Distant tales of the Dichotomy

Torren Ballast kept the count on the garden wall.

He did it with a stub of red chalk, in tallies of five, one stroke for every day of the Ladder, and when the strokes had run the length of the south wall he began again on the east. Nobody had asked him to. He did it, he said, because a man ought to be able to look at a year and see it, and not have it go by him like a crowd in a street. Fel passed the wall every morning on his way to the first rung. For a long time it was just a wall, with a few red marks on it. And then, one morning, somewhere in the middle of the second row, he looked up from his cup and found that it had become something else, something long and ruled and patient, like a very slow road, and that he had walked a great deal of it.

It would be a thing to tell, if there were room, how the year went by.

There was the juice, to begin with. It did not get better. The old dwarf at the Gibbous Cog had warned them of it, and the old dwarf was a woman of her word. Every morning, at the dawn bell, in the corner of the great hall where the cask-cat had taken up residence on the best chair, Fel and Brek stood side by side with a pewter ladle between them and drank a cup of dragon’s dung, and it was every morning as it had been on the first. They learned its ways. They learned to drink it fast, and to drink it slow, and to chase it with cold tea, and with ginger, and with a raw onion on Thara’s advice. They learned that it was worse in hot weather, and worse still when you were thinking of something else. In the fourth month Brek said, with perfect solemnity, over the rim of his mug, “I think it’s getting better,” and Fel tasted his own, and was sick in the fireplace. It was not getting better. It was only that they had stopped being surprised.

“That’s the whole point,” said Torren, when Fel complained of it. “If it tasted nice you’d stop. The bad taste is how you know you’re serious.”

And there was the body.

It happened slowly, and then all at once, as such things do. Nerissa measured him on the first of every month, with a tape and a pencil, against the door of the pantry, and wrote it down in a small green book, and by the fourth page she had stopped saying dear me and begun to say nothing at all. His sleeves went. His boots went, and then the next pair. A coat that Thara had won at dice, and called a very good coat, split down the back on a Tuesday while he was reaching for the salt. His shoulders filled out until he had to turn a little to go through the door of the stable. The soft, quick, wiry lines of a boy of seventeen, which had been all he had known of himself, thickened and hardened and squared, as if a hand had taken up a rough sketch and gone over every line again with a heavier pen. His voice dropped. He grew hands.

By the sixth month, he was not a boy at all. By the eighth, there were street-sweepers in the Wards who stopped their brooms as he went by.

He stood, in the last week, against the pantry door, with his heels together and his back flat and his chin level, and Nerissa pressed the pencil to the wood above his head, and drew back, and looked, and said in an odd small voice:

“Six feet, three inches.”

“Three?” said Fel.

“And a hair.” She laid down the pencil. The look on her face was a thing that he did not often see there, a mixture of enormous pride and something near to alarm, as of a woman who had put a bulb in a flowerpot and seen a tree. “You have stopped, I think. A body does, at the last. There is a point where it says enough, and even the juice cannot argue.” She touched his arm, lightly, just above the elbow. “You were five feet nine, on the day I met you.”

He was not sure what to say. He looked down at his own hands, which were very big, and brown, and scarred across the knuckles, and then, because it seemed that somebody ought to, he said, “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For writing it down.”

Nerissa did not answer. But she turned away, rather quickly, and put the green book in her apron, and said that there was a pie in the oven.

* * *

The weight was found, after that, on the scales in the Rotunda.

It was Marigold’s idea. She had come to dinner on a night in the ninth month, in a little velvet cap and a good deal of flour, with a pie of her own in a cloth, and she had looked at Fel across the table for a very long time, and set down her fork, and said with her whiskers trembling that she was a professional, and that she would not be put off. The Rotunda kept a weigh-bench, you see, for the loot, a great brass-armed thing with a pan the size of a cartwheel, and she had a notion that it would take a man as easily as a sack of clinker. They went the next morning. The Third Cage was shut up for a quarter of an hour. And Fel, with some embarrassment, stripped to his shirt and stood in the pan under the green-shaded lamp, with his arms folded, while half the staff of the Rotunda found business at the end of the counter, and the little russet clerk climbed on a stool, and adjusted her spectacles, and slid the weights along the beam, one by one, with the quick, small, wondering paws of a woman who has seen a great many things weighed and never one like this.

“Two hundred and…” She stopped. She wet her lips. “Two hundred. Exactly. Oh, that’s… that’s very tidy of you, dear. I did not think it would come out so even.”

“Two hundred pounds?” Thara had been sitting on the counter, swinging her legs. She stopped. “Of what? He’s all bone! I’ve seen him eat a whole ham, and it’s all in the bone!”

“It’s not bone,” said Torren, with deep complacency. “It’s muscle, girl. That’s two hundred pounds of the best that the Republic has ever bred, in the body of a human.” He shook his head. “It’s a thing you’d not see in a hundred years. I’ve seen men that were two hundred, aye. And I’ve seen men that were six foot three. But not in a one, and not at seventeen, and not in a body with no Raskian blood in it, not a drop. A human frame isn’t built to carry it. The bones ought to crack. The heart ought to go.” He looked at Fel, and there was something very odd and very tender in the weathered old face. “It’s almost unheard of. It’s the juice, and the work, and the thing, the thing that you’ve been doing with the weight. It’s the thing that has taught the body how to carry it.”

He did not say anything more. But that night, in the garden at Ember Court, under the lanterns, with the cat on the bench and Brek sitting cross-legged on the grass, he said, quite simply:

“Put your hand on the table, lad.”

It was a stone table, the dwarven gardener’s, that stood at the edge of the black trees and had been used for a very long time for the playing of draughts. Fel sat. Torren sat across from him, and put his elbow down, and held out a great brown hand with a knuckle like a walnut, and Fel took it.

The old man was smiling. It was a small, rather sad, quite unmistakable smile.

“On three. Brek?”

“Yes, Pops.”

“Count.”

“One,” said Brek, in a voice that cracked slightly in the middle, “two. Three.”

Fel had never in his life known a thing that was so like trying to move a wall. It was not force. It was mass. It went on for a very long time, with the lanterns hissing and the table creaking and the sweat running into his eyes, and neither arm went down, and neither arm went up, and the old man’s face, a foot from his own, grew red, and then dark, and then very still. And then, with a long, slow, exhaling groan, Torren Ballast put his free hand flat on the table, and said, “Enough.”

They let go.

The old man sat there, rubbing his wrist, looking at his hand as if he had never seen it. He did not say that he had been going easy. Fel noticed that, and loved him for it.

“A draw,” said Torren Ballast, at last, in a quite ordinary voice. “I’d have said that you’d need another two years.” He gave a short, wondering laugh. “I’m an old man. I know. I’ve lost a step, and a knee, and half the wind. I’ll not pretend that I’m what I was. But I was the Anchor of the Gate of Brass, boy, I was the strongest man in a country of strong men, and you’ve just held me to a draw, with the arm of a boy who couldn’t do a hundred of a thing.” He shook his head. “You’re as strong, now, as a grown Raskian. In every muscle. You’re as strong as one of mine.”

Fel did not know what to do with that. He looked at his own hand.

“It’s not the size,” said Torren. “Don’t mistake it. There’s men of your size in every street. It’s what you do with it. It’s what you’ve got behind it.” He tapped, very lightly, on the stone, between them. “The rest of it. The thing that’s under the strength.”

The thing that was under the strength was, by then, a good deal of the day.

* * *

It had come in the third month, and he had not known that it was coming.

He had been standing, as he had every night for ninety days, at the foot of the nearest black tree, with his right palm on the bark and his eyes closed, doing nothing. He had been thinking of a pie. He remembered that afterward, with a kind of helpless hilarity. He had been thinking, in a vague and comfortable way, of a pie of Nerissa’s with apples in it, and wondering whether there would be any left. And somewhere in the middle of the thought, in the dark behind his eyelids, he felt a thread.

It was not the first. He had felt that far-off flicker a dozen times, a hair, a draught, a bird in a hedge. But it was not like those. It did not flicker. It did not run away. It lay quite still, in the dark of his arm, as fine as a spider’s silk, and he knew without being told that if he turned his head toward it, it would go. So he did not turn his head. He went on thinking of the pie. And a second thread lay down beside it. And then a third.

They were gold. That was what astonished him. He had never known that they would be coloured. They were very thin and very bright, like the strings of a harp seen at a great distance, and they ran out of his palm and into the wood, and up, and up, in a great shining web, through the trunk and the branches and the leaves, a thousand, ten thousand, as thick as hair, as far as he could see. And between them, along every one, there moved a small slow river of light.

He opened his eyes, and it was all still there.

That was the second thing. He had always had to shut them. But he stood in the lantern-light, with the whole black tree laid out before him like a drawing in gold wire, every stem and vein of it, every knot and fruit and curl of root, and he saw, quite plainly, across the court, three more of the same, and a lantern, burning, and the garden wall, and the old man on the bench with a flask in his hand, a great knotted tangle of light, like a sun in a thicket. And the thread, the line that led from his own chest to the black trunk, hummed, softly, as steadily as a held note.

“Lad?” said Torren, from the bench.

“I can see them,” said Fel.

The flask went down.

“I can see them all,” said Fel. His voice shook. “They’re gold. They’re everywhere. They’re in the stones, and the water, and Brek, there’s a little one in Brek, it’s so…” He stopped. Brek, in the shadow, had gone quite still. “They’re in you. You’re all… you’re like a… a fire. You’re just a great knot…”

He felt the old man cross the cobbles. He felt, before he saw it, the vast warm brightness of him come up at his side, and the great hand land on his shoulder, and grip it so hard that the bone ached, and he turned his head, and found that Torren Ballast, Anchor of the Gate of Brass, the strongest man in the Republic, was crying like a child.

“Three months,” said Torren, hoarsely. “Three. It took me four years.”

They stayed up very late, that night.

* * *

The fruit was another matter.

It was a long time in coming. Seeing a thread is a different thing from using it, as Torren explained, many times, with growing patience, in the light of the lanterns. It was like having your eyes opened, and being asked to thread a needle. For two months Fel reached along his lines, with great care, to the heart of the nearest CoalHeart, and poured, and the mana ran away from him like water through a cracked pot. For another month it did nothing at all. And then, in the sixth month, on an evening that smelt of rain, he reached out, as he had a hundred times before, to a single small fruit, high in the dark, among the leaves, and did not push.

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He asked.

It was a distinction that he could not have explained. He had been shoving. That was the trouble. He had been treating the thread as a pipe, and himself as a pump. But the thing was alive, in its way, and slow, and old, and it had its own sense of what was its weight, and what was not. He sat in the dark with his eyes closed and sent down the line, very lightly, a little of what he was, a small round pound of his own heaviness, offered, as one offers a coin to a child. And the fruit took it.

He felt it grow. He felt the rind thicken. He felt the weight settle on the stem, a pound, three, six, a stone, drawing down on the thin green cord that held it to its bough like a bucket drawn down in a well. And he felt, for the first time, in the long bones of his own body, that curious bright lifting, a kind of hollowness, a lightness in the hips and knees, as of a man standing in water to his chest.

“Brek,” said Fel, in a quiet voice. “Stand back.”

He did not hear the boy move. He heard, from above, in the dark, a small thin creak, and a snap. And then there was a long rush, like a bolt of black silk through the leaves, and a thud like a dropped anvil, and the whole ground shook.

A CoalHeart sat in the cobbles.

It was a perfect one. It lay in a little crater, a hand’s breadth deep, round and black and glossy in the lantern light, quite whole and quite uncracked, with the red veins pulsing faintly in the rind and a thin thread of steam rising from it, and nobody in the whole of the garden said a word. Then Fel, very carefully, as he had been taught, let the line go, in a slow, long, sloping taper, like a man easing a rope through his fingers. He felt the weight come back to him, in a soft, warm rush, as gentle as a returning tide. He did not fall. He did not break. The fruit sighed, and settled, and split quite neatly down the middle, and a flood of red jelly ran out into the grass.

There was a long silence. A very small voice said, “You did it.”

“I did it,” said Fel.

“You did it!” cried Brek, who never shouted, and who, as he said it, went up in the air with both fists over his head, and came down, and stood with his chest heaving and his round face quite red, looking at the fruit in the crater, and at Fel, and at the old man, and said a great many words very fast, none of which anybody could follow.

Torren said nothing at all. He had taken off his hat. He stood in the dark with it against his chest and his head bowed, quite still, like a man in a church, and when at last he lifted his face there was a smear of red on his cheek where he had wiped it, and the look in his eyes could not have been described by any language that Fel knew.

“Now do it again,” said Torren Ballast.

* * *

After that it was simply part of the day.

It crept into things. That was what surprised him. Fel had thought of it, when he thought of it at all, as a great grave occult mystery, like the opening of a vault. He found instead that it was like learning to read. You did it with effort, for a long time, a letter at a time. And then one morning you picked up a handbill off the pavement and found you had read the whole of it before you noticed.

He used it for the doors. The great oak door of the stable, which had been warped since the day they came, and which two men had to heave open, swung at his touch like a curtain, because he had set a hand to it and sent its weight, for a moment, into the doorstep. He used it on the stair, taking the whole flight in four long, light, floating strides, with his own weight lodged for the length of it in the stone of the wall, and a basket of Nerissa’s washing riding on his arm like a handful of feathers. He used it to carry Thara’s trunk. He used it to catch a falling plate, an hour before supper, with the tips of two fingers, by setting a hundred weight of dropped pewter gently down in the floor. He used it for Orrin, who was tall and thin and had a terror of heights, and who was taken one morning, with a good deal of dignity and a moan, over the roof ridge to the high window in a single step. He used it, to the lasting indignation of a pickpocket in the Wards, to make a stolen purse so heavy that the boy who had taken it could not leave the spot, and sat down in the street, in an attitude of great surprise, with his arms round it, until the watch arrived.

And he used it, in a small way, all the time. It became a kind of habit of the mind. He caught himself doing it in his sleep. He would wake, in the early light, with the quilt a feather on his chest, and a long, slow, faintly guilty sense that for some part of the night he had not been quite in his bed.

By the autumn they had names for the four things that he could do, because Torren held that a thing without a name was a thing you could not shout. There was the Feather, which was the simplest: to park a part of your own weight in whatever you stood on, and go light as thistledown. There was the Hang, which was to send that weight along a line into a weapon, or a wall, or a man, so that it fell like a stone where you wished. There was the Draw, the hard one, which was to take the weight out of one thing, a boulder, a bell, a tree, and pass it through yourself into another, a little at a time, and never, ever to be a bucket. And there was the Kiss, which was the Hang with a fist behind it, and which Torren said was a vulgar name for a very good blow.

“It’s a muscle,” Torren said, when he mentioned it. “Like any other. It wants using. A man who lifts a thing once a month, he’s weak. A man who lifts it every day, he’s strong. And a man who lifts it every hour, who never puts it down, he’s…” He grinned. “A fool, with a very bad back. Mind that. You’ll rest. Nerissa will see to it.”

She did. She was, in her gentle way, a tyrant. She had devised, some time in the seventh month, a small ritual of her own, with a bowl of still water and a drop of silver, and at the end of each week she made him sit at the kitchen table with his hand on the bowl, quite still, and she watched the surface. In the first month it had given a faint, thin ripple, like a breath on a window. By the fourth it was a ring. By the ninth it was a whole shivering tide, and the water stood up in a small, bright, trembling dome, and a spoon, laid across the rim, began quite quietly to sing.

“It is growing,” she said, with her chin on her hand. “Do you know that? It is steady. It does not spike and fall, as it does with some. It comes up like a tide. In another year you will be…” She did not finish.

“What?”

“I should not like to say,” said Nerissa. “I should not like to be responsible.”

Orrin, who could feel it from the next room, said it more simply. He said that Fel’s mana had been, at first, a small clear note, like a drop in a glass. It was a chord, now. It had depth. He said it in the cheerful, absent, hospitable voice of a man who has been given a gift, and that was all.

* * *

And the rest of them, meanwhile, went down.

They went down all year. They went down every morning of the world, at the dawn bell, across the Iron Pass with their sacks and their cart, and they came up every evening, grayer and thinner and more ragged and a good deal richer, and Fel, standing on the step of the house in Lampwick Close, watched them go and come until the sight of it had become a habit as deep as his own breath. They did the second floor, and the third. They did the fourth in a day, and the fifth, which was a cavern of singing mushrooms, in a week, because of a misunderstanding about the tune. They did the tenth, on which the road was a bridge over a lake of pitch, and the floor itself was a single huge slow wheel, and the boss a monstrous clockwork spider that wound its own thread. They fought, on the seventeenth, a bride in a rotted veil. They fought, on the twenty-fourth, a thing that Thara steadfastly refused to describe. They did the thirtieth, with a bad night and a good morning and a broken arm, and the thirty-fifth, and the fortieth. With each floor the loot grew, and with every week the roof of the house grew tighter, and the stores in the larder, and the sums that Veyra wrote on the first page of the guild book in her small straight hand. They paid off the roof. They paid for a new kitchen. They put a floor in the loft where Orrin kept his chimes.

And they climbed. The Seven Sorrows were no longer unranked. Their name was on the pillar in the Rotunda, in the first of the Crown’s colours, and when they went through the iron gate the iron-bearded sergeant looked up from his desk, and did not say anything at all, and the next day began to say good morning.

It was noticed. It was noticed, in a small, silent, weighing way, in the Guild Wards, where a hundred and eight halls looked at one another over their walls. Nobody said anything to their faces. But there was a look, now, on the faces of the big golden guilds, as the Seven Sorrows went by, that Thara described, with relish, as the look of a cat who has found a mouse with a sword.

But the thing that Fel carried, from the year, was not the floors.

It was the suppers.

It was a thing that he did not know until afterward, when he tried to count them and found that he could not. They ate, every night of the year, at the long oak table in the great hall, with the banners of the dead guilds nodding on the beams, and the firelight on the faces of the people he loved, and the whole room loud with the day’s account, and it was the same supper, and the same table, and he would not have traded one of them for a kingdom. There was the night that Thara set fire to the pudding. There was the night that Brannoch, who did not speak, got to his feet in the middle of a story of Orrin’s, and in a deep slow voice, like a grindstone, sang the whole of a tiny bright song in the Oakhorn tongue about a squirrel, and sat down again, and nobody said a word, and Veyra wiped her eyes with her thumb. There was the night of Orrin’s birthday, when they had no money and a very small fish, and Nerissa made a feast of it, with a great deal of parsley and a long speech, and Orrin hummed, in a voice that was almost entirely a whisper, the first three bars of something that nobody had ever heard, and the chimes in the high room, far above, quivered all together and gave back the note.

There was the night that Marigold got a little drunk on Nerissa’s cowslip wine and told them, in tears, that she had been the Clerk of the Rotunda for forty years, and that nobody, nobody, had ever come to her to be fed.

And there was the roof.

It was a flat part of it, behind the chimney, where a man could sit with his back against the warm brick and see the whole of the city turn. It was where Veyra went, when the house was too full. He did not go there often. It was hers. But on a night in the eleventh month, with the lamps of Dun Vurrim burning below like a field of small gold flowers, he found himself on the ladder, with no memory of having decided, and she was sitting there with her bow across her knees and her braid over one shoulder, looking at the stars on the glass.

She did not look round. She moved over, a little, along the brick.

They did not say much. They did not need to. She asked him how the lines were, and he told her. He asked her about the thirty-ninth floor, and she told him, drily, and he laughed. For a long time they sat there, with the warm brick at their backs and the wind in the chimney-pots and the whole slow gleaming city turning under them like a great jewelled wheel, and then she said, very quietly, without turning her head:

“You are going to be eighteen.”

“In a month.”

“In thirty-one days. I have counted.” She looked down at her hands. “I will tell you something, Fel. I thought, when you came to us, that you would not last a week. I thought you would be killed on the stair. I thought it very clearly.” The faintest line of a smile touched her mouth. “I am glad that I was wrong.”

He did not trust himself to answer.

“That is all,” said Veyra. “I wanted you to know.”

She did not look at him. But after a while, quite lightly, in the dark, her shoulder came to rest against his, and stayed.

* * *

It was only in the last few weeks that the three of them went down together.

By then they were a company, in the garden, of three. It was Torren’s notion. He had said it first, on a morning in the eleventh month, in a tone of deep and mournful reflection, over the porridge: that a man who has been training for a year should test his training, and that the only fit test for a Raskian was another. So they went out into the courtyard of Ember Court at dawn, an old man and two young, and Torren set down Maude on the cobbles like a man laying down a child, and picked up two wooden staves, and put them in their hands.

It was a thing to see.

It had a rhythm, in the end, that Fel could have hummed. Brek was the first of it. He had grown, by then, in a way that nobody had thought to expect. The small, round, grave boy with the tin soldier had gone, somewhere in the year, as a morning mist goes, and there stood in his place a tall, broad, flat-faced, black-haired creature who came, to the great delight of the whole house, to within a finger’s breadth of Torren’s own chin. He was not an adult. He had the face of a child, round and smooth, and the voice of a boy of twelve with a crack in the middle, and he still carried the tin soldier in his pocket, and talked to it, in private, when he thought nobody was by. But his shoulders were as wide as a door. His arms were as thick as Fel’s thighs. And he moved, in that long grey courtyard, with a terrible slow patience, like a landslide that has been told to wait. He took a blow as a wall takes the sea.

Fel was the second. He moved as a thing moves that has no weight. He was in, and out, and over, as light as a cat on a roof, with the long staves flickering in his two hands, and when the staff struck he went with it, and the force of it ran off him like rain. And Torren was the third, and the oldest, and the cunning one. He stood in the middle with his feet planted and his eyes half shut, and let them come, and every blow that struck him struck, somehow, a moment too late, in a place that was not where he was.

They went at it for an hour, every dawn. It ended, as a rule, with all three of them on their backs in the cold dew, with the sky going from grey to gold, laughing, and Brek saying in a thin high voice, “Again?”

“Again,” said Torren.

And in the last week of the year, on a bright cold morning, with the first leaves coming down off the black trees, Veyra stood on the lowest step of the great hall with the guild book in her arm, and watched the three of them fight, and when it was over she came down into the courtyard and said, in her level, quiet voice:

“Torren. Brek. Fel.”

They looked round, panting.

“We have been on the forty-ninth floor,” said Veyra, “since the first week of the Month of Falling Leaves. We have cleared it. We have not gone down.” She looked at the old man. “We have been waiting.”

“For what?”

“For you,” said Veyra. “For the three of you. It is a very large floor. It is, the dwarves say, the end of the Pits, and the beginning of the Deep, and a company that goes through its door without every sword it has is a company that does not come back.” She did not smile. “Orrin’s list is written. Marigold has checked it, twice. Every chart that we have shows the same thing. If we are to find the heart of an Amolite, it is on the fiftieth, or below it, and I will not take the Seven Sorrows through the door without the ones who have just been trained for it.”

There was a short silence in the yard.

“Tomorrow?” said Brek, in a very small voice.

“Tomorrow. At the dawn bell.” Her eyes rested on Fel. They were violet, and steady, and very bright. “It will be the day before your birthday. I do not think that is an accident. I think that the gods have a sense of humor, and that it is a poor one.”

“I’m ready,” said Fel.

And, to his own surprise, it was true.

That night, when the others had gone up, he stood for a long time in the garden at Ember Court, alone, at the foot of the nearest black tree, with the lantern-light on his hands. Behind him, the wall ran on, in its long ruled rows of red chalk, three hundred and sixty-four strokes, and the old man’s flask stood, quite empty, on the bench. Above him the great trees creaked. And all through the leaves, down every bough, in a vast, dim, glittering web, the fine gold lines ran up into the dark, and hummed, together, quite softly, in the key of an old man’s laughter.

He put his palm on the bark. Tomorrow, he thought. And, below it, deep and quiet and sure, in the river that ran through him like a long golden thread: Tomorrow, then.