What Was Under It

The gully covers came up first.

All of them, the whole way down that hill, one after another, like lids coming off pans in a kitchen where nobody is watching the stove.

Clang. Clang. Clang-clang.

They're coming up in order!

Somebody count them, because they are coming up in the order the hill goes down.

It was Tuesday, and the water had been standing in this city since Sunday.

Two days. It's always two days.

What you don't use stands up.

Every child here knows it!

A man in a courtyard told a whole ward on the day he stopped being anybody, and he was right.

And I've had two days of watching a city not do the sum.

Nobody had roped one thing. There's no roster in Vasa. There's a form.

Who ropes eight hundred years?

And nobody on those terraces went in. They came out.

They came out onto every step and rail on that hill with their children on their shoulders, the way they came out for a fire across a gap.

A man two steps below me lifted his boy to see it better.

"Hold on to your father," I said.

"He's holding on to me," said the boy.

Shu got out of my apron on the third terrace and went across it on its own feet, gray, in a straight line, and sat down where the stone dips.

It put its face flat at the ground and wouldn't be picked up, and its back was warm as a tin out of an oven.

It did that at the bottom of Tulk's stair.

Before anybody smelled smoke.

"Yulen. It's found something."

"It has sat down on a wet corner."

"It's found something."

He looked at it for a while, and then he shut the thin book, which is the same as shouting.

Onnik came up that hill through it.

He came up four terraces on his own with the water over his boots and his father's words in his mouth, and he had them the way he always has them, which is exactly, and in the wrong order.

"My father says the low corner's gone."

"Gone how?"

"Gone down," said Onnik. "He says the drain took it at six and then the lane took it and then the gutter went the wrong way up the hill past our door. He says he's never seen water go up a lane in forty years and Weller says—"

"Onnik."

"Weller's not saying anything," said Onnik. "Weller's on his roof."

On his roof!

The next bit I didn't see. I'm putting it down the way he told it to me, standing on a terrace with his boots full, because he had it before anybody in this city did.

"It came up out of the square first," said Onnik. "Not the drain. All around the drain, in a ring, so the founder went over on his face again and then he went under.

"Then it came up out of the lane. Then out of Anzo's stall and out of Tulk's yard and out of the low corner, all of it at once, and my father says they didn't join, because they were already joined, they were joined underneath and we've been walking on it.

"It's the size of the ward. It's the size of two wards.

"And my father says to say it's got the ropewalk in it, and I'm to say ropewalk, because he says you'll know what that means and I don't."

Ha.

"And he says you're to come and stand in our kitchen when it's done," said Onnik, and pulled his whole face about. "He made me say that one twice. He said say it twice or she'll think it's about the sheet."

Say yes. Say yes now, before he can take it back.

I know what it means.

I know what it means!

I sat on a bench at three in the morning and watched that street walk off up a hill.

Then it came up on our side.

It came up out of the third terrace and the fourth at once, and kept coming, and there's no way to say the size of it, so I'll say what was in it instead.

A cart's wheel-arch, standing off the body, with the tarpaulin still on the hem.

A drain grating, bars out, at about the height of a door.

Cobbles in the underside, in rows, and a front step, and a schoolroom floor with the tables still on it the right way up.

A gauge glass in the front of it like a bit of window.

And a stone throat off the end of a broken arch, sitting up in the shoulder of it with the moss still on the coping.

Sick, and it isn't the size of it. It's that I know the moss on it.

I said sorry to that stone.

I said sorry to it and then I sent a canal through it.

And it has been under this city ever since, waiting.

That's mine.

That is every single one of mine, in one thing, wearing all of it at once.

And up the side of it, out of the top, in the part that was gray before any of the rest, an arm.

Pale as a peeled stick. Long as a cart. Smooth on top and wet all over.

I know that arm.

My first day!

A hundred people watching, and a man in a green coat shouting about his jug.

"Yulen. The arm."

"I see the arm."

"That came out of the founding ring. That came out of the floor of a hall in front of the crown."

"It did," said Yulen, and he did not say anything else for a long time, which is how I knew he had got there before me and had been hoping he was wrong.

"Say it."

"You cracked the founding ring on your first morning in this world," said Yulen. "You did it holding a tray, in front of the crown, and you had been in this kingdom an hour."

"Say the rest of it."

"There is no rest of it," he said. "It was coming out. It has been coming out for eight hundred years and somebody was going to be standing there when it did."

He's giving me the kind version.

He hasn't handed me the kind version of anything before, and he has picked today.

Grateful, and I'd rather have been shouted at.

Ken has a word for the big one at the end. Boss.

He said it with his mouth full and drew it on a napkin.

Now. I did this on a terrace with my boots in it and nobody near me, and I haven't said it out loud.

At Fujimori's there was a jar under the fryer for the fat.

Nobody ever emptied that jar. You put a spoon of it in at the end of a shift, because you were tired and it was there, and you went home.

After four years it wasn't four years of spoonfuls. It was one thing. It had a skin on it and it took two of us to move it and it was nobody's job.

Not one person in that shop ever decided to make it.

Nobody in eight hundred years ever decided to make this. It is only the part nobody used.

It isn't a boss.

Nobody built it. Nobody meant it. Ken hasn't got a word for a thing that nobody meant.

A Measurer came along the terrace at noon with his cuffs back and his hands behind him, stood where he could see it, and told four people what it was.

"That is an event of standing water," he said. "There will be a reading."

"There's a schoolroom floor in it."

"There will be a reading," said the Measurer, "in its season, before witnesses."

"Whose season?"

"The ward's."

"Which ward is it in?"

"That," said the Measurer, "is a question for the office," and he put his hands behind him and watched it come up another terrace.

Whose season is a thing nobody made?

In its season?

On a Tuesday!

A district of this city is standing on its own feet and two men will have it out in a room with a carpet.

In its season!

There's a district of this city standing up on its own feet and he has given it a Tuesday.

Ottar came past behind him with rope over one shoulder and stakes under the other arm and didn't stop walking.

"Twenty-two boards," he said. "I've got twenty-two boards on posts in this kingdom and I could walk you around every one of them, and there's not a copper in this. You can't charge for a thing people can see from their own window."

He said it and he kept walking!

The man priced a canal before the fire was out and he has just walked past this one.

Gedda put her hand flat on the terrace wall the way she did on a coal yard in July, with her mouth full.

"Warm's coming out of that wall," she said. "It's been coming out since the covers went. It'll be at the ovens by dark."

"The ovens?"

"It goes where the warm is. It always has. It's been in my wall, your boiler and a schoolroom stove and I've said so twice in this kingdom and lost my license for one of them."

What was lying at the end of that afternoon, and none of it roped, because there's nobody in Vasa whose job it is:

Four terraces under water. A hill with the covers off it. Two wards of the lower city gone from under my own people's doors.

And a thing the size of a district standing between the bridge and the palace, going uphill, slowly, after the warm.

Onnik got to the top of the steps at five with his father's last one, and he was disgusted before he opened his mouth, which is how he always arrives.

"My father says he's ruled it out fresh, and he says he's got the day, and he says he's got the hour off the bell."

"Onnik, tell him not to—"

"HE SAYS WHAT DAY DOES HE PUT ON THE SHEET FOR EIGHT HUNDRED YEARS?!"

"IT IS NOT GOING IN MY COUNT," Weller shouted from a terrace below.