Six O'Clock

The knock came at half past five in the morning, while it was still black outside and the forge below him was nothing but a red eye in the dark, and when Aurel opened the door at the top of the outside stair, Tamsin Brook was standing on the second step down with her shawl over her head and a folded paper held out at arm’s length.

“From her,” she said.

He took it. It was a quarter-sheet, folded twice by somebody who folded paper all day for a living: the creases were exact.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t.” Tamsin already had one foot on the step below. “I didn’t read it. I’d have liked to. She asked me to carry it up before I started the grinding and I said yes. That’s the whole of it, and I’d be obliged if you didn’t make it into something.”

“I will not.”

“She’s not sleeping,” Tamsin said, to the dark, furiously, as though the fact were his and she were returning it. “Since the pot. She was down in that kitchen at three, scrubbing a floor that didn’t want scrubbing. I know something’s happened. I can’t be in it, and I won’t carry another one.”

She was gone down the stair before he could answer. That was twice in a fortnight somebody here had said a hard thing to his face and not stayed for the reply.

He unfolded the paper under the lamp. Four words, in a small square hand he had watched write his name into a book twice a day for eight days.

The tea-house opens at seven. Come at six.

· · ·Scene break

The lane at ten to six was blue-black and silent, with the frost off it and a mist standing over the river the height of a man. The mill was dark. One lamp burned at the far end of the street, where somebody had a new baby. Nothing else in Hollow Ash was moving but the water.

He had spent the rest of the night with the paper on the bench in front of him, drawing up and discarding the things a careful man would do. A careful man would not come. A careful man would send the paper back with a line regretting that the order did not allow it, which would be correct, and cowardly, and would leave a woman alone in her own kitchen at six in the morning wondering what she had asked for.

He came.

He stood under the chandler’s eave on the far side, forty feet off, until the mill bell rang the hour across the water, because he was not going to knock on that door at five minutes to.

The bell went. He crossed.

The tea-house was unlit at the front, and the bell over the door had been tied back against the frame with a strip of cloth, so that when he lifted the latch the door came open in silence.

Two cups stood on the counter. A lamp at the back, turned low; a pot on the trivet; and the smell of the room at six in the morning, cold ash and yesterday’s bacon and green tea standing.

Hesper Quill came out of the kitchen doorway with her sleeves already turned back.

“Come in properly,” she said, “and shut it.”

He shut it. She came round him, put the bar across the door, and went back behind her counter, and they stood a moment with four feet of scrubbed elm between them and nobody else in the shop.

An empty room at six in the morning, Aurel thought, is the only kind of room that does not expect anything of a man. He had not been in one for years and had forgotten what it was for.

“Sit down,” she said. “You’re too tall to be told things standing.”

He sat. She poured both cups from the pot, and he saw, because seeing small things was a habit he had never managed to break, that the leaf had been weighed and the water rested and the pot timed short: it came out pale, and clean, and thin. Three minutes. She set it in front of him and said not one word about it, and he understood that he was not to mention it either.

“Right,” Hesper said. She put her own cup down without drinking from it. “I’ve had all night to word this and it’s got no better, so here it is plain. I want you to tell me what you saw in the tent. From the minute you came in to the minute you went out. In order, with the times, the way you’d have given it to your own staff. Once. And then we will never do this again.”

“You were in it,” Aurel said.

“I know what I was doing. I don’t know what it looked like.” Her hands were flat on the counter, as he had once seen them on a table. “My own side has been telling me what happened in there for eleven years, and every one of them reading it off a page somebody else wrote. You’re the only person left who was in the room and doesn’t want anything from me.”

“And if my account is wrong?”

“Then you’ll say it wrong and I’ll know that too.” A pause. “Please.”

He set his cup down, put his hands in his lap, and gave it to her the way she had asked for it, which was the only way he could have got through it: as a report.

· · ·Scene break

“The parley was called for an hour after first light on the third day, and we came up to the flag at twenty past seven, your side already standing. The tent was between the lines, forty yards from mine, sixty from yours. Wet canvas; it had been rained on for two days and it stank of it. There was a brazier fed with something wrong, and the whole place smelled of burnt copper. I still get it in a room with a bad stove.

“Inside: Marshal Vance at the centre, two clerks on her right, a scribe. A captain of yours on the flap. On my side, myself, my political officer, and my aide, who was nineteen. The table was a door on two trestles, four feet across. I know it was four feet because I measured it with my hands while your Marshal talked, to have something to do that was not listening.

“You came in eight minutes after we did, from the north side, and you were introduced by rank and not by name, and you did not sit down.

“Vance set out terms for twenty minutes. They were not terms; they were a list of what would happen to my country after the working went up, and they were for the clerks and for whoever would read that page in ten years’ time.

“At ten to eight she said the working would be raised at eight whether I signed or not. My political officer asked whether that was a threat within the meaning of the parley flag. Nobody answered him.

“You went out at four minutes to eight through the north flap. The canvas on that side was up on poles because the ground was flooded, so from where I sat I had a clear view of thirty yards of field, and of you standing in it, twenty yards out, alone.

“At eight o’clock, the air went wrong.

“I do not have better words. The frost lifted off the grass in a ring and went up. The horses on both lines stopped making any noise whatever, which I had never heard before or since. There was a pressure on the ears, like a hand laid on a drumhead. And there was a light with no colour in it, not white, running along the ground from where you stood — outward, both ways along the line, and fast.

“It ran to the right and it kept going. It ran to the left and it stopped, about a hundred yards short of the spur, and stood there. I could see the end of it, standing still, like water up against a wall.

“It was up for nine seconds. That is my count, and my count was fast that morning; call it eleven and you’ll not be far out.

“And then it went out. Not faded. Went out, all at once, both sides, and the air came back in like a door shutting, and the sound came back with it, and every horse on that field started screaming at the same moment.

“You went down on one knee. Your right hand was still up. Nobody moved for a count of three or four — hundreds of men, and not one of them moved — and then one of Vance’s clerks ran out and put his hand under your arm, and you said something to him, and he took his hand off you and stepped back and let you get up on your own.

“You came back in at eleven minutes past eight. You walked the whole way and you did not put your hand on anything. You sat down across the table from me — four feet of door, directly opposite — and you put both hands flat on it, palms down, and you left them there. The left one had come up off the wood about half an inch and you put it back. You did not take your hands off that table again for two hours and forty minutes, and you did not speak once, and nobody on your side looked at you, because none dared.

“My political officer wrote a note and put it in front of me that said, It has failed. The pass is open.

“What I did about that is not part of the tent, and I will not tell you about it this morning.

“At eleven, Vance adjourned to the next day. We signed at that same table at nine the following morning, and the words she used, standing, with the scribe writing — the words that are now said on every green in the Marchland once a year — were that the Marchland working had held both armies on the field, and that Caldemoor’s general had been broken upon it.

“You were standing behind your chair. You did not say anything.

“You looked at me once.”

· · ·Scene break

The pot had gone cold on the trivet. Outside, one cart went past, early, and the sound of it took a long time to die away up the hill.

Hesper had not moved at all.

“Which hand was up?” she said at last.

“Your right.”

“What did the air do when it went?”

“Came back all at once.”

“And the light — you say it ran right and kept going, and ran left and stopped.”

“It stood a hundred yards short of the spur and it did not close,” Aurel said. “It never made a circle. That is why I say it broke before it held. Nothing of ours was within a mile of it. It came up, it got three-quarters of the way round, it stopped, and then the whole of it went.”

She looked at the cold pot for a while.

“That’s right,” she said. “Every word of that is right. I’ve nothing to correct.”

“I had prepared myself to be told I had it wrong.”

“So had I.” She said it almost lightly, and then her mouth did something complicated and she put it away. “The version you’ve got is the right one, and you’re the only living soul carrying it, and you’ve had it eleven years and never spent it once, when spending it would have got you out of a great deal.” She turned her cup round on the counter without lifting it. “That’s what I wanted to know. Whether it was the same in another voice, or whether I’d made it bigger in my head for a decade.”

“And?”

“It’s smaller than I’ve been carrying,” Hesper said. “Nine seconds. I’d have sworn to a minute.”

There was a great deal more in that room, standing about like furniture under sheets, and he was aware that a man could put out his hand and pull one of them off.

“There’s the rest of it,” she said. “Why it stood. Why it’s been let stand. I’m not telling you that today, and you’re not to ask me, because it’s got other people’s names in it and all of them are still alive, and I’ve not decided yet what I’m allowed to do about that.”

“I have not asked you for anything,” Aurel said, “and I do not intend to begin at six in the morning behind a barred door.”

“No.” Her eyes came up. “No, you don’t ask. It’s the single most irritating thing about you.”

· · ·Scene break

They settled it standing, in the dark end of the shop by the stove, because neither of them would sit down again.

The order and nothing else. Half past eight and six. He would sign in front of whoever was in the room. No notes in either direction, carried by Tamsin or anybody; no letters; no stopping in the lane; no six o’clocks. If Ferris asked either of them a direct question they would answer it truthfully, because the one thing neither of them could survive was a lie laid on top of this one.

“You can be recalled,” she said. “Under sanction, which means a cell and not a coach, and don’t tell me otherwise: I read the sanction schedule before I let them print it.”

“And you lose the licence.”

“I lose the licence, and Tamsin loses four years of a trade she’s got nothing else to show for, and this street loses the only place where a person who’s had a bad week can sit down out of the weather.” Hesper folded her arms. “So. We’re careful.”

“We are careful.”

“Say it like you mean it.”

“Mistress Quill,” Aurel said, “I have spent thirty-four years being careful with things that could not be replaced, and my record in the matter is not what anyone would call unblemished. I have never been less inclined to be casual about anything.”

She looked at him. He let her, and stood perfectly still, and did not say the obvious thing; and she did not say it either, and they both heard it not being said, filling up the room the way the smell of the leaf did.

Then she went behind the counter, and picked up his cup, and looked into it.

“Stone cold,” she said. “Untouched. Well, you’ve cost me a pot, an ounce of the good green and a night’s sleep, and I’ve not even the satisfaction of knowing whether three minutes was right. Take the cup with you. Bring it back at half past eight like a lawful man, and I’ll fill it again, and you can tell me then.”