by M. R. Carey
When testing day come, Haijon and me waked up to find our white testing shirts laid out beside our bunks. We put them on and went into the kitchen, where Spinner was already sitting down in her own white shirt, eating a plate of pancakes and honey piled up higher than I ever seen. There was twice as many left on the platter, along with bread and warm milk and duck eggs and slices of pink-white meat, hot and steaming off the stove-top.
“I started without you, sleepyheads,” Spinner said, through a mouthful of something. “You gonna have to race to catch up.”
“No need to race,” Shirew Makewell said. She was at the stove, frying up more meat. “You can have anything you want, and as much as you want. This is your day, remember.”
“Well then,” Haijon said, sitting down. “I think I’m gonna have some of everything, Shirew. Starting with this bread, which smells like it’s got spike-seed in it.” I sat down too. Haijon had took the seat next to Spinner, so I was opposite. That was okay though. It meant I got to look at her face while I was eating.
The bread did have spike-seed in it, and it tasted so good it kind of made you sigh through your nose when it was in your mouth. The meat was good too. I was thinking it would be chicken but it was pig. Pig was a Salt Feast thing, for at Salt Feast they cooked a whole pig in the firepit and everyone got to eat as much of it as they could hold. So the taste of pig was a holiday taste to me in any case, but somehow this was even better. The meat had been sweetened, kind of, in some way I never knowed before.
“Did you taste this?” I asked Haijon. “It’s god-food.”
“It’s just bacon,” Haijon said. “Spinner, did you get one of these eggs? You can dip your bread in it, look.”
He showed her how to do it and she copied him, the two of them laughing when she spilled the yolk on her fingers and licked it up so as not to waste it. “You can be Rampart Breakfast,” Spinner said to Haijon, “since you know so much about it.” Then she said eggs used to be all white inside until the people of the old times used their tech to put gold inside them. “See, that’s why you Vennastins always pass the test. You eat eggs every day, and all that metal builds up inside you. The tech’s just recognising its own self.”
Haijon bridled a little. It was a joke that kind of had an edge to it. Leastways, it pricked him a little. “We don’t always pass,” he said. “My uncle Vergil didn’t.” Which was true. Vergil had lost an arm to a choker seed just before his fifteenth year-day. He was as close to dying as a word is to a whisper, and couldn’t go into the Waiting House. The next year, being on his feet again and supposed to be well, he went Waiting and was tested, but nobody thought he could be a Rampart. He was like the ghost of himself, pale-faced and solemn-quiet and almost not there at all. When he failed his test, people was sorry for him but also mostly relieved. Ramparts is meant to be strong, and that terrible wound had washed Vergil halfway out of the world. He didn’t have no strength that anyone could get a glimpse of.
But he was the onliest Vennastin to fail the test. And though Perliu said other folks had been Ramparts, as far back as anyone could figure it was Vennastins and more Vennastins and occasionally their wedded kindred. Like I said already, Spinner was not the onliest one by any means to wonder why that might be.
“So that’s one against all the rest,” she said now. “I’d still put odds on you to pass, Jon, if anyone would fade the wager. I’m gonna watch what you do and see if there’s a trick to it.”
“There’s no trick,” Haijon says, mightily put out now. “Why would you say that?”
“There’s always a trick,” Spinner says to him. “Look at this.”
She lifted up her knife and passed her hand over it a few times with the fingers all spread out. “Idowak, bidowak,” she says in a really low voice like as it was a man speaking. “Ansum, bansum.” She brung the knife down so it touched her fork, then when she lifted it up again the fork was stuck to it. Not stuck like glue, because it slid a little as she moved the knife this way and that way, but it didn’t drop.
Haijon and me was sitting there with our mouths wide open, like two jump-frocks. Shirew turned round and seen it too, and she near to dropped the pan and all the bacon in it, which would of been a shame.
“How you doing that?” I says to Spinner.
“I got magic in my hands,” she tells us. “Didn’t you know?” She was putting a grave face on, but she couldn’t keep it up no more and a laugh burst out of her. “It’s not old tech or nothing. It’s just a thing metal does, sometimes, if you stroke it or smack it against other metal. My father showed me. It happens to his knives when he strops them. For a while after he’s finished, if he puts them down close together they find each other and latch on. Not every time, but oftentimes.”
She put her hand on Haijon’s arm. “I’m sorry I said the testing was a trick,” she said. “That’s near to saying your family is dishonest, which I didn’t mean and wouldn’t ever think.”
It was a sweet apology, and furthermore I seen now how Spinner did the thing with the knife and the fork to turn Haijon’s thoughts away from the hurt she done him. I admired her cleverness in that, which was not a sly cleverness but a thoughtful and a gentle one. That Spinner could be gentle or fierce by turns whenever there was need for one or for the other was part of who she was, and part of why I loved her.
Haijon said he knowed she never meant it, and went back to eating.
“And I’m gonna be soulful sorry,” Spinner went on, “when I go to live in Rampart Hold and they throw you out for failing your test.”
She timed it just right. Haijon had his mouth full of bread and bacon and he spluttered it all over the table in laughing. That made the two of us laugh like fools too, and even Shirew, though she said we was ungovernable and that Haijon was going to have to clean the table when we was done even if it meant going late to the Count and Seal.
She was only joking, of course. Nobody ever come late to their testing, or left it early. It was fixed like a star in the sky, if anything that’s only human could be said to be like that.
8
The Count and Seal was a room that didn’t have no corners to it. It was shaped like a circle. If that sounds strange, it’s because you’re imagining the Hold to be a wooden house with beams and timbers. That’s my fault, for I never said no different.
Rampart Hold wasn’t made out of wood; it was made out of stone. It was one of three buildings from the old times that was still standing in Mythen Rood, the other two being the lookout and the broken house. Rampart Hold stood three floors above the ground, and went down a considerable way under it. Its walls was grey, and grey slates made up the roof, that was long enough to fit four chimneys all in a line. You could tell it was a house from the old times because of all the windows it had, letting light into every room. Perliu said it was called the Little Stub once, which you might think was said as a joke because it’s so much bigger than any other house in the village. But I been to Birmagen and London and Baron Furnace, and I seen how big we used to build before we lost the knowing of it. Rampart Hold wouldn’t of been anything much at all in the old times.
To us, though, it was as big as big could get. It looked like part of a mountain got broke off and made into a house. There was a room you went into right away when you come in the door. It was all shiny wood that had got patterns in it, squares inside squares, and it had wooden stairs like the stairs up to the lookout, except that this wood had such a high shine to it you could see your face inside it looking back at you like in a mirror.
Only Ramparts and their kindred was supposed to go up those stairs. The top part of the house was family rooms, and it was called the residence. Even Vergil lived in the residence, for though he was no Rampart he was still Perliu’s son, Catrin and Fer’s brother. He was still Vennastin, and this at a time when Rampart and Vennastin had almost come to be like two ways of saying the same thing.
For the rest of us, when we come into Rampart Hold we would go on past them stairs, along a
long, low corridor and into the Count and Seal. It was a room in the shape of a circle, like I already said, and it was bigger than you can imagine. There was rows of seats that was in circles too, and a round window in the ceiling. It was like whoever built the room had spun himself round and round for a long time beforehand and couldn’t see nothing but circles any more.
Also there was more of the shiny wood here, but with years and years of meet-days and testing days it was all scuffed and the shine wore away so you could only see it in a few places like on the edges of things or high up on the walls.
But the main thing was that the room went down as it went into the middle. I don’t know how to say it better than that. The seats went higher and higher around the sides, almost up to the ceiling, but the middle dropped away so it was below where you come into the room. That kind of made it be the natural place where you looked, no matter where you was sit. Your eye was drawed to it. There was a platform there that we called the middle round. It was another place where only Ramparts got to stand, at least on meet-days. In a testing it was different, because it was where the testing got to happen.
On meet-days there wasn’t no furniture in the middle round. On testing days there was three tables stood there, kind of like three sides of a square, only the sides wasn’t flat but opened out a little ways. The middle table had the tech that was already woke up and working: the firethrower, the bolt gun, the cutter and the database. The other two tables had all the things, more than you could count, that was old tech but didn’t never do nothing no matter who touched it.
I seen this lots of times when other people was testing. In fact I seen it fourteen times exactly, once for every Summer up to this one, only the earliest times I was too young to remember it. So I knowed what was going to happen, right down to the last, least thing. Shirew Makewell had coached us in what to say, but we had all the words solid in our heads before we ever started so she didn’t waste too much time on that. Mostly she told us how to look and how to be once we was in the Count and Seal.
“There’ll be more than two hundred people there, all looking at you,” she says to the three of us, “but don’t you be minding that. Don’t you look at them at all, or think about them. They’re there for you, not the other way round. When Rampart Fire speaks to you, you say your part the way you learned it and you come forward when she bids you. After that, it’s all just doing what you’re told to and keeping a hold on yourself after.”
It was good advice, and kindly meant, but on the day of my testing it went out of my head as soon as I stepped in the room. Actually it didn’t stay even that long. When we was walking along the corridor toward the big doors (there was two doors to the Count and Seal) and hearing all the people inside, my whole head emptied out like a downturned bucket. I stumbled along behind Haijon, through the doors and into the room, and I bumped into his back when he stopped.
It’s the testing, I thought. This is the time. This is the test. And my legs sort of losed their strength so I all but fell down.
Haijon stepped to the side so we was all in a line like we was supposed to be. The Ramparts was in the middle round, all in a line too except that Catrin was out in front a little way. On testing day, Rampart Fire spoke for the village.
“Who is it comes into this chamber?” she asks us.
I risked a look up at the faces all around. That was just what Shirew told us not to do, and she was right. So many people! Everyone I knowed. Everyone as had ever been in my life from before I even knowed my own name right down to the here and now. I seen my mother there, and Athen and Mull to either side of her. It was like my eyes knowed how to find them, even in all that great, breathing, shifting press of life. And I got some strength from seeing them, though also a kind of dizzy strangeness as though I was there with them looking down on my own self as well as being where I was.
It was only then I realised how come I could hear everyone breathing. It was because there was stone silence in the room. I don’t think I was the only one thinking Haijon would answer first, but he never done it. I looked at Spinner and Spinner looked at me. Haijon didn’t look at either of us. He was standing with his head down and his hands all clenched in fists. If I had to say what he looked like, he looked like he was afraid, only I never knowed Haijon to be afraid of anything.
“It’s me,” Spinner says, finding her voice first. “Demar Waiting, come to be tested.”
“It’s me,” I says, and barely got my name out. “Koli Waiting. I come to be tested.”
“It’s me, Haijon Waiting,” Haijon says at last. “Come to be tested.”
“Stand forward on your name, and come down,” Rampart Fire told us. Then to the whole room she says, “These who are Waiting will be known, by your will and with your blessing.” She didn’t say knowed, she said known, just like she’d said chamber instead of room. It was how they said those things in the old times, and it made her words seem heavier somehow. Like they was hard, solid things and kept right on standing there in the air after she was done saying them.
There was a murmur as everyone said yes or aye or yay or I bless it, after their fashion. Some of them made the Dandrake sign of two fingers folded. I seen Jarter Shepherd, Veso’s mother, make it, and I seen Veso turn away like he didn’t want to look at that. He had good reason.
Catrin bowed her head like she took all them ayes and yays solemn serious.
“Demar Waiting,” she says. “Come to the Count and Seal.”
Demar walked down into the circle and stood right dead in the middle of it, facing Catrin. She had her arms at her sides and her back was straight. She didn’t seem to be shaking at all, nor she didn’t look at nobody except Catrin.
“What do you see here?” Catrin asks.
Spinner give the looked-for answer. “I see the tech of the old times.”
“Will it wake for you?”
“I do not know, but mean to try.”
“And if it wake for you?”
“Use it for the good of all.”
“Choose well.”
That was all the speaking. And for the choosing, Shirew told us to decide before we come there. “You don’t want to freeze when Rampart Fire invites you and make her have to say it twice. Nobody will blame you for it, but you’ll look foolish in front of everyone and you’ll blame yourself after.”
Spinner picked up the firethrower. It was a bold choice, but lots of people done the same before her. It was the biggest of the waked tech by far, and there was something about it that drawed the eye and kept it. The sleekness of the metal was a part of it, dark green except for the grip which had an edge of shiny grey. Not silver, for it wasn’t bright: it was grey metal that was as lustrous as silver. On its side there was a name in old-times writing. Nobody in Mythen Rood could read it, but Rampart Remember had learned it from the database. The word was Phoenix, with some numbers after it. It was hard to figure what the database said oftentimes, for it speaked at great length in strange words of the world that was lost, but the gist of it was that Phoenix was a place a long way away, a village bigger than Mythen Rood, that got burned down lots of times but always builded itself up again afterwards.
Spinner lifted the firethrower the way you might lift a newborn baby, with one hand on the grip and the other under it, cradling the weight. The weight seemed to be less than she was expecting, for she bent her knees a little when she first picked it up, but then straightened again. Her face was lit up with the wonder of it. Everyone I ever seen take the test got that look as soon as the tech was in their hands.
“Acknowledge,” Spinner said. She might of waited a while to savour that feeling, but again most of them that was tested went at once to the word. They needed to know.
The firethrower didn’t say nothing.
“Accept command,” Spinner said, which was the second ancient word. And still the firethrower was silent.
“New user,” Spinner said. The firethrower didn’t wake, and didn’t answer her. Her back was to me,
so I couldn’t see what was in her face right then. I seen in the set of her shoulders, though, that putting the firethrower down was going to be harder and heavier than picking it up.
Catrin seen it too, and took it from her as gentle as anything. “Demar Waiting,” she said. “Wait no more. Woman of Mythen Rood you are, and will be, under what name you choose.”
“Spinner Tanhide,” Spinner said.
“Spinner Tanhide,” said everyone in the room all at the same time.
Spinner stepped off to the side a little way to make room for me, and Catrin called me in the same words she used before.
“Koli Waiting, come to the Count and Seal.”
I come to her, looking at my feet the whole way in case I tripped over them. Even when I was standing right in front of her, I didn’t seem able to look up.
“What do you see here?”
“I see the tech of the old times,” I answered her.
“Will it wake for you?”
“I do not know, but mean to try.”
“And if it wake for you?”
“Use it for the good of all.”
“Choose well.”
I had told Shirew I meant to choose the firethrower, but now that Spinner had done it I changed my mind. I picked up the bolt gun instead. The handle of it fitted to my hand so snug I wanted to laugh, almost, which there was no law said you couldn’t but would of been a shocking thing and not soon forgived. The metal felt cold like snow against my skin, though the room was warm from all the people that was in there. And it was smoother than anything I’d ever held. Like a shiny pebble dipped in water, but smoother even than that.