Item, the cut from the upper fen was opened in the flood year and has not been closed. Cadder Fen, drainage note, undated
She walked to the water and stood there until it got light.
He did not say anything for the whole of it. Not one word, not in the yard and not on the path and not through the four hours she stood on the bank with her hands in her sleeves watching a fen come out of the dark, and she understood somewhere in the third hour that he was not sulking and was not waiting either. He had said the thing he had been carrying for a year and there was nothing after it. There was no second half.
She came back at dawn with her boots soaked and stood in Bircher’s kitchen and said:
“There is a child at the Ferrels’ with a cough.”
Yes, said Azaelis.
And that was all, and neither of them ever said one word about it again, for the rest of their lives, which was a very long time.
There were four children with a cough by the end of that week and thirteen by the end of the next, and it was not a cough.
She knew it was not a cough on the fourth day, and she knew it the way she knew things, which was in her hands and not her head, and she spent two days unable to say why and being extremely irritating to everybody in the parish about it.
“It is the spring,” said Bircher. “It is the spring every year. They cough and then it stops.”
“They are not coughing.”
“Madam, I was in that house yesterday and the child coughed at me thirteen times.”
“She coughed,” said Su’inn. “She is not coughing. There is a difference and I know exactly what it is and I cannot get it into words, and I want until Friday before you write to the physician at Loft, because he will come in a week and take a day and he will say it is the spring, and I would rather be wrong for free than wrong for two shillings.”
She went to all thirteen.
That was the whole of it in the end, and she thought about that a great deal afterward. She went to all thirteen and she put her hands on all thirteen, which no physician in the province would have done, because a physician looks and asks and writes, and an Ulmatine puts her hands on people, because the trade is the trade.
The fourth was the Ferrel girl and she got nothing.
The seventh was a boy of about six and she got something in the belly, low and off to the right, a hardness with no heat in it, and she stood with her fingers on it for a long time.
By the ninth she had it in three of them.
By the eleventh she had it in seven, in the same place, the same shape, in seven bodies of seven different sizes, and she sat down on a wall in the middle of Cadder Fen with her heart going.
Su’inn.
“Seven.”
I do not know what I am looking at.
“No,” she said. “You do not. And I have been waiting eleven months for that.”
I am not being modest. I have been over your shoulder for all eleven and I have four hundred years and eleven bodies and I do not have the faintest idea what that hardness is, and I want to say it plainly once, and then I want you to tell me.
“I do not know either,” said Su’inn.
Then what are we doing on this wall.
“I do not know what it is. I know that seven people have the same thing in the same place, and none of them are related, and four live at the top end and three at the bottom.” She stood up. “That is not a cough. A cough goes down a street. This has gone to seven houses in a pattern that is not a street.”
She was already walking.
“It is something they are all putting into themselves. And it is not the bread, because the Ferrels grind their own, and it is not the milk, because two of them have no cow.” She got her stick. “Which leaves water.”
It took three days and most of it was walking.
There were four places in Cadder Fen where people drew water and she went to all of them and sat by all of them and asked ninety-one people, one at a time, which one they used, and wrote it down badly with her right hand on paper Bircher gave her out of the church, and by the second evening she had a list that did not work, because the seven were drawing from three different places.
It is not the water.
“It is the water.”
You have three sources, seven households, and no overlap. That is what a thing looks like when it is not the water.
“Or it is what a thing looks like when the water is not where people think it is.”
She went up onto the fen on the third day, on her own, with the stick, and walked the cut.
There was a drainage cut running off the upper fen that had been opened in a flood year nobody could give her a date for, and it ran along the top and turned east and went down through the peat and came out, eventually, somewhere.
She walked it for four hours in the wet.
It came out about two hundred yards above the upper spring, which was one of the three, and a mile above where the ground water ran east toward the other two. She stood at the mouth of it in the mud and looked up the cut, and then she walked up the cut, and about half a mile along she found what was at the top of it.
It was a beast pit.
Twelve years of dead sheep in a hole in the peat, where a farm had been putting them because the ground was soft and because it was uphill of nothing, until a flood year opened a cut that nobody closed.
Su’inn stood on the edge of it in the rain.
“There,” she said.
Yes, said Azaelis.
She was wrong about one thing and right about the rest.
She was wrong about the hardness, which turned out to have nothing to do with it, and which she never did explain, and which was probably, she decided years later, just what seven children’s bellies feel like when you have decided in advance that they will feel like something.
She was right about the cut.
They closed it in a fortnight with about forty men and a great deal of complaining, and dug a new soak on the far side of the hill, and the coughing stopped in six weeks, which proved nothing at all and convinced everybody.
Nobody died. Two of the thirteen had been going to, she thought, and she was never able to say which two, and that was the entire shape of it. She had saved somewhere between nought and two people and would never know the number, and it had taken ten days of walking and asking and a stick.
There was no form in it anywhere.
She had not run a single one of the eleven. She had not needed a hand that closed, or a shoulder, or four minutes, or a man who was four hundred years old. She had needed nine years of putting her hands on people, and a bad list, and the willingness to walk a cut in the rain.
Su’inn, said Azaelis, on the evening they finished the soak, when she was sitting on the church wall with her boots off. I want to say a thing and I want to do it carefully.
“Then be careful.”
I could not have done any part of that.
“I know.”
I do not think you do. I have sat behind your eyes for eleven days watching you do a thing I would not have known how to begin, and the reason is not that I lack a form. It is that it would not have occurred to me to touch all thirteen of them. A pause. I would have looked. I would have asked very good questions. I would have been wrong in about four hours, and I would have been extremely impressive while I did it.
She sat on the wall with her feet in the wet grass.
“It might have been nobody,” she said. “It might have been nought.”
Yes.
“I might have walked a cut in the rain for ten days and closed a hole for nothing.”
Yes, said Azaelis. And you did not spend one minute of yourself on it, and that is the part I have been sitting with since the beast pit, and I expect to be sitting with it for some time.
She thought about that summer a great deal in the years when she was thinking about things.
It was the only one. She knew it at the time, on the wall, with her boots off, and she did not let herself pretend otherwise for a single day: ten days of walking had happened to fit, exactly once, into a hole in a fen.
The next thing through the door would not fit.
It came in September and it was a woman under a cart with her pelvis in four pieces, and Su’inn had her hands on her for ninety seconds and then said, out loud, in the road, in front of six people:
“How much.”
Three hours.
“Take it.”