第20章 The Upper City

The upper city took four days to reach by the road above the valley, and the road was the reason the whole valley had been worth fighting over, and neither Corvin nor Vael had any interest in it until the fifth morning when they came over the shoulder above it and stopped. It was a market town built on a bluff where the river used to run, which is what a bluff is, and there were eleven hundred people in it, and every one of them had known, on the morning the ninth tide turned, exactly what the river had done. They had felt it. Corvin found that out on the road, from a carter who came up beside them on the last day and asked whether they had felt it, and when Corvin said that he had, the carter said, "My father said he'd felt the eighth go in his time. Eleven hundred people on this bluff and not one of us had ever felt a gate go." Then he looked at the two of them for a while, at the mud, at the torn sleeves, at the hands that had been wrapped and were not wrapped any more, and he said, "You came up out of it," which was not a question, and then he drove on and did not come back. The Nine came apart in about a month, which was faster than anybody expected and slower than anybody hoped. There was nothing to steal and nothing to let through, and a gate-guild without gates is a guild of ninety men with a uniform and a hall, and the hall was sold in the autumn to a man who wanted a warehouse. Quart handed in his badge on the sixth of the month and went down the valley on foot as far as the drowning field above Mirefall and sat on a stone, and Corvin found him there, eight months later, with a good deal of beard and a black coat that had not fitted him since the spring. "Sixteen, in the eleventh year," Quart said, before Corvin had got his breath. "I have never told the river-kin and I am not going to now, and I would like it noted that I never told them." "It is noted." "And you took a thing out of my ninth gate and put it in a hole in the floor of the world, and I have had six months to decide what to do about that, and I have decided to do nothing, because the bar comes up and it goes down easily now and there is not a man alive who could tell me what is in the throat." He looked at the water. "There is something in the throat. I can feel it in the ninth, the way you can feel a shoal. It has been there since March and it is not going anywhere and it is doing something down there, and I have decided that a gate-keeper's job is to know what is under the bar and not to ask it any questions." Rann's five men got their paper in the spring, from a licensing office in the upper city, and Rann got it with them, which surprised Corvin more than anything else in the entire business. The office had no gates to give anybody, and the work was entirely about drainage, and there were eleven thousand feet of nineteenth-century drainage in this valley that had never been on anybody's schedule, and a man who had spent a year and a half pulling ballast out of a culvert could read a silt bank the way a priest reads a psalter. The two hundred and nine went up onto the ballast bank and then up the road out of the valley in three groups over four months: the ones with trades first, then the ones with the four hundred slates, then the ones who had nowhere to be. Selka went last and went alone and took nothing but a slate and a book, and she was gone nine days and came back with an old lease on eleven acres of silt land above the drowning field and the Ninth's ninth-storey, which had come free with the dissolution of a guild, and she said it was not a good building and it had a good roof. The man of sixty, whose name was Ovain and whose name had a line under it on a barge board for three days, lived nine years. He did not learn to swim, and he told everybody that he would not, and he went into the ninth-storey kitchen on a Tuesday in the November and sat down, and Corvin — who had carried him up nine feet of ballast with a punt pole behind his heels, and who had not mentioned it in nine years — was told about it by a woman who had been in the room. They buried him on the bank above the drowning field with the four hundred slates around him, which Selka had asked for and which took nine weeks to cut, and the second names were cut by Teviot, who was twenty by then and had learned the lettering from Selka, and who cut her own grandmother's underneath a river-kin's who had drowned in a culvert six weeks before a ferryman put a compass in the water. Vael went back down the valley in the first week of May with a chart of the drainage, a bar, and a commission from Selka to survey every foot of the tunnels, and Corvin went with her as far as the drowned quarter and no further, because he had a punt to sell. He sold the punt to a man in the upper city who took the badge out of the bow with a fingernail before he paid for it, which Corvin had told him to do, and which he did. Then he went back down the road on foot with no boat and no badge and no licence, at thirty-one years of age, and the last of the first light under nine feet of water in a hole in the floor of a river, doing the only job it was ever built for. The last ferry he took was not a ferry. It was a flat punt with three inches of freeboard and a poleman of sixty-one who could not swim and did not intend to, taken out onto the drowning field on a bright morning in the September because a woman in the ninth-storey wanted to see the towers of a city that had been under forty feet of water for a hundred and fifty years and was, on the ebb, a mile of mud with nine of its forty towers standing out of it like the stumps of a burnt wood. That was a good day for it. The tide went out the way it had always gone, unhurried, patient, under the city and over the city and through the city, and the towers stood in it, and the two of them sat on a bank of packed ballast nine feet thick that a ferryman had made by accident while he was doing a job he was ashamed of, and neither of them said anything about it, because there was nothing left to say about it, and because the water was doing what it had always done, and it was going to keep doing it long after both of them.