Scarecrow

I asked Aune on the roof whether Halvane had been exaggerating.

It was the fourth night of the thirty. The storm out at sea, four miles further out than it used to be. Seven of us on the warm slates. Everyone very tired, the way everyone on the hill has been tired since the voice on every band, and nobody saying so.

“About Ister,” I said. “Bedtime stories. Drawings on walls. He was being kind.”

Aune didn’t answer straight away.

Then she sat up. All the long way up, the way the Aldri do, with her grey hair falling down her back. And looked at me with her very bright eyes for a long time.

“Come to Ister,” said Aune.

“What?”

“Tomorrow,” said Aune. “Come to Ister with me. Not the engine room. Not the long table in the deepest city with my grandfather. Out. In the squares. In the day. Walk about with me in public like a person.” She smiled. Very slowly. “Then you can tell me if he was being kind.”

“All of us,” said Sera. Immediately.

“It’s a lot of people,” I said.

“It’s thirty days,” said Sera. “Maybe less. We’ve had four of them already. If the Collective wants a war at the end of it, I’d like one day in the middle that isn’t about the Collective.” She lay back on the slates. “I’d like to go shopping on another world with my husband and my wife and my children. Like a normal family.”

Risa laughed.

“We’re not a normal family,” said Risa.

“No,” said Sera. “That’s why I’d like to pretend.”

So we all went.

I’ll write who. Because it’s a lot, and because Mother says I should get it right for the children, who’ll read this one day and want to know they were there.

Me. Aune, at the front, in her flight robe, because she said nobody on Ister would know her in anything else. Luna. Sera, not round yet, very pleased about it. Risa with her hair on end. Hana. Andraste with Holdfast on her back, because she doesn’t go anywhere without it, and the one white ribbon on the hilt.

Dory, twenty-two, with Dusk.

Trevor and Elin. Sigmund, who is not small. Kesh, with a cloud. Ash, home from Odra’s forge for the week with soot still under her nails. Goldie. Kwame. Efua. Abena, let out of the long ward by Halloway for one day on the condition that she didn’t breathe for anyone she wasn’t related to. Corin and Thessaly and Vessa. Tiri, with her ribbon. Oona, who’s not mine but is Mother’s, which is the same thing on the hill. Lio, who’s Sefa’s, which is also the same thing.

And the four.

I should write about the four properly. I haven’t. Mother says I left them in the heap for four years without giving them a chapter, and that’s not fair, because they’ve been there the whole time and they’re Dasks now.

They are. Officially. Okafor wrote it on the slate in the third quiet year, and Konrad wrote it on the sheet, and Wren read it out at the count. Dask. All four. The nine from the bottom shelf in the middle; five found their people, and four had nobody. They went into the heap, and then they went into the house, and then we asked them if they wanted to stay, and they said yes.

Each of them chose a mother. That’s how it works in our house. Children belong to their mother’s house first, the way the Aldri say. So they each chose.

The girl with ears like leaves and no hair chose Risa.

She’s eight now. Maybe. Nobody knows when she was born. She follows Dory everywhere, the way Dory used to follow me, and won’t sleep until Dory’s said goodnight. Dory named her. She said she’d never named anyone before and wanted to get it right, and took a week.

Sorrel. After the weed that grows in the cracks of the red glass, that comes back every spring however many times Nan Vey pulls it up.

“Because it doesn’t give up,” said Dory. “And because it’s green. And so are her ears.”

Sorrel’s ears are very green. They go darker when she’s pleased. They were dark green the whole day on Ister.

The boy chose Hana.

He was the smallest of the nine. So thin Halloway didn’t think he’d live the first night. Hana breathed for him for three days without stopping, in the long ward, and on the fourth morning he opened his eyes and looked at her and put his hand on her face. He’s never let go since. Not really.

He’s from a people none of us know. Ithel didn’t know his world. He has very large dark eyes and skin the colour of river stones, and he hums when he’s thinking, very low, not Corin’s two notes but something like it.

Hana named him Fen. After the wet ground at the bottom of the rain valley where she and Abbe walk in the mornings. Where things grow that you wouldn’t expect.

The other girl chose Luna.

She’s quiet. Quieter than Luna. She has fine silver scales on her arms and the backs of her hands, very small, like frost on a window, and when she’s cold they go white. She was always cold, the first year. She’s not now. She sits with Luna on the north field fence at night when Luna can’t sleep, the way Aune used to, and doesn’t say anything at all.

Luna named her Linnet. After a small brown bird on Earth that used to come to the window of the cadet barracks in the winter, when Luna was very young and couldn’t sleep. Luna said she’d never told anyone that. She told Linnet.

And the last boy chose Andraste.

That surprised everyone. Except Andraste.

He’s the oldest of the four. Ten, maybe. Square. Solid. Very serious. He has four arms. Two big ones and two small ones lower down, which he uses for holding things while the big ones are busy. He followed Andraste to the ridge on Hyrran the first time she went after he came out of the long ward. He sat on the rock beside Kyria’s and watched Andraste do her forms with Holdfast for three hours without moving.

When she’d finished, he picked up a stick. In both big hands. And did them back to her. All of them. In order.

Kyria looked at him for a long time.

“That one,” said Kyria.

Andraste named him Teo. It’s an old Hyrrani name. It means he stays standing.

She’d wanted a daughter who’d hold a blade, she said on the roof. She says Teo will do until the daughter comes along. Teo says he heard that, and he doesn’t mind.

So that’s who went. Twenty-seven of us, counting Aune and me, and Abena, and Oona and Lio and Tiri.

We went through the arch from the red glass at dawn. After the names. After the cups.

Mother stood at the arch with the pot and watched us go.

“Behave,” said Mother. To all of us. Me included.

Ister in the morning is gold.

It always is. The lamp’s still there, at the centre of everything, even though they don’t need it now they’re beside us. Halvane says they’ll never turn it off. He says it’s the first thing an Aldri child sees and he wants them to keep seeing it.

So Ister’s sky is gold. Not blue. And the squares in the cities under it are gold too, the stone of them, very pale, very old, smooth from eleven thousand years of very tall people walking on it slowly.

We came out of the arch into the biggest square in the second city. The market one. Aune said it was the busiest place on Ister in the mornings.

It was.

It went quiet.

That’s what I’ll remember first. The noise of a great many Aldri at their morning market, which is a soft noise, because the Aldri don’t shout. And then us, coming out of the arch, twenty-seven of us. And then the noise stopped.

Not all at once. In a ring. Going out from the arch, across the square, the way a ripple goes out across a pond. Every Aldri in the square stopped what they were doing, and turned round, and looked.

At us.

At me.

“Oh,” said Kesh. Very quietly. Under her cloud.

Then a child shouted.

The Aldri don’t shout. I’ve said that. Their children do, a bit, the way all children do. This one was very small, sitting on her father’s shoulders on the far side of the square. She saw us. She pointed. And shouted something in Aldri, very loud, that Dot wasn’t there to turn, but I didn’t need her to.

My name.

And then everyone was moving.

Not toward us all at once. The Aldri are too polite for that. But slowly. Carefully. The way they move. A great many very tall people, coming across the gold stone of the market square toward the arch. Smiling. Talking. Holding their children up so they could see.

Aune put her hand on my arm.

“Well?” she said. Very quietly. “Was he being kind?”

I didn’t say anything.

I couldn’t.

It wasn’t just me.

I want that written down first. Because it’s the thing that surprised me more than any of it.

They knew my wives.

They knew Risa. A whole crowd of young Aldri pilots came across the square to her, from the fighter fields on the edge of the city, still in their flight robes. They’d flown beside her wing on Root. They’d seen her call the lightning through Dory’s hand in a net across the whole sky. They called her something in Aldri that Aune said meant the one who holds the storm by its collar. One of them asked her to sign the inside of his flight helmet. Risa laughed so hard her hair stood up even further.

She signed it. With a little lightning. It’s still there, Aune says. He won’t let anyone clean it.

They knew Sera. The Aldri children did. They’d heard she burned as hot as a dying star, and they wanted to know if it was true, and they wanted her to show them, and she held her hand out flat and made a very small flame in it, no bigger than a candle, and they stood round her in a ring with their mouths open. One of them asked if it hurt. Sera said no. Sera said it was the warmest thing in the world.

Then she made it into a little bird. A fire bird. And it flew up out of her hand over the square, very slowly, and went out. And every Aldri child in the square screamed.

The good kind.

They knew Hana. The old Aldri. The very old ones, the ones Ilas’s age, who sit on benches at the edge of the square in the mornings. They’d heard about her breathing for the Standing on Root. A whole line of them came, very slowly, with sticks, and stood in front of her. And one of them, the oldest, said something very quietly.

Aune turned it. “She says,” said Aune, “that she’s a hundred and eighty, and her chest has been tight for forty years, and she’d heard there was a woman on Avalon who could make it not be.”

Hana looked at her.

Then she put her hand flat on the old woman’s chest. Very gently. And breathed.

The old woman stood there for a long time. With her eyes shut.

Then she opened them, and took a breath of her own. All the way in. All the way down. And started to cry.

Abena, beside Hana, looked at me.

“I’m not breathing for anyone I’m not related to,” said Abena. “I promised Halloway.”

“I know.”

“Mum is, though,” said Abena. And went and stood beside her mother and held the next old woman’s hand.

They knew Luna. Of course they did. She’s the one who made the roads across the sky on Root. White, from fight to fight. The Aldri engineers came for her; a whole group of them, very serious, from the second city’s workshops, wanting to know how the ice held its shape at that height without anything under it.

Luna told them. In detail. For an hour. With her hands.

It was the most I’ve ever heard her talk to strangers in my life. Linnet sat at her feet the whole time with her silver scales gone a very pale pink, which Halloway says means she’s happy.

And Andraste.

The Aldri don’t carry blades. They’ve never needed to; they had the engine. But they’d heard about Holdfast. About the blade with a door in the middle of it that took the whole Ashen wave on the third morning of the body. About the woman who cut forty Ashen ships out of the sky in one morning.

They wanted to see it.

So Andraste took Holdfast off her back. In the middle of the market square. And held it up. Flat. In the gold light. With the one white ribbon on the hilt.

The square went very quiet again.

Then a very small Aldri boy, about Teo’s age, came out of the crowd on his own. Walked straight up to her. Looked up at the blade. Then at her.

And bowed. All the way. The way Halvane bowed to Dory on the steps of the deepest city.

Teo, beside Andraste, with his four arms folded very seriously, bowed back.

And Aune.

I should have known. I didn’t. I never do.

They knew Aune best of all.

She’s the north squadron. She held the reef on Root with one arm. She was the one who walked onto the far town of the Lenn in her fighter and sat on the wing and waited for the children. She’s Ceren’s. Everyone on Ister knows Ceren’s name; it’s on the wall. And she’s Halvane’s granddaughter, and Ilas’s, and she married the man the children have drawings of on their walls, eleven days before the first star.

They came up to her one at a time. Very slowly. The Aldri way. And said things to her I didn’t understand. And she answered every one of them, and touched their hands, and some of them cried, and so did she.

“I’ve flown over this square every day for forty years,” she said to me. Later. Very quietly. “I’ve never once walked across it with anyone.”

We ate at noon in a hall at the edge of the square. Aune chose it. A long low room with one very long table down the middle of it, the way the Aldri eat, everyone together, strangers beside strangers, passing bowls.

The owner was very old. Older than Ilas, almost. She came out of the kitchen when we came in and looked at us for a long time. At all twenty-seven.

Then she said something to Aune in Aldri. Aune went the colour of a shell.

“She says,” said Aune, “her son flew in my squadron. On Root. On the second day.” Aune stopped. “He’s on the wall now. Beside Ceren.”

I didn’t say anything.

The old woman looked at me. And then she said something else, and turned round, and went back into the kitchen.

“She says we don’t pay,” said Aune. Very quietly. “She says we never pay. Not here. Not ever.”

She brought the food herself. All of it. Bowl after bowl. Aldri food is pale and light and tastes of things I don’t have names for. Kesh ate four bowls of something gold. Fen ate everything Hana put in front of him and then everything Hana didn’t. Sorrel’s ears went so dark green they were nearly black.

Linnet didn’t eat at all. Not for a long time. She sat beside Luna with her frosted hands in her lap and watched the old woman going in and out of the kitchen.

Then she got up. Very quietly. And went into the kitchen after her.

Luna went to fetch her, after a while. She came back without her.

“She’s washing up,” said Luna. “They’re doing it together. Neither of them’s saying anything.”

Linnet came out an hour later with her scales gone pink. The old woman came out behind her and put a hand on her head, very gently, on the way past. The way Mother does.

We went to the shopping plaza after that.

It’s new. The Aldri built it after they came beside us, in the first year, when the trains started and the arches opened and Avalon and Ister started buying things off each other. It’s at the edge of the second city. Big. Gold stone like the squares, and glass roofs very high up, and a great many small shops in rows under them, the way a market goes, only indoors.

Aune said we had to see it. She wouldn’t say why.

I found out why in the third shop.

It was a toy shop. A big one. With a window full of very well-made Aldri things that moved: birds like Tiri’s, and little ships that flew round the shop on their own, and a small engine you could wind up that moved a small Ister round a small lamp.

And on the middle shelf, at the front, in a row, me.

I’m going to write this exactly. Because nobody will believe me otherwise.

It was a figure. About the length of my hand. Very well made. The Aldri make everything very well. It was a man in a long coat, with dark hair, and black eyes. All black. The way mine go.

Its arms moved. Its legs moved. It came with a little stand, and a little red glass base, and a very small teapot.

On the box it said something in Aldri. Aune turned it for me. She was trying very hard not to laugh.

“The Man Who Asks Stars to Be Steps,” said Aune. “With Light-Up Eyes.”

I pressed the button on its back.

Its eyes lit up. Black. Which shouldn’t be possible. The Aldri had managed it anyway.

There were others.

Further along the shelf. Smaller. In a set. Five women, very well made. One with hair on end and a little lightning bolt. One with a flame in her hand. One very still with frost on her. One with her hand on her chest, breathing. One with a very small Holdfast, and a door in the middle of it that actually opened.

And a sixth. On her own. Very tall, very thin, in a grey flight robe, with long grey hair. With a fighter.

“They added me last month,” said Aune. Very red. The colour of the inside of a shell. “When the wedding was in the news.”

There was a seventh.

At the very end of the shelf. A young woman. Very tall. With black eyes that lit up and glasses you could take off and a net, made of very fine silver thread, that went out from her hands to tiny figures of everyone else on the shelf.

The box said The World-Breaker.

Dory looked at it for a long time.

“They’ve made my nose too small,” said Dory.

Kesh bought one of Dory. With her own money. Sigmund bought one of Risa and pretended it was for Sorrel. Trevor bought one of Luna and didn’t pretend anything.

Teo bought the Andraste one. With the little door. He opened and closed the door the whole rest of the day, very seriously, with his small hands, while his big hands held Andraste’s.

Corin bought Tiri the one of her mother.

Tiri held it very carefully. Then she bought him one of me.

“So you know what you’re going to look like,” said Tiri. “When you’re old.”

Corin looked at the figure for a long time.

“I don’t want light-up eyes,” said Corin.

“You’ll get them anyway,” said Dory. “Sorry.”

There was a comic.

In the shop next door, which sells books and pictures. A whole wall of them. Aldri comics are long and very beautiful and drawn in gold and white, and this one was on a stand in the middle of the shop, in a stack as tall as Teo.

The Asker, it was called. Volume nine.

Volume nine.

I opened it. It was the third morning on Root. The spear coming down. A man going up into it. Drawn so well you could feel the air go white.

On the last page there was a woman standing on the plateau with her hands up, palms up, lifting a ship the size of a city, with her long brown coat blowing round her knees.

To be continued, it said underneath.

“They’re going to want to put Gran in the next one,” said Elin. Very quietly. “She’s going to be furious.”

“She’s going to buy every copy,” said Ash.

They were both right.

And there was a book.

A real one. Bound. In the window of the same shop. Very thick. With a picture on the front of the red glass at dawn, and the porch at the top of the hill, and a man on the steps with a cup.

Aune turned the title for me. She’d stopped trying not to laugh.

“Lucas Dask: A Life,” said Aune. “By Imre Oshan.”

“Who’s Imre Oshan?”

“The most famous writer on Ister,” said Aune. “In eleven thousand years. She wrote the history of every move. Every jump. She’s three hundred and two.” She took the book out of the window. “She came to Avalon in the second year. You won’t remember. She sat at the long table for a week and asked your mother questions and drank tea.”

I didn’t remember.

“Mother let her,” said Aune. “Mother told her everything. She said someone should write it down who wasn’t you.”

I opened it in the middle.

It was about Father. The kitchen wall. The periodic table, in paint. A boy of four who’d put water on the moon, sitting at the table while his father explained hydrogen.

I closed it again.

I didn’t say anything for a long time.

“Is it right?” said Aune. Very gently.

“Yes,” I said. “She got it right.”

Imre Oshan was in the back of the shop.

I didn’t know. Nobody told me. She was sitting at a small desk in the corner, very old, very thin, very tall even sitting down, with her grey hair in a long plait and a pen in her long hand and a great many papers in front of her. Writing.

She looked up when I came round the end of the shelf with her book in my hands.

“Ah,” said Imre Oshan. In our language. Very slowly. She’d learned it at the long table, she told me later. In a week. From Mother. “There you are.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“You don’t remember me,” she said.

“No. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” said Imre Oshan. “You were very busy. You were building a city that week, for eleven thousand people coming home from one of the stock worlds, and you’d promised them it would be finished before their grandmothers came through the arch. You came in every night covered in stone dust and your mother made you wash before you sat down.” She put her pen down. “I sat at the other end of the table and watched you eat. You never once looked up.”

Aune, behind me, made a small noise.

“He never does,” said Aune.

“No,” said Imre Oshan. “So I asked your mother instead. She knew everything. She’s the best source I’ve had in three hundred years.” She looked at the book in my hands. “Have you read it?”

“A page.”

“Which page?”

“The kitchen wall.”

She nodded. Very slowly.

“That was the one I worried about most,” said Imre Oshan. “Your mother cried when she told me. I wanted to get it right for her.”

“You did.”

She looked at me for a long time.

“I’m writing another,” she said. “About now. The Collective. The Assize. The thirty days.” She picked her pen up again. “I’d like to know how it ends before I finish it. If that’s not too much to ask.”

“So would I,” I said.

Imre Oshan smiled. The slow Aldri way.

“Then go and find out,” she said. “And come back and tell me. Your mother says someone should write it down who isn’t you.”

Then the children came.

Not mine. The Aldri children. A few at first. Then a great many. Very tall for their age, all of them, the way Aldri children are, and very shy, and very determined. Holding things. The figures. The comics. Pieces of paper.

The first one was a girl about Sorrel’s age. She came up to me in the middle of the bookshop and held out the figure of me with the light-up eyes, and a small Aldri pen, and said something in Aldri very fast.

“She wants you to sign it,” said Aune.

“Sign it?”

“Your name,” said Aune. “On the box. So she can show everyone at school that you were really here.”

I signed it.

Then the next one. And the next. Figures and comics and scraps of paper and the insides of flight helmets and one very small Aldri boy’s arm, which his mother said was all right. And the backs of their hands. And a lot of copies of Imre Oshan’s book, which I signed very carefully on the first page, under her name.

It took two hours.

My children watched.

All of them. Standing in a line along the shelves of the bookshop with their figures in their hands. Watching their father sign a very small Aldri boy’s arm.

Kesh looked at me for a long time. Under her cloud.

Then she turned to Sigmund.

“Did you know Dad was cool?” said Kesh.

Sigmund thought about it.

“No,” said Sigmund. Very honestly. “I thought he was just Dad.”

“He signs things,” said Kesh. “People want his name on things.”

“I know.”

“That’s cool,” said Kesh. Very seriously. “That’s actually cool.”

Trevor said: “I knew.”

Everyone looked at him.

“Teva’s got the figure,” said Trevor. “On her shelf. She’s had it for three years.” He went a bit red. “She never told me. I found it. She said it was research.”

Abena said: “Halloway’s got the book.”

Everyone looked at her.

“In the long ward,” said Abena. “Under the desk. She reads it on the night shift. She thinks nobody knows.”

Corin didn’t say anything.

He was standing beside Tiri with his figure of me in his hands. Very still. Looking at the line of Aldri children waiting for me to sign their arms.

“They tell stories about him at bedtime,” said Tiri. Very quietly. To him. “Grandad told you. Here. Every night.”

“I know,” said Corin.

“About him asking a bird to fly again,” said Tiri. “In my hands. That’s the first one. That’s the one every Aldri child knows.” She looked at him. “Only it wasn’t Dad. It was you.”

Corin looked at her.

“They got it wrong,” said Tiri. “In the stories. Even Grandad tells it wrong. It was you, and they all think it was him.” She smiled. Very slowly. The Aldri way. “I’ve never told anyone.”

Corin didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then he hummed. Two notes. Very quietly.

“Don’t,” said Corin. “Don’t tell anyone. He’d hate it.”

I heard that. I wasn’t meant to. I was signing a comic for a very small girl who wanted me to draw a teapot on it.

I didn’t hate it.

I’ll write that here, so Corin knows. When he reads this.

I didn’t hate it at all.

We came home through the arch at the turn.

Twenty-seven of us. With bags. With figures and comics and three copies of Imre Oshan’s book and one very small Aldri pen that I’d forgotten to give back.

Mother was on the porch. Of course. With the pot. Lifting it a finger’s width, with Oona’s step beside it empty, because Oona was coming up the hill behind me with a bag.

Mother looked at all of us.

Then she looked at Elin, at the back, holding volume nine of The Asker with the last page open.

She put the porch down.

“Elin,” said Mother. “What is that.”

Elin looked at me. I looked at Ash.

Ash said: “It’s you, Gran. Lifting a ship. In a comic.”

Mother looked at it for a long time.

“How many of those are there?” said Mother.

“On Ister?” said Aune. “About four million.”

Mother didn’t say anything.

She poured. Twenty-seven cups.

Then she sat down on the top step, which she doesn’t, much. And held out her hand.

Elin gave her the comic.

Mother read it. All of it. From the first page to the last. In the light from the kitchen door, with her cup going cold beside her and twenty-seven of us standing on the porch not saying anything.

When she got to the last page she looked at it for a long time.

“They’ve got the coat right,” said Mother.

She closed it. And put it on her knee.

“I want volume ten,” said Mother. “When it comes out. Somebody fetch it.”

Days 8917–8918. Famous.

On the fourth night of the thirty: was he being kind? Come to Ister and walk about with me in public like a person. Sera: one day in the middle that isn’t about the Collective; we’re not a normal family; that’s why I’d like to pretend. Twenty-seven of us. The four from the bottom shelf, Dasks now, each choosing a mother: Sorrel with leaf ears, Risa’s, named by Dory after the weed in the red glass that won’t give up; Fen with river-stone skin, Hana’s, who breathed for him three days; Linnet with frost scales, Luna’s, after a bird on her mother’s sill; Teo with four arms, Andraste’s, who did her forms back with a stick; that one, said Kyria; he stays standing. Mother: behave. The old woman at the eating hall: her son’s on the wall beside Ceren; we never pay, not ever; Linnet went and washed up with her. The gold square went quiet in a ring, and then a small girl shouted my name. They knew my wives: Risa, who holds the storm by its collar, signing a helmet with lightning; Sera’s fire bird; Hana breathing for a hundred-and-eighty-year-old chest; Luna explaining ice for an hour; the small boy bowing to Holdfast, and Teo bowing back; Aune best of all: forty years over this square and never once walked across it with anyone. The toy shop: The Man Who Asks Stars to Be Steps, with light-up eyes and a very small teapot; the five; Aune added last month; The World-Breaker: they’ve made my nose too small. Tiri: so you know what you’ll look like old; I don’t want light-up eyes; you’ll get them anyway. The Asker, volume nine, with Mother lifting the ship on the last page. Lucas Dask: A Life, by Imre Oshan, three hundred and two, who sat at the long table a week asking Mother questions; she got it right. She was in the back of the shop: there you are; you never once looked up; I’m writing another, about now; go and find out how it ends, and come back and tell me. Two hours of signing, including an arm. Kesh: did you know Dad was cool? Sigmund: I thought he was just Dad. Trevor: Teva’s had the figure three years; research. Abena: Halloway reads the book on night shift. Tiri: the bird story every Aldri child knows was you, not him. Don’t tell; he’d hate it. I didn’t, Corin. Mother read the whole comic on the step: they’ve got the coat right; I want volume ten.