A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  Setting it down means making the bucket taller and thinner, back down in the big dip of the ridge, but this is loose rubble, we really want it compacted for a dam, so the bucket just keeps going up, and up, and then it just goes away, like steam from the kettle getting into the kitchen, and there’s no separate dip for the dam just for a second.

  Less than a second, some narrow moment of time. Then the dam’s own dip is back, and I can pick it out of the rest of the hill as one single thing. I look down, the individual pebbles, if I concentrate for a second the individual specks of dirt all have their own little dip in the gravity of the world.

  Dove punches me in the shoulder with the gentleness of ritual. I know about the motion before Dove’s hand lets go of mine. Dove probably knows I’m going to say ‘oof’ anyway before the punch starts.

  It looks like a dam, not a pile of rubble, it’s steaming or smoking a bit, and it’s in exactly the right place, there’s a narrow, narrow band of Blossom’s transect lights around it.

  “Never even heard a crunch.” Dove sounds reverent.

  Somewhere up the hill I hear applause.

  Doesn’t make walking back up there any easier. It’s no wonder we nearly fell, parts of this hill start trying to turn back into mud when it gets rained on all day.

  We all sort of trail over to the excavation. It’s got far more water in it than the rain can explain, and it feels like clean water, if I can trust the feeling.

  Kynefrid grabs a mass of rain out of the sky, sluices out, washes off, the tamping mud bucket with great thoroughness, flings the mildly muddy water somewhere downhill, and tosses the bucket in the excavation. It comes back up again full, and Kynefrid puts out both hands to grab it out of the air. Kynefrid’s hair steams, after the bucket gets dumped over it.

  Zora takes the bucket when offered with a single firm nod, and repeats the dip-lift-and-pour process.

  Dove grins, and produces a good deal more steam than Kynefrid or Zora did. I don’t think there’s any steam off me, though the water surely feels good. Chloris looks doubtful, but douses anyway, and looks relieved. Definite steam, head and torso too.

  Blossom takes the bucket from Chloris, who looks surprised Blossom wants it and more surprised when handed Blossom’s hat.

  Blossom’s hair doesn’t so much steam as dry implausibly fast.

  “Well. You’ve all earned your early day. Lunch buckets back to the refectory, get dinner, get breakfast, wash at least once, sleep in between.” There’s a grin with that. Three days like this and the routine takes you over, and I’m sure Blossom knows that.

  “Get Steam to show you the exercises for balance after dinner, and do them.” The emphasis on do would bend thick metal. We all nod, our spines on strings. Blossom is relentlessly pleasant and looks barely older than Zora. An apparent age that can’t possibly be right, but I’m starting to wonder if the whole thing’s a complex lie.

  Blossom looks at me, speculatively. “I think I should get Halt to take a look at that perceptual knack of yours.”

  “Halt is a story.” Kynefrid says this with emphasis. “For variety, when the bad children falling prey to weeds or monsters isn’t convincing.”

  “Halt has a cottage in Westcreek Town.” Dove says this with no emphasis at all, so doubt can’t get into it anywhere.

  “Halt has tomorrow’s class,” Blossom says, and giggles.

  Chapter 10

  It’s the grandmotherly lady with the knitting.

  Who does have a cane, who is really short, I don’t think there’s an adult Creek much under a metre-ninety, Halt’s not a metre-fifty, and I’ve learnt. I’ve got the tightest grip I can manage on my perceptions. Nothing but eyes and ears.

  It was trying so hard to be a regular day, too. No rain falling, though everything was wet. Wet’s a lot less of a bother now that all of us can make our feet not-wet once we’re at breakfast.

  Steam took us out to the sand pit after breakfast and ran us through exercises. It doesn’t especially hurt. I’m really not sure how that happened. After yesterday, it almost ought to hurt.

  There were some new exercises, ones you do in pairs, Steam calls it Push Hands, and I’m definitely not just the shortest but maybe the lightest. It’s supposed to be about circles and balance. When I stop worrying about getting thrown over the horizon by Chloris I can work on stopping worrying about getting thrown over the horizon by Dove.

  I did give myself a twitching fit realizing it’s not a joke anymore. Centre of mass of five hundred tonnes five metres in the air is a hundred kilos, twenty-five kilometres straight up, and I’m not a hundred kilos myself unless I hold bags full of rocks or start wearing armour. Can’t convince myself it was only five hundred tonnes, either.

  Steam had looked at me, looked at Zora looking baffled at me, I hadn’t been having problems a second before, said “That’s why we teach you control,” and kept walking, to where Kynefrid and Dove were having different problems.

  It helped.

  Kynefrid’s taller than Dove, a couple of centimetres over twenty decimetres to Dove’s nineteen-five, maybe nineteen-six. I doubt Kynefrid’s got significant-much more mass than me, it’s an attenuated physiology. Long arms, long legs, lots of leverage, but the ‘push’ part doesn’t work with just physical effort, it can’t. Chloris claims Dove is strong by Creek standards, there’s got to be that bit of exercising the Power to make it work, no possible way to do it all with muscle, only Kynefrid has shaky control and gets angry about it, which doesn’t help. Makes me glad I got switched to Zora.

  There’s been a couple of vivid flashes and some crackle-zap sounds from over by Dove and Kynefrid. The flashes make me jump. They make Zora jump, too, and there’s enough energy going round in circles between us that we swapped places both times. Can’t really look, Zora’s taller and heavier and stronger than I am, I need almost all my attention on the Power. It’s getting so Zora looks like a regular lass, which is only fair. Zora is, here, we’re in the Creeks and Creeks are all the people I’m seeing who aren’t sorcerers. Then we do something like this.

  No crackle-zap, though. It’s kinda like the terrain-swap thing, all that energy, but it’s moving in its little flat circle just like our hands are, leaning forward and back with the balance shifts.

  “Figure — Steam — will — tell — us — what — we — do — with — this?” Zora says one word every time I’m pushing, on the inhale, which sounds even weirder. Can’t shrug, can tip my head back and forth, which seems to be Creeks for “I have no idea.”

  “Remember hold-the-ball?” Steam probably heard Zora. And I suppose neither of us looks panicked, so Steam goes on. “Each of you gets half, and from going round the energy spins in place.”

  Zora and I go round a few more times, doing that horrible ‘keep doing what you’re doing but think about something else’ thing I hardly ever had to do before I went to sorcerer school. Zora doesn’t nod, I don’t know what it is, but the next time around Zora’s only pushing half and I’m only pushing half back and my hands go round in a way I don’t even notice and there I am, holding a big spinning ball of magical energy, only half of which came from me in the first place.

  Out of the corner of my eye, Steam makes a judicious, well, maybe you won’t kill yourselves today, nod. “Classic counter-rotation, too. Good.”

  Steam’s hand motions shouldn’t be visible, there’s even less freedom of motion holding the ball of energy than there is doing Push Hands, I can’t look around. Steam has a bunch of standard motions, I don’t know them all yet, it’s been four days and I doubt I’ve seen all of them yet. Doesn’t keep me, or Zora, from making an eighth-turn, me left, Zora right, so we’re looking at each other as much as we’re looking at Chloris on the third point of the triangle.

  Chloris looks nervous. Hands are steady, though. Breathing syncing up, which is easy to say and hard to do, especially with three. I wish I knew it was impossible for my lungs to get bigger from all this matching breathing with large
people, my flesh wouldn’t of itself, but get the Power involved and I don’t know my lungs growing can’t happen.

  “Zora, Edgar, pass a third over to Chloris, same exhale.”

  That’s new, and we do, and Chloris picks both bits up with an eep! noise and an intent look and putting some energy into it, and then we’re all standing there holding an energy ball that’s spinning slowly in some indefinable way. It’s not like the thing has any actual mass or a surface or something; if you push a stick into it, there’s a zap. Bad for the stick. Rain falls right through once you get the hang of it, I don’t think this is raw Power, it might just be an illusion of the Power.

  Steam gives us a couple of breaths. “The whole thing, pass to your left.” Lots of emphasis on ‘left’.

  It works; no zap, no bang, not even anybody’s hair standing on end. It’s not easy to grab energy from somebody else, at least not compared to summoning it up out of myself.

  “Three breaths holding, one breath passing, still to the left, keep passing.”

  The first couple of those are unnerving. Doing it once doesn’t make the how you did it stick, which is probably why Steam has us doing a lot of these. More fun than all those doorknobs were. We make it through the fluster, and settle into the pattern well enough we stay in when there’s an outright crash and a little whiff of ozone from behind me.

  There’s a faint “tsk,” from Steam, and, pointing over at Dove and Kynefrid, “You two, ground out.”

  “Chloris, Edgar, Zora, on the next pass, hold.”

  Steam sticks one hand out, and we hand over the energy balls one at a time. They float to Steam and go away, quietly, without any fuss.

  “Could’ve gone worse.” Steam sounds more like pleased. “Ground out, shake out, stretch, that’s not much warm-up for today.”

  Dove’s fine; shaking out one hand with something of an intent look about it, but no evidence of distress. Kynefrid looks kinda rumpled. Don’t think hurt, though I don’t know what you’d be looking for, to see if someone’s sprained themselves in the talent.

  “I’ll be five hundred before I stop wanting to say attention to orders.” Steam’s fairly quiet, and the attention to orders part still comes out in a way that feels like it’s grabbing me by the back of the head and making me look straight at Steam.

  “A general note on the theory. We’re doing so much external Power management stuff because you’ve all got finite capacities to conduct the Power. Everything has a finite capacity, but your capacity is in your head so we don’t want to overload it. Boiled brains smell bad.”

  Zora makes an amazing face when Steam says that, and Chloris’s face looks like Chloris nearly did, might have prefered to. Steam waves Kynefrid at the water. All the teachers are good about stuff like that.

  “You can raise a bunch of Power and then manage it with much less; depending on how, and how skilled you are, sometimes very much less, thousandths of the amount you’re using. It’s indirect, and it’s awkward, and you feel like you have no sense of control because, compared to doing it all internally, you really don’t.

  “Kinda like steering a barge, right? Huge big thing, you don’t exactly control it, you just get to provide an opinion. Do it right, and the barge goes where you want. Do it wrong, or try to do it in the wrong time and place, and there goes the barge into the rapids. What we’re doing now is the equivalent of plunking you in a rowboat and seeing if you can get an even stroke with oars. It’s a lot harder than just hanging off the back of the boat and kicking with your feet, but it gives you a lot more choices later.”

  There’s this patter-of-feet noise, in a really odd rhythm, and this thing arrives. Someone’s sitting in it, and there are a lot of feet, and it’s got a canopy over it.

  And a door.

  Which is when the lady with the knitting from the hospital steps down.

  Steam puts both feet together and bows, formally. Halt, it has to be Halt, smiles at Steam, makes a small wave, and Steam straightens up and trots off.

  “Good morning, children.”

  We all mumble something. No matter how hard I try to stick to eyes and ears, that friendly smile, the twinkle of eyes behind glasses, the tiny old lady leaning on a cane, has the presence of an immense hungry spider.

  “Dove, dear, could you get the buckets off of Eustace?”

  Dove grins, spins round, and waves at the — I suppose it’s a sheep. It’s huge. It’s got a couple of immense glass buckets slung over it. Really immense, a couple metres across and a couple metres high. They’re heaped full of something whitish-grey, with covers tied across. Has to weigh tonnes, it’s not popcorn, which might explain why the sheep thing looks a bit morose. Or murderous. I’m not sure I could tell morose from murderous with a normal ram, and this one has horns like murderous would be more natural to it.

  It walks over, which is something.

  “Ed, can you get the other side? Don’t want the pack frame to tip.”

  Bucket, dip, roll the rim of the dip, keeping it even, at least roughly even, with Dove’s straight lift of the bucket on the other side. That one floats down and makes a significant crunch on the sand, it weighs tonnes all right. I get mine floated up and set it down next to the first one while Dove is hoisting the pack frame off of — I guess it has to be Eustace.

  Halt, it still has to be Halt, looks straight at Eustace, says “Not too far; no meat,” very sternly. Eustace looks like having the buckets off was a reason to look pleased, but now ‘no meat’ has taken it away. This is definitely morose. Eustace does wander off, out of the sand to toward the little oxbow marsh that’s between the sand and the West Wetcreek.

  “Uh, teacher? It’s rather weedy down there.” Chloris doesn’t normally sound the least bit uncertain.

  Halt smiles. “Quite all right, Chloris dear, Eustace’s main diet is weeds.”

  We all get smiled at.

  “Making useful materials out of rocks is more a Blossom thing, but the poor dear has been presented with two whole waggon-loads of mineral samples that might contain useful amounts of samarium, and will be quite useless until satisfied as to the truth of the assertion. Expecting Blossom not to set a bad example by playing with molten sodium is just unreasonable under the circumstances, so here I am to teach you glass making.”

  Zora says “Molten sodium?” in worried tones. It’s not clear just precisely what Zora’s worried about. Lots of choices there.

  “I’m nearly sure Blossom finds it relaxing.” Halt’s perfectly cheerful. The legions of spiders are perfectly cheerful.

  Chloris’ face looks stuck; Kynefrid looks frightened. Dove has half a smile on and is nodding.

  Four hours later we’re all doing our very best to sit up straight and eat lunch with good manners. You’d worry about your table manners, too, sitting cross-legged in a sandpit after a morning spent melting tonnes of rocks, sand is tiny rocks, if you could not make the grandmotherly figure sitting across from you stop looking like an enormous spider to your inner eye. An enormous spider with the same shapeless purple hat and delicate way with a teacup.

  Making glass takes all five of us, each doing something different to the same mass of stuff.

  We’d grabbed a couple of tonnes of water out of the West Wetcreek before lunch and dumped it over ourselves. The ground is comfortably warm to sit on because that’s where we put the heat from the five-tonne block of glass.

  Halt has a chair; Halt has a little side table. Both of them follow Halt, or at least, I never see Halt do anything to move them. I don’t see them move, either, but follow seems more likely, somehow.

  The big block of glass is cool enough that there’s condensation running down the south side of it.

  There were words like ‘calcium hydroxide’ and ‘boric oxide’ used this morning, but I don’t claim they stuck. One of the big buckets was full of borax, the other full of salt. Both come from the badlands well to the east in barge-load lots, and Halt had a lot to do with setting up a glass-making collective n
ear here last spring, when there was one Commonweal. If there’s a lot of this borax stuff just lying on the ground, you can see why that’s the limit of settlement.

  It took more water than I thought it would; some of it to pry up the limestone, and more to get the lime. It was loud and hot and I certainly couldn’t do it on my own, it didn’t form a particularly cohesive memory.

  There was a lot of heat, and a lot of pressure, and a lot of pulling the one thing out of the other thing, the one I almost remember is combing the air bubbles out of the glass. There was a lot of the Power involved, and there were a bunch of times I didn’t think I was going to make it, that I’d just fall over, and have to hope Halt wanted to control whatever hole that left in the overall working.

  But it’s there and it’s solid and it’s clear as water and we’re going to make water pipes out of it. Also sewer pipes and some hot-water tanks, all of which we’re going to carry six and a half kilometres from the sand pit to the Tall Woods.

  That’s not the scary part, not after yesterday. The scary part is that Halt brought pipe size gauges, and we have to hit the tolerance.

  Eventually, we do. The last length of sewer pipe, forty centimetres outside diameter, thirty centimetres inside diameter, and four metres long exactly, takes five tries. We’re all a bit loopy by then, and it’s nearly sundown. Not as much daylight this time of year.

  Halt is nodding approvingly. Looking at the heap of pipe, I feel like we earned it. But mostly I just want to fall down and not move for awhile.

  Halt produces, from somewhere, a tray not big enough to make a useful hat with six little cups, my mother would call them eggshell cups, on it. They’ve got something in them, one regular swallow worth.

  Dove’s looking suddenly very dubious. “Does this have cranberries in it?”

  Halt smiles. “None whatsoever, Dove dear. You’re none of you short of vigour, really, you’re just tired. This is rather like a muscle relaxant for the talent. Helps prevent cramps.”