Fabric return, Cadder Fen. Roof, south side, made good. No further application anticipated. Diocesan house, fabric book, four years after
She had the roof done in the third year and it cost twelve pounds and took two men ten days, and the third man was not asked.
That was the first thing and she thought about it later as the thing that decided the rest, because a woman who has a roof done in a parish is a woman who lives in that parish, and after that nobody in Cadder Fen ever again referred to her as anything but the practitioner.
The chapter sent a priest in the second year and he lasted seven months and asked to be moved, and they sent another in the fourth year who was twenty-six and frightened of the fen, and Su'inn taught him to bank a fire and where the causeway went soft, and he stayed thirty-seven years and buried her.
Nobody ever fixed a date.
She spent perhaps four years being ready for somebody to fix one, and then about ten more noticing occasionally that she had not thought about it, and then she stopped. Vasse wrote once, in the ninth year, to say that the file had been moved from the province to the diocesan house and back again and had ended up in neither, and that as far as he could establish it was in a box in a corridor at the eastern seat, and that this was the safest place any document had ever been in the history of the province.
He died in the fourteenth year. She heard about it four months late, from a clerk, in a letter about something else.
She went to Marren in the fourth winter, which took ten days on bad roads and cost four hours and eleven minutes.
She did not argue about it. That was the year she stopped arguing about that particular sort of thing, and she never entirely worked out afterward whether that had been growth or fatigue.
Marren was seventy-one and had been in a chair since the summer and had a daughter who did not know and a granddaughter who did not know, and Azaelis sat with her for three afternoons and Su'inn walked in the garden, in the rain, for as long as it took, and did not ask what was said.
On the last afternoon he came back and was quiet for about eleven miles.
She asked me to tell her what she had been for, he said, eventually. Which is a thing that people ask at the end, and there is a way of answering it that is kind and takes about four minutes, and I have used it eleven times.
"And?"
And I did not use it, said Azaelis. I told her that she had spent nine years farming inquiries and had closed them because a number was wrong, and that this was the only thing she had ever done that I could not have predicted from the age of four, and that it was therefore the only thing in her life that was hers rather than mine.
Su'inn walked.
"How did she take it?"
She said, that is a great deal better than four minutes.
Marren died in the spring. The daughter wrote to Ostrand and Ostrand wrote to a house in the north, and Ferris was dead by then and it was a man called Dellow who did the letter, and the letter went to an address that had not been current for six years and came back.
Nobody in that family ever knew.
Ferrow came in the seventh year.
She came on the mail cart with a bag and a certificate from the low house at Ulmatis, which she had got at thirty-four by doing four years of it in a room in Ellersgate under a woman called Hess and then two more in a proper house, and she stood in the churchyard at Cadder Fen and said, "You wrote me a page and a half."
"I did."
"It was wrong about the close."
"It was not wrong about the close."
"It was wrong about the close," said Ferrow, "and I have been running it your way for six years and getting a tightness at the edge about one time in five, and Hess showed me the wrist thing in my second year and I have not had it since, and I have come nine days to tell you to your face because you are the only person in the world who would rather hear it than not."
Su'inn stood in the churchyard.
"Show me," she said.
Ferrow stayed four days and then went back to Kettle Ward, where she had a room and eleven years of her own, and they wrote about twice a year for the rest of it, mostly about hands.
The hours went down.
That was the shape of the whole of it and neither of them ever pretended otherwise. She kept the number in her head the way she had always kept it and he kept it in his and they arrived at the same figure without discussing it, and about once a year one of them would say it out loud and the other would say yes.
A thousand and twenty in the June of the sitting.
Nine hundred and forty in the fifth year.
Eight hundred and eleven in the ninth.
He drove perhaps fifteen or twenty times a year and never for long, and the ritual held for about eleven years and then began to go.
She told him to stop saying the number in the twelfth year, in a kitchen, in the middle of a bad night, because she was tired and because it had begun to feel like being read a bill.
He said it anyway.
He said it every single time for the next nineteen years, without once making anything of it, and she never told him to stop again, and in about the twentieth year she worked out that he had told her in a fen road in the first month that this would happen and that he would do exactly this, and she lay awake half a night being furious about it and then got up and did not mention it.
He began refusing in the ninth year and it took her four years to notice.
That was because he was good at it. He did not refuse in the yard. He refused about eleven hours earlier, in the way a man does who has decided to have the argument before there is an emergency to lose it in, and he would say things like that is a splint and a fortnight and she will do better with your hands than mine because you can come back on Thursday, and every one of them was true and she checked about a third of them and never once caught him.
It was the eighteenth that did it. A crush injury on the peat, a man of thirty, and she got him and kept him and it took nine days and she did it with her own hands and it was harder than it should have been, and afterward she stood in the yard with her wrists shaking and said:
"You did not offer."
No.
"That was four hours of you and you did not offer, and I would have given it to you."
I know you would have, said Azaelis. That is the difficulty.
Her hands began to go at sixty-one.
It was the right one, which she thought was funny for about a month and then did not. The left had been useless for thirty-nine years and had never got any worse because there was nowhere for it to go, and the right, which had carried the whole of her working life, began to stiffen in the mornings and to have a tremor at the end of a long job, and by sixty-four she could not run the close on anything small.
That was the year they had the only real fight of the last two decades, and it went on for four months.
She wanted him to drive.
She wanted him to drive three or four times a week, on the small work, the close and the seat and the fiddling things her hands would not do, because there were seven hundred hours left and she was sixty-four and she was not going to live long enough to spend them, and the arithmetic was on her side and she did it out loud at him about eleven times.
He would not.
"You have seven hundred hours."
I have seven hundred hours and you have about twenty years and the second number is the one that matters.
"That is my number."
It is your number and you are proposing to give me a third of it for a set of hands that will do everything except two forms, said Azaelis, and I am refusing, and I am going to go on refusing, and you may be as angry as you like.
"You have never once refused me on a body."
I have refused you two hundred and forty times in twelve years and you have caught me on about nine of them.
She sat down when he said that.
"Two hundred and forty."
I keep a count, said Azaelis. You know that I keep a count. I have kept a count of everything since about the year eleven hundred and it is the single least attractive thing about me.
Su'inn sat in a kitchen at sixty-four with her hands in her lap.
"Say why."
Because I have four hundred and forty years of memory, he said, and about thirty of them are yours, and I am not going to spend the last of you buying myself something to do.
They ran it down to about six hundred and that was where it stopped.
She worked until she was seventy-one and then she stopped taking anything hard, and until seventy-six on the small things, and after that she sat in a chair by a fire in a house at Cadder Fen and told a woman of thirty-two called Pell what to do with her hands, which was, she said, the only part of the trade she had ever been any good at anyway.
He drove eleven times in the last nine years.
Four of them were births. Two of them were the same man's leg, twenty-one years apart, which they both found funnier than it was. One of them was a fire.
The last one was in the spring of the year she turned eighty-one, and it was a child with something in her throat, and it took about ninety seconds, and he gave it back in the road and put her hand flat on a gatepost because that was a thing he did.
Neither of them knew it was the last one.
That was the whole point of it, she thought afterward, in the chair, in the long slow afternoons.
You do not get to know.