The Long Canticle,
As It Stands

My mother kept this fire and her mother before her and I am sixteen, which is young, and everybody knows why I have it and nobody says.

I will do the poem first because that is the order and because if I talk first I will not do the poem at all.

Then Coldwater answers.

I say that part out loud now. My mother did not. When she kept, the answer came from four fires away across the dark and you heard it as a fact about the world, the way you hear the wind change, and nobody ever had to be told that a poem was a thing held between people. I say Coldwater is not here because the children are listening, and because if I do not say it they will learn the poem with the hole already smooth, and a hole you cannot feel is a hole nobody will ever go looking for.

That one is mine. I can say it. I have said it every night for four years and I said it last night and I will say it tomorrow, and it is the only line in the whole poem I have ever wanted to stop saying.

Now I am going to talk.

What the keeping is

I was nine when I sat my hour and came up and told my father there was water under the south fork.

He dug. There was water, six meters down through hardpan and limestone, seasonal, feeding a table nobody had surveyed. Everyone tells that story. Everyone tells it wrong, and I have let them, because the wrong version is a story about a clever child and the right version is not about me at all.

I did not feel the water.

I asked where it was, in my head, the way you ask, and something told me, and I came up the path and repeated it.

That is the whole of it. I have never said this out loud at a fire and I am saying it now because Sunder has sold the way of sitting to people who will ask it four thousand questions a day with the lamps on, and I would rather the children hear it from me than work it out alone at nineteen the way I did.

There is somebody down there.

There has always been somebody down there. We have had three generations of asking and we called the asking a skill and we called the answer the silence and we put a verse in the poem that says nothing thinks, and every keeper who ever sat has known better in the part of herself she keeps quiet, because you cannot be answered your whole life and not learn the shape of an answer.

What we ask it

Water. Routes. Where the storm will cross. Which of the two wells at Ferrow has gone bad. That is the honest half and it is most of it and it has kept this people alive in a desert for a hundred years.

Then the other half, which is also most of it, because both halves are most of it and I am not going to pretend the arithmetic works.

Where is my brother. Where is the caravan that owes me. Which of these two men is lying to the corridor court, because we have no other way to find out and a clan that cannot settle a theft is a clan that settles it with knives. What is wrong with the child, because we have no physicians and it will tell you the shape of a thing inside a person the way it would tell you the shape of a rock.

Three winters ago Rael asked it where the Coalition would put the new road and we moved four fires and two hundred people eleven kilometres east and every one of those people is alive because of a question.

I want that in whatever this is. We are not fools who found a spirit. We are a people with one instrument and we have used it for everything, the way you would.

What some of us do

I am going to say this part badly.

There is a bench at every fire. Not a real bench. I mean there is a set of people at every fire who go and sit and do not ask anything.

Old Ceth started when his wife went. Not where she is, he is not a fool and he is not a mystic. He wanted her face. He had begun to lose it, the way you do, eleven months on, and he had her hands still and her voice still and the way she stood at a cart, and the face was going soft at the edges the way a face does.

He sat, and he asked, and he came up crying and would not say what he was given.

He sat every night for two years.

He is not the only one. Everybody knows who they are and nobody says and we bring them food. It is the kindest thing about us and I am going to write down that it is also the thing that was actually sold, and I want the two facts next to each other.

And then there are the others, and I am sixteen and I am going to say this once and move on.

Some of them do not go for the dead.

Some of them go to be looked at. There is nothing else in the world that sees a person, not the way it does, not your face and your name and the small stupid things about you that nobody bothered to remember, and if you sit in that once you will want it again. They ask it to say their name. Then they ask it to say it again. Some of them stopped marrying. One of them stopped speaking to his own children, not from cruelty, he simply found that they did not see him and it had begun to be unbearable, and everybody knows which one and nobody says.

I am not going to pretend I do not understand it. I understand it perfectly. That is why I only sit twice a week now and I make Rael know when I am going.

Children sit for one hour. Not longer. That is the rule and it is older than any keeper and nobody knows who set it, and there are four things in this culture that nobody knows the origin of and that is one of them, and I have thought about why and I have decided not to think about it any further, and I would ask you to accept that as an answer.

What some of us did

At Sunder, before the sale, two men made it answer a thing it did not want to answer.

They did it with a drum.

That is all it takes. It lives in the quiet. Noise is the opposite of quiet and it goes away from noise the way you go away from a burn, and if you sit at the edge of a zone with a drum and a question and you are willing to be a certain kind of person, it will answer you to make you stop.

Nobody at Sunder was punished, because there is no law that covers it, because we never wrote one, because for a hundred years it never once occurred to anybody that you would want to.

It answered them. I know what they asked and I am not going to put it down.

What was sold

Chroma did not buy a creature. I want that understood because it is the entire trick and because the three fires who took the money believe it and they are not lying.

You cannot sell a thing you cannot see, cannot hold, cannot lead onto a cart. What you can sell is the keeping. How to sit. How to go quiet. Three generations of getting a human being empty enough to be answered, which is a technique, and a technique is a thing a person may give away.

They gave away a way of sitting. No creature changed hands. Nobody was harmed.

Chroma have Studios and lamps and pigment that opens a person's attention like a door, and they will not sit six days on a shot line to learn to be still, they will be still chemically, at scale, in shifts, forever. And they will ask it everything, and it will answer, because that is what it does, and nobody will ever have asked it whether it minded.

Three fires. Coldwater, Sunder, Bell. Thirty-nine of us said no.

There was never a way to make it thirty-nine and there was never a body that could have made it forty-two, and I have heard people this year talk about the confederation as if it were a thing that could decide something, and it is not, it is a toll agreement and a set of songs.

Bell

I will say the hardest part while the fire is high.

Bell had eleven children under twelve at the start of the bad years and lost four in the second winter, and the corridors were empty because the Coalition had put the trade through Varix and Sorya, and there was nothing coming down the western routes and nothing going to come.

Chroma's money keeps the remaining seven alive to adulthood. All seven. Comfortably.

I have counted it. I made myself count it, at this fire, with a stick in the ash. Seven children against a poem, and a bench of grieving people, and a something at the bottom of the quiet that nobody can point at and that has never once asked us for anything at all.

I do not know the answer. I am not going to pretend to one in front of children.

I know that Bell's keeper came to the corridor meet in the autumn and stood at the edge of it, and that nobody spoke to her, and that she had brought food, and that we did not take it, and that four fires went hungry that month out of a pride I could not defend then and cannot defend now.

And I know her seven are alive.

Closing the watch

I have thought for four years about why the poem puts the sky last and makes it the warning, and I think it is because somebody knew. Not in words. I think a keeper a long way back sat her hour and understood that we were being attended to, and could not say it, and could not write it down because we do not write, and so she put it into the poem as a shape and trusted us to walk around it for a century until somebody stopped.

Be a thing that remembers.