Scarecrow

Isar Thenn came up the hill on a Tuesday, carrying his own bag.

I should say that first, because Aune said it first, when she saw him from the porch. She said the most famous man on Ister had come through the arch from the second city and walked up from the red glass like anybody, in a plain grey travelling robe, with a bag over his shoulder that he was carrying himself.

“He’s never carried his own bag in his life,” said Aune. “He has people for it. He has people for his people.”

“Maybe he left them on Ister,” said Risa.

“He left them on Ister,” said Aune. Watching him come. “He’s doing research.”

He’d written first. Of course. Through Imre Oshan. He said he’d been filming for nearly a year now, and he’d done the parts of me that he could do from the book and the recordings, and the comic, and the soft one, which he kept on his dressing table, he said, to look at. But there were scenes coming that he couldn’t do from any of that. The long table. The bottom step. The roof. He said he’d like to come and watch, if he wouldn’t be in the way. For a week. He said he’d sleep wherever he was put and eat whatever was in front of him and not ask me anything I didn’t want to be asked.

I said no.

Risa said yes. Again. She wrote back before I’d finished saying no, and signed it the wife who’s fishing, which Isar Thenn apparently understood, because he wrote back and signed his the actor who agrees with her.

So he came.

He was taller than I expected. Which is saying something, with the Aldri. Taller than Aune by a head, and Aune’s taller than nearly everyone. He had to duck to come through the porch door. He didn’t look like the card. Not exactly. He’d let the silver they’d put in his hair for the filming grow out at the roots, and you could see his own grey coming through underneath, short, the way all Aldri wear it. And he wasn’t wearing a long coat. And his eyes were his own. Pale. Not black at all.

But he had the face. The one on the card. You couldn’t get away from it.

He stood on the porch and looked at the long table. All of it. The bread and the jam and the honey and the teapot with the chip and Mother pouring and Oona lifting and the twenty children and three babies and six wives and the windowsill full of figures.

He didn’t say anything for a long time.

“It’s much louder,” said Isar Thenn. In our language. Very carefully. “Than the book.”

“It always is,” said Mother. “Sit down.”

He sat down.

I want that written down. Because Aune went very still, and Halvane, who’d come that morning with the long record and was looming over the bread, went very still too. The Aldri don’t sit for important things. And Isar Thenn is the most famous Aldri there is, and he’d come about something important.

He sat on the bench. Between Kesh and Teo. Teo had to move two of his arms.

“Imre told me you’d make me,” said Isar Thenn. To Mother. “She said you make everyone. She said she stood at the long table for a whole morning the first time and you put a cup in her hand and then put her in a chair by her shoulders.”

“She was looming,” said Mother. She poured him a cup. “Like Halvane.”

“I’m not looming,” said Halvane.

“You’re over the bread,” said Mother.

The children loved him.

I’ll get that out of the way. I’d like to say they saw through him. They didn’t. Kesh asked him to do the voice. My voice. The one he’d been using in the filming. And Isar Thenn looked very serious for a moment, and then said, in a voice that sounded nothing like mine and somehow exactly like it, slow and a bit tired and dry at the edges: “I’m not a king. I make floors.”

The whole long table went quiet.

Then Kesh fell off the bench.

“That’s Dad,” said Kesh. From the floor. “That’s exactly Dad.”

“It is not,” I said.

“It is,” said every one of my wives. All at once.

He did Mother next. Not the voice; he wouldn’t do Mother’s voice, he said, that was Maelis Orr’s and he’d never take a part off Maelis. But he did the way she sits down. Very suddenly. When something’s too much. He did it once, at the end of the bench, so exactly that Oona laughed so hard she dropped the lifting and Mother had to catch the pot herself.

Mother looked at him for a long moment.

“I don’t sit like that,” said Mother.

“You do, Gran,” said Oona.

“I’m going to be cross,” said Mother. “Just a bit.”

“You said that about the soft one,” said Ash.

“I’m still cross about the soft one,” said Mother. She poured him more tea. She’s never poured anyone more tea who she was actually cross with in her life.

For the week, he watched.

That’s all he did. He said he would and he did. He didn’t ask me anything. He followed me round. Not close. A long way back, like a heron at the edge of a pond. He came to the dawn count and stood at the back with his bag, which he still carried everywhere, and watched Wren write two hundred and eighty-one, all saying not yet at the top of the slate. He watched me ask the stars. He watched me walk the north field with Luna, and help Rory hang a door, and sit with the grey ones with Mother in the morning.

He watched me eat breakfast. Every day. He told me afterwards that was the hardest. He said everyone on Ister knew what I did with a star and nobody knew what I did with a piece of bread, and the bread was harder to act.

“What do I do with a piece of bread?” I said.

“You look at it first,” said Isar Thenn. “Every time. Before you eat it. For about as long as it takes to say good morning. I don’t think you know you do it.”

I didn’t.

“Imre says it’s because of Earth,” said Isar Thenn. “When there wasn’t much. When your mother cut it in thin pieces so it would last.” He looked at the bread on the long table. “She says you still look at bread like it’s a good surprise.”

I didn’t say anything for a while.

“Put that in,” said Mother. From the other end of the table. Not looking up. “In the film. Put that in.”

Corin found him on the second evening. In the garden. By the wall.

I know because Tiri told me. She’d gone with him. She says Corin walked straight up to the most famous man on Ister, who was sitting on the garden wall by Sefa’s terraces looking at the bed of the gardener’s cutting, and said, without saying hello: “Are you doing the bird?”

Isar Thenn looked down at him. A long way down.

“The bird,” he said.

“Tiri’s bird,” said Corin. “The lamp. The one everyone tells wrong.” He’d gone red to the ears, Tiri says, but he didn’t stop. “Is it in the film?”

“It’s in the film,” said Isar Thenn.

“Who mends it?”

Isar Thenn was quiet for a moment.

“The script says Lucas Dask,” he said. “It was written before Halvane went round the schools.”

Corin looked at his feet. Then he looked up again.

“It wasn’t him,” said Corin. “It was me. I didn’t want anyone to know. I still don’t, much.” He swallowed. “But it’s in a film now. And if it’s in a film it’s going to be true for everyone for ever, and it isn’t true. And Dad would hate that more than I hate people knowing.”

Tiri says Isar Thenn looked at Corin for a very long time. The way he looked at me eating bread.

“Will you show me,” said Isar Thenn. “How you held it. When you mended it.”

So Corin sat down on the garden wall beside him and showed him. With his hands. How he’d held the broken bird. Where his thumbs had gone. How he’d hummed. Two notes. With his tongue between his teeth.

Isar Thenn did it back. Exactly. With his long Aldri hands. And hummed.

“That’s it,” said Corin.

“I’ll tell Imre,” said Isar Thenn. “The boy mends the bird. The father watches from the door and doesn’t say anything.” He looked at Corin. “Is that right? Was he in the door?”

Corin thought about it.

“He was in the door,” said Corin. “I didn’t know he’d seen. I found out later.” He went red again. “He didn’t tell anyone either.”

“Then that’s what it’ll be,” said Isar Thenn.

Tiri says she’s never been so proud of anyone in her life. She says she told Corin so on the way back up the garden, and he said don’t, and she said she would anyway, and he said I know.

On the third day he sat on the bottom step.

Nobody was having a baby. There were three in the house already and Halloway said if anyone so much as looked at her she’d lock the long ward. But he asked if he could sit on it, for a while, on his own, to see what it was like. And I said he could.

He sat there all afternoon.

I came past once, on the way to the kitchen, and he was sitting with his head in his hands. Very still. And I nearly asked if he was all right, and then I saw that he was practising.

He looked up. He looked exactly like me on the night of Luka. Exactly. Worse than the voice. I had to sit down on the step above him.

“Is it right?” said Isar Thenn.

“Too right,” I said. “Stop it.”

“I’ve been doing it for three hours,” said Isar Thenn. “I think it’s starting to work on me. I keep thinking someone upstairs is having a baby and I don’t know what to do with myself.”

Taveth came round the corner of the porch at that moment, with the great iron pot on his back, because Ash had told him there was a man on the bottom step with his head in his hands and Ash doesn’t check the details.

He put a bowl in Isar Thenn’s hands.

Isar Thenn tasted it.

“It’s wonderful,” said Isar Thenn. Instantly. Without being told.

Taveth looked at him for a long time. Then at me.

“He’ll do,” said Taveth.

On the fourth day, Hana let him hold Queenie.

He asked first. Very carefully. He said he’d held a great many babies on a stage, made of cloth, and never a real one, because the Aldri are very slow to have children and he’d never had any of his own. He sat down on the bench, because Hana told him to, and she put Queenie in his long arms in her crooked glasses, and stood over him with one finger ready to push them back up.

Queenie opened her eyes.

She looked at him. Behind the soot. All the way down. The way she looks at everything.

Isar Thenn went very still. I’ve seen that face on people Queenie looks at. Kyria made it. Halvane made it. It’s the face of someone being seen to the bottom by someone who doesn’t want anything from them.

He didn’t say anything for a long time.

“Everyone looks at me,” said Isar Thenn. In the end. Very quietly. “All my life. A hundred and forty years. Every street on Ister. And every one of them wants something. A face. A part. A name on a card.” He looked down at her. “She doesn’t want anything.”

“No,” said Hana.

“She’s just looking.”

“She’s just looking,” said Hana. And pushed the glasses back up.

Queenie went to sleep in his arms. He didn’t move for an hour. Kesh says he didn’t even blink. When Hana finally took her back, he sat on the bench for a while longer with his arms still the shape of her.

Then he went and sat on the bottom step again. Not practising, this time, I think.

Maelis Orr came on the fifth day.

She’d heard he was here. She said she wasn’t going to let Isar Thenn have a week at the long table and not have a morning herself. She came up the hill on an Aldri walking stick with a carved top, very slowly, three hundred and eighty years old and straight as a post, in a robe the colour of evening, and stopped at the bottom of the porch steps the way the toymakers had.

Mother looked at her.

Maelis Orr looked at Mother.

It went on for a long time. Everyone at the long table stopped eating. Isar Thenn put his cup down very quietly.

“You’ll be the one who’s been practising,” said Mother.

“Four thousand cups,” said Maelis Orr. In our language. Very low, very grand, very slow. “And I still don’t know whether the second pour is lower.”

“It’s lower,” said Mother.

“How much?”

Mother came down the porch steps. And took her arm. The way she took Sefa’s. And brought her up the steps, and put her in the chair at the corner where Ilas usually sits, with her stick across her knees. And went round the table and picked up the pot.

“Watch,” said Mother.

And poured.

I’ll say what it was like, because I’ve seen Mother pour every day of my life and I’ve never seen anyone watch it like that.

Maelis Orr didn’t move. Not her hands, not her face, not her eyes. She watched the pot tip, and the tea come out, the first pour, and stop. And the cup, and Mother’s wrist. And the second pour, lower. A finger’s width lower. Less. And the way Mother’s other hand came up, without thinking, to the lid. And the way she put the pot down, on the cloth, and turned the handle round so it faced Oona, so Oona could lift it next time.

Then Maelis Orr closed her eyes.

“The handle,” said Maelis Orr. “You turn the handle. For the child.”

“Do I?”

“Every time,” said Isar Thenn. Very quietly. “I counted. Forty-one times this week.”

Mother looked down at the pot. At the handle. Facing Oona.

She’d never known.

“Well,” said Mother. In the end. “She lifts it. It’s easier for her that way.”

Maelis Orr opened her eyes. They were wet. She’s the grandest woman on Ister and she’d been crying with her eyes shut at a long table on a hill on another world, over a teapot.

“That’s the part,” said Maelis Orr. “That’s the whole part. I’ve been doing it wrong for four thousand cups.”

She stayed for lunch. And for dinner. She and Mother sat at the corner of the long table all afternoon, two very old women, one very tall and one not, and talked. Nobody heard what about. Oona says it was mostly about the pot. Ilas came in the afternoon and sat with them, and then it was three very old women, and Halvane came and stood behind Ilas’s chair and loomed, and Mother told him to sit down, and Ilas said he wouldn’t, he never has, not once in all the years she’s been married to him. And Maelis Orr said she’d known him for three hundred, and he’d stood at her first opening night all the way through the interval.

Halvane didn’t say anything.

He sat down.

I want that written down more than anything else this week.

Halvane sat down. At the long table. On the bench. Between Kesh and Teo, where Isar Thenn had been. Teo moved two of his arms.

Nobody said anything. Nobody dared. Mother poured him a cup and turned the handle round for Oona and didn’t say a word, and Ilas looked at her husband sitting at a table on another world for the first time in eleven thousand years of his people’s running, and put her hand on his knee.

“It’s very low,” said Halvane. After a while. About the bench. “I don’t know how you manage.”

“You get used to it,” said Mother.

On the last night, Isar Thenn asked me his question.

He’d said he wouldn’t ask me anything I didn’t want to be asked. And he hadn’t. All week. But on the roof, the last night, where I’d taken him because Risa said he should see the roof, he asked if he could ask one thing.

I said he could.

“In the doorway,” said Isar Thenn. “On Lantern. When the twelve came. When you were beside them and in the arch at the same time.” He was looking at the sky. Avalon’s sky. Not his. “What were you thinking?”

I thought about it. I’ve been asked that a lot since. By the Assize, and by Imre Oshan, and by the children, once, at the long table. I’ve never answered it properly.

“I was thinking about the old woman,” I said. “At the back of the line. With the teapot.”

“Your mother.”

“My mother,” I said. “And I was thinking that if I moved from the door, even one step, she’d see me move. And she’d think something was wrong. And she’d be frightened.” I looked at the sky too. “So I didn’t move. That’s all. That’s all it was. I didn’t want my mother to see me move.”

Isar Thenn didn’t say anything for a long time.

“That’s not in the book,” he said.

“I never told Imre.”

“Can I put it in?” said Isar Thenn. “Not the words. Just the not moving. Just that it was for her.”

I thought about Mother at the back of the line. Not knowing. Walking home.

“Yes,” I said.

He went home in the morning. Carrying his own bag.

He left something on the long table. Under the teapot, where Mother found it when she lifted it for the first pour. A gold card. The film card. The one with him in the doorway, too beautiful, in my coat, with silver in his hair.

He’d written on the back of it, in our language. Very carefully.

For the wife who’s fishing. He’s better looking than me. I checked. All week. I. T.

Risa has it on the wall by her side of the bed. She says it’s evidence. I say it’s fishing. She says, in this house, those have always been the same thing, and that I married her knowing it.

The engine on Lantern finished a few weeks after that.

I’ll write it properly. It deserves it.

Nine months, Halvane had said. Nine months, with every engineer on Ister and every smith who could be spared and the queens. And the star-eater coming, the nearest one, the one that had turned toward the Collective and eaten three of its suns on the way, and was now reaching for Lantern’s thin red one. Eleven months off, at the start. Then ten. Then fewer.

They finished it in a little under eight and a half.

Keir and Enna were there. They’d been there most days since the twins were born, with Bram and Aster in baskets at the edge of the engine room. Enna says the twins have spent more of their lives under a lake on Lantern than anywhere on Avalon, and that Aster’s first word is going to be tolerance. The old woman who brought the engineers lunch was there, every day, with her basket. She’s one of the three hundred and eleven who stayed. She said she’d stay until the end, either way. She said someone had to bring the lunch.

And all through it, Lantern’s three hundred and eleven sat in their low round houses on the shore of the big lake, with a lamp in every window, and waited.

Dory held the line.

From the red glass. The way she did for Ister, the first time, when Ister came to Avalon. She stood on the glass by the open Lantern arch with Sorrel on her hip and her glasses off and her black eyes open, and put her hand out, flat, into the air, as if she were resting it on the back of something very large.

“Ready,” said Dory.

Halvane was on Lantern. At the stern, he’d said. There isn’t really a stern, on a world. But there’s a place at the edge of the biggest lake where the engine comes up under the water, and that’s where he stood, with Ilas beside him, who’d said he’d do no such thing at his age, and who’d come anyway, because she said if he was going to be foolish she’d like to see it.

The old woman with the basket was beside them.

“Tell them,” said Halvane. Through the arch. To Dory.

Dory told them.

The engine turned over.

You could feel it from Avalon. Through the arch. Through the red glass. A long, low, enormous turning, like something waking up that had been asleep under a lake since before there were lamps. The water on Lantern’s lake went flat all at once, like a held breath. And then a light came up out of it, from underneath, very bright, Aldri gold.

And the queens sang.

Every queen who’d sung the place ready, all the months of building. Through the ground. Through the arch. Through Dory. I felt it in my feet.

And Lantern went.

Not far. Not as far as Ister went, the first time. Halvane says you don’t move a world that’s lived its whole life under one sun any further than you have to; it’s like moving someone very old to a new house, you put them in the room most like their old one. So Lantern went to a quiet place two stars inward from where it had been. Inside the Hedge now. Close enough to Tiel that you can see Tiel’s sun from the shore of the big lake at night, small and yellow, like a lamp in someone else’s window.

Its own thin red sun stayed where it was.

Without it.

The people on Avalon felt it go. The ninety thousand from Lantern, in their Lenn-woven houses round the lake on the eastern plain, with a lamp hook by every door. Wren says they all came out of their houses at the same moment, when the arch shook, every one of them, and stood by their doors with their lamps lit and looked east.

Ebb was at the front. He’s very old now. He leaned on his granddaughter, the one who taught Mother to make the clay lamp. And when the arch went quiet again, and Dory put her hand down, and said it’s there, it’s safe, it’s where it’s meant to be, Ebb poured a cup of tea out on the ground. The way he did on Lantern’s square when Mother came. And the whole of the eastern plain did the same.

Mother lit the clay lamp on the kitchen sill. It smoked. She left it.

I kept asking it. Lantern’s old sun.

I should say that. Every morning, at the arch, when I went down the Hedge one star at a time, I still asked the thin red one. Even after Lantern had gone. Even though there was nobody under it any more. Wren noticed. She asked me why, the second morning, and I said I didn’t know. I said it had been asked every morning for a long time and I didn’t want it to stop being asked just because nobody needed it any more.

Wren didn’t write it in the count. She just stood beside me while I did it.

Not yet, it said. Every morning. Very faint. Very far. Not yet.

On the last morning, it said something else.

Thank you for asking, it said.

Then: Nobody has before.

I stood at the arch for a long time after that. Wren didn’t say anything. She put her hand on my arm, the way her grandmother used to on the dawn line, and waited, and then we went in to the count.

Three months later we watched the star-eater eat Lantern’s old sun.

From the shore of the big lake. On Lantern. Where it is now. Mother and me and Dory, and Halvane, sitting down, on a bench Rory had carried through the arch for him, which he has started doing, and doesn’t explain. And the three hundred and eleven. And the old woman with the basket.

It was very far. Two stars outward. A small red light in the dark, low over the water.

And then the dark came over it.

Not quickly. Not like a hand closing. Like a slow tide coming in over a lamp left on the sand. The red went dim. And dimmer. And Bell, beside me, with her instruments, said something under her breath, very fast, about the shape of the dark round it, and then stopped talking.

Then it was gone.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

“That was ours,” said the old woman with the basket. Very quietly. “That was the sun I was born under. That my mother was. Her mother.” She looked at it. Where it had been. “I used to sit on the step in the evening and watch it go down over the lake.”

Mother put her arm round her.

“You’ve still got the lake,” said Mother. “And the step. And the evening.”

The old woman thought about that.

“It’s a different sun,” she said.

“I know, love,” said Mother. “It’ll go down just the same.”

Bell came to me afterwards. On the shore.

“I saw it,” said Bell. “How it took it. The shape.” She looked at her instruments. “I’ll need to do the sum again. With what I saw.”

“Is it worse?”

Bell thought about that for a very long time. Bell always does.

“It’s different,” said Bell. “I’m not sure yet whether that’s worse. I’ll tell you when I know.” She closed her instruments. “It hesitated. At the very end. Just before it closed. For about as long as it takes to say good morning.” She looked at me. “I don’t know why. I’d like to.”

The other things. The way I do.

The toymakers have made the babies.

All three. A set. Aune brought it up from the plaza in the gold bag the week after Lantern moved. A soft Luka, in red, with a little warm pad inside him that you heat on the hearth, so he’s warm to hold, the way the real one is. A soft Kyrie, with a soft blunt blade in her fist and her mouth open, and a button in her middle that makes her shout, very small, which Andraste pressed eleven times in a row and then hid from Halloway. And a soft Queenie, in her crooked glasses, one lens darker than the other, exactly the way Hana said.

The children of Ister have started calling them the three. As if there’d never been any other three. Halvane says the long record has had to give them a page of their own.

And there’s a thing Ilka found. That I want to put down.

It came on the thin band. Not the one Corvan used. A different one. Even thinner. From inside the Collective, she thinks, from one of the big inner worlds, the ones that sit near the front of the far hall. It wasn’t a packet. It wasn’t locked. It was a picture.

A child’s drawing. On something that might have been paper. Of a round thing. Green on one side. Dark on the other. With a ring of small shapes round it.

The eldest.

The playset. Someone inside the Collective has one. Someone’s child has drawn it. And sent the drawing out, on the thinnest band there is, to nowhere, to anyone, the way you’d put a note in a bottle.

There’s one word under it. In the Collective’s script. Ilka read it to us.

Ours?

Dory’s taken it to Root. To show the eldest.

And one more thing, that Dory told me on the red glass, the night Lantern went. After everyone else had gone up the hill. When she was still standing by the arch with her glasses in her hand and her black eyes open, looking at nothing.

She said that when the engine turned over, and she was holding the line, and her net was out as wide as it goes, all the way to Lantern and past it, she’d felt something. Very far. Out past the Watch. Further than anything with a name.

She said it was like the voice.

Not the voice. Like it. The way the hush is like a hand over a mouth. Very faint. Talking.

Not to us. Not to anyone she knew.

To someone new.

Then it stopped. And she couldn’t find it again.

“It might be nothing,” said Dory.

“It might,” I said.

Neither of us thought it was nothing.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Two hundred and eighty-two now, because Lantern’s under a new one, and its new star wanted to be asked too.

Wren wrote it at the top of the slate. And then, under it, for the first time, she wrote something else. Very small.

Lantern’s old sun: gone.

Days 9269–9441. Research.

Isar Thenn came up the hill carrying his own bag; he has people for his people. I said no; Risa said yes, signed the wife who’s fishing; he signed the actor who agrees with her. Taller than Aune by a head; his own grey coming through the silver; pale eyes; the face. It’s much louder than the book. Mother: sit down; and he sat. He did my voice: I’m not a king; I make floors; Kesh fell off the bench; every wife: it is. He did Mother sitting down suddenly; I’m going to be cross, just a bit. He watched for a week like a heron: the count, the stars, the north field, Rory’s door, the grey ones. You look at bread first, every time, for as long as it takes to say good morning; it’s from Earth; Mother: put that in. The bottom step for three hours: too right, stop it; Taveth’s bowl; it’s wonderful, instantly; he’ll do. Corin on the garden wall: it wasn’t him, it was me; the boy mends the bird and the father watches from the door. Hana let him hold Queenie: she doesn’t want anything; she’s just looking. Maelis Orr came on a carved stick: four thousand cups; it’s lower; watch. She saw the handle: you turn it for the child, every time; Isar Thenn counted forty-one. That’s the whole part. Three old women at the corner; and Halvane sat down, for the first time, on the bench between Kesh and Teo; it’s very low; you get used to it. On the roof: I didn’t move from the door because I didn’t want my mother to see me move. Can I put it in? Yes. Under the teapot: he’s better looking than me; I checked; all week. Risa has it on the wall: evidence. The engine finished in under eight and a half months; Bram and Aster in baskets in the engine room; the old woman with the lunch, one of the 311. Dory held the line from the red glass; Halvane at the stern with Ilas; the lake went flat and gold; the queens sang; Lantern went two stars inward, inside the Hedge, near Tiel. On the eastern plain, ninety thousand by their doors with lamps lit; Ebb poured a cup on the ground. I kept asking Lantern’s old sun; on its last morning: thank you for asking; nobody has before. Three months on, from the lake, we watched the eater take Lantern’s old sun like a tide over a lamp on the sand. The old woman: that was ours. Mother: it’ll go down just the same. Bell: it hesitated at the very end, as long as it takes to say good morning; I’ll do the sum again. The three: soft Luka with a warm pad, soft Kyrie who shouts, soft Queenie in crooked glasses. On the thinnest band, from inside the Collective, a child’s drawing of the eldest: Ours? And when the engine turned over, at the far edge of the net, past the Watch, something like the voice, talking to someone new; then nothing. Two hundred and eighty-two, all saying not yet. Wren: Lantern’s old sun, gone.