Burn to the left forearm and palm, dressed. Cause unknown. Ward physician, Halverside, entered twenty-one years past
She slept in the lee of a hayrick above the mill and it was not the worst night she had spent that season, and in the morning she went down and looked at the house.
There were children in it.
That was the first thing and she had not prepared for it at all. Two of them, a boy of about six and a girl younger, out in the front with a hoop and no coats on, and a woman in the doorway telling them about the coats, and a line of washing along the side wall where there had never been a line because he had not liked the look of one.
The gate was new. The step was the step.
Su’inn stood on the far side of the lane with her hands in her sleeves and looked at a house with a line of washing on it.
Su’inn.
“I am all right.”
I did not ask.
The girl dropped the hoop and it went over on its side and rang on the stones, that flat iron ringing that a hoop makes, and the sound came off the front of the house and across the lane.
And her whole body went sideways.
It was not a flinch. A flinch is small and she had seen ten thousand of them. This was the entire structure of her, shoulder and neck and the left arm coming up across the body, all of it happening in about a third of a second and finishing before she had any part in it, and then standing in a lane in the morning with her heart going like a bird and her arm across her chest and nothing at all to do with it.
The woman in the doorway looked over.
Su’inn put the arm down and made her face into a thing and nodded, and the woman nodded back and went in.
Inside her there was a silence.
What was that.
“Nothing.”
Su’inn, I felt the whole of it. I was in it. I do not know what happened and I would like to know what happened, because from where I am sitting a hoop fell over and you came apart.
“I know what it looked like.”
Then tell me what it was.
“No,” said Su’inn, and walked away up the lane.
He did not ask again.
The woman came out of the cottage on the corner an hour later and stopped dead in the road with a basket on her hip.
She was about thirty-three and had a hard capable face and Su’inn had never seen her before in her life.
“You are dead,” the woman said.
“Yes.”
“They hanged you in the spring.”
“They did.”
The woman stood in the road with her basket and did not move and did not run, and after a while she set the basket down on the wall, very carefully, the way you put a thing down when your hands have decided they want to be free.
“Onnie,” she said. “Onnie Fell. I was in that house.”
Su’inn did not say anything.
“I was twelve,” said Onnie. “I did the fires and the water. I was there four year, from ten. You never once said a word to me that was not kind and you never once let him see you being kind to me, and I was twelve and I did not understand why, and I have understood it every year since.”
Su’inn, said Azaelis, very quietly, and then nothing else, and that was the last thing he said for a long while.
They walked up the river path because standing in a road was a poor idea and both of them knew it without discussing it.
“They said you had got clean away,” said Onnie. “Twenty year, and then in the spring there was a man in the Fleece saying they had you at the eastern seat. And then they said hanged. And I have not slept right since Candlemas and I could not tell you exactly why.”
“You do not owe me anything.”
“I know what I owe. I have had twenty-one year to work it out and I have got a very good idea of the figure.” Onnie stopped on the path. “I told.”
Su’inn stopped too.
“I told the physician,” said Onnie. “The night. When they had you in the back room and he was doing the arm. I was twelve and I was standing in that kitchen with a candle and I told him. I said, sir, he done that to her, I seen him, he had her hand on the range and he held it, and I seen it through the door and I have got the whole of it.”
The river went past.
“And he said?”
“He said, girl, go and get more water.”
Onnie’s face did not do anything at all. She had had twenty-one years to arrange it.
“And I got more water,” she said. “And in the morning he wrote his two lines and he went home, and I read them eleven years later when I was grown, because the clerk let me, because I asked. And it says unknown.” She picked at the wall. “And I have wanted to say this to somebody who could do something with it since I was twelve, and every single one of them was somebody who could not.”
Do not tell her yet, said Azaelis, and it was the first thing he had said in twenty minutes. You are about to tell her that it does not matter, and it is going to come out kind, and it is going to take that from her, and I want you to sit with it for four seconds first because you will not get this back.
She sat with it for four seconds.
“Onnie.”
“There is a bench,” said Onnie. “There is a bench at Lammas and there is a stay lodged, they say. I know that much because my sister’s man is on the door at the moot hall and he cannot keep his mouth shut about anything. I can stand up. I am not frightened of standing up. I have been ready for twenty-one year and I am thirty-three and I have got no man and no children and there is nothing in this town that can be taken off me.”
“I know.”
“So I will do it.”
“I know you will,” said Su’inn. “I am not going to ask you.”
Onnie’s head came round.
“You will not ask me.”
“No.”
“Why.”
“Because it is not going to be a defence.” Su’inn put her hands on the wall. “I want to be very plain with you and not kind about it, because you have had twenty-one years of people being kind to you about this and it has got you nowhere. If you stand up at Lammas and say what you saw, then what happens is that four men in a room take what he did and weigh it against what I did, and they decide whether it came out even. And it might. Corliss thought it would and Corliss was very good.”
“Then let them.”
“No,” said Su’inn.
“Why.”
“Because I decided it was even twenty-one years ago, standing in that kitchen, and I have not changed my mind since and I am not going to hand the question to a bench so that they can arrive at my answer by a worse road.” She looked at the water. “If they say it was enough, then it was only enough because they said so. And if they say it was not, then I have to live the rest of whatever I have got knowing that four men had a look and came out the other way. I am not putting it on the table. It is the one thing I have got that is entirely mine, and I have got very little.”
Onnie Fell stood on the river path.
“That is a terrible reason,” she said.
“It is a very good reason,” said Su’inn, “and it is mine, and it is not going to be improved by discussion.”
They walked back down as far as the corner and neither of them said anything for most of it.
“There is a thing you can do,” Su’inn said, at the wall where the basket was. “If you want to do a thing. It is not the bench.”
“Go on.”
“Say it to somebody who writes.” She got the words out flat, because they were difficult and flat was the only way she had. “There is a finder called Vasse. He is at the diocesan house at the eastern seat and he will be there eleven days from now for a priest’s hearing, and he takes notes, and he is honest in the way a good scale is honest, which is that it does not care what you weigh.”
“He is not a bench.”
“No. He will write down that a girl of twelve told a physician what she saw and was sent for water, and he will put it where it stays.” She picked up the basket and handed it over. “And in forty years somebody looking at that file will find a note that says unknown and a note underneath it that says it was not unknown, somebody told him, and he wrote it anyway.”
Onnie took the basket.
“That is a very small thing,” she said.
“It is the size of the thing,” said Su’inn. “I have spent nine years putting people’s legs back together and every single one of them was the size of a leg. If you want the big one you will have to find somebody else, and I have met one and he is a priest and they are having a hearing about him.”
Onnie Fell looked at her for a long moment.
Then she said, “You have got a mark on your neck,” and went into her house and shut the door.
She got up onto the road above the mill before she stopped, and stood there with her back against a wall, and put her right hand over her eyes.
Su’inn.
“Do not.”
I am not going to say anything about the bench, said Azaelis. I have an opinion and it is a strong one and you will have it at some point and it will not be today, because you have decided and because it is yours, and because I said in a lane above this town that I would be a witness and not a tactful one and I meant the second half of that as much as the first.
She stood with her hand over her eyes.
“Then what.”
A hoop fell over in a lane, he said, and you came apart, and you told me it was nothing, and I have spent the last three hours not asking.
“Yes.”
I am not asking now. I am telling you that I have been in this body eleven weeks and I have driven it four times and I thought I knew what it could do, and it turns out that it can do a thing I have never seen a body do, from a sound, without being consulted. A pause. And that whatever put that in there did it a very long time before I got here, and is still in here, and I am going to be living with it.
Su’inn took her hand away from her eyes.
“Yes,” she said. “You are.”
I wanted you to know that I know that.
“Why.”
Because you have been carrying it alone for twenty-one years, said Azaelis, and you are not going to be able to do that anymore, and I would rather you found that out from me on a road than from a hoop.