16.

The Borrowed Grave

Orbag, spring, Year 30 AGH

“You can't draw again just because you don't like it,” a child shouted in the yard.

Bartholomew lifted one finger from the arm of his chair.

“A serious objection,” he told the kitchen. “Delivered much too late.”

Ragh put the breakfast cups beside the basin. Through the open window he could see a small hand thrust into a pot, then three other hands attempting to prevent its withdrawal. His mother had her back to the window and her hands in the dough. She had already told Bartholomew that if he wanted to conduct the children's affairs, he could go outside and help them.

“They've made a new rule,” Ragh said.

“That one was inevitable.”

“The rule is that you don't get a turn.”

“An excellent constitution. I shall support it from here.”

Kazmira held out a floury hand. Ragh passed her the bowl and shifted the cups farther from the edge of the board. Outside, someone had been elected to something against their will. The protest carried clearly into the kitchen.

Bartholomew sat in his usual place, long legs angled clear of the table, the sunlight catching silver in the black fur at his muzzle and ears. Once, when Ragh was small, he had believed that the chair belonged to him in the same way the window belonged to the wall. At thirty, he still looked for Bartholomew there before he looked anywhere else.

The commentary dwindled. Ragh rinsed a cup. Kaz turned the dough and pushed it away with the heels of her hands. Beyond the window, the children were having the vote again.

“The thing nobody ever tells you about luck is—” Bartholomew said.

Ragh held the cup above the basin, waiting.

Barth's mouth was slightly open. He had sounded interested, as though the rest of the sentence had just occurred to him. Ragh looked toward his mother. Her hands had stopped.

For three breaths she did not move.

Then she drew her hands out of the dough and wiped them on the cloth beside the board. She worked the flour from one finger, then the next. Ragh set down the cup. By the time he turned back, she had crossed to the chair.

“Bart?” he said.

Kaz closed his eyes. Her palm stayed on the silver top of his head. The children broke into a shout outside, several voices insisting that it was somebody else's turn.

Ragh could see the place on Barth's sleeve where the morning sun ended. He had been about to ask him something. He could not remember what it was, or whether it had been a question at all.

“Go and open the door,” his mother said. “The whole town is about to come through it.”

He went. In the passage he put his hand against the wall before he reached the latch.

The first person he saw was a neighbor on her way to market. She stopped when he said her name. He told her, and she stood looking past him into the passage, her basket still looped over her arm.

“Oh,” she said.

She set the basket down inside the gate and came in.

*   *   *

By noon, Ragh had stopped answering every knock. The door was open, and someone had brought a bench for the passage. People sat for a little while or went through to Kaz, and others waited by the gate without needing to be told.

A man arrived with a covered pot that was too hot to hold comfortably. Ragh reached for it and was given the warning after he had already taken its weight.

“Bottom's hot.”

“Yes.”

He had nowhere to put it. There were loaves on the table, a dish of cold meat on the board, a basket of clean cloths on the only empty chair. The man caught one handle again while Ragh shifted the basket with his elbow.

“Here,” said the neighbor who had been going to market. She took the cloths, set them on the bench and cleared the chair. “And leave the lid on. It won't want serving yet.”

Ragh lowered the pot.

“Who is waiting outside?” he asked.

“I'll see.”

She went, and for the first time since morning he did not follow a question to the door.

His mother was washing her hands. There was flour dried around one nail that she could not seem to get loose. He put the brush beside her, and she used it. Neither of them said anything. Someone in the passage asked whether they wanted another table. Kaz dried her hands and said yes, the narrow one if it could be spared.

People brought word of other streets. The smith had put his tools down. The ferry was moored. Shops had closed with customers still inside, and the customers had helped with the shutters. Ragh knew which shops would have been losing a day's good trade. He listened to their names while he found a place for a sack of flour.

One of the visitors caught him in the passage.

“Was he awake?”

“He was talking.”

“What did he say?”

Ragh gave him the sentence. He could hear how it ought to go on. The man waited, looking at him with the expectant attention Bartholomew had always been able to collect in a room.

“That was all,” Ragh said.

The man nodded slowly. He moved out of the way so two neighbors could carry the narrow table through.

Hjalmar came late in the afternoon with the will in a flat leather case. The young orc took his hat off at the threshold and did not put it back on. He asked for somewhere he could spread the pages, and Ragh cleared the new table for him.

“Tomorrow,” Hjalmar said. “Before the burial. There are instructions about the place.”

Ragh nodded.

“And the reading.” Hjalmar laid his finger beside a passage, keeping it off the writing. “He asks for the largest room available.”

Ragh bent to look. He read the words while everyone is still usefully sad twice.

“The hall,” he said.

“I've sent to ask.”

“They'll open it.”

“I thought they might.”

The notary started to put the pages back in order. Ragh wanted him to leave the one with the burial instructions where it was. He also wanted never to see it again. Hjalmar waited while Ragh read to the bottom, then took it when he let go.

By evening the Thing Assembly had recorded the mourning that was already happening in the streets. A messenger brought word that the hall would be ready. Outside Kaz's gate, people were arranging who would wait through the night and who would come back in the morning.

Ragh went to find his mother. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a piece of bread in front of her. He sat beside her and took another piece. It was still soft in the middle.

*   *   *

The hall was full before Hjalmar stood on the speakers' stone.

Ragh had found his mother a place on a bench near the rear wall. Tarren stood at the bench’s end in their weather-cloth. People had offered Kaz places farther forward. She had thanked them and stayed where she was. Ragh sat on her other side, with his knees turned to make room for the last person squeezing past.

He could see Hjalmar between two heads. The notary had laid out the pages and checked their order. On a table below him stood a small ironbound chest.

Hjalmar looked up. The talk diminished, then stopped.

“Being of sound mind,” he read, “a claim my executor is instructed to read with a straight face or not at all—”

A laugh broke out near the front. Several people joined it before Hjalmar had finished the next words.

He stopped. He looked at his place on the page, waited, and began the clause again.

“I set down here what is to be done with everything I am leaving, which is more than I arrived with, and less than you all gave me, and exactly as much as fits in a will.”

Ragh lowered his head. The words sounded strange in Hjalmar's careful voice, and still he could hear Bartholomew choosing them. He looked toward the stone expecting the notary to be annoyed. Hjalmar was following the next line with his eyes, his lips shut firmly over whatever expression he had decided was correct.

The first bequests were read. There were names Ragh knew and practical instructions that made people look for one another across the benches. A door at the side opened to admit latecomers and was held open because there was no more room for them inside.

Then Hjalmar said, “To Kazmira, my landlady of twenty-nine years.”

Beside Ragh, his mother made a small sound through her nose.

The chest held the rent. All twenty-nine years of it, saved coin by coin, counted to the day, with interest. Hjalmar said the last part in the same exact voice he had used for the rest. He had checked the arithmetic, he said.

Kaz sat forward.

“Twenty-nine?” she said.

Several heads turned. Hjalmar looked up and nodded.

“Counted to the day.”

Ragh had seen the chest being carried in. He had thought it would contain papers. He looked at it again, at its ordinary latch and the rubbed iron around the corners. He could not remember seeing it in the house.

“There is a note,” Hjalmar said.

Kaz's hands lay empty in her lap.

“You would never have taken it warm. Buy flour. Feed everyone. You always do.”

She pressed her lips together. Her chin moved, and she lifted one hand too late to hide the tears. Ragh reached into his pocket and found nothing useful. Before he could get up, Tarren had put a folded cloth on the bench beside her.

Hjalmar waited. A man in front of them bent to move his bag from beneath somebody else's feet. Farther along the bench, a woman looked down and worked a loose thread back into her cuff. Kaz unfolded the cloth with both hands.

“Go on,” she said.

Hjalmar did.

“To Ragh, every story I ever told him, with the true parts marked.”

Ragh looked up sharply.

For years he had suspected there must be some way of sorting them. Bartholomew had been able to put an absurd thing beside an ordinary one and make the ordinary thing look doubtful. Even now, Ragh's first thought was that the promised marks might be on another sheet.

Hjalmar picked up a slip from among the pages.

“There is no key,” he read.

Ragh shut his eyes.

“Half the work of loving somebody is deciding which parts were true. You have been doing it since you were six. Continue.”

His mother leaned against his arm. It was brief, no more weight than she needed to shift herself on the bench. Ragh opened his eyes in time to see Hjalmar placing the slip beside the rest of the document, where it could be given to him afterward.

Twenty-four years, then, and another instruction to get on with it. Ragh wanted to object. He wanted Bartholomew to hear the objection, and that stopped him.

The pan flute went to the militia camp.

Hjalmar lifted it from the table so the back of the room could see. Ragh knew the darkened places around the bindings and the little repair near one end. Bartholomew had played it at festivals with an assurance that survived every note. Kaz said it had been used in the fight against Nocturne. Someone near the door laughed before the terms had been read.

“To be awarded each year to whoever pulls off the finest prank, judged by the previous winner.”

“What if he awards it to himself?” a man in a militia coat called.

Hjalmar kept his finger at the place.

“Appeals settled by whoever laughed hardest.”

“That doesn't—”

The man stopped. His neighbor was laughing too hard to hear him. Hjalmar waited until he could be heard again and set the flute down with care.

The tea recipe was for Eren.

“The tea she has been pretending to like since the war,” Hjalmar read, “so that she can finally, with honor, stop.”

Kaz let out a wet, unwilling laugh. Ragh had to look at the floor. He had drunk that tea often enough.

The folded recipe went beside the other things to be delivered. Hjalmar read on. When laughter started, he let it run, keeping the next words for when people could hear them.

At last he turned a page and held it still.

“Last,” he read. “To Tarren.”

Ragh felt his mother straighten beside him.

“Thirty years ago, on this same mountain, you got resurrected and left a perfectly good grave lying around, and it has stood empty ever since, which is untidy, and bad luck, and worse landscaping. I'm taking it. You weren't using it. Consider us square.”

No one laughed.

People at the front turned. The movement came back through the hall until all those faces were directed toward the wall beside Ragh. He could hear someone breathing through a blocked nose. Hjalmar kept the page in his hands.

Tarren looked at the notary.

Then they laughed.

It came out suddenly, loudly enough to make Kaz turn, and went on. Their shoulders dropped. Kaz's hand rose to the weather-cloth, stayed there for a breath, and was back in her lap before Tarren had finished. Ragh found himself laughing with them, and the sound was all around him now, people bent forward, a hand braced on the shoulder of the person ahead, someone calling out a word that was lost in the noise.

He knew the grave. Everyone in Orbag knew the green pocket among the rocks that had been Hammond's childhood hideout. Tarren had been buried there during the war, and had come back. For thirty years the place had remained unused.

Tarren wiped their face with the heel of a hand. They were still looking toward Hjalmar when they nodded.

He waited a little longer, then read the burial instructions.

“Bury me at the hideout, in the vacancy, facing sunrise; I never saw one sober and I intend to make up the numbers. And then, Orbag, hear me: come back up. Not once. Always. Bring food. Bring the children, bring the dogs, bring the argument you're having; the view is the best in the north and I decline to keep it to myself merely because I'm dead.”

Hjalmar turned the sheet slightly toward the window.

“The stone gets my name and my years and nothing else, because the stone is not the monument. The hill is. Sit on it. Anyone caught being solemn up here after the first year owes the camp a cask.”

The militia man began to speak again. This time his neighbor caught his sleeve, and he sat back without being heard.

*   *   *

Tarren brought the white flowers to the house before they left on the third morning.

“From Eren,” they said, giving the bound sprig to Kaz.

She laid it on the coffin herself.

Ragh climbed behind it. The path was narrower than he remembered. People made room for one another at the turns, and those carrying food kept moving aside for those carrying the weight. A child asked twice how much farther it was. The first time someone answered; the second time another child pointed up to the rocks.

The path brought them above the last trees to the hideout's green pocket among the rocks. There was room to see the town and not much room to stand. Ragh took a basket from someone who needed both hands to get over the last rise. He put it down with the others and went to the grave.

The coffin had been brought beside it. The flowers were still in place, white against the lid. There was damp soil on a boot near Ragh's own, and he looked at it for a moment before he looked down into the cut earth.

They were preparing to lower the coffin when a gray-haired woman came through the people standing nearest. Arena laurels were pinned crooked on her clothes. She took the coffin's rail in a firm grip, as though it were someone's offered forearm, and shook it once.

Ragh waited for her to say something. She let go and stepped back into the crowd.

The ropes took the weight. He watched the lid pass below the edge of the grave, the flowers descending with it. Kaz stood beside him. There was nothing for his hands to do.

People stayed when the earth was filled in. For a while they did not begin anything else. Ragh stood where he had stood through the lowering and watched a small clod break under someone's heel. Tarren had moved away from the grave-head. He could see them speaking to one of the people who had carried the coffin, but not hear what was said.

Then a woman asked whether anyone had brought a knife for the bread.

Ragh had one. He took it out and went to help.

There were too many loaves to fit on the cloth somebody had spread. He cut one into thick pieces and passed them along, then took the next. A child reached over the uncut bread for a piece with a better crust. Ragh moved the knife out of the way and let the child have it.

His mother sat on a rock eating her bread. When he looked over, she held out another piece. Ragh looked back at the loaves, put the knife down beside them and went to sit with her. With bread and meat on his knee, he discovered that he was hungry. Below them the roofs of Orbag lay close together, smoke rising from a few of the chimneys. He could pick out the road he had walked yesterday to the hall.

Someone farther along the rocks began an argument about the best way down. It was an old argument. Half the people present had already made the journey by one route or the other. They continued it while they packed the food.

Ragh helped collect the baskets. On the descent he took one from his mother and carried it with his own. She did not argue.

At home there were dishes to return and people who had waited to be useful. By the time they had gone, the kitchen was clear enough for Kaz to put supper on the table. Ragh sat with her until they had eaten. Then he said he was going for a walk.

She looked up at him.

“Take your coat.”

He took it from the peg.

*   *   *

The climb was easier without the basket. He went slowly anyway.

He wanted to stand at the grave without having to find a knife or tell anyone where to put something. At the last turn he stopped. There was movement beyond the rocks.

Tarren knelt at the grave-head with a trowel and a cloth bundle. Small white flowers lay on the opened cloth, their roots wrapped damp. They had already planted part of a row.

Ragh kept still. He was below the turn, where the rock covered most of him. Tarren eased another root into the soil and drew earth around it with two fingers. He could hear the faint scrape of the trowel.

He had been there long enough to think of going back when Tarren spoke.

“I told you at the river it wasn't your time. I stand by my work. Look what it bought: a whole town, thirty springs, and my grave, you thief.”

They tamped the soil down gently, twice.

“It's a good grave. I never got the chance to try it. They tell me the view is the best in the north.”

The wind moved through the rocks. Below, the first lamps were coming on in the town.

Ragh had his hand on the stone beside the path. He could call out, or climb the last few steps and ask whether Tarren wanted help with the flowers. He stayed where he was.

“Rest, Bartholomew.”

Ragh took his hand off the rock. He moved back until the turn hid the grave, then began to walk down.

The lamps were below him all the way home.

*   *   *

When Ragh was about a hundred, he gave his account of that spring to the Archive and asked that the kitchen be written down plainly, without music. He kept the three breaths. He kept the unfinished sentence. Asked about the dusk visit, he said what he had heard and where he had turned back.

That was the end of his account of the grave.

The will's flute passed from one prank winner to another. People kept taking food up to the hideout. And at wakes in Orbag, somewhere past the third round, someone would raise a cup and say, “The thing nobody ever tells you about luck is,” and stop.

The answers belonged to the person being mourned. They changed from table to table, from one year to the next. Nobody supplied the last words Bartholomew had failed to say.

For a hundred and seventy years, the room answered instead. Sometimes the person holding the cup had to put it down.