A Succession of Bad Days Read online

  Wake looks pleased. Dove looks startled.

  However pleased Wake looks, Wake sounds dry. “High talent results in abrupt learning experiences.”

  “Just as long as they’re survivable.” Dove sounds just as dry.

  Wake’s head tips from side to side. It’s a Creek gesture, I thought it meant ‘maybe’.

  Kynefrid is looking around. “Lots of drainage here. If the water pooled at all there’d be grass, this is all starving forb and lichen.”

  Soil too poor for weeds. Which is really useful, in its way.

  “Which means it’s broken rock, and we don’t even want to pile anything on it. Not without digging down far enough to find something mostly solid.” Dove crouches down, prods with the survey stake. Up comes a hunk of rock that crumbles when Dove’s hand closes on it.

  “Lots of digging.”

  “The cellar will leak.” Chloris says this about how I’d expect someone to say ‘and they skin babies to make hats’.

  “There’s always a way, though.” Which way, Zora couldn’t say, that’s clear from tone. “It’s a school problem, there’s a way to solve it. You don’t get ‘don’t try to do that’ problems the first day.”

  Wake nods sagaciously. “Not usually.”

  Dove grimaces. “Dig the hole, haul in fifty tonnes of sand, fuse that to glass for the cellar and support pads, bunch of brick pillars, arched brick roof. Nobody’s got any spare timber this year, it’s all in barges. So glass tile for the roof, too, another ten tonnes of sand.”

  “You have neglected working spaces.” Wake doesn’t say this as a criticism, it’s just information.

  “Sleep out of the rain first, then working space?” Kynefrid, not sounding all that definite. “Houses get built better than sheds.”

  “You will find you will have work to do that takes days, and which must be attended to every hour of those days. Not this year, I grant, but the day shall come.”

  “And we won’t want to be putting boots on.” Zora sounds exhausted just thinking about it.

  “Most do not.” Wake’s ‘most’ could as well be ‘all, except for two special cases of great note and comment’.

  Dove has been scratching numbers in the dirt. “I could almost believe there’s a way for the five of us to move fifty tonnes of sand, and fuse it. If we need workspace, we’d need at least a couple hundred, and I don’t believe that.”

  “Edgar?” Wake’s tone is much closer to ‘do you have anything to contribute?’ than I really expect it to be; I had teachers get really cranky about hanging back from group participation exercises all through school. I hate arguing.

  “It makes no sense to worry about digging the hole or making the roof or whatever unless it’s worthwhile to start. The people who know about digging think we’d be working really hard to get a leaky cellar, and this is a class. So there’s something the class is about that you haven’t told us yet.”

  Wake looks at me, and nods. Which is a lot better than being told that the leaky cellar will really help with raising the strange frogs that will be forming most of our diet…

  “Dove is quite right that this rock is full of crap; there’s fine sand, what would be clay or mud, and a great deal of organic matter. Nor did it get very deep, to be made into rock; it’s friable and fragile in large part because it is only barely rock, not so different from the mud it was when the water dropped it.”

  Everybody nods.

  “Those processes all involve chance; where the water flowed faster, you could find clean sandstone; if the land here had risen faster, this — ” Wake’s hand waves, invoking general principles — “would already have eroded down, into something more completely rock.”

  Kynefrid and I are looking at each other. Having both been displaced, we’ve both heard the explanation for why the road through the Folded Hills goes where it does; it’s the relatively flat bit because it’s the seam between two totally different geologies, the plants are different, most of the animals are different, but north of the road and south of the road happen to be arranged in the same kind of mountains.

  “So, what could this have been?” Wake’s hand motion encompasses at least the hilltop.

  “Better rock? Further out to sea, clean deepwater limestone?” Kynefrid voice holds no belief in the words it is saying, no belief in the choice of these particular words. “Get the right limestone bedrock, we could put in some grape vines…”

  Chloris’ arms rise in rhetorical dismissal, disbelief; Zora giggles. I’m trying to think a few steps ahead, but Dove gets there first.

  “There’s that big dike of hard rock, halfway to the Folded Hills; it’s south of the road, we’re south of the road. And the Folded Hills didn’t rise until after, you can see where the dike fractured when the Hills came up.”

  “You want a volcano?” Kynefrid, sounding scandalized.

  “I want there to have been a volcano, or almost a volcano, something that gives us hard rock, basalt or something, to build on. And before the land tipped with the Hills, we’ve got lots of time to suppose a nice big lake, so we can pile lots of clean sand and some clay for bricks up-slope from the hard rock, enough so that it’ll still be there downhill from the hilltop.” You get the impression Dove is used to planning things.

  I’ve never had to dig actual basalt, or any other hard rock that was intact; we got granite-y boulders, though, scattered through the soil, anything from head-sized to bigger-than-houses, and sometimes you had to hack them up to get them out of where you wanted to put a post-hole. If you just dig, you get a post-pit, and even more work. Did quite a bit of that before I joined the collective. It’s kid-work; energy and stubborn would get the job done, skill not required.

  The thought of trying to hack a foundation into a huge chunk of the stuff doesn’t appeal.

  “If it’s a volcano, can we try to put a gas bubble in? Big one, so we’ve got the cellar?” Everyone looks at me, Wake rather intently. “Digging a basement in basalt would take a long time, I don’t think any of us are going to be just making the rock move any time soon.”

  “If we’re being silly, I want some limestone, or some chalk, or something. Something so we can have an actual garden without two generation’s lead time, composting sand.” I don’t know if Chloris is just playing along or has decided that it’s clearly socially expected to be crazy today.

  “None of these things is impossible.” Wake is being utterly serious. “The alteration of possibilities does not permit one to be extremely specific, but priorities may be set.”

  “How big is this thing going to be?” Dove, sounding speculative.

  “I should not like to see you five attempt something greater than thirty hectares at this stage of your studies.” Totally straight-faced from Wake.

  “Thirty? That’s not a garden, that’s a farm.” Chloris sounds indignant. “Why don’t people do this instead of weeding?”

  “People have done this instead of weeding; all of the north-western corner of the Creeks is geologically discontinuous from the lower Westcreek watershed, the three eastern Creeks are each distinct from the eastern barrens, all are distinct from the southern swamplands. You don’t always get something you can farm, and sometimes it has worse weeds when you do. It’s a matter of odds, not certainty.” Wake sounds patient. My head hurts, this is too much like trying to make the Bad Old Days return.

  “Like fixing the teapot.” Kynefrid sounds stunned.

  Everybody looks at Kynefrid, uncertain how the landscape is like a teapot.

  “One of my aunts had a favourite teapot, and it broke, and an Independent who was there to talk about soil properties in the orchards and what we should add fixed it, fixed it so that it had never been broken.” Kynefrid takes a deep breath. “It wasn’t exactly the same colour after.”

  “Just so,” Wake says. “It is an alteration of which past shall manifest itself in the world.”

  “Wasn’t there only one past?” My head hurts, and I don’t think the answe
r is going to help. At least let my head hurt for the correct reasons.

  “At any point in time, there is only one past.” Wake scuffs one sandalled foot across dirt or rock, it’s hard to tell the difference, gestures. There’s a floating green and blue rectangle thing, taller than Wake and full of crosshatching and squiggles. Someone has made a sandwich out of engraver’s styles for filling space. My brain wants to make the basic crosshatches boxwood, but I don’t think whatever it really is makes good drawer pulls.

  Wake points at this glowing stack of lines. “What we are standing on. Every layer, every geological period, was an accumulation of chance. Most of those chances are scarcely relevant; precisely where the footsteps of some ancient behemoth passed has little effect on what we are standing upon. Yet that accumulation of chances made all the wide earth.”

  “It’s really that hard to control?” Zora, sounding worried.

  “It is impossible to control. It can be reliably predicted.”

  Zora sits down, head in hands. “I don’t see how those are different.”

  “Is this like dice?” Dove doesn’t sound especially doubtful.

  Wake nods.

  Dove looks at Zora. “Remember school? Honest dice, you don’t know what they’re going to roll, but roll enough of them and you can say what the range of outcomes were ahead of time.”

  “It’s a hill,” Zora says.

  “It’s a tremendous pile of chance events, stretching back billions of years.” Wake outright grins at us. “It just looks like a hill.”

  It goes right on looking like a hill while we stake out a big squashed rectangle, “Trapezoid,” Chloris says definitely while I’m wondering about the lumpy hill making the sides curve and wiggle, the baseline two hundred metres across the south side of the crest of the hill and reaching more than six hundred metres of the north slope, fanning out so that the far side, the end line, is four hundred metres long. It’s regular old iron survey stakes and heavy twine, nothing special; last time I saw a road crew, this is just what they were using.

  Not quite twenty hectares; Wake points out that we don’t really need even this much, and Chloris, Kynefrid, and Zora all produce some variation of “But we can grow stuff!”.

  Chloris tries to pull Dove into supporting that. It doesn’t work; Dove apparently held a quarter-thorpe once, what would be more than one farm where I’m from. Dove makes a best try to point out to the other three that while it’s usual for Independents to do things like develop new varieties of food crops, that’s probably not what any of us are going to be doing.

  “Why not?” Kynefrid clearly likes the idea of being able to make better apple trees.

  I think it’s going to be a long time before we’re allowed to make anything alive.

  “Strength. If it’s a five-demon problem, they send the Line. If it’s a lots-of-work-over-a-long-time problem, like making weeding work better, that’s an Independent from the right tail of the main distribution; something that depends on skill and specific knowledge more than strength. We’re going to get either three-demon problems, or the stuff no one has ever seen before; if we can figure it out, great. If we can’t figure it out, that’s when someone on the battalion list gets to deal with it.”

  Ok, that’s twice. “What do Line battalions have to do with being an Independent?”

  Dove looks at Wake.

  “The Line’s standing orders, should an Independent ever escape the constraints of the Peace, include a minimum level of force.” Wake’s tones are completely dry.

  “There are people, individual people even if they are wizard people, who could fight a battalion?” Zora, sounding almost personally offended.

  I’ve only seen it once, but a single battalion can march somewhere and leave a permanent road behind them, fused rock a metre thick and ten metres wide, and everything under it rearranged into roadbed. Ditches, too.

  Wake looks at Zora, makes a gently gesture. “It has never been tried within the Commonweal, and the Line is cautious.”

  I’ll believe cautious. I don’t believe timorous. Are the Independents that strong, or that skilled?

  “If we are to be cautious, we should specify which of the changes in the terrain are most desirable.” You can tell from Wake’s voice that we’re getting back to the actual lesson.

  “Bedrock, nearby sand and clay, limestone top cover, cellar bubble?” Dove tries to make this sound like a question, it’s an honest try.

  “Isn’t that too specific?” Zora, sounding both doubtful and determined. “We want good clean soil, compatible with the Creeks; we don’t really care what produced it, do we?”

  “Good clean soil arising from natural processes,” Wake says, quite gently.

  Everybody nods.

  No one else is going to ask, so I’d better. “What about water? We’re on top of a hill, and lugging buckets up from Westcreek doesn’t sound fun.”

  “The West Wetcreek,” Zora and Chloris and Dove all say at me, quietly, but definitely out loud.

  Dove says it while miming a forehead smack, only just within the gentleness of ritual. Wake looks pleased at me. Everybody else’s face does some variation of ‘Establishment Of Laws, uphill with buckets every day’.

  By the time we get it written down, it’s ‘near-surface competent bedrock’, ‘ready access to plentiful potable water’, ‘good clean soil, arisen from natural processes and compatible with its surrounds’, ‘many tonnes of readily dug sand and clay near to hand’, and ‘obvious optimum cellar location’, set down carefully in that specific order.

  Set down in angular letters pressed into a thin sheet of copper; according to Wake there’s no reason for the copper beyond the greater difficulty of smudging the writing. It starts to feel serious, like something real rather than a classroom exercise, watching the goal written down.

  “How do we do this?” Kynefrid asks.

  “Standing in a circle.” Wake’s general good cheer doesn’t seem to have a problem with five people who don’t know what they are doing altering the landscape.

  We get put in a rough shape, to match the curved trapezoid we hammered into the landscape, rather than precisely a circle; ‘standing in a circle’ turns out to be a standard answer for ‘how do we perform ritual magic?’ as a question, one of the jokes common to sorcerers.

  The survey stakes have individual numbers punched into them. That’s apparently enough for ritual purposes, and Wake adds the numbers to the copper sheet, along with our names, our regular names and something we get told we’ll learn in a couple of years that references use-name to true-name held by the Shape of Peace.

  Wake explains that this isn’t an enchantment, it’s nothing more complicated than a request for a different history, “Which your present skill might plausibly obtain.” The only difficult part is being in balance together, Wake says. To do that, we get to hold one big ball of Power together, all of us facing in and arms outstretched. Wake does something and is somehow outside, under, and above the space we’re defining. I don’t want to think about that; listening, stretching out my senses on purpose, instead of flinching away from yet another weird taste that something sounds like, is more than enough like work.

  There’s a lot of room to put effort, to put energy, into the big ball; it wobbles a little, until everybody gets roughly even on how hard they’re pushing into it, and then it steadies and grows and does something so it sinks or rises.

  Chloris is green and white and shining, Kynefrid a mist of blue, a waft of hot glass and springtime, Zora extremely purple and happy and spinning. Dove is gold and red, the gold built harsh and glittering out of the sound of trumpets.

  The ball gets larger, spins a little, comes back still, stops growing, and starts to gain weight. The whole time, I don’t do anything but hold my arms out and breathe, as slow as I can. I’m surrounded by fit people with larger lungs; they want to breathe more slowly than I do, and it’s a long time, it feels like forever, until we’re all in balance, all breathing t
ogether, all breathing in and breathing out the great mass of Power we’ve woken.

  First thing, says Wake, voice come silent and inescapable.

  Near surface competent bedrock, we all say, once voice together, just as silent and just as inescapable.

  Breath in, breath out, breath in, the next thing. The next, and the next, and the next.

  Wake’s inescapable silence, saying “Is it done?”

  All of us, saying it is done as we will it.

  I’m least five metres higher than I was standing, and the dirt is different, very different, the whole smell of autumn has changed.

  There are trees.

  Huge trees, the kind of trees you look at and think ‘forest primeval’ before you think ‘no, before that’. No underbrush, no understory, it’s bare and still and silent in there. When we walk under those trees, I know, with a vast implacable certainty, that we’re going to be the first thinking footsteps the fallen leaves of thousands upon thousands of years have ever known.

  I count on my fingers. My hands are shaking nearly too much to make that possible. I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired.

  Nine days ago, I thought I had no talent at all.

  I wasn’t awake for most of those days.

  I sit down, and do my best not to gibber.

  Chapter 6

  “Up, students!” Wake’s cheerful, still, though now with the kind of cheer you’d have to be three heroes to want to argue with.

  I’m not the only one sitting.

  “Briskly, now; no sense in letting the weeds in here.” Wake makes a couple of strange broad gestures, both arms going wide. There’s a corner-of-the-eye coiling shape, like a rope that’s woken up. It has the colour of the feel of deep cold dust.

  I lurch up, and take three steps forward, and grab. Change the number of steps, and in one case skip the lurch, and everyone does.