第59章 The Long Way Back

The thaw came early that year, and they raced it south across the ice with the barometer falling and the sea talking under the runners in long groaning syllables, like a language recovering an old word. They lost the horse at the second pressure ridge. Not to injury — to sense — for the animal simply stopped at the black seam of open water where the tide had bitten a lead through the track, and would not be persuaded, and Sandell said afterward it was the only intelligent creature in the party. They went around by the north, over young grey ice that bent under the sledge runners with a sound Brennan said he never wanted to hear again as long as he lived, and at the crossing of the lead the sledge's left runner went through, and the machine's case began to slide, and Brennan had it by the strap and was waist-deep in the freezing gulf before anyone could speak. Sandell hauled him out with a boathook and no ceremony at all. They ran then, hard, for the seal hunter's hut that showed its turf roof against the sky-line like a knuckle, and stripped him and rubbed him down and packed him into blankets before the little stove, feeding him brandy in spoonfuls while his teeth chattered out something that was either profanity or prayer. The machine case had gone into the water to the depth of one hand-span. Margaret sat up until four in the morning drying its interior by turns at the stove door, page by page of punched paper, brush assembly by brass tooth, while Vane slept sitting upright against the door frame with the false ledger's remaining twin copy under her coat — because, she said, a counterfeit is only as good as its backups — and when the hum came back at dawn, faint but whole, Margaret put her forehead briefly against the warm wood of the case and allowed herself exactly ten seconds of being a woman whose father's inheritance had nearly drowned. Sandell set them ashore at Nauvo before noon and would take nothing for the crossing except Brennan's cardigan, which he declared had earned its keep and deserved a good harbour to retire in. The rest of the way was rails, and rails meant checkpoints. The coastal battery post held them two hours at the causeway. A lieutenant named Korhonen, young and exact and tired, read their survey credentials twice, looked longest not at the papers but at Eleanor Vane's face, and asked where madam had been keeping herself these past years, in that particular light voice which is how officials ask whether you are worth the paperwork of arresting. Vane told him she had kept a light. He considered this; he looked at the logbooks stacked in their luggage; he looked at Brennan, who returned the look with the expression of a man who has fished bodies out of rivers and expects to fish this officer's superiors out of history; and he stamped everything, wished them a quick thaw, and held the door. Margaret understood that somewhere behind his tiredness lived a Finn who had decided years ago which side of history the honest records belonged to, whatever the armistice brought. At every station the news ran ahead of them like fire along a fuse: the peace feelers were real now, printed in whispers on the platforms, confirmed in the shape of legation couriers travelling without luggage and embassy chimneys standing in rows like factory stacks, smoking paper from morning till night. In the train south, while Brennan slept off the cold and Vane read her own old logbooks as though saying farewell to them, Margaret drafted the bond. She wrote it three times. The first draft was too humble and would have invited amendment; the second was too proud and would have invited fear; the third was simply a contract, which was the whole point — clauses that could be audited by anyone, obligations that bound the reader more tightly than the read. *I accept the office of reader under restriction. I will read what is true. I will record what I read. I will publish what is recorded. I will write no man's fate, and no date shall be woven by my hand to fall upon another.* She showed it to Vane across the compartment table, and Vane read it twice and made one mark on it, moving a comma, and said it was the first document of the loom's acquaintance that improved under a teacher's pencil. Helsinki received them on the evening of March the second with the smell of burning card-index thick over the white city, sirens practising in the distance for a war or a peace, nobody certain which. Erik was alive. He had come up the cellar stair to meet them — against Edith's written instructions, she said, and produced the instruction in evidence, dated and signed — and he stood holding the rail while Margaret laid the machine on its table beside its twin, and set Erik's own book of hands between them, open to the last blank page, where the third draft stood copied out fair in ink, because some things must not be erasable. Erik read it four times, moving his lips, the way he did with all important text. Then he laughed — a small dry sound, like a book opening for the first time in decades. "Your father wrote almost these same words," he said. "In 1940, in the margin of his refusal, in the hand you know better than mine. *A reader who will not write fates* — those are his phrases, child, dressed in your grammar. He never got to sign. The fire was the loom's answer to the unsigned page." He closed the book and pressed both hands flat upon its cover, and the strength seemed to run out of him between one breath and the next, so that Edith took his elbow and Brennan pulled forward the stool. "Tomorrow, at the date, we learn whether the loom will accept a bond instead of a master. And if it refuses your oath—" "Then I will sit in the chair anyway," Margaret said, "and lie to it in good faith." Above them, faint through the floorboards, the church bell rang nine, and the machines slid into unison for the first time since the raid, and held the note, patient as arithmetic, waiting for morning.