CHAPTER NINE Neither Wholly #3
She was right. For four hours I’d been sorting.
There’s an enormous amount going past you in that water, and from the first minute my instinct was to put it in order.
That one’s hungry. That one’s angry. That one wants his shift over.
I’d built myself a little ledger in my head and I was quite proud of it.
“That’s a catalogue,” she said, when I finally owned up. “Four hours, and you’ve made a catalogue.”
“You told me to listen.”
“I told you to listen. You’ve been naming. They’re opposites, and you’ll do the second one your whole life if nobody stops you now.” She sat on the wall. “Go back. Don’t name anything. Catch yourself putting a word on it, start again.”
That took the rest of the afternoon, and it was the hardest thing I did down there. Harder than the ridge, and I’m counting the ridge.
Because once you stop naming, it isn’t other people any more.
The catalogue is a wall. It keeps the thing outside you, at arm’s length, and the whole discipline is taking that wall down.
The moment mine came down I was standing in a training yard with forty-odd people’s wanting blowing through me like weather, and no way on earth of telling which bits were mine.
I came out of it shaking.
“There,” said Ivrid. “Now you know what the job is.”
? ? ?
On the third day she taught me to hold it out.
Which is different from shutting it out. That’s another skill entirely, and she wouldn’t teach it, and I’ve never properly learned it.
“Shutting out is what he does.” She nodded at the man at the far side, the one my ember had drifted towards on the first day. “It’s a trade skill. Takes about nine years. When he’s finished he’ll be a man who can stand in a room and feel nothing, which is very useful, and I’d not wish it on you.”
“Why not?”
“Because a woman who can’t feel it can’t hold a gate either.
It’s the same door.” She swam her slow circle round me, arms folded, which by then had stopped being annoying and started being steadying.
She’d have hated to know that. “You want the other way. Feel all of it and stay standing in it anyhow. That’s holding out.
It’s worse, and it’s slower, and it never goes away. ”
Then she made me do it with her.
I wasn’t ready. She stood four feet off and let her own wanting through, on purpose, for maybe five seconds, and it was in me before I’d got a single defence up.
I’d never felt anything like it, and the only words I’ve got for it are hers.
She wanted her mother to have looked at her differently in a gallery twenty-four years ago. That was it. There was a lot else in there, most of it ordinary, but underneath it all lay one piece with a weight on it I couldn’t have carried for an hour, and that was the piece.
She shut it off.
Neither of us said anything for a minute. I was holding on to the edge of the wall and didn’t remember taking hold of it.
“Now you know why I don’t teach the shutting-out,” she said. “That was five seconds of one woman, and she let you have it on purpose, and she stopped when she meant to. The gate is eleven thousand people, and it does not stop.”
? ? ?
On the fourth morning she threw a stone at my head.
I mean that exactly as it sounds. We were in the yard, she was going on about something else altogether, and she picked a chunk of the pale stuff off the wall and lobbed it at me underarm from eight feet.
My hand came up on its own and the thing went past my ear and cracked against the wall behind me.
“Good.”
“What was that for?”
“That was me finding out whether you fight down here or freeze.” She sat. “You fight. Most do. It’s the wrong answer, and it’s the one I can work with.”
“What’s the right answer?”
“There isn’t one. There’s what you do.” She picked up another piece and didn’t throw it.
“Listen. Up there, when something comes at you, you’ve got the fire, and you’ve got that gift, and you’ve got a man who’ll stand in front of you.
Down here, one day, you’ll be on a ridge eleven miles from anybody, and something will come at you, and the fire won’t behave, and there’ll be nobody. ”
“So what do I do?”
“You open.”
I stared at her.
“It’s the only thing you’ve got, and the only thing that’s ever worked, and it feels every bit as stupid as it sounds.
” She turned the stone over in her fingers.
“Everyone gets the line wrong. They think it’s a weapon, because of what it does to men in taverns.
It’s the biggest thing you can do with your own attention, that’s all, and nothing in this water can bear the full weight of it.
If something comes at you out of the dark, you stop defending, and you give it everything at once, and it goes away. ”
“Has anybody actually done that?”
“Twice that I know of,” said Ivrid. “One of them didn’t come back. I’m telling you anyway, because the other one did.”
? ? ?
I asked her on the fourth evening, while we were putting the yard to rights, because she was the one person down there who’d never wanted a single thing from me.
“Ivrid. Are you the line?”
“No.” She didn’t look up. “My mother was. I’m not.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning it does what it does, and sometimes it doesn’t turn up.” She stacked something. “There’s a test. They do it at eleven. You stand in a room, they bring in a man who’s been told nothing, and if he looks at you, you’re the line. If he doesn’t, you’re not.”
“And he didn’t.”
“He didn’t.” She straightened. “Eleven years old, stood in a room, and a stranger didn’t look at me. My mother was up in the gallery. I watched her face do the sum.”
Beyond the wall the rose light came up off the vents and sank back.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Best thing that ever happened to me.
” She said it flat, and I couldn’t tell then how much of it she meant, and I can’t now.
“I’d have been at a gate by thirty. Instead I’ve got a trade, and I teach the ones they do want, which somebody in this city thinks is a hilarious joke, and I’ve got a house, and nobody’s ever written my name on a slate. ”
She picked up the bucket.
“That’s all there is to it. Don’t go soft on me tomorrow or I’ll be unbearable.”
? ? ?
“Ivrid. What happens if I do it badly?”
“Define badly.”
“If I stand at that gate and I’m not good enough. I don’t refuse. I don’t walk off. I’m just short.”
She put the bucket down again and didn’t say anything for a while.
“Then the light comes back a bit, and not enough,” she said.
“The northern quarter stays dark. The lower terraces go on dimming, a bit more every year, and never recover. The city gets used to being four-fifths lit, and in a hundred years nobody remembers there was another fifth, and you stand out there for sixty years doing a thing that doesn’t quite work, and everyone’s terribly polite to you about it. ”
“That’s worse than failing.”
“A good deal worse. It’s also far and away the likeliest, and nobody in this city will tell you so, because they need you to go.” She hefted the bucket. “So now somebody has.”
? ? ?
Kael came on the fourth night and took me up to the rail above the vents.
He had a flask. He didn’t offer it, and then a good while later he did. It was vile. I drank some anyway.
“Ivrid says you’re quick.”
“Ivrid says I’ve got habits.”
“Ivrid told me that for a year and a half. She was right, and I’ve got them still, and I’ve grown fond of them.
” He leaned his elbows on the rail and sighed at the vents as though they’d overheated him on purpose.
“There’s a thing she’ll not teach you and I will.
You’ll hate it. I’d rather you had it from me than found it out in a room where it matters. ”
“Go on.”
“Turn it on yourself.”
I looked at him.
“What?”
“The pulling. The listening.” He kept his eyes on the vents. “You’ve spent four days aiming it out at other people, because that’s how it’s taught and that’s how it’s used. Aim it in. Now. Stand there and ask the water what you want.”
“That’s absurd. I know what I want.”
“Madam, you are the most thoroughly lied-to woman I’ve ever met, and every last one of the liars was you.”
? ? ?
I did it standing right there, in a temper, to prove him wrong.
It went into me like a hand into a drawer.
Elias. He came first, and clean, and the relief was so sharp I nearly laughed. That one at least was exactly the shape I’d always believed it was. Nothing tied to it and nothing gone off in it, just a plain wanting with my own name on it.
And under that.
I wanted them to answer the question. I’d told myself on the hill, in the wind, that I wanted to know the answer, and that was a lie.
I wanted them to say it to my face, all nine hundred of them, and what was under that wasn’t curiosity.
It was what I’d wanted since I was fifteen, standing in rooms where everybody was looking at me and nobody could tell me why.
I wanted someone to write me down.
And under that, small and cold and perfectly clear, with the rose light rising past my face:
I wanted to stand at Ilmarren.
I didn’t want to serve. I didn’t want to save the northern quarter. There wasn’t a reason in it I could have said out loud in front of Threnn, or Elias, or my own mother.
I wanted it because for thirty-four years I’ve carried a thing inside me that was no earthly use to anyone, and eleven miles out and two hundred fathoms down there’s a hole in the bottom of the world with my exact shape cut into it.
? ? ?
I kept all of it behind my teeth.
I stood at the rail holding the flask and watching the vents, and after a while Kael took it back out of my hand, gently, because I’d forgotten I was holding it.
“There,” he said. “Now you know what’s in the room.”
“I hate you.”
“Yes.” He drank. “That’s the job.”