Scarecrow

Okafor went to Gilgamesh first.

I know because I was there. Not on purpose. I was on the porch with Mother, shelling beans, which I’m allowed to do now and which Mother says I’m still very bad at, and Gilgamesh came up the hill road with a crate on his shoulder that nobody had asked for, the way he always does. It was full of Hearth bread. He put it down on the step and sat down next to it.

And Okafor came up the hill road behind him. Very straight. With her slate under her arm.

She didn’t come up the steps. She stood at the bottom, in the yard, and looked up at Gilgamesh sitting on the step with his crate.

“I need you,” she said.

Gilgamesh looked at her. He’s older than he looks, and he looks very old. His armour looks old even when it’s just a tunic, the way it is when he’s sitting on somebody’s step. He’s carried an axe and a sword for longer than most of the Hedge has been alive.

“For what?” he said.

“For the Standing,” said Okafor. “All of it. Every post. Every world. Every person in a grey suit with a door-blade.” She held up the slate. “I’ve got four hundred and sixty-eight worlds, Gilgamesh. I can’t be on all of them. Neither can you. But you’ve stood on more of them than anybody alive, and they know your face, and when you tell them to hold, they hold.”

Gilgamesh didn’t say anything for a while.

Then he reached into the crate and took out a loaf and broke it in half and held one half out to her.

Okafor came up the steps and took it.

“Yes,” said Gilgamesh. “Eat that. You haven’t eaten.”

She hadn’t. Rhiannon would have known. Gilgamesh, it turns out, knows too.

She went to all of them. That month. One at a time, the way she does things, in person, never with a line on the band.

She went to Alexander on the training ground below Commonhold, where he drills the Hearth companies on the long grass with a hundred floating silver blades going round him in formation like a flock of birds. She waited until he’d finished. All of it. Then she said, “The Line. When it comes. Everything that has to stand in one place and not move.” Alexander looked at his blades, hanging in the air round him in their perfect rows, and said, “Yes.” And then, “I’ve been waiting a very long time for somebody to ask that.”

She went to Caesar in the long room at the back of the Senate hall, where he’s been reading. He reads everything. He’d been reading the Assize’s sealed records, Ferro Hale’s case, the copies Senna isn’t reading out, one at a time, very slowly, with his short sword across his knees. She said, “The school. Every new Standing. Every cadet. Discipline. The thing that makes someone stand at a door when they want to run.” Caesar closed the book he was reading and said, “Yes. On one condition.” Okafor said, “What?” Caesar said, “That they’re taught to ask before they’re taught to stand.” Okafor said, “That’s not a condition. That’s the first lesson.” Caesar almost smiled. He doesn’t often.

She went to Aramaeis on the ridge on Hyrran, where he’d been sitting with Kyria for three days talking about the Ashen. Aramaeis is Tiamat’s brother. He looks like her twin. Silver, draconic, very large when he wants to be, and very quiet when he doesn’t. He was a General on Hearth for a very long time. She said, “I need a second.” Aramaeis looked at Kyria. Kyria said, “She means you.” Aramaeis said, “I know she means me. I’m waiting for her to say it.” Okafor said, “Aramaeis. Will you be my second?” Aramaeis said yes.

She went to Arcturus in the Arch Hall, where he’d been standing with Crane for a week learning the board. Arcturus links to every ship. That’s his silver. Wings, and a flight suit, and a way of knowing where every ship in a fleet is at every moment, the way Crane knows where every train is. Okafor said, “The Wings. Not flying them. Aune flies them. Holding them. All of them, all at once, when there are more than anyone can hold.” Arcturus said, “How many?” Okafor said, “Marrach’s building nine hundred.” Arcturus said, “Yes.”

And she went to Dinraal last.

She went to Dinraal’s house. The one on Avalon that I built to look exactly like Hearth, with the roof tree that was planted the spring Tiamat told him, and the cracked third pane that Bahamut, his father, leaned on the night she told him and never fixed. Isolde opened the door. Small Bahamut was on her hip. Isolde is expecting again.

Okafor stood on the step.

“I need him for the edges,” she said. “The border worlds. The batteries. Every world where something might come through and there’s nobody there yet who can stop it.”

Isolde looked at her for a long time. Then she turned round and called into the house.

Dinraal came to the door. Very tall. In an ordinary shirt. With his son’s soft dragon over his shoulder, the one small Bahamut won’t sleep without, which Dinraal carries round the house all day in case it’s needed.

He listened.

“How long would I be away?” he said.

“Not long,” said Okafor. “Not more than a day at a time. The Arch Hall’s open. You’d be home every night.” She looked at small Bahamut. “I’ll make sure of it.”

Dinraal looked at Isolde. Isolde looked at him.

“Go on,” she said. “You’ve been wanting to since the halls.”

“Yes,” said Dinraal.

So there are six of them now.

Okafor calls them Holders. It’s the rank the General and Kyria drew under First, which is Kyria’s alone. There were no Holders before. There was nobody Okafor thought should hold that much.

Gilgamesh holds the Standing. Alexander holds the Line. Caesar holds the school. Arcturus holds the Wings. Dinraal holds the edges. And Aramaeis holds Okafor’s left hand, which is what he says when anybody asks him what he holds.

They stood in front of the Table on the thirtieth dusk, the six of them, in a row, on the grass. In their armour. Gilgamesh with his axe, and Alexander with his blades in formation behind him, and Caesar with his cloak, and Aramaeis very large and silver, and Arcturus with his wings folded, and Dinraal with his son’s soft dragon still over his shoulder because he’d forgotten to put it down.

Konrad said their names. Then the General stood up, from his place at the Table, and walked down the row with his tin box. He took a ribbon out of the box for each of them. Not red, not gold. A new one. Grey, with a thin line of silver down the middle.

He tied one on each of their wrists.

“Holder,” he said. Six times. He didn’t say anything else.

When he got to Dinraal, he stopped. He looked at the soft dragon. Then he tied a second, smaller ribbon round the soft dragon’s neck.

“For the one who carried it,” said the General.

Dinraal laughed. It’s the first time I’ve heard him laugh at the Table.

Dinraal’s first day on the edges was on Isk.

Teth met him at the post, in the snow, by the battery. Teth’s been on the ridge with Kyria for twenty years and on Isk for most of two, and he’s not easily impressed. He looked Dinraal up and down, very tall, in ordinary clothes, with the soft dragon still over his shoulder because he’d forgotten again, and said, “You’re the Holder.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve got a toy on your shoulder.”

Dinraal looked at it. “It’s my son’s.”

Teth thought about that for a while. Then he nodded, as if that settled something, and took him inside for tea.

The Isk girl was at the post. Of course she was. She’s always at the post. She sat across the table from Dinraal with her soft Taveth and her soft battery and her soft listener in a row in front of her, and looked at him for a long time.

“Are you a dragon?” she said.

“Sometimes.”

“Can you be one now?”

Dinraal looked at Teth. Teth looked at the ceiling.

So Dinraal went out into the snow, and the Isk girl went after him, and Teth went after her. And in the snow by the battery, very carefully, so as not to frighten anyone, Dinraal let his silver remember what it was. Not all of it. Just a little. Just enough. A small silver dragon, the size of a pony, standing in the snow on Isk, with a soft dragon round its neck on a grey ribbon.

The Isk girl looked at it for a long time.

Then she walked up and put her hand flat on its nose.

“Hello,” she said.

Dinraal says that’s the first time anyone’s ever said hello to him like that. He says on Hearth people bowed. He says he likes Isk.

He was home by dusk. Small Bahamut was waiting at the door. Dinraal gave him back the soft dragon, with its ribbon, and small Bahamut looked at the ribbon for a long time and then said, very seriously, “Holder.”

Aurelius didn’t take a command.

He went to Konrad instead.

Aurelius was the Chancellor of Hearth. For a very long time. He ran it, all of it, every hall and street and station and the whole of its long government, from a desk in a white room with a window, and he never once raised his voice. He’s very gentle. He has a shield on his arm that can make a wall big enough to stand in front of a starship, and he uses it, Isolde says, mostly to keep the rain off people.

He came up the hill road one evening and knocked on the door of the narrow house at the bottom of the road with the blue door. Konrad and Ingrid’s. Konrad opened it, in his shirtsleeves, with a pen behind his ear.

Aurelius looked past him. At the sheets. On every wall. All of them. Avalon. Home. All. and Came by themselves and Still out and Teva’s people. Stopped running. and Tirr and Hollen and The halls, with its three columns.

“You’re doing all of this,” said Aurelius. “By yourself.”

“Ingrid helps.”

“Four hundred and sixty-eight worlds,” said Aurelius. “And a Senate. And every name.”

“Somebody has to,” said Konrad.

Aurelius took off his coat.

“Yes,” he said. “Two somebodies would be better.”

It’s been two months. I’m told it’s like a different Hedge.

Not the Table. The Table’s exactly the same. Mother pours. Konrad says the names. Everything comes back there at dusk.

But everything in between. Everything the Senate argues about and the Cabinet decides and the Table needs to hear. Aurelius took it apart and put it back together in nine days. He did it very quietly. He found the clerks; there were a great many clerks in the Hedge by then, working in a great many rooms, not knowing what the others were doing. He put them in one hall. He gave each of them a desk and a window and a list of what they were for. He made a book of every law the Senate has ever passed and every decision the Table has ever made and had it copied for every world. He set up a room where anybody from any world in the Hedge could come with a problem and sit down and be listened to by somebody whose only job was listening.

He called it the Asking Room. Konrad nearly cried.

And Konrad’s sheets. All of them. Every name. Aurelius had them copied, very carefully, by hand, by forty clerks from forty worlds, into books. Proper books, bound in Kiln leather, one for every sheet. They’re in the long hall in Commonhold now, on shelves, where anybody can read them.

But the sheets are still on Konrad’s walls. Aurelius made sure. He said the books are for everybody else. The sheets are for Konrad.

Ingrid says it’s the first time in thirty years Konrad’s gone to bed before midnight. She says she’s not sure what to do with him.

Caesar’s school opened on the fortieth day. In the long low buildings on the training ground below Commonhold, where Okafor drilled us, a very long time ago, on another world, when there were only a few of us and she knew which of us cried at night.

Three thousand new Standing came. From every world. Caesar stood at the front of the first hall in his plain uniform with his short sword at his side and his cloak folded over his arm, and looked at them for a long time without saying anything. Okafor stood at the back with her arms folded.

“Before I teach you to stand,” said Caesar, “I’m going to ask you one thing. And you’re going to answer it. Out loud. One at a time. All of you.”

Three thousand people looked at him.

“What,” said Caesar, “do you want to keep?”

It took all day. Okafor says she stayed for every one. Three thousand answers. A mother. A boat. A field of barley. A soft one. A queen under a river. A little brother who talks too much. A door. A pot.

At the end, Caesar wrote every answer down himself, in a book, very small, in his careful soldier’s hand. Then he closed it and put it on the table at the front of the hall, where it stays.

“That’s what you’re standing for,” he said. “Not me. Not her.” He nodded at Okafor. “Not the Hedge. That. Whatever you said. When you want to run, you’ll remember what you said. That’s the whole of discipline. The rest is just practice.”

Okafor told me about it at the long table. She didn’t say anything about it for a while after. Then she said, “I should have asked you lot that. On the field. At the beginning.”

“You didn’t need to,” I said. “We knew.”

“Did you?”

I thought about it. Seventeen. Two sisters in a penthouse. A kit and a planet nobody had ever been to.

“Yes,” I said.

Imre made The Six, of course. Six figures in a long box, in a row, in their armour: Gilgamesh with a tiny crate, Alexander with a ring of tiny silver blades on a wire, Caesar with his cloak, Aramaeis in silver, Arcturus with folding wings, and Dinraal with a very small soft dragon over his shoulder on a grey ribbon. Dinraal asked her to take the soft dragon off. Imre said no. Imre said it’s the bestselling detail she’s ever made.

The keepers sent their half-year early again. There are nine hundred little Aldri boys called Gilgamesh this year, which Gilgamesh says is nine hundred too many and has started bringing crates of bread to their houses. There are four hundred Caesars. There are, for reasons nobody can explain, eleven Holders.

Corvan sent a line, the second month. Very short.

Still sitting. They move me every night, a different house, a different sister. I’ve learned to shell beans. I’m very bad at it.

Mother read it and laughed so hard she had to sit down. Then she wrote back herself, one line, and gave it to Dory to send: Thumb along the seam, love. Not your fingernail.

And the two hundred and sixty-eight are still in the last hall on Velle. Dreaming. The two houses say nothing has changed. The houses in Velle haven’t decided. Hen sits by the window on the long ward every morning with her list of names and says them, all two hundred and sixty-eight, one after another, the way Mother says hers.

She says somebody has to keep saying them. She says that’s how they’ll know.

And then Halvane told us about the university.

He’d been building it for a year. Nobody knew. That’s very like Halvane. He’d gone to the Table after the golden year, very quietly, when the eleven million had come to the old schools on Ister and there wasn’t room for them, and he’d asked for a piece of ground. On Ister. Across the valley from the old schools, on the other side of the river that runs below the second city. A whole side of a mountain. The Table had said yes without asking what it was for, because it was Halvane.

He’d been building there ever since. With the Aldri engineers who built Commonhold and the cities on every continent of Avalon. With Marrach’s yards. With Thole’s lumen and Kiln’s iron and the Lantern weavers and the walkers, who carried the stones.

He brought us to see it on the sixtieth day. All of us. Through the Ister arch, across the second city’s plaza, over the bridge, and up.

I’m going to try to describe it. I’m not sure I can.

It’s the size of a city. More than one city. It goes up the whole side of the mountain from the river to the snow, in terraces, the way the old towns on Orsk go up the staircase. Every terrace is a building. Every building is the size of the whole of Commonhold. They’re white, and tall, and made of Dory’s glass where the walls should be, so that all day long the light goes through them, and at dusk, when the second city lights, the whole mountainside lights with it.

There are halls you could put the Senate in nine times. There’s one, at the very top, under the snow, that holds forty thousand people at once, sitting, with a floor of warm stone the walkers can lie on and benches Rory made for everyone else, all of them facing a single small table at the bottom.

There are rooms for everything. I mean everything. Engines and water and stars and queens. The long record. The old Aldri tongue and the hill tongue and the walker tongue and the songs of the Sedge. Medicine. Law. The forms. Farming and fishing and how to make a soft one. Mathematics, Bell’s, the kind that’s very nearly music. Stone and how it sits. Ships and how they fly. Cities and how they work. How to build a door. How to hold one.

There’s a room just for listening. Nobody teaches in it. You go in and sit down, and listen, and somebody who knows something sits down next to you and asks what you’d like to know.

There’s a library. It’s the size of the old hall under the hill where the keepers live, nine floors of it, and it goes up instead of down. Every book in the Hedge is in it. Every book Hearth brought. Every book the Aldri saved from the running. Copies of Konrad’s sheets, in Aurelius’s leather. Ferro Hale’s case. Mother’s names.

There are gates on every side of the mountain. Halvane says there are a thousand of them, and that’s what he wants it called. Not after him. Not after anyone.

A Thousand Doors.

“Who’s going to teach?” said Mother.

She was standing on the bridge at the bottom, looking up at it, with her pot under her arm because she never goes anywhere without it now. Halvane was beside her.

“That,” said Halvane, “is why I’ve brought you all.”

He turned round. To us. To the whole family on the bridge, and everyone from the hill who’d come. To Tiamat, standing at the back in her humanoid form because she’s very large otherwise. To Asha with her floating instruments, and Eve with her floating spheres. To Enna, with Bram’s sister asleep in a sling, and Keir beside her carrying Bram.

“I need teachers,” said Halvane. “The best there are. Anywhere. I’ve been asking for a year and I’ve got a great many. Aldri, Hearth, Hyrrani, Kiln, Thole. But I need the ones who know the things nobody else knows.” He looked at Tiamat. “How to hold a station round a world for a hundred years.” At Asha. “How energy listens.” At Eve. “How to keep everything running when everything’s breaking.” At Enna. “How to make a railway that goes round a world without a single join.” At Keir. “How to build a ship that does what nobody’s ever made a ship do.”

He put his hands behind his back.

“Will you teach?”

Asha said yes before he’d finished. Very fast. In about nine words, all at once, and then a great many more, about what she’d teach and how and which hall and whether she could have the one with the high windows because energy behaves better in high rooms, and she’d need instruments, and students who’d ask questions, lots of questions, the more the better, and—

“Asha,” said Eve.

Asha stopped.

“Yes,” said Eve, to Halvane. “For both of us. She’ll talk. I’ll make sure they can follow.”

Tiamat said yes. Slowly. She said she’d never taught. She said she’d held her stations round Hearth for longer than most of Hearth had been alive and she’d never once explained to anyone how. She said she thought it was time somebody knew besides her.

Enna said yes, and then woke Bram’s sister by accident, and said yes again, more quietly.

Keir said yes, and then said, “Can I teach what went wrong as well? With the ships? Every time?” Halvane said that was the most important thing anyone could teach and he’d give Keir the biggest hall for it. Keir went red.

Halvane asked me last.

I didn’t expect it. I’d been standing at the back, with Bram, whom Keir had handed to me so he could shake Halvane’s hand, and who had gone to sleep on my shoulder.

“And you,” said Halvane.

“I can’t teach,” I said. “I don’t know how I do anything. I just ask.”

“Yes,” said Halvane. “Teach that.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Not the asking,” said Halvane. “Nobody else can do that. The other thing. The thing your father taught you before you could do anything at all. On the kitchen wall.”

The squares.

“The little things holding hands,” said Halvane. “In order. Every one. What they are and what they like and how they hold. Nobody in the Hedge knows them the way you do. Not because you can ask them. Because you were taught them by somebody who loved you, at a kitchen table, so you’d know what you were doing them to.”

He looked up at the mountain.

“There’s a hall at the top,” he said. “Forty thousand seats. One small table at the bottom. And a wall behind it, that I’ve left blank.”

I said yes.

Mother made me. Not out loud. She just looked at me on the bridge, with her pot under her arm, the way she looked at me at the kitchen table when I was ten and my father had just died and I didn’t want to learn any more squares because he wasn’t there to show me.

So I said yes.

The first day of A Thousand Doors was the ninetieth.

They came through every one of the thousand gates. From every world in the Hedge. Not just young people. Grown people, and grandparents, and the walkers, and a Sedge girl of nine who’d come on her own because her mother was a fisher and couldn’t leave the boats. Nine hundred thousand, Wren says, on the first day. Every hall full. Every terrace. Every room.

Tiamat taught in a hall with no roof, so she could be her full size, and so the students could see the stars while she explained them. Asha taught in the hall with the high windows and talked so fast that by the end of the first hour half her students were taking notes on Eve’s floating spheres instead, which Eve had set up beside every bench without telling anyone. Enna taught with a twin in each arm. Keir taught every ship that ever went wrong, starting with the first one he built in the room he was locked in, and his students sat absolutely silent for four hours and then stood up.

Bell taught mathematics. Halloway taught medicine, and refused to call it anything but the ward. Oriel taught the water under the rivers, with Kwame at the back of the hall in case anybody wanted to see it come up. Isar Thenn and Maelis Orr taught the stage. Kyria taught the forms on the terrace under the snow, at dawn, and nine thousand people came, and she made every one of them hold the blade the first way, loose, before she’d let them do anything else.

Mother didn’t teach. She said she’d pour. She stood at the bottom of the mountain at the gate by the bridge with the biggest pot I’ve ever made her, and poured for everyone who came through. All day. Nine hundred thousand people.

She didn’t run out. Rory says that’s impossible. Rory’s right.

I went up last. At dusk. To the hall at the top.

Forty thousand seats. Every one full. People standing at the back. Walkers lying on the warm stone along the sides. And at the bottom, one small table. Rory’s. Plain. With a cup on it.

And a blank white wall.

I didn’t say anything for a long time. I stood at the bottom with forty thousand people looking at me and didn’t say anything, and nobody said anything back, and it was very quiet.

Then I picked up a brush.

I’d asked Mother for paint. She’d given me the same tin she gave me for the kitchen wall in the house on the rise, the one I painted from memory. The same colours. She says she’s been keeping it.

I painted the first square.

H. One. The smallest. The one there’s most of. The one everything starts with.

“My father painted this on our kitchen wall,” I said. “When I was four. Because I’d put water on the moon, and he wanted me to know what I’d done it with.”

Nobody said anything.

“This one’s hydrogen,” I said. “It’s the smallest thing that holds hands with anything. It’s in the water you drank this morning and the sun that came up over the second city and every one of you. It’s very old. It’s older than the eldest. It’s not very good at being on its own. It always wants to be holding something.”

I painted the second square.

“This one’s helium,” I said. “It’s the opposite. It doesn’t want to hold anything at all. It’s perfectly happy on its own. You can ask it as nicely as you like and it’ll just look at you.”

Somebody laughed. Then somebody else. Then the whole hall.

It went on from there.

I painted all of them. All the squares. In order. One at a time. Every one, I told them what my father told me. What it is. What it likes. Who it holds hands with and who it won’t. What I’ve done with it, and what I’ve asked it, and what it said.

It took nine hours.

Nobody left. Not one. Not the walkers on the warm stone, not the Sedge girl of nine in the third row who’d come on her own, not the old Aldri men at the back who’d been at the old schools for two hundred years and must have known half of it already. They stayed. All forty thousand. All night.

When I’d painted the last square, the empty one at the end that Bell drew and Lio filled with a knot, I put the brush down.

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I just stood at the bottom of the hall in front of the wall, with paint all over my hands, the way my father had paint on his hands the night he finished ours.

And forty thousand people stood up.

The Aldri way. For important things. All of them at once. And then the walkers, lying on the warm stone, made the sound like a mountain clearing its throat, all of them together, and the whole hall shook.

And then, very slowly, starting at the back, they sat down again.

All of them. On the floor. In the aisles. On the warm stone. Forty thousand people at the top of a mountain on Ister, sitting down.

I don’t know who started it. Nobody does. Wren thinks it was the Sedge girl.

Mother was at the door at the back. She’d come up at the end, all the way up the mountain, with her pot. She’d been standing there for the last hour.

She didn’t come down. She didn’t say anything. She just stood in the doorway, at the top of all the stairs, and looked at the wall.

Then she looked at me.

And she put her hand on her chest. The way the Overseer does. The way people do when they’ve been given something they didn’t expect.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Four hundred and seventy-one. Three more. Wren says one of them said it like a student who’s just put their hand up.

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

And under it:

Holders: six.

A Thousand Doors: open.

The squares: all of them.

Morning: 267.

Days 11091–11180. A Thousand Doors.

Okafor went to them one at a time, in person. Gilgamesh on our step with an unasked crate: the Standing; he gave her half a loaf, you haven’t eaten. Alexander on the training ground among his formations: the Line; I’ve waited a very long time to be asked. Caesar in the back of the Senate hall reading Ferro Hale’s case: the school, if they’re taught to ask before they’re taught to stand; that’s the first lesson. Aramaeis on the ridge with Kyria: her second, once she said it. Arcturus at Crane’s board: the Wings, nine hundred of them, held all at once. Dinraal at the door of the house that looks like Hearth, with small Bahamut’s soft dragon over his shoulder: the edges, home every night; Isolde: go on. On Isk the Isk girl asked Dinraal to be a dragon, a small one, the size of a pony, and put her hand on his nose: hello; small Bahamut at the door: Holder. Caesar asked three thousand new Standing what they wanted to keep, a mother, a boat, a soft one, a pot, and wrote every answer in a book on the front table: that’s the whole of discipline; Okafor: I should have asked you lot that. The Six in a box, the soft dragon on Dinraal’s figure the bestselling detail; nine hundred Gilgameshes, eleven Holders. Corvan: still sitting; I’ve learned to shell beans; I’m very bad at it. Hen says the two hundred and sixty-eight every morning. Six Holders on the grass at dusk; the General tied a grey ribbon with a silver thread on each wrist, and a smaller one on the soft dragon, for the one who carried it; Dinraal laughed. Aurelius took no command; he took off his coat in Konrad’s narrow house: two somebodies would be better; in nine days he put the clerks in one hall, made a book of every law, and opened the Asking Room, and had the sheets copied into Kiln-leather books by forty clerks from forty worlds, leaving the sheets on Konrad’s walls; Konrad goes to bed before midnight. Halvane had built for a year across the valley from the old schools: A Thousand Doors, terraces the size of Commonhold up a mountainside from river to snow, glass walls lit at dusk, a forty-thousand-seat hall at the top, a library nine floors high, a room just for listening, a thousand gates. He asked Tiamat, Asha (Eve: Asha. Yes, for both of us), Eve, Enna and Keir with their twins (can I teach what went wrong?), and they said yes; then me: teach the squares, the thing you were taught by somebody who loved you at a kitchen table. On the first day nine hundred thousand came; Tiamat taught under the stars, Kyria taught nine thousand the first grip, Mother poured at the bridge and didn’t run out. At dusk I painted my father’s wall in the hall at the top with Mother’s same tin, hydrogen first, helium who’ll just look at you, all of them, nine hours, to the knot at the end; forty thousand stood, the walkers shook the hall, and then they sat down. Mother at the door with her hand on her chest. Four hundred and seventy-one. Holders: six. A Thousand Doors: open. The squares: all of them. Morning: 267.