CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Down as Payment #3
“The new moon is in nine days. The ridge is eleven miles out. The party would need four days’ arrangement. I propose the thirty-first.”
“You are proposing a date for a thing that hasn’t been agreed,” said Threnn.
“I am proposing a date. The agreement is a separate matter.”
“Then propose it separately.”
“Archivist.” Ferrant laid his hands flat on the table, pleasantly, like a man resting a case he’d already won. “Nobody in this room believes the agreement is in doubt.”
Threnn said, quite mildly: “Then it will cost you nothing to establish it in the ordinary way. You can have your date afterwards, and I won’t object to the thirty-first when it comes.”
He looked at her, and then he laughed, and I swear he was enjoying himself, and he withdrew the date.
It came back on the sixth day in a different form and she blocked it again. On the ninth it came back a third time, stuck onto something else entirely, and that time she let it through, and I didn’t find out why for a month.
? ? ?
The fourth day was the claim, and it was the only day I was frightened.
The fourth house entered it at second light without notice, which is permitted and is regarded down there as about the same as spitting in somebody’s food.
It was a formal claim that I was a subject and not a guest, on the grounds that the obligation had been carried by the houses and was therefore theirs to discharge.
If it had gone through I’d have had no standing at all. Threnn told me afterwards there would have been no negotiation about the ridge, no party of nine, no eleven days. There would have been an instruction, and I’d have followed it.
She killed it with the precedent. The same three-hundred-year seal she’d carried up to my kitchen in October, flat and chalk-white and dead, and she laid it on the table in front of eleven people and read the eleven lines aloud without her voice changing once.
The woman who had entered the claim said the precedent addressed a guest, and the question in front of them was whether I was one.
“It addresses the daughter of the line,” said Threnn.
“It addresses a guest.”
“It addresses the daughter of the line, in the third clause, in those words. I’ll read the third clause again. I’ll keep reading the third clause until somebody in this room tells me they’ve heard it.”
Somebody threw something. I never found out who, and Threnn wouldn’t tell me. It was a stylus, and it hit the wall about four feet from her head, and she didn’t look at it and didn’t stop reading.
They withdrew the claim at the end of the day.
That night Threnn came up to the western terrace and sat down on my floor, which by then had stopped being remarkable, and said, “I’m going to tell you something and then I’m going to bed.”
“Go on.”
“They will enter it again on the day you go to the ridge, when I’m eleven miles out in the dark with you instead of in that room.
” She was looking at the wall. “I’ve known that since second light.
There is nothing I can do about it. I have spent this whole day winning something I’m going to lose inside a week, and I’d like one person in this city to know I’m aware of it. ”
? ? ?
The delegation came on the fifth day and the seventh.
Eleven people from the northern quarter. On the fifth they came in and sat down and said nothing for two hours, and then got up and left.
Nobody in the room spoke to them. That’s the part I couldn’t get past. They were entered in the record as present, and somebody had found eleven chairs for them, and the room’s business went on over their heads for two hours about a date and a form of words, and not one person in good colours said a syllable in their direction.
I recognised the woman from the market.
She didn’t acknowledge me, and I knew why, and I didn’t acknowledge her either. Of the eleven days, that hour was the hardest.
On the seventh they came back and did the same, and on the way out the youngest of them, a man of about twenty-five, stopped at my end of the table and put down a small, hard, cold thing about the size of a plum, and went out without a word.
It was a light. It wasn’t lit.
Ferrant said, into the quiet, “That is not permitted,” and Threnn said, “Then have it recorded that it occurred.” Nobody moved to take it off the table. It sat in front of me for the rest of the day, dark, and I didn’t touch it in that room.
That night I lit it in my own room with the door shut, and held it as long as I could stand to, and then let it go out.
? ? ?
The eighth day was the worst, and nothing happened at all.
Nobody warns you about that part of proceedings.
They asked me the same four questions they’d asked on the first day, in the same order, in different words, for five and a half hours.
By the fourth hour I’d started giving slightly different answers because I was tired, and Threnn stopped me twice.
The second time she said, in front of everybody, “The guest has been answering questions for eight days and has answered this one four times. I am recording that the variation is fatigue and not inconsistency.”
“You can’t record an opinion.”
“I can record an objection, and I have, and I’ve given my reason, and the reason is now in the record, which is what I wanted.” She didn’t look up. “Ask it a fifth time if you like.”
They didn’t.
Afterwards, in the passage, I said, “Is that going to work?”
“No. Somebody who wasn’t here will argue about it in six weeks.” She was putting her things away. “But it will have to be argued about, and that costs them an hour. I’ve found, over thirty-one years, that a great many things fail because somebody couldn’t be bothered to spend an hour.”
? ? ?
The ninth day was the prophecy.
There were six people in the room, and a little after the second hour one of them said it out loud to my face. Nobody had before.
The last to hold, or the first to be free.
He used it as an argument against me. Half of it was a disaster, he said, and there was no telling which half, so the sensible thing was to put a woman of the line at Ilmarren whom nobody had ever loved.
Nobody in the room answered him. Somebody raised a point about who should make up the party, and the room just carried on, for another hour.
I sat through that hour with my hands flat on the table. I watched two of the six not look at me, and I knew, as clearly as I’ve ever known anything, that those two were working out whether Elias could be got at.
Afterwards Threnn walked me back to the western terrace, and neither of us said anything until we were inside. Then she shut the door and said:
“You want to know why I didn’t object.”
“Yes.”
“Because objecting would have established that the sentence was worth objecting to.” She put the satchel down.
“It’s a bit of doggerel children learn. The moment I treat it as a threat, it is one, and it goes into the record as a matter the archivist of the third house thought material.
I’d have made it real, Miss Angel, in the only way anything gets to be real down here. ”
“He was talking about killing him.”
“He was talking about a woman nobody had loved. He didn’t name Vale.
He didn’t name anyone.” Threnn sat on the edge of the bed.
“If I had objected, the record would now hold a note that everyone present understood the phrase to mean one particular man on the Vaelmoor coast. That note would be there for ever, and anybody who wanted him in six months’ time would know exactly where to start. ”
I sat down on the floor.
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“No. You had eight seconds. I’ve had thirty-one years.” She was quiet for a while. “I should tell you I was wrong about something else this week. I haven’t worked out yet how wrong. It concerns the ninth day, and I’d rather you heard it from me when I’m sure than guessed at it now.”
“Threnn.”
“When I’m sure,” she said.
? ? ?
I got word up that night.
Threnn arranged it. A fisherman’s boy again, a coin and no explanation, a folded paper going up a hill in a child’s fist. I wrote four lines, and they were the hardest four lines I’ve ever written.
They have said the prophecy out loud in a room. Two of the six were doing sums about you. I do not think anything will happen and I am telling you anyway because we agreed. Do not do anything about this. Do not come to the coast at night for a fortnight. Ask Wren to put you up.
He wrote back inside three days, which meant he’d paid somebody a great deal.
Not going anywhere. Am extremely difficult to reach, as you know, being a man who sits in one house being sad.
Wren says I am not to move in as I would frighten the customers.
Went down to the cove Tuesday. It is bigger.
Tell Threnn the tide table for the eleventh is out by a hand and I want to know why.
I love you. Do the thing you went to do.
? ? ?
On the tenth day I refused to go.
I did it quietly. Threnn came at second light and I was sitting on the floor of the western room with my back against the bed, and I said, “No.”
She stood in the doorway.
“They’ll note it.”
“Let them.”
“Miss Angel, it’s one day. One more, and then the eleventh, and then a boat, and then it’s done.”
“I’ve been in a room for nine days being asked whether my mother was in the habit of doing things.
A man said out loud that the trouble with me is somebody loves me.
Eleven people from the dark sat in chairs for two hours and nobody spoke to them.
And on the fourth night you sat on this floor and told me you’d spent the day winning something you’re going to lose.
” I didn’t get up. “I want one day where nobody says a sentence in front of me that I’ve got to worry about. ”
Threnn came in and shut the door and sat down on the floor across from me with her back to the wall, in the grey cloak, at second light, with a full day’s proceedings waiting for her somewhere down the passage.
“Then we’ll have one,” she said.