Iselm. Master of the school at Warring Cross, thirty-one years. Died in the autumn, no family. Parish register, Warring Cross, entered fifty-two years past
He came back on the fourth step down and she stood in the lane and let it happen and did not go anywhere for a moment.
Tell me.
“He put his hand on the folder and said there was no answer to it.”
Tersey did.
“Tersey did. And then he said the book will sit on that table for three days and none of them will be able to pick it up, and that I am the same problem in a coat.”
There was a silence, and then Azaelis made a sound she had never heard from him, which was a sort of short breath out through the nose that in a body with air in it would have been a laugh.
Su’inn.
“Do not.”
I have been standing on a step for six hours, he said, and I have spent about four of them constructing the version where you go in and say I do not know and it does not work.
“It worked.”
It worked. And an old man in a chair told you to do it and I would not have. A pause. I want that in the road as well.
The knock came at about the eighth hour.
She was in the room over the bakery with her boots off and a plate of something she was not eating, and the knock was three and then a wait and then two more, which was a man who had been raised to knock properly, and she got up and opened it.
He was about sixty-two and he had a hat in his hands and a canvas bag under his arm, and he had come a long way and had washed his face somewhere in the last hour to do it properly.
“I am looking for the woman from the sitting.”
“You have found her.”
“Ah.” He stood in the doorway. “Then I am looking for the other one.”
She let him in, which she thought about a great deal afterward, and put him in the chair, and he sat on about a third of it with the bag on his knees.
“My name is Tobe Marchant,” he said. “I have come from Warring Cross. That is nine days and I have been three of them on a canal boat and I want to say that first so that you know I have thought about it.”
“Mr Marchant.”
“There is a thing I have to ask and it is going to sound like a madman, and I have decided I do not mind.” He had his hands flat on the bag. “Is his name Iselm?”
Su’inn sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Ask him,” she said. “He can hear you.”
Tobe Marchant looked at the air about a foot to the left of her head, exactly as a finder had once done in a drovers’ yard, and said:
“Is your name Iselm?”
Su’inn waited.
Then she waited a little longer.
“Azaelis.”
No, said Azaelis.
“He says no.”
Marchant’s face did something and he got hold of it.
“I have got the wrong one.”
Ask him what it is.
“He wants to know what it is.”
“It is not a what.” Marchant undid the top of the bag. “Iselm kept the school at Warring Cross for thirty-one years and he taught about four hundred of us and he taught me, and he died in the autumn of the year I was ten, and there was nobody to bury him because he had no people, so the parish did it, and I stood at the back.” He got the thing out of the bag. “And I have known since I was about thirty that he was not what he said he was, because I have spent fifty years reading everything I could get about the Eternals and about half of what is written about them is what Iselm used to say to us out of his own head about the way the world was in the old time, and it is not in any book.”
He put it on the table.
It was a primer. It was hand-cut and hand-stitched, about forty pages, in a case of oiled cloth that had been remade at least twice, and on the front board somebody had written in a very fine upright hand: For T. Marchant, who is not slow, and is to stop saying that he is.
Su’inn looked at it.
“Azaelis.”
I do not know that book.
“Look at the hand.”
I am looking at the hand, said Azaelis. It is not mine. It is not any of mine. I have had eleven hands and I know all eleven of them and that is not one of them and I have never seen that primer in my life.
Su’inn sat on the edge of the bed and looked at a sixty-two-year-old man holding his hat.
“He does not know it,” she said.
“Ah,” said Marchant.
And he did not get angry and he did not argue, and he sat there for a moment with his hat, and then he said, in the tone of a man who has come nine days and is going to finish:
“May I say the rest of it anyway?”
He talked for about forty minutes.
He said that Iselm had been a small man with bad eyes who never sat down, and that he had a way of stopping in the middle of a sentence and looking at the window that the whole school had imitated for a generation. He said Iselm would not have a rod in the room and had told the parish that a boy who is beaten learns exactly one thing.
He said that when Marchant was seven, Iselm had found out that his father was taking his shoes off him in the mornings to sell and had walked four miles and come back and said nothing about it, and that Marchant had shoes for the rest of that winter and did not find out where they came from until he was thirty-one and his mother was dying.
He said that Iselm had made about eleven of those primers over the years, for the ones who were slow, and that he had made them at night, and that he had written a different thing on the front board of every one.
He said that he had gone back and looked at the parish register when he was forty, and that the entry said no family, and that he had thought about that for twenty-two years.
And then he said: “He was the best man I ever knew and I never once heard him say anything about himself, and I have spent fifty years trying to find out who he was, and about four months ago I heard there was a sitting at the eastern seat about an Eternal, and I got on a canal boat.”
Su’inn sat on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap.
“Mr Marchant.”
“It is all right.”
“It is not all right,” she said. “Sit down. I am going to ask him something.”
Do not, said Azaelis.
“You know what I am going to ask.”
I know exactly what you are going to ask and I have known since he said Warring Cross and I would like you not to.
“Eleven hours and forty minutes,” said Su’inn, out loud, in a room with a man in it. “In February. On the ice.”
Su’inn.
“You told me there is always a hole. You told me you cannot find it by looking, because a man who loses a thing does not have a space where it was, he has a life that is one thing smaller and fits perfectly.” She was looking at the primer on the table. “And there is a man in this room who has come nine days on a canal boat with a book you made.”
There was a very long silence.
Long enough that Tobe Marchant put his hat down.
Ask him what year Iselm died, said Azaelis.
“He wants to know what year.”
“The autumn of the year I was ten,” said Marchant. “Fifty-two years back.”
And I was in the ninth body from about a hundred and ten years back to about eighty, said Azaelis, very quietly, and the tenth from eighty to fifty-one, and I have always known both of those, and I know them now, and they are in my head as clear as this room. A pause. And there are twenty-nine years in the tenth that I have never once had occasion to describe to you or to anybody, and I have just gone to look at them, and they are there, and they are a very great deal thinner than the ninth.
Su’inn sat very still.
“Say it.”
I know where I was. I know the province and the shape of the years and that I kept a school. And his voice did the thing it had done exactly once before, on a road above Halverside. I do not know one face. I do not know one name. I have thirty-one years of a school in the south and there is not a single person in any of them.
She told him.
That was the hardest half hour of the whole two years, harder than a yard in the rain and harder than a leat, because it had to be done slowly and in order and out loud to a man who had washed his face to come.
She told him that the man he had come nine days to find was in the room. That he had been in the room the whole time. That he had made eleven primers at night and written a different thing on every front board and had walked four miles about a pair of shoes, and that he could not remember one minute of any of it, and that it had been taken out of him in February in four feet of water on a fen to keep a woman from drowning.
Tobe Marchant listened to the whole of it without saying anything at all.
At the end he picked up his hat.
“Then it is gone,” he said.
“It is gone.”
“And he cannot get it back.”
“No.”
Marchant sat with that.
“Fifty years,” he said. “Fifty years I have been going to ask him what his name was.”
He looked at the air a foot to the left of her head.
“Sir,” he said, “I do not know what you are and I have got no opinion about it. I know that you were kind to a slow boy for no reason at all when nobody was watching, and I have carried that about for fifty years and it has done me a great deal of good, and I would have liked you to have it back.”
Su’inn waited.
Then she said, out loud, because he had asked her to and because there was nothing else in the world to say:
“He says: I believe you.”