by M. R. Carey
“De… action…?”
“Switch itself off. Go dark and refuse to work.” Ursala give a curse and flicked her finger hard against the side of her head, like she was angry with her own mind. “I’ve said way too much. I shouldn’t have talked to you while I was drunk.”
“I’m happy you did,” I said, though that was only somewhat true. My thoughts was still in too much of a boiling for me to know what I thought or felt. I think Ursala knowed that too, for she shaked her head at them words.
“But since I’ve got this far,” she said, “there’s one more thing you have to know, Koli. In case you were thinking of trying something stupid and reckless. Even if you found some tech and powered up the battery and found the switch, it would still be only fifty-fifty that it would work for you.”
“Fifty-fifty?” I felt like an idiot, breaking in all the time with these questions about the words she was using, but by now this was a thing I felt like I couldn’t just halfway understand. I had got to know it all.
“Fifty-fifty means one chance in two. It might work for you, but it’s just as likely that it wouldn’t. The reason why… well, it’s a big secret here, though in other places I’ve been it’s well known. I suspect you could get yourself into a lot of trouble, here in Mythen Rood, if you even spoke about it.”
I didn’t care, right then, about any trouble. I wanted to know. I couldn’t bear for this secret, whatever it was, to pass out of my hands when I was this close to hearing it.
My life has had any number of bends in it, where I was going one way and then suddenly found myself heading in another with no chance or thought of going back. And most of those times I only seen the bend after, when I was looking over my shoulder at it, as you might say. When it was too late to do anything but live with it.
This time, though, I seen the bend coming. I knowed in the heat and heart of me that this day, this talk, was going to be a kind of switch, and would turn something on that couldn’t never be turned off again while I lived.
And so it was, and so it did.
18
I come home after talking to Ursala, my head still full of all the things she told me – and especially that last thing. I didn’t tell you that yet, but I will soon. It will make more sense in its right place.
When I got to the mill, Jemiu was standing at the front door of our house with her hands on her hips and her face like a threatening sky. But when she seen the look I was wearing she changed at once and was afraid for me.
“What happened?” was her first words. She must of thought from my smacked-in-the-mouth stare that someone died, or else that I was took bad in a way that might not mend. And if that was what she thought then she wasn’t wrong, but I couldn’t tell her. It was hard enough knowing it my own self.
“I run the walls with Haijon,” I said, which was true, though it seemed a long time ago now. “And I think maybe I pushed myself too hard. I’m winded.”
“Well, you’re an idiot,” Jemiu said. I expected no less, and I only throwed out that bait so her worrying for me would be turned right back into being angry again. Spinner was right about me and secrets: I never could hold one safe for very long, if my life depended on it. In fact, when my life come to depend on it was when I failed most woefully of all. So I did not mind Jemiu giving me rough words as long as she didn’t press me harder on where I’d been.
“Get off to bed,” she says to me now. “And tomorrow you mind you stay home. There’s ten cord of timber to be steeped, and as much again to be cut square. You’ll help Mull and Athen.”
“Sorry, Ma,” I said. “I’ll do that.”
She gun to relent a little then. She told me I was an idiot one more time, but she said there was bread and soup waiting for me in the kitchen, and probably enough life left in the cinders to warm the soup again. “Though the pot’s dry as Midsummer from all the warmings it already had.”
I slipped away to the kitchen, and I sit there a while thinking. I didn’t have the stomach to touch that soup. My mind was in two pieces that was fighting each against the other. What Ursala said was too terrible to be true, yet it made some other things, that was vexing me already, in some ways better. I had failed the test, but suppose it wasn’t me that failed but the test that was wrong and bad its own self? Then I had got a right to be tested again, didn’t I? I had got a right to be tested on an equal foot with them that passed.
With Haijon.
Whatever I did (and I was already thinking what I might do) I had to start with him. If what Ursala said was true, then I couldn’t be friends with him no more. We had got to be enemies. I didn’t want that, yet a part of me was inclined to welcome it.
If Haijon had lied, then I would shout out the lie to everyone in the village, and Spinner would shun him. Everyone would shun him. Vennastins would be shamed too, since the lie would belong in equal parts to all of them. Ramparts would fall.
And what then, Koli? I asked myself. What happens to Mythen Rood if the Ramparts fall? I was checked somewhat in my recklessness by that question, but other reckless thoughts come in its wake. It was like Ursala dropped a big stone into my heart, and what was in there had got to come slopping out one way or another.
I lay waking all night, and worked all the next day. Jemiu was watching me close the whole time. It was not just to make sure I kept at it. I thought that at first, but there was a look on her face said it was something else besides. I think it was the state I was in the night before when I come home. It was still in her mind, and it had lit a suspicion there. She was keeping me home to keep me from something worse, though she had no real idea what that thing might be.
That was the day Ursala left the village. She had told me she would, and though I was sorry I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to her, yet I felt in another way like we had said all that had got to be said. I had asked her for answers and she give me more answers than I could rightly cope with. Now her road lay to the south, down the valley, to Ludden and then on to Sowby or Burnt Lea, places that was only names to me.
I throwed myself into the steeping and the cutting with a will, hoping some of the things I was feeling would come out of me along with the sweat. I never leaned on the long-soled plane harder than I leaned on it that day, or the next day. Jemiu left me alone at last, satisfied that I was deep into what I was doing.
Nor I never meant to deceive her, think what you might. It was myself I was striving with all that time, and I had no thought for any other. Excepting Haijon. Him I thought on a great deal.
On the third day, I picked up the water buckets and shrugged the yoke on across my shoulders. “I’ll do that,” Athen says to me. “You’re better with the plane than I am.”
“If I plane another plank, I’ll be crying splinters,” I said. “I want a change from it, Athen, and this is as good as any.”
I seen the doubt in her face. She read me almost as well as my mother did. “Did someone hurt you, Koli?” she asked. “If I didn’t know you was as gentle a one as ever walked, I’d say there was blood in your eye.”
“There’s sawdust in my eye, is all,” I said. “And I’ll walk it out and sweat it out, and be back betimes.”
She give it up, and kissed me on my cheek. “Go the right way then,” she said. Which was a peculiar thing to say when I was only going to the well. But I believe she seen deeper into me, like I said.
I left the buckets and the yoke by the well and went on to the gather-ground. That was the most likely place for Haijon to be, and there I found him, practising with the cutter while his cousin Mardew watched him with a shrewd, mistrustful eye as if he meant to steal it. I sit down to watch, some ways off, at the corner of the ground nearest the tocsin bell.
Haijon seen me after a while, and he waved to me. I waved back, though I didn’t feel much like it.
“Hey, Koli,” he called out. “Watch this!”
He leaned down, grabbed a rock off the ground and throwed it into the air. Then he pointed the cutter straight up, t
ook aim and fired. Only he must of done something to the cutter’s beam I never seen before. It hit the rock as it was falling and bounced it straight back up again. The rock come down a second time, and boom! It hit the beam and shot back up.
He bounced it three times, and then he done something that surprised me even more. The fourth time the rock come down, he got the cutter right under it and made it stop dead in the air, about ten feet or so from the ground.
He looked round, like as to say “How is that then?” and laughed when he seen the wonder on my face. I never knowed the cutter could do something like that. I never knowed it could do anything but cut. But I remembered what Ursala said about how the inside walls of her tent, that you couldn’t rightly touch with your fingers, was somewhat the same as the cutter beam. So maybe there was more to the cutter than anyone knowed.
Haijon slipped his wrist out of the cutter and give it back to Mardew, who had been watching all this show with a sour sort of scowl on his face. If I was made to guess, I would say that Haijon was showing better with the cutter than Mardew expected, and that sit ill with him.
Haijon come over and clapped me on the shoulder. “You want to race again, Koli?” he asked me. “I’ll give you a start as far as that tree, if you want. Knowing how lazy you are in the afternoons, and all.”
He was meaning to invite me to a trial of insults as much as to the race. I couldn’t take either one right then. “Let’s just walk a ways,” I said. “To the lade, maybe.”
“What’s at the lade?” Haijon says.
“Nothing I know of. But it’s a place to walk to that isn’t here.”
He nodded slowly. “I hear that song,” he said. “Okay, let’s walk.”
We headed up the Middle, that was busy with people going to and fro. I seen Mardew turn around to keep us in his eye the whole way. There wasn’t nothing friendly in the look he give me.
The lade was a kind of an open space just inside of the gate, like the gather-ground but much smaller, with walls that was long stakes hammered into the earth. I told you that no houses was builded so close to the fence, but the lade was not a house, nor nobody was meant to live there. It was just a circle of cleared ground with a wooden bench and an iron drink trough in it. It was meant to be a place where visitors could wait until they had said what their business was and got a yes or a no. But since we didn’t get no visitors except only once in a bloomed moon, the lade was not much used. The bottom of the trough was rusted almost through, and there was green stains down the sides of it. I would not of drunk from it even on a dare.
When we got there, Haijon climbed up on the bench and sit on the back of it, since there was two planks missing from the seat. I stayed standing. I couldn’t find a way, at first, into what I wanted to say. But since the tech was at the heart of it all, it wasn’t that hard in the end to sneak around to it. “How’d you make the cutter do that?” I asked him. “Did Mardew teach you?”
Haijon laughed like that was a big joke. “Mardew teached me everything he knows,” he said. “Took about an hour, but some of that time he was off taking a shit. Koli, there’s more to the cutter than anyone guessed before. So much more. You seen what it does. But it’s how it does it that’s the amazing thing.” He held up his hand like he still had the cutter on it, clenched up in a fist and pointing at the sky. He kind of made pretend with his other hand of what the cutter was doing. First of all, he stretched out all his fingers and held them tight together in a line. “See, it makes a kind of invisible knife that goes out in front of you, like this. You can’t see it by looking at it, but you know it’s there because it makes the air go wavy, kind of. Like the twists and ripples you get over a puddle when the sun’s cracking down on it.
“But it don’t have to be a knife, really. You can sort of decide the shape of it by how you move your hand. You can narrow it right down so it’s like…” He curled up his pointing finger and folded his thumb around it, leaving just a tiny hole in the middle. “Like that. You know? Like that drill thing you use to put neat little holes in a plank of wood.”
“An auger.”
“Yeah, like an auger. Or you can flatten it out into a shovel. Or you can make it really wide, and then if it hits you it’s more like being punched real hard than being stabbed with a knife. That was what I was doing with that stone – hitting it with a wide beam.”
“How about when you held it still?”
Haijon shrugged. “I don’t even know the words for that,” he said. “It’s like the widest field of all. Only you drive it in soft, so it don’t hit the thing you’re pointed at, it just kind of slides around it. I only just figured how to do it.”
He looked up at me, and maybe he seen in my face some of what was in my heart. “You gonna sit down?” he asks me. He scooted to one side, leaving room for me to get up on the bench next to him, only I didn’t do that. I didn’t move at all.
“Why’d you choose the cutter, Haijon?” I asked him.
He looked surprised. “What?”
“Why’d you choose the cutter? Why not the firethrower, like your ma? Keep it going down through the family, like? Wasn’t that a thing you felt like doing?”
He was looking at me strange, and I didn’t blame him. My voice must of gone real hard when I come up to the point at last, and Dandrake knows what my face looked like. The whole time Haijon was telling me about the things he could make the cutter do, I was thinking of Ursala’s words and kind of hating him. Kind of running forward into that hate, and holding back at the same time, and not knowing which was worse.
“What’s the matter with you, Koli?” Haijon asked me.
“There isn’t nothing that’s the matter with me. Just you answer, now. Don’t try to get out of it.”
Haijon blinked, like something got in his eye. “Get out of what?” he says. “What are you talking about?”
“The cutter, Haijon! I’m talking about the dead-god-damned cutter!”
He come down off the bench. “What’s the matter with you?” he asks again. “Did I say something to cross you, cos if I did I don’t remember it.”
“A shit on what you remember,” I shouted at him. “Why the cutter? Why was it the cutter you choosed?”
He shaked his head, like he was giving up on all this. “I’m going back inside the fence,” he said, “and leaving you to your sulks.”
I punched him in the face. I done it without even thinking. First thing I knowed about it was Haijon putting his hand up to his nose and bringing it away bloody.
“Oh,” he says. “Like that?” And he hauled off and hit me back. It wasn’t like he let go of his temper or nothing. It was more like something had wobbled out of balance and he had got to tilt it back again. Just the one punch, about as hard as the one I give him. It landed on my cheek and made my whole head ring – but Haijon outweighed me by a good twenty pounds and could of knocked me off my feet without trying.
The next thing I was up at him like a madman, swinging with both fists. He held me off with his left hand on my chest, leaning his head away from the punches so they just landed on his arms and shoulders and done very little to discomfort him.
“Koli, stop it!” he said. “Stop doing this!”
I stopped, and he let go of me. Then I jumped at him again and tried to wrestle him down. I had even less luck with that than I done with the punching. Haijon got me in a lock and pushed me down so I was on my stomach in the grass, one arm folded under me and the other held in both of his hands so I couldn’t move it at all.
“You’re gonna get hurt,” he shouted, like I wasn’t trying to hurt him, or like that wasn’t a thing that mattered much.
“Tell me the truth!” I yelled back, though the force of that yell was only felt by worms in the ground. “When did you see it? When did you touch it? Dandrake choke you, Haijon, what did Catrin teach you? What did she tell you to do?”
There was just silence, for a moment, from up on top of me. Haijon still kept me pinned in the same way, his
knee in my back but not hard enough to hurt – only to stop me trying to get up, and getting my arm broke in the bargain.
“Oh,” he said. “That. How’d you even know about that?”
I gun to cry then. I hadn’t wanted to think it, but here was Haijon telling me it was true. It was true, and it was the worst thing that could be.
“If I let you up,” he said, “are you gonna come up swinging?”
“No,” I said. I didn’t have no fight left in me. Haijon got off of me and took a step away. After a while I rolled over onto my back and sit up, rubbing my arm to get the feeling back.
He looked at me in wonder. “What in hell are you crying for?” he asked me. “I didn’t hardly touch you.”
“Tell me,” I said. I was too angry right then to be ashamed that he seen me crying. This was the onliest thing that mattered, and I had got to hear it all.
Haijon wiped some more blood from his nose, which was still streaming. “There isn’t hardly anything to tell. I know it was breaking the rules, but it’s not like it was important. Are you gonna make a big song about such a stupid little—”
“You better just tell me, Haijon,” I said. “Tell me, or tell the Count and Seal.”
He blinked. “The Count and Seal? Are you mazed, Koli?”
“Tell me!”
“All right. The day before I went into the Waiting House, my ma asked me if I wanted to see the tech up close. I knowed I wasn’t supposed to, and I said no at first. I thought it might be bad luck or something. But she said it wasn’t anything. She asked me which one I was gonna try with, and when I said the cutter she went and brung Mardew into the room. She got him to take off the cutter and give it to me so I could try it on.”
