CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Down as Payment #4
We didn’t talk about any of it. She told me about the ties on a rack, at length and with real passion, for well over an hour.
Then about a junior in 1889 who had reorganised four hundred slates by colour and been quietly moved elsewhere.
Then about the only argument she’d ever won against Sethe, which was over a comma.
She won it on the second reading, she said. She would like that noted.
Somewhere in the fourth hour she said, “I have never had a friend in that House,” flatly, as a matter of fact, in the middle of a sentence about something else, and went on with the sentence.
I didn’t interrupt her. I’m not sure I could have.
They noted it. It cost me something on the eleventh day, in a form I didn’t understand at the time and Threnn never explained.
I’d do it again tomorrow.
? ? ?
The eleventh day lasted ten minutes.
They came in, and Ferrant read out a form of words agreeing the make-up of the party and the date of the first descent to the ridge, and Threnn said, “The guest does not object,” and I said nothing, and they all got up and left.
Six days of substance and five of repetition, and it ended in ten minutes with a sentence that had been sitting there available since the second day.
I said so in the passage, fairly hotly.
“Yes,” said Threnn.
“Then why.”
“Because on the second day it would have been their sentence. Today it’s a sentence that survived eleven days of me not objecting to it.
” She was putting her things away, slowly, and her hands weren’t quite steady, which by then I knew how to read.
“That is the difference. It’s the only thing I had to give you, and you won’t see what it was worth for a long while. ”
There was a small cold stone on the shelf in my room that I hadn’t given back. I looked at it that night for longer than I meant to.
? ? ?
They took me out to Ilmarren on the twelfth day, which was the first of April. I went in a party of nine and came back in a party of nine, and nothing happened at all.
I want that down about the first time, because every account of it since has made something of it, and there was nothing to make.
It’s eleven miles out from the city, which down there is a long way, and you do it as a slow descent instead of a straight run, because the floor drops away.
The city light goes behind you in stages.
The last of it is a blue-white smudge over your shoulder, and then it’s gone, and after that there’s a stretch of perhaps two miles in absolute dark where nobody spoke.
The only thing in the world was the pulse, six seconds and six seconds, except it was coming up through the water from ahead of us now, where before it had always come from below.
Then the floor lifted into a long shallow slope, and the slope went on for half a mile, and at the top of it there was light.
? ? ?
There’s a ridge. It runs away east and west further than the light reaches, and it isn’t rock, or isn’t only rock, and along the top of it, the whole length, it’s open.
A seam. One long unbroken parting, perhaps four feet across at its widest, narrowing and widening along its run the way a river does.
And the light comes out of the seam.
Blue and gold and that rose colour, all mixed, and it doesn’t shine up like a lamp.
It seeps out and lies along the ridge and then spills down the northern side in a long slow fall, like fog coming over a hill, and it goes away north into the dark and doesn’t stop.
That’s the current. That’s what has lit a city for nine hundred years.
It was beautiful. There’s no cleverer word, and I’ve looked. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen or ever will, and standing on the rise half a mile off I understood why two women in nine hundred years had walked out into the silt sooner than stand there.
It’s beautiful, and it wants nothing from you, and it’ll take everything you’ve got.
? ? ?
The seam is closing.
You can see it. Nobody had told me. I don’t think it had occurred to anybody to tell me, because everybody down there had been looking at figures for thirty-four years and nobody had lately gone out and looked at the thing.
Along about a third of its run, the western third, the parting is shut.
Closed, the way a hand closes, and there’s no damage to it that I could see.
Where it’s closed the ridge is dark, and the light comes out of the other two-thirds thinner and faster than it ought to, like water forced through a narrowed pipe.
And at the eastern end, a mile off, where nobody in the party was looking because everybody was staring at the dark western third, the seam stood open a good deal wider than four feet.
I stood on the rise and looked at that until my eyes hurt.
“How long has the east been like that?”
Nobody answered.
“Threnn. How long has the east been open like that.”
And Threnn, who had come out with the party because she refused to be left behind, said: “Miss Angel, I have read every survey of this ridge taken in nine hundred years, and not one of them mentions the east at all.”