Fork. Halverside left, four miles. Naught right. Milestone, eastern road
Coming back into it was nothing like going out of it.
Going out had been a hand opening. Coming back was more like being handed a bag she had not agreed to carry, and finding that the bag was her, and that it was cold and wet and had been walking for four hundred yards without her.
Su’inn sat down properly behind the milestone with her back to the stone and put her head against it.
“You are freezing.”
Yes.
“You did not say.”
You were not in a position to do anything about it and I did not want to spend the last of the road complaining.
She got her arms around her knees.
The rain had stopped being weather and had become a condition. Her feet were bare and had been bare through three hundred and forty feet of service run and over a wall, and she took stock of them the way she would have taken stock of anybody’s and found them survivable and disgusting. The clothes were what the province had put her in on Tuesday and had not been intended to last past the fourth bell.
And her mouth tasted of a coin.
She sat with that for a while.
“Azaelis.”
Yes.
“What is in my mouth.”
There was a pause, and she felt it, and it was a longer one than she had heard from him yet.
You can taste it.
“I am in here.” She turned her head against the stone. “You told me it was a stone in your shoe. You were barefoot. It was a joke and I let you have it because you were three hundred feet into a hole in the dark and I did not think it was the moment. It is the moment now.”
Yes, he said. All right.
“What is it.”
It is the body starting to go.
She had known that. She had known it before she asked, in the way a person knows a thing about their own body without any of the words, and hearing it out loud was different and she sat with the difference for a moment.
“That is the decay.”
That is the first sign of it. There are perhaps six, and they arrive in an order, and that is always the first one. It comes up out of the tissue and it sits at the back of the mouth and it does not go again. Very level. In an ordinary body it means nothing at all. It means the thing has begun, which everybody knows already.
“When does it usually come.”
It varies enormously.
Su’inn looked out at the road.
She had spent nine years listening to people answer questions about their own bodies, and she knew, in her hands and not in her head, the difference between a man who does not know and a man who is choosing which part to give her. She could not have said how. It was not in the words. It was in the same place as everything else she knew about bodies, which was nowhere she could point to and had never once been wrong.
“Fine,” she said.
Su’inn.
“I said fine. I am cold and I have no shoes and I am not going to have that argument sitting in a ditch.” She pushed up onto her feet against the stone. “But you should know that I heard it, and that I am going to ask again, and that when I ask again you will not get it varies enormously.”
Understood.
“And I want a rule.”
Ask.
“Before. Every time. What it will cost, in a number, out loud, before I decide.” She got her balance. “You did that tonight without me asking and I have been thinking about it since the wall. I want it to be the thing we do, not the thing you did once when you were being careful with me.”
Yes, said Azaelis, without any hesitation at all, which she noticed. That is a good rule and I accept it, and I will tell you now that there will be a night when you tell me not to bother and I am going to say it anyway.
“Fine.”
I want that on the record.
“There is no record.”
There is always a record, he said. That is more or less my entire difficulty.
The fork was two hundred yards on and the milestone at it had been cut by somebody in a hurry.
Halverside left, four miles.
Nothing on the right at all. Just a road going up.
Su’inn stood in front of it in the last of the dark with the rain coming across at an angle and looked at the left-hand road for a long time.
Left, said Azaelis.
“No.”
I am going to give you the reasoning and then you may refuse it. Halverside is four miles. It is a market town of about nine hundred with a bench that sits twice a year, and more to the point it is the town in which every document about you was written. He had gone into the voice he used for schedules. The stay of sentence is lodged there. The physician’s note is there. The inquiry is there and has been for twenty-one years. If there is any road at all out of this that ends with you as a living woman with a name, it starts in a records office in Halverside, and every hour that goes by makes it a harder office to walk into.
“No.”
The alternative is a road going up into hills with nothing on it, in the rain, with no shoes.
“Yes.”
Su’inn.
“We are going right.”
There was a silence. She could hear the rain on the road.
May I ask why.
“No.”
I would like to point out, said Azaelis, with what she was beginning to recognise as his version of exasperation, which was indistinguishable from his version of everything else except that the sentences got shorter, that I am not asking out of idle curiosity. I am asking because I have one working plan and you have refused it without a reason, and I am now going to be walking up a hill for some hours constructing another one, and it would go considerably faster if I knew what I was routing around.
“You would.”
Yes.
“Then you can route around all of it.”
She started up the right-hand road.
He let her get about forty yards.
It is where you killed him.
Su’inn stopped.
She stood in the middle of the road with the rain going down the back of her neck and did not turn around, which was ridiculous, because there was nothing to turn around to.
“How.”
Because I have been dead four hundred years and you are the fourth person this week to go quiet about a town. A pause. And because there is only one thing on a first page.
“You did not read the first page.”
No, said Azaelis. I did not. And I have been in this body for one day, and in that day a factor has read me a clause about a vessel not as certified, and a provincial officer’s name has been said twice, and a priest went to a bench about a note that said unknown. Level, unhurried, and entirely without triumph, which somehow made it much worse. I do not know what you did. I know that you were hanged for something you did in a town four miles to the left, and that you would rather walk into hills with no shoes.
She stood in the road.
“Do not do that again.”
Do what.
“Work me out and then tell me you have.”
That is a strange thing to ask of a man who lives in your head.
“It is the only thing I am going to ask of you,” said Su’inn, “and I am asking it once. You will find things out. I cannot stop that and I am not going to spend the next thirty years pretending otherwise. But you will not hand them to me in the road at five in the morning to win an argument about a hill.”
Another silence, longer.
That is fair, said Azaelis. I apologise. It was badly done and I did it because you would not give me a reason and I dislike being refused, and neither of those is a defence.
“No.”
We go right.
“We go right.”
They went right, and it went up, and it kept going up.
By first grey she had stopped being able to think about anything except the soles of her feet, which had gone past pain into a sort of loud numbness that she recognised professionally and did not care for at all. The hills came out of the dark in stages. There was nothing on them. There was a wall and then no wall, and sheep somewhere, and once a dog barking a long way off at something that was not her.
Somewhere in there she started talking to keep herself upright.
“The seat,” she said. “The bone form. Two hands, one holds the shape and one makes it true. That is why the arm matters, in case you were wondering, and you were, because you have had this hand for a day and you have already worked out that it does not close.”
I had, and I did.
“You cannot do the seat.”
I cannot do the seat with that hand and I could not do the seat with a whole one, because I have never learned it. A beat. I want to be clear about that before you build anything on top of me. Whatever I have, it is not yours. I do not get your eleven. I have four hundred years of a great many things and about nine of them are any use in a body with one hand, and the Ulmatine I learned I learned three bodies ago and let go, and it is old, and some of it is wrong in ways I will not know are wrong until somebody is on a table.
Su’inn kept walking.
“That is the first useful thing you have told me.”
It is the least useful thing I have told you.
“No,” she said. “It is the first one that cost you something.”
The carter came over the rise at about the seventh hour with a load of cut peat and a horse that had given up on all of it years ago.
He stopped, because a man does, when there is a tall woman standing barefoot in the road in the rain in clothes that had clearly belonged to an institution.
“Now then,” he said.
“Good morning.”
“You have no shoes on.”
“I am aware.”
He looked at her for a while, with the unhurried thoroughness of a man who was not going anywhere and whose horse cared less than he did.
“There is a house at Ennick,” he said eventually. “Two mile. My sister keeps it. She will give you a fire and not ask you anything, because she does not ask anybody anything, and if you want my honest opinion you have got about an hour in you and then you are going to sit down in this road and not get up.” He took up the reins. “I am going the other way. Two mile, and it is the only house, and you cannot miss it because there is nothing else.”
“Thank you.”
“Aye.” He clicked at the horse.
And then, ten feet on, he stopped again and turned around on the board and looked back at her, and his face had changed, and he said, in a completely different voice:
“Missus. Are you all right?”
Su’inn stood in the road.
Say yes, said Azaelis, very quietly. Say yes and thank him and keep walking, and do not ask him what he saw.