Scarecrow

The Assize answered on the forty-ninth day.

It wasn’t the Prime. It was an Assessor, a thin one with a very careful voice, standing on the steps in the white where the Prime usually stands. Dory says the Prime was in the hall behind him. She says she could hear him in there, very still, the way he sits now, with his back to the wall.

The Assessor read it from a long white sheet.

The Assize had considered its response, he said, to the threats made against the person of the Prime by the so-called man on the hill. And the Assize had decided that the root of those threats, the soil they grew in, was not the man himself.

It was his toys.

I’ll put down what they did, because I think one day somebody will want to know, and because it’s the cruellest thing the Assize has done since Tirr, and they did it to children.

From the forty-ninth day, the Assessor said, any soft one, figure, comic, playset or picture from the Hedge, found anywhere in the Collective of the Bright Reach, was a crime against the Reach.

Not a ban. They’d banned them before. A crime. And not the selling of them. The having.

Any household found with one would pay a fine. Any household found with one twice would lose its tithe-standing. Any world found with them in numbers would lose its standing in the Reach. And the Refined would search. Every home. Every ship. Every bunk. Every cupboard.

Every child.

And what they found, they’d burn. In the squares. In front of everyone.

“So that the children of the Reach,” said the Assessor, reading very carefully, “may learn, early, what their own mothers should have taught them.”

He rolled up the sheet. He went back into the hall.

They started the next day.

I won’t put all of it down. I can’t. Mattick told us some. Corvan sent a line. The Word goes out from Mattick’s ramp and comes back the same way, and what came back that month was the worst thing I’ve heard since the room under the building on One.

On an ore world on the third arm, the Refined went down the bunks of a mining ship and took every soft one from every child’s bed and piled them on the quay and burned them while the children watched. One of the children was a boy of six who’d had a soft Dory since he was two. He tried to take it back out of the fire. They let him. Then they made him put it back in.

On a grain world, a girl of nine hid a soft Mother in the bottom of a sack of seed. They found it. They burned it. They took her father away for nine days.

On a world in the middle of the Reach, a long way inside, closer to Carrow than to the Watch, the Refined went into a school. They searched every child. One at a time, at the front of the room, in front of all the others, turning out their pockets and their bags and their shoes. Every child in that school watched every other child be searched. Mattick sat at the long table telling it with his heavy hands flat, and his granddaughter sat next to Sorrel and held her hand under the table the whole time.

Sorrel writes their names on her wrist now. The ones Mattick knows. Every morning. Under the C and the Y and the pebble and the four. There are a great many of them. She’s had to start on her other wrist.

The rest of the house started writing the names too.

Not all of them. Sorrel’s wrists filled up first, and then she started on the backs of her hands, and Mother saw her doing it at breakfast and said, very quietly, “Give me some, love.”

Sorrel looked at her.

“Give me some,” said Mother, and held out her own wrist. “You can’t carry all of them yourself. Nobody can.”

So Sorrel wrote one on Mother’s wrist. The boy of six with the soft Dory. Mattick had found out his name. Mother wore it all day. In the morning she said it with the others, after Varrin and the five from Hollen and the grey ones’ names and all the rest. She’s said it every morning since.

By the end of the week every child in the house had a name on their wrist. Teo. Oona. Lio. Corin, small, on the inside, the way he wrote the C. Queenie, who can’t write yet, had Hana write one for her, and then looked at it for a long time with her black eyes, all the way down, and then just at the top, and said, “Leaf.”

The Overseer heard about it. He came up the hill on the third evening with his ledger, the big one, the one he keeps all the names in. He sat at the long table and asked Sorrel, very politely, if he could copy them.

She read them out to him. He wrote every one. When he’d finished, he closed the ledger and put his hand flat on it.

“I used to keep a different book,” he said. “Numbers. Under the houses. How many came in, how many went out, how many were sorted.” He looked at the ledger. “I like this one better. These ones have names.”

I didn’t sleep again.

I’ll be honest about that too. I lay awake and I thought about it. About standing beside him. Bright. Tonight. Not waiting for the door. I could do it. He knows I could do it. Everyone in the Reach knows I could do it.

I’d said I’d strike last.

I went down to the kitchen at three in the morning, and Mother was there, the way she always is now, with her cup and the tea towel over her shoulder.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, before I’d sat down.

“He’s burning children’s toys.”

“I know, love.”

“In front of them. He’s making them put them in the fire.”

“I know.” She turned her cup round. “And if you go and stand beside him tonight, what happens tomorrow?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Tomorrow,” said Mother, “there’s a new Prime. Or there’s the Assize, with nobody in the middle. And the Refined are still on the quays, and the houses are still under Velle, and the door’s still being built. And every child in the Reach who’s had a soft one taken off them and burned learns that the man on the hill does the same thing the Prime does. When he’s angry enough.”

“It’s not the same.”

“I know it’s not, love. But they won’t. They’re six.” She put her cup down. “You told him you’d never once struck first. That’s the only thing you’ve got that he hasn’t. Don’t give it to him because he’s burned a soft one.”

I sat there for a long time.

“Then what do I do?”

“What you always do,” said Mother. “You make more.”

So we made more.

I don’t mean me. Imre Oshan’s workshops on Ister and in the third city and on Marrach and in Commonhold. Every one of them. Every toymaker in the Hedge. They didn’t wait to be asked. Imre went to every workshop herself through the Arch Hall in one day and when she came back she sat down on the bottom step and said, “They’ve all started.”

They made soft ones that look like ordinary things. That’s the clever part. A grey woollen rabbit, the kind any child on any world might have, that you could put in front of any Refined and he’d see a rabbit. And inside the rabbit, if you undo a seam on the back that only a child would know to look for, a very small soft Dory. Or a soft Mother. Or a soft me, sitting down, with my hand on my knee.

They made comics that look like tithe papers. Forty pages of very dull numbers, and in the middle, between the columns, very small, the next volume of The Asker.

Mattick took nine crates in on the next run. All rabbits. He says he walked them straight past the Refined at the bottom of the ramp. One of them picked a rabbit up and looked at it and put it back.

Kiln made a thing I didn’t expect. Very small iron charms, the size of a fingernail, the shape of a cup. Plain. You can put one on a string round your neck under your shirt. You can’t burn iron. You can’t burn it in front of a child.

They sold more cups in a month than they’ve sold of anything in Kiln’s history. Most of them went into the Collective. Mattick says on the edge worlds now, you see children going to the tithe office with their mothers, and if you look very carefully, at the neck of their shirts, you can see a very fine string.

And the Collective’s own people did something I didn’t expect either.

On the grain world where the girl’s father was taken for nine days, on the day he came home, the whole town came out to the square where they’d burned her soft Mother. Every household. They didn’t say anything. They didn’t shout. They didn’t have anything to burn, or anything to wave.

They just stood there. And then, one after another, the whole town sat down. On the stones. Where the fire had been. And stayed there all day, in the square, sitting, while the Refined walked round the edge of it and didn’t know what to do.

Mattick says it was the same thing the million did in the plaza on Ister, at the end of the film. He says he’s sure of it. He says he saw it in a cupboard on an ore ship once, on a very small screen with the sound down, The Asker, and the ore-ship children sitting down on the floor of the bunk room when it finished, without anybody telling them to.

Seventy towns on fourteen worlds sat down, that month. Mara Quell counted.

The Refined burned nothing in any of them. You can’t burn people for sitting.

The Prime answered the sitting. Of course he did.

Corvan sent one line, folded very small, tied to the bottom of a crate of rabbits.

He sent the Refined to stand them up.

That’s all it said. Mattick told us the rest. He was on one of the grain worlds when it happened. He says the Refined came into the square at noon, very tall, in their white, and went to the first person sitting on the stones, an old man, and lifted him up by the arms and stood him on his feet.

The old man stood there for a moment. Then he sat down again.

They stood him up again. He sat down again.

They went to the next one. A woman with a baby. They stood her up. She sat down. They stood her up. She sat down. They went to the next.

Mattick says it went on all afternoon. Nine Refined, in a square with four thousand people in it, standing them up one at a time, and every one of them sitting down again the moment the Refined let go. Children too. Children were the fastest. A small boy was stood up eleven times and sat down eleven times and by the eleventh he was laughing.

At dusk, the Refined left.

Corvan’s next line came a week later.

He asked the Assessors what to do about the sitting. Nobody answered. He asked again. Nobody answered. Then one of them said, very quietly, that you can’t make a law against sitting down. He said he could. Nobody wrote it.

It’s the first time I’ve ever seen the Assize not write something he said.

I want to put down the good things now. There’ve been good things. Mother says that’s the only way to get through a month like that: you notice the good things, on purpose, while you’re in them.

The first is that Trevor and Teva went to the keepers.

The keepers of the long record live in the second city, in the old hall under the hill where the vault is. The vault with the painting in it, the oldest thing the Aldri have, the tall red-haired family in the gold field. The long record is in there too. Every Aldri child’s name since before the running. Every one. In books so old and so many that the hall goes down nine floors under the hill, and the keepers walk up and down the stairs all day with lamps.

There are nine of them. There have always been nine. When one of them dies, another comes, and she’s been learning for a hundred years by then, Halvane says, so she’s ready.

And when two people are going to marry, the Aldri way, after the nine meetings, they go down to the bottom floor of the hall, where the oldest books are, and they stand in front of the nine keepers, and they say what they’ll be called together.

Not their names. Their names are already in the book. What they’ll be called. The two of them. As one thing.

And the keepers write it down. And it can’t be taken back.

Trevor and Teva went down at first light, the way the Aldri do important things.

Not alone. Nobody’s ever alone at a keepers’ standing, Halvane says. Both families come. Everyone who was at the nine meetings. So we all went. Through the Ister arch, across the second city’s plaza, very early, while the gold was just coming up on the towers, and down into the hall under the hill.

Nine floors. Mother walked every step. Teva’s grandmother walked every step, on her stick, and wouldn’t be carried. Great-grandmother Efua walked every step and shouted at nothing, because there aren’t any birds under the hill, which she said was a very poor arrangement.

At the bottom, there’s a long low room. Very old. Lamps all down both sides. Books everywhere, floor to ceiling, so old the spines have gone the colour of earth. And at the far end, nine chairs. The only chairs I’ve ever seen the Aldri sit in for something important.

The nine keepers sat in them. Very old, very straight, in long grey robes, with their grey hair loose down their backs. In front of them on a low stone table there was a book, open, with a pen beside it.

Halvane sat on the bench at the side. He sits there every visit now.

Trevor and Teva walked down the long room and stood in front of the nine.

The eldest keeper spoke first. In old Aldri. Halvane translated, very quietly, for the rest of us.

“You are Trevor Dask, of Avalon, of the house on the rise. Son of Luna, of the Windsors, who makes the air go still. Son of Lucas, who asks stars to be steps.”

Trevor said yes.

“You are Teva, of the third city, of the narrow grey house by Ilas’s old house. Daughter of an engineer who made the dream rooms, and of a woman who poured for Lucas’s mother before Lucas’s mother poured for her.”

Teva said yes.

“You have had the nine meetings.”

Teva’s father, at the back, held up the third slate. Then the fourth. The keepers looked at them both for a long time. The eldest keeper’s mouth moved very slightly at one corner.

“You have,” she said. “What will you be called?”

Teva’s father had fourteen suggestions on the fourth slate by the end. All his. Some of them were very long. One of them was a whole sentence. Teva had read every one, very carefully, and thanked him, and said no to all of them, very kindly, which is the Aldri way.

Nobody knew what they’d chosen. Not Luna. Not Teva’s mother. Not Mother, who’d asked every day for a week and been told you’ll see, which nobody ever says to Mother.

Trevor looked at Teva. Teva looked at Trevor.

Then Trevor reached into his pocket and took out the glass cup. The one that went to glass at the long table at breakfast, the morning after the Sedge boat. He carries it everywhere. He’s carried it to Isk and back four times.

He held it up, so the keepers could see. The lamplight went through it. You could see right through to the books on the other side.

“Morning,” he said.

Halvane told us afterwards what it means, in old Aldri. The word Trevor said. It doesn’t only mean morning.

It means the moment when it starts. When the light comes, and you didn’t know if it would. When you can see through something you couldn’t before.

It’s the word the first house says. Every dawn, on the plateau, to the Overseer. Good morning. It wished for it on its birthday and it’s said it every morning since, as if it’s never quite sure the light will come.

Teva said that’s why. She said it, standing in front of the nine keepers, in old Aldri, very clearly, without looking at anybody.

“Because he asked me first. At the top of the wheel. When I didn’t know if he would. And because everybody we love has had to learn to say it. And because the wedding takes about as long as it takes to say it, and we’d like to be called the thing we’ll be doing for the rest of our lives.”

The eldest keeper picked up the pen.

She wrote it in the book. In old Aldri. One word.

Then she wrote, underneath, what it means. The keepers always write what it means. Halvane read it to us, very quietly, from his bench.

“The ones who say it first. And keep saying it. Every day. Whether or not they know the light will come.”

Nobody in the long room said anything.

Then, very slowly, at the back, Teva’s grandmother stood up off her stick. She hadn’t been sitting; she’d been leaning. She stood straight up, all the way, the way the Aldri stand for important things. And then everyone stood. Both families. All of us, in the long low room under the hill, under the lamps, among the books the colour of earth.

And Mother, at the back, very quietly, said:

“Good morning, loves.”

Dory and Teva walked back up the nine floors together, at the end, behind everyone else. I was a little way behind them. I didn’t mean to listen. I’ve stopped pretending I don’t.

“You’re thinking about it,” said Teva.

Dory didn’t answer for a few steps.

“Is it that obvious?”

“You looked at the book,” said Teva. “The whole time. Not at us. At the book. At the pen.” She was quiet for a flight. “Trevor told me. About the roof. About Ash.”

“Trevor tells you everything.”

“Yes,” said Teva. “That’s one of the reasons.”

They climbed another floor.

“The year’s for noticing,” said Teva. “That’s what Halvane says. Not for changing your mind. For noticing you didn’t.” She stopped on the landing, under a lamp, and looked at Dory. “Maybe you don’t need a person yet. Maybe you just need a year. To notice what you’d want, if you let yourself.”

Dory didn’t say anything.

“You can borrow ours,” said Teva. “If you like. Our year. Count it with us. Every morning. And see what you notice.”

Dory looked at her for a long time, under the lamp, on the stairs under the hill.

“All right,” she said.

That’s why, if you look at the bottom of Wren’s slate, under Morning, in very small letters that only Dory and Teva and I know about, there’s a second line, and it’s the same number.

So the year has started.

Mother began counting the next morning. Wren wrote it on the slate, at the bottom, under the stars and the names and everything else, in a new line of its own.

Morning: 1.

Every morning since, she’s changed it. Morning: 2. Morning: 3. Mother checks it at breakfast, every day, before she pours. She says she’s going to check it every day until it says Morning: 365 and then she’s going to stop counting and start crying, and she’d like it noted that she’s given everyone fair warning.

Nobody changes their mind in the year, Halvane says. Nobody ever has. Not in all the long record. He says the year isn’t for changing your mind. He says it’s for noticing. For a whole year, every morning, you get to notice that you didn’t.

Quenby’s magazine had a picture of the glass cup on the front. Just the cup, held up in the lamplight. Nobody knows how they got it. ROYAL WEDDING: ONE YEAR TO GO.

The keepers had eleven requests in the next month from Aldri couples who wanted to be called Morning too. They said no to all of them. The keepers never give the same name twice. They wrote, under the last refusal, very kindly, Find your own.

Imre’s made a soft glass cup. It’s clear, like real glass. You can see right through it. You can’t break it. It comes with a card that says, in old Aldri and in ours, Good morning. The children on the edge of the Collective have started calling the iron cup charms mornings.

The second good thing was the birthdays.

We missed them. I’m ashamed of that, but it’s true. Luka was four in the season of the holes, and Kyrie in the week before Corin asked Tiri, and Queenie nine days after Kyrie, and every one of them went by while Dory was sitting at the glass every night and nobody was sleeping. Mother made a cake each time. But there wasn’t a day for it. There was a candle, very quickly, at supper, and everyone too tired to sing properly.

Mother said that wasn’t good enough. Mother said a fourth birthday is the first one you remember, and it was going to be done properly, all three at once, if she had to tie everyone to a chair.

So we did them all at once, on a quiet day after the keepers. On the plateau. The houses asked to be there, the way they asked the first time, even us?, and the Overseer brought them a cup, and they said good morning to the three of them very solemnly at dawn.

Luka had a red cake that went warm when he touched it, because everything goes warm when Luka touches it. Kyrie had a cake shaped like the shelf on Hyrran, with a small iron post at the edge of it, and she walked to the post across the cake with two fingers before anyone could stop her. Queenie had a brown cake, the colour of the north field after rain, the same as her first, because she asked for it. And a single leaf on the top. Just a leaf. From the old tree by the gate.

She looked at it for a long time.

“Just the leaf,” she said.

Then she ate it.

Hana says that’s the first time she’s ever seen anyone eat a decoration. Mother says it was a perfectly good leaf and she’s not surprised.

The long record has three new lines on the Dask page. Halvane had them put in. Luka, Kyrie and Queenie: four. All at once. Late. Properly.

The third good thing was Kwame.

He asked Oriel.

Not to marry him. That’s months away. The Aldri way. He asked her if he could start the nine meetings. He asked her at the bottom of the oldest well under the third city, where he made the first spring come up into her boots.

She said yes. Then she said, “You realise this is going to take most of a year,” and Kwame said, “Yes,” and she said, “And you realise you’re going to have to come to every one of my family’s houses, and there are a great many of them, and they all live in the deep city and they all want to show you their wells,” and Kwame said, “Yes,” and she said, “Good,” and kissed him, in the dark, at the bottom of the well, with water coming up round both their feet.

Teva’s father has offered to lend them his slates.

Hana cried for an hour. Abena Osei cried for two. Great-grandmother Efua shouted at a bird so loudly it fell off the gate.

Corin and Tiri started theirs the same week. Their nine meetings. Corin went to Teva’s father and asked, very seriously, whether there was a slate going spare, and Teva’s father went home and came back with three, already marked out in nine circles each, with a very small bird drawn in the corner of every one.

The first meeting is at the wing. Ilas’s chair, by the lamp Corin mended. Tiri’s great-grandmother has said she’s going to talk for the whole of it and nobody is to stop her. Ilas has been decided about this since she was nine.

The long record has started a new page for weddings in the Dask house. Halvane says it’s going to need one.

The hill got ready.

Not with walls. Mother wouldn’t have walls. Okafor came up the hill road with the General and a sheet of squared paper on the day after the Assize’s answer, and they sat at the long table, and the General laid out a plan for a wall round the house on the rise, a good one, Kiln iron and walker stone and Crane’s design, with a battery at each corner.

Mother looked at it for a long time.

“No,” she said.

“Mrs Dask—”

“No walls, General. Not round my kitchen. Not round my house. Not round my children.” She pushed the sheet back across the table to him, very gently. “I’ve lived behind walls. They put me out of them. I’m not going to build them round myself because a man in a white robe said my name.”

The General looked at her. Then at Okafor. Okafor looked at the ceiling.

“What will you let us do?” said the General.

Mother thought about it.

“Listen,” she said.

So that’s what they did. Listeners. In every room. One in the kitchen, on the windowsill by the Scarecrow queen. One in each bedroom. One on the porch, one on the roof, one in the end room where Dory sleeps in the day, one in the wing where Aune and Tiri and Ilas live. One on the bottom step, where everyone sits. One by the garden wall, where Queenie looks at leaves.

Forty-one, in the house alone. Asha brought them up herself.

And all down the hill road, from the house to the red glass, in the fields and the orchard and the lanes, a ring of them. And past that, out of sight, in the trees and the long grass and the houses of the north field, the Standing. Okafor won’t say how many. She says if she told me, I’d count them every night instead of sleeping.

And the batteries. Not at the corners of a wall. In the hills round the plain, where you can’t see them from the house. Pointing up. Halvane says they’ll see a ship the moment it comes through. He says if it’s a ship that big, it’ll take nine volleys, not one. He says he’s put eighteen.

Mother looked out of the kitchen window the evening it was finished. At the north field, and the orchard, and the hill road going down to the red glass in the dusk. You couldn’t see any of it. Not one listener. Not one Standing. Not one battery.

“Good,” she said. “It still looks like home.”

Dory slept that night. In the end room, with the curtains open, and the listener on the shelf by her bed, faint blue, not ringing. She didn’t wake once. I know, because I went and looked, twice, the way I used to when she was very small and slept with her hand flat on the wall.

I didn’t. I sat at the red glass with my hand flat, and listened. To the net. To four hundred and thirty-seven worlds. To the listeners all down the hill road, very faint, like a ring of small bells that nobody was ringing.

And past all of it, past the Watch, a long way down under the gardens of Velle, the forge. Building.

It’s louder now. Dory says so. She says it’s growing.

She says it sounds like something being made very big, very slowly, by people who know exactly where it’s going.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Four hundred and thirty-seven. Wren says they said it all together this morning, in one voice, the way the families stood up in the long room under the hill.

At the top of the slate, the way she does, Wren wrote the count.

And under it, in their own lines:

Seventy towns: sat down.

Kwame: meetings, 0 of 9.

Morning: 19.

Days 10837–10893. What They’ll Be Called.

The Assize answered through a thin Assessor: the root of the threat was the toys. Having one is now a crime; fines, lost standing, searches of every home, ship, bunk and child; and they burn what they find in the squares so the children of the Reach may learn what their mothers should have taught them. A boy of six made to put his soft Dory back in the fire; a girl’s soft Mother in a seed sack, her father taken nine days; a school where every child was searched in front of the others; Sorrel has started on her other wrist, and Mother held out hers: you can’t carry all of them yourself; every child in the house has a name on a wrist now, and the Overseer copied them into his ledger: these ones have names. At three in the morning I wanted to stand beside him; Mother: tomorrow there’s a new Prime and the children learn the man on the hill does the same when he’s angry enough; striking first is the only thing you’ve got that he hasn’t; make more. Imre’s workshops made rabbits with a seam only a child would find, and The Asker hidden between tithe columns; Kiln made iron cup charms you can’t burn, worn on fine strings; seventy towns on fourteen worlds sat down where the fires had been, and nothing burned there; the Refined stood them up one at a time all afternoon and they sat down again, a small boy eleven times, laughing by the last; an Assessor said you can’t make a law against sitting, and for the first time nobody wrote down what the Prime said. Trevor and Teva went down nine floors to the keepers under the second city; Trevor held up the glass cup and said Morning: the moment it starts, when you can see through what you couldn’t. Teva: because he said it to me first, because everyone we love had to learn to say it, because it’s what we’ll be doing for the rest of our lives. The keepers wrote: the ones who say it first, and keep saying it, whether or not they know the light will come. Teva’s grandmother stood up off her stick; Mother: good morning, loves. Morning: 1, and counting; the year is for noticing. On the stairs Teva lent Dory their year, to count with them and see what she notices; there’s a second small line on the slate with the same number. The keepers refused eleven more Mornings: find your own. Luka, Kyrie and Queenie had their fourth birthdays late and all at once on the plateau; the houses said good morning to them; Queenie ate the leaf. Kwame asked Oriel at the bottom of the well to begin the nine meetings; she said good and kissed him with water round their feet; great-grandmother Efua shouted a bird off the gate. Corin and Tiri began their nine too, on three of Teva’s father’s slates with a bird in every corner; the first is at Ilas’s chair, and she intends to talk for all of it. Mother refused the General’s wall: I’ve lived behind walls; they put me out of them. Listen, she said. Forty-one listeners in the house, a ring down the hill road, the Standing out of sight, eighteen batteries in the hills; it still looks like home. Dory slept; the forge under Velle is louder, something very big being made very slowly by people who know where it’s going. Four hundred and thirty-seven, in one voice. Seventy towns: sat down. Kwame: 0 of 9. Morning: 19.