CHAPTER SIXTEEN The Choice #2
I’d gone deaf. In my own yard, in the one place I’d only just learned to hear.
This is what the ballads get wrong about the two worlds.
They make one magical and the other plain, and that’s rubbish.
Down there I’m a woman with an ear. Up here I’m a woman holding a lamp, deaf as a post, and I had four weeks of being the second one left, and until that moment I hadn’t known I’d miss the first.
I shut my hand and the fire went out. I stayed out in the cold a good while longer, till my feet started complaining.
? ? ?
The best day was the twenty-fourth, and there was nothing in it.
It was a Wednesday, clear and bitter, and the wind had gone round to the south for the first time in six weeks. At about nine in the morning Elias looked up from the stove and said, “Do you want to do nothing?”
I said yes.
So we did nothing, and we were very thorough about it.
We ate far too much bread. He read me four pages of a book about a naval engagement in 1811, which he’d decided was badly written, and every third sentence he stopped to be annoyed with it.
“‘The sea was angry,’” he read. “It was not. It was the sea.”
I laughed till I had to put my face in a cushion.
The cat that isn’t mine came and sat on the wall and judged us.
In the afternoon we walked down to the harbour because the light was extraordinary and stood on the wall like everyone else, and Hallam bellowed something obscene at Elias across forty feet of cobbles, and Elias, barely raising his voice, sent back something worse.
I stood there with my hands in my pockets watching a man I loved trade insults with a rope seller in the cold, grinning, and I couldn’t have told you what at.
We came home and he fell asleep in the chair at about eight, which he never does, and I sat across from him and didn’t wake him for an hour and a half. His mouth was a little bit open. I’ve never told him that.
I’m not going to make anything of it. That’s rather the point. Nothing on the twenty-fourth of February moved anything forward, and it’s the day I’ve gone back to more than any other in my life.
? ? ?
On the twenty-eighth I did the arithmetic.
It was the last day of the month and I was sitting on the stairs, which is where I do that sort of thing, with the piece of paper I’d been avoiding since the first.
Twenty days to the equinox.
I wrote it out properly, because writing a thing out is how I stop it going round and round. Twenty days. If I went the day before, nineteen. If it took two days to arrange, eighteen.
Under that I wrote: how often can I come up.
I didn’t know. Nobody had told me and I’d never asked, not Kael, not Threnn, not Ivrid, because I was too frightened of the big question to ask the small one.
Half past eleven at night on my own stairs, with the pencil going blunt, and I’d spent four months deciding whether to go and not one single hour asking what going would actually be like.
I put the paper in the dresser drawer under the linen with the other list.
Then I went up and got into bed next to a sleeping man and lay awake till it got light.
And on the last night of February the water came over the harbour wall on an ordinary high tide in a flat calm, which has happened twice in living memory, and both of those times in a gale.
? ? ?
I went down to look at it, because everybody went down to look at it.
The whole town was on the wall. That’s what Duskmere does.
Something goes wrong and forty people stand about in the cold with their hands in their pockets, and someone says it was worse in fifty-one, and someone else says it wasn’t, and the argument over which year was the last bad one quietly moves in where the fear was.
I’ve always thought that’s one of the more sensible things people get up to.
The water had come over the low end by the slipway, run about thirty feet across the cobbles and gone back out. There was weed on the stones and a dead crab upside down in the gutter, and the whole stretch was wet and giving off a faint steam in the cold.
Hallam’s wife said, to nobody in particular, “In calm.”
That was all anyone said about that part. Then they all went back to arguing about fifty-one.
? ? ?
Wren found me at the back of the crowd.
“You’re stood here with a face on you, love.”
“I’ve got a face on me.”
“You’ve got that face.” She put her arm through mine, which she’s done maybe five times in nineteen years, always in cold weather, and always when it’s the arm she’s after and not the warmth. “Come away from the wall.”
We walked up past the chandler’s and stopped where the lane turns and you can see the whole bay.
“Is it you?”
I didn’t answer.
“Rose.”
“It isn’t me. It’s a thing that’s failing because nobody’s holding it, and I’m the one who could hold it. If you want to know whether that’s the same sentence, I’ve been awake every night since January trying to work it out.”
Wren looked at the water for a bit.
“I’m going to say a thing, and then I’m going back to open up, because there’s forty people on that wall and every bloody one of them’s going to want a drink inside the hour, and I’m not made of money.”
“Go on.”
“Don’t do it for us.”
I turned my head.
“I’ve known you since you were fifteen. I’ve watched you make every decision of your grown life for somebody else, and I’ve watched most of them go badly, and I never said a word because it wasn’t my place.
Well, it’s my place now.” She still hadn’t let go of my arm.
“You go down there and stand at that thing because Hallam’s boy went in the water and Ness has stopped baking of a Thursday, you’ll last about four years, and then you’ll hate every last one of us.
I’d rather have the flood, love. I mean it. ”
“Wren, if it goes.”
“Then it goes, and we’ll manage or we won’t, and this town’s been doing that with the sea since before there was a road up that hill.
” She let go of me and squared up to face me right there in the open lane, which she’d never ordinarily do where people could see.
“We are not your reason. Find a better one or don’t go. ”
? ? ?
Kael turned up on the first of March with a boat and no explanation, and took me out past the headland to look at something, and wouldn’t say what till we were there.
It was a cold bright morning, the swell long and slow and the light coming up off the water hard enough to make my eyes stream. He rowed. He was terrible at it, which I hadn’t expected, and which cheered me up no end.
“You could swim this.”
“I could swim it and arrive wet, madam, and I’ve found arriving wet gives people entirely the wrong idea about a man.” He shipped the oars with a clatter and a look of great suffering. “Also this air is appalling. It’s like being hung out on a line to dry. There. Look down.”
I looked down.
The water was clear the way it goes out there in March, forty feet of green shading off into blue, and there was nothing to see, and I told him so.
“Look at the colour.”
And then I saw it.
Off to the north, running away from us towards the shoulder of the headland, there was a band in the water.
I thought current line at first, but it wasn’t that.
It was a strip of a different green, wider than a road, and along it the light didn’t go down as far, like the water there was a shade thicker than on either side.
“What is that?”
“That is Ilmarren. The top of it. You are looking at eleven miles of a thing that isn’t visible from a boat in any conditions whatsoever, and I’ve been rowing out here, very badly, every ten days since November to look at it. In November it was a hand’s width.”
? ? ?
We sat in the boat in the middle of the sea and neither of us said anything for a while.
“I’m going to ask you something,” I said in the end, “and I’d like it answered by the man who put his hand between my shoulder blades and pushed. Not by anybody’s envoy.”
“Ask.”
“Who do you work for?”
Kael laughed. I hadn’t expected that.
“Madam, that’s the wrong question, and you’ve been asking it since October.”
“Then give me the right one.”
“The right one is who lit the second seal. I haven’t told you because I made a promise, and I intend to break it in about a fortnight, and I’d be obliged if you’d stop picking at me until then. I should like to do it properly. Not in a boat. Nothing’s ever done properly in a boat.”
“A fortnight.”
“The equinox is on the twentieth. I plan to be a considerable nuisance a few days before.” He took up the oars again, badly. “Ask me something else. I’ve one more answer left in me today, and then I intend to sulk.”
I looked down at the band of thicker green going off north underneath us.
“What happens to a person who stands at a gate?”
Kael didn’t row.
“You want the ballad, or the other thing?”
“The other thing.”
“You stand. That’s it. That’s all of it, and everybody who tells it makes it grand, and it isn’t.
You go to the place and you want at it, all the time, at a pitch that would kill an ordinary person inside a week, and after a year or two it stops being an effort and turns into the shape of you.
Like a woman who’s carried a child on one hip for four years and stands crooked for good after. ”
“And then?”
“And then you’re a woman who wants at a hole in the bottom of the world, and everything else you want gets weighed against it and comes off worse. It’s no curse. Nobody does it to you. A thing that big in a person just leaves less room.”
The swell went under us, and under us again, long and slow.
“Say the last part.”