CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Down as Payment #2
“You do not know, because I haven’t said the next part yet.
” She closed the satchel. “I cannot guarantee anything after sunset. For five months I have been extremely careful to give you nothing but figures. Now I am going to give you the one thing I have that isn’t one.
If anybody puts a hand on you down there, I will cause so much procedural difficulty that they’ll wish they had thrown me out in October.
I am sixty years old and I am not brave. I’ll do it anyway.”
I didn’t trust myself to answer.
“Good,” said Threnn. “That’s done, then.” And she turned away and did something completely unnecessary to the strap of the satchel for quite a while.
? ? ?
Kael led the rest of the way out to the deep end of the reef, which meant walking over the weed, so the last thing my life asked of me before it changed was to concentrate very hard on not falling over.
Ivrid came as far as the second rib and stopped.
“Right. Three things, then I’ll shut up. You’ll want to push. Don’t. Everything down there is listening, and you’ve a voice on you like a dropped plate.”
“Yes.”
“When you get to it, don’t do anything for a day. I don’t care what they tell you. Stand there and look at it for a day. You can’t unlearn the first thing you do.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll want to hold it the way you hold the fire.” She had her arms folded and was looking somewhere past my ear. “It’s not like that. It’s the other way about. You’ll see.”
Then she put her hand out, and I took it, and she gripped it once, hard, the way a man shakes on a horse he’s bought, and let go and walked back up the reef without looking round.
? ? ?
And then it was Elias, on the last black rib, with the water six feet deep and glassy at slack and all of it waiting.
We’d said everything. We had used the four days properly, and there was nothing left in either of us that hadn’t been got out, or almost nothing, and I’ve been grateful for that every day since.
So he didn’t make a speech.
He took my right hand and turned it palm up and held it for a second in both of his, the outside hand closing over first and then the other coming up underneath, as if he’d caught something that might fly off.
Then he let the top hand go, and set his thumb in the centre of my palm, and pressed. Hard. Hard enough that I sucked in a breath, and the print stayed white when he lifted his thumb away, and then went red.
“There. Now you’ve got something to think about.”
“It’s ridiculous.”
“It is, yes.”
I closed my hand round it.
“Elias.”
“Don’t.” His voice was perfectly level and his eyes weren’t, the same as in October, and I have never worked out how he does that. “You’re going to say something, and then I’ll not be able to stand up. Go on. Go and stand at the bottom of the world and be difficult about it.”
? ? ?
I stepped off the rock.
There was no hand between my shoulder blades, nobody’s grip on the back of my neck.
I went off the edge of the black rib into six feet of slack green water on the coldest morning of the year, and it took me the way it has taken me every time since September, like a hand going into a glove.
The cold wasn’t there. The first mouthful went down the way bread does.
I looked up once.
The underside of the surface, silver and rocking, with the morning on it. Three shapes on the reef. One of them at the very edge, on the last rib, standing still.
Then I turned over and put my arms down at my sides and went.
? ? ?
The forty seconds are the forty seconds. Green, then the long blue, then the violet, and then the stretch where there’s no colour at all and your mind starts handing you your own kitchen.
This time it handed me the gate in the yard.
Not the cliff path or the fire. Not even his face. The gate, hanging square and true in the cold with the chimney’s shadow across it, doing nothing, the way it had done nothing all through November and December and January and February while everything else came to pieces.
I fell through the dark with that in my head, and I said out loud, in water, in a voice that landed in my own chest: “I know. Go on.”
And it did.
? ? ?
They were waiting at the landing. That was the first thing that was different.
The first time I came down there’d been Kael and Threnn and a young one who never said a word, and the great avenue had been going about its Tuesday.
This time there were perhaps two hundred people on the terraces above the landing, standing, not moving, in the blue-white light, and every face was turned down at me.
Nobody spoke and nobody came forward. I came down into the light with Threnn at my shoulder, and two hundred people watched me arrive the way a harbour watches weather come in over the headland.
“Don’t look up,” Threnn said, in my chest. “It isn’t discourtesy I’m worried about. They are trying to work out what you are, and they’ll take the first thing you give them.”
So I looked straight ahead, and we went up the great avenue, and the two hundred came down off the terraces behind us and followed at a distance. By the top of the Court steps there were a good many more than two hundred.
? ? ?
Sevrid Anvarre was waiting at the head of the steps.
She was alone, which I understood at once was meant to be read, and she was in the second house’s colours, which was meant to be read too.
“You came.”
“You knew I would.”
“I hoped you would, cousin. They’re very different, and I’ve had five months of people confusing the two at me.
” She looked past me at the crowd coming up the avenue.
“You’ll want to know why there are four hundred people behind you.
The second house will tell you, since nobody else will bother.
Two things happened this morning. The northern quarter lost another terrace, and the standing ridge off your coast was seen from the city. ”
“Seen from.”
“It’s eleven miles long, and it’s now deep enough to show from the upper terraces as a shadow. Four hundred thousand people have spent this morning looking up at it. Come inside before you say anything else.”
? ? ?
I didn’t go to the gate that day. Or the next, or the one after.
Threnn had warned me, and Ivrid had warned me, and it turned out both of them had been kind about it.
There were eleven days of what Threnn calls procedure and I’d call slow arithmetic done in public, in which a great many people in good colours asked me questions in rooms and I answered perhaps a third of them.
The second house wanted me at the gate by the new moon.
The fourth house wanted a formal claim entered first, which would have made me a subject instead of a guest, and Threnn killed it twice with the same three-hundred-year precedent, and the second time somebody threw something.
There was a faction I never got the measure of who wanted me examined, a word nobody would define for me.
And there was a delegation from the northern quarter, eleven of them, who’d come up out of the dark to sit in a room and say nothing at all, sent by people who couldn’t afford to send them.
I’ve thought about those eleven more than I’ve thought about any of the houses.
? ? ?
The first room had six people in it and went on for four hours, and I followed maybe a third of it.
That was the twenty-first, the day after I came down; they hadn’t even given me a night.
Threnn came for me at second light and said, “Eat something. You won’t be fed.
” I asked what it was. She said, “It’s nothing.
It’s procedural. It’s the establishment of the record.
” I said then why are you walking like that.
Threnn stopped walking like that.
“Because the establishment of the record is where everything gets decided,” she said, “and everybody in that room knows it but you, and I have eleven minutes to explain nine hundred years of practice. So listen.”
Here is the practice. Nothing down there is settled by a vote.
A house doesn’t win an argument in the Court.
It wins by getting what it wants written into a record that nobody contests at the time, and then producing it six weeks or six years later.
The Court is theatre. The work happens in the rooms, and the work is almost entirely a matter of what nobody objects to.
“So if somebody says a sentence about you and I don’t answer it,” Threnn said, “that sentence is now true.”
“Then answer everything.”
“If I answer everything, I’m a woman who can’t tell one thing from another, and by the fourth day nobody will listen to me at all.” She shifted the satchel on her shoulder. “That is the whole of my job for the next eleven days. Deciding which sentences to let past.”
? ? ?
On the first day they asked me about the vents, eleven different ways.
A grey man in the fourth house’s colours, very courteous, wanted to know what I had felt beforehand. Then what I’d felt during. Then whether I’d felt anything afterwards, and whether I had ever done anything like it before, and then whether my mother had.
“I never met my mother.”
“I didn’t ask whether you had met her, madam. I asked whether she had.”
Threnn said: “The guest cannot testify to events before her birth. The question is withdrawn.”
“I did not withdraw it.”
“You will,” said Threnn, and turned a page, and after a moment he did.
That was the first time I watched her work, and I didn’t appreciate it until the fourth day, when it came to me that she had just stopped a record from existing in which I had declined to answer a question about my mother’s conduct.
? ? ?
On the second day the second house asked for a date and didn’t get one.
Sevrid Anvarre wasn’t in the room, and that’s worth saying. She was in none of the eleven rooms, not once. Her house was represented by a man of about forty called Ferrant, who was extremely good at it and whom I disliked at first sight, completely and for no reason I could give you.