The Oldest Spill

I got up the terrace steps at six on all fours in the wet, because they had a hand's depth going down them and my boots have been wrong since a supper.

Ow.

That's an ow with a stone step in it.

Yulen was above me with the lamp out at arm's length, telling me where the treads were, which he cannot help.

"Third from you is broken."

"I've had the third from me."

"Then the fifth," said Yulen.

Fond, at six in the morning, and I wouldn't say it to him for a kitchen.

Worried. That's the word and it's for a doctor on a step.

It had come up two terraces in the night. It moves at the speed a bath goes down, which is the worst speed there is, because you can watch it and do nothing else.

Above it: the fourth terrace, the coach road, a bakehouse with steam going up off its roof vent, and the palace with four hundred rooms of people asleep.

Below it: sixty steps, the bronze doors, and a room the size of a street with nothing in it.

Ow. That's the second one and it's a knee.

Downhill is the Cistern.

Underneath me!

What do you do with a thing that eats what you hit it with?

First time since I got to this kingdom that the empty thing isn't in front of me.

We tried it at seven and I'm putting the failure down in full, because it's the whole reason for the rest.

Yulen shaped it. I gave it everything I had, straight down the middle, into the flank of the thing, off both hands.

Whoom.

It went in. It went in and it didn't come out anywhere.

The flank took it, and stood a hand higher, and kept going up the hill.

"Again—"

"It is not going to work again," said Yulen. "It has just got bigger by exactly what you gave it."

"Then I'll give it more."

"You are giving a bin more trash," said Yulen.

"Then give me something that isn't trash."

"I have nothing that is not trash," said Yulen. "Neither has anybody on this hill. It is water. That thing is made of water and it has had eight hundred years of practice at it."

Ha.

Only joke he's made this week!

It's at me and it's correct.

So we had it by half past seven and nobody liked it: everything anybody pours at that thing becomes that thing.

Eight hundred years of what nobody used, and we were standing on a hill in the wet handing it more of the same.

Every drop I've got is the same stuff it's made of.

And I've got a great deal of it, and it's the only thing I've ever had.

Gedda got there at eight with her lenses up in her hair and a cloth in her hand and looked at the bakehouse.

"It wants that tank."

"It wants the warm."

"It wants the warm and the warm is in that tank, and there are nine people asleep over the top of it," said Gedda. "I can hold a line. I have held one on worse."

"On what?"

"On a child, for an hour, on what you spill getting out of bed," said Gedda. "Is there bread up here?"

Mira went up on the bakehouse wall with the slate and got the whole hill in front of her, which is where she has been going since a parapet.

"I'm calling it," she said. "You'll do what I say and you'll do it when I say it, and if you're both slow I'm writing that down as well."

She's fifteen!

Fifteen, on a wall in the capital, calling an aim for a doctor and a Thimble.

Onnik took the relay and put himself at the turn where he could see her and be heard at the bottom, and ran it four hours without once asking what it meant.

And Marshal Corr came up the coach road at nine with the rolled strip in his hand.

Him?

Him?!

Last time that man opened his mouth at me he put me out of a gate.

"Marshal."

"The crown is—" he said, and stopped.

He looked down the hill at a thing with a schoolroom floor in it.

He stood there about four seconds, which is exactly how long it takes to have an idea, and I've watched somebody do it before.

"The crown is not content," said Marshal Corr.

He answered!

Two months of that man, and he has answered a question nobody asked him.

"That is the first thing I have said in this office that was not on the paper," he said, "and I have been in it thirty years, and I would rather not do it twice."

"Why now?"

"Because there is a schoolroom floor in it," said Marshal Corr, "and I put my name on the paper that put that floor in that school. It was a Thursday and it took four minutes."

Four minutes!

Everything in this kingdom takes four minutes and then eight hundred years.

Then he took his coat off and gave it to nobody, and rolled his sleeves back, and stood on the step below Gedda.

He's got a band on his wrist as wide as hers.

Four trained people on a hill and me.

Yulen at my right, shaping. Gedda one step down, holding a line across the front of the bakehouse. Corr below her at the turn. Mira up on the wall with the slate. Onnik at the corner with his hands around his mouth.

Mira had the slate up in both hands, turned out to the hill, and read the middle line off it at the top of her voice.

"BRAID IT!" Mira shouted down at me. "TWO OF THEM, CROSSED, EACH ONE HOLDING THE OTHER ONE UP — AND NOT AT IT, ACROSS IT—"

So I put both hands down and let go with each of them separately and crossed them over.

The first went nowhere. The second held.

Two ropes off my two hands, going the wrong way around each other, standing up off a wet terrace with a district coming up it.

Then I over-corrected, because it was going wide at the top, and I pulled all of it three feet left and took the corner off a public building.

"Sorry—"

Yulen put two fingers on the back of my wrist and moved it, and didn't look up from what he was doing, and didn't say one word about it.

He didn't look.

He didn't look!

He hasn't done that before.

I'll think about it later, in private, and probably for years.

Then they all gave everything at once, and I'm going to say what that is, because I had never seen it and I won't see it twice.

It is quiet.

How long can four people hold a hill?

Frightened, and it's the wrong feeling, and I couldn't tell you what the right one is.

Four people who spent their lives learning to give less than they have, giving all of it, on a hill, in the rain off a bakehouse roof, and the only sound is water.

Corr's went for a count of nine and stopped.

Gedda's went longer, and then her line came down and she sat straight down on the step where she was and said something about bread.

Yulen held his the longest of the four. Then his hands came off the stone and he put them on his knees.

Mine didn't stop.

Ken has a word for five people in a line doing one thing.

He'd have wanted to know which of us was the healer.

It's the woman eating, and he wouldn't have believed me.

It's still going.

The Fill. Into a vessel, and there isn't one, so it goes where the hole points.

Shu came out of my apron gray and went at the front of that thing on its own feet, and got its face into the arm that had come out ahead of the rest.

Glut. Glut glut glut.

It drank that arm the whole way down to the terrace, and the stripe came up floor, then pigeon, and the rest of the thing came on past it on both sides and left it sitting there.

It's holding the corner!

It can't take a district and it has taken the one bit that was going to reach Gedda.

Mira called that hill for four hours off a bakehouse wall and she got every one of them right.

"LEFT — HIS LEFT, NOT YOURS — AND SHORT, IT'S SHORT, YOU'RE OVER THE ROAD AGAIN—"

Left? His left?

"I'm not over the road."

"YOU ARE OVER THE ROAD. ONNIK. TELL THEM AT THE TURN SHE'S OVER THE ROAD."

"SHE'S OVER THE ROAD," Onnik told the turn, disgusted, and the turn told the bottom of the hill.

Fifteen.

Fifteen!

She's running four grown people and a boy off a wall, and nobody has asked her who said she could.

"That girl has called four aims and got four of them," said Gedda, from her step, around a mouthful. "I'd have her in a room with me, and I have said that about two people in my life."

That is how we held a hill for four hours with five people, a slate and a child, and at the end of it the thing was two terraces higher than it started.

A trough went. The bakehouse tank went, and it went cold, and nine people came out of a door in their nightshirts and stood on their own step to watch.

"That's our tank," one of them told the hill, in a nightshirt, at eleven in the morning.

"I know it's your tank."

"It was full yesterday. It was full for the first time in a year yesterday, and now it's cold, and there's nine of us and a bakehouse under it."

"IS IT COMING UP HERE?!" said the one behind him.

Nine of them.

Nine of them over a cold tank, and the man is telling me about the tank.

Four volumes and then a thin one!

He's had that book out twice today and put it back both times.

"Four pages does an average commission," I said, to nobody, on my knees.

"It does," said Yulen.

"You haven't written in that one all week."

"There is one line in it and it is not about you," said Yulen, "and I would like that to be the end of this conversation, and it will not be."

Is that the bells?

Then the bells went for noon and the thing stopped at the coach road, because there was nothing warm above it that it could reach.

It stood there with a schoolroom floor in its side and the tables still the right way up.

By then we had held a hill for four hours and moved nothing at all except the thing itself, which was two terraces higher than when we started.

I'm told it looked like a rescue from the bridge. From where I was it was five people getting steadily wetter.

Four terraces of it at the end of that, a public building with the corner off, and every drop the five of us had.

Mira got down off the wall.

"It can't be put down," she said, flat, with the numbers in. "Five of you gave it everything you had and it's two terraces up. It's not a thing you put down."

"Then what is it?"

"It's a thing you put somewhere," said Mira.

Nobody said anything, and then everybody on that hill looked down it at once, past the steps, at bronze doors standing open on the only empty room in the kingdom.

"The doors are open," said Yulen, and put the thin book inside his coat and started down.