Chapter 537 - 536: The Fourteen Stones

Chapter 537: Chapter 536: The Fourteen Stones

Location:Ferrow’s Rest

Date/Time:TC1856.11.11 – TC1856.11.18

The masons arrived on the eleventh, and Emrys Dunmore made them wait a day, which everybody understood and nobody said anything about.

He wanted to try it himself first. Maren had known he would, and had told the masons on the road in a letter that reached them at the last staging post — he will want a go at it before you touch anything, and he will fail, and you will let him do it without standing there watching — so they took their tools up to the church and unpacked them and then found a great deal to do indoors for an afternoon.

Emrys went up to the shed at the top of the eastern row where his father had cut stones and his father’s father before that, and set out a blank of the gray slate they took from the low quarry, and picked up the chisel in his left hand.

He could hold it. Nobody outside the trade would have understood why that mattered. His fingers closed and stayed closed, and the chisel did not move in his grip, and for about four seconds he thought the last month had been a mistake and everybody had been wrong.

Then he set the edge on the stone and could not tell whether he had set it.

That was all of it. Not weakness. Not shaking. He had to look — actually turn his head and look — to know where the edge had gone, and by the time he looked, his right hand had already come down with the mallet, because thirty-one years of doing a thing does not wait for you to check.

The first strike went a finger’s width off and took a shallow flake out of the face of the blank.

He set it again. Looked. Struck. That one went where he put it, and he did four more the same way, looking each time, and it took him a minute and a half to do what he had done in nine seconds since he was nineteen years old.

At the seventh strike he lost the edge entirely, because the chisel had crept in his hand — a quarter-turn, the way a chisel always creeps, the way every mason in the world corrects a hundred times an hour without knowing they are doing it — and he had not felt it creep.

The mallet came down on his own thumb.

He knew because he saw it happen. Nothing else told him. He sat down on the bench in his father’s shed with a split thumb and no pain in it whatsoever, and watched the blood come up out of it, and understood in a completely calm and orderly way that he was never going to cut a name into a stone again.

Then he wrapped the thumb, because Mira had told him to check his hands every night and he had been checking them every night, and he went down the hill and told the masons they could start in the morning.

***

They were at Refining Hall: two Hallorans, Anselm and his sister Ilsabet, and a broad quiet man called Tobiah who was married to one of their cousins. Between them they had cut letters into memorials for the better part of a decade.

They were not good at this.

The first stone they set out was Dell’s, because Emrys had put it first on the list and had not explained why, and none of them asked. Ilsabet Halloran laid the blank across two trestles, chalked the line, checked it against her rule and chalked it again, and then stood back and waited to be told to start.

Emrys had been standing behind her the better part of two minutes by then, saying nothing, because he had discovered on the walk down the hill that he did not know how to do this. Three decades at it and every instruction he owned lived in his fingers. There was in his hands. Bring that up a hair was a thing his thumb did to a chisel, not a thing he had ever once said out loud to another person.

"Start it two fingers lower," he said, in the end.

"Why two fingers?"

He had to think about why. That was the part that took the morning.

"Because it’s slate off the low quarry and it’s got a grain to it that runs about a thumb under the face, and if you start where you’ve chalked, your first letter will look right and your fourth will drift, and you’ll not see it drift until you’ve cut the whole name and stood back." He heard himself. "That’s not how I’d have said it to myself."

"No," said Ilsabet. "But it’s how I needed it."

She moved the chalk two fingers down and cut, and the first letter went in true, and Emrys Dunmore stood in his own churchyard with a dead hand strapped across his chest and understood that he had just taught somebody something, which was not a thing anybody in his trade had ever asked him to do.

Not at the cutting — the cutting was superb, better than anything Emrys could have produced with two working hands, and he said so on the first morning because it needed saying and because saying it early cost less than saying it late. They were bad at the other part. They stood too straight. They said sir to a sexton. They did the thing that people from big institutions do in small dying places, which is to be very carefully respectful in a way that makes everyone feel like an exhibit.

It broke on the third day over Nella Corlin’s stone, and it broke because Ilsabet Halloran asked a question.

"What was she like?"

Emrys had been standing behind them for two days saying there and deeper and bring that up a hair, and had not said anything else at all.

"Why?"

"Because I’m about to cut her name into a rock that’s going to be there for two hundred years," Ilsabet said, "and I’ve never cut a stone for somebody I didn’t know a single thing about, and I don’t like how it feels."

So he told her about Nella Corlin, who had complained about the drains for thirty years to four separate parish councils and had been right every time, and who had once thrown a bucket of water over two men fighting outside the inn and had never afterward been made to pay for anything at that inn again, and who had gone back into a house that was leveling itself for a cat that had, as far as anyone could establish, got out on its own.

Ilsabet listened to all of it. Then she cut the name.

The Pell boy started fetching for them on the fourth day.

Nobody arranged it. He was the only person in Ferrow’s Rest under sixty, and he had spent two years being the one who carried things, and now there were three strangers on the slope who needed water and rags and the small pot of oil kept in the shed, and he simply began to be where those things were wanted. By the sixth day he was holding the rule.

Emrys watched that for an afternoon, then went and sat down beside Maren and said nothing for a good while.

"He goes when the roads dry," he said eventually.

"He might."

"He goes when the roads dry. He’s been saying it for two years, and he means it, and he’s right to." Emrys looked down the slope at the boy, who was crouched at Anselm’s elbow with his head at an angle Emrys recognized from the inside. "I’d not keep him here. There’s forty-one of us and forty are past sixty and this village has one thing to offer a lad of nineteen, and it’s four hundred graves and a slope that wants watching."

Maren considered that.

"You could teach him."

"I could teach him to cut. That’s a trade, and he could take it anywhere." He shifted his shoulder. "The other thing isn’t a trade. And I’d not put it on him. Somebody put it on me without asking, and I’ve spent my whole working life thinking I was clever with a spade."

After that the masons were all right. Tobiah asked about Bracken on the fourth day without being prompted, and by the sixth day Anselm was eating in Emrys’s kitchen and arguing with Maren about drainage, and the work went faster, and Emrys stood behind them and said there and deeper and found that it counted for something.

It was not the same. Mira had been right about that and had refused to pretend otherwise, and he was grateful to her for it every single day.

But it wasn’t nothing.

***

The new sheet came in on the fourteenth, four days out of Millford and nine days old, with the branch dispatch folded inside it. Maren Harren read both on the churchyard wall and then sat with it in her lap for a long time before she went and found him.

She did not soften it. She had worked out, somewhere in her first fortnight here, that softening things for Emrys Dunmore was a way of managing him rather than telling him, and that he would know the difference and would never say so.

"Millford’s gone." She did not sit down. "Not the town. Two hundred and thirteen dead, the stockade’s down, the branch is standing because it’s stone. Lira Feng’s alive and so’s her apprentice."

Emrys put down the mallet he had been holding for no reason.

"How."

"Same things. Better made." She handed him the sheet. "The lamps didn’t draw the small ones. The light didn’t stop the long ones — they’ve grown hoods over the feelers. The big ones came straight at people standing still on stone, and they’ve got no vents any more, so there’s no soft spot where we put ours."

He read it twice, and Maren watched him do it, and watched him get to the part that she had known he would get to, because she had got to it herself on the wall an hour earlier.

Read aloud at the well to about ninety people. Six of that ninety alive a week later.

"That’s my dead."

"Say that properly."

"They cut up my dead." His voice had not risen. "The ones off my slope. That’s where the sheets came from — Ostrek measured them in my churchyard, and they went west in a cart, and the woman at Millford read them and made a paper out of them and stood at a well and read it to ninety people." He was looking at the sheet and not at her. "And she’d got it right. Every word of it was right. It was right for us, and it killed them, and the only reason it held for us is that we were the first ones."

"Yes."

"So the next lot of paper comes off Millford’s dead, and it’ll be right until it isn’t, and somebody stands at a well somewhere west of here—"

"Yes."

He put the sheet down on the wall and set a stone on the corner of it so it would not blow away, which was the sort of thing his hands did on their own.

"Then what’s it for? Any of it. If everything we learn is only true until she’s read it."

Maren took her time.

"When I was forty-one," she said, "a blight came through our valley that nobody had ever seen. Took the whole of that year and half the next. And every single thing anybody worked out about it stopped working the season after, because it moved on and did something else instead." She shifted her weight off the bad knee. "Mine came up. Every year, all through it, and I put it down to the drainage, and so did everybody else, because the alternative was that I was lucky and nobody wants to be told that about a neighbor." A grunt. "We beat it in the end. Not with any one of the things anybody worked out. We beat it because after four years there wasn’t a farmer in that valley who couldn’t look at a field and see something wrong in it a fortnight before it showed."

"That’s not the same."

"It’s not remotely the same, and it’s the only thing I’ve got, so you’ll have to take it or leave it." She looked out over the flat rows. "The sheets go stale. The people who read them don’t. Ostrek was in this one, and she’s had them on a table ever since, and in a year she’ll see a thing on a corpse that nobody else in the world would see, and that doesn’t go stale, because it isn’t written down anywhere. It’s in her." A pause. "And that’s a horrible thing to say out loud, because what it means is that the useful thing we’re building is people who’ve survived it, and we build them by putting people in front of it."

Emrys did not answer for a while.

"You’d have made a poor comfort at a graveside."

"I’d have made a terrible one. That’s why I grew things instead."

***

He was worse for four days after that, in the specific way that a man is worse when he has decided not to be, and Maren let him have three of them and then stopped letting him.

She did it on the practice ground below the wall, where she had been running him through the not-doing every morning for a month.

"Again."

"I’ve done it four times."

"You’ve done it four times badly. You’re carrying all four hundred at once, and you’re doing it the way you’d take a full bucket up a stair, and it works, and it’ll go on working right up until the day it’s a long day." She planted the stick. "Let go of the far end."

"That’s the oldest graves."

"I know what it is. Drop it."

He dropped it.

It took him most of an hour to work out how, because the thing she was asking for was not a smaller version of the thing he did — it was a different thing entirely, and there is no instruction for it any more than there is an instruction for wiggling one ear. He found it eventually the way everybody finds it, by accident, in the gap between two attempts when he had stopped trying.

The far end of the slope came loose in his hands and stayed exactly where it was.

Maren let out a breath. "There."

"Nothing happened."

"Nothing happened yet, because settled ground takes weeks, and that corner’s forty years old. Go and stand up there tomorrow and the day after, and you’ll feel it start." She was watching his face. "That’s the lesson, and it’s the one nobody wants. You can hold the whole slope, or you can hold fourteen and hold them properly, and the whole slope will cost you everything you’ve got and the fourteen won’t cost you anything at all, and you’re going to have to choose, and you’re going to have to keep choosing every day for the rest of your life."

Emrys stood on the practice ground with his ruined arm hanging and his good hand open at his side.

"Which do I do?"

"I don’t know. It’s your slope."

***

On the evening of the sixteenth they carried the finished ones up and stood them in a row along the wall, because Anselm wanted Emrys to look at all of them together before the last of them were started, and because a stone standing up tells you things a stone lying on trestles will not.

Seven of the fourteen.

Emrys went down the row slowly with a lamp. Cass Rell, cut in his own hand in the summer, and the only one there that was his. Then six that were not: the letters deeper than he cut them, the serifs squarer, the spacing more even than he had ever managed in his life.

He got to the end and turned round and went back along the row again, and the three masons stood at the bottom of the slope and let him.

"They’re better than mine," he said.

"They’re not better than yours," said Ilsabet. "They’re better cut. That’s not the same thing, and I’d not have known the difference a fortnight ago."

"Say what you mean."

"Yours has got her name in it." She nodded at the first stone. "I’ve cut two hundred stones, and I’ve never known one of them. You told me about a woman who threw a bucket of water over two men outside an inn, and I cut her name, and I’ll not forget it as long as I live, and that is not because I’m any good with a chisel." Ilsabet Halloran rubbed her wrist. "There’s seven more, and I want the stories for all of them before we start, and I know that’s slower, and I’d like it anyway."

So he gave her seven more, standing in the dark by the wall, and it took most of two hours, and the lamp went out before he finished the last one, and neither of them went for another.

***

Elian’s letter arrived on the seventeenth, four pages, in the handwriting of a nine-year-old who has been told that letters are important and is trying very hard.

Most of it was about a paper crane, which he had now managed, and about Aren, who was reading a book about locks, and about the little boy in the residential quarter, who nobody would let him play with anymore, which Elian thought was unfair and said so twice.

The third page had a question on it that he had clearly written and rewritten.

Grandma Maren, when you feel me, does it make it worse for you? Because if it makes it worse, I can try to stop. I don’t know how yet, but I would try. Mama said to ask you and not her because you would give me a straight answer.

Maren read it three times and then went and sat in the kitchen for a while with the door shut.

Then she wrote back, and she wrote it in the biggest and clearest hand she had, because his letter had been in a careful child’s script and she would not make him work at reading hers.

No. It makes it better, and you are not to try to stop, and if anybody ever tells you different, you send them to me.

Some days it is the only good thing that happens, and I would not have you take it away because you were worrying about an old woman four days off who is perfectly capable of worrying about herself.

Now. Your mother told you to ask me instead of her because she thought I would be straighter with you, and she was right, so here is the straight part. It does cost me something. Not much. About what it costs to keep a window open in cold weather.

I keep the window open. I would like you to understand that I am choosing it and that I would notice if it shut.

She sealed it and gave it to the rider and stood in the lane afterward for a minute, and then went to find Emrys, because there was a thing in the letter that was not about the boy at all and she wanted to say it while she still had it.

He was up at the fourth row with his hand flat on the turf, doing what she had told him not to do.

"Dunmore."

"I know."

"You’ve been holding all four hundred for two days straight and you look like a sheet."

"I know." He did not take his hand off the ground. "I worked out what you were really asking me, and I’d like to say it out loud so it’s said. You want to know whether I’ll be any use to your Sect Master when she comes back to ask me a second time. And I can’t be, can I, if I’m spending everything I’ve got on a hillside."

Maren leaned on her stick.

"That’s not what I was asking. But it’s a fair thing to think, and I’d have thought it in your place, so I’ll answer it. No. I don’t care what use you are to her." She let it sit. "I came out here for a man who didn’t know what he was, and I’ve mostly done that, and if you spend the next thirty years holding four hundred graves flat and never once do another useful thing for anybody, I’ll have got what I came for, and I’ll say so to her face."

Emrys took his hand off the ground.

"That’s the first thing anybody’s said to me in a month that wasn’t about the war."

"Well," said Maren. "There’s a lot of it about."