Scarecrow

The white ship sat at the edge of the Watch for three days.

It didn’t come in. It didn’t call again. It just sat there, long and white and very plain, where the grey ships used to sit, and waited.

Tiamat watched it the whole time. From the ninth station. She said it didn’t do anything. Not once. Didn’t turn, didn’t signal, didn’t send anything out or take anything in. She said she’d never seen a ship sit so still.

“It’s not waiting for us,” said Tiamat. On the second night. Over the silver. “It’s waiting for the three days to be over. So it can say they were.”

Okafor wrote on the slate again.

Not much. On the first morning. Small, in the middle, where Quiet had been.

REACH.

And under it, smaller:

?

Nobody knew anything.

That was the thing that frightened Okafor most. I could tell. She asked everyone. Halvane, first. The Aldri have been out further than anyone; they moved Ister seven times across more of the dark than anyone else has ever crossed.

Halvane had never heard of it.

“Not the Assize,” he said. At the long table. Very slowly. “Not the Reach. Not the Bright anything.” He turned his cup round in his long hands. “We had eleven thousand years of looking at the sky, and in all of it we never heard that name.”

“Then it’s further than you’ve looked,” said Okafor.

“Or,” said Halvane, “it didn’t want to be heard.”

She asked the Overseer.

He was sitting on the porch with the dog, in Holt’s cap. He listened to all of it. The voice, and the charge, and the forty. He’d heard it at the time, through the silver; everyone had.

“The houses talked about a great many things,” he said. “In the rooms. When they thought nobody was listening, or didn’t care.” He scratched the dog’s ear. “They never once talked about anything bigger than them.”

He looked at the slate through the kitchen door.

“I always thought that was because there wasn’t anything,” said the Overseer. “Now I wonder if it was because they were afraid to.”

She asked the eldest.

Dory took the question to Root. On the second morning. She came back at noon and sat down at the long table and didn’t say anything for a while.

“She doesn’t know,” said Dory. “She says she’s been at the edge of everything for longer than there have been days, and she’s never once heard of the Reach.” Dory turned her cup round. “She says that’s not possible. She says she’d have heard. She says anything with a law and a white ship and a voice like that should have made some noise, somewhere, in all that time.”

“So?”

“So she thinks it’s very far,” said Dory. “Further than she’s ever listened.” A pause. “Or very quiet. On purpose.”

On the third evening the white ship left.

It didn’t call. It didn’t say anything. Tiamat says it turned round, very slowly, the way the houses’ ship came down on the plateau. And then it was gone. Not fast. Just gone, from one moment to the next. Out past the edge of anything she could hear.

The last thing it did, before it went, was send one line. Not to us. Out. Into the dark. Tiamat caught the edge of it and couldn’t read it.

“It’s telling someone,” said Tiamat. “That the three days are over.”

Mother said the names that night.

At the end, after Ithre, she said: “And whoever’s coming. Let them come and find us home.”

Oona said: “Goodnight, love.”

I’d like to say we got ready for the Reach. We did, a bit. Okafor put the Standing back on the walls. Halvane’s stations turned their guns out. The grandmothers went back to the arches.

But the Reach didn’t come.

I’ll write the eleven days anyway. Because they were the last ordinary ones.

The Standing went back on the walls. Not all of them. A ring round every city, and every hollow dug out again, and Kwame Osei walking every one of them with a lamp to check the floors were warm. Varra put on her suit for the first time in four years and did her forms on the north field at dawn, and the Kasrai did theirs behind her, and the children of the north town sat on the fence and watched and said nothing, because they’d been too small the last time to remember.

Small Sigmund came up the hill on the second evening with the General’s tin. He put it down on the top step beside the General without saying anything.

The General looked at it for a long time.

“Not yet,” said the General.

“You said I’d know where they were,” said small Sigmund.

“You do,” said the General. “That’s the point.” He pushed the tin back. “Put them back in your drawer, son. If it comes to it, you’ll know.”

Small Sigmund put them back in his drawer.

Old Holt started wearing a cap again. Not the first one; the Overseer has that. A new one. Maura made it. He wore it down to the red glass every morning and took it off at the count and put it back on after, the way he always has.

Small Holt asked him why.

“So I’ve got something to take off,” said Holt. “If I need to.”

Small Holt thought about it. Then he asked Maura for one too.

Something else came instead.

It started with Caddoc.

Eleven days after the white ship left. The Caddi grandmothers, the ones who’d stayed under the salt with their lamps when the body came the first time. Some of them still go up onto the salt at night. The old ones. To look at the sky. They say they spent too many years under it not to look now.

One of them came through the arch onto the red glass at dawn. At the count. Very old, very small, with her lamp. And went straight to Mother.

“The stars,” she said. “At the edge of our sky. The far side. Away from you.” She held her lamp up, as if she could show us. “They’re going out.”

Mother looked at me.

I looked at Dory.

Dory was already looking. With her black eyes. Out. Past Caddoc. Past the edge of the Hedge.

“I can’t feel anything,” said Dory. “It’s too far. It’s past where the net goes now.” She frowned. “But there’s nothing there. Where there used to be something. Like a tooth gone.”

Then Tiel.

Then Ostry, where Eska’s people walk holding each other’s sleeves. Then Sedge, where the Ennet pour the first cup for whoever isn’t at the fire. Then Kiln’s old sky, and Hyrran’s far side.

All in the same eleven days. All from the far edge. The side away from Avalon. Every Hedge world that could see that part of the dark, telling us the same thing, through the arches, at the count, one after another.

The stars are going out.

Ilka put it together.

On the Meridian, in her room, with the map and the Aldri ears. She came down through the arch at noon on the eleventh day with her board under her arm and put it on the long table in front of Okafor without saying anything.

She’d marked them. Every call that had gone quiet, out there, past the Hedge, in the last year. Every voice on any band that had been talking and had stopped. She’d been keeping the list the way Ingrid keeps Came by themselves. Ilka keeps a list of who stopped.

There were a lot of them.

And they made a shape.

I’ve seen that shape before. So had everyone at the table.

It was the shape the Hungry make when they come. An edge. Moving. With nothing behind it.

Okafor looked at it for a long time.

“It’s gone,” she said. “Tiamat said. It’s all gone. We watched it go.”

“The one we fought is gone,” said Ilka. Very quietly. “Yes.”

I went to look.

I’ll say who. Because Mother made a rule, after Ithre, that I don’t go anywhere far on my own any more, and Hana agreed with her, and Risa said if I tried she’d follow me as lightning and be very cross about it.

So: me. Dory. My wives. Dinraal and Isolde. That’s the unit. That’s who goes when it’s something nobody knows.

Mother stayed. She said someone had to pour when we came back.

We scattered.

Dory found the nearest of Ilka’s marks that she could feel. A world past Caddoc, past the edge of the Hedge, further than the net goes. Not far, for us. A breath. She took hold of the edge of where it used to be. And we went.

It had been a world.

I’ll start there. It had been. Blue and white once, Dory thought, from what was left of the clouds. There’d been people. You could see the shape of the cities from the sky, in lines across the land, like the cities on Avalon from the train.

The shape was all that was left.

Everything else was gone. Not burned. Not broken. Gone. Eaten. The cities were outlines on the ground where the cities had been, the way the shape of a picture stays on a wall when you take it down. The forests were outlines. The seas were low, very low, as if something had drunk them. The ground was grey and soft and moved, a little, under the wind.

And over it, on it, all through it, the Hungry.

Andraste drew Holdfast. Without being asked. It came out of the sheath humming. Not two notes. One. Low.

“They’re not supposed to be here,” said Andraste.

“No,” I said.

“Tiamat said they were gone. All of them. We watched.”

“We watched ours go,” I said.

There were a lot of them. Not as many as the body. A swarm. The kind we used to fight, before the body; before Caddoc. Fliers and diggers and the plated ones, the new kind, big as walking engines. Spread across the whole of what had been the world, feeding on what was left.

They hadn’t noticed us yet.

I looked at them. With my eyes black. Down into one.

And it was the same. The same as the new ones on the birthing world, the ones on Root. The same plates. The same mouths. The same way of being held together. And at the very bottom of it, under everything, the same thing.

The shape of wanting.

But it wasn’t ours.

That’s the only way I can write it. I’d been inside the spear. I’d been all the way to the middle of it, to the thing at the centre that wanted to be me. I know what that felt like. I’ll know it for the rest of my life.

This was the same kind of thing. But not the same thing. The way two people can have the same face and not be the same person.

It was smaller, in this one. A little piece of wanting, in a little swarm, on a dead world. And it wasn’t pointed at us. It wasn’t pointed at anything here.

It was pointed back.

Somewhere else. Out. Away. Further than the net goes. Further than anything. The way a hand on the end of an arm points back toward the body it’s on.

I didn’t hold back. There wasn’t any point. It took about as long as it took to look.

The swarm went. All of it. The whole of what was left of that world, every flier and digger and new one, at once. White. And the air rushing in where they’d been, across the whole of the grey ground, like a door slamming the size of a world.

Dory did the last of it. In the south. Where some of them had gone into the ground, deep, after what was left of the sea. She didn’t even go down. She just looked, from the sky, and they turned to salt under the ground, and the ground fell in over them.

Then it was quiet.

It was very quiet.

Sera found the cup.

In the outline of a house, at the end of the street. A small house; you could see where the walls had been, and the step at the front. The cup was on the step. Clay. Small. With a handle, for a hand with four fingers. Empty.

Everything else in that city was gone. The Hungry eat everything. Halloway says they eat anything with anything in it. They’d eaten the walls and the roofs and the gardens and the people.

They hadn’t eaten the cup.

Sera picked it up. Very carefully. And held it.

“There was nothing in it,” she said. “That’s why. It was empty. There was nothing in it for them.”

She didn’t put it back. She brought it home. It’s on the kitchen sill now. Beside Ilas’s lamp and the moss woman’s jar.

Mother pours a little into it, every morning. Then pours it out.

We stood on the grey ground in the middle of an outline of a city. All of us. In what had been a street. You could see the lines of where the houses had stood. Small ones. In rows.

Hana knelt down. And put her hand on the ground. The way Mother does.

“There’s nothing,” said Hana. “Not even a queen.”

“Eaten,” said Luna.

“No,” said Dory. She was standing very still, with her eyes shut. “Gone. Before. She left before they came. She’s not here.” She opened her eyes. “I think she knew. I think she went to sleep, very deep, so they couldn’t find her. Like the eldest did with the false roads.”

“Can we wake her?”

“Not now,” said Dory. “She’s too far down. She’d have to want to.” A pause. “She’ll hear Mother pour, maybe. If we come back.”

We went to four more.

I won’t write them all. They were the same. Worlds that had been something, past the edge of the Hedge, eaten down to their outlines. Swarms on them. Feeding. Every swarm with the same small piece of wanting at the bottom of it, pointing back. Out. Away. To the same place.

We cleared every one. It wasn’t hard. It took a day.

The last one still had people on it.

Not many. Dory heard them before we got there. A few hundred, under a mountain, the way the Caddi live under their salt. In the deep. With the swarm over their heads, digging down toward them. Very close.

We were in time.

I want that written down too. Because so often we aren’t.

We were in time. Two hundred and twelve of them, small and grey, with eyes like lamps, under a mountain, with the swarm a few hundred yards over their heads. Dory scattered the swarm to salt and I asked the mountain to close over the hole they’d dug, and when we came down into the deep, the two hundred and twelve were all sitting together in the middle of the biggest cave with their hands over their eyes.

They thought we were more Hungry.

Andraste knelt down. And put Holdfast on the floor of the cave in front of her, flat. And held her hands out, empty.

The oldest of them looked at her for a long time between his fingers.

Then he took his hands away from his eyes.

Dory cut the arch. The thread way. From their cave to the red glass.

Mother was there with two hundred and twelve cups.

The oldest of them, the one who’d taken his hands away from his eyes, stood on the red glass in the dawn and looked at the cup in his hands for a long time. Then at Mother. Then at the town going up the hill behind her, the roofs and the gardens and the smoke from the chimneys and the trains going out.

He said something in his own language. Long and low.

The silver turned it for us, slowly.

“He says,” said Dory, “they’d stopped looking up. Years ago. Because everything that came down from the sky ate someone.” She listened. “He says he’s going to start again.”

He drank the cup. All of it. Then held it out.

Mother filled it again.

Wren wrote them down. 212.

Ione said it was a good number. She said it was always a good number.

That night I sat at the long table with Okafor and Halvane and Tiamat and Ilka, and Dory, and told them what I’d felt. The small piece of wanting at the bottom of every swarm. Pointing back.

Halvane listened very carefully. With his long hands flat on the table.

“Pointing,” he said. “At something.”

“Yes.”

“Something you can’t feel. It’s too far.”

“Yes.”

Halvane looked at Tiamat. Tiamat looked at Ilka.

“Then we’ll listen for it,” said Halvane.

I didn’t know what he meant. I do now.

The Aldri have ears. Not like Ilka’s; better. They built them over eleven thousand years, to hear the Sorn coming, and the Ashen, and the Hungry, so they could move Ister before anything arrived. They’d put them on the Meridian and on Tiamat’s nine stations and on all twenty-six of their own. They can hear further than anything any of us have ever built.

But they’d only ever listened for calls. Voices. Ships talking. Radios. Things that make a sound on purpose.

The Hungry don’t make a sound on purpose.

They breathe.

Tiamat remembered first. The third morning, on Root, when the body pulled in to make the spear. She’d heard it. Over the silver. With her ears in every moon.

“It breathed,” said Tiamat. “Before it came. On the first morning. When it came over the edge of the Watch. The whole sky drew breath at once. Lucas heard it. Everyone on Root heard it.” She looked at Halvane. “It had a sound. Not a voice. A sound. Very low.”

“How low?”

Tiamat told him. In numbers. I didn’t understand them. Halvane did.

He sat back in his chair.

“We’ve never listened down there,” said Halvane. “Nobody listens down there. There’s nothing down there to hear.”

“There is now,” said Tiamat.

It took them nine days.

The queens knew before they finished.

On the fourth night, the Scarecrow queen called me down to the garden wall. With her head on the stones and her young round her and the light going. She’d heard Tiamat on the silver, describing the sound. Everyone under the town had.

We know that sound, said the queen.

I sat down on the wall.

Not this one. Not these. But the sound. She was quiet for a long time. There is a song. Very old. Older than me. Older than the heavy queen. It came from the eldest’s daughters, the first ones, the ones she sang to before she learned. It is not a song for singing. It is a song for remembering.

“What does it say?”

It says, said the Scarecrow queen, that once, very far off, before there were the Sorn or the Ashen or anyone with a name, there was a long breath in the dark. And the queens who heard it went deep, and slept, and waited, and when they woke, it had passed them by. She lifted her head. It says: if you hear the long breath, go down. Go down and wait.

I didn’t say anything.

We will not, said the queen. Go down. Not this time.

“Why not?”

Because last time, said the Scarecrow queen, nobody poured.

Halvane’s people, and Tiamat’s, and Ilka, and Bell with her numbers, and Keir and Enna, and Asha, talking too fast, with Eve telling her to stop. They turned every ear we had. Every one. On every station, every ship, every moon. And they turned them down. Below where anyone listens. To where there’s nothing to hear.

And then they turned them out.

Away from the Hedge. Past the edge. Past where the net goes, and the Watch, and the furthest place the Aldri ever moved Ister to. Out. Into the dark. The way the small pieces of wanting had been pointing.

And they listened.

I was in the map room when they heard it.

The ninth morning. Early. Before the count. Tiamat’s wall was lit up with Halvane’s light and Ilka’s marks, and the silver on the table was very quiet, and everyone in the room was very still.

Then Ilka put her hand up.

Nobody said anything.

She turned something on the board. Very slowly. And put it through to the silver on the table. So we could all hear.

It was breathing.

Very low. So low I didn’t hear it so much as feel it, in my chest, in the table under my hands. A long breath in. A long breath out. Very slow. So slow that one breath took the time it takes Mother to pour a cup.

I knew it. Everyone in the room who’d been on Root knew it.

It was the sound the sky made on the first morning. When the body came over the edge of the Watch and drew breath, and every thread in Root’s sky went taut.

Only it wasn’t coming from the edge of the Watch.

It was coming from so far away that Tiamat’s numbers stopped meaning anything.

And it was bigger.

“How big,” said Okafor.

Tiamat didn’t answer straight away. She was looking at the wall. At what Halvane’s light was drawing on it, out of the sound.

A shape.

I’ll describe it once.

It was the shape of the body. The one we fought. The one that came over the edge of the Watch as wide as the sky, that came at three worlds at once, that took three days and every queen on Avalon and the eldest herself to break.

Only on Tiamat’s wall, drawn out of that breathing, the body we fought would have been a finger.

The thing on the wall was a hand. And an arm. And a shoulder. And more than that, going back, off the edge of the wall, off the edge of Halvane’s light, into the dark, further than the ears could follow.

Nobody said anything.

“There’s more,” said Ilka. Very quietly.

She turned the board again.

Another one. In a different direction. Further.

And another.

And another.

Six.

That’s how many the ears found, in the nine days, before the count, before the light came up over the long table. Six of them. Out in the dark, past anywhere anyone has a name for, very far apart from each other, in every direction.

Each one breathing.

Each one so big that the body we fought on Root would have been a finger on it.

“The one we fought,” said Okafor. In the end. Very steady. “On Root. It wasn’t the body.”

“No,” said Tiamat.

“We called it the body. Because it was what the arms were reaching for.” Okafor looked at the wall. “It was an arm.”

“It was the end of a finger,” said Halvane. “If that.”

Dory was sitting at the end of the long table. With Dusk off. Looking at the wall with her black eyes.

“They’re pointed,” she said. “The small ones. On the dead worlds. The bits of wanting.” She didn’t look away from the wall. “They were pointing at this.”

She put her finger on the nearest of the six. The one Ilka had found first. The one whose hand, on the wall, was reaching toward the edge of the Hedge.

“That’s where the swarms came from,” said Dory. “That’s what’s eating the stars. It’s not coming here. Not yet.” She took her finger away. “It’s just eating. On its way.”

“On its way where?” said Okafor.

Dory didn’t answer.

She didn’t need to.

Mother came into the map room.

With the pot. It was the count; she’d been on the red glass, and the sun was up, and she’d come straight up the hill because somebody always comes up the hill to get her when something’s happened, and nobody had, and she knew what that meant.

She stood in the doorway and looked at the wall.

For a long time.

Then she came in. And put the pot down on the long table. And poured. Into everyone’s cup. All the way round. Slowly.

Nobody spoke.

When she’d finished, she looked at the wall again.

“Well,” said Mother. “They’re a long way off.”

“Yes,” said Tiamat.

“How long?”

Tiamat told her. Not in numbers. In years. I’m not going to write it. It isn’t many, for something that size. It isn’t many at all.

Mother nodded.

“Then we’ve got time to get ready,” said Mother. “And time for everyone to have their tea first.”

The eldest heard. Through Dory. Through the ground. All the way from Root.

I did not know, she said. Very quietly. To all of us. I have been at the edge of everything since before there were days. I did not know there were more.

They did not breathe toward me, said the eldest. I never listened down there. Nobody did.

A long quiet.

Now we will, said the eldest.

Okafor went to the slate.

In the kitchen. It still said REACH, small, and the question mark under it. She looked at it for a long time with the chalk in her hand.

Then she wrote under it. Not small.

6.

And under that, after a while, the way she wrote STANDING once, the morning after Asylum, in letters nobody could miss:

READY.

Holt was at the long table behind her with his new cap on his knee. He read it.

“How?” said Holt. Not unkindly. The way he asks everything.

“I don’t know yet,” said Okafor. She put the chalk down. “I didn’t know how the first time either. Or the time after. I never have.” She looked at the six on the slate. “That’s never once stopped it being the word.”

Holt nodded slowly, the way he does when he’s agreed with something he can’t yet see the end of. And put his cap on. And went down to the red glass to tell Crane he’d need a bigger board.

Ingrid took Ilka’s list.

The one of everyone who’d stopped. She came up the hill that evening and asked Ilka for it, very politely, and Ilka gave it to her, and Ingrid took it home and sat at her kitchen table with it all night, with Konrad asleep in the chair beside her and the lamp turned very low.

In the morning there was a third sheet. Beside Came by themselves and the big one Konrad keeps face up. Pinned to the wall with Voss’s wire.

Stopped, it said at the top. In Ingrid’s hand.

And under it, every call on Ilka’s list. Every one. Not as numbers. As whatever name the call had given, if it had given one. A world. A ship. A town. A voice that had said one word over and over on the old band and then not.

“Someone should,” said Ingrid. When Konrad asked her. “Keep them. Somewhere they’re not just a shape on a wall.”

Konrad looked at it for a long time. Then he took his pen and wrote, very small, at the bottom of the sheet:

Still out.

I went out onto the porch afterward.

It was full morning. Sun on the town, all the way down the hill to the red glass. The trains going out of Crane’s room toward every city. The warm rain in the courtyard where Kesh and Lio and Oona were making it for nobody, because somebody might come.

Small Holt was on the bottom step with old Holt. Shouting at a bird.

Ysse’s note was still going, very faint, under the red glass. The one she hums at the count.

Dory came out and sat down beside me on the top step. Where she used to sit when she was small and had a question too big for the house.

“Dad,” she said.

“I know.”

“Six.”

“I know.”

“And the Reach.”

“Yes.”

“And the hand. Wherever it went. With the unborn ones. And the Ashen.”

“Yes.”

She was quiet for a long time.

“I thought it was over,” said Dory. “For four years. I thought we’d just build.”

“So did I.”

She leaned on my shoulder. The way she did on Root, on the second night, with her hair lying down.

“It’s never over, is it,” said Dory.

I thought about Father. About the kitchen wall in the old house, with the periodic table on it in paint, and the notebooks, and him sitting me down at four years old because I’d put water on the moon and if I was going to do big things I had to know what everything was made of.

“No,” I said. “It’s never over. That’s why Grandad painted the wall.”

Dory didn’t say anything.

Then she took Dusk out of her pocket. And put it on.

“Then I’d better go and learn some more,” said Dory.

She went inside. To the kitchen. To the wall behind the stove, where I painted it from memory, where Lio drew a knot in the empty square at the end.

I heard her start at the top. Hydrogen.

Out loud.

Days 8531–8573. Going Dark.

The white ship sat three days without moving; it was waiting so it could say they were over. Okafor wrote REACH, and a question mark. Halvane never heard the name in eleven thousand years; or it didn’t want to be heard. The Overseer: the houses never talked about anything bigger than them; maybe they were afraid to. The eldest never heard of it either. It left and told someone. Mother: whoever’s coming, let them find us home. The Standing back on the walls; the General: not yet; you’ll know. Holt wore a cap again, to have something to take off. Then the Caddi grandmother at the count: the stars are going out. Tiel, Ostry, Sedge, Kiln’s sky, Hyrran’s far side; all the far edge. Ilka keeps a list of who stopped, and it made the shape the Hungry make. Mother’s rule: nobody far alone. We scattered past the Hedge to worlds eaten down to outlines, and swarms on them, and at the bottom of each a small piece of wanting, not ours, pointing back. Holdfast hummed one note. Sera found an empty cup on a step; there was nothing in it for them; it’s on the sill now. The queen there went to sleep deep before they came. Five worlds cleared in a day; on the last, two hundred and twelve under a mountain with their hands over their eyes; Andraste put Holdfast down; we were in time. He says he’s going to start looking up again. Halvane: then we’ll listen for it. The Scarecrow queen: there’s an old song: if you hear the long breath, go down and wait. We will not; last time nobody poured. The Hungry don’t call; they breathe. Tiamat remembered how low. Nine days turning every ear down, then out. Then the breathing on the long table, the sound the sky made on Root’s first morning, from so far away the numbers stopped meaning anything. On the wall, the body we fought would be a finger. A hand, an arm, a shoulder, more. Then another, and another: six. Okafor: it was an arm. Halvane: the end of a finger. Dory: that’s where the swarms came from; it’s just eating, on its way. Okafor wrote 6, and under it READY; how? I never have known; that’s never once stopped it being the word. Ingrid made a third sheet, Stopped; Konrad wrote under it: still out. Mother poured: they’re a long way off; then we’ve got time to get ready, and time for tea first. The eldest: I never listened down there; now we will. Dory on the step: it’s never over. No; that’s why Grandad painted the wall. Then I’d better learn some more. Hydrogen. Out loud.