Paid one week in advance, the room at the back. Name given: Ulmat. The Green Man, Loft, day book
She woke in a bed she had never seen, in a room with a window in the wrong wall, and lay there for a long time working out that it was afternoon.
There was a fire. Somebody had built it up recently and not very well.
There was a jug and a basin and a chair with her coat over it, and the coat was not the coat she had been wearing on the fen, and there was a pair of boots by the door that were hers and had been cleaned by somebody who did not know how to clean boots.
Her chest hurt in a way she recognised professionally and did not like.
She got about halfway to sitting up and stopped, and put a hand flat on her own sternum, and pressed, and found four ribs that had been broken and were about four days into it.
Four days.
“Azaelis.”
I am here.
“Where am I.”
Loft. Two days’ walk east of Cadder Fen, or a day and a half if somebody is unreasonable about it. A pause, and the pause was wrong, and she heard that before anything else. You are at the Green Man. The room is paid to Thursday. Your ribs are mine and I am sorry about them and there was no other way to do it on ice.
She sat all the way up and the room went round and came back.
“Tell me the whole of it.”
Yes, said Azaelis. And I want to say one thing first, which is that you have not lost anything. Whatever you are about to look for, it is all there. You went under and you came up and you have been ill and you are going to be ill for a fortnight, and none of the four days are missing out of you, because you were not in them.
“That is not comfort.”
No, he said. It is a description. I have not got any comfort this week.
The boy was alive.
He made her have that first, before anything else, and she understood exactly why and let him do it anyway.
The boy was called Ansell Tarr and he was eleven and he had been on a hurdle in front of a fire within nine minutes and he had lost the top of two fingers to the cold and nothing else at all, and he had been out on the ice again within the week because he was eleven.
“Good,” said Su’inn.
Yes.
“Now the rest.”
I got you out of the water in front of about thirty people.
She sat on the edge of the bed with her feet on the floor.
There were nine adults at the reeds by then and the rest of the parish came down within four minutes, and you had been under for something between two and three minutes when I took it, and you were not dead but you were about ninety seconds from it, and I got the ice broken back to the reeds with the right forearm and got us in on the bottom because the fen is four feet deep at the edge and everybody had forgotten that. Level, and going too fast. And then I stood up.
“You stood up.”
I stood up in four feet of water in front of the whole of Cadder Fen with a drowned woman’s face on and no breath in the body, because it did not occur to me to breathe, because I have never once had to think about it in front of a crowd. A pause. And I walked out. And a man had a rope round me and I took it off, and I have been over this for four days and I cannot find the version where I do it differently, and I have found eleven versions where I do it worse.
Su’inn sat with her hands on her knees.
“They saw.”
They saw a woman go under the ice for three minutes and stand up and walk out and not breathe, said Azaelis, and seven of them saw her ribs go in when I got her on the bank and did the thing you do to a drowned person, and four of them are still telling everybody that she was dead. Because she was.
She did not say anything for a while.
“Bircher.”
He came down about six minutes in. He is sixty-six and he came down the causeway at a run and I was already out. Something went through him. Su’inn, he did not ask me one question. He got a coat round us and he got the crowd moved and he said, out loud, to about forty people, that he had seen a woman fetched out of the water and that the Ulmatine work had held her, and that they were all to go home and be thankful.
“That is a lie.”
It is a magnificent lie and he told it in about nine seconds and it will hold for perhaps a month. A beat. And then he took us into the church and put us on the floor by the altar, and I went out on the step, and I want you to know that I have thought about that for four days as well. He put me out. He did it on purpose. He put me out and then he sat with you for eleven hours on the flags of his own church, alone, where I could not be, because he had worked out inside ten minutes that a woman with a rope mark and a dead man in her was going to have people in that village by the weekend.
Su’inn put her face in her hands.
He is not in trouble, said Azaelis. He has done nothing that anybody can write down. He is a priest who fetched a woman out of a fen and said a true-sounding thing in a yard.
“He is sixty-six and he ran down a causeway.”
Yes.
“I cannot go back.”
No, said Azaelis.
She got dressed, which took twenty minutes, and sat in the chair by the fire because the bed had started to be unbearable.
“How long did you have it.”
Eleven hours and about forty minutes.
She did the arithmetic without wanting to.
Yes, he said.
“That is a quarter of a year of ordinary use.”
It is nearly a year of ordinary use, and it is the largest single thing I have ever taken and I did not ask and I could not have asked, and I would like to put on the record that if you want to be angry about it I will sit here for as long as it takes.
“I am not angry about it.”
Then be angry about something else, because you have got the face on.
Su’inn looked at the fire.
“You should not have been able to do it,” she said.
There was a silence.
No, said Azaelis.
“I was under. I did not give it to you. I could not give it to you, I tried, I was trying the whole way down.” She looked up. “Control is surrendered. That is the rule. You have said it to me on four separate occasions and once in a leat and you said it as if it were a wall.”
It is a wall.
“Then how are my ribs broken.”
He took a long time.
There is a thing that can be done with an unmanned body, said Azaelis. A body that has nobody at the front of it and is not dead. It is not taking, because there is nothing to take it from. It is more like walking into a house whose door has come open.
“And you can do that.”
It can be done. I have known about it for perhaps three hundred years and I have never done it, and I have never met anybody who admitted to doing it, and the reason is that it has a price and the price is not negotiable and you do not get to choose it.
Su’inn sat very still.
“What did it cost.”
I do not know, said Azaelis.
“Azaelis.”
I do not know, and I have been looking for four days, and that is what I have been doing while you were not in the four days. And it came out at a completely different speed from anything she had heard from him. I have gone through all of it. The eleven. The languages. The trades. I have sat in this room and recited the whole of a treaty I signed in eleven-forty and the whole of a song I learned in a farmhouse in the west and the names of every person at Odile’s mother’s funeral, and it is all there, and I cannot find the hole.
“Then perhaps there is not one.”
There is one, said Azaelis. There is always one. And I cannot find it, and I have spent four days working out why, and the answer is the same answer as everything else about this. A pause. You cannot see what is missing by looking. A man who has lost a thing does not have a space where it was. He has a life that is one thing smaller and fits perfectly.
The fire moved.
“So you will never know.”
I will know, he said, when somebody walks up to me and tells me about it.