Cadder Fen. Souls, ninety-one. No infirmary. Physician at Loft, one day. Diocesan return, Michaelmas
Cadder Fen was eleven miles of wet ground and ninety-one people and a church with a sinking corner, and she went there in the autumn because it was the only place in the province where being unregistered was not a problem, on the grounds that there was no register.
Bircher did not ask her to stay. He did the opposite, extensively, for about four days, in a great deal of detail about his heart and the state of the roof and what a chapter would do if it found out.
Then he stopped, because she was still there, and because a man came in off the peat with a hand he had put through a hurdle stake and she dealt with it in ten minutes, and the old man stood in the door of his own kitchen and watched her do it and did not say anything else about the roof.
She kept the number in her head.
That was the whole of the winter, in a sense. She kept the number in her head the way you keep a debt in your head, and she got up with it and went to bed with it, and she found that she could not stop converting things into it.
An hour and a half was a leg.
Four hours and twenty minutes was a flight of stairs in Halverside.
Eleven hundred hours was six weeks and the rest of her life, and she was forty-three, and if she got the forty-four years her mother had got she was going to have to spend six weeks of him across sixteen thousand days, and she did the division one night in the dark and got about four minutes a day and laughed until she had to sit up.
What.
“Four minutes a day.”
Yes, said Azaelis. I did that one in October.
She said no eleven times that winter and ten of them were easy.
A man with a shoulder that would come right on its own in three weeks and wanted it right for a wedding. A woman who wanted a scar taken off her daughter’s chin, which could not be done anyway, and who did not believe her, and who went away angry. A boy with a green stick fracture that she set herself, right-handed, badly, in about forty minutes, when Azaelis could have done it in four.
That one was the eleventh and it was not easy at all.
“Say it,” she said afterward, walking back across the wet ground in the dark.
I have nothing to say.
“You have four minutes’ worth.”
I have a great deal to say and none of it is any use to you, said Azaelis, and I have been working on not saying it since about the fifteenth minute, and I would ask you to let me have the walk.
“It came out crooked.”
It came out crooked and it will remodel, because he is nine, and in four years it will be a leg with a story attached to it and he will show it to people. Level. And I would have done it in four minutes and it would have been straight, and that is a real thing and I am not going to pretend it is not, and it is also four minutes, and you have nine thousand days and you have spent none of today.
She walked.
“You agree with me.”
I agree with you completely and I have agreed with you all winter, said Azaelis, and you keep asking me to say it out loud, and I want to know why, because it is not for the arithmetic. You have the arithmetic. You did it in October before I did.
Su’inn walked about forty yards.
“Because if you say it, it is a decision,” she said. “And if you say nothing, it is a thing I did to a nine-year-old.”
The one that was not easy at all came in February and she got it right and it did not help.
His name did not matter and she made a point of not learning it, afterward, which she recognised at the time as cowardice and did anyway. He was about fifty and he had been coughing since Christmas and there was a thing in his chest that she could feel from the outside with two fingers, hard and fixed and wrong, and there was no form in the eleven that touched it and there never had been.
“Can he,” she said, in the doorway, with the man’s wife four feet away.
No.
“You have not looked.”
I looked in the first minute. There is nothing. It is not a window that is shut, it is not a thing anybody has ever been able to do, and if I told you otherwise I would be spending your hours on making a frightened woman in a doorway feel that everything had been tried. A pause. And it would work. That is the difficulty. She would feel it. It is four hours and it works.
Su’inn stood in the doorway.
“And he still dies.”
He still dies in about six weeks, in exactly the same way, and you have four hours less, and I want to say clearly that I would do it if you asked and that I would not think worse of you.
She did not ask.
She sat with the man three afternoons a week for six weeks and ran the ease over him, which was the ninth of the eleven and did nothing but what it did, and he died in the middle of March with his wife holding his hand and no arithmetic in the room at all.
Afterward the wife thanked her.
Su’inn went out and stood behind the church in the wet and was sick, which she had not done in nine years, and then walked home in the dark.
You were right, said Azaelis.
“I know I was right.”
I am saying it because you asked me in November to say it out loud, and I have thought about that conversation a great deal, and I have decided you were right about that as well.
“Do not.”
Very well.
The argument was in April and it was about nothing at all.
She had stopped talking to him at night.
Not deliberately. There had been a stretch in the winter where she had talked to him most nights, lying in the dark in the room behind Bircher’s kitchen, about nothing, the way you do, and then the man in February had happened and she had stopped, and she had not noticed she had stopped, and by April it had been six weeks.
“You are being odd,” she said.
I am not being anything.
“You have said four things today and two of them were about the weather.”
I have been keeping out of the way.
“You cannot keep out of the way. You are in my head. When you keep out of the way it is like living with somebody who has gone into another room and is standing in it.”
Then I will come back into this one, said Azaelis, and I will observe that you have not said one word to me after dark since the fourteenth of February, and that I have counted, and that I am aware of exactly how contemptible it is to have counted, and I have counted anyway.
Su’inn put down the bowl she was drying.
“That is not fair.”
It is entirely fair and it is also small, and I am allowed one of those a year.
“I have been tired.”
You have been tired since April of last year. You were tired in a leat. And then, because he could not leave it: You talk to Bircher after dark. You talked to him for two hours on Tuesday about a roof.
“He is sixty-five and he has a bad heart and he has been sent to a bog to die in, and if he wants to talk about a roof at ten at night then I will talk about a roof.”
I am aware.
“Then what do you want.”
I want four minutes, said Azaelis.
And she turned round with the cloth in her hand and said the thing she had been not saying since February, which was:
“You get four minutes a day whether I like it or not. That is the arrangement. That is what four minutes a day is. You do not get to be lonely at me about it as well.”
The kitchen was very quiet.
She heard it land. She was inside it and she heard it land, and she knew before he said anything that she had reached for the cheapest thing in the room, and that she had done it because she was tired and because he was right about February.
Ah, said Azaelis.
“I did not.”
You did, and it is fine, and I have had four hundred years of people saying that one to me in one form or another and you have got at least a year before you say it again. Perfectly level. May I have mine?
“Azaelis.”
I have caused a very great deal of harm in my life, he said. A very great deal. I have named it up in the last year in front of you more than I have in two centuries and I am not going to itemise it again in a kitchen. But I have never, in four hundred years, killed a person on purpose.
She stood with the cloth in her hand.
What you did, said Azaelis, is far more damning than everything I have ever done put together.
The fire moved in the grate.
Su’inn did not say anything at all.
She finished drying the bowl, and put it on the shelf, and took her coat off the back of the door, and went out into the yard and across the wet ground toward the water, and she did not stop and did not turn round and did not answer him, and there was nowhere in the world for either of them to go.