Halverside, four mile. Bench sits Candlemas and Lammas. All carriage to declare at the bridge. Board at the ward boundary
She did not shout and she did not go silent, and afterward she thought that what she did was probably worse than either.
She sat on the stool for about a minute with her face in her hands. Then she took them away and said:
“You waited to find out whether it mattered.”
Yes.
“That is the same sentence as Bircher.”
There was a silence in her that went on a long time.
Yes, said Azaelis. It is.
“Twice in nine weeks. Both times you had a thing I needed and you sat on it, and both times the reason was that you were waiting to see whether it would turn out to be worth the trouble of telling me.” She got up and started putting the room away, because her hands wanted something. “And both times you were right about the arithmetic, and I want you to notice that I am not arguing with the arithmetic.”
I have noticed.
“I am telling you what it is. It is a habit. You said habits are made by doing a thing badly forty times, and you were talking about me, and you were right about that too, and it did not occur to either of us that you have had four hundred years to make yours.”
No, said Azaelis. It did not.
She folded the cloths.
“I am not going to punish you,” she said. “I want that clear, because you are sitting there waiting for it and you have been waiting since the yard. I am not going to freeze you out again, I am not going to refuse you when it costs somebody a leg, and I am not going to bring this up in eight months in the middle of something else. I have watched a marriage run on that and I did not care for it.”
Then what.
“Then I am going to Halverside,” said Su’inn, “and you are going to help me, and we are going to be extremely civil about it, and you are going to find out how much you dislike that.”
They left the next morning with a bundle, a knife she had been given in a hill house, four days of walking in front of them, and about eleven shillings.
Say it, she said, on the second hour, because she could feel him not saying it.
You refused this road nine weeks ago and would not tell me why.
“I did.”
And I am not going to ask.
“No.”
I am, however, going to walk into a market town of nine hundred people in a body that everyone in it will assume is a stranger, said Azaelis, and I would like it on the record that this is the most frightened I have been since about eleven hundred.
“You are not frightened.”
I am frightened. I have simply had four hundred years of practice at sounding like a man reading a schedule, and I am not going to stop now on a road.
She walked a while.
“Why Halverside,” she said. “You wanted this from the fork. Give me the actual reason, not the records office.”
The records office is the actual reason.
“Azaelis.”
Very well. There is a thing about a stay of sentence that Vasse said and did not push, and I have been turning it since, he said. It is lodged and it has never been withdrawn. That means that on paper you are a woman whose sentence is suspended pending a new hearing. Not a fugitive, not a corpse, not a vessel. A defendant awaiting trial. A pause. And the province has not withdrawn it, in nine weeks, with a reconstructed day book and a crusade rider and a factor writing letters. Which is either the most extraordinary piece of clerical sloth I have ever encountered, or somebody is holding it open.
“Why would anybody hold it open.”
Because a suspended sentence keeps you alive and unhanged and outside a cell, said Azaelis, and I cannot think of a single institution in this business that wants that, which means it is not an institution.
Su’inn walked.
“That is a person.”
That is a person.
They slept the first night in a barn and the second in a hedge, and on the third day it rained on them for six hours and she stopped talking somewhere in the fourth, and he filled it.
That was new. He had not filled a silence before. She noticed it happen and let it, and understood somewhere around the fifth hour that he was doing it for her and that he had waited a long time to be allowed to.
“Tell me about them,” she said, eventually.
About whom.
“The eleven.”
There was a pause.
Which one.
“Any.”
That is not an answer, and it is not an answer in a way I am going to be difficult about, said Azaelis, because there are eleven and they are not a set. People say the eleven, and I say the eleven, and it is a lie of convenience. It is like asking a man about his decades.
“Then pick one.”
The seventh, he said, after a while. Because it is the one you will be least prepared for.
“Go on.”
Her name was Odile Marren and she was thirty-one when she died and she died of a thing in the gut that took her in about a week, and her family were farming people out of the western wards, and she was certified and lawful and her mother signed the forfeiture with a cross because she could not write. A pause. And I was in her for twenty-two years.
Su’inn stopped walking.
“You have been a woman.”
I have been a woman three times, and I want to say plainly that it is not remarkable and I have never found it so, and every single person who has ever found out has stopped walking exactly where you have stopped walking.
“I am allowed a moment.”
You are allowed a moment.
She started walking again.
“Twenty-two years.”
Twenty-two years, in a farmhouse in the west, with her mother, who lived another nine of them and knew exactly what I was and never once said so out loud, and with her two sisters, who did not. Something moved in the way he said it. And I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it becomes a story about me and it is not. Odile was dead. She had been dead a week before I ever arrived and there was nothing of her in that house except a great many people who wanted there to be.
“And you let them.”
I let them for twenty-two years, said Azaelis, and I did the work, and I got the harvest in, and I sat up with her mother when the mother was dying and held her hand, and she called me Odile, and she knew, and she called me Odile anyway. A pause. And then the body began to go and I left, because I had to, and I told them I was going to my aunt’s, and I have never in four hundred years told a worse lie or a more necessary one.
Su’inn walked in the rain.
“The sisters.”
The younger one is dead. The elder one is seventy-eight and lives in the same house, and there is a woman of about fifty in that house who is her daughter, and there is a chin in that family that comes down the female line and has been coming down it since before I ever got there. Very level. The elder sister has spent fifty-one years believing her sister walked out of the door in the spring of a bad year and never wrote.
“That is monstrous.”
Yes.
“You could tell her.”
I could tell her that her sister has been dead since she was twenty and that the woman who taught her daughter to milk was a dead man from the eastern wards, said Azaelis. Which of those two do you imagine is the kindness.
Su’inn did not have an answer to that, and he did not offer her one, and they walked another two miles in the rain.
The bridge at Halverside was on the fourth day at about the third hour, and she saw the town before she was ready to.
It came round the shoulder of a hill the way it always had, all at once and lower than you expected, a market cross and a mill and the church with the short tower, and the roofs going down to the water, and the whole of it sitting in its bowl looking exactly, precisely, unbearably the same.
She stopped on the road.
She had not been there in twenty-one years.
The house was on the near side. She could see the roof of it from where she was standing, because of course she could, because she had chosen that road out of the town twenty-one years ago at four in the morning with her arm wrapped in a shift and she had walked up this exact hill and turned around once at this exact place.
Su’inn.
“I know.”
I am going to say one thing and then I will not say anything else about it, ever, unless you raise it.
“Say it.”
Whatever is in that town, said Azaelis, I am going to be in the room for it. I cannot help that and neither can you. I am not going to pretend to be elsewhere and I am not going to be tactful and look away, because there is no away, and I have found over four hundred years that people can bear a witness a great deal better than they can bear a witness pretending not to be.
She stood on the hill with the rain coming off the roofs below her.
“That is the first thing you have said to me in nine weeks that was not about arithmetic.”
I have a great many of them, said Azaelis. I ration them. They lose their value if a man produces one every day.
Su’inn laughed, once, badly, with her hand over her mouth.
Then she went down the hill into Halverside.