Across Infinities: The Twelve Games · Book 7
The Herbalist and the Harp
Prologue: Channel One
Channel One, live to the eternals, welcome back to the show, and welcome to world seven. Would the cloud in row three please stop throwing grapes at the monitor. Yes, I know what happened in world six. I was there. I’m always there. That’s the job.
For the new viewers who wandered in from the weather channel, introductions. I’m the host. I’m also his Shadow, which is a fancier word for the voice in the back of a man’s head that does the commentary when he’d rather it didn’t. Over on Channel Two there’s another one of me, attached to her, colder than I am and better dressed. We don’t talk. We share a kettle. The kettle ticks like a bomb when it’s thinking, and I have now descaled it three times, so if it explodes this season, it explodes clean.
Downstairs there’s the Clerk. The Clerk keeps the files. The Clerk does not host, does not do voices, does not take bets, and does not want to be thanked on air, so I’m thanking him on air. Hello, Clerk. He’s filing that.
Upstairs there’s the Architect. Door shut. They wrote the rules for this round over the break and slid them under the door on a single sheet, and then they went back to whatever they do up there, which I assume is plumbing, because everything they build leaks in exactly the place they meant it to.
New world, new format. This season’s show is called Keep What You Carry. One wet season in a river valley called Vael, all stepped terraces and herb gardens and cedar roofs, where they bury grief in flower beds like you’d bury a bulb, and when it comes up, a woman plays it back to them on a harp so they can stand to hear it. At the end of the season it rains for nine days. The elders nail a notice to a post. The notice says leave. And whoever stays keeps only what they can hold in their hands when the water comes. The gallery bets on what each of them drops. The house takes a cut on every drop. In this valley, eternals, everybody drops something.
The stakes, for the cloud at the back who’s been asleep since world two. There’s a child on the council docket called Ivy. Brand-new eternal, small, loud, fond of ducks. She gets approved only if this love holds through twelve worlds, and the odds on that are one in a quadrillion, which is a real number and not something I made up to frighten you. This is world seven. More than halfway. The odds haven’t moved. I checked them in the elevator.
Three items of business, and then you can have your boy.
First. The build. Vael is a valley with a river at the bottom and a market along the river, and the market talks. I don’t mean gossip. I mean the knife-grinder’s wheel sings when the blade is true and the ginger man rings you a bell for the weight. There’s a ferry at the bend with a woman on it called Tamsin, who is exactly what she looks like. And there’s another woman in the stern of that ferry that nobody in Vael can see, whose name I’m still not allowed to say. It sticks on her, though. It always does. There’s a still-house on the far bank where a very kind man makes a very kind drink, and if you’ve been watching this show for six worlds you already don’t like the sound of that. Good. Trust the itch.
Second. The wipe. Our boy is going to come back online in an herbalist’s drying-loft with his hands already tying a knot he doesn’t remember learning, and a name on a ledger that says Kane Ashe. That’s his. It’s the first time in seven worlds the name on the ledger has been the name in his chest, and he’s going to notice that, and he’s going to hate noticing it, because a man who’s been nobody six times is very suspicious of being somebody. There’s a seed packet involved. There’s always a seed packet involved. Don’t ask.
Third. The romance. I can feel you leaning in. Lean back out. I’ve watched this pair fall in love six times across six worlds and every time somebody’s paid for it, usually him, sometimes her, once a goat. I’m against it. Officially. For the board. Not because I’m a monster. Because I’m the one with the mop. She’s a harpist who tastes grief in soil, she’s thirty-one, she’s got a sister she won’t talk about and a glass vial in her harp case she holds up to the window every morning and counts to ten. He’s a man who’s going to want to fix that. You can see the problem. I can see the problem. He’s going to walk straight into the problem with a basket of willowbark under his arm.
One last thing. When this world ends, and it will, he’s going to fold out of it as he always does, into the gold, into the between. And in six worlds nobody has ever said his name back to him on the way out. Not once. The gallery’s got that at four hundred to one. I’ve got nothing on it. I’m noting that I’ve got nothing on it. Make of that what you like.
Kettle’s ticking. Lights down. One wet season, eternals. Place your bets.
Chapter 1: The Drying-Loft
Channel One. Round one, eternals. Our boy comes back online with his hands halfway through a knot, in a loft that smells like somebody’s grandmother’s linen cupboard. He’s going to check his pockets. He’s going to find a name. It isn’t his. Odds on him leaving it alone: I’ll give you a thousand to one and I’ll still be rich.
His hands were tying a knot when he arrived in them.
He let them finish. That seemed the polite thing. Long fingers, stained green to the second knuckle and yellow around the nails, finished a clove hitch around a bundle of silver-leafed stems and hung it from a line strung under the rafters, and only then did they stop and wait, as a dog waits after it’s brought you something, to see what you’ll say.
He didn’t say anything. He looked at them.
Herbalist’s hands. Split at the knuckles. A burn, old and shiny, across the back of the left. They were his, plainly, and they’d been doing this for years, and he didn’t remember one minute of the years.
The bundle swung on its line. Sage, maybe. Something grayer than sage, with a smell that went up the back of his nose and sat there, rain on hot stone. All around him, hanging from line after line, hundreds of bundles in rows like washing, green and gray and gold and a dark red that might have been dock, drying in the warm air that came up through the slatted floor. Below the slats, somebody was feeding a stove. He could hear the iron door clang and the coal go in.
He took inventory, because that was the first thing that came back, before his name, before anything. A loft. A long roof of cedar shingles with rain on it, a lot of rain, the steady kind that means it isn’t going to stop for lunch. A cot against the gable end, made with corners a soldier would approve of. A shelf with four books and a clay cup. A small window under the eave with the shutter half open and gray light coming in.
A ledger on the shelf, open, with a pencil in the gutter. Columns of weights and herbs in a small cramped hand. At the top of the page, the same hand had written a name, as you’d write your name in a schoolbook so nobody could steal it.
Kane Ashe.
He read it twice. Something in his chest went very quiet, as a room goes quiet when the person everybody was waiting for walks in.
It was his. Not the name somebody had given him. His. He knew it as he knew which way was down.
He’s been conscious for ninety seconds and he’s already suspicious of good news. That’s my boy.
* * *
He went through his pockets because you go through your pockets.
Pants, brown, patched at both knees: a stub of pencil, a twist of string, three copper coins with a cedar tree stamped on them. Shirt pocket: nothing. The waistcoat on the hook by the cot: a folded handkerchief, a seed packet with nothing in it, and a scrap of the same brown paper, torn off a larger sheet, with one word on it.
Meilin.
The hand was his. The cramped one. The ledger hand.
The name meant nothing to him. Nobody in this valley meant anything to him, that he could feel, and a Meilin least of all, and yet when he read it his eyes stung so suddenly that he put the paper down on the cot and stepped back from it as if it were hot.
Beside the ledger, on the shelf, was a list in the same hand. Small jobs, ticked off. Willowbark to dispensary, ticked. Re-string east racks, ticked. Packet to S., on the shawl, not the door, ticked. Don’t explain.
He read that one four times. Don’t explain. He’d written that. Some earlier version of him, the one who’d tied the knots and kept the ledger and made a cot with corners, had left a packet for somebody called S., on a shawl, and then written himself a note telling himself not to explain. As if he’d known that today he would wake up and want to.
He put the scrap with the name on it in his shirt pocket, over his heart, and buttoned the pocket, and then stood there for a while feeling foolish about where he’d put it.
* * *
The old man downstairs was called Edevane, and he was a person who regarded you as if you were a jar with a label that had come off.
“You’re up,” he said.
“I’m up.”
“You slept through the second bell. You’ve never once slept through the second bell.” Edevane had a long brown face and a white beard cut square, and he was sitting at a table by the stove with his knees wrapped in a blanket and a mortar in his lap. The room was a dispensary. Shelves to the ceiling, jars and bottles and bundles, every one of them labeled in the cramped hand. Kane’s hand. He’d labeled this whole room. “Let me see your eyes.”
Kane let him. The old man peered into one and then the other and grunted.
“Fever,” Edevane said. “Wet season fever. Half the valley has it. You’ll be odd for a day or two.” He reached behind him without looking and took down a jar. “Willowbark. Chew it. Don’t make that face, you made the tincture.”
It tasted of tree. It tasted exactly and entirely of tree, as if somebody had taken a whole forest and boiled it down to the size of his thumb. He chewed. Edevane watched him chew with an expression Kane couldn’t read, and then went back to his mortar.
“There’s a basket by the door,” Edevane said. “For the harpist. Her wrist. Take it down to the market and then come back and lie down.”
“Which harpist?”
The pestle stopped. “There’s one harpist in Vael,” Edevane said slowly. “You’ve taken her willowbark every two weeks for two springs.”
“Right,” Kane said. “Of course. The harpist.”
He took the basket. At the door he turned around, because there was a question in his mouth and no room left to keep it.
“Who’s Meilin?”
Edevane didn’t look up. The pestle didn’t start again, either. The old man sat with it resting in the mortar and his eyes on the jars, and the stove ticked, and the rain went on, and after a long time he said, “Go to the market, Kane.”
So Kane went to the market.
* * *
He went the long way, by the river path, because his feet chose it.
The ferry was tied up at the bend, a flat broad boat with a cabin at one end and a lantern on a pole, and a woman sat on the landing coiling rope. Sixty, maybe. Or forty. The light kept changing its mind about her. She had her sleeves rolled to the elbow and a bag of oranges at her feet, and when he came along the path she didn’t look up so much as allow him to arrive.
“Kane,” she said.
“Morning.”
“Is it.” She coiled another loop. “You’ve woken up.”
Not you’re up. Edevane had said you’re up. This woman said woken, and put a weight on it, as if she’d been waiting at this landing for exactly that word to walk past.
“I had a fever,” he said.
“Everybody has a fever in the wet.” She held out an orange. He took it, because his hand did, and she nodded as if he’d passed something. “Tamsin,” she said. “Since you’ll be wondering. You’ll be wondering a lot, this season. Wonder quietly. People here don’t like a man who asks.”
“Who’s Meilin?”
Tamsin’s hands stopped on the rope. Only for a moment. Then she went on coiling, and looked across the river instead of at him, to the far bank, where a low house of dark cedar sat with its back to the trees and a stone apron running down into the water. Smoke lay along the river from its chimney. Even from here he could smell it under the rain, green and sweet, a smell that made the back of his throat ache.
“That,” Tamsin said, “is the question the whole valley’s spent six years not asking. Go and sell your willowbark.”
There was somebody else on the ferry that morning, a small woman in an old oilcloth sitting in the stern, who said nothing and whom the ferrywoman never once looked at. When he stepped off onto the landing she said, close at his ear, Welcome back, love, and when he turned around there was nobody in the stern at all. He’d hear her again. She never told him her name. He asked once, on a night when nobody else was on the path, and she said it was none of his business, love.
* * *
The path down from the drying-house went in switchbacks across the face of the west terraces, and by the second switchback he had stopped walking and was standing in the rain with his mouth open.
The valley was talking.
Not people. Everything. The river at the bottom, brown and fast and full, carrying stones that knocked along its bed like somebody rapping on a door. The cedar awnings along the market, drumming under the rain, each one a different pitch depending on how old the wood was. A wheel somewhere, singing a falling note. Bells. Somebody’s drum. A goat with opinions. It all came up out of the valley to him in layers, like a choir warming up in a room where nobody had told them they were in the same choir, and every layer had a shape, and he could hear every shape.
He’d lived here two springs. Apparently. He’d walked down this path a hundred times. And it was as if somebody had come along in the night and switched the valley on.
He stood there until a woman with a barrow of turnips said, “Morning, Kane,” in a voice that suggested he’d been standing there quite a while, and he said, “Morning,” and went on down.
* * *
The market ran along the river under the awnings, and it was worse up close, and better.
The fishwife’s drum told you the price in rhythm. The knife-grinder’s wheel went up a note when the edge was coming and down a note when it was done. A square gray man with a cough had a frame of copper bells and was ringing them, one at a time, for people holding up bags of ginger, and the people were humming back at him, lower, and Kane understood after about a minute that this was haggling. They were haggling in pitch. A girl of maybe nine bargained a root down by a whole tone and walked off looking like a general.
He stopped by the bell frame because he couldn’t help it.
“Kane,” said the gray man, and rang him a low bell, which seemed to mean good morning.
“Morning,” Kane said. “Bao,” he added, because it was on the frame, painted, and it seemed likely.
Bao gave him the sort of look Edevane had given him. Jar, label, off. Then he coughed into his fist and went back to his ginger.
And then, from the far end of the market, by a fountain under a leaking awning, somebody started to play a harp.
He didn’t notice the market songs. He was told afterward there’d been market songs, a rain tune and a boat tune and something about a heron, and he believed it, but he never heard them. What he heard, after a while, was the last thing. The chord.
It came up out of the harp slow and falling. It had the shape of a grief song, a shape he knew, which was ridiculous because he had no grief songs in him at all. It climbed. It gathered. All around him the market leaned toward it, actually leaned, a hundred heads tilting the same way like grass in wind, because everybody could hear where it was going. There was a note coming. The note that would bring it home.
He knew the note. He knew exactly which string it was on.
And he knew, a breath before it happened, that it wasn’t going to come.
The chord stopped one string short. It hung there open over the fountain in the wet air with nowhere to land, and the whole market rocked back on its heels as if somebody had pulled a chair out from under it, and something under Kane’s breastbone, right under the button of his shirt pocket, rang like it had been struck.
He put his hand flat on it. He didn’t decide to.
“I know that chord,” he said.
He didn’t say it loud. He said it to himself, as you’d say there’s my key when you find it in the coat you’ve already checked. But the market had gone quiet in the way markets do after that chord, apparently, and the harpist’s hand stopped on the strings, and she looked up.
He’d sold this woman willowbark every two weeks for two springs. He’d never seen her in his life.
She was dark-haired, with it tied back hard, and a face that had been pleasant once and then had been made, by something, into a fence. Thirty or so. Sitting very straight with the harp across her knees and a cap at her feet with copper in it. She considered him as you’d consider a dog that had just spoken.
“No,” she said. “You don’t.”
He met her eyes, and found that his own were wet and that he couldn’t remember when that had started.
“It doesn’t land,” he said. “Does it. It stops before the last note. It always stops there. Because she never finished it.”