Scarecrow

Spring on the island has a particular quality of arriving all at once.

It does this every year. It is not a surprise. And yet every year it manages to feel like a surprise — the orchard coming in overnight, the particular yellow-green of the first grass, the smell that comes in off the sea and is not winter anymore. Mother says it was like this on Earth, too, the last spring before the shelter. She says she has never gotten used to it. I don’t think she is trying to.

Tovi’s first child came on the third morning of the first real warmth, before full light. The baby was not early and was not late. She arrived at the hour she meant to, in the room above the kitchen at the east end of the rise, with Halloway and Risa and Hana in attendance and Sigmund in the corridor outside, being talked to quietly by Liam in the way that Liam has learned, over the years, to talk to young men who are waiting for news. I have been told this talk involves a great deal of silence and very little advice, which is a measure of how much Liam has grown.

Halloway opened the door at some point just before dawn and said the word, which was: girl, and Sigmund made a sound in his throat that I have no word for except that it was entirely sincere, and Liam put a hand on his shoulder and left it there.

Luna was at the bottom of the stairs in her dressing gown. She had been in her dressing gown since midnight, had refused to go back to bed, had sat with a cup of tea and periodically looked up at the ceiling as if she could hear what was happening through the floor. When Sigmund came down — I had come to the kitchen by then, most of us had — she took his face in both hands the way she did when he told us about Tovi’s pregnancy, but this time she didn’t say anything. She looked at him for a long moment and then pulled him in and held him.

”My boy,” she said. Very quietly. Into his hair.

He held on and didn’t speak either.

Rory was at the kitchen table when the word came down and he cried immediately, which is what Rory does, and then went to the corridor and planed a bit of wood that wasn’t particularly in need of planing, which is also what Rory does. Maura went straight upstairs without a word, which Maura is allowed to do as the person who has been knitting small things for nine months and has earned the first visit. She came back down twenty minutes later and sat very close to Rory at the table and didn’t say anything, and he put his arm around her and kept on planing, and that was all they needed.

Mother was on the high bench on the east porch when the sun came up. I went to sit with her.

”He’d have liked this part,” she said, without preamble.

”He would have been down here already,” I said.

She smiled. ”In the kitchen with Rory, saying nothing.”

”I think that’s right.”

We sat for a while in the early light. The orchard was all blossom now, the third week of it — that stage when it tips from pink-white to white-white and you know the petals are going to start coming down in a few days. A good wind was moving through the high branches.

”She’ll want something to call her,” I said.

”She’s always known,” Mother said. ”Even before she’d met him.”

Tovi had, in fact, known. She’d told Risa in the fourth month, quietly, and Risa had not told anyone because Tovi had asked her not to until it was time, and Risa respects a confidence in a way that is almost supernatural given how much good news she is usually required to sit on.

The baby’s name was Calla. Sigmund had asked Tovi what she wanted — she was from the plateau, her family names ran toward the blunt and the strong — and she’d said she wanted something that could belong to both of them, to the plateau and to the island, to the family she’d grown up in and the one she’d married into. Calla was a flower name from the highland meadows of the high plateau, the kind of small white bloom that comes up early in the stone gardens there. It also, apparently, sounded like something in Jessa’s grandmother’s tongue that meant the first good thing after a long winter.

”That’s both,” Risa had said, when Tovi told her.

”That’s what I wanted,” Tovi said.

Halloway said both.

Aune’s baby was due in spring, Halloway had said, and the spring had come, and Halloway said both with the particular economy of a woman who has delivered a great number of babies and has strong opinions about unnecessary drama. She came to the kitchen that afternoon — Sigmund’s daughter was three hours old; most of the family was still in the orbit of the east wing, rotating through the room upstairs in the quiet two-at-a-time way Mother had decreed — and she said:

”Tomorrow.”

Just that. And then she looked at me over her teacup in a way that meant: make sure your affairs are in order.

Aune, who was at the table, looked entirely calm. She has been calm about this in a way that I find simultaneously reassuring and slightly unnerving. She said, ”I know,” in the voice she uses when something is simply so. The Aldri have a different relationship to certainty; she had said spring months ago and spring had come and tomorrow was spring, so.

She reached across and covered my hand with hers. ”You have been very worried for a very long time,” she said. Not unkindly.

”I am not worried,” I said.

She looked at me.

”I am prepared,” I said, with dignity.

”You have been prepared since the third month,” Halvane said from the doorway. He had arrived that morning with Ilas, who was sitting at the far end of the table doing needlework and occasionally offering opinions to Halloway on the relative merits of various Aldri birth customs that Halloway received with the professional patience of someone who is very good at her job and is choosing not to have an argument. ”We appreciate the thoroughness.”

”The thoroughness,” Ilas agreed, without looking up.

”I didn’t say thoroughness was bad,” Halvane added quickly.

The baby came the next morning, which was the fourth morning of the warmth and therefore, by the specific logic of this spring, somehow the most spring morning yet. This was not an observation I made aloud because there is a time for being philosophical about the light and it is not while Halloway is working.

What I will say about Halvane is that he held together better than I have ever seen him, which was not very well, but which was an improvement. He cried from about the second hour and did not stop, quietly, which Ilas told me later was an ancient Aldri custom in birth rooms — the fathers and grandfathers of the Aldri weep so the mother doesn’t have to, drawing the difficulty out of the room into themselves. Whether this is traditional or whether Halvane invented this explanation afterwards is something I did not ask. He cried, and Ilas held his hand, and they were both very steady.

Aune was magnificent. This is the word. I was there for the whole of it and she was magnificent in the matter-of-fact way she is magnificent at most things — not dramatic, not performing, simply doing what was needed with the full force of herself and without waste. At one point she looked at me over Halloway’s head and said, in a voice that was absolutely even: ”You need to breathe too, Lucas.”

I breathed.

The baby was a boy. He had Aune’s grey Aldri colouring and my hands — there is no other way to put it, it was the first thing I saw, the particular shape of the thumb — and his eyes were black. All the way black, from the moment they opened. Not the arriving-black that some newborns have and lose in the first weeks; the real black, the permanent kind. Halloway looked at them and then looked at me and wrote something in her book without saying anything, with the specific expression of a woman whose list is getting longer and who has feelings about this that she is reserving for a more appropriate time.

When Aune held him up he looked at her with the expression that all newborns have, which is the expression of someone who has just arrived from a very long journey and hasn’t quite decided what they think of the destination.

”Hello,” Aune said. In Aldri. She said it in Aldri first, the word that means arrival, and then she said it again in the common tongue, and then she said his name.

His name was Ari.

Halvane folded at the waist when he heard it. He had to sit down. Ilas was already crying and held both their hands. Ari — it is an old Aldri name, one of the first names, the name the deep city’s founders gave to the idea of the ones who come after — it was the name Halvane had hoped for since he was young and had never quite dared to ask for.

”How did you know,” Halvane managed.

Aune looked at him. ”You put it in every lullaby you ever sang to me,” she said. ”I always knew.”

Halvane sat down more completely and Ilas handed him a cloth and he used it.

Mother went upstairs to Calla’s room first, in the morning. She always goes to the new ones first. She holds them before she says anything else, and then she says hello, love in the voice she uses for first meetings. This is what she has done for everyone — for my children, for Sigmund and Kesh and Efua and all the rest, for Lumi when she was lifted out of the glass tank, for Queenie. The same hello.

She went to Calla and said hello and then she went to Ari, who was with Aune in the garden — it was warm enough, Halloway had cleared it, and Aune had wanted the first air to be the island’s air — and she held him for a while and said hello to him, and Ari looked at her the way he had looked at Aune: arriving, assessing, not quite ready to commit.

Mother looked back at him with the same level regard.

”You’ll do,” she said eventually. Which is what she said to Ash. And to Efua. And, apparently, to Doran Vale, which I did not know until Ash told me and which explains a great deal.

Halvane, who was nearby, said: ”High praise.”

Mother handed Ari back to Aune and went to look at the orchard.

Kyria came from Hyrran on the second day. She came in the afternoon, without announcement, in her working clothes, and went directly to the room where Calla was sleeping. I did not follow her. Ash told me later that she went in and stood at the crib for a long time and did not touch anything, just looked — the focused, quiet look she brings to things she is trying to understand all the way down. She stayed for twenty minutes without speaking and then she came back to the kitchen and drank a full cup of tea and asked Risa how Sigmund was doing.

Risa said: ”He’s good.”

Kyria nodded. Something in her expression had resolved. ”Good,” she said. And then, with the slight turn of voice that means she is reaching for something: ”She looks like him. The shape of the chin.”

”I thought so too,” Risa said.

Kyria drank the rest of her tea and went out to find Sigmund, and I do not know what she said to him but he came in an hour later looking like a man who had just had a thing confirmed that he had not known he needed confirmed.

The house was very full for a week. This is what the family does in the wake of good news: it comes together by instinct, the way a tide comes in, and fills up all the available space. Luna appeared at every hour, rotating between Sigmund’s wing and the garden where Aune was. Sera sat on the low porch and read and was available, which is Sera’s particular gift — not the constant presence but the available one, the person who is there when you come looking. Risa had brought three completed knitted things and two in progress. Hana cried twice on the second day and once on the third and explained each time that this was not distress, it was simply fullness.

The older children were better at being quiet than they used to be. Ash came for two days and sat with both babies in turn — she has a particular stillness with newborns that I have never tried to explain, the same stillness she brings to new metal — and said very little and was entirely present. Dory came and held Ari for a long time and looked at his hands and looked at me and said, ”Oh,” very quietly, and I knew what she meant. Efua came and said, to Ari, ”My name is Efua and I’m going to teach you to be loud,” and Aune said she was absolutely not going to teach him anything until he was at least two, and Efua said she’d teach him to shout first and then they could do the refinements, and Ari, who appeared to be listening, made a sound that could generously be described as an opinion.

Corin and Tiri came, and Tiri held Calla and was so visibly happy to be holding a baby that it was difficult to look at directly. Corin stood next to her with his hands in his pockets and the quiet face he gets when something is both simple and enormous. At some point during the visit he found Sigmund and they sat at the far end of the orchard wall for an hour, the two of them, not talking much, and I think they talked about their fathers and probably also about whatever it is that men think about when the world has suddenly acquired a new weight and direction. I did not ask what was said. The look on Sigmund’s face when he came back was enough.

Pip came on the fourth day, moving carefully now in the particular way of the later months — not slowly, just with a heightened attention to her own centre of gravity. She sat with Tovi for a long time in the east room, just the two of them, and nobody went in, which was right. Davo came with her and stood in the kitchen being quietly overwhelmed, and Rory sat with him for half an hour and talked about trains and timber and not at all about the thing that was actually on both their minds, which was also right. Maura watched them from the counter and her face had the specific expression of a woman who has watched this exact scene twice before and finds it no less dear.

Davo, before he left, picked up Ari very carefully, in the particular way of people who are new to babies and have been told they are fragile and are taking this seriously. He held him for about two minutes, very still, and looked at him with intense concentration. Ari looked back. Then Davo said, quietly, to no one in particular: ”Oh, I see.”

Rory was watching from the door. He nodded, once, the way he nods when something has been confirmed.

Kwame found three separate springs in the garden over the course of the week, which Halloway said she hadn’t known about and which Kwame said had always been there, they just hadn’t been asked. By the end of the week there were small green things growing along the new wet patches at the east wall, which Risa said she hadn’t planted, and which the garden appeared to be doing for itself out of a general sense of occasion.

The General came on the third day with Sabeth, who stood at the edge of the garden with the specific expression of someone who is working out how to offer help without overstepping. She has been learning the family the way you learn a new landscape — carefully, respectfully, one feature at a time. Ari regarded her with the frank appraisal of a baby who has not yet learned to pretend he is not looking, and Sabeth looked back at him with something that rearranged her expression slightly.

The General watched this happen. He stood with his tea at the edge of the orchard and watched Sabeth hold his wife’s son’s son and said nothing, but his face did the particular thing it does when something has gone right that he wasn’t entirely sure was going to.

Sabeth came to me afterward and said, very formally, that she was deeply honoured to be part of this.

I said: ”You’ve been part of it for a while. We’re just glad you’re here.”

She absorbed this. Then she said: ”He said the same thing.” Meaning the General. ”He says it differently, with fewer words, but it’s the same thing.”

”He always has,” I said.

She looked at the orchard, where Ari was asleep in Aune’s arms in the spring sun. ”Three hundred and forty years,” she said, quietly. Not to me, to herself. The wonder of it still visible in her expression — not the number, but what the number contained. The long way from the first refusal, from the two good men she couldn’t quite get there for, from the word she’d been waiting to feel true.

She had it now. I could see that she had it now.

Ash brought Doran on the last day of the baby week. She did not announce this in advance. She arrived in the afternoon with him behind her, carrying a wrapped thing that turned out to be a loaf of bread from the forge-side bakery on Hyrran, which is the best bread in the Hedge and which Ash had presumably told him to bring because she knows this family’s first instinct toward any new person is to feed them.

He stood in the kitchen door and said he was sorry to come at such a time, and his face said he was actually sorry, and then he said the bread was from Sera’s bakery and Risa said sit down and that was that.

He held both babies. This happened because the babies were circulating and he was in the kitchen and there was no particular reason not to include him, which is how the family usually makes decisions about whether a new person is welcome. He held Calla first — Sigmund handed her over with the slight self-consciousness of a new father handing his child to someone he doesn’t know yet — and Doran held her correctly, without being told, in the way of someone who has held babies before, and said she had good hands. Sigmund relaxed incrementally.

Ari came to him later and looked at him with the inventory expression, and Doran looked back, and then Ari made a small sound and went to sleep, which Aune, watching from the garden door, regarded as a verdict she found acceptable.

Efua appeared at some point during the visit and introduced herself by name and volume, and Doran said he’d heard of her, and Efua said all good things as a question, and Doran said mostly, and Efua laughed, and that was enough. She pulled him into the kitchen with the particular efficiency of someone who has decided a person is worth talking to, and they were in there for forty minutes. I do not know what they talked about. I know that when Efua came back out she was satisfied in the way she gets when a theory has been confirmed.

She caught me watching her. She said: ”He’ll do,” in the specific voice she reserves for things she means entirely. It is Odra’s phrase but it fits Efua’s mouth just as well.

Benno, by the by, had been to the dock on Tuesday. And the Thursday after. He had not come to the house yet. He was, Efua said, proceeding at a sensible rate, which from Efua is the equivalent of a full page of praise.

The only awkward moment was when Halvane, who had met Doran briefly in the morning and had spent three hours thinking about it, arrived at the kitchen table and sat down across from him and looked at him in the way Halvane looks at things he is trying to categorise. Doran bore this without flinching. After a while Halvane said, in Aldri-accented common tongue: ”You split wood.”

”When there’s wood to split,” Doran said.

Halvane absorbed this. ”Good,” he said. And went to find Ilas. I do not know what he told her but she came to look at Doran from the garden window shortly after, and her expression suggested that the report had been positive.

The war news during the baby week was quiet, which Okafor told me privately meant nothing. The Refined were quiet in the particular way of a held breath, she said, and she did not like held breaths. She had a phrase for this kind of quiet: counting steps. She said the Refined had taken their losses at Sann and at the outer posts and they were counting steps, working out the gaps, mapping the distance between one thing and the next.

She came to the house on the fifth day, not for the babies — she sent a note, which is what Okafor does instead of arriving — and she came for the weekly briefing and stayed for the meeting and drank her tea and left, but on the way out she paused at the garden where Aune and Calla and Ari were all in the afternoon sun and she stood for a moment with her hands behind her back.

Aune looked up. ”General,” she said, which is what everyone except the family calls Okafor.

”Good morning,” Okafor said. And she looked at both babies with the specific expression I have come to understand is her version of what other people do more visibly, and then she nodded, and went.

Corvan’s report came in on the same day: nothing at Sann, nothing at the outer posts, the standard rotations on schedule. His handwriting was steady and his sign-off was brief. I read it twice and then folded it and thought about what quiet means — the gap between quiet and peace, the held breath and the exhale — and then went back inside because there was a baby in the garden and the orchard was at peak blossom and some things you go back to.

Okafor’s slate still said Now. I had asked her once, long ago, how she decided when to change it. She’d said she hadn’t changed it yet. I’d said: When will you? And she’d said: When it’s true. She said it without drama, the way she says everything. I think of that sometimes, the difference between when it’s going to be true and when it is true. The slate remains. The spring remains. Both are real at once.

Dory had Corvan’s latest letter in her coat pocket, alongside the glass bird. She was not making anything of this. I was not making anything of this. The letter was correspondence and the glass bird was a question she was holding for him. These are distinct and I will not combine them.

What I will say is that she came to supper on the third evening and sat across from me and said, in the way she has of saying things she has been thinking about for a while and has finally decided to say aloud: ”He wants to come. When things are quieter. He wants to meet them.”

I said: ”Calla and Ari.”

”All of them. But yes.”

I thought about this. Corvan Carrow, the Prime’s son, who had come off the Collective morning band saying I’m not dead and who had been making himself useful and decent in a hostile system for more years than I could count. He had been to the island before, in the particular official capacity of Dory’s colleague, in the way that made clear there was something else but that something else was being handled carefully and by its own pace.

”When things are quieter,” I said.

”He said: I know it won’t be soon.”

I looked at her. She was looking at the table. ”He can come whenever you want him,” I said. ”The table is long.”

She nodded. She went out to sit in the orchard with the babies in the late afternoon after that, the light coming golden through the blossom, and she took the glass bird out of her pocket and held it up to the light the way Pebble used to do — the light coming through the bird’s thin glass wings, the same light the whole way through. When she put it back she seemed settled in a way she had not been when she came out.

Pebble, who had been asleep under Ash’s chair, woke up and went to sit beside her. He stayed there until the light changed.

Pell Jorad’s column this week was about babies, in the most indirect possible way. He had been, he said, at the ferry terminus again, and he had observed a family arriving — parents, a young child on a hip, another by the hand — and the particular quality of attention the parents gave to the world around them: checking the gap between the ferry and the dock, the height of the step, the placement of a bag, the whole landscape scanned with a continuous peripheral awareness that he had come to recognise as the specific look of people who are responsible for something small and precious.

He wrote about how the city looked when you walked it with that awareness — not smaller, but denser. More detailed. Every edge and step and uneven paving stone suddenly legible in a new way.

He said he thought about this for the rest of the day and into the night, and he thought it might be the best argument he’d heard for the proposition that caring for things teaches you to see.

Hanne printed it under the heading A CONSIDERED VIEW, which is what she calls the columns she considers important. Pell, she told me, had been surprised by this. He always is. He still does not quite understand how many people read him.

The league news was complicated that week by virtue of Sigmund being unavailable to play because his daughter had just been born, which the league acknowledged with a formal notice of congratulation and a rescheduled fixture that the Hill’s captain signed with the note: Take your time. She’s worth it. Sigmund read this twice and made the face he makes when something has moved him more than he expected.

Pim was up another bracket. The selection committee had now sent an official inquiry, which Pim received by opening the letter, reading it, folding it neatly, and asking Kesh what the inter-island circuit meant for training schedules. Kesh, who had been waiting for this question, had a schedule prepared. This is entirely typical of their arrangement.

Kyrie’s score stood at thirty-five — she had reached the top of the bracket on the last day of the week, which she had done without ceremony, which is Kyrie’s way with all achievements: notice them, record them, move on to the next thing. Luka, who had been watching from the bench, said there it is in a quiet voice and Kyrie said mm in the voice that means I know, I’ve been working towards this for some time, we’ll celebrate properly later when there’s time. Okafor sent a note that said: 35. As expected. Next bracket is harder. Good.

Lumi’s wind navigation had drawn the attention of the crosswind committee, which had asked to speak with Halloway, who had agreed, and the meeting had taken two hours and produced what Halloway described as a great deal of interest and very few answers, which is her standard assessment of meetings about Lumi.

Aoife had set something on fire again, this time with documentation as to why, which Liam said showed growth. The documentation was quite thorough and cited precedent and Liam said the precedent was both surprising and entirely correct, which Aoife received as the highest possible compliment.

The mothers’ getaway that year had the new element any year with new babies has, which is that the new grandmothers were considering whether to leave.

Luna and Risa had a conversation about this in the garden that Maura told me about second-hand. Luna had said she felt she shouldn’t go so soon after Calla, and Risa had said she felt the same about the new arrival on Aune’s side, and they had sat with this for a while, and then Maura had said, with the gentleness she brings to things that need to be done: ”The babies will be here when you come back. The getaway is for you.”

Luna had not said anything. Then she had said: ”Yes. All right.”

The getaway went, as it always does. Mother put on her hat — the wide straw one, the blue band, the hat that means it has begun — and asked each person in person with her pot, and each person said yes, and Aune flew them south to the coast resort. Luna and Risa had worried about going; they went. Tovi had said she was fine and they should all go; they checked on her twice from the coast and she told them firmly that the baby was asleep and they should put their feet in the sea and they did.

Efua’s great-grandmother shouted birds, and Teva’s grandmother joined her, and the bent-footed gull and its four young came to be fed bread as usual. This is always the moment that marks the getaway as properly underway: when the gull comes. The bent-footed one, who has been coming for three years now, has developed a trust for Efua’s great-grandmother specifically that is based, Efua’s great-grandmother says, on the fact that she has never once tried to shout it away. It is the gull she allows to stay.

Halloway sat in a chair on the beach and read two books and was contacted by no one professionally for four days, which she described on her return as remarkable. Kyria took a long walk on the second morning and came back looking like a person who has been somewhere quiet and found it useful. Risa sat in the sun and knitted. Andraste commissioned her soft one again, as she does every year — she has the same soft one commissioned every year by a different artist and gives them all away. Sera found a small restaurant on the third street and went there for lunch three times.

Nobody had to be responsible for anything small and precious for four days. When they came back they were each of them approximately themselves again, which is what it’s for.

Rue’s count was three hundred and seventeen by the end of the month. She had told Bess in the morning and then, unusually, told the number to Ari, who was in the kitchen at the time being held by whoever was nearest, which was me.

”Three hundred and seventeen,” Rue said, to Ari specifically, as though informing him of something he would need.

Ari looked at her. He had been looking at things very carefully since his first day, with the focused attention of someone inventorying a new situation.

”He doesn’t know what that means yet,” Bess said.

”I know,” Rue said. ”But it’ll mean something later.”

She went back to her breakfast. Ari continued to look at the space where she’d been standing. I thought, watching him, that she was probably right about that.

The Scarecrow queen had been out at dawn three mornings running that week — not at Next Door, further east, standing at the edge of the high field with the particular stillness she brings to new things, looking toward the house. Genny thought she was listening for something. Garnet thought she was counting.

”What could she be counting,” Genny said.

”The same thing Rue counts,” Garnet said, with the quiet certainty she has about the queen’s business.

Genny thought about this. Then she said: ”That’s a lot of mornings.”

”Yes,” Garnet said.

The stars said Not yet this morning. 1,109. N.

The stars: not yet. / Calla: born. / Ari: born.

Days 13602–13670. Both.

The spring chapter. Tovi’s daughter Calla came on the third warm morning and Sigmund made a sound in the corridor that Liam heard and said nothing about. Aune’s son Ari came the following day, grey and wide-eyed, with the same hands. Mother went to both and said hello. Halvane sat down more than once. The orchard was at peak blossom. Both babies were well. That’s the word for the week: both.