Scarecrow

The ash queen said her first word on a Tuesday.

Nobody on Avalon had kept track of days of the week for three years. There hadn’t been any reason to. You got up when the light came and you went to bed when it went and in between you did whatever needed doing. But nine hundred and forty thousand people had come off the ships from Earth with calendars in their heads, and within a month every farm on the plain had a market day, and the market day was Tuesday, and so it was a Tuesday.

I was on the red glass. At dawn. The way I was most mornings now, before the map room. Sitting beside the heavy queen with my coffee, because she liked the company and didn’t say so.

The ash queen was where she’d been since the Ground came home. Curled against the heavy queen’s side. Very small. Grey as the inside of a stove the morning after. She hadn’t moved. She hadn’t made a sound. Neve came down every day and put her lit fingers on her and said her heart was there, very slow, very faint, and that was all.

And curled against her, the keeper.

It hadn’t moved either. Not once. Not for food. Not for water. Not when the Overseer came and sat beside it. Not when Mother came. It lay with its long grey arms round its mother and its face pressed into her and the red scarf closed in one hand, the way it had lain since the night she came down the ramp.

That morning, the ash queen opened her eyes.

I felt it before I saw it. A change in her silver. Small. Like a coal in a dead fire when you blow on it, and for a moment, at the very bottom, something goes orange.

She opened her eyes. Grey. Very pale.

She didn’t look at me. She didn’t look at the heavy queen. She looked down. At the long grey thing curled against her side with its face pressed into her.

And made a sound.

Very small. Very hoarse. Like something that had been taught, every day, for longer than anyone remembered, to have nothing in it at all. And had found, at the very bottom, one thing the teaching never reached.

I didn’t need Dot for it.

It was a brood-word. The one the young said, in the courts, for the youngest in the hollow. The one that meant you’re the last one I counted, and you’re here.

The keeper lifted its head.

For the first time in a month.

It looked up at its mother. At her pale grey eyes. Open.

It didn’t say anything. I don’t think it knew how. I don’t think anyone had ever taught it a word for this.

It put its long grey hand on her face. Very slowly. Flat. The way Tally put out her hand. The way every child off every bench put out their hand, when they’d found out they could ask.

And the ash queen leaned into it.

The heavy queen, beside them, began to hum.

Very low. So low I felt it in my feet more than heard it.

I sat on the red glass with my coffee going cold and didn’t move for a long time.

It was a good month.

I want to write that down, because there weren’t many. Because the next one wasn’t. Because Genny says you have to write down the good ones too, or the brood book’s only a list of what went wrong.

It was a good month.

The barns went up. Then the dairy. Then a mill on the river below the town, which Halvard Ostrand designed and the east block carpenters built and the river turned, and the first flour that came out of it Hettie Crale took in both hands and smelled for a long time and then said nothing at all and went and sat in the barn with her cows.

The seed vault came out of the Scarecrow’s hold into a long cool building on the north plain that Doctor Bell’s people built for it. Eleven thousand kinds of seed, in small sealed jars. Every kind of plant that had ever grown on Earth before the brown sky. The forest queen came up from the south base to look at them, and lay outside the long building for a whole day with her great green head on the grass, listening to the jars, and when she went back south she took a handful of every kind.

The interceptors went from four to eleven to twenty-two. Risa had them in the air every morning at dawn, over the plain, practising. You could hear them from the porch. A sound like the sky tearing, and then quiet, and then tearing again, further off. Dory learned to tell them apart by the sound. She said each one argued differently.

The Meridian hung on her low track and listened. Ilka Marrow sat at the relay every night with the spine-queen laid along the floor behind her and listened to nothing for a long time. Twice, she heard a thread come down. Twice, it was a Kethri queen coming home from a freed world, and Ilka logged it, and said nothing, and went back to listening.

Genny’s trays went from three hundred and twelve to four hundred and six.

The Overseer went to the mountain with Mother. Twice. To lie on the old queen’s terrace while the queens listened for what it had been before it was made. They didn’t find it. Not yet. The old queen said it was very deep. She said whatever the Overseer had been, the houses had buried it very carefully, under a great deal of teaching, the way they’d buried the ash queen.

But it is there, she said. The bone remembers. Come back. We will keep listening.

The Overseer said it would.

And we dug.

Six black worlds left. Six white dots on Garnet’s sheet, in the middle of six black circles. Six queens, curled under the black, deep, with as many young as each could carry in her coils, and hearts so slow Wren kept losing them.

Okafor sent the heavy young in teams. Three at a time. On the Harness, with Anja’s people to stand in front and one of Toby’s medics to hear the hearts and Corwin, every time, because Corwin could ask the rock and Corwin wouldn’t be left. With a rope sung by whichever queen was rested.

They brought up a queen of salt. From a world that had been a white flat desert under a pale sun. Four hundred and twelve of her young, out of nearly six hundred.

They brought up a queen of moths. From a world where it had always been night. Corwin said when they reached her she was curled so tight round her young that her wings had grown into the rock. They had to ask the rock to let go of her a feather at a time. It took four days. Six hundred and ninety young.

They brought up a queen of water. From a world that had been all lakes, one after another, like beads. Toby said her heart had stopped twice while they were digging. And started again. Both times. On its own.

Three queens home.

Three white dots on Garnet’s sheet coloured green.

Three left.

Then the forest queen asked to go home.

She came to the map room to ask. Not the red glass. The map room. Up the long road from the plain, uncoiling, long and green and brown, moving the way water moves over moss. She put her great head through the window, because the door was too small, and looked at the great table, at Garnet’s sheet, at the black circle with the green dot in the middle.

Hers.

I would like to try, she said.

Okafor looked up from the slate.

”Try what?”

What I said, said the forest queen. On the mountain. When we sang Neve’s hands. She looked at the black circle. The black is taught. Every grain of it. To stay empty. But every grain of it remembers what it was. The trees. The river. The moss. A pause. If enough of us sang the shape of a forest—

”Can you?” said Okafor.

I do not know, said the forest queen. Nobody has tried. She looked at me. I would like to try. I would like to go home and try.

Okafor didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she looked at me.

”How many queens would she need?”

I didn’t know. Nobody knew. I went to the mountain and asked the old queen, and the old queen thought about it for a long time with her great head on the warm stone.

For a hand, she said, all of us.

”For a forest?”

More, said the old queen. Many more. A pause. But not all at once. A forest is not a hand. A hand is one shape. A forest is a great many small shapes, next to each other. Her pale eyes went south. You do not sing a forest. You sing a tree. And then the tree next to it.

Eleven queens went.

Not every queen on Avalon. Okafor wouldn’t have it. Not with the bases. Not with the black still out there and correctors dropping out of the sky over the old queen’s valley six weeks before. The heavy queen stayed, with the Ground, with the ash queen and her keeper. Our queen stayed, at the top of the garden wall. The four at the bases stayed.

But eleven went. The forest queen and the hill queen, who’d both lain under the black and knew its shape. The marsh queen. The salt queen and the moth queen and the lake queen, three weeks out of their holes, still slow, who said they wanted to, because they knew. Both Kethri queens. The small green one from the wall. The blue queen from under the ice.

And the reed queen. A small green light no bigger than a lamp, brighter now, who’d come out of the black in Mother’s hands. She said she’d like to see a forest come back. She said she’d like to know it could be done before she went home and tried it on her own reeds.

And people.

Me, to feel. Corwin, to ask the ground. Neve, with her lit hands, to feel the trees the way she felt a patient. Hana, because water would have to come back into everything, and she could tell it what shape to be.

Luna and Sera and Risa. In case.

Okafor sent them. She didn’t say in case of what.

She didn’t have to.

The forest world was the same.

I don’t know what I’d expected. I’d seen it from the Harness, the first time, with the heavy young going down the ramp to dig. Black. Flat. Long straight lines that had been trunks, all fallen one way. Round shapes that had been the hollows round their roots. A long winding line that had been a river.

Nothing moved. Nothing grew. Nothing was there.

We came down beside the hole where the heavy young had dug her out. A hundred and four feet. It was still there. The black had closed in a little at the edges, but the hole was still there, going down into the dark.

The forest queen came down the ramp.

She stopped at the bottom. On the black. And looked at it for a long time.

Then she lowered her great green head. Down. Until her face was almost touching it.

And didn’t move.

”What’s she doing?” said Luna. Very quietly.

”Listening,” I said.

I listened with her.

Down. Into the black. Every grain of it. The way I’d felt the archive. The way I’d felt Neve’s hand. Every grain, taught. Stay empty. Take, and stay empty. The one note. Over and over.

And under it.

Very faint. Very far down. Fainter than anything I’d ever felt.

A root.

Not alive. Not anything. The shape of a root. In the black. Where a root had been. The black had taken everything out of it, every grain of life and warmth and silver, and taught what was left to be empty.

But the shape was still there.

The black didn’t know it was there. It had never been taught to look for shapes. Only to take, and stay empty. And under the taking, in every grain of the black where a root had been, the shape of the root lay quiet. Remembering.

The way Neve’s bone had remembered the paths.

The way the keeper had lain in the shape of where its mother had been.

Here, said the forest queen.

She lifted her head. Slowly. And looked at a place on the black about twenty feet from the foot of the ramp. Nothing there. Flat black. Like everywhere else.

Here was a tree, she said. Very old. Older than me. It was the first tree I knew when I came out of my mother. A pause. Its roots went down to the water. Its branches went up to the light. It held the bank of the river when the floods came. Her great green head swayed. I know its shape. Every part. I lay under it for a thousand years.

She looked at me.

Feel it, she said. All of it. Where the roots were. Where the trunk was. Where every branch went.

I shut my eyes.

And felt.

It took a long time to find all of it.

The roots first. Down. Very deep. Spreading. A great net of shapes in the black where roots had been, going down and out and down, all the way to a place far underneath where something that wasn’t black anymore was very slowly moving. Water. Old water. The black hadn’t gone that deep.

Then the trunk. Up from the roots. Lying on its side now, on the black, where it had fallen, all one way with the others. The shape of it. Every ring.

Then the branches. Broken. Scattered. Every one.

I felt it all. And held it. Every grain of the shape of one tree. In the black.

”Got it,” I said.

The forest queen sang.

Not the great singing. Not the war-song, the one note, not still. Not the shape of a hand.

The shape of a tree.

And the hill queen sang with her, because she’d lain under the black too, and knew how. And the marsh queen. And the salt queen and the moth queen and the lake queen, slow, three weeks out of their holes. And the Kethri queens. And the small green one. And the blue.

And the reed queen. Very small. Very bright.

All eleven. All at once. One tree.

Corwin knelt on the black with his hands flat on it and asked it.

The way he asked rock. The way Genny asked bone. Which way did you go? What were you before?

And the black didn’t answer. It had been taught not to.

But the shape of the root under it did.

Hana stood at the foot of the ramp with her hands out and her face set.

And under the black, very deep, in the old water that the black hadn’t reached, something began to move. Up. Slowly. Along the shapes of the roots. Into them. The way water comes into a dry field along the channels when you open the gate at the top.

Hana told it where to go.

Every root. Every fine branching hair of every root. Every shape.

Up.

The black over the place where the tree had been went grey.

Then pale.

Then, very faintly, brown.

It wasn’t a tree.

I want to be honest about that. Genny says I have to be. The brood book has to be true.

It wasn’t a tree. Not the tree. Not the one the forest queen had lain under for a thousand years. That tree was gone. The black had taken it, all of it, and nothing could bring it back.

But where it had been, on the black, in a patch the size of a kitchen table, there was soil.

Brown. Damp. With the smell of soil. With old water in it, come up from very deep. With the shapes of the roots in it, all the way down, every one, remembering.

And in the middle of the soil, so small that Neve had to kneel down and put her lit fingers on it before she was sure, something green.

One leaf.

Nobody said anything.

The forest queen put her great green head down. Very slowly. Until her face was almost touching it.

And didn’t move for a long time.

Then she lifted her head. And looked at the next place. Twenty feet away. Flat black.

Here was a tree, she said.

We sang eleven trees that day.

Eleven patches of soil, each the size of a kitchen table. Each with one leaf. In a long line along the black where the river had been, on the bank, where the old trees had held it when the floods came.

By dusk the queens were so tired they lay on the black where they’d sung and didn’t move. Neve went from one to the next with her lit fingers. She said their hearts were very slow. She said they needed to sleep.

The forest queen didn’t sleep.

She lay along the line of eleven patches of soil with her great green body curled round as many of them as she could reach, and her head on the last one, and her eyes open. Watching the leaf.

It is a thousand years, she said. To me. Very quietly. To grow back what was here. A thousand years.

”Yes.”

I have time, she said.

The correctors came at the second hour after dark.

Ruan told us. From the Meridian. Through the relay, through the dark between worlds, through Dot in the Scarecrow’s wood.

”Thread coming down,” she said. ”Your world. The spine-queen heard it. Eight minutes. Maybe less.”

A pause.

”Lots.”

I felt them come.

Down the thread. Out of the dark past the middle. Into the black world’s sky. Not a hundred and forty. Not three hundred.

More.

Six hundred. Seven. A great long dark rain of them, coming down over the hills and the black forest and the river, toward the place where eleven queens lay asleep on the black round eleven patches of soil.

Toward the leaves.

”They’re coming for the soil,” said Luna.

She was already armoured. Ice. All over. Clear and white at the edges, with her silver branching through it. She’d felt it before Ruan finished. She stood at the foot of the ramp with a blade in each hand and looked at the eleven queens, asleep, and the eleven patches of soil, and the eleven leaves.

”They know,” she said. ”They watched. They know what it is.” Her voice was very flat. ”They’re going to teach it again.”

We couldn’t hold seven hundred.

Not the four of us. Not with eleven queens asleep on the black who couldn’t be moved, who were so tired Neve said if we tried to lift them their hearts might stop. Not with Corwin and Neve and Hana, who didn’t fight, who’d never fought. Not on a black world with nothing to stand on but the black.

I knew it. Luna knew it. Risa, hanging over the river on her storm with her hair on end, knew it. Sera, burning, at the edge of the first patch of soil, knew it.

We got ready anyway.

The forest queen woke up.

She didn’t lift her head. She didn’t make a sound. She opened her eyes. On the last patch of soil. Watching the leaf.

And I felt her feel them come.

Seven hundred correctors. Dropping out of the dark over her world. Over her forest. Over the eleven leaves she’d lain under the black for days to learn how to sing.

Coming to teach them to be empty again.

On the red glass on Avalon, six weeks before, the old queen had said: the next time the houses send correctors to a world with a queen on it, the queen will not curl up under the black and wait for someone to dig.

She will break mountains.

The forest queen didn’t have a mountain.

She had roots.

I felt her reach. Down. Into the black. Into every shape of every root under it. Not the eleven we’d sung. All of them. Every tree that had ever stood on the bank of that river. Every one she’d ever lain under. Every root that had ever gone down to the water.

All of them. Shapes. In the black. Remembering.

She didn’t sing them back to life. There wasn’t time. She didn’t sing them into soil.

She sang them up.

The black split.

Along the river. All of it. From one end of the valley to the other. In a thousand places at once. Long dark cracks, opening, the way ice cracks on a pond in spring.

And out of every crack, roots.

Not living roots. Not green. Black. The shapes of roots, in the black, taught to be empty, but with the shape still in them, and the forest queen singing to the shape, and the shape answering. Coming up out of the ground. Long. Twisting. Thick as a man. Thick as a house. Thousands of them.

The correctors landed among them.

And the roots closed.

The black couldn’t take them.

That was the thing. Nobody had thought of it. Not even me. The black took fire and light and silver and warmth and everything that lived. It took everything that had anything in it.

The roots didn’t have anything in them. They were already black. Already empty. Already taught.

They were just shapes. Remembering.

And a shape, when a queen sings to it, can hold.

I’m not going to write down all of it.

I’ll write down that the roots took the first two hundred and pulled them down into the cracks they’d come out of and the cracks closed over them.

I’ll write down that Luna stood in front of the first patch of soil with her blades and killed every one that got through. And Sera stood in front of the second, burning, and gave the ones that reached her a line of star out of her palm. And Risa held the sky over all of it with a storm and every time a dark shape came down out of the rain she broke it before it landed.

I’ll write down that I was everywhere, scattered, over the whole of the valley, letting go every one I could feel that the roots hadn’t reached. Forty at a time. And that I noticed every one.

I’ll write down that Hana stood over the eleven sleeping queens with her hands up and held a dome of water over them that the black couldn’t take because she made it so cold it was ice before the black could touch it, and held it, and held it, with her teeth clenched and her face white, until it was over.

And I’ll write down that Corwin and Neve lay flat on the black between the patches of soil with their arms over their heads, because they didn’t fight, because they’d never fought. And didn’t run. Because there was nowhere to run to. And because Neve said, after, that if anything got close to the leaves she was going to lie on top of them.

Nothing got close to the leaves.

It took two hours.

When it was over the valley was quiet.

The roots had gone back down into the cracks. Most of them. Some of them stayed up. Standing. Black. Twisted. Like the bones of a forest. All along the river.

The black between them was flat and empty and quiet.

Seven hundred and twelve correctors.

Nobody of ours.

Not one.

The forest queen put her head down on the last patch of soil.

And shut her eyes.

And slept.

We stayed three days.

Until the queens could move. Until Neve said their hearts were strong enough to stand the rope. Sera kept the camp warm. Luna kept the watch. Risa sat on top of the tallest of the standing roots every night with her arms folded and the storm under her, looking up at the dark where the thread came down.

Nothing else came.

On the second day, Neve came to find me. At the foot of the Scarecrow’s ramp. With her lit hands held out in front of her, very carefully, palms up.

There was a leaf on each of them.

”The first two,” she said. ”From the first patch. There are four now.” She looked at them. ”I didn’t pick them. They came off. On their own. When I put my hand down.” She looked at me. ”Trees do that. On Earth they did. Before the domes. Hettie told me. They put out more leaves than they need so they can lose some.” A pause. ”That’s a tree, Lucas. That’s what a tree does.”

I didn’t say anything.

”The forest queen asked if I’d take them to the seed vault,” said Neve. ”So there’ll be something of the first one. In case.” She closed her hands. Very gently. ”I said I’d keep them in my pocket the whole way.”

We came home on the fourth morning.

The forest queen stayed.

It is a thousand years, she said. At the foot of the ramp. With her great green body curled along the line of eleven patches of soil, with four leaves now, and five, and two. I would like to start now.

”Alone?”

The forest queen looked at the standing roots. Black. Twisted. All along the river. Like the bones of a forest.

Not alone, she said.

Hana slept on the way home.

She’d held the dome of ice over the eleven queens for two hours. Then she’d held water in the soil for three days so the leaves wouldn’t dry. She came up the Scarecrow’s ramp on the fourth morning on her own feet, very straight, and sat down on the bench in the forward cabin, and was asleep before the rope took us.

I sat beside her. She leaned against my shoulder. She didn’t wake when we came out over Avalon, or when the ramp went down, or when I lifted her and carried her up the long road from the landing field to the house.

Efua was on the bottom step.

She’d been there since dawn, Mother said. She wouldn’t come in. She sat on the bottom step of the porch with her chin in her hands and her silver ring very bright round her eyes, watching the road.

When she saw us, she stood up.

She didn’t run. Efua never ran. She stood on the bottom step and put out her hand, flat, toward Hana in my arms, and the air round all three of us went very still. Every grain. Not to hear. Something else. I felt it. She was holding the air still so it wouldn’t touch her mother. So nothing would. Not the wind, not the light, not the sound of the town.

So she could sleep.

I carried Hana up the steps through the still air and into the house and laid her on the bed. Efua came behind me, with her hand out, the whole way. She climbed onto the bed and lay down against Hana’s side, the way the keeper lay against its mother, and kept her hand out, flat, over both of them.

Kwame came and stood in the doorway. And looked at them for a long time. Calmly. Considering.

Then he went and fetched a cup of water from the kitchen, very carefully, with both hands, spilling most of it, and put it on the floor by the bed.

In case.

I said it to all three of them. Quietly. From the door.

Hana didn’t wake. Efua didn’t move her hand. Kwame looked at me, and nodded once, very seriously, exactly like Okafor.

Garnet coloured the green dot in the middle of the black circle bigger.

Not much. A little. A ring round the dot, in green, with the side of the pencil. Eleven small marks round it.

”That’s the trees,” she said. ”The ones you sang.” She looked at it for a long time. ”It’s still mostly black.”

”Yes.”

”It’s going to be black for a long time.”

”A thousand years, the forest queen says.”

Garnet considered this.

”I’ll be dead,” she said.

”Yes.”

”Somebody will have to keep drawing it.” She put the pencil down. Very straight. ”I’ll teach someone.”

The scream stopped on the night we came home.

I was on Father’s roof. Listening. The way I always did. To everything. Avalon, and the broods, and the queens, and the bases, and the Meridian overhead, and the threads going out into the dark.

And under all of it, at the end of the ninth line, the middle.

It had been screaming since the fire world. Months now. The long torn note, going out along every thread. Never stopping. Never changing. Wren said it was the only thing she’d ever heard that she couldn’t stop counting, because it was one thing and it never ended.

That night, it stopped.

Not faded. Stopped. All at once. In the middle of the note.

And there was silence at the end of the ninth line. Very large. Very cold.

And then something came down the thread.

Not a push. Not the one note. Not the houses’ grip, the one I’d felt in the Overseer, cold and certain.

Small. Very small. Slow. Like someone coming down a staircase in the dark who has never been down it before and doesn’t know how many steps there are.

Not to the fire world. Not to the ninth line.

Here.

Tally heard it.

She was on the porch. On the rail. With her blanket round her shoulders and the notebook Garnet had given her open on her knees. She’d been writing something. She stopped.

And looked up.

At the sky. At nothing. At the place where the thread came down.

And I heard the voice say something. Very thin. Very far. To Tally. Because she’d answered it, once, a long time ago, at the end of a long table. Because it knew her voice.

You said you came out of someone.

Tally didn’t move.

You said when you find them again, you know. A pause. Very long. They taught me something tonight. The houses. Something new. They put it in me. Another pause. I do not want it.

Tally put her hand out. Flat. Into the dark.

”What is it?” she said.

The voice didn’t answer for a long time.

How to make the black, it said.

Days 2821–2878. Green.

The ash queen opened her eyes on a market Tuesday and said the brood-word for the youngest in the hollow, and the keeper lifted its head for the first time in a month. A good month: a mill, the seed vault, twenty-two interceptors, four hundred and six trays. We dug out three more queens: salt, moths, lakes. Then the forest queen went home to try. One tree at a time: I felt its shape in the black, eleven queens sang it, Corwin asked, Hana brought old water up the roots, and there was soil the size of a kitchen table, and one leaf. Eleven trees. Seven hundred correctors came to teach them empty again, and the forest queen woke and sang the shapes of every root in the valley up out of the black, and they held. Nobody of ours. She stayed: a thousand years, she says, and she’d like to start now. The scream at the middle stopped. The voice came down the thread to Tally: the houses taught it something new tonight. How to make the black. It doesn’t want it.