Chapter 19 The Last Closing

The weir was the oldest thing in the valley and it was not a gate, and that was the whole argument. It lay a quarter of a mile above the drowned quarter, where the Second River came out from under the silt and turned over a lip of dressed stone four feet high, and it had been put there by something that had not been the city-builders, and it had been there so long that the two ends of it had grown together at the water line and the river had made a hinge of it. Selka took Corvin and Vael up there on the morning of the twentieth in weather that had come in from the west and was not going to improve. "Look at the wear on the top face," she said. "That is not water. That is rope. Generations of somebody drawing this by hand, on the ebb, to let a boat out of the Second River into the Thorn above the gates." "Your people drew it." "Our people drew it every ebb for a hundred and fifty years, and the city-builders put the Ninth across the top of it, and the Ninth has held ever since, and the Second River has been a room ever since." She put her hand flat on the stone. "On the last tide, the river comes up to this lip. It does not come over. It has never come over. Nine gates close and this is the one that stays shut by itself, and it stays shut by being nine feet of ballast and a hundred and fifty years of silt in a throat, and the only thing holding it is the work you did two nights ago." "If we cut the weir, the Thorn's last water goes into the Second River." "It goes into the Second River and the Second River goes down. Not all of it. A sixth of it, maybe. The rest goes out the way it came in, a hundred and fifty years of tunnels, and it goes out through the drowned quarter and out under the sill and down to the Thorn below the gates, and everything between here and the drowned quarter comes down eight feet and stays down." She said it the way she said everything. "Eleven galleries dry. Two hundred and nine people in a dry room with a river at the bottom of it going nowhere, and a weir to sit on, and no gate anywhere above them that anybody can ever open again." "The Fourth gallery is between here and the lip." "The Fourth gallery is two feet below the lip." Corvin looked at the water going over the stone for a while. "No," he said. "It is the only way." "It is *a* way." He turned round. "Selka, I have been in a hole in a river for two days and I have spent the thing I spent four days and a career and a name getting to keep. I am not saying no to you because I have a better idea. I am saying no to you because your idea drowns the fourth gallery and there are twenty-six people in it, and one of them is a man of sixty who told everybody twenty years ago that he would not get in the water, and his name is on a board with a line under it and I would like to look at you when you tell me how that ends." Selka did not answer. Vael, who had been standing eight feet back with her hands in the sleeves of a coat that was not hers, said, "There is another way up." "There is a way up the drainage." "There is a way up out of the river." Vael came forward and looked at the water going over the lip and did not look at either of them. "Corvin. The apron. Nine feet of ballast on a dressed sill, tipped wet in one piece, and then forty cartloads of it knocked off the top of it in the dark two nights ago, and then nine feet of it walked on for a day and a night by eleven men and a punt." "That is not a road." "It is not a road," Vael said. "It is a bank. It has silt in it and shell in it and broken ends of things, and it has been under forty feet of water for six weeks, and it has just had the top forty cartloads taken off it, and the underneath forty are still lying at the angle they were tipped at, and wet ballast packed at that angle and walked on for a day is the only substance in this valley that I have ever seen which is closer to cement than to mud." "Vael—" "It is nine feet of bank the width of the apron at the mouth of the Ninth, and the apron is what the whole gate is built around, and on the last tide the Ninth closes and the bar comes down and the water comes over the apron, and if you put two hundred and nine people across that bank in one day they will be over the lip of it when the river stands highest, because the water cannot climb nine feet of packed ballast at the same angle a river climbs a mud bank." She stopped, and then said the rest of it quietly. "And it is not a gate. That is the whole of it. Nothing opens and nothing shuts. It is a road a man made by accident while he was doing a job he was ashamed of, and it is the only way out of this river that does not have a bar in it." They walked back down to the drowned quarter in the rain, and Selka did not speak for two hours, and at the top of the apron that evening she put two hundred and nine people to work on a bank of nine feet of ballast in the dark, with no carts, and no light but the compasses of four river-kin who had carried them for eighty years and would not give them up. They got ninety-one of them up before the tide began to make. At about two in the morning the Fourth gallery emptied, and Teviot brought the man down the gallery steps on his own arm, and he stopped at the lip of the apron and would not go on, and said the thing he had been saying for twenty years. Corvin did not argue with him. He put the flat punt's pole across behind his heels and let him hold it, and they went up the ballast together, one step at a time, and it was not dignified, and nobody watched them do it except Vael. At four o'clock the tide came up the Thorn and stopped at the Ninth, and the gates began to go over. There is no other word for it. Corvin stood on the bank above the drowned quarter and felt the bar in the seat through nine feet of ballast, and felt it go down, and heard the sound come up through the stone of the apron that a man who had been on the Thorn for thirty years had told him was a sound nobody can describe and every ferryman recognises, and the last of the nine went. They stood there until it was light. Some of the river-kin had been awake for two days and stood on a bank of made ballast in the rain and watched nine gates close behind a river, and the last of them going was the ninth, and it did not make any sound that was different from the others, which Corvin found, and which he was still thinking about a year later, to be the single cruellest thing the river ever did.