Chapter 18 The Return

The way out was easier in the ebb than it had been on the flood, which is the whole of what an ebb is for. They went down the west apron on the ballast Corvin had made, which had settled overnight into a bank you could walk on, and Rann's punt went first with nine of his men on it and two of them rowing, and the two of them rowing had not been able to swim when they came out of that room and could now, which Vael said was the difference between a river and a canal and was the only joke she made in two days. The walled-up doorway was still open. Corvin went through it and put his hand on the dressed stone of the jamb, and there was a groove in it at the height of a man's shoulder that had not been worn by a man in a hundred and fifty years, and he understood on the way past that the city-builders had not walled a door up to keep something in. They had walled it up to keep something out, and had then gone away, and had then been remembered by nobody at all. Vael's hands were the price of the four minutes and she had wrapped them in two strips torn off her own shirt and had not mentioned it, and Corvin did not mention it either, and the not-mentioning was the arrangement for the rest of their lives. They came down into the Second River at midday with a mile and a half of current to fight, and the punt fought it, and the three of them got through the tunnel mouth at about two o'clock and into the drowned quarter of Mirefall, where the silt was a floor and the forty-foot ceiling moved overhead and the nine bars of light came down through it in slow bars. The chapel door was open. Selka was in the doorway with her sleeves up and mud to the elbow, which is how Corvin had last seen her, and she had not moved from that doorway in two days and two nights. "Third gallery," she said. "Not the first. The water came to the third gallery and stopped, and I have it in writing from a boy who can write, and I have been standing here since half past four yesterday waiting for one of you to come up that tunnel so that I could stop being the woman who is waiting." "It is clear." "Clear." "The throat is open. I put the light in it." Selka looked at the mud on him, and at the mud on Vael, and at the torn strips round Vael's hands, and she arrived at it faster than Corvin had expected and much more quietly. "You spent the compass." "Yes." "In the throat." "In the throat, on the bed, at about ten past twelve. The silt went over it and I did not get it back and I am not going to pretend to you that I tried for longer than a minute, because I did not, and I had four minutes in there myself and I spent all four of them thinking about the front door of my own house." "You should have thought about the front door of this river." "Yes," Corvin said. "I thought about your front door first. It took me most of a day and it did not help." She turned her head and shouted into the chapel, and eleven people came out of it, and Teviot came out last with a slate in each hand and a list on the back of a barge board, and she had been awake for two days and had counted every niche in that wall twice, both names, and she handed the board to Selka and said, "The second names are grouped. Nine groups. All nine of them are in the Second and Third galleries, and the Fourth gallery list is the only one that is a list of people who are still alive, and there are twenty-six of them and Serr and Bain are two of the names because their mother is in the Fourth." "How many of the Fourth gallery can swim." "Twenty-two," said Teviot. "Four cannot. Three of those four cannot hear, and the fourth is a man of sixty and he will not go into water and he has told everybody so for twenty years." "Then he stays," Corvin said. "That is what I wrote on the board." Teviot looked at him properly for the first time. "I put his name at the bottom with a line under it. It is the only name on the board that has a line under it and I have not told Selka and I am telling you, and you can decide whether to tell her before we get there, and I would rather you did, and I would rather you did it now than at the tunnel mouth in front of him." Corvin took the board and looked at the line. "Tell her," he said. "Not at the tunnel mouth. On the way. She will take it better being told while she is walking." The number of the dead went into the book that night, all of it, and Selka wrote the slate-names herself because her hand was the hand that had cut the first four hundred, and it took until about three in the morning, and nobody in that chapel said anything to anybody else for the whole of it, and at the end Corvin found his own name written in a list of eleven river-kin who had swum the culvert and come back, and he did not argue about it, and she did not look up when she wrote it. At four she put the pen down and said the thing she had come out of the doorway to say, two days ago, in the middle of a night, and said it now as though it were ordinary. "The ninth tide is on the twenty-second." Vael said, "The gate closes." "The gate closes. All nine of them, at once, on the turn of the last tide that will come up this valley in my lifetime or in yours." Selka stood up and put her hand on the wall of the chapel, on a slate, and did not take it off. "They turn the gates forever on the last tide, and then there is no more water in this river that anybody can argue with, because there is no more coming. A gate is a promise. The last tide takes the promise away." "Then the Second River is a room," Corvin said. "The Second River is a room, and the room is a hundred and fifty years deep, and there are two hundred and nine people in it, and twenty-two of them can swim, and one of them will not get in the water, and a quarter of the way up that depth is where the river goes over the lip of the old silt into the Second River proper." She said it perfectly level. "In the last tide, the water comes up to the lip. It does not come over. And after that it comes down, and stays down, and everything between the lip and the drowned quarter becomes dry for the first time since the city was a city, and stays dry, and the two hundred and nine of us are living in a dry hole with a river at the bottom of it going nowhere." Teviot said, "So we go up." "There is no up," Selka said. "There is the drainage, and the drainage is what you have been standing in for two days, and I have four hundred years of it mapped and I can tell you that every one of those routes ends in a gate, and every one of those gates is going to be shut, and the shutting is not a thing a man does with a bar. It is a thing the river does to a gate once, and then that gate is a rock." Nobody said anything for a while. The water under the chapel came up four inches, went, and came back, which was a thing that had happened about a hundred and forty million times. "Then it is the Fourth gallery," Corvin said at last. "Twenty-six of them, nine feet above the lip, and a way out that does not go through a gate." "There is a way out that does not go through a gate," Selka agreed, "and I have not said the word, and you have not asked me to, and I have been waiting a day and a night to see whether you would work it out or whether you would just ask me for a boat." "I am not going to ask you for a boat." "Then I will tell you what it is, and then I will tell you what it costs, and it is not a boat, and it is not a gate, and it is the only thing in this river that is older than the city-builders." She turned the lamp so that the light went on the four hundred slates and on the second names cut underneath them. "And you are going to say no to it, and I am going to make you hear it anyway, because you have been carrying other people's decisions for two days and somebody has to carry yours."