Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 548: Chapter 543: Intake

Location:Kaelport — The Lower Yard

Date/Time:1 Emberrise, 9943 AZI — Kindleday, first working day of the year

Realm:Lower Realm

Eden had planned for sixty, and by the time the light was properly up she had stopped counting.

She had the tables out. She had the slates and the chalk and the two benches and the tea urn that Feng Lian had built out of a ration heater and refused to explain, and she had four people who had given up the first working day of the year to stand in the cold and write names down.

She had, at a guess, three hundred children in the yard and more coming through the gate while she guessed.

”It is early.” Bai Shu did not sound as though she believed it.

”It is not early. It has been open an hour.”

”It is the first day of the year. People are slow on the first day of the—” Bai Shu stopped. She had turned to put another cup on the table and had got a clear view down the road while she did it. ”My mother would not have let me out of the house before the sun was over the wall on Kindleday. It is unlucky.”

”Is it?”

”It is if my mother says it is.” Bai Shu put the cup down without looking at it. ”Nobody in that road has told their mother.”

[There are more in the road,] Zhi said, from wherever Zhi was, which today was somewhere along the eastern wall, being a shape nobody would look at twice. [They are not coming in yet. They are waiting for the ones in front.]

How many?

[Lots.] A pause, in the flat register of a creature who has been asked for a number and understands that a number is wanted. [More than in the yard. More than in the yard again after that. They have been there since it was dark.]

***

Eden went and looked.

The road was full for as far as the wall let her see, and it was organized, in the manner of people who have been standing a long time and have sorted it out among themselves without anybody being put in charge. Somebody had started a fire in the ditch. Somebody had brought a cart and the cart had become a place for children too small to stand. Three women near the front had a system going where one of them held everybody’s places while the other two walked the line telling people how far it was to the gate.

Nobody was pushing. Nobody was going to push. And nobody had gone home.

Eden stood at the gate for a while and did the arithmetic she did not want to do, which was that these people had walked in the dark from further away than this district went.

”You are from Anseth,” she said to a woman near the front, because the dye on her sleeves said so.

”Anseth, yes. Them behind us from Corran.”

”That is a day’s walk.”

”A day and a bit.” No complaint in it anywhere. ”We could not have come two years ago. I want that said, because you will hear it from everybody today and you will hear it wrong. It is not that we did not want to. My eldest was on the thresher paddles from the year she could stand up, and the year before that it was me, and before that my mother. There were not children to spare. There were hands.”

”And now.”

”And now there is a machine at Anseth that does in a morning what four of us did in a week, and it does not care whether anybody is holding it.” The woman looked back down the line at her own two. ”So there are children. That is new. Nobody has ever had to work out what to do with a child before.”

***

The rest came out over the morning, in pieces, from whoever Eden happened to be standing next to.

Three of the Academy’s own had gone home to Corran for the Void Days and talked, which is what students do, and by the third day half the province knew there was going to be a school and the other half had heard something garbled about one. Nobody had put out a notice. Nobody had needed to.

And underneath it, said quietly and not by everybody, the other thing.

Nobody in that road used the word Temple. Eden noticed that about the fourth time it did not happen.

What they said was since the testing. Since the testing came through. Since the year they did the testing twice.

The assessments have been in the villages since before anybody standing in that road was born — you take a child at six, and somebody reads what is in her, and the reading is crude, and everybody knows it is crude, and it has never mattered much because nothing followed from it. What was new was priests. White and gold, warm, patient, no charge for anything, doing the reading properly this time and doing it for free, and telling a woman who had been informed her whole life that her daughter was nothing much that the Temple thought otherwise.

The ones who read well were offered places. Real places, at real academies, with boarding and books.

Their families were proud. Eden heard that four separate times and it was the worst part of the morning.

A woman two-thirds down the line said her nephew went at nine, and that she had waited a year for a letter and then another year, and then had stopped explaining to people why she still checked. She had thought about it every Void Day since and had never once said so out loud in a village.

She was not the only one. That was the thing that got into Eden’s chest and stayed there — the line was full of them, and they had all worked out separately that they were not the only one, and none of them had ever said it to each other until this morning, standing in a road, waiting for a different door.

Somebody further back said, not to Eden, that the Roskin girl had read very well two summers ago and her father had said no.

Eden waited for the rest of it, and there was no rest of it. That was the whole sentence. Everybody near enough to hear it already had the ending.

***

So they were not queueing for a future.

They were queueing to have their children written down somewhere, with a name on it, in a hand that was not white and gold, where a great many people could see them.

And there was one other thing, and Eden did not hear it said until she was nearly at the end of the line, and then heard it three times in a hundred paces.

The Academy’s students come home.

They come home for the Void Days, and they come home in Emberwane, and they walk into their own villages in their own clothes and complain about the food, and they have done that for as long as anybody’s grandmother could remember, and not one family in that road could name a single one who had gone up that mountain and not come back down it.

It was not a recommendation. Nobody meant it as one. It was the only piece of evidence any of them had.

She was still turning that over when she came to a man holding a girl of about six by the wrist.

***

The man was the only person in that stretch of road who was not moving forward.

”Are you coming in?”

The man looked at her carefully. Working clothes, mended well. A face that had done a lot of arithmetic in the last week.

”What does it cost?”

”Nothing.”

”For how long does it cost nothing?”

And there it was.

”Forever,” Eden said. ”It is not a trial, and it is not a first year free. There is no bill coming.”

”Everything has a bill coming.”

”Not this.”

The man shifted the girl’s wrist to his other hand.

”Then what is it for?” he asked.

***

She did not have a good answer.

That was the thing that stayed with her afterward. There were several hundred people within earshot, and not one of them had asked her the question, and the one man who had was holding up the line, and she could feel the line deciding whether to be irritated with him.

She had a great many answers, and every one of them was a slogan. And this was the only person in the road who had made her earn it.

”Because she will be able to read.”

”She does not need to read. She cultivates. Everybody cultivates, and she will go on cultivating whether she can read or not, and it has never once been the reading that got anybody off this district.”

”No.”

”The last people who came into my district with something free came in white and gold, and they were very kind about it.” He said it with no heat at all, the way a man states a rate of exchange. ”They tested for nothing. They were better at it than the old woman who used to do it. They told four families in my village that their children were worth more than anybody had ever said, and they gave those children places, with boarding, and books, and the mothers cried in the road about it.”

”That was three years ago. Nobody has had a letter.”

Eden did not say anything.

”So you will forgive me,” the man said, ”if a person standing at a gate telling me it costs nothing and no bill is coming does not land on me the way you want it to. I have heard the sentence. I watched what came after it. And you are standing where they stood, saying what they said, and I have walked my daughter three miles to look at your face while you say it.”

”That is fair.”

”It is not fair. It is what I have got.”

***

She had been walking past the baskets all morning without letting herself see them.

Eden noticed the first one properly because she nearly walked into it — a flat basket set against the wall with eight eggs in it and a cloth folded over the top, nobody standing near it, nobody claiming it. Then she started seeing them. Eggs. Two winter cabbages. A crock of something. A bolt of undyed cloth that somebody had carried a day and a bit on their back and put down against a wall in the dark and walked away from.

”No,” Eden said, out loud, to nobody, and went to find Bai Shu. ”Get them back to the road. All of it. Politely.”

”Eden—”

”It is free. That is the entire thing. That is the only thing I have said out loud all morning.”

”Leave them where they are.”

Eden had not heard him come into the yard, and afterward she was not able to say from which direction, and she suspected that was habit rather than intent and had gone on being habit for a very long time.

Headmaster Qin was standing by the gate in a plain coat with his hands behind his back, looking at a flat basket of eggs with the expression of a man reading a document.

”Headmaster.”

”You are about to make a generous mistake, which is the worst kind, because you cannot see it from inside.” Pale gray eyes came up. He did not raise his voice and Eden had never once heard him raise it. ”That woman carried eight eggs a day and a bit, in the cold, at the top of a basket where they could break. You may give them back to her. She will take them, because you are the person behind the table. And she will walk home understanding that whatever this is, she is not part of it — it is something being done to her, at no charge, by people who require nothing of her.”

Eden opened her mouth and shut it again.

”Charity is a debt,” Qin said, ”and it runs in the wrong direction, and it never once comes due, and everybody standing under it knows it. Ten thousand years I have watched families keep a boy out of this Academy rather than take a place they could not answer for.” He looked at the basket again. ”Eight eggs answers for it. Let her pay. She has priced it herself, and she has priced it correctly, and it costs you nothing to be paid.”

”It is not a fee. I will not have it become a fee.”

”No. It will not be a fee, because you will never once ask, and nobody will ever be turned away for arriving empty-handed, and you will make sure the first person who does arrive empty-handed is written down in front of everybody with exactly the same amount of ceremony.” Qin took his hands out from behind his back. ”That is the whole of the discipline, and it is not complicated. Do not confuse it with the eggs.”

He walked back toward the gate. Then he stopped.

”Keep a list of who brought what.”

”Why?”

”Because in nine years one of them will tell you they were there on the first day, and you will want to be able to say yes.” He did not turn round. ”And because you are going to eat the cabbages, and a school that eats a woman’s cabbages without writing her name down is a school with a bad habit in its first week.”

***

”You have to go out and tell them what it is.” Meifen had not stopped writing for two hours and did not stop now.

”They are already coming in.”

”That is what I mean.” She turned a slate over and started the other side. ”My father was a blacksmith. When I was seven, a man came through the village offering to teach the children for nothing, and my father chased him out of the yard with a bar, and he was right to, because the man was recruiting for a house that wanted small hands. Every one of these people would have done what my father did, two years ago, to you, on this ground.”

”And now they are queueing in the dark.”

”Now they are queueing in the dark, and they have not asked one question, and that is not because they got cleverer.” Meifen wrote another name. ”Go and tell them what it is for. Not because they want to know. Because in nine years they are going to want to have been told.”

***

She went back out at midday and said it to a road that had already decided.

”She cultivates. Every year she is with us, from the first day, alongside the rest of it and not instead of it, and with the resources to do it on.” Eden started there because it was the only part any of them had actually asked about. ”Nine years of cultivating with somebody feeding her, and nobody selling the good pills on to a cousin. The worst she comes out at is peak Sparkforged.”

Eden had not expected that to be the sentence that did it. It was.

She waited for the road to finish doing what it was doing, and went on.

”She is six. She is out at fifteen. At fifteen she chooses, and it is her choosing, not mine and not yours.” Eden had a slate in her hand, and she was reading off it, badly, because she had written it in a hurry and it was a list of the least inspiring facts she owned. ”She can come home. She will be able to read a contract and check a court’s arithmetic and set a bone and work out how much seed a field takes and whether the water is safe, and there is not a village in four provinces that cannot use that, and she will be paid for it the same as anybody else with a trade.”

”Or she sits at the entrance for the Academy. Line, Command, Medical, Engineering, Logistics, whichever of the five she turns out to be good at. And I will tell you straight, because you will hear it wrong otherwise — that does not pay. It costs her nothing, and it earns her nothing, and she will be twenty-one when she comes out of the far end of it.”

”Then what,” said somebody, well back.

”Then she is paid. From the first day, in coin, by us. Or she stays at the Academy, and some of them will.” Eden lowered the slate. ”And none of it is decided by anybody’s uncle.”

Silence in the road.

”None of it is decided by anybody’s uncle,” a woman near the back repeated to the woman beside her, in the voice of somebody storing a sentence to use later on a relative.

”It is an examination. On paper. With her name off it.”

That was the part that moved. Eden watched it go back down the line the way weather goes down a valley, and she understood, standing in the cold with a slate in her hand, that she had just told several hundred people something none of them had thought to ask for and all of them had wanted their whole lives.

Then the line came on again, and Eden spent the rest of the afternoon writing names badly and running out of slates.