The village was called something like Haskin. Oriel never got it quite right. Teska said it, and the rowers said it, and the people who came down to the stone shore to stare at the copper-bottomed barge said it, and every time it sounded slightly different, the way names do in a language you don’t have. She wrote it Haskin in the field book and underlined it to show she wasn’t sure.
It sat on the last leaf before the rock.
That was the first thing she understood, standing on its stone shore on her stick with Bastian’s hand under her arm, looking up. The leaf ran east from the shore for perhaps half a league, low and flat and grey, crowded with houses — small, square, grey stone and grey timber and grey thatch, packed so close their eaves touched — and then, at its eastern end, it met the cliff.
And tipped.
You could see it from the shore. The whole far end of the leaf leaning down, the way Hob Strand’s north field had leaned, toward the foot of the rock. The houses at that end leaning with it. Some of them roofless. Some of them half gone, their back walls missing, sheared off where the leaf-edge ground against the cliff and slid under. And the grinding came up from there, steady, the sound of a mill on a dry axle, going on and on.
The rock went up from the end of the leaf like the side of the world.
And up its face, from the village, the stair. Zig-zag. Narrow. Cut in the black rock. A hundred and fifty rods of it, maybe more, to the first terrace. And at the top, the wall, and the gate.
Open.
It was open now. In the morning. Oriel could see it through the glass. And people on the stair. Going up. A long thin line of them, in grey wool, with baskets and tools on their backs, climbing.
“Work,” said Calloway beside her.
She looked at him.
“I’ve been listening to them since we landed,” he said. “It’s not that different. The trade words. Every language has them. Work. Food. Pay. How much.” He nodded at the stair. “They go up at dawn. They work on the terraces. They come down at dusk, and the gate shuts.” He watched the line climbing. “They live down here. On the leaf that’s going under. And work up there. On the rock that isn’t.”
Nobody in Haskin had a word Oriel knew.
That was hard for an hour. Then Neve Asher sat down on the stone shore with a stick, in a patch of grit between two boulders, and drew.
A line. Then another. Then three. Then four.
A small crowd had gathered round them — Low-folk in grey wool, women and men, old and young, staring at the copper boat and the tall Canton woman and the enormous man with the crooked hand. They watched Neve draw. An old man in the front bent down. He looked at the lines in the grit. One. Two. Three. Four.
He took the stick from her hand. Gently. And drew a fifth line. And a cross through all five.
Neve looked up at Oriel. Her face was shining.
“Tally,” she said. “They count in fives. Like us. Like Bastian’s chain-arrows. Like the Wells.”
By noon they had numbers.
Not words. Numbers. Neve and the old man and then four or five others, kneeling in the grit, drawing tallies and pointing at things and saying words and drawing more tallies. One boat. Two oars. Five houses. Ten. The Haskin word for one and two and five and ten. And then — because Neve was Neve — how many, and more, and less. By the middle of the afternoon she could ask a Haskin woman how many people lived in her house, and understand the answer, and write it in the ledger.
“Numbers are the same everywhere,” she said to Oriel, at dusk, sitting on the shore with the ledger in her lap and her knees black with grit. “Aren’t they. Five is five. A chain is sixty-six links. A star’s where it is.” She looked up at the cliff. “You can’t lie about a number unless somebody lets you.”
Teska’s house was near the shore. The safe end. She took them there at dusk, Oriel and Sarn and Isaut and Neve — the others stayed with the barge — and sat them on the floor of a single low room round a fire of something that burned blue and smelled of salt.
There was a wheel on the floor.
Oriel saw it when her eyes got used to the firelight. Cut into the stone of the floor itself, under the rushes, worn smooth by feet. A circle. Leaves round it. And on one side — the east — a solid dark band. A rock. And the leaves going round toward it, and tipping, and going under.
And on the far side, the west, a line. Where they came up.
Isaut was on her knees beside it before anyone else moved.
“It’s the same,” she said. “It’s Vell’s. It’s the wheel. But — turned round. The rock’s on the east. The Seam’s on the west.” She put her hand flat on it. “It’s their wheel. It’s the other wheel.”
Teska watched her.
Then she knelt too, across the carved floor from Isaut, and put her own palm flat on the other side of the wheel. On the rock. On the dark band in the east.
She said a word. She touched the dark band. She pointed up, through the roof, at the cliff.
“Ardun,” she said.
Then she touched the leaves going under. And pointed down, at the floor. At the leaf they were sitting on.
“Haskin.”
Then she moved her finger round the wheel. Slowly. From where the leaves came up on the far side, west, at the line of the Seam. Round. East. Toward the rock. To the edge. And down. Under.
And she looked at them. And held up her hand, fingers spread. And then closed it, and opened it again. And again. Counting.
“How long,” said Sarn. Very quietly. “She’s asking how long. Or telling.”
Teska held up her hand one more time. And then two fingers.
Neve had the ledger out. She’d learned the tally-words that afternoon.
“Seventeen,” she said. “Years? Seasons? Seventeen something.”
Teska shook her head. Slowly. She put her palm flat on the floor again. On the wheel. On the leaf, Haskin, at its tipping edge against the rock. She closed her eyes. She tilted her head. Listening. The way Sarn did.
She opened her eyes. And held up her hand. Five fingers.
And then she closed it. And didn’t open it again.
Sarn put her hand flat on the floor beside Teska’s.
She listened for a long time. The fire burned blue. Outside, the grinding went on, steady, from the far end of the leaf, where the houses leaned.
When Sarn lifted her head, her face had gone very still.
“She’s right,” she said. “It’s quickening. Here. Like the Orme Leaf did. The groan. It’s — it’s the same sound. Exactly the same. The knocks are close.” She looked at Teska. “Five. She’s saying five. And then nothing.”
“Five years?” said Neve.
“Shorter,” said Sarn. “Seasons. Maybe less. It’s loading.” She looked at Oriel. “Like Lusk. Like the Bay. Like Strand’s north field. The whole leaf. All of Haskin.”
They watched the gate shut.
From the shore, at dusk, with Teska. The line of grey-wool people coming down the zig-zag stair from the first terrace, tired, slow, with their baskets. Hundreds. Coming down off the rock onto the leaf, into the village, into the houses, at the end of the day’s work.
And at the top, when the last of them were through, the gate.
They saw it close. Through the glass. Two figures in something that caught the last light — bronze, or brass, a breastplate — swinging it shut. A heavy thing, iron-banded. And a sound, very faint, across all that distance: a bar going across.
Teska watched it close. Then she said something to Calloway. Short. Calloway listened, with his head on one side, and asked something back, slowly, in the trade-words he’d been collecting all day. She answered. He asked again. She held up her hand — tallies — and said a number.
Calloway was quiet a long time.
“Places,” he said finally. To Oriel. “That’s the word. Up there. On the rock. They call them places.” He nodded at the terraces, where the windows were beginning to light, one by one, in the dusk. “A place on the rock. To live. Not to work — to live. Behind the gate.”
“Can they get one?”
“They can buy one,” said Calloway. “From the Holders. That’s what they call the ones up there. Holders.” He looked at Teska. “She says a place costs —” He worked it out. Neve leaned over and showed him the tally. “— forty years of work. On the terraces. For one person. Forty years, and then you can go through the gate and stay.” He looked at the village. At the houses leaning at the far end. “And the Holders say the leaf is safe for generations. They say it every year. At a ceremony, on the top of the rock. At the needle.” He paused. “She says they have a man who counts the sun. And he says so.”
Nobody said anything.
Oriel looked up at the cliff. At the windows, lit. At the gate, shut. At the long thin bronze needle at the very top of the rock, the last of the light gone from it now, black against the haze.
Forty years. And five fingers. And then nothing.
“Wheresoever the said Star may lie,” said Calloway. Very quietly. To nobody. “I wrote that. On eleven thousand deeds.” He looked at the gate. “It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing exactly.”
FIELD BOOK · O. TASH
HASKIN (SPELLING UNSURE), THE LAST LEAF BEFORE THE ROCK, 17th Fourthmonth C.418
THE ROCK IS CALLED ARDUN. THE LEAF’S E. END TIPS UNDER THE CLIFF. HOUSES THERE HALF GONE.
NUMBERS: THEY TALLY IN FIVES. N. ASHER HAS 1–10, HOW MANY, MORE, LESS.
TESKA’S FLOOR: THE WHEEL, TURNED ROUND. ROCK E., SEAM W.
TESKA: 5 … THEN NOTHING. S. IVO: “SHORTER. SEASONS. IT’S LOADING.”
ONE STAIR, ONE GATE. LOW-FOLK GO UP AT DAWN TO WORK. DOWN AT DUSK. GATE BARRED.
A “PLACE” ON THE ROCK: 40 YEARS’ WORK.
THE HOLDERS SAY THE LEAF IS SAFE FOR GENERATIONS. A MAN WHO COUNTS THE SUN SAYS SO.