Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 601: Chapter 596: Nothing Comes to Me

Location:Kaelport — The Long Shed, The Yard, The Street

Date/Time:8 Flamefade 9943 AZI, Hammerday — to 9 Flamefade, Temperday, first bellRealm:Lower Realm

The long shed smelled of ink, and of paper, and of chalk, and of the cold brazier nobody had lit because nobody had been in at first bell to light it. Meifen stood in the doorway and breathed it in and thought, as she had thought on the first morning, that it was the wrong smell for a room where things got decided. A room where things got decided ought to smell of hot iron and quench water. Halvar’s forge smelled of both, and things had got decided in it for six generations, and not one of them had been written down.

The brazier first. Then she went and stood in front of the board.

It was the commander’s board, with the commander’s chalk on it, the twenty-one coins in their ranked column and the small careful hand of Eden’s notes in the corner. Meifen did not touch any of it. She had been told she had the board, and having it and changing it were two different things, and she had worked out on the first morning that the difference was the whole of the job.

The order was pinned to the frame beside it, where she could see it every time she looked up. By now she had read it so many times she could have recited it.

Nothing comes to me.

The commander had crossed out the end of a longer sentence to write that. You could still see the longer sentence under the line. Meifen had looked at the crossing-out for some time on the first morning, and had understood that it was the most expensive thing on the sheet, and that it was not hers to remark on.

Meifen sat down at the commander’s end of the trestle, because that was where the slates came, and waited for them to come.

+++

The first one was carts.

Orun came in at the second bell with his hat in his hands and the particular expression of a man who has been arguing with somebody for four years and has turned up to find the somebody missing.

”He’s not at the weighbridge,” Orun said.

”I know.”

”He’s always at the weighbridge.”

”Not today. Everybody’s off.” Meifen pushed the slate she had been about to write on to one side. ”What’s the problem?”

”Fourteen carts for the east store and the sill’s dry and the doors are wide, he said, round by the east store, he said it Restday on the path, and now it’s Hammerday and the east store’s full.” Orun turned his hat round once. ”So where do the fourteen go? I’d ask him, normally. We’d have the argument. It’d take forty minutes.”

Meifen thought about it for the length of time it took her to see the yard in her head.

”Split them,” she said. ”Nine to the north store. Five to the drying floor under canvas, because the weather’s holding and it’ll hold till Grindday. Anything that won’t sit under canvas goes in the nine.”

Orun looked at her.

”He’d have made me argue about it.”

”I’m not him.”

”No.” Orun put his hat back on. Then he stopped at the door and turned half round. ”Nine and five’s right, though. He’d have got there. He’d have made me get there first.”

”I know he would,” Meifen said. ”My father does that. Drives you mad.”

Orun laughed, a short surprised bark, and went.

On the slate, in her own hand: Carts: 9 north store, 5 drying floor under canvas. She signed it. Halvar had never written anything down in his life, and she thought, signing, that he would have looked at that line for a long time and then said that’s sound, which from Halvar was a speech.

+++

The second one was the street.

It did not come as a slate. It came as a woman from the cooper’s row standing in the shed doorway with her arms folded, and three more behind her in the yard, and a man Meifen did not know at the back with a pale coat and a little book in his hand, writing.

”It’s been two days,” the woman from the cooper’s row said. ”Two nights since. My boy saw it from the loft. White, he said. Straight up. Twice. Down off your end, by the water.”

”I heard.”

”So what was it?”

Meifen had been waiting for this since the first morning, and had decided on the first morning what she would say, and had found, every time she rehearsed it, that she could not make it any better than the plain thing.

”I don’t know,” she said.

The woman looked at her.

”You’re the corps.”

”I am. And I don’t know.” Meifen did not get up, and did not need to; the woman was not angry, she was frightened, and you did not stand up at a frightened person. ”The commander does. She’s off till Temperday. Everybody here is, on her order, first time in a year. When she’s back, I’ll ask her. And I’ll come and tell you what I’m allowed to tell you, and if I’m not allowed to tell you anything, I’ll come and tell you that.”

”That’s not an answer.”

”No,” Meifen agreed. ”It’s the truth, though. You’d rather have the truth than an answer, wouldn’t you? I would. My father always says a thing that’s out of true looks fine right up until you put weight on it.”

The woman from the cooper’s row stood there a while longer. The three behind her shifted.

”Your father the smith?”

”Loam Hollow.”

”Huh.” The woman unfolded her arms. ”My husband’s people are from Anseth. He says the corps came and put a road in. Didn’t ask for anything.” She looked at Meifen a moment longer. ”Temperday.”

”First bell.”

The woman went, and the three behind her. The man in the pale coat stayed in the yard a while longer, writing in his little book.

Meifen knew who he was. Everybody in Kaelport knew who he was, or knew what he was, which came to the same thing: the Temple’s man, who had stood at the back of the school yard on the first morning and enrolled nobody and counted everything. He had been counting ever since. Eden had said let him count, once, in Meifen’s hearing, and Meifen had thought about it and decided it was right, because a man who is counting is a man who has not decided anything yet.

So she went out to him.

”You’ll want the figure,” she said.

He looked up, startled. He was younger than she had thought.

”I beg your pardon?”

”For your book. You’ve been writing. Five women. Two nights. The corps doesn’t know, says the corps, back Temperday.” She nodded at the little book. ”That’s the figure. Have it right. I’d rather you had it right than made it up.”

He looked at her for a long moment.

Then he wrote something, and she could see from the shape of his hand moving that it was short, and that it was what she had said.

”Thank you,” he said, which she had not expected either, and went.

+++

The third one was Lantern Hill.

It came in on the relay at the fourth bell, as it had every day since the second of the month. Four of her people on a watershed a day and a half east, surveying ground that genuinely needed it, which was the only reason she had been given and the only one she had asked for. The commander had written the order for that herself. Meifen had read it and thought it was a lot of trouble to go to over a watershed, and then had thought that the commander did not go to trouble over anything she did not mean, and had stopped thinking about it.

The line said what it said every day. Survey proceeding. Weather holding. Spring line at the north end re-staked, four paces east of the old mark. Nothing else to report.

Twice she read it, properly, the way you read a temper line on a blade you did not forge yourself. Then she wrote it into the log, and signed under it, and sent back the line she sent every day: Received. Carry on.

What they were watching for, she did not know. By now she was fairly sure that they were watching for something. Nobody posted four surveyors and a relay a day and a half from anywhere for a spring line.

It was not hers to ask. It was hers to read the line properly every day and make sure that if it ever said anything other than nothing else to report, the commander had it inside the hour, order or no order, stand-down or no stand-down.

That too she had decided on the first morning, looking at Nothing comes to me. Some things came anyway. That was what a second was for.

It had not said anything else, and she was glad.

+++

The fourth one was Qin.

Nobody ever heard him come in, and she did not. When she looked up from the cooperage tally, which she had found on the commander’s end of the trestle half-finished in the commander’s hand and had decided to leave exactly as it was, he was simply there, inside the door, a thin old man in a plain dark coat with white hair that could not decide what color the lamp was and a nose somebody had broken twice.

Meifen stood up. You stood up for the Headmaster. Since the first week she walked up his mountain, she had stood up for him.

”Headmaster.”

”Captain Meifen.” His voice did not rise. It never did; it simply arrived in the room at whatever volume he wanted it. ”I have come down to see the Commander. She asked me to, before the month was out.”

”She’s not here.”

The pale gray eyes rested on her.

”She is standing down,” Meifen said. ”Kindleday and Hammerday, the whole corps, on her order. She’s back at first bell Temperday.” She turned and took the order off the frame and held it out to him, because he would want to see it, and because she would have wanted to see it. ”That’s her hand. Nothing comes to me. That includes you, Headmaster. I’m sorry. It’s in writing.”

Qin took the sheet. He read it. Meifen watched his eyes go to the crossing-out and stay there.

Then he looked up from the paper and studied her.

It went on for exactly as long as it always did. Everybody who had ever been in a room with him had told her about it, and she had never had it done to her: three seconds, no more, the pale eyes going over her face and her hands and the way she was standing, the burns on her knuckles and the slate under her other hand, taking all of it, the way a smith runs a thumb along an edge before saying a word about it.

”Interesting,” said Qin.

He handed the order back. Meifen pinned it to the frame again, square, where it had been.

”I can send to the Pavilion,” she said. ”If it’s urgent. That’s the one thing I’d break it for.”

”Is it urgent, do you think?”

”I don’t know what it’s about.”

”Nor do I, entirely.” Something happened at the corner of his mouth that might have been a smile on a less controlled face. ”It will keep. It has kept for a very long time already. A day more is nothing.” He looked round the long shed, at the board, the chalk, the cold cup somebody had left on the end of the trestle. ”Is there somewhere a man might sit?”

Meifen gave him the stool in the corner by the brazier, which was the best stool, and fetched him tea, which he had not asked for, because her mother Essa would have fetched it and she found she could not do otherwise.

He thanked her. He drank half of it. He did not ask for anything else, all that long day, and he did not ask her anything at all. At the last bell he was still sitting there with his hands folded and his eyes on the board, and he told her she need not stay, he had sat in rooms a good deal colder than this one. She did not lock the shed. She banked the brazier, and put a man from First Company on the door with a lamp and orders to bring the Headmaster anything he asked for, and went home and lay awake for an hour thinking about a Headmaster of Obsidian Academy sitting in a corps shed because a blacksmith’s daughter had told him to wait.

In the morning the man on the door told her the Headmaster had asked for nothing, all night, and had not once lain down.

+++

Jayde came in at first bell on Temperday.

She came in brown-eyed and black-haired, in her corps coat, the way she always came in, and Meifen, who had been at the shed since before the bell lighting the brazier, looked at her and thought she looked different and could not have said how. Rested, perhaps. Meifen had never seen her rested. She had not known it was a thing that could show.

Her hands were not wrapped any more. There was new skin across the heel of both palms, pink and shiny, the kind that comes after a bad burn.

”Commander.”

”Meifen.”

Meifen held out the board, and the log, and the stack of slates. ”Everything I signed. Carts, the street, Lantern Hill, two sick reports from Tiller’s Row, a boundary dispute at the north field I settled with the survey sheet, and a fodder bill I paid because it was due and you’d have paid it.” She took a breath. ”I didn’t touch the board. I didn’t touch the cooperage. The Headmaster’s in the corner. He came down yesterday and I told him your order, and he’s been there since.”

Jayde’s eyes went to the corner. Qin was on the stool by the brazier, upright, his cup on the floor beside him gone cold, his eyes open, looking at her.

For a moment she looked back at him. Then she turned to the trestle and sat down and read.

She read all of it. Meifen stood and watched her do it. Every slate. Every line of the log. The cart split. The street, and the five women, and the Temple’s man getting his figure right. The Lantern Hill line, twice, which Meifen noticed. The sick reports. The boundary. The fodder bill.

No chalk. No pen. She read the last slate and set it face down on the stack, and put both her new-skinned hands flat on the trestle, and sat like that for a moment.

”There is nothing on here,” she said, ”that I would have done differently. And two things I would have done worse.”

Meifen did not know what to do with that, so she did the thing she always did, which was say it plainly.

”Which two?”

”The street. I would have told them less, and they would have trusted it less.” Jayde looked up at her. ”And the carts. I would have had the argument with Orun, and it would have taken forty minutes.”

Meifen grinned before she could stop it.

”He said that. He said Heiteng would have got there.”

”Slower,” Jayde said. She squared the stack of slates against the edge of the trestle, carefully, as if they belonged to somebody else, which they did. ”These are yours. They stand as written.”

Then she stood, and looked at the board, with its twenty-one coins, and the order still pinned square beside it, and the crossing-out under Nothing comes to me.

She did not take it down.

Then she crossed the shed to the corner by the brazier, and the old man on the stool watched her come, and did not get up, and she stopped in front of him.

”Headmaster Qin.”

”Commander.” Qin’s voice arrived in the room, quiet, without effort, and found her exactly where she stood. ”You sent for me.”