, freely shed. I sewed it into my cloak, over my heart.

Old Mudge is gone. So is Mr. Crouch, and the dove-folk grandmother of the feather loft, and the hedgehog mother, and a great many others. The goblin twins are old and fat and argue still, I am told, about everything, in a yard of their own on the coast.

And the small bound thing has gone out into the world.

I first saw one in a market.

It was at Harrowgate, at the great autumn fair, perhaps twenty years after the month of thin rain. Harrowgate has grown very large. It is a city now, with walls and towers and a council-hall of its own, and every autumn the merchants of the valleys and the coast come to its fair with their carts and their stalls. I had gone there to ask the river swans, who gather in great numbers on the wide water below the city at that season, for their molts.

I was walking through the fair on my way to the water when my bell rang.

You will remember my bell. Small, silver, cracked on the third night of Illumination. It rings, in its cracked flat sobbing voice, for things taken that were not given. It had rung so seldom in the years since the reform that I had almost forgotten its weight against my throat. It rang now, very softly, as I passed a stall at the edge of the fair, and I stopped.

The stall belonged to a fox-folk. A young one, sleek and bright-eyed, in a fine red coat, with a fine voice and fine long fingers. I thought for a moment it was the bowyer’s son from the capital who had sat one morning at the tortoise’s bench and said I see, it’s breathing, and gone away. It was not. It was his son.

On the stall, laid out on blue velvet in neat rows, were a great many small objects.

They were the size of a finger, a little longer, round. Each was made of a short length of something pale, which I took at first for bamboo and then saw was mostly bone, or horn, or polished wood, or once or twice a kind of pale glazed clay. Each was capped at either end with something bright. Brass. Silver. Colored glass. Each was bound about with silk, scarlet mostly, but some green and some gold. Each hung from a loop of cord.

And from each one, from the binding, from the caps, from the cord, hung other things.

Beads. Glass beads and bone beads and beads of polished stone, strung on the silk. Tiny bells, like mine but brass, that tinkled when the breeze stirred them. Little hooks of bright steel, such as fishermen use, hanging in clusters like grapes. Tassels. Fringes. Chips of mirror. Painted eyes. And feathers.

Every one of them had feathers. Small feathers, mostly. Breast feathers and coverts, bright and soft. Bound into the silk, or tucked under the caps, or hanging from the hooks on threads. Blue jay and green parrot and red cardinal and gold oriole. Once, on a very large and very expensive one at the center of the stall, a single long eye-feather of a peacock, shimmering blue and green in the autumn sun.

Above the stall, on a painted board, in letters of gold, it said:

TRUE CINDERFORD BREATH-CHARMS. AS WORN BY THE FLETCHER-SAGE. BRINGS STILLNESS TO THE HAND AND CALM TO THE HEART. ONE SILVER.

I stood before the stall a long time.

The fox looked at me with his bright eyes. He did not know me. Why should he? I was only an old black bird in a tattered cloak of feathers, with notches on his beak. He smiled at me, the smile of a merchant who sees a customer.

“A charm, grandfather?” he said. “For the hands? You’ve the look of a creature who’s worked hard in his time.”

“What is it?” I said.

“A breath-charm,” said the fox, as if I were a child. “From Cinderford. You’ve heard of Cinderford? The silent arrows? The Fletcher-Sage?” He lifted one from the velvet and held it up. It tinkled with its little brass bells. “The Sage made the first one. Out of a broken arrow, they say, and the bones of a holy beast, and silk dyed in the blood of a crane. Wore it over the heart. And it made the hands so still that every arrow flew silent and true, and the Sage never missed a mark in a hundred years.” He smiled. “Copied exact from the original, grandfather. One silver.”

The bones of a holy beast. Silk dyed in the blood of a crane.

I thought of two caps of bone from the rubbish pile beside the glue-house fire, and a badger-woman saying nobody wants it. I thought of nineteen failures of scarlet silk, untangled one by one, knotted end to end, and a mother’s thread worn to dust. I thought of the crane, kneeling on the frozen floor of the third shed, opening her robe.

“Who is the Fletcher-Sage?” I said.

The fox laughed. “Why, grandfather, everyone knows. Harrowtusk. The great quartermaster of Cinderford. Reformed the yards. Saved the coast. There’s a statue of him in the council-hall.”

My bell rang.

Not for the fox’s lie. My bell does not ring for lies. It rings for things taken that were not given.

It was ringing for the feathers.

I looked down at the rows of charms on the blue velvet, with the blue jay and the parrot and the cardinal and the oriole bound into their silk. My bell sobbed and sobbed, softly, against my throat.

Not for all of them.

That was the strange thing. That was the thing that held me there in the autumn sun before the fox’s stall for a whole hour, while the fair went past me and the swans waited on the water below the city. Not all of them. I bent close over the velvet and held my throat to each charm in turn. My bell was silent for one. It sobbed for the next. It was silent for three. It sobbed for two. Some of the feathers on those charms had been gathered from the molt, from the floors of henhouses and the margins of ponds, by children with bundles, for two coppers each. And some of them had been taken.

Taken in the night, from sleeping birds, with ladders and sacks, by lean soft-voiced creatures in rusty coats, exactly as the rookery wood was taken on the third night of Illumination.

Forty years. The reform. The notice on every post and door and tree. Shed feathers only, two copper each, ask the Keeper. The council’s own printed form. Schedule the Second, Appendix B. Was the feather given? Yes / No.

And here, in the great market at Harrowgate, on a stall beneath a painted sign that said Cinderford in letters of gold, were feathers pulled from living birds, bound into charms copied from the thing a tortoise made out of failures, to be sold for silver as a token of stillness and calm.

I laughed.

I do not laugh often. I laughed then, there in the market, a dry cracked rasping sound, like my bell. The fox stopped smiling and looked at me as one looks at a madman.

And then I did a thing I have done many times since, in many markets, and have never once been able to explain to myself.

I bought one.

I chose one of the ones my bell sobbed for. A small plain one, horn capped with brass, bound in scarlet silk, with a single blue jay’s covert tucked beneath the binding. Its quill was dark with a small dried crust. I paid the fox his silver. I carried it down to the water’s edge below the city, where the swans were gathering, and I sat there in the reeds and looked at it.

It was ugly. The horn was badly shaped. The brass caps did not fit. The silk was wound tight, very tight, in the old way, in the haste way. There were no paths on it. Not one line scratched along its length. The maker had never heard of paths. The maker had copied the shape of a thing without knowing what the shape was for, as a child copies the letters of a word it cannot read.

And the blue jay’s feather sobbed against my bell.

I held it in my talons.

It was cold. Of course it was cold. My talons were angry, and my heart was bitter, and the thing was a mirror, as the tortoise told me on the morning after I stole the first one. It does not lie.

I put it in the pocket of my cloak, and forgot it.

That is the thing I must tell you now, and it is the thing that has kept me awake more nights than the rookery wood.

I forgot it. I did not mean to. I went out onto the water among the swans, and knelt in the reeds, and asked, all that afternoon and all the next day. The swans were generous that year. When I came back to the bank on the second evening, with a dozen long white molts held close against my breast, I put my hand into my cloak to lay them away. I found the small ugly charm still there in the pocket, where I had forgotten it.

It was warm.

I sat down in the reeds.

I held it up to the last of the light. The badly shaped horn. The ill-fitting brass. The tight scarlet binding. The blue jay’s covert with its dark crust, still sobbing faintly, very faintly, against my bell.

And warm. Warm as a living thing. Warm as the first small bound thing had been in the very last instant of letting go, on the morning I gave it back.

Forgotten. Asking. Two days on my knees in the reeds before the swans.

It did not care that it was ugly. It did not care that there were no paths. It did not care that its maker had never heard of Shu Manbang, or the crane, or the mother’s thread. It did not care that it was sold for silver under a lie. It did not care, God help me, that one of its feathers had been pulled from a living bird in the dark.

It warmed anyway.

I have spent forty years trying to understand that, and I do not understand it.

I went to many markets after that.

I could not stop myself. I went to the fairs at Harrowgate, and at the coast towns, and once all the way to the capital, where there was a whole street of shops that sold nothing else. I watched the charms change as the years went by and the makers learned from the makers who learned from the makers who learned from the fox. They grew larger. They grew brighter. They sprouted hooks, more and more of them, until some of them looked like little steel bushes. For a while the fashion in the coast towns was to hang them with fishhooks, dozens of them. The fishermen’s wives believed this would make their husbands’ hands steady on the nets. In the capital, the fashion was for feathers, bright ones, the brighter the better, until the charms looked less like a small bound thing and more like a small bird that had been plucked and dressed and hung on a cord. Somewhere in the hill country, I was told, they made them out of stone and buried them under the doorsteps of new houses.

And at every stall, I bent over the charms with my bell.

Silent. Sobbing. Silent, silent. Sobbing. Silent.

Some given. Some taken.

There was no pattern to it. The charms of the honest makers were not better than the others. The charms of the cheats were not worse. A charm with a stolen peacock’s feather on it, sold for a gold piece in a velvet shop in the capital, would warm for the merchant’s daughter who bought it and hung it on her bedpost and forgot it. A charm with a feather picked up honestly from a henhouse floor would stay cold as a stone for the anxious young bowyer who wore it every day and squeezed it at every stroke.

The feathers did not matter.

The makers did not matter.

The meaning did not matter. Most of the people who wore them had forgotten the meaning entirely, or never known it. They thought the charms were luck. They thought they kept off fever, or brought fish into the net, or made a wife faithful, or a husband kind. They thought the Fletcher-Sage was a boar, or a saint, or a god. They thought the hooks were the important part. They thought the feathers were.

And still, most of them worked.

Not all. Never all. The ones squeezed and demanded and held too tight stayed cold. But the ones hung on a nail and forgotten, the ones tucked in a pocket on the way to the nets, the ones buried under a doorstep and never thought of again, warmed. As the first had warmed for the tortoise, in the lamplight, in the third shed, forty years ago. As the second had warmed for a one-handed lynx in a loft, on the day she bound linen with her teeth.

I counted them.

You will have known I would. It is my nature, as I have told you. My curse. In twenty years of markets, I bent my bell over some four thousand of those charms. Of the four thousand, my bell sobbed for one thousand one hundred and twelve. And of the four thousand, by the testimony of those who wore them, and by my own talons when I held them after I had forgotten them, some three thousand worked.

I tried to find a column for that.

I tried for many nights. The given feathers and the stolen. The honest makers and the cheats. The paths and the absence of paths. The meaning kept and the meaning lost. I tried to make the figures add up to something I could carry on my face like a notch, so that I should never forget it.

They would not add up.

Here is the bitterness, if you want it. I will give it to you plainly.

I spent the best years of my long life counting thefts. I carved them on my beak. I carried the requisition against my heart until it rotted. I walked a crippled road and sat in a hundred rafters and knelt at a thousand hidden waters. All so that someone, somewhere, would ask before they took. All so that the feathers would be given. All so that what was made from them would be made right.

And the thing the tortoise made, in the end, did not care.

It warmed for stolen feathers and given ones alike. It warmed for the fox’s lie and the crane’s truth. It warmed for the boar’s statue in the council-hall and the tortoise’s lamp at the end of the bench. It did not keep the count. It did not keep the meaning. It did not keep anything at all, except the one thing the tortoise had put into it without meaning to: a small round room of bamboo, or horn, or bone, or stone, that warmed for whoever forgot it.

I was right, about the stealing. I am still right. It was wrong. It is wrong. The bell rings for it, and always will.

And it did not matter.

That is the bitterness. That I was right, and it did not matter. That the thing I loved went out into the world and was painted and gilded and hung with hooks and lied about and sold. Half of it was made of the very thefts I had spent my life counting. And it went on doing the good it did anyway, quietly, without the meaning, without me.

There is one more thing I must tell you.

It was perhaps ten years ago, at a coast town, at a small poor fair on a windy strand. That strand, I learned only afterward, was Greyhook. They had rebuilt the village. There was a little stall at the edge of the fair run by an old stoat-folk woman, very bent, very poor. She sold fishhooks and net-floats and a few charms she made herself, of driftwood and fish-bone and twine. On her stall, among the fishhooks, there was a charm with a long black feather bound into its twine.

My bell sobbed.

I bent close. It was a raven’s feather. A primary. Long and black and glossy, with a sheen of violet in the windy sun, and at the base of its quill, worn almost smooth with age, the faintest trace of a dark crust.

I knew it.

I knew it as I knew my own heartbeat. As I had known the one on the tortoise’s bench in the lamplight, on the night of the bundle, under my own talon.

It was one of the six.

One of the six primaries pulled from my left wing, one by one, with a little twist at the end of each pull, by a soft-voiced weasel in the dark of the double elm, on the third night of Illumination, forty years before. It had gone down the hill in a sack, and into the loft at Cinderford, and somewhere out of it, I do not know how. Perhaps in one of the sacks the goblin twins carried and set down by the door, on the morning of the hourglass, and did not take back. Perhaps by some other road. And now here it was, on a windy strand at Greyhook, bound with twine to a scrap of driftwood, on the stall of an old stoat-woman who could not possibly know whose it was.

I stood there a long time. The wind blew. The bell sobbed.

“It’s for a child,” said the old stoat-woman, watching me. “That one. My grandson’s girl. Her hands shake. Since she was small.” She shrugged her bent shoulders. “Her father’s an archer. Lost a hand on this strand, long ago, before she was born. Arrows broke. She’s afraid of ’em. Can’t hold a bow.” She nodded at the charm. “Thought I’d make her one. They say they help. Fletcher-Sage and all that.” She looked at the feather. “Found that in my mother’s things when she died. Don’t know where she got it. Pretty, though.”

I did not answer.

A child came running along the strand. A small stoat-girl, perhaps eight, thin and quick, with her hands held close against her chest. They were shaking. I could see it from where I stood, a fine steady shaking, like the hands of a tortoise on a cold night long ago.

The old woman held out the charm. The child took it, and looked at it, and put it on over her head without a word. The long black feather lay against her chest. Then she ran off down the strand toward the water, where some other children were playing at the edge of the waves, and forgot it.

I watched her go.

My bell sobbed and sobbed.

And I watched her play at the edge of the water all that windy afternoon, the charm swinging forgotten at her chest. Some time toward evening, I saw her stop, and stand still in the shallows, and look down at her hands.

They were not shaking.

She looked at them a long while. Then she put one of them up, slowly, to the charm on her chest. To my feather. And left it resting there, flat, over her heart, while the waves came in around her ankles.

I did not ask for it back.

I did not tell the old woman whose it was. I did not tell the child. I paid the old woman a silver piece, which was far more than her charms were worth, and told her it was for the child’s next one, when this one wore out. And I walked away along the strand at Greyhook in the dusk, with my bell sobbing at my throat for my own stolen feather, warming on a stranger’s child.

I have twelve notches on my beak.

I have never carved a thirteenth.

I have not been sure, since that evening at Greyhook, whether I ought to. Whether the theft of my feather, forty years ago, in the dark of the double elm, was a thing I should remember on my face for the rest of my life, or a thing I should, at last, after all this time, let go.

I have not been able to decide.

So I have done neither. I have only gone on, as the tortoise taught me. Asking. Gathering. Counting, a little, still, from habit, in the markets. Bending my old bell over the charms with their hooks and their beads and their bright stolen plumes, and hearing it sob, and watching them warm.

It is a bitter thing, to be right and have it not matter.

It is a stranger thing to have it not matter, and to be glad.

I am not sure which of the two I am.

Perhaps both.

The bell is ringing as I write this. It is always ringing, now, somewhere, for something. I have stopped trying to make it stop.

 

Segment 28:

The Fletcher’s Last Breath

One

The river does not hurry to the sea.

It does not hold back from it either.

It only goes where it is going, and when it arrives, it is not the river anymore.

It is not lost.

It is only everywhere.

Two

The month of thin rain again.

This one has seen it come eighty-three times now. Forty-one before the crane, and forty-two since.

It came this year as it always comes. The rain grows thin and does not fall so much as linger, hanging in the air like a thought not quite finished. It beads on the edge of the shell and on the long wrinkled neck and on the old flat-nailed hands. The yard is quiet in it. The yard is quiet most of the time now.

The otter keeps it. She is not a girl anymore. Her burned hand lies flat on every shaft she works, and her students call her Mistress Rest. She does not like the name, and she has stopped trying to make them stop.

There are forty benches in the third shed. Each has a scarlet loop at its edge. Each has a lamp. Most of the lamps flicker a little when the wind comes through the doors.

This one’s does not.

Three

This one is very old.

That is not a complaint. A tortoise is made to be old. The shell is made for it. It is only a thing that is so, the way rain is wet.

The hands are slower now. Slower than they were. A shaft that took a day takes three. A binding that took a breath takes many. The eyes see the grain less clearly, and the knife must be held very close to the face to follow the path.

The moss on the shell has grown thick and grey. The students say it looks like an old roof. This one does not mind. A roof keeps out the rain.

On the chest, on a loop of scarlet silk, hangs the small bound thing. Not the first. The fifth. The first went to a lynx with one hand and is still with her, she says, on its nail beside her bunk. The second went to a young boar-folk from the hill yards, the one who threw down his knife and came back two years later. The third went to the crane, though she did not ask for it. She is gone now. The fourth wore out. Bamboo does, in time.

The fifth is here.

It is made of the end of a cracked shaft and two caps of bone from the glue-house rubbish pile, as they all were. And of silk, scarlet, from the dyer at Harrowgate. And at the end of the loop, as in all of them, a very small length of the mother’s thread, which this one has cut finer and finer each time so that there would be some for each.

There is not much left of the mother’s thread now.

There is enough.

Four

This morning, this one began an arrow.

That is all this one does now. Not many. One in a season, perhaps. Sometimes less.

The students say the arrows are the best in the valleys. This one does not know. This one does not proof them anymore. They go into the crates with the others, and the crates go down the river road, and this one does not see them again.

This morning, there was a shaft on the knees. Shaved in the dark before dawn, slowly, over three days. With the path drawn faint along it. And three feathers beside the lamp, from the long row the raven keeps there, that never seems to grow shorter however many are used.

Grey. White. Black.

Goose. Swan. Raven.

He brought the black one himself, the last time he came, at the turning of the season. From his right wing. The whole one. The good one.

He did not say anything when he laid it down.

He did not need to.

Five

This one cut the vanes.

Thumb on the scarlet loop at the end of each stroke. Breath. All the way out.

The breath goes out slower now than it used to. It takes a long time to go all the way. Longer every season. Sometimes, at the bottom of it, there is a long quiet before it comes back. Longer every season too.

It always comes back.

That is the first thing this one learned, forty-two years ago, in the dark before dawn, with the hands on a piece of bamboo. The breath comes back by itself.

This one has never once had to reach for it.

Six

This one bound them.

Not tight. Only firm. As a hand holds a sleeping bird.

Between each wrap, the fingers on the scarlet loop. Breath. All the way.

It took the whole of the afternoon.

The rain lingered outside. The lamp burned.

Seven

This one seated the point.

Palm flat over it. Breath out. At the bottom of the breath, the hand pressing very gently, empty.

It went on.

As it always goes on.

Eight

The arrow lay across the knees.

Pale bamboo. A small steel point. Three feathers: grey, white, black. Plain linen. Small loops of scarlet at the resting places, holding nothing. And down its length, faint as breath on glass, the path.

This one looked at it a long time.

It was not the best this one has made.

It was not the worst.

It was an arrow.

Nine

There is a custom in the yard. There always has been.

Every bench puts its mark on every arrow it makes. A small number, scratched with the point of a knife into the shaft below the nock. So that if the arrow fails, the yard may know whose fault it was. So that if it comes back whole, the yard may know whose to count.

This one’s number is forty-one.

This one has scratched it on every arrow for forty-eight years.

This one took up the knife and turned it to the point and set the point below the nock.

And did not scratch.

Ten

Why put a mark on it?

The mark says: this one made it.

But did this one make it?

The tree made the bamboo. It grew in rain and wind and turned its leaves to the light for years before any knife came near it.

The goose made the grey feather. The swan made the white. The raven made the black, and gave it from his good wing.

The badger-woman’s fire made the bone caps clean, though they are not on this arrow. The dyer at Harrowgate made the scarlet. The crane made the resting places. She found them in the hands and pressed them and said hm.

The mother made the thread.

The boar made the hourglass. And the hourglass made the crack. And the crack made the first small bound thing.

The old sawyer heard the culm split without tearing. The raven knelt in the mud and asked. The lynx bound linen with her teeth.

And these hands only rested.

What part of it is forty-one?

Eleven

This one laid the knife down.

The arrow lies on the knees with no mark below the nock.

When it goes into the crate with the others, and the crate goes down the river road, no one will know whose it is.

That is right.

It was never anyone’s.

Twelve

It is evening now.

The rain is still lingering. It has grown dark outside the shed. The students have gone to the loft. The otter has gone round the benches once with her lantern, as the crane used to, pressing wrists, and has gone to bed. From the far end of the shed, by the door, there is only the faint sound of the rain, and somewhere far off, the river.

The lamp burns.

This one’s hands rest on the knees, on either side of the arrow.

The small bound thing on the chest is warm.

Thirteen

This one is tired.

Not as one is tired after work. After work, one is tired in the arms and the back and the eyes, and a night’s rest mends it.

This is a different tired. It is in the shell. It is in the breath. It is the tired of a river that has come a very long way and can feel, somewhere ahead in the dark, the sea.

This one knows what it is.

This one is not afraid of it.

That is a strange thing to be able to say. For forty-one years this one was afraid of everything. Of the boar. Of the quota. Of the arrow missing. Of the name. Of the shaking. There was a stone at the bottom of every breath, and the breath stopped at it, every time, and held.

The stone is very small now.

It has not gone. The crane was right: nothing goes. But it is very small. Like a pebble at the bottom of a deep clear pool. One can see it there, if one looks. It does not stop the water.

Fourteen

This one is thinking of the mother.

A river tortoise. Small, quick for a tortoise, with a shell the color of wet stones. She tied the red thread round this one’s wrist when this one was very small. She said: when you are afraid, touch it.

This one touched it every day for forty years.

This one never told her that it did not work.

Perhaps she knew.

Perhaps that was why she smiled, when this one asked which name she meant.

Fifteen

This one is thinking of the crane.

On the frozen floor of the shed, on her knees, with her robe open and these two shaking hands held against her breast among the feathers. Saying: the shaking is the hands asking to be heard.

Saying hm.

This one never learned what all her hms meant. There were a hundred of them. A thousand.

This one thinks now that perhaps they all meant the same thing.

I hear you.

Sixteen

This one is thinking of the raven.

Dropping from the rafters in the dark, with his crooked wing and his seven notches and his cracked bell shrieking. Saying: no one asked them.

He was right.

Bowing, then, in the dust. Asking. The bell stopping.

A single black feather sliding down the back of the neck and coming to rest in the dust beside the face.

Thou didst ask.

Seventeen

This one is thinking of the boar.

At the end of the bench with his ledger, roaring: nil. At the end of the bench with his hand on the hourglass: begin. At the end of the bench, the last time, with his tusks shut and his rings silent: will you show ’em?

He asked too, in the end.

He never said he was sorry. He did not need to. This one heard him, the night of the frost, standing in the dark doorway of the shed, breathing. Not the bellows breath. Something slower. Catching.

He lives in a small white house at the edge of Harrowgate now, they say. He keeps one ledger.

This one hopes there is a line at the bottom of every page.

Only one.

Eighteen

This one is thinking of the arrow that went into the dark.

Grey, black, tawny.

Three feathers that had each failed once.

On the palms, and then not on the palms, and then there.

Already there.

Nineteen

This one is thinking of nothing.

Twenty

The breath goes in.

Slowly.

Through the nose. The air of the shed, cold, smelling of rain and resin and old glue and the lamp.

Down. Into the shell.

It takes a long time.

It has always taken a long time.

Twenty-One

The hands are on the knees.

The arrow is across them.

The small bound thing is on the chest, over the heart, warm.

The lamp does not flicker.

Twenty-Two

At the top of the breath, there is a moment.

Every breath has it. A small still place between the going in and the going out, where nothing moves. When this one was young, that place was the held place. The breath stopped there and crouched, like a creature in the grass listening for the hunter.

It is not that anymore.

It is only a place where the breath turns. Like the top of a wave. Like the moment at the end of a stroke, when the thumb comes to rest on the scarlet loop, before the hand goes back.

A resting place.

Twenty-Three

The breath goes out.

Slowly.

There is no hurry. There has not been a hurry in a long time.

Out.

Past the shell.

Past the long neck.

Out through the nose, into the cold air of the shed, where the lamp is, where the rain is, where the arrow lies across the knees with no mark below its nock.

Out.

Twenty-Four

It is going a long way this time.

Further than it has gone before.

This one can feel it going. Past the place where it usually turns. Past the pebble at the bottom of the pool, which does not stop it, and which this one sees, as it goes by, very small and very clear. Not a stone at all, now. Only a pebble. Only a small round thing that was afraid for a long time.

This one does not hold it.

This one lets it be what it is.

The breath goes past it, and on.

Twenty-Five

The small bound thing on the chest is growing light.

Lighter than it has ever been.

So light that it seems to rise a little from the plate of the shell.

As a leaf rises from the hand when the breath goes out over it.

Twenty-Six

There is a part of this one that wants to reach.

It is very small. It is very old. It is the part that held the breath back for forty-one years, in case the hunter came. It says, very quietly, from somewhere near the pebble: the breath has gone too far. It will not come back. Reach for it. Hold it. Keep a little. In case.

This one hears it.

This one does not argue with it. It has been heard. That is all it ever wanted.

Hm.

This one does not reach.

Twenty-Seven

The breath comes back by itself.

That is the first thing this one learned.

It has come back every time.

This one does not know if it will come back this time.

This one does not need to know.

Twenty-Eight

A name is a question one spends a whole life asking.

One Who Binds Slowly.

One Who Keeps Missing.

The mother smiled. The father smiled.

This one has spent eighty-three years asking.

And this one thinks now, with the breath going out, that the answer was in the asking. That it was always both. That this one bound slowly, and kept missing, and bound slowly again, and the binding and the missing were the same long breath, going in and going out.

And this one thinks, too, that there is a third meaning, which neither of them told.

One Who Lets Go.

Perhaps that is why they smiled.

Twenty-Nine

The breath is nearly all the way out now.

There is very little left in the shell.

The hands are still on the knees. They are not shaking. They have not shaken in a long time. They are resting, open, on either side of the arrow, the way they rested on a piece of bamboo for five nights, long ago, before the first breath. Waiting. Not for anything. Only waiting, as water waits in a bowl.

The lamp burns.

It does not flicker.

Thirty

This one is not afraid.

Thirty-One

Out.

Thirty-Two

All the way.

Thirty-Three

The breath does not come back.

This one does not reach for it.

The arrow is on the knees.

The hands are open.

The small bound thing is warm.

And light.

So light.

Thirty-Four

The river does not hurry to the sea.

It does not hold back.

It goes where it is going.

And when it arrives

Thirty-Five

it is already there.

 

Segment 29:

No One Could Tell Which

There is a peculiar privilege that belongs to very old creatures and to no one else. It is the privilege of being forgotten while still alive. When a boar-folk has outlived his usefulness, his post, his yard, most of his friends, and nearly all of his enemies, the world goes on about its business around him as a river goes round a stone. It does not ask his opinion. It does not require his signature in three places. It does not send him requisitions. It only leaves him in some small whitewashed house at the edge of a city, with a single ledger and a great deal of time. And it lets him sit by his window in the thin rain and remember things, in whatever order he pleases.

I have enjoyed this privilege for some years now. I want the reader to know that I do not complain of it. I complained of a great many things in my working life, loudly, at the ends of benches, and I find in my old age that I have rather lost the taste for it.

But I must tell him of the one morning, this past month of thin rain, when the world remembered me after all. It knocked at my door, and took me out into the rain, and showed me a thing I had been looking for my whole life without knowing it. It is the last chapter I shall write in this history. I have kept it for the end, as a careful quartermaster keeps the most important figure for the foot of the page.

I was at my window when the knock came.

I had been writing in my ledger. I keep only one now. The others went to the archive at the council-hall long ago, where I am told they are kept in a locked room and consulted by scholars. I find this very amusing, since nobody ever consulted them when they might have done some good. The one I keep is small and plain, bound in brown leather gone soft with handling. Every morning, at about the hour of nine, I write a single entry in it. Sometimes it is a figure. Sometimes it is a sentence. Sometimes it is only a word. And at the foot of every entry I draw a line. Only one. I have never once drawn two.

That morning I had written the date, in the old form: 9,0 and the rest of it, the month of Tyrus, the week of Illumination, the day. And beneath it, I had written nothing. I was sitting with my pen in my hand looking out at the thin rain, trying to think what to write, when there came a knock.

It was not a hard knock. It was not a soft one. It was three slow taps, very evenly spaced, as if made by something that had all the time in the world and did not wish to waste any of it.

I got up. That takes me some time now. I went to the door, and opened it.

On my step, in the rain, stood a raven.

I knew him at once, though I had not seen him in many years. He had grown very old. His glossy blue-black had gone grey about the head and neck, the way an old dog goes grey about the muzzle. His cloak of a thousand molts had grown so long and heavy that it dragged on the wet stones behind him like a train. But his wings were whole, both of them, glossy and strong. And on the side of his beak, in the horn, there were notches. I counted them, as I count everything.

Twelve.

At his throat, a small cracked silver bell. It was silent.

He looked at me with his black eyes and his milky inner lid flickering across them. I looked at him. Neither of us spoke for a long while. We had never, I realized, in all the years since the reform, exchanged a single word directly. I had shouted in his presence a great deal, at the gate, at the ends of benches. He had stood silent in mine. But we had never spoken.

“Harrowtusk,” he said at last. His voice was very low and very rough, like old leather.

“Keeper,” I said.

He was quiet a moment. Then he said it.

“The tortoise.”

I did not need him to finish. I knew from the way he said it. I knew from the way the rain was falling, and the way he stood on my step with his cloak dragging and his bell silent and his twelve notches, and the way he had knocked, slowly, evenly, with all the time in the world.

“When?” I said.

“Four nights ago,” he said. “At the bench. In the night. The otter found it in the morning.” He paused. “Sitting up. Its hands open on its knees. An arrow across them. The lamp still burning.”

I put one hand on the doorframe. I did not mean to. My legs did it, as they did on the morning of Greyhook Strand.

“It did not flicker,” said the raven. “The lamp. The otter says it burned until noon, and then went out by itself, and it did not flicker once.”

We stood there, the two of us, in the doorway of my small whitewashed house, in the thin rain, for a long time.

“Come in,” I said at last. “Come in out of the wet.”

He came in.

He would not sit. He stood in the middle of my small front room with his long cloak dripping on my floor and looked about him. At the shelves, mostly empty. At the window. At the desk, where my small brown ledger lay open with the date at the top of the page and nothing beneath it.

And at the wall above the desk, where, on two pegs, there hung an arrow.

It was a plain arrow. Pale bamboo, a small steel point, three fletchings, grey and black and tawny, faded now to the color of dust, and plain linen bindings. And here and there along its length, small loose loops of scarlet thread, holding nothing.

The raven looked at it a long time.

“Thou didst keep it,” he said.

“I did.”

“The sergeant found it in the farthest butt,” said the raven. “I was there, the night it flew. I stood behind the tortoise’s shoulder. I never knew what became of it.”

“It came to me,” I said. “Reedwhistle brought it to my office at dawn. Laid it on my desk. On top of Requisition Four ‘Undred an’ Nine.” I looked at it. “I’ve ‘ad it on a shelf or a wall every day since. Forty-two years.”

The raven turned his head and looked at me with one black eye.

“And the other?” he said. “The last?”

“What last?”

“The arrow on its knees,” said the raven. “When the otter found it. The last one it made.”

“Where is it?”

“Gone down the river road,” said the raven, “four days ago, in a crate. With the rest of the week’s work from Cinderford. To the armory here, at Harrowgate. The council is sending a fleet to the Ironreef islands at the next dimming week, and wants every arrow in the valleys.” He paused. “The otter did not know which it was. No one did. It had no mark.”

I looked at him.

“No mark?”

“Below the nock,” said the raven. “There was no number. The otter looked. The tortoise had scratched forty-one on every arrow it made for forty-eight years.” His milky lid flickered. “Not on the last.”

I stood there in my small front room with the rain on the window, and something rose in me, very slowly, from far down. I had not felt it in many years. I had thought, if I thought of it at all, that I had grown too old for it, the way one grows too old for climbing trees or running down a yard at dawn.

It was the old fever.

Not for commendations. Not for gold seals or statues or Quartermaster-General. I had had all of those, and found them very cold, and set them aside.

It was the fever to count.

To find it. To go down to that armory and open those crates and look through every arrow in them, one by one, until I found the last arrow that tortoise ever made. Then to carry it home and hang it on my wall beside the first silent one. Two arrows. The first and the last. A single line beneath them, never two.

“I’ll find it,” I said.

The raven looked at me.

“I’ll find it,” I said again. “I’ve counted every arrow that ever came out of that yard, one way or another. I counted the salvage from the coast in a cold storeroom by lantern light. Two thousand broken an’ twelve whole. I picked out every one of the tortoise’s then, by its mark. I’ll pick out this one without.” I was already reaching for my coat. “Will you come?”

The raven was quiet a long time.

Then, slowly, he inclined his grey head.

We went out into the rain together, an old boar and an old raven, and walked across Harrowgate to the council-hall.

I must tell the reader something about the council-hall at Harrowgate, and about what stands before it. I have avoided mentioning it in the whole course of this history, out of embarrassment. But I can avoid it no longer, for we had to walk past it to reach the armory.

There is a statue.

It stands on a great block of grey stone in the square before the hall, three times the height of a living boar-folk, in bronze gone green with weather. It shows a boar-folk of heroic proportions, in an apron coat, with brass rings on his tusks and a ledger in one hand and an arrow in the other, held aloft. The arrow is fletched in bronze with three bronze feathers and hung all over with little bronze hooks and beads and tassels, of the kind that the charm-sellers in the market hang on their breath-charms. Beneath the statue, on the stone, in letters of gold, it says:

OBADIAH HARROWTUSK, THE FLETCHER-SAGE. HE TAUGHT THE ARROWS SILENCE.

I have walked past it, in my years at Harrowgate, perhaps four times. Each time I have walked past it with my eyes on the cobbles and my tusks clamped shut, so that my rings would not clack and attract anyone’s attention.

That morning I stopped before it.

I do not know why. I stood in the thin rain at the foot of that great green bronze boar and looked up at it. At the heroic tusks. At the bronze ledger. At the absurd bronze arrow, with its bronze hooks and beads, held up toward the grey sky as if to say: I made this.

The raven stood beside me and looked up too.

“He taught the arrows silence,” the raven said, very quietly. His bell made no sound. But I heard in his voice something that was very like it: a small, dry, cracked note, like a laugh, or something under a laugh.

“I didn’t,” I said. “I shouted at ’em.”

“I know,” said the raven.

We stood there a while longer.

Then I said, “Come on,” and we went round the side of the hall to the armory.

The armory at Harrowgate is in the vaults beneath the council-hall. It is a great range of long low stone rooms, lit by lanterns on hooks, and in the season before a war it is the busiest place in the city. That morning it was full of clerks with ledgers and porters with handcarts and soldiers of the fleet in grey, checking crates and stamping dockets and arguing. And it was full of arrows.

I have seen a great many arrows in my life. I have seen ten thousand loaded into forty wagons by lantern light. I had never seen so many as were in those vaults. Crate upon crate upon crate, stacked to the low vaulted ceilings in long rows that ran off into the dark further than the lanterns reached. From every yard in the river valleys and the coast and the hill country, stamped on their sides with their yards’ names. Hundreds of thousands. For the Ironreef.

At the door, at a small desk, sat a clerk.

He was a mouse-folk. Very small, very neat, with very small handwriting, and whiskers that trembled when he saw me come in. He looked up from his ledger, and his eyes went wide, and he half rose from his stool.

“Sergeant?” he said. “Sergeant Harrowtusk? Is it really…?”

“Who are you?” I said.

“Pennywhistle Scrapple, Sergeant,” he said, and bowed. “Clerk of Stores. My grandfather was…”

“I know who your grandfather was,” I said. My voice did something odd on it, and I cleared my throat. “Best clerk I ever ‘ad. Smallest ‘and in the valleys.” I looked at him. His whiskers trembled exactly as his grandfather’s had. “I want the Cinderford crates, Mr. Scrapple. The ones as came in four days ago.”

He looked at me, then at the raven, then back at me.

“All of them, Sergeant?”

“All of them.”

He took us there himself. Down the long row of crates, past stacks stamped with the names of yards I knew and yards I didn’t, to a corner of the farthest vault, where a lantern hung low over eleven crates. Each was stamped CINDERFORD on its side, and beneath the stamp, a single line.

“These came in on Transmuday,” said young Mr. Scrapple. “Two thousand seven hundred and fifty. From the week’s work.” He hesitated. “There was a letter with them, Sergeant. From the yard-mistress. The otter. I didn’t know what to make of it.” He took it from his coat and held it out.

I took it. I read it by the light of the lantern.

It was very short. It was written in a careful left-handed script that leaned a little backward, as left-handed script does. It said:

To the Clerk of Stores, Harrowgate.

These are the arrows of the third shed at Cinderford for the week of Illumination. You will find that they bear no bench marks. This is not an error. On the morning we found the old one at the last bench, with its last arrow across its knees and no mark below the nock, every bench in the yard laid down its marking knife. We have not taken them up again. We do not intend to.

No one will be able to tell whose they are.

That is right. They were never anyone’s.

I stood there in the low light of the lantern, in the vault beneath my own statue, with that letter in my hand, a long time.

Then I gave it back to young Mr. Scrapple, and took off my coat, and folded it, and laid it on the stone floor, and lowered myself onto it. That takes me some time now. I said: “Open ’em.”

He opened them.

I will not pretend to the reader that I went at it sensibly. I did not. I was an old boar on a cold stone floor in a vault with the fever of counting in me. I went at it the way I went at the salvage crates in the cold storeroom, forty years before. I took up each arrow from the first crate, one by one, and turned it over in the lantern light, and looked.

I looked first below the nock, from habit, for the mark. There was none. There was none on any of them. Two thousand seven hundred and fifty arrows, and not one with a number.

So I looked at the arrows themselves.

I looked along the shafts, for the path. They all had paths. Every one. Faint lines scratched along the grain, wandering, curving out around each knuckle of the bamboo and in again. Some fainter than others. Some a little more wandering. None cutting across.

I looked at the fletchings. Grey, black, white, tawny, brown, every shade. All shed. All asked for. The raven bent his old grey head over each crate as I opened it, and his bell made no sound.

I looked at the bindings. All firm. None tight.

I looked at the scarlet loops. Every one of them had scarlet loops. At the head, at the nock, above each binding. Loose. Holding nothing.

I took out my black spectacles.

I had not worn them in many years. I had carried them, as I had always carried them, in the pocket over my heart, out of habit. I unfolded them with fingers that were not so steady as they used to be, and put them on, and looked down into the first crate.

Nothing glowed.

I looked into the second.

Nothing.

The third. The fourth. All eleven. Two thousand seven hundred and fifty arrows, lying in their crates in the lantern light, every one of them as pale and plain and quiet through those soot-black lenses as it was to the naked eye. Not a blush of red anywhere. Not one flaw.

I took the spectacles off.

I took up one arrow and flicked its fletching.

No sound.

Another.

No sound.

Another. Another. Another.

I sat on my folded coat on the stone floor and flicked arrow after arrow, as I imagine some foolish scholar in some later age may one day flick an arrow in the dark of a crate. Not one of them made any sound at all.

They were all the same.

I do not mean that they were all alike. They were not. Some were long and some a little shorter. Some had grey feathers and some black. Some paths wandered more and some less. One had a small dent near the nock where the bamboo had been close to a crack. One had a fletching set a hair too high, I think by a student.

But they were all the same in the one way that mattered. Every one of them, lying across my palms in the lantern light, had that stillness I had felt once before, in my office, at dawn, with the first silent arrow in my hands and a lynx watching me. The stillness of a pond with no wind on it. Everything in it resting exactly where it was, and nothing straining to be anywhere else.

I could not tell which one was the tortoise’s.

I tried. Lord, I tried. I sat on that cold floor until the lantern burned down and young Mr. Scrapple brought another. I went through all eleven crates twice. I laid arrows side by side on my coat and squinted at them, and flexed them, and listened to them, and turned them every way. I told myself that the tortoise’s hand was older and slower and finer than any student’s. I told myself its last arrow must be finer than all the rest, in some small way that only an old quartermaster who had counted ten thousand could see. I looked for the finest one.

There was no finest one.

There was no worst one.

There were two thousand seven hundred and fifty arrows that had all learned the same thing.

And then, sitting there on the stone with an arrow across my knees, I looked up from the Cinderford crates. Down the long row of the vault, I saw the others.

The crates from the hill yards. From the coast. From the goblin twins’ yard at Saltmere. From a yard at the mouth of the river I had never heard of. From yards whose masters had learned from masters who had learned from masters who had once sat a season in the Slow Shed at Cinderford, at a bench beside a tortoise, or a goat, or a field-mouse, or a lynx with one hand.

I got up. It took me a very long time. I walked down that row of crates in the lantern light with my coat over my arm and the raven walking silent beside me. At each crate I stopped and lifted the lid, and took out an arrow, and held it, and flicked it.

Not all of them. Not every yard. There were still yards, here and there, that made arrows the old way, with green wood and iron jaws and feathers in sacks. Their crates I knew before I opened them, by the faint high wavering sound that came from inside when the porters set them down. And there were still a great many charm-seller’s arrows, I suppose, out in the world, hung with hooks and beads and bought in markets. But in that vault, that morning, of all the hundreds of thousands of arrows gathered for the Ironreef, most of them were good.

And every good one was the same.

I stood at the far end of the farthest vault, with an arrow from some yard on the coast whose name I did not know lying across my two old hands. It was silent. It was still. It was exactly like every arrow in the Cinderford crates, and exactly like the arrow on the wall above my desk.

And I understood.

I could not find the tortoise’s last arrow because the tortoise’s last arrow was not in one crate.

It was in all of them.

Every good arrow in that vault had learned what the tortoise’s had learned. From a student who learned it from a student who learned it from a student who learned it at a bench in a shed in the elbow of a river, from an old mossy creature who rested at the end of every stroke and breathed out all the way and asked. Every arrow. From every yard. No one could tell which ones the tortoise made, because there was no longer any difference between the ones the tortoise made and the ones it didn’t.

It had not left behind an arrow.

It had left behind the way arrows are made.

And it had not put its mark on any of it.

I wept.

I want the reader to know that. I wept, there at the end of the farthest vault, beneath my own statue, with an arrow from a yard I had never heard of across my hands. An old boar-folk with brass on his tusks and ink still on his fingers after all these years, weeping like a child, with a raven standing silent beside him in the lantern light and a mouse-clerk at the end of the row pretending not to look.

I did not weep for grief. Not only. I wept for the tortoise, yes. For the slow mossy creature at the end of the last bench whom I had shouted at, and served notice, and turned the glass on, and never once in forty-two years thanked. I wept for that.

But mostly I wept because I was grateful.

Grateful that I had been wrong. Grateful that I had been so loudly, stubbornly, magnificently wrong, for so long, about everything that mattered, and that it had not mattered. The tortoise did its work anyway, at the end of the last bench, under the steady lamp. It did it under my roaring, under my ledgers, under my hourglass, and taught it to everyone who would sit still long enough to learn. And now there was a vault full of arrows that would fly true and silent and come back whole. Arrows that would not shatter in some young archer’s hand on some strand at dusk and take her hand with them. There would be no Greyhook at the Ironreef. Not from these arrows.

I had not done that. The statue said I had. The statue was a lie.

But I had been there.

I had stood at the end of the bench and seen it, and counted it, and in the end, with very bad grace, got out of its way.

I was grateful for that. More grateful than I have words for, even now, sitting by my window in the thin rain, writing this.

The raven spoke, at last.

He had not said a word since the door of the armory. Now he said, very low, so that only I could hear:

“It never kept the count.”

I looked at him. His old grey head was bowed. His beak, with its twelve notches, was close to the arrow across my hands.

“I kept it,” he said. “Forty years. On my face. Every theft. And the tortoise kept nothing. Not its failures. Not its mark. Not its name.” His bell made a small sound. Not a sob. Something else. “And it is in every arrow in this place. And I am only in twelve notches.”

“You’re in the feathers,” I said.

He looked up at me.

“Every feather in those Cinderford crates,” I said, “was asked for. You taught ’em that. You sat at my gate forty years with a basket at your feet. Asking. You’re in every one.” I held out the arrow from the coast yard, the one I could not tell from the tortoise’s. “Can you tell which feathers are yours?”

The raven looked at the arrow a long time.

Then, very slowly, he shook his old grey head.

“No,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Nor can I tell which arrows are ‘is.” And I laughed. I laughed through the weeping, there in the vault, a great cracked snorting laugh that rang off the low stone ceiling and made young Mr. Scrapple jump. “No one can tell which, Keeper. No one can tell which. That’s the ‘ole beauty of it.”

I laid the arrow back in its crate, very carefully, the way one lays down an egg.

I did not take one home.

I had meant to. I had come to find the tortoise’s last arrow and hang it on my wall beside the first. But I could not choose one. To choose one would have been to put a mark on it. To say: this one. And the tortoise had laid down its marking knife on the last night of its life, and the otter’s whole yard after it. I had no right to pick it up.

So I left them all in their crates, for the Ironreef. And I put on my coat, and walked back up through the vaults with the raven beside me. At the door, I shook young Mr. Scrapple’s very small hand. At the top of the stair, I walked out into the square, past the statue, without looking up at it, and home through the thin rain to my small whitewashed house.

The raven left me at my door.

He did not say goodbye. He only looked at me a moment with his black eyes and his milky lid flickering. Then he inclined his grey head, very slowly, as he had in my front room that morning. He turned and walked away down the wet street, his long cloak of a thousand molts dragging behind him on the stones, and his bell silent.

I have not seen him since. I do not expect to. We are both very old.

I went in. I sat down at my desk by the window. The small brown ledger was still open where I had left it that morning, with the date at the top of the page and nothing beneath it.

I took up my pen.

I looked up at the wall above the desk, where the first silent arrow hung on its two pegs. Its feathers had faded to dust. Its scarlet loops held nothing. It had no mark below its nock except a small, neat, slightly crooked forty-one.

I looked at it a long time.

Then I bent over the ledger and wrote, in my round firm hand, gone a little shaky now, as the hands of old creatures do:

Bench 41. Arrows sent: uncounted. Arrows returned: uncounted. Which were its: no one can tell.

Received: everything.

I sat back.

I looked at it.

And then I drew beneath it a single line.

Only one.

Never two.

I shall not write in this book again. There is nothing more I need to count.

 

Segment 30:

The Last Lines of the Oldest Fragment

Chapter the First, in Which I Arrive at the Last Tablet

Madam, we have come to the thirty-first tablet.

I did not think we would. I want to confess that at once, here at the top of the page, before I lose my nerve. When I first crawled through the crack behind the tax rolls and found that crate, and lifted the broken lid, and saw the thirty-one tablets lying in the damp, I did not truly believe that I should ever reach the last of them. Not in order. Not without wandering off into some margin and never coming back. I promised you I would. I underlined the promise twice. But I am a copyist, Madam, and a copyist is a creature who has broken more promises at the top of a page than any other creature living. I did not believe myself.

And yet here it is.

The thirty-first tablet. The last one. The one I read first, if you remember, in my very first preface. I could not help myself. I held the lamp close to it and dug down through six hundred years of scratched and quarreling margins until I found, worn almost smooth, at the very heart of all that argument, the moral.

I read the end first, Madam. Before anything. Before the boar or the arrow or the crane or the raven or the first breath. I spoiled it for myself and for you in the ninth paragraph of a preface that swore to tell it in order.

And now I have come back round to it, the long way, by every tablet and every crack and every margin. It lies before me in the lamplight. And I find, Madam, that it is not the same tablet at all.

It is the same clay. The same cramped and hurried hand. The same words, worn almost smooth.

But it is not the same tablet. Because I am not the same scribe who read it first.

Chapter the Second, in Which I Copy the Last Lines

I shall copy them now. All of them. In order. Without stopping.

The last lines of the oldest fragment say that when the fletcher finally died, their arrows were still in use, and no one could tell which ones they had made, because all good arrows had learned the same thing.

Moral of the Story: That which is shaped in balance remembers its path, but that which is rushed forgets even why it flies.

There.

Chapter the Third, in Which Nothing Happens for Some Time

I sat a long while, Madam, after copying those lines.

Not because I had anything more to say about them. I did not. That was the strange part. I had expected, all the long way through these tablets, that when I came at last to the end I should have a great deal to say. I had planned a magnificent closing chapter, full of dashes and digressions and learned footnotes, gathering up every thread of the story and tying them all off in a fine scholarly bow.

I sat there with the quill in my cloud of a hand and the ink fresh on the vellum, and I found that I had nothing to add.

The tablet had said it.

—The Black-Ink Mites wish it noted that this is the first time in the history of the swarm that I have had nothing to add.

—Yes.

—The Red-Ink Mites wish it noted that they are not sure it will last.

—Nor am I.

Chapter the Fourth, in Which I Confess My Errors

But before I set down the quill, Madam, I owe you a confession. I have been putting it off for thirty segments. It is a long one, and I should like to make it in order, for once, so that I may say at least that I ended in order, if I did not begin so.

These are my errors.

First. I promised to tell this story in order, and broke the promise in the very preface in which I made it. I gave you the moral before the beginning. I told you the boar was perhaps sorry before you had learned what he had to be sorry for. I showed you the raven’s notch before you had met the raven, and read you the healer’s verse before you had seen the healer.

Second. I spent an entire segment of thirteen chapters on a single line of dialogue, The wood will forget your patience. At the end of it, I concluded that the line was said by they, which is precisely what the main text had told me in the first place.

Third. I ate a piece of a six-hundred-year-old crate in the name of scholarship. I do not regret it, but I confess it.

Fourth. I drew a line four miles long, looping and doubling on itself a dozen times, in an attempt to reconcile seven contradictory accounts of the flight of a single arrow. I pinned it to a shelf. It is still there. I look at it every day.

Fifth. I unwrapped an arrow at the bottom of the crate. It may or may not have been the arrow that did not whistle, and I flicked it some forty times to make it prove that it was silent.

Sixth. I led eleven thousand mites in a deliberate attempt to forget that arrow, which resulted in the most intense period of thinking about that arrow in the history of the world.

Seventh. I mocked, in the privacy of my own margins, a heron-folk clerk of the second grade named Mr. Thaddeus Quillsby for measuring a tortoise’s breath with a brass timer. I did so while measuring, myself, the length of every pause in the fletcher’s lines on every tablet I copied. I recorded them in a small private notebook of my own. That notebook I shall now burn.

Eighth. I was indignant at Sorrel, a one-handed lynx archer, for demanding the small bound thing and squeezing it in the dark. All the while I was demanding of these tablets, every night, that they give me the meaning, whole, in my hands, so that I might hold it and be sure.

Ninth. I was indignant at all the copyists who came before me. I scorned them for filling the margins with quarrels, and for never once sitting down before this crate and simply reading the story through, slowly, from beginning to end. And I have filled more margins, and quarreled more, and read more hurriedly, than any of them.

Tenth. I introduced a cat. Several times. Against my own express wishes and those of the Black-Ink Mites. And I must confess, Madam, that I am now very fond of it.

There. Ten errors.

—The Red-Ink Mites wish it noted that there are certainly more.

—Yes. There are certainly more. There are a great many more. I have not counted them all. I have stopped counting.

Chapter the Fifth, in Which I Discover Whose Hand It Was

There is one thing more that I must tell you, Madam, and it came to me only tonight, as I was copying the last lines.

You will remember that I said, at the very beginning, that the main text of these tablets was written in a cramped and hurried hand. The letters were crowding toward the edges. The clay was put into the kiln before it was properly dry, so that nearly every tablet cracked. Whoever wrote it, I said, was clearly in a great hurry. And I said, with a scholar’s smugness, that you would appreciate the irony of this when you had heard the story.

I have been thinking about that hand for thirty segments.

Who was it? Who was the first to write this down? Who sat with soft clay and a stylus and pressed into it, in such great haste, the story of a tortoise who learned not to hurry?

Not the tortoise. Its own lines are scattered through the cracks and margins, short and plain, and they are not in that hand.

Not the boar. His hand is round and firm and unhesitating. I know it from the fragments of his ledger.

Not the crane. Her hand is small and graceful, like a needle.

Not the raven. His is dark and slanting.

Not the sawyer. His is large and uncertain, the hand of one who cannot see.

Not the mathematician, nor the sergeant, nor the goblin, nor the night-proofer, nor the lynx.

I do not know who it was, Madam. I have looked at that hand under my lamp for a whole year, and I do not know. But tonight, as I copied the last line, no one could tell which ones they had made, because all good arrows had learned the same thing, I noticed something I had never noticed before.

At the very end of that line, where the stylus came off the clay after the last word, there is a small mark. Not a letter. Not a word. A very small round dent, pressed into the clay, as if the writer’s thumb had come to rest there for a moment at the end of the stroke.

And then, below it, the moral. In the same cramped hand.

But not cramped. Not hurried. The letters of the moral are as carefully spaced and as evenly pressed as any I have ever seen. They are not crowding toward the edge. They take their time. They are written, Madam, so far as one can tell such a thing from clay, slowly.

Whoever wrote these tablets wrote them in a hurry. All thirty-one. They hurried so badly that the clay cracked in the kiln. They were afraid, I think, that the story would be lost if they did not get it down at once, before the last of those who remembered it were gone.

And then, at the end of the last line, they came to rest.

And breathed.

And wrote the moral slowly.

I wept when I saw it, Madam.

—The Black-Ink Mites wish it noted that mites do not weep.

—The Black-Ink Mites wept too. I saw them.

—The Black-Ink Mites wish it noted that they were not weeping. They were circling.

—Yes. Of course.

Chapter the Sixth, in Which I Forgive My Predecessors

I want to say something now to the copyists who came before me.

To Q, who wrote MALLOW, OBVIOUSLY MALLOW, WHO ELSE HAD THE LUNGS?

To the one who wrote IT CANNOT MEAN BOTH, IDIOT, and to the one who wrote perhaps it means both?

To the one who drew the rude picture. To the one whose mother was a goblin.

To the one who first scratched WHAT IS THIS MARK? beside the raven’s notch, and to the one who answered, near the very bottom of the margin, almost lost in a crack: of what was not asked for.

To the one who wrote, in a hand so faint and so shaky I could barely read it: I have seen the ledger. There is a line at the bottom of a page. Only one line. I think he was sorry.

To all of you, across six hundred years.

I was angry with you. I was very angry. In the first segment of this copying, I sat in the dark behind the tax rolls and shouted at you so loudly that the cat fled the library for two days. I said you had wasted six hundred years telling one another you were wrong. I said not one of you had ever sat down and simply read the story through. I said you were all in such a hurry to be right.

You were.

So was I.

And yet you came. Every one of you. Down into this damp hole, by whatever lamp you had, every fifty years or every hundred, to a crate of cracked clay that no one had asked you to copy. You copied it. You argued with it. You loved it so much that you could not leave its margins alone. And because you came, and argued, and loved it, and could not leave it alone, it is still here. I have been able to sit before it and read it through, slowly, from beginning to end, as you never did.

I could not have done it without your quarrels.

The story did not survive in spite of you. It survived because of you. Every scratch in every margin was a creature saying: this matters. This matters enough to be wrong about.

I forgive you.

I hope you will forgive me.

Chapter the Seventh, in Which I Add a Note of My Own

And so, Madam, I have done the thing I swore at the beginning that I would never do.

I have written in the margins.

Not of my copy. Of the tablets.

I could not help it. I tried. I sat a long while with the quill laid down and my cloud of a hand folded in the lap of my habit, and told myself that I should leave the margins exactly as I found them. I should add nothing. I should be the first copyist in six hundred years to come and go without a scratch.

But the margins of the second tablet were still there. The old argument, pressed into the clay by two furious hands so long ago: NO. THE ONE WHO KEEPS MISSING. And beneath it: THE HILL SPEECH IS A BARBAROUS DIALECT AND THE TRANSLATION IS ONE WHO BINDS SLOWLY. And beneath that, small and apologetic: perhaps it means both? And beneath that, cut so deep it nearly went through: IT CANNOT MEAN BOTH, IDIOT.

And no one had ever answered.

Six hundred years, and no one had ever answered.

So I sent down a single Black-Ink Mite. Only one. The oldest and most careful of them, who has been with the swarm since the days of the minor bishop’s sermons. I sent it down onto the clay with a single grain of ink. Very slowly, beneath IT CANNOT MEAN BOTH, IDIOT, in letters so small that you would need my lamp held very close to see them, it wrote:

It can.

And then, after a moment, because I could not resist, because I am what I am:

It means both. And a third.

Chapter the Eighth, in Which I Add Another

And then I went to the thirty-first tablet.

The last one. With its margins so crowded with six hundred years of scratching and counter-scratching that I had to dig down through them, on my very first night, to find the moral at its heart.

There is, at the very bottom of that tablet, below the moral, a small space. A space about the width of a finger, where the clay is smooth, and no one has written anything. I do not know why. Perhaps every copyist who came to it, having dug down through all that argument to the moral, found that they had nothing left to say. Perhaps they simply ran out of room. Perhaps, like me, they sat a long while before it with the quill laid down.

I did not send a Black-Ink Mite.

I sent one of the Unstained.

You will not have heard of them, Madam, for I have not mentioned them before. They are the newest of us. Nymphs hatched in the swarm during the year of this copying, too young yet to have fallen into any ink at all. They are pale. They have no color. They have no faction. They have no opinions about anything. They were born while we were reading this story, and they have known nothing else. They have heard every quarrel and every digression and every chapter of minutes. They have heard the cat purring on the crate. And they have never once said anything at all.

I chose the smallest of them, and sent it down onto the smooth clay at the bottom of the last tablet, with no ink at all.

And I told it to write whatever it liked.

It stood there on the clay a long time.

Then, very slowly, it walked. Not in letters. In a single line. A faint, wandering line across the smooth clay at the foot of the tablet, so faint you can only see it when the lamp is held very close and slanted. The line curves out a little, here and there, and in again, as if going around something that is not there. It does not cut across anything. It runs from one edge of the smooth space to the other.

And at the end of it, where the line comes off the clay, a very small round mark. As if something had come to rest there.

That is all.

That is my note, Madam. It is the only thing I have written in this whole long copying that I do not want to explain.

Chapter the Ninth, in Which the Swarm Breathes

And now I must tell you the last thing.

I was sitting before the crate, with my habit on its hook and the swarm gathered about me in the dark. The quill lay on the vellum beside the last lines, the lamp burned low, and the cat was asleep on top of the tablets as it has slept every night since it first climbed there. The Unstained nymph came back up from the clay at the foot of the last tablet and rejoined the swarm.

And something happened.

I want to be very careful in how I tell it, because it is the only thing in all these thirty segments that I am truly not sure of. The Red-Ink Mites are not sure of it either. Neither are the Black, nor the Blue, nor Professor Ibid. I have asked them all. Each of them remembers it differently.

But I will tell you what I remember.

The swarm breathed.

Mites breathe, Madam, though you would not think it. Not through a nose, as you do. Through small pores along their sides, very fine, too small to see. Each mite breathes on its own, in its own rhythm. Eleven thousand of us, eleven thousand little breaths going in and out at eleven thousand different times. It makes a sound, if one listens very closely: a faint, constant, uneven rustle, like a whole library of pages turning at once.

I have lived with that sound all my life in this body. I have never once heard it stop. I have never once heard it be anything but eleven thousand.

That night, it was one.

It began with the Unstained, I think. The pale ones. The newest. I heard them first, a small clear sound at the center of the swarm, breathing together, in and out, slowly, in time. Then the Blue-Ink Mites nearest them, who have always followed wherever wonder goes. Then the Red-Ink Mites. Then Professor Ibid. And last of all, very slowly, very reluctantly, as literalists will, the Black.

In.

Out.

All the way.

Eleven thousand of us. In the dark behind the tax rolls, before a crate of cracked clay, with a cat asleep on the tablets and an arrow wrapped in brown linen at the bottom that may or may not have been the one that did not whistle.

In.

Out.

As one breath.

It was the first time.

I do not know how long it lasted. A moment. A minute. Perhaps longer. I only know that while it lasted, I was not Brother Errata, nor The Marginalia, nor Professor Ibid. I was not Black or Red or Blue or Unstained. I was not eleven thousand opinions in a habit several sizes too large.

I was a single creature, sitting very still, breathing.

And at the bottom of that breath, where there had always been, for as long as I can remember, a small hard place of quarreling and doubting and wanting to be right, there was nothing at all.

Only the quiet.

Only the lamp.

Only the cat, purring.

Chapter the Tenth, in Which I Set Down the Quill

It did not last, Madam.

—The Red-Ink Mites wish it noted that they began to doubt it almost at once.

—The Black-Ink Mites wish it noted that there is no evidence it happened at all.

—The Blue-Ink Mites wish it noted that they are going to circle for a very long time.

—Professor Ibid wishes it noted that a committee should be formed to investigate.

—The Unstained wish nothing noted at all.

It did not last. Of course it did not last. The crane said it, long ago, kneeling on a frozen floor: stillness is never kept. It can only be found again.

But it happened.

I am nearly sure it happened.

And so I am going to set down the quill.

I have copied all thirty-one tablets. I have set down, as faithfully as I could, every voice: the boar and the tortoise and the crane and the raven. The sergeant and the sawyer and the goat and the goblin and the badger and the lynx. And the hurried hand that wrote it all down and came to rest at the end. I have added two notes of my own in the margins, one in words and one in a single line. I have confessed my errors, ten of them, and stopped counting.

The tablets will go back into the crate. I shall not move the arrow at the bottom. I shall not move the cat. I shall put the broken lid back on as I found it. The crate will stay behind the tax rolls in the damp, as it has stayed for six hundred years, until some other copyist comes down with some other lamp and lifts the lid and begins to argue.

I hope they argue.

I hope they write in the margins. I hope they tell me I was wrong, and draw rude pictures beside my notes, and cut IT CANNOT MEAN BOTH, IDIOT into the clay beneath my It can. I hope they spend thirteen chapters on a single line and eat a piece of the crate and try to forget the arrow on purpose and fail.

And I hope that somewhere, some night, at the end of the last line, they come to rest.

And breathe.

And find, at the foot of the last tablet, a faint wandering line that cuts across nothing. And a small round mark where something came to rest. And do not know what it means.

And do not need to.

—See margin.

—The margin says I have not told this story in order.

—I know. I never did.

But Madam, I told it.

And that, I think, is what the tablets have been trying to teach me from the first night I found them: that it does not matter whether one binds slowly or keeps missing. What matters is that one keeps binding, and keeps missing, and comes to rest at the end of every stroke, and breathes, and begins again.

There.

I am setting down the quill now.

The swarm is breathing.

Not as one. Not anymore. As eleven thousand, each in its own time, a faint uneven rustle, like a library of pages turning.

But I can hear it now.

I could not hear it before.

The lamp is burning low. The cat is purring on the crate.

In.

Out.

All the way.

 

Character Appendix:

---

Avatar 1: Shu Manbang, the fletcher, whose name is translated as “One Who Binds Slowly” or “The One Who Keeps Missing”

Physical description:

• A mossback tortoise-kin who stands about five feet tall, with a domed shell furred in grey-green lichen.

• A smooth groove is worn into the left side of the shell where a quiver has rested for decades.

• The neck is long and finely wrinkled, and the heavy-lidded eyes are amber.

• Each hand has three thick fingers and a stubby thumb, with nails filed flat for fine work.

• A loop of faded red thread is tied around the left wrist and never removed.

• Pine resin and bamboo dust cling to the scutes, so Shu always smells faintly of a workshop.

• Every movement is deliberate. Shu turns the whole body rather than just the head.

Overarching personality:

• Patient to the point of stubbornness, humble, and quietly self-doubting.

• Treats every failure as a teacher, and grieves over haste more than over loss.

• Refuses to argue, but also refuses to stop.

• Rarely speaks of itself, and gives credit to the wood, the feather, and the breath.

Accent and dialogue mannerisms:

• A soft, low voice with drawn-out vowels and long pauses.

• Often draws an audible breath in the middle of a sentence before going on.

• Rarely says “I,” and prefers “these hands” or “this one.”

• Answers many questions with a quiet question of its own, or with silence.

• Sample dialogue: “These hands… are not ready. (breath) The wood is. Will you wait with it?”

Items carried:

---

Red-Thread Wristwrap of Resting Hands [3817]

• Slot: Left arm (wrist)

• Skills gained while openly worn: Fletcher +1, Binding and Knotwork +2, Concentration +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Resting Points: The thread tightens gently at the moments the hands should pause, which prevents overwork injuries during long crafting sessions.   ◦ Knot Memory: Knots tied while wearing the wristwrap do not slip or loosen unless the wearer deliberately unties them.   ◦ Tremor Quiet: Minor shaking from cold, hunger, or fatigue is dampened during fine manual work.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Binding Pause (2 uses per day): The wearer touches the thread before binding fletching. That binding cannot fray or loosen for one week.   ◦ Hand Rest (1 use per day): After at least 10 minutes of calm crafting, the wearer removes one crafting-related Fatigued condition.   ◦ Thread of Return (1 use per day): A strand of red thread tied to a crafted arrow lets the wearer sense the direction of that arrow within 100 feet after it is loosed, which helps with recovering ammunition.

• Tags: Fletcher, Binding, Knotwork, Patience, Recovery, Ammunition, Craft, Wrist, RedThread, HandStability

---

Lichen-Lacquer Shell Harness of the Long Path [5294]

• Slot: Back (shell)

• Skills gained while openly worn: Endurance +1, Woodcraft +1, Stealth (while motionless) +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Lichen Breath: The living lichen in the lacquer filters sawdust, smoke, and spores from the air near the wearer's face.   ◦ Slow Armor: Grants +1 AC during any turn in which the wearer has not moved.   ◦ Quiver Groove: Arrows carried in the harness never warp from humidity, heat, or cold.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Into the Shell (1 use per day, reaction): When hit by an attack, the wearer withdraws into the shell, halving the damage taken and losing one action on the next turn.   ◦ Moss Cushion (2 uses per day): Shafts laid against the harness for 10 minutes have minor warping corrected.

• Tags: Defense, Shell, Endurance, Lichen, Storage, Ammunition, Stillness, Protection, Woodcraft, Reaction

---

Bamboo Meridian Rod of Unmeasured Lines [1468]

• Slot: Right hand (held tool)

• Skills gained while openly worn: Fletcher +1, Bamboo Working +2, Precision Handling +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Path Lines: Lines drawn with the rod guide the wearer's cuts to perfect straightness.   ◦ Grain Listening: Hidden splits and weak grain in bamboo or wood can be felt by touch.   ◦ Uncounted Measure: Each shaft cut while holding the rod matches the length and weight of the last good shaft the wearer made.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Straighten the Shaft (3 uses per day): Rolling the rod along a warped shaft trues it within one minute.   ◦ Path Mark (1 use per day): The wearer draws a line in the air or on a surface. Any arrow loosed along that line within one minute gains +1 to hit.   ◦ Silent Flight (1 use per day): The next arrow completed flies without whistle or sound when loosed.

• Tags: Bamboo, Meridian, Precision, Fletcher, Straightness, Silence, Measurement, Tool, Woodworking, Pathfinding

---

Healer-Needle Hairpin of Permission [7720]

• Slot: Head

• Skills gained while openly worn: Herbal Lore +1, Anatomy +1, Calm Presence +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Pain by Permission: The wearer's own minor aches fade slowly when the wearer rests, rather than when they are ignored.   ◦ Watcher's Eye: The wearer notices tension held in the shoulders, jaw, and hands of anyone within 15 feet.   ◦ Breath Count: The wearer is always aware of the rhythm of their own breath, even while asleep.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Permission Needle (1 use per day): Touching the hairpin to a willing creature's tense muscle restores 1d4 HP over 10 minutes.   ◦ Release the Knot (2 uses per day): After one minute of breathing together, the wearer ends the Shaken condition on themselves or one ally.

• Tags: Healing, Needle, Permission, Anatomy, Calm, Breath, Observation, Hairpin, Restoration, Gentle

---

Leftover-Bone Toggle of the Light Weight [9053]

• Slot: Neck

• Skills gained while openly worn: Bone Carving +2, Meditation +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Heavy When Rushed: The toggle grows noticeably heavier whenever the wearer hurries, as a warning.   ◦ Light When Breathing: During calm, measured breathing, the toggle becomes nearly weightless and faintly warm.   ◦ Scrap Sense: The wearer knows which leftover scraps of wood, bone, or feather are still useful for crafting.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Weightless Moment (1 use per day): The wearer's carried weight is halved for one minute.   ◦ Second Try (1 use per day): After taking three slow breaths, which costs one action, the wearer may reroll one failed crafting check.

• Tags: Bone, Toggle, Weight, Meditation, Patience, Salvage, Recycling, Neck, Warning, Calm

---

Avatar 2: Aoi Hari-no-Tsuru, crane-folk needle healer

Physical description:

• A red-crowned crane-folk who stands nearly seven feet tall when her neck is extended.

• Her plumage is snow white, and her wing-arms are tipped in black and end in slender three-fingered hands.

• A bright scarlet patch crowns her head, and she tends it with quiet vanity.

• Her long ivory beak is used to straighten and clean her needles.

• Her legs are grey and finely scaled, and she often rests standing on one leg.

• She wears layered indigo robes damp at the hem from walking through morning grass.

• She smells of mugwort smoke and rain.

Overarching personality:

• Serene, exacting, and gently ironic.

• Believes the body heals by consent rather than by force.

• Teaches through questions, and is quietly delighted when a student finds the answer alone.

• Becomes cold and distant when she sees anything, living or made, beaten into obedience.

Accent and dialogue mannerisms:

• Precise, clipped consonants and a light trill on her r’s.

• Refers often to seasons, weather, and the time of day.

• Speaks of body parts as if they were guests in a house.

• Ends many statements with a soft, thoughtful “hm.”

• Sample dialogue: “Your shoulder has not invited me in yet. We will wait for spring to arrive in it, hm.”

Items carried:

---

Lacquered Needle Case of Seven Seasons [2639]

• Slot: Waist (belt)

• Skills gained while openly worn: Acupuncture +2, Healing +1, Anatomy +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Clean Steel: Needles kept in the case remain clean and free of infection.   ◦ Season Sense: The wearer perceives which season's energy dominates a patient's body, revealing whether they run hot, cold, dry, or damp.   ◦ Quiet Case: Opening and closing the case makes no sound, even in silence.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Permission Needles (2 uses per day): Restores 1d4 HP to a willing creature over 10 minutes.   ◦ Unknotting (1 use per day): Removes one Fatigued condition from a willing creature after five minutes of needlework.   ◦ Numb Point (1 use per day): A willing ally ignores penalties from pain for one hour.

• Tags: Acupuncture, Healing, Needles, Seasons, Anatomy, Restoration, Medicine, Quiet, Consent, Belt

---

Scarlet Crown Ribbon of Clear Seeing [4481]

• Slot: Head (crown)

• Skills gained while openly worn: Diagnosis +2, Perception +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Flow Sight: Faint lines of tension and blocked flow can be seen in creatures within 10 feet.   ◦ Haste Sense: The wearer can tell when a person nearby is acting from impatience rather than need.   ◦ Crown Calm: Creatures speaking with the wearer feel slightly less inclined to raise their voices.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Read the Meridians (2 uses per day): Reveals one creature's current HP state and any physical condition affecting it.   ◦ Settle the Flock (1 use per day): Allies within 15 feet end the Frightened condition at the start of their next turn.

• Tags: Diagnosis, Perception, Meridian, Calm, Insight, Crown, Healing, Support, Observation, Ribbon

---

Indigo Robe of Thin Rain [8102]

• Slot: Chest (body)

• Skills gained while openly worn: Etiquette +1, Herbal Lore +1, Endurance +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Beading Silk: Rain and spilled liquids bead off and leave the robe dry.   ◦ Cool Weave: The wearer suffers no penalties from moderate heat.   ◦ Grants +1 AC.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Mist Step (1 use per day): The wearer moves up to 15 feet as fine mist and cannot be targeted during that movement.   ◦ Rain Poultice (2 uses per day): Wringing a sleeve produces a cup of herb-infused rainwater that removes the Bleeding condition when used to wash a wound.

• Tags: Robe, Rain, Mist, Healing, Movement, Protection, Herbal, Etiquette, Water, Cooling

---

Grey Ankle Bands of the Standing Heron [6357]

• Slot: Legs

• Skills gained while openly worn: Balance +2, Stillness +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ One-Legged Rest: The wearer can stand on one leg indefinitely without fatigue.   ◦ Rooted Stance: Ordinary wind or rushing water cannot knock the wearer prone.   ◦ Clean Step: Mud and sand never cling to the wearer's legs or slow them.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Long Stillness (1 use per day): The wearer becomes perfectly motionless for up to one hour and gains advantage on checks to remain unnoticed.   ◦ Wading Step (2 uses per day): For one minute, the wearer walks on the surface of shallow water or deep mud.

• Tags: Balance, Stillness, Wading, Stealth, Mobility, Legs, Heron, Patience, Terrain, Endurance

---

Moxa Lantern of Mugwort Embers [1194]

• Slot: Right hand (held)

• Skills gained while openly worn: Moxibustion +2, Herbal Lore +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Ember Glow: Gives dim light in a 10-foot radius.   ◦ Insect Ward: The fragrant smoke keeps biting insects away.   ◦ Safe Heat: The embers never burn the bearer.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Warm the Channel (2 uses per day): Restores 1 HP to a creature and removes one penalty caused by cold.   ◦ Mugwort Veil (1 use per day): Releases a 10-foot cloud of fragrant smoke for one minute. Creatures inside gain the Blurred condition.

• Tags: Moxibustion, Lantern, Mugwort, Light, Warmth, Healing, Smoke, Concealment, Herbal, Ember

---

Avatar 3: Quartermaster-Sergeant Obadiah “Grist” Harrowtusk, boar-folk supply master of the arrow-hungry armies

Physical description:

• A broad, barrel-chested boar-folk standing a little over six feet tall, with bristled brown-black hide.

• A ridge of grey bristles runs down his spine and stands on end when he is impatient, which is often.

• His yellowed tusks are capped with brass rings stamped with tally marks.

• His eyes are small, dark, and sharp. One ear is notched and the other torn from an old supply-yard brawl.

• His thick fingers are permanently stained with ink and tallow.

• He wears a soot-streaked leather apron coat covered in pockets, with a heavy ledger chained to his belt.

• He smells of smoke, grease, and wet canvas.

Overarching personality:

• Impatient, loud, and efficient to a fault, he believes numbers win wars.

• Beneath the bluster lies a real fear of shortages, born from watching soldiers die for lack of arrows.

• Gruff, loyal, and fair in his own blunt way.

• Mocks slow work openly, while quietly beginning to notice that the slow arrows come back intact.

Accent and dialogue mannerisms:

• A booming parade-ground voice that drops its h’s.

• Rattles off numbers constantly and counts everything aloud.

• Barks “Right!” and “Chop-chop!” and punctuates sentences with snorts and grunts.

• Sample dialogue: “Right! Four ‘undred shafts by sundown, or I’ll know the reason, snrk, and the reason ‘ad better be on fire.”

Items carried:

---

Brass Tally Tusk-Rings of the Endless Count [5508]

• Slot: Tusks

• Skills gained while openly worn: Logistics +2, Appraisal +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Instant Count: The wearer knows the exact number of identical objects in view, up to one thousand.   ◦ Shortfall Twinge: The tusks ache dully whenever supplies under the wearer's charge fall below what is needed.   ◦ Ring Echo: Clacking the tusks together draws the attention of every soldier within 60 feet.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Muster Call (1 use per day): Allies within 30 feet subtract 2 from their initiative roll in the next combat, moving them earlier in turn order.   ◦ Recount (2 uses per day): The wearer learns whether anything has been removed from a stack or crate they counted within the last day.

• Tags: Logistics, Counting, Supply, Military, Tusks, Muster, Initiative, Inventory, Alertness, Brass

---

Hundred-Pocket Apron Coat of the Supply Yard [3346]

• Slot: Chest

• Skills gained while openly worn: Organization +2, Haggling +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Perfect Pocket: The wearer always reaches into the correct pocket for any item stored in the coat, without searching.   ◦ Pickpocket Snag: Pockets tighten against hands that do not belong to the wearer.   ◦ Grants +1 AC.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Pocket of Plenty (1 use per day): Produces one mundane supply worth less than 1 silver that a quartermaster would plausibly stock, such as twine, nails, tallow, or a whetstone.   ◦ Quick Issue (2 uses per day): Hands one item to an ally within reach as a free action instead of an action.

• Tags: Apron, Pockets, Storage, Supply, Organization, Haggling, Protection, Quartermaster, Utility, Theft-Resistance

---

Chained Ledger of Debts and Arrows [7865]

• Slot: Waist

• Skills gained while openly worn: Accounting +2, Military Requisition Law +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Indelible Entry: Entries can be erased only by the hand that wrote them.   ◦ Number Truth: The wearer knows when someone states a quantity falsely.   ◦ Storm Ink: Ink in the ledger never smears or runs in rain.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Requisition Seal (1 use per day): Stamping a page gives the wearer advantage on haggling with a non-hostile tier 1 supplier.   ◦ Debt Mark (1 use per day): Writing a debtor's name gives the wearer a faint pull toward that debtor's direction within one mile for one day.

• Tags: Ledger, Accounting, Debt, Law, Truth, Tracking, Supply, Requisition, Records, Chain

---

Iron-Shod Hoof Boots of the Parade Ground [2017]

• Slot: Feet

• Skills gained while openly worn: Marching +2, Command +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Tireless March: No fatigue from marching up to ten hours in a day.   ◦ Stamp of Authority: The wearer's footfalls carry clearly, so subordinates know when he is approaching.   ◦ Sure Footing: Mud and loose gravel never cause the wearer to slip.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Stamp of Order (2 uses per day): Allies within 20 feet end the Dazed condition.   ◦ Double-Time (1 use per day): The wearer and two allies gain +10 feet of movement for one minute.

• Tags: Boots, Marching, Command, Military, Movement, Endurance, Order, Support, Footing, Iron

---

Soot-Black Spectacles of the Shortfall [9431]

• Slot: Eyes

• Skills gained while openly worn: Quality Inspection +1, Perception +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Flaw Glow: Cracks and defects in hastily made goods glow faint red to the wearer.   ◦ Smoke Sight: The wearer sees normally through smoke up to 30 feet.   ◦ Long Squint: Fine print and distant tally marks are read without strain.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Cull the Bad Batch (2 uses per day): After one glance over a bundle of up to one hundred arrows, every flawed arrow glows for 10 minutes.   ◦ Hard Look (1 use per day): One creature within 30 feet must make a saving throw or become Shaken.

• Tags: Spectacles, Inspection, Quality, Perception, Smoke, Defects, Intimidation, Ammunition, Eyes, Shortfall

---

Avatar 4: Corvane Ashquill, raven-folk Keeper of the Molted Rookery

Physical description:

• A raven-folk about five and a half feet tall, with glossy blue-black feathers that shimmer violet in sunlight.

• His left wing is patched with mismatched pale feathers where plucked feathers have regrown poorly.

• His curved, heavy beak is carved with small notches, one for every feather taken from a bird without asking.

• A milky grey inner eyelid flickers across his black eyes when he is thinking.

• His talon-hands are long-jointed and precise.

• He wears a long tattered mourning cloak sewn entirely from shed feathers of many birds, with a small silver bell at his throat.

Overarching personality:

• Brooding, solemn, and accusatory, but scrupulously just.

• The self-appointed archivist of every feather stolen from the birds of the land.

• Capable of grim, dry humor.

• Demands consent and reparation rather than revenge.

• Slowly becomes an ally to the one fletcher who thinks to ask before cutting.

Accent and dialogue mannerisms:

• A low, raspy voice with throaty rolling r’s.

• Pauses mid-phrase with a soft croak.

• Repeats the last word or words of an important sentence, like a refrain.

• Slips into old formal speech, using “thou” and “thee” when angry or grieving.

• Sample dialogue: “Thou didst not ask the heron, nor the goose, nor me. Ask now. Ask… now.”

Items carried:

---

Mourning Cloak of a Thousand Molts [4093]

• Slot: Shoulders and back

• Skills gained while openly worn: Feather Lore +2, Stealth (night) +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Night Blend: The wearer gains advantage on hiding in dim light or darkness.   ◦ Plume Memory: Touching any feather reveals the species it came from and whether it was shed or plucked.   ◦ Grants +1 AC.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Shroud of Plumes (1 use per day): A flurry of black feathers obscures vision in a 10-foot radius for one minute.   ◦ Molted Glide (2 uses per day): The wearer falls slowly up to 60 feet and glides 2 feet forward for every foot fallen.

• Tags: Cloak, Feathers, Stealth, Night, Gliding, Concealment, Mourning, Lore, Protection, Avian

---

Silver Consent Bell [6618]

• Slot: Neck

• Skills gained while openly worn: Avian Persuasion +2, Bird Speech +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Kin Recognition: Ordinary birds within 30 feet treat the wearer as kin and do not flee or attack.   ◦ Theft Chime: The bell rings faintly when an object within 10 feet was taken from a living creature without consent.   ◦ Carrying Call: The wearer's voice carries clearly to birds up to half a mile away.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Ask the Flock (1 use per day): Local birds answer one simple question with yes, no, or a direction.   ◦ Gifted Feather (2 uses per day): A nearby bird willingly drops one flight feather. Fletching made with a gifted feather grants +1 to the crafting check.

• Tags: Bell, Consent, Birds, Communication, Detection, Feathers, Fletching, Persuasion, Silver, Kinship

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Notched Beak-Cap of Remembered Theft [2751]

• Slot: Beak (mouth)

• Skills gained while openly worn: Record-Keeping +2, Intimidation +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Notch Memory: Each notch holds the exact place, time, and thief of one remembered feather theft.   ◦ Hardened Beak: The beak can be used as a natural weapon dealing 1d4 piercing damage.   ◦ Grim Bearing: Creatures with guilty consciences avoid meeting the wearer's gaze.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Accusing Croak (1 use per day): One creature that has stolen something within the last day must make a saving throw or become Shaken, betraying itself with an involuntary flinch.   ◦ Peck of Reckoning (1 use per day): The wearer's next beak attack deals +2 damage against a creature carrying plucked feathers.

• Tags: Beak, Memory, Records, Justice, Intimidation, Natural Weapon, Theft, Accusation, Raven, Notches

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Milk-Glass Eyeband of the Watchful Lid [8186]

• Slot: Eyes

• Skills gained while openly worn: Night Perception +2, Insight +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Darkvision out to 30 feet.   ◦ Glare Guard: The wearer is protected from being Blinded by bright light or blowing sand.   ◦ Haste Sight: Rushed, careless movements stand out clearly to the wearer.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Unblinking Night (1 use per day): The wearer remains fully alert through one night without sleep and suffers no penalty the next day.   ◦ Shadow Gaze (2 uses per day): The wearer sees through magical darkness out to 15 feet for one minute.

• Tags: Eyeband, Darkvision, Insight, Night, Vigilance, Vision, Protection, Watchfulness, Glass, Perception

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Talon Rings of the Returned Quill [5137]

• Slot: Hands (rings on both talons)

• Skills gained while openly worn: Fletcher +1, Sleight of Hand +1, Climbing +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Branch Grip: The wearer's grip holds firm on any branch, ledge, or rope.   ◦ Crease-Free Touch: Feathers handled by the wearer never crease or split.   ◦ True Fletch Sense: The wearer knows whether an arrow's fletching came from feathers given freely or taken by force.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Return the Quill (1 use per day): Touching the fletching of a spent arrow after combat reveals a face-impression of the one who loosed it.   ◦ Perch Lock (2 uses per day): The wearer locks talons onto a surface and cannot be moved or knocked prone for one minute.

• Tags: Rings, Talons, Climbing, Grip, Fletcher, Feathers, Tracking, Stability, Investigation, Avian

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Avatar 5: Brother Errata, also called The Marginalia, a gestalt swarm of ink-stained paper-mites and the copyist of the oldest fragment

Physical description:

• A swarm of thousands of dust-sized pale paper-mites, their bodies stained with old inks in red, black, and faded blue.

• The swarm gathers inside an oversized brown scribe’s habit so that it holds a vaguely human shape.

• Where a face should be, the mites shift into half-formed letters and crossed-out words.

• Its hands are drifting clouds that write by arranging mites into lines of ink.

• The whole body rustles like pages being turned.

• It smells of old paper, hide glue, and damp library stone.

• A cracked reading lamp hangs from one sleeve.

Overarching personality:

• Pedantic, argumentative, and obsessively devoted to accuracy, yet constantly in error.

• Made of many small opinions that bicker among themselves before reaching any decision.

• Affectionate toward texts and jealous of earlier scribes.

• Delighted by its own corrections, and secretly convinced the original fletcher would have approved of its footnotes.

Accent and dialogue mannerisms:

• A chorus of tiny dry whispering voices, never quite in unison.

• Interrupts and corrects itself mid-sentence with phrases like “no, strike that” and “see margin.”

• Mutters “ahem” and “ibid” between thoughts.

• Ends many claims with a smaller voice disputing them.

• Sample dialogue: “The fletcher was named… no, strike that, translated… as One Who Binds Slowly. See margin. See the other margin. The other margin is lying.”

Items carried:

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Oversized Scribe’s Habit of Gathered Pages [3970]

• Slot: Chest (body)

• Skills gained while openly worn: Calligraphy +1, Endurance +1, Disguise +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Held Form: The habit keeps the swarm in a humanoid shape, so wind and drafts cannot scatter it.   ◦ Dry Folds: Scrolls and tablets carried in the habit's folds stay dry and free of mildew.   ◦ Grants +1 AC.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Collapse the Habit (1 use per day): The whole swarm leaves the habit and flows through gaps as narrow as one inch for one minute, then must return to it.   ◦ Page-Rustle Hush (2 uses per day): The wearer's movements make no sound for 10 minutes.

• Tags: Habit, Swarm, Form, Disguise, Infiltration, Silence, Protection, Scribe, Storage, Robe

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Ink-Horn of Disagreeing Colors [6224]

• Slot: Waist

• Skills gained while openly worn: Scribing +2, Ink Alchemy +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Bottomless Ink: The horn never runs dry of common writing ink.   ◦ Doubt Color: Ink drawn from the horn turns red when the writer is uncertain of what they are writing.   ◦ Water Fast: Writing made with this ink resists water and fading.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Margin Note (2 uses per day): The wearer writes a note on any surface that only chosen readers can see.   ◦ Clean Correction (1 use per day): The wearer erases up to one page of mundane writing without leaving a trace.

• Tags: Ink, Scribing, Writing, Alchemy, Doubt, Secrecy, Correction, Records, Horn, Communication

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Cracked Reading Lamp of the Late Copyist [1582]

• Slot: Right hand (held)

• Skills gained while openly worn: Research +2, Archaic Scripts +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Faded Ink Glow: The lamplight reveals faded writing within 10 feet.   ◦ Paper-Safe Flame: The lamp's flame never ignites paper, vellum, or wood.   ◦ Eye Ease: Reading by this lamp causes no eye strain.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Palimpsest Glow (1 use per day): Reveals one layer of text that was scraped away or written over on a tablet or page.   ◦ Lamp of the Long Night (1 use per day): The wearer may read and study through one night without penalty from lack of sleep.

• Tags: Lamp, Research, Light, Reading, Scripts, Revelation, History, Scholarship, Night, Archives

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Quarrelsome Quill of the Second Opinion [8749]

• Slot: Left hand (held)

• Skills gained while openly worn: Copying +2, Debate +1, Forgery Detection +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Error Scratch: The quill scratches loudly whenever the writer copies a mistake.   ◦ Script Echo: The quill reproduces the letterforms of any historical script the wearer has studied.   ◦ Argument Ink: The quill writes faster during heated discussion, recording every point raised.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Second Opinion (1 use per day): The wearer rerolls one failed knowledge or research check and must keep the second result.   ◦ Scribble Swarm (2 uses per day): The wearer flings a spray of ink-soaked mites at one creature within 10 feet. That creature must make a saving throw or be Blinded until the end of its next turn.

• Tags: Quill, Copying, Debate, Forgery, Knowledge, Reroll, Ink, Swarm, Blinding, Scholarship

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Wax Seal of Uncertain Provenance [4406]

• Slot: Neck (worn on a cord over the habit)

• Skills gained while openly worn: Document Appraisal +2, Heraldry +1

• Passive magic:

  ◦ Seal Truth: The wearer knows whether a seal on a document is genuine.   ◦ Age Sense: Touching a tablet, scroll, or book reveals its approximate age.   ◦ Warm Wax: The seal's wax stays soft and ready without heat.

• Active magic:

  ◦ Seal of Doubt (1 use per day): A document sealed with it shows faint underlines beneath every contradiction in its text to anyone who reads it.   ◦ Authenticate (2 uses per day): Reveals the era, region, and craft tradition in which a written item was made.

• Tags: Seal, Wax, Authentication, Appraisal, Heraldry, Documents, History, Truth, Provenance, Neck