A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  I think we’re blinking in accidental eerie unison.

  The member of Parliament lifts an eyebrow at Wake, gets a nod, and starts taking the warded suit off, hood first. We wind up having a sort of picnic by the side of the road, with the member of Parliament, and Wake, and Halt, and Blossom shows up and hugs Grue, who is a lot calmer after, and the three doctors who aren’t insisting that our good health is impossible. Various people scrupulously walk around us by at least a hundred metres. The food emerges from Wake and Blossom and Halt’s larger-than-they-seem bags, it’s an odd mix. Much of what Wake’s got is clay pots full of various kinds of mush. It’s all tasty, and some of it’s nearly too hot to eat, sitting there at air temperature.

  “Aren’t we going to be late for the boat?” Zora asks, sometime well after dawn, when we’re all sitting there drinking various kinds of tea and everybody’s being really polite about not noticing that the little jar being passed from Halt to Blossom and back to Halt via Dove is pickled demon heart. Dove’s developing a real fondness for the stuff. Not inclined to try it, it’s got the texture of really old pickled beets, ones old enough that they’re nothing but sharpness and disintegration and stains.

  “No boat today,” Wake. “The boat-teams were up all night, getting news and help around the outbreak. Weeding can wait a day.”

  Not two, not if anyone can help it, and certainly not three. But probably a day. Not much inclined to learn how to walk a hundred kilometres today.

  Halfway through the morning, we all wind up going through the tests again, and some different, less portable tests. The member of Parliament carefully notes that in terms of their personal talent, there’s an equivalence to a small kitten, or perhaps a very clever rock. Altering the outcome through subconscious will is not a likely thing. The MP’s clean, all of us are, doctors, students, all three keepers of the Shape of Peace of the Second Commonweal, and Grue. Grue turned back into a unicorn after breakfast and lay down very neatly behind Blossom, who is leaning on Grue and looking contented. Grue looks asleep, head tucked around and the glittering spike of horn rising past Blossom’s ear. And making whorfling noises. Halt tsks at me sadly when the two warded doctors get around to drawing blood again. “Blue ichor. Really, dear,” and then doesn’t explain at all.

  We get to go home, finally, around noon. Some very senior doctor shows up and has words, not especially tactful ones, with the two doctors still wearing warded suits. The senior doctor tries to apologize, but Wake won’t hear of it. “Enough death, enough death you cannot prevent, will trouble anyone,” Wake says, and they, Halt, Blossom, the member of Parliament, it’s definitely a grownup thing, all nod, all get something of the same look.

  Healthy or not, we sleep like the dead.

  Chapter 27

  Waking up hurts.

  Nothing actually wrong, talent-tired, a combination of peak and sustained output, sitting out in cold rain for hours wouldn’t be a problem by itself. Furnacing the orchard buildings was work, keeping that kid’s brain alive was work, Chloris making spores inert, disassociated harmless chemicals inert, over square kilometres without help was work. It’s difficult to convince ourselves it’s nothing more than that, the memory of that poor kid’s body drifting away, the angry lines of purple welts, just how panicked the doctors were, it sticks. None of us have the least indication of welts, purple or otherwise, we shouldn’t, we know we shouldn’t. It’s still horrible enough it wants to stay in my head, all our heads, even Dove’s.

  Dove’s way much better, I can feel a lot of, let’s not say relaxation, but the removal of pain, the tense you get from pain’s nearly gone down there. Doesn’t make it easier for Dove to toss the memory of that kid being devoured alive really slowly, harder if anything, not so locked into the one rigid shape of duty anymore.

  We’re on time for lunch, a little wobbly, the incidental eerie unison involved in linking together and sterilizing the inside of the Round House with special attention to the bathroom, well. The tub wound up too hot to touch, but if we just leave it, it will be fine. We’ll all be fine, it’s just talent-tired.

  Cleaning the house helped.

  Halt’s there, drinking tea, but not knitting. Our apprentice buttons, the set, yeah, really the set, at least mine, they’ve got a particular feel, I can tell all six of mine apart somehow, are out of the jar of disinfectant and back on cards. I’m trying to remember how far the jar made it, when the last time I can remember it is.

  “The picnic breakfast, dear.” Halt starts handing cards with buttons back. None of us have a hat, it’s too warm for a winter hat and it’s just not a day for a festival hat, there’s a thousand funerals going on somewhere.

  Careful ones, sealed immolations. No exposed ashes.

  Even if we didn’t know, you could tell something had happened, the refectory’s hushed, there’s lots of people there, it’s not quiet, not the way it can be, but they’re trying to be respectful of something. Big printed sheets up by the door, a thousand names is a lot when you print them. Nobody comes in and reads the list and crumples into grief while we’re there. It’s surely happened, the upper edge of the outbreak was only just ten kilometres from town.

  Halt watches us eat lunch, there isn’t any tsking at us for being slugabed, not from anybody. I guess some specific news has been getting around. Someone wants to know if we want the sofa back, it got left in the road and the road-crew is still arguing about how much it weighs, apparently different amounts depending on where you try to pick it up from. Chloris looks completely disbelieving about that, even after Halt says “Quite possible, Chloris dear,” in reassuring tones.

  Chloris is entirely happy for whoever wants that sofa to have it. Given a little notice, Chloris, we’ll, make more.

  We wind up standing in a sunny place, the rain cleared out early this morning, down near the West Wetcreek, there’s some kind of open space there, a barge-builder’s timber-yard but they’re out of timber, it’s all open space.

  “If you are alive, children, you ought to be.” Halt’s cheerful. I think I can tell that from Halt being cheerful, intending to be seen as cheerful, no matter what Halt’s actual mood might be. “The world hasn’t got any notions people don’t put into it.” There’s some foot shuffling, but yeah. We are alive. Alive enough to notice searching looks from Halt.

  Halt gives no sign of having found anything of concern.

  Halt has us shift our hair back, on the grounds there isn’t any concern about infection and you can’t go get a hat that’ll fit with no hair, not if you plan to have hair again.

  Dove’s hair comes back just as it was, short, distinct curl, dark and darker green stripes. It suits, probably because that’s what I’m used to seeing. Might just be being more relaxed, after telling us about what happened, how Dove lost family, but Dove looks better. Less like believing it’s a hopeless situation, way down deep somewhere.

  Zora has a short internal argument. Zora’s hair comes back just at the length to get a comb through it in one pass, out at the full stretch of an arm. It goes into a thicker braid, so I suppose it comes out even.

  Chloris’ hair comes back the way it had been, silver and pale green. Chloris’ eyelashes and eyebrows go the shining-silver colour of the lighter hair colour, the one it took after we learnt to shape-shift, which is new, and Chloris’ face is looking less young and more ageless, really ageless, unearthly, not what people say when they think you look younger than you ought to look. Halt looks approving, and says something about having to get Chloris a dress with a really high collar.

  My hair won’t come back any colour that isn’t iron grey, the colour you see in cast iron if you break it, and it won’t come back any longer than two or three centimetres, or any other way than dense and extremely fine. Any breeze at all, it ripples and swirls and looks like it wants to float off my head. Dove says nearly fur, having given it an experimental ruffle.

  We wind up with proper Creek-style summer hats, broad brims, retted-reed canvas, bug-n
et sewn to the brim. They’re a sort of old-straw brown colour, retted-reed is apparently just not worth trying to dye, it’s been done but the results don’t repay the effort. Explains why I see so many coats this colour in the Creeks, coats and tarps and rucksacks, along with the hats.

  I don’t see how any of our apprentice buttons get attached to our new hats. None of the three people working in the hat-shop do, either, they’re bothered by it. Less practice with how things happen around Halt.

  It’s a quiet afternoon, sitting on stones in the back garden of Halt’s cottage. It’s a tiny cottage, and a tiny garden, about five metres on each square side. Halt has us use our perception of the Power to count spiders.

  Try to count spiders.

  Tiny spiders.

  Immensely many tiny spiders.

  After we get that, we’re to try counting by type of spider, different sorts of weaver spider, stalking spiders, ambush spiders, per rosebush. “Species, oh, goodness, no, dear, species, with spiders? I’m not sure they’re entirely certain themselves.”

  There’s a sort of amorphous ‘common descent?’ thought, I think we all have it. As a school subject that’s mostly about why areas with people are so different from those without, the directed selection pressure from weeding, but that doesn’t make sense without knowing about descent-with-modification first.

  “Not spiders,” Halt says. “There were, we’re nearly sure, various squashed tiny fossils, spiders in the regular way, before the Power. Someone started from that.”

  “Aren’t they still spiders?” They look like spiders, I’ve never heard anyone call them anything but spiders.

  Halt’s head shakes. “Ants, bees, you get a single mother and thousands of sisters working together. If they had wits, a nest of ants, a hive of bees, would be a gean, but they breed. Spiders, you might not say breed. All the spiders in a garden will, well, agree on niches, what each eats, they switch body forms by circumstance and season, if you can moult your exoskeleton you can change a great deal. They share information, there’s several mechanisms to respond to changes in their environment.”

  “Spiders are a permanent weeding team?” If the ants can be a gean, the spiders can be a weeding team.

  Halt smiles. Halt really does seem cheerful today. “Nearly enough, dear.” There’s a sort of constrained stick-sweep at the wider world. “A way of preventing insect monocultures might be closer.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been easier to keep people from making weeds?” Zora’s closest to being able to count spiders. Closest, but not there. Halt’s radiating patience about our inability, narrow perception is worse than shape-shifting for needing practice, and Halt is being vague about how much worse.

  Halt’s head shakes again. “Making weeds is easy. Stopping them is hard; it’s another sorcerer. You might be greater, but there are more making weeds. Spiders work in the future, in places you aren’t.”

  “Not a known skill?” Dove doesn’t believe this is a question, but makes a try at having it sound like one.

  “At times in the first, oh, twenty thousand years, of the Power, my dears, there were, well, probably not one, maybe two, maybe three, could have been four, the argument can be made, substantial time periods where things were organized. We can’t tell, not this far off, if it was good; people were tall, they died with their bones straight, they were eating well, but.” Halt pauses, Halt’s voice goes serious, grandma-voice serious, not reality-flinches serious.

  “That can be the care of a wizard-lord for their valuable cattle, or it can be a population of tolerably secure and prosperous people. No way to tell, so far away.”

  “Spiders, spiders as we have them, appeared then, probably. The error bars are large.”

  Thinking about a quarter-million years of consequences from using the Power, the Power’s about that old, the error bars on the Power coming into the world aren’t that large, it left more traces than spiders, it’s not enough to kill my appetite for dinner.

  When you’re talent-tired, if it doesn’t kill you, your appetite survives.

  “Do cheer up, children,” Halt says. “The trend’s going the right way, knowledge is increasing with the Peace.”

  That’s a thought I can’t get out of my head.

  It’d explain what Halt thinks the Peace is for, why someone who can do what Wake can do, or Blossom, really is happy to run around and do stuff for people.

  The thought’s still there the next day, boating up to that orchard-island up near Headwaters. Same boat. Wake has about twice the sample racks this time, and this list is two tiles full of little angular marks, last time’s almost filled one. Weeding, killing many things, is still easy. I feel like this should bother me, it’s almost bothering me that it doesn’t, it does bother Chloris and Zora. Dove, it’s not Dove’s regular voice, even for the undertone, this is like sitting close to a small hot fire in the dark and having it speak. Many more are born than can possibly survive, Dove says, quoting. Choose what keeps the Commonweal in the better future. That’s a quote, too, different source, that’s, the image of the cover floats into my awareness, that’s the Commonweal Line’s Manual For Those Placed In Authority. Very first thing on the very first page.

  We go through the samples, everything in the racks of jars, that’s much easier than trying to make a list of everything on Wake’s list, getting the full sense of the preserved critters, the arthropods, the plant-weeds, and the fungus-weeds, it’s just not very hard. Counting spiders one at at time is hard, this is like, maybe, having the Name. If we had enough perception, enough strength to have enough reach, we could kill every one of that weed in the world, it doesn’t matter how many there are, or where, inside what we can reach. Name and number are really different, I don’t understand why.

  “Shalt be first,” Wake says, a layer of wry over the benevolence.

  Easy or not, weeding is nothing to get at all shoddy with, and we don’t. We go through the lists, we’re careful, we’re thorough, halfway through the second day, the whole thing takes us six days this time, four days of actual weeding, I figure out how to do my share of actually killing things without distressing anybody. At least not anybody on the boat, no way to tell how someone ashore might react.

  I’d about concluded that reaching, the idea of reaching, was the problem, all the reaching happened out of shadows. Reaching is space, something’s over there. Everything’s now, though, you can count on that. Don’t have to reach to get to now, I’m in it.

  Can’t move anything in time, not sure it would do any good if I could, adding time to a weed might just make it flower and spread seeds. Can smear the average, though, the whole weed has to be in now but various parts of the weed’s chemistry, its metabolism, those can move away from now as long as some other bit’s going the other way so the average holds. No idea how much away, it can’t be much, but it’s fast, it’s not actual duration to smear something’s metabolism’s existence in now across a handful of seconds. Instantly, reliably fatal.

  Dove’s looking approving.

  Thanks for the idea. It’s a lot like the first thing Dove did, scrambling the metabolic chemistry.

  I get a grin, the first real Dove grin I’ve seen since the orchard. I hug Dove, couldn’t not. Been missing that grin.

  Chloris’ a bit perplexed, Zora’s saying Did that work?, Wake’s not looking benevolent. That might be Wake’s real face, a perfect mask of dispassion. After a very long ten, fifteen seconds, Wake nods, face sort of falling into benevolence again. “That won’t frighten anyone but the Twelve,” Wake says.

  We’re back to Westcreek Town, done weeding, before I figure out what Wake meant. The Twelve, Wake’s one, Halt’s one, there aren’t any more in the Second Commonweal, are the surviving pre-eminent pre-Commonweal sorcerers the Foremost overcame. Why that particular thing would frighten them I have no idea, it seems basic. Wake didn’t tell me not to use it.

  Well, done our share of weeding. There’s a couple days of delay, Halt and Grue both hav
e something to deal with before we can head off to the swamp. So there’s two, and then a third, day of Putting In The Garden. There’s a bit of weeding in that, stuff blown in on the wind that wants to volunteer.

  Putting in the garden, after mornings spent exercising in armour.

  Dove’s happy about having the armour, it’s not just the first large group of Line troops in new armour making Dove smile and smile. The stuff Block teaches is something you fight with, that’s obvious, Block said so, but I think ‘armour’ is a requirement for ‘fight’ in Dove’s head. Block is happy about it, Block’s suit is not much like the Line pattern but once we’ve got armour, Block shows up in armour to teach us.

  Dove smiles like that, the smile for the first company in armour, at being sure the armour’s a good fit, there isn’t any kind of motion your body can do that isn’t in Block’s exercises, our armour fits, and I feel warm. Rocks feel warm, no metaphor at all. Makes me happy. Going to be a trick keeping the armour-coat washed, but that’s the worst I can say; even new boots aren’t causing any wear problems.

  It’s not, Chloris and Zora and Dove all assure me, a big garden. Fifty metres by twenty is still a good solid chunk of digging, stronger than I was, grabbing enough of Blossom’s time that we can make exactly the tools we want, shovels and hoes and some traditional Creek thing called a cultivator, first steel things we’ve made, all notwithstanding.

  I find out that the garden is why the Round House has that extensive kitchen. The point to having your own kitchen is to be able to put up your own preserves, so you can swap them with people. You eat, nearly all of the actual food preparation in the ‘about to be eaten’ sense, happens in a gean refectory. Staying home to eat is what you do if you’re sick, or the infant’s hopelessly cranky, or you just can’t leave the work. Otherwise you’re anti-social. Doesn’t keep having your own pickles to swap from being socially essential.