Chương 47: The Book Room

His hand closed. It closed slowly and in stages, like a rusted thing, but it closed, and the pole was inside it. Dobbs walked backward up the apron with the pole over his shoulder, hauling, and the water gave Abe up with a sound like a boot coming out of mud. Cottle took him under the arms and set him on the stones. Purnell had her coat off before his boots stopped streaming.

"Shed," said Dobbs.

"All of us. We're done." The last board stood seated and true in its slots behind them, and nobody looked at it once on the walk back. That evening Abe sat on the floor of June's room with his back against the door and gave her the day. Her terms. Start to finish, bad bits included. She had her pencil out and she never touched it. She let him get all the way to the shed and the stove before she said anything.

"Did Dobbs say out?"

"No. He said ten minutes."

"Right," said June. She looked at the window for a while. Her rule only started when Dobbs said the word out, and Dobbs had never said it. He had said ten minutes, so the rule had sat there in Abe's pocket doing nothing at all while the water came in over his waders. She pulled her list of rules onto her knee. What she wrote at the bottom of it, she did not show him. The famous Croft gate was waist-high and green, and the latch stuck.

Abe worked it until it gave and stood on the path on Christmas Day with his coat brushed and his hands empty, which had felt wrong all the way up the hill. The house was farmhouse-big, not mansion-big. Somebody had nailed up the same string of lights that half of Salt Row used. Inside, a man was shouting.

"It rings TWICE and then it stops. Every time. There is nothing wrong with the phone. Do not buy a phone." The door opened on a woman with flour halfway up one arm and Croft's exact eyebrows.

"You're the boy," said Croft's mother, delighted.

"Look at you. Ignore his father, he's at war with the phone. Miles, your project's here." The hall smelled of goose and hot fat and pine. Three aunts looked him over in a row, exactly as promised, and one of them turned him by the shoulder to see the other side. Croft came down the stairs two at a time, already talking, and was unbearable straight through the meal. His family had heard about the duel and the board and the drill, and by the sound of it very little else since October.

Halfway through, the nearest aunt turned to him with the kind expression that comes just before the bad question.

"And what does your father do, Abe?" Everybody at the table stopped talking at once. Croft went still with his fork up.

"He was a wall guard. He was on the wall when it went."

"Which tower?" said Croft's father, from his end. It was the first thing he had said since the phone.

"The far tower."

"That's the end of the wall. Coldest post there is." He nodded twice.

"Eat more of the goose." That was all of it, and it was enough, and the table came back up over them like water closing. They went out to the garden at three, while there was still light. Croft's mother had wanted the dishes done first. She lost. The grass was stiff with cold. The family came out with coats over their good clothes and mugs in their hands and stood along the wall, and they stood along it like people who had watched that garden teach sixty years of feet.

"Third step," Croft announced, to everybody.

"He's had the gate and the low tide since November. Today he meets the ferryman."

"God help him," said an aunt, warmly, and the wall laughed. Croft ran the first two steps slowly, so Abe could see the difference coming. On the gate step his back foot stayed down. On the low tide his back foot stayed down. Both times he could have stopped halfway through and walked away. Then he did the third one, and his back foot came off the ground. He drove off that back foot hard and never put it down again.

His whole weight went out over the front leg and kept going, blade first, and he crossed about four feet of frozen grass with nothing underneath him that could stop it.

"That's the ferryman," said Croft, landing.

"You push off, and there's no back foot to pull you home. Halfway across you've got no answer if you were wrong. That's what it costs to get there." He looked at his own hands.

"That's the book's line, not mine. It's a good one, though. You're the boat and you're the pole. Go on." If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. Abe went on, and the ferryman put him on his face twice. Both times, his back toe stayed touching the ground out of pure sense, keeping a way home open, and both times he got about two feet across and stopped. The wall enjoyed it enormously. Croft's mother laughed loudest and an aunt made a noise like a gull.

"Up. Again. You're taking it back at the last second." Croft stood over him with no sympathy in him anywhere.

"Stop keeping the exit open." That was not in any book, and it was the truest coaching Abe had gotten all month. Miles ran it once more to show the push, and overshot, showing off. His father crossed the grass without a word and put one hand flat on his son's chest. Everything stopped. Croft reset two steps back without being told and ran it clean, and his father went back to the wall and picked up his mug.

Abe stood very still and watched a family correct itself, and said not one word about a cold hall on Fenner Street. On the ninth try, he let the back foot go. There was a horrible moment in the middle where the ground was doing nothing for him at all. Then the step put him down on the far side with the blade out and his balance under him, four feet from where he had started, and no way he could have stopped himself getting there.

The wall made a low sound, all together, the sound a crowd makes when somebody just gets over a high jump.

"Again," said Croft's father. He did it again. They kept the book room at the back of the house, and they kept it cold on purpose, because paper lasts longer that way. Shelves went to the ceiling on three walls. Not a library. A working store: two hundred books at least, most of them small, most of them swollen at the spine from being carried in coat pockets in the rain. Ledgers along the bottom. Boxes of loose paper above those.

And at eye height, running the whole length of one wall, a line of matching black notebooks that got dustier the further left you looked.

"Forms. By person." Croft walked the wall with a finger out.

"Great-grandfather down that end, then his brothers, then Granddad, then my father. That gap's my uncle, who gave it up. Then me. My pages are terrible and you're not seeing them." The offers book had a shelf to itself, fat and battered.

"And that lot is everything anybody tried that didn't work." He waved at the boxes.

"Nobody's opened those since about the war." From the front of the house came his mother's voice, pitched to carry. Dishes. Goodbyes. An aunt's coat, missing.

"Four minutes," Croft said, backing out.

"Touch what you like. If you take a page out my father will know which one by the weight of the book." The door swung most of the way shut behind him. Abe stood in the middle of all that paper and worked out how much of it he was actually going to read. Getting quiet took him fifty seconds on a good day, in his own yard, with nobody in the house. Four minutes was four settles. Maybe five. And in a stopped world he could not turn a page, because the second he took hold of anything the world started again.

So each settle got him whatever was already open in front of him, and nothing else. Read, let go, turn, get quiet again. Fifty seconds. In a stranger's house. With a family two rooms away. Four pages, and two hundred books. He went to the oldest end of the black notebooks and pulled out one whose spine had been mended with tape twice, and stood it open on the shelf in front of him. Then he put his hands at his sides and reached for the quiet with Croft's aunts saying goodbye in the hall.

It took longer than fifty seconds. It took a long bad while, and twice he felt it start and slide off him, and then the room went out like a lamp. The fire in the hall grate stopped with all its light still on. Through the gap in the door he could see down the hall to the kitchen, where an aunt stood with her hand halfway into a jar and her mouth open on a word, and none of it moved, and none of it was going to move until he let it. He read the two pages in front of him. Drills.

A boy's handwriting complaining about his wrist. He let go. The fire jumped, the aunt's word finished somewhere out of sight, and Abe turned twenty pages at once and started again. The second settle was worse than the first, because now he knew exactly what he was spending. Drills. A diagram of a foot. A long complaint about somebody called Ivor. The third one, a chair scraped in the hall right in the middle and the quiet tore like wet paper.

He had to start again from nothing, and that cost him most of a minute he did not have. When it finally came, the page in front of him was not drills. Somebody had ruled the lines with a straight edge and copied out a screen in ink, the same as the page in the back of Abe's father's book. EVOLUTION · Meditation Choose one. This choice is permanent. STILL WATER · Common You are harder to read and harder to hurry. THE PATIENT HOUR · Common You can sit far longer before your attention breaks.

THE TURNING WHEEL · Fine Rest without sleeping. Work without stopping. Your day is longer than their day. Above it, in the same ink, the boy who copied it had put a heading of his own. MINE. 14 MARCH. Abe read the word at the top of the screen twice, and then again, because it was not a word that belonged in a book like this one. Meditation. The sit. The boring thing every kid in Calder got handed at eleven and put down again the same week. Abe had it.

He had had it since the afternoon he sat on mat four for nine minutes and forty seconds and outlasted the whole year. He brought his own screens up in the stopped room. It was the first line on the list, and he had been reading straight past it since October. Meditation · Novice Lv 3 (61 / 450) Two levels since October. He knew why. Getting quiet had stopped being hard somewhere in the second week of October, and the Weave paid for hard and nothing else.

He had used the sit to get into the still, and for nothing else, ever. Fifty seconds, and then he was through it and gone. And the best thing this family had owned in sixty years grew out of it. He read your day is longer than their day four times over. He let go. The fire moved. He turned the page with a hand he made go slowly, and got quiet again, and that one came faster than any of them. He did not know why yet. Margins now. Three hands, forty years between them, all circling the same thing. Wheel again.

Cannot be got off the page. M. says so and M. is right. The Turning-Wheel Trance, in the looping handwriting of the man who had named the four sword steps. The best thing this family ever owned that was not steel. And under that, in ballpoint, modern, pressed hard enough to dent the paper: Nobody in this family has had it since Great-grandfather. Nobody living to teach it. Do not let the boys waste years off the book. Abe came out of the still with that sitting on his chest. Gone since the oldest book on the shelf.

A sword family, and their own books said the best thing they ever had was not a sword. It was lost, and no page on earth was going to give it back. And there was not one word on the page about how you did it. They had written down every step of every sword form they owned. About the wheel they had written what it could do, and that it was gone, and nothing else at all. The kitchen door banged. Feet in the hall, more than one pair, and Croft's mother in the middle of them.

"Whose gloves are these? Somebody's going home cold." His four minutes had run out a long time ago. The next page would have how they tried. It had to. Three of them had gone at the same thing in this room and got nowhere. They wrote everything else down. They would have written down the trying. Abe got his thumb under the corner of the page and turned it, and started getting quiet with people coming down the hall.