Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 589: Chapter 584: A List of Names

Location:A hayloft above a carter’s yard, four days south of Ashmarch

Date/Time:25 Cinderfall 9943 AZI, Kindleday

Realm:Mid Realm

Aleida Vesk had been writing names on the inside of a coat for twenty-two weeks and had not once thought of it as anything.

It started on a bench at Ashmarch because the registrar wrote things down, and she had not had a pencil in her hand in eleven years, and the morning had been long. A woman two along said Doorn, Herrik, the boy’s Teun, and Aleida wrote it in the lining with a carpenter’s pencil she had borrowed off a man in the queue and forgotten to give back, because she had decided on the walk in that she was going to stop losing things.

Twenty-two weeks. Four coats’ worth, in the end, because you cannot keep writing on the same lining and because the fourth coat is the one she is wearing.

Forty-one names.

***

Nobody came in the night. That is the part she cannot make anybody understand who was not in it.

There was no door kicked. Nobody was taken out of a bed. In twenty-two weeks, in four districts, not one person she knows of was arrested, charged, questioned, or so much as spoken to by a man in white.

What happened was weather.

Her landlord found that the lease had been written wrong in her mother’s time and could not be renewed, and he was sorry about it, and he was telling the truth; she saw the sheet. Her brother’s license for the Vense crossing went to somebody else at the quarter, which happens, and had never happened to him in nineteen years. The woman from the bench two along — Doorn’s wife, not Herrik, the wife — was told her well had been condemned, and it had been, and it was bad water, and the inspector was perfectly civil and had the papers.

Four separate reasonable things, to four separate families, in one district, in a season.

Any one of them is a Hammerday.

***

Aleida worked it out in Blazepeak because she had the coat.

That is the whole of why she is alive and in a hayloft and not in a village being reasonable about a lease. Not courage. Not cleverness. She had written the names down, and when the third thing happened to the third family she looked at her own lining and found that she could put a finger on all three and that they were the three who had stood up at Ashmarch on the same Restday.

She counted. Of the forty-one, nineteen had had something happen. Of the nineteen, every single one had been to a gate hall and asked out loud.

Of the twenty-two who had not had anything happen, nineteen had never gone; two had gone once and said nothing; and one was a man called Brun who had gone three times and shouted, and about whom nothing at all had happened, which she did not understand and wrote down anyway.

That is not weather. Weather does not sort.

Aleida left on the ninth of Infernorest with a bag and a coat and her mother’s ring sewn into the hem, and her brother would not come, and she has not heard from him and will not write.

***

The inspector who condemned the Doorn well came back a second time, which is the detail Aleida cannot put down.

He did not have to. The paper was signed, and the well was capped, and his part was over, and still he came back on his own time, on a Restday, with a bucket and a length of cord, and went down into it himself and came up filthy and stood in the yard explaining to a woman whose son had been gone two years that the seep was off the midden and that if they moved the midden nine paces east and dug a new shaft on the far side of the lane the water would come good in a few years.

Drew it for her, too. In the dirt, with a stick, as men draw things.

Then he went away, and the family had no water, and had to go, and nothing he had said was untrue, and nothing he had done was unkind, and Aleida has thought about that man more often in twenty-two weeks than she has thought about anybody in a white coat.

Somebody set the condemnation. Somebody did not set the inspector.

Aleida wrote both of those down.

***

There are nine of them in the loft tonight, and they came from four districts, and not one of them was looking for the others.

That is the thing about running, which none of them had known: you do not go anywhere. You go to where there is work that does not want a name, and so does everybody else in the same position, and a carter’s yard four days south of Ashmarch turns out to be where that lands you. Three of them had been here a month before any of them said one true word.

It was Herrik Doorn who broke it, in the end, and he broke it the way a man breaks a thing he has been holding too long: badly, at the wrong moment, over nothing.

Somebody said the water at Haddenmere was bad now too.

”That’s the fourth well,” said Herrik, to the hayloft, in a voice that was not a loft voice. ”That’s the fourth.”

And the loft went very quiet, and a man at the far end said, ”Which four?” and that was the beginning of it.

***

They were at it until the fourth bell and the coat came out at about the second.

Aleida had not meant to show it. She had meant to say what she had worked out and let them decide what they thought, and she had got a handful of sentences in before a woman called Senna Harrow said, flatly, ”You’re saying you kept a list,” and there was a silence with something unpleasant in it.

So she took the coat off and turned it inside out and put it on the boards under the lamp.

Forty-one names in four hands, because the pencil had gone and she had borrowed others. Dates beside about half of them. A district beside all of them, because she had started doing that in the sixth week when she realized she was forgetting which bench.

Nine people stood round a coat on a hayloft floor for a long time.

”My cousin’s on there,” said Senna Harrow. ”Third from the bottom. I didn’t tell you that.”

”You didn’t. Somebody at Grennholt did, in Sparkfall. I don’t know who. It was a woman with a burn on her hand.”

”That’s her sister.”

***

What the list does is the thing none of them had been able to do alone, and it took them most of an hour to see it, and when they saw it they went quiet again in a different way.

Alone, each of them has a story.

A story is nothing. Aleida has known that since the first morning. My daughter went down for assessment and did not come back, and there is no record is a thing a woman says, and the person she says it to is sorry, and then goes home, because people say a great many things, and sorrow makes people say more of them. A dozen people have heard her story and been sorry and done nothing, and she does not blame one of them.

Nine stories in a loft is nine stories.

Forty-one names in four hands with dates and districts is a document.

It does not prove the children were taken. It does not prove anything about the Temple at all, and Herrik said so, loudly, and was right. What it proves is that forty-one families in four districts lost a child to the same procedure in the last few years, and that nineteen of them got into trouble afterward, and that all nineteen of those had been to a gate hall and asked.

”A man could argue with that,” said Herrik.

”He could not say he had never heard it,” said Aleida.

***

They made four copies that night, and it took until the sixth bell, and three of the nine could not write and were given other jobs so that nobody had to sit there not writing.

The copies go in four directions, which was Senna Harrow’s idea and is a better one than anything Aleida had.

”Because if it’s in one place it’s in a cupboard,” said Senna, ”and a cupboard burns. Four copies and four people and none of us knows where the other three are keeping theirs, and then it isn’t a thing somebody can come and get.”

”And if one of us is taken.”

”Then they get one copy and one person, and the other three are still out there, and the list goes on being added to.” Senna looked round the loft. ”That’s the whole of it. There isn’t anything cleverer, and I’ve been thinking about it since Blazepeak.”

So they wrote until their hands were bad, and the fourth copy went to a man called Oram who is sixty and slow and entirely unremarkable and who had said barely a word all night, which is exactly why.

Aleida watched Oram take his copy and understood why Senna had picked him about four seconds after she had.

He is sixty, and he moves like a man with a bad hip, and when the sheet went into his hands he folded it in four and put it inside his shirt without looking at it, as you put away a thing you have already decided about.

”You had a child in it,” said Aleida. Not a question.

”Girl. Marelle.” Oram tied his coat. ”Eleven years ago, not two. Before any of this started being a thing people noticed.”

The loft had gone quiet again. Nine people doing arithmetic.

”And I’ve been on a bench at three halls in eleven years, and I’ve been told there’s no record at three halls in eleven years, and the first two times I believed the clerk was lying and the third time I worked out he wasn’t.” Oram did up the last button. ”That’s the whole of what I’ve got. Nobody’s ever come for me. Nobody’s ever done a thing to me, and I’ve asked out loud more times than anybody in this room.”

”Why not.”

”Because I’m not worth the weather.” He said it without any self-pity at all, as a man states a trade. ”Sixty, no land, no license, no lease worth taking off me, nothing to condemn. There’s nothing they can do to me that would look like an accident, and they don’t do the other kind.” He picked up his bag. ”That’s why I’m carrying one. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been good for in this, and I’ve been waiting eleven years to find out what it was.”

Oram went down the ladder first, and nobody said anything after him for a while.

***

The last argument was the one that mattered, and Aleida lost it on purpose.

Herrik wanted to add what they believed. Not just the names — the rest. Where the children went. What it was for. The thing they had all worked out in the small hours in four separate districts and had never said out loud until tonight.

”We know,” he said. ”All of us in this loft know.”

”We do not know. We have decided, and it is probably right, and it is not the same thing.”

”Aleida—”

”Put one sentence on that list that you cannot stand on, and the whole list is a story again.” She had both hands on the boards. ”Forty-one names. Dates. Districts. What happened after. Every single line is something I can point at or a person said to my face. That is the whole document, and it is not going to have one word on it that somebody can call mad.”

”And when somebody reads it and asks what we think it means?”

”Then they are asking,” said Aleida, ”and that is further than anybody has got in two years, and we can tell them what we think, and they can decide if we are mad, and the list will still be the list afterward.”

Herrik Doorn stood in a hayloft with his jaw working.

”Teun’s been gone two and a half years,” he said.

”I know.”

”Two and a half years, and I’ve got nine lines on a sheet about a lease.”

”You have got nine lines on a sheet about a lease,” said Aleida, ”and you are the only man in four districts who can prove the lease and the boy are the same morning. Nobody has ever been able to prove anything about any of this. You can prove that.”

***

They came down out of the loft before light, in ones, over an hour, which is how they do everything now.

Aleida went south with the second copy and her mother’s ring and a coat with forty-one names in the lining, and about two days out she stopped on a road and did the thing she had been putting off for twenty-two weeks, which was to work out what it was actually for.

Not rescue. She had stopped having that one somewhere around Blazepeak and had not told anybody, because saying it out loud in a loft would have taken the legs off three people in there.

Sanne is nine and has been gone eleven months, and Aleida does not know which province she is in.

What the list is for is this: in some number of years there will be a person in a room with the authority to do something, and that person will say show me, and somebody has to be able to put a thing on the table. Not a mother crying. A document, in four hands, in four places, with dates on it, added to every season by people who were never paid and never organized and never once got a straight answer.

Who that person is, she does not know. She has never met anybody with any authority at all except a registrar at Ashmarch who was kind to her for one morning and could not help.

Two more names went in at a crossroads inn on the twenty-seventh, as she walked south.

Forty-three.

***

Four days north, in a hall at Ashmarch, a registrar with twenty-two years in the post took a quire out from under a volume nobody has opened since he was twenty-three, and entered three names, and put it back.

He has fifty-eight.

He does not know about the loft. He knows Aleida Vesk as a name in the narrow fifth column of the first line he ever wrote in that quire, and a face on a bench in Sparkfall, and nothing since.

Both of them have been writing the same thing down for twenty-two weeks, from the same Restday, four days apart, and neither has any idea that the other is still doing it.