The Marks

The boat put them off on a rock ledge at the foot of a bluff, in the rain, with four hundred other people’s property stacked around them under canvas, and Kyra Davan stood on the wet stone and understood that they had arrived at a place whose entire purpose was to be left.

It was not a town. It was a landing with a town four miles behind it. The bluff went up green and raw above the water with a cut in it where the wagons came down, and the cut was full of mud and men, and the men were not stopping to look at anything, which was how she knew the place was serious. In Lowell the men had looked. On the Delaware the men had looked. Here a woman could stand in the open in the rain with her hair coming down and a bundle at her feet and nobody had a single second to spend on her, because the season was going and the grass was coming up somewhere west of here and every hour on this ledge was an hour not spent walking.

“Two thousand miles,” Val said, beside her.

“You’ve been saying that since Wheeling.”

“I have been refining it since Wheeling.” Val had her hood back despite the weather, which she did when she wanted to see, and the rain had got into the pale of her hair and darkened it at the temples where it was always darker anyway. “It was two thousand and eighty from the Ohio. It is now a little over two thousand from here, depending on which of four people you believe, and one of the four is a man selling wagons.”

Kyra picked up her bundle. “Which one do you believe?”

“None of them yet.”

They went up the cut with everybody else. Halfway there was a place where the mud had beaten the road entirely and a freighter’s team had gone in to the hocks, and the freighter was standing in it up to his knees with his hand flat on the ox’s neck, not shouting, saying something low and continuous that Kyra could not hear and did not need to. She slowed without meaning to.

Val slowed with her.

Val stopped beside her and put her hands in her sleeves.

“He’ll get it out,” Kyra said.

“In about a quarter of an hour.”

“Twenty minutes.”

“We are not betting on a man’s livestock in the rain on the first day.”

“You say that.” Kyra started walking again. “And then in twenty minutes you’ll tell me how long it took.”

Westport had been a store and was now an industry.

You came up off the river road into it and the first thing was the smell, which was oxen and pine resin and hot iron and rope, and the second thing was the noise, which was hammering from four directions at once and did not stop while they were there and did not stop for two years afterward. The wagon yards ran back behind the main street in rows. There were men laying tires on wheels in the open, and a tire went on glowing and came off gray with the water hissing up in a sheet, and a boy walked the finished wheels down the row one at a time like a man walking cattle.

And the street had everyone in it.

Shawnee men in calico with their heads shaved back, from the mission four miles west across the line, buying the same flour everybody else was buying. Delaware. Wyandot in coats and hats, who looked like any clerk in Pennsylvania except that they were speaking Wyandot. Kaw wrapped in blankets against the wet. Santa Fe men with two years of sun on them, and Missouri farmers in for the day, and a party of Germans standing in a knot around a wagon tongue arguing about it in German, and a dozen Mormons going quietly along the far side who were not arguing about anything.

Kyra stood in the middle of it and let it come at her.

This was the part Val did not have. Val could stand in a street and count it — Val had once told her, on a wall above a port, exactly how many people were in a square and what four of them were doing wrong — but she counted it the way you read a page, one line after another, and she was never finished. Kyra took a street the way you take weather. One breath of Westport in the rain and she had it: a town with no interest whatsoever in who you were, only in whether you were buying, and going somewhere.

“I like it,” she said.

“You have been here nine minutes.”

“I like it.”

“I have no objection,” Val allowed. “I am noting the nine minutes.”

They took a room that afternoon above a harness maker, because the harness maker’s wife had a room and did not ask anything except whether they could pay. The rain came on harder in the evening and the smell of new leather came up through the floor, and Kyra lay on her back on the bed with her boots off and listened to the hammering go on in the dark.

“They’re still working.”

“They will work until the last party is gone.” Val was at the window with the shutter open, getting the last of the light. “Then the town will have four months of nothing, and then they will start again.”

“Like the mill.”

“Not like the mill. The mill made cloth for people who were not there.” Val did not turn round. “This town makes leaving. Everyone in the street today is either going, or is being paid by someone who is going. It is the first place we have lived in four hundred years where the entire economy is departure.”

Kyra put her arm over her eyes. “You’ve been composing that since the ledge.”

“Since the cut,” Val admitted.

The question came on the fourth day, which was later than either of them had expected.

It came from a man in the doorway of an outfitter’s, a heavy man with a good coat and a pencil, who had watched them price flour and then salt and then flour again, and who said, with no particular malice and no particular interest, that it was a strange thing, two women buying an outfit with no man behind them, and what exactly were they for.

Kyra gave him the answers.

She gave them in the order they had been given in for two hundred and forty years, because the order was the whole of it: the order was what made them sound like a life instead of a story. Sisters. Their father had been a Pennsylvania man. Their mother was dead. There had been a brother and the brother had gone to Texas and they had not heard. They were going out to their uncle’s people in the Willamette because the uncle had written twice. The elder one did doctoring, which had been their mother’s trade. The younger one had a hand with weather and stock. They had money enough and not a great deal more. They kept themselves to themselves, and they were obliged to him, and would he take four dollars for the barrel or five.

The man took four and a half and forgot them inside the week.

Outside, Val fell in beside her and they went up the street together past the wheelwright’s.

“You put the uncle in early,” Val said.

“He had a pencil.”

“He did.” Val was quiet for four or five steps. “That was well done. You gave him the brother before he asked for the brother, which is the piece that does the work, and I would not have thought of it in the doorway.”

Kyra looked sideways at her and did not say anything, because Val would say a thing like that about work, in a street, with people going past, and would not have said one word of it about anything else, and both of them knew exactly where that line ran and neither of them had ever once drawn it out loud.

The register was a marriage book in the county clerk’s office, and Val spent an evening with it that she had no business spending, in the way she had spent an evening with a parish book in Burlington a hundred and eighteen years before.

She came back up the stairs and sat down on the end of the bed and took her boots off before she said anything, which meant she was pleased with herself.

“Miller,” she said.

Kyra did not sit up.

“Miller.”

“Smith, Brown and Jones ahead of it, and every one of those three has a family in this county that somebody in this county has married into. Miller has eleven households and none of them are related to each other and two of them can’t spell it the same way twice.” Val set the boots side by side. “Miller is a noise.”

“And the front of it?”

“Sarah and Martha.”

Kyra lay back on the bed.

“You’re Sarah,” Val said.

“I’m always the common one.”

“You were Mary in Philadelphia. Sarah is an improvement of some magnitude.”

“You were Ann in Philadelphia,” Kyra said to the ceiling, “and I have never stopped enjoying it.”

“I am aware.”

“Ann.”

“Martha,” Val said, “and I am going to be Martha for some time, so you may as well begin.”

Kyra turned her head. Val was sitting on the end of the bed in the last of the light with her hair down her back, heavy and wet-dark near the scalp and going to the pale of it further out, doing the thing she did with her hands when a piece of work was finished, which was nothing at all. Two hundred and forty-one years of rooms above other people’s trades. A dozen names apiece. And Kyra had a clear memory, that arrived unasked and did not have to be looked for, of a hut with one bench in it and a woman who had not yet worked out that she was allowed to be looked at.

“Martha,” she said.

“Thank you.”

The wagon yards took her on the strength of a hand.

Kyra was there for it because she had gone down with her to price a yoke and had stayed to watch a man lay a tire, and so she saw all of it from the fence. A yard hand had got two fingers between a wheel and the stone the week before and the yard’s own opinion was that he would lose the hand at the wrist and that the sooner it came off the better, and the man had the opinion that he would keep it, and the two opinions had been circling each other in the yard for four days with the man getting quieter.

Val asked whether she might look. She asked it of the man and not of the owner, which Kyra noticed and the owner did not.

Then she was down on one knee in the dirt with the hand held flat in both of hers, turning it to the light, and she did not say anything at all for a long time. That was the part people always misread. They thought the silence was doubt. Kyra had watched it for two hundred and forty years and knew what it was, which was a woman reading a page and refusing to be hurried off it.

“You keep the two fingers or you keep the hand,” Val said. “Not both.”

The man said nothing.

“The two will not straighten again and they will not close, and they will be in the way of everything you do for the rest of your life, and they will hurt when the weather turns, and I am telling you that now so that you do not get to the second winter and think somebody lied to you.” She turned the hand over. “The hand is sound. The hand is not in any danger at all as long as this stays clean, and it has not been clean since it happened. If it goes yellow along here and the ache goes up the arm instead of staying in the fingers, then it is the wrist, and then it is my opinion too, and then you have a week to decide and not four days.”

The owner came over and stood at Val’s shoulder with his thumbs in his belt, and asked what she charged.

“For that, nothing. I have not done anything yet.”

“And for the rest of the season?”

Val stood up and wiped her hands, and she did not look pleased and she did not look anything, which was what she did in front of strangers and had done for as long as there had been strangers. The pale of her hair had come loose on one side and she pushed it back with the back of her wrist because her hands were dirty.

“A dollar a week,” she said, “and I come when you send, and I tell the man the truth before I tell you, and if you want it the other way round there is a doctor on the main street who will oblige you.”

The owner looked at her for a while.

“Two bits a week and the coffee.”

“Six bits and the coffee.”

“Half a dollar.”

“Half a dollar,” Val said, “and I want the stone moved.”

Kyra, on the fence, put her chin on her arms and watched her win and go on looking at nothing in particular, and thought that there were perhaps four people alive on this planet who would have seen a woman making a bargain in a wagon yard on a Tuesday, and not one of them would have seen what she had just seen, which was the slight and entirely private straightening of the shoulders of somebody who had wanted the work and had not said so.

Val did the arithmetic in the second week and brought it to the bed in the notebook, which she had kept since 1608 and which had the seventeen names in the front of it and everything else behind.

She did not hand it over. She read it out, which was worse.

A wagon, secondhand and sound, forty-five to sixty dollars. Four yoke of oxen at forty-five the yoke, and better four than three, because three yoke meant the party did the arithmetic on you at the first hard crossing and decided which wagon got left. Eight hundred pounds of flour. Two hundred of bacon. Coffee, rice, salt, saleratus. A sheet-iron stove nobody would want by the Platte and everybody would carry to the Platte anyway. Sixty dollars against sickness and breakage, because there would be both.

“Three hundred and forty,” Val said. “Three-eighty if the oxen go up, and they will go up, because oxen always go up in April and everyone who tells you otherwise is selling oxen in March.”

“And we have?”

“A hundred and ninety, and the two of us, and a winter.”

Kyra sat up. “Then we go in the spring.”

“Not this spring. Next.” Val closed the notebook on her finger. “I can get us the rest in one winter. You have weather and stock in a town that cannot get enough of either, and I have the only thing every one of those wagon yards is short of, which is somebody who can look at a man’s hand and say whether he keeps it. A winter is enough. We are on the road in April of forty-nine with a wagon that is ours and four yoke that are ours, and we are in the Willamette before the first snow.”

She said it the way she said things she had checked.

And Kyra, who had spent two hundred and forty-one years learning the difference between Val being right and Val being certain, and who could usually tell, lay back down on the bed above the harness maker’s and listened to the hammering going on in the dark, and believed her.

— end of chapter one —

The news came up the river in December, in a newspaper, four weeks old and printed in Washington, and Val read it standing in the cold outside the post office because she could not wait to get up the street.

It was a message to Congress. It was not an exciting document. It said, in the flattened voice that official documents used when they were about to change the world, that the accounts of the abundance of gold in California were of such extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service. Val read that sentence twice. Then she read the rest of it, which was mostly about Mexico, and then she folded the paper and gave it back to the man who had let her look at it and thanked him, and walked up the street to the yard and cleaned a hand and splinted a thumb and said nothing about it for two days.

She was not slow. She had understood it on the step.

What she did in the two days was the arithmetic, four times, in four different ways, because the first three came out the same and she did not want them.

By February the town had begun to fill and by March it was not a town anymore.

They came up the river on every boat. They came overland from Iowa and Illinois and down from the north and up from Arkansas, and they were not emigrants in the way the people going to Oregon had been emigrants, because emigrants brought their mothers. These men brought pistols and pans and a great deal of confidence, and they arrived in Westport with money in their pockets and no intention of spending a single day longer in Missouri than they had to.

Which meant they bought. They bought wagons at whatever wagons cost. They bought flour at whatever flour cost. They bought a mule that had been worth twenty dollars in November for ninety in April and went off down the Santa Fe road on it looking pleased.

Val watched the whole thing happen from a wagon yard where she was paid half a dollar a week and the coffee, and she kept the figures in the back of the notebook, on the page after the one where the seventeen names were, because it was the only clean page left and because she had long ago stopped being sentimental about paper.

Nine dollars a hundredweight for flour in November. Fourteen in March.

Forty-five the yoke in November.

She went down to price the oxen on the first Tuesday in April, in the morning, early, because she had learned in Trieste that the first price of the day was the honest one.

Kyra’s winter was mules.

It had begun with weather, because weather was what she sold, and a freighter on the Santa Fe road had paid her four bits in January for an opinion about the third week of the month and had come back in February to say that the opinion had been worth a good deal more than four bits and could she do it again. But the weather work was slow money and the town was full of men buying animals they could not judge, and so by the end of February Kyra was standing in the pens three mornings a week with her hands in her sleeves, being paid two dollars a head to walk down a line of mules and say which ones would still be walking at the Little Blue.

Val came down to watch her do it exactly once, and then did not come again, because it turned out to be difficult to watch.

Kyra went along the line slowly and did not touch anything. She looked at feet and she looked at eyes and she stood behind them and watched them stand, and then she went back to one particular animal and stood in front of it doing nothing whatsoever for about a minute and a half, and then she said, that one, and the man said what’s wrong with him, and Kyra said nothing’s wrong with him today.

She was right four times out of five and she could not have told anybody how.

Val could have told them. Val had watched her do it on a mountain with sheep and in a yard in Maribor with a carter’s horses and on the mole at Trieste with men, and she knew perfectly well that what looked like a gift was a hundred small readings performed at a speed nobody could introspect, and she had once spent an evening trying to break it into its parts so that she could write it down, and had failed, and had been obscurely pleased about failing.

What she had not expected, standing at the rail in February with her collar up, was how long she went on looking.

The light was flat and cold and Kyra had her hair down her back in the one thick plait she wore for work, dark and going to the color of wet copper where the low sun got into the loose of it, and her sleeves pushed up despite the weather, and her whole attention was on a mule. And Val stood at the rail with her hands in her pockets, sealed, unremarkable, a woman waiting for somebody, and looked at her for a length of time that she noticed only when the man counted the money into Kyra’s hand and the two of them turned toward the gate.

Eleven minutes, at a conservative estimate.

She put it away where she put things like that, which was not nowhere, and walked up to meet her at the gate and said that the roan had been the obvious one, and Kyra said that the roan had been the obvious one to everybody and that was why it had been worth saying the other one out loud.

The man wanted a hundred and ten.

He was not gouging her and he did not enjoy telling her. He was a Missouri farmer who had brought in eleven yoke from his brother-in-law’s place and had sold six of them before breakfast to a company of young men from Ohio who had not asked the price before they said yes, and he told her that too, because he was the sort of man who would rather be understood than admired.

“I’d take ninety from you,” he said. “I wouldn’t take ninety from them.”

“Why not from them?”

“Because they’d pay a hundred and ten and not know they’d been foolish, and I’d have to live with it.” He scratched under his hat. “You’ve been down here every week since Christmas looking at stock. You know what a yoke’s worth. That’s worth something to a man.”

Val thanked him and did not buy.

She stood in the road outside the pens afterward for rather longer than there was any reason to, with the noise of the yards going on behind her and the whole street moving west past her elbow, and she ran it one final time, standing up, with nothing to write on.

Four yoke at ninety was three hundred and sixty dollars.

They had a hundred and ninety-four and the two of them and a wagon they had not bought yet.

She had been wrong. Not by a little, and not because she had made an error — she went back through it in the road and there was no error in it; the arithmetic of November had been correct arithmetic about November. She had been wrong because the world had done something in December that no amount of care in November could have anticipated, and there was no version of herself, however careful, who could have put a column in that notebook for gold found in a millrace two thousand miles away in January and nobody tells anybody until December.

She found that she minded this considerably more than she had expected to.

Kyra was on the bed with her boots on when Val came in, which she did when she had been out in weather and wanted to be told about it.

“How much?”

“A hundred and ten. Ninety to us.”

Kyra sat up.

“Yes,” Val said.

“And flour’s fourteen.”

“Flour is fourteen and will be sixteen by the end of the month, because every man in this town is buying six months of it at once and there is one mill.” Val put the notebook on the table and did not open it. “The wagon has gone from fifty-five to ninety. A tent is a dollar and a half a yard and it was six bits in the autumn. There is a man on the main street this morning selling a machine that washes gold out of gravel and he has sold four of them and not one of the four men has ever seen gravel with gold in it.”

“Val.”

“I am telling you the figures,” Val answered.

“You’re telling me the figures in a voice.” Kyra put her feet on the floor. “Say the other thing.”

Val stood with her hands at her sides.

There was a particular quality to being looked at by Kyra Davan in a small room, which two hundred and forty-one years had not worn down at all and which she had given up trying to describe to herself with any accuracy. It was not pressure. It was the reverse of pressure. It was the sensation of a door being left open in a house where every other door was one she had shut herself, and it made her want, every single time, to walk out of the room.

She did not walk out of the room. That had been the work of a century and a half, and it was, on the whole, done.

“We are not going this year,” she said. “I got it wrong and we are not going this year, and I have been standing in a road for a quarter of an hour deciding how to say that to you, which is an absurd length of time, and I am aware of it.”

Kyra looked at her for a moment.

Then she said, “Four minutes.”

“What?”

“The freighter. In the cut, the first day.” Kyra was working her boot off. “Took him four minutes. You never told me and I’ve been waiting fourteen months.”

Val opened her mouth and shut it again.

“You said twenty,” she said.

“I said twenty because you said a quarter of an hour, and you’re unbearable when you’re right about oxen.” The boot came off. “Four minutes. He had the off ox out before you’d finished telling me we weren’t betting.”

And that was the whole of it, and it was done, and Val — who had come up the stairs with a speech and a column of figures and a small hard knot under the ribs that had been there since the road — stood in the middle of the room and found that the knot had gone and that she could not identify the exact moment of its going.

They did not talk about the year they were losing until the middle of the night, which was when they talked about things.

“It’s an object,” Val said, to the ceiling. “That is the part I keep returning to. A wagon is an object. It is the largest object either of us has owned since a house in Trieste, and I made a rule about objects on a road out of Boston in seventeen twenty-five and I have kept it for a hundred and twenty-four years.”

“My rule was about the object, because I could not be trusted with the reasoning.”

“Your rule was a key and a room in anybody’s house and a place at a table laid for us.” Kyra said it into the dark, without moving. “A wagon is nothing but walking away.” “That’s the entire point of a wagon. It’s a room that runs.”

Val lay in the dark and considered that, and could not fault it, and was aware that Kyra had produced in nine words a distinction it would have taken her four pages to be satisfied with.

“That is true,” she conceded.

“Say it properly.”

“It is a room that runs, and it is therefore exempt.” Val turned her head on the pillow toward her. “And you have just repaired a hundred-and-twenty-four-year-old rule, Kyra Davan, lying on your back with your eyes shut.”

“I do my best work like this.”

“You do.”

The hammering had stopped for the night. Somewhere down the street a company of men was singing and doing it badly, going at it with the conviction of people who were leaving in the morning and would be rich by autumn, and perhaps two of them would be and the rest would not, and Val listened to them and did not begrudge them any of it.

“How much longer?” Kyra said. “Honestly.”

“A winter. One. April of fifty and I will not be wrong twice.”

“That’s what I thought.” Kyra turned over. “Not far now.”

“No,” Val said. “Not far now.”

And neither of them said anything after that, and outside the men went on singing, and the town went on making the thing it made, which was departure, for everybody in it except the two of them.

— end of chapter two —

It came up the river with everybody else.

That was the thing nobody in Westport could get their mouth around afterward, and the thing Kyra understood before the end of the first week: the sickness had not come to them. It had come with them. It had got on a boat in New Orleans in the winter and gone up to St. Louis and killed people there by the thousand through the spring, and then it had come on up the Missouri in the same cabins as the men going to California, and it arrived in Westport in June on a fine morning with the wind out of the southwest and the wagon yards going full.

The first Kyra knew of it was a boy running up the street for Val by name.

By the second week the town had two opinions, and both of them were about air.

The first opinion was that it was the air off the river bottoms, and that the remedy was to be up on the high ground and keep your windows shut and burn tar in the street. The second opinion was that it was the air in the camps, where the emigrant companies were lying four thousand strong along the creeks waiting for grass, living in their own filth in the heat, and that the remedy was to keep the camps out of the town. There was a great deal of tar burned. There was a great deal of talk about the camps. Men who had been in the pens all spring buying mules from Kyra now crossed the street rather than pass an Ohio company on the walk, and the Ohio company crossed back, and both of them went on drinking out of the same creek.

Val came in on the ninth night, put her bag down, and sat on the floor with her back against the door.

“Tell me,” Kyra said.

“Fourteen dead in the camps on the Blue. Six in the town.” Val had her head back against the wood and her eyes shut. “A woman on Pennsylvania Street who was well at eight in the morning and dead before the lamps. That is the part nobody is ready for. It is not a sickness that argues with you.”

“And you can’t stop it.”

“I have not stopped one yet.” She said it flatly, without any weight on it, which was how she said things that had weight on them. “They pour out of themselves until there is nothing left to pour, and they go cold, and the pulse goes to nothing at the wrist, and the doctors bleed them and give them calomel and opium, and the bleeding is the worst thing anybody could possibly do to a body with nothing left in it, and I cannot say so.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Because I am a woman who cleans hands in a wagon yard,” Val said, “and the man who bleeds them trained in Philadelphia.”

She got it in the fourth week, and she got it from a well.

Kyra came back from the pens in the afternoon and found her sitting at the table with the notebook open and a page of columns in front of her, and she knew from the doorway that something had changed, because Val had the particular stillness she got when a thing had gone from a suspicion to a fact and she had not yet decided what to do about it.

“Twenty-two houses,” Val said. “I have been in all of them. Nine of them have lost somebody and thirteen have not. I have been trying for two weeks to find the thing the nine have in common and it is not the air, because two of the thirteen are on the bottom by the creek with their windows open all summer and they are perfectly well.”

Kyra sat down.

“The nine take their water from the well behind the lower cross street. The thirteen do not.” Val turned the notebook round without looking up. “And there are two more that do not fit it at all until you find out that one of them sends a girl down to that well when their own runs low in August, which she did, on the twelfth, and the other keeps a cow and drinks the milk and the cow is watered out of the branch. So it is nineteen of twenty-two on one well and the three exceptions explain themselves if you ask enough questions, and that is not a coincidence. That is a cause.”

Kyra put both hands flat on the table.

“Then tell them.”

“I have told four people this afternoon.”

“And?”

“Two thanked me and went on drawing from it. One told me the well has been there since the town has been there and his children were raised on it.” Val closed the notebook. “The fourth asked me what a woman from the yard knew about it, and I could not tell him, and I stood in his kitchen and did the arithmetic on how many people would have to die before he asked me again.”

Kyra looked at her across the table for a long moment. The summer had got into her — there was a hollow under the cheekbone that had not been there in April, and the pale of her hair was pushed back and pinned anyhow, and her hands on the closed notebook were a working woman’s hands and had been for two hundred years.

“What do you do that works?” Kyra said.

“Water and salt. Continuously, in small quantities, by the mouthful, for as long as it takes, with somebody sitting there to give it.” Val looked at her own hands. “It is not a cure. It is keeping a bucket full while the bottom is out of it, and if they are strong and it is early and somebody stays with them all night, some of them come back. Four so far. Four out of the forty-one I have sat with.”

“Four is four.”

“Four is four,” Val conceded, “and the other thirty-seven are also thirty-seven, and I am going to go on doing it, and I would like you to not make me feel better about it tonight.”

“All right.”

“Thank you.”

Kyra got up and went round the table and stood behind her chair and put both hands flat on her shoulders, and Val let her head go forward, and neither of them said anything for a while. The tar smoke came in through the shutter, which did nothing for anybody and smelled like a roofing job, and somewhere down the hill a bell was going for somebody’s funeral, which it had done most days for a month and would go on doing until the first cold.

The near thing did not happen in August. It happened in the second week of September, when the sickness was going off and the town was beginning to believe it might be over.

Kyra came up the stairs and Val was at the window with her sleeves rolled, and she had been in the same three houses on the lower cross street for nine days running, and she was not tired in the way that showed on a person and she was tired in the way that did not.

“The Bakers’ second girl came through it,” she said. “That is five.”

“Val.”

“She was the earliest one I have had. Four hours from the first sign, and I think that is the whole of it, I think it is nothing but hours —”

“Val.”

Val stopped.

“Count the houses,” Kyra said.

There was a silence in the room of a particular quality.

“Say the rest of it,” Val said, and her voice had gone very even.

“You have been into how many houses since June? Forty? More than forty. You have sat up all night with people in their own rooms with their families watching you, and there is not one mark on you, and the whole town knows there’s a woman from the wagon yard who goes where the doctors have stopped going and never takes it.” Kyra shut the door behind her. “I’m not telling you to stop. I want you to hear the sentence out loud in a room, because it’s the sentence somebody else is going to say in a street.”

Val stood at the window with her back to her for what felt like a long time.

“Boston,” she said.

“Boston.”

Kyra did not move from the door.

“It is not the same. In Boston there were nine houses a day for eleven months and four hundred people who could describe my face.” Val turned round. “This is a river town with four thousand strangers in it who will all be in California by Christmas and none of whom will ever see either of us again. The ones who stay are the ones who matter and there are perhaps sixty of those, and of the sixty perhaps eight could tell you my name.”

“That’s a good answer,” Kyra allowed.

“It is an accurate answer.”

“It’s a good answer and it’s accurate, and you made it in about four seconds standing at a window,” Kyra said, “which means you’d already made it. Some time ago. And didn’t say.”

Val did not deny it.

What she did instead was cross the room and sit down on the end of the bed, and put her hands on her knees, and say — to the floor, in the voice she used for once a decade — that she had made the calculation in the second week and had made it again in the fourth, and that on both occasions the answer had come out the same, which was that she would take the risk and would keep taking it, and that she had not brought it to Kyra because bringing it to Kyra meant asking Kyra to agree to something that might one day cost them both a town.

“And I’d have agreed,” Kyra said.

“I know.”

“So ask me.”

Val looked up from the floor.

“I am asking you.”

“Then yes,” Kyra said, “obviously, and next time ask me in June.”

They made the rule that night, sitting on the floor with their backs against the bed, and it was a short rule and both of them said it and neither of them wrote it down: when we are on the road, it is the party or it is nobody. Not a town. Not forty houses. Not a month of nights on one street with the doors open behind her. A party was twenty wagons and a hundred people who would scatter across a territory the size of Europe and never be in one room again.

It was a good rule. It was the correct rule. It held for nine months.

The cold came at the end of October and took the sickness with it, and the town went back to making departure.

They had a hundred and ninety-four dollars in April and they had four hundred and sixty by the first snow, because a town in a plague year pays what it would not pay in a good one, and Val put the figure in the notebook and looked at it for a while and did not say anything that Kyra could hear.

And then, on a Tuesday in the middle of December, with the wind coming down the river and the yards shut and nothing whatever happening in the world, it came.

Kyra knew before Val did. She always had. The half-second was not a warning so much as an announcement, and it arrived while she was carrying wood up the stairs, and she stood on the landing with an armful of oak and felt the whole of it go through her like the ground going soft, and then she went in and put the wood down and said, “It’s today.”

Val was already up and turning the key.

They got the shutter barred and the fire in and the water where it could be reached, and then there was nothing to do but the thing they had done twice a century for two hundred and forty-two years, which the two of them had never once discussed on Sethal and had talked about, in the dark, by now, perhaps forty times.

It was the twenty-third since the hut.

Kyra counted them the way you count anything you cannot stop — eleven years at a time, forever, and the column in the back of the notebook getting one line longer in a hand that had been the same hand on a mountain in 1608. She got through it. Val got through it. Somewhere in the worst of the second night Val said something into her hair that Kyra did not catch and did not ask her to repeat, and in the morning the fire was out and the room was cold and the street was going about its business, and neither of them was any different to look at than they had been on Monday.

“April,” Kyra said, from under the blanket.

“April,” Val said. “Four yoke and a wagon and everything on the list, and we are going with the second company out and not the first, because the first company is always fools.”

— end of chapter three —

The wagon stood in the yard behind the harness maker’s from the middle of February, and Val went out to look at it more often than there was any reason to.

It was not a handsome thing. It was a farm wagon with a new bed and a good tongue and iron that had been laid by somebody who cared, and the cover was not on it yet, and it cost them ninety-two dollars and was the first object either of them had owned outright since a house in Trieste with a walnut table in it that they had walked out of at two in the morning with nothing.

She stood in the cold with her hand flat on the sideboard. It had a smell, which was new wood and linseed. It had a weight. If you put your shoulder against the box you could feel the whole of it want to go.

A room that runs, Kyra had said, lying on her back with her eyes shut, and had thereby repaired a rule Val had kept for a hundred and twenty-four years in nine words and gone to sleep. Val had not stopped thinking about it. It was not the cleverness. It was that Kyra had known precisely which rule was in the way and had gone at that one and left the rest of them standing, which is a thing you can only do for somebody whose rules you have been living inside for two and a half centuries.

They talked about it on a Thursday, over the last of the packing lists, and it began as a joke about a widow.

The widow was a real woman on the lower cross street who had buried a husband in the summer and had got herself a brooch made of his hair, woven flat under glass and set in gold, and wore it at her throat every day where the whole street could see it, and Kyra had thought this was the most extraordinary object she had ever heard of and had been unable to leave it alone for a week.

“She’s got him round her neck,” Kyra said. “In a little window.”

“It is a memorial.”

“It’s a fence post. It says: here is the man, here is my claim, here is the piece of paper in a locket.” Kyra pushed the list away. “And I’ve been thinking about it for a week and I can’t decide whether it’s grotesque or whether I’m jealous, and I’ve come down on jealous.”

Val put her pen in the ink and left it there.

“Go on,” she said.

“They all have something.” Kyra had her chin on her hand. “Everybody down there has something. A ring. A brooch. A name in the front of a Bible. A stone with two names on it and a space under. Every one of them can put their hand on a thing and say, that is what we are, and any stranger in the street can read it off them in half a second without a word being said.” She turned her hand over on the table. “And we’ve got four hundred years of it and there isn’t one object on this planet that says so.”

Val looked at the hand on the table for slightly too long, and then at the pen.

“Say the rest,” she said.

“There isn’t any rest. That’s the whole of it.”

“There is. You have been at it a week.”

“Then the rest is that I don’t want a ring,” Kyra said, “and I want a ring, and I know exactly what would happen if we had them.”

And she said it flatly, and it was true, and both of them knew the shape of it without going through it: two women with matching rings in a town whose entire business was strangers, a clerk’s eye at a land office, a driver’s eye on a trail, the question that would be asked out loud once and forty times behind a hand, and four centuries of not being asked anything gone for a piece of metal you could not even take off quickly.

“There is also the road,” Val said. “Everything you can put on can be taken off you. We have been robbed once on a road and we lost every portable thing we owned except the bundle I slept on, which was a notebook and two books and eleven sheets of a record, and the only reason we have those is that nobody wanted paper.”

“I know.”

“A brooch would have gone in the first ten minutes.”

“I know, Val.”

“I am agreeing with you,” Val said. “I am agreeing with you at length because I have nothing else to offer and I would rather talk than sit here.”

Kyra put her head back and let out a breath, and the thing went on standing where it was.

It was Val who brought up the sailors.

She did it two days later, out of nowhere, in the middle of doing something else, which was how she introduced subjects she had been carrying around: she was oiling the harness and she said, without looking up, that there were men on every wharf from Venice to Boston with marks on their hands.

Kyra came over and sat on an upturned bucket.

“Pricked in with a needle and ink or powder,” Val said. “Anchors. Initials. A woman’s name, often. I have seen a man in New York with a date on the back of his hand that I would guess was a ship and not a wife. It does not come off. I have had hands in mine for two hundred years and I have never once seen one fade out entirely, and I have seen them on men in their seventies.”

“And you’ve been thinking about that for how long?”

“Since Thursday.”

“Since the widow.”

“Since the widow,” Val agreed.

Kyra thought about it for a while with her elbows on her knees.

“Where do they put them?”

“Hands. Forearms. The back of the wrist.” Val went on oiling. “Which is the difficulty.”

“That’s the difficulty.”

“A sailor with a mark on his hand is a sailor. A woman with a mark on her hand is a question, and it is the one kind of question we cannot answer with any of the eleven answers, because there is no dull version of it.” Val set the strap down. “I have spent two days looking for a way round it and there is not one. The mark has to be where nobody looks, and everywhere nobody looks is somewhere I cannot make a needle go without a reason, and I do not have a reason. I have a want.”

She heard herself say it and did not take it back.

Kyra was looking at her from the bucket with an expression Val had learned to read at Casse and had been getting wrong ever since.

“You have a want,” Kyra said.

“I have been aware of it since Thursday evening and I have been treating it as a problem in order to avoid describing it as a want, and that is dishonest, and you noticed on Thursday evening, and you have let me have two days.”

“I have.”

“Thank you.”

“So put it down,” Kyra said. “Leave it on the shelf. It isn’t going anywhere and neither are we, not till April.” She stood up off the bucket. “We’re not the sort of people who solve a thing by wanting it harder.”

And Val, who had never in four hundred years left an unsolved thing on a shelf if there was any possibility of taking it apart instead, put it down.

She decided at four in the afternoon on the last Sunday in March.

She decided it the way she decided everything, which was completely and in advance and in silence: she was rolling flour sacks in the back room and she stopped with one in her hands and thought, tonight, and then went on rolling flour sacks, and said nothing for five hours.

There was a stage of this that had frightened her for the first eighty years or so, which was the walking around afterward. Carrying it under an ordinary face through a supper and the washing-up and a conversation about whether the spare tire went under the bed or in the bed. She had assumed at first that it was a kind of lying. It had taken her a shamefully long time to understand what it actually was, which was the only thing in her life she had ever built entirely on purpose, from nothing, for the sake of another person.

Kyra knew by about seven.

She did not say so. She never said so. What she did was go quieter in a particular way and stay near, and once, reaching past Val for the lamp, let her hand come to rest for a second on the back of Val’s neck under the hair, and leave it there, and take it away.

Val’s own hands were entirely steady and she noted with some interest that her pulse was not.

The canvas had come that week and it was in the room with them, folded on the floor in the corner, because there was nowhere else in Westport to put forty dollars of new duck and Val would not leave it in the yard. It made the room smell of a sail loft. It was the last thing Val saw before she turned the lamp down, and afterward she could never smell hot canvas anywhere on the continent without being put straight back into that room.

She started at the temple, where the hair was pinned, and took the pins out one at a time and put them on the sill, and it was slow and she meant it to be slow. Kyra stood and let her, with her hands at her sides, which Kyra could only do for about a minute at a time and did for rather longer than that.

“You’re enjoying this.”

“Enormously.”

“You’ve got that face.”

“I have no face,” Val said, “and you have been telling me for two centuries that I have, and one of these days I am going to ask you to describe it and you will not be able to.”

“It’s the one where you’re counting something.”

That was close enough to be worth not answering, so Val put the last two pins on the sill and put her mouth just under the ear instead, where the pulse was, and felt the whole length of Kyra go still.

“Say it,” Kyra said.

“Which.”

“Whatever you’ve been holding since four o’clock. It’s been in the room all evening like a third person.”

So Val said it, low, against the skin under her ear. That she had decided while rolling flour sacks and had gone on rolling flour sacks. That she had spent five hours unable to look at her straight on. That she had wanted to put a mark on her since Thursday week and had spent two days calling it a logistical problem, out of cowardice, and had been caught at it inside a minute. And that she could not explain, tonight or at any point in the next four hundred years, why a thing under the skin that nobody on this planet would ever see had gone through her like a bell going off in an empty house.

“Then don’t explain it,” Kyra said, and got a hand into the back of her hair, and that was the end of the talking for a while.

Then the light was in her arms and her throat, the way it went when it was feeling and not one other thing, and it put a low edge on everything in the room that was nearer than the wall. Kyra’s shoulder. The hollow at the base of her neck. The two of them did not remark on it. Neither of them had said a word about it in a hundred and fifty years. What it did, in practice, was hand Val a quarter of an hour in which she could see her properly with the lamp out, which was the only practical advantage either of them had ever got out of four centuries on this planet and which Val had never once described out loud.

Kyra’s went gold at the edges and stayed, and Val watched it happen from four inches away, and was glad, and said nothing at the time.

She woke before it was light, as she did, and the fire was ash and the canvas was a pale block in the corner and Kyra was face down with one arm off the side of the bed.

Val did not move for a while. She had nine days and a list of forty-one items and a wagon in the yard with no cover on it, and she lay in the cold with all of that stacked up behind her eyes, and did not get up and start on any of it, which for her was a considerable act.

“You’re awake,” Kyra said, into the mattress.

“For some time.”

“Doing the list.”

“I was doing the list. I have stopped doing the list.”

Kyra got the loose arm up and put it across Val’s middle without opening her eyes, which was a thing she had been doing since a hut with one bench in it, and which had started because it was cold.

“Val.”

“Mm.”

“The mark. On the shelf.” Her voice had gone level in the way it did perhaps once a decade. “I haven’t put it down. I want that said in a room instead of thought about in one, and I don’t expect anything to come of it, and I’d like it on the record anyway.”

Val lay with the weight of her arm across her ribs and the day waiting on the other side of the shutter, and felt the thing turn over in her chest that had been turning over since Thursday week.

“It is on the record,” she said.

— end of chapter four —

Nobody left when they meant to. That was the first thing about the season, and the men who had been in Westport all winter telling each other they would be off on the fifteenth of April went out to look at the grass on the fifteenth of April and came back and did not say much.

Grass was the whole of it. An ox could not eat a calendar. The companies sat in their camps along the creeks south and west of town with their wagons in rows and their stock out on picket, four thousand people and more waiting for six inches of green on the Kansas prairie, and Kyra walked out every third day to look at it for them, and was paid in coffee and opinions.

“Another week,” she told a man from Illinois on the twenty-second.

“Fellow up the road says Thursday.”

“The fellow up the road has thirty-one wagons and a brother-in-law selling hay,” Kyra said. “Another week.”

The company they went with called itself the Nemaha Company, after a river most of them had never seen, because somebody had said the name in a meeting and nobody had a better one.

It was twenty-two wagons when they joined it and twenty-six when it rolled, and the way you joined was that you went out to the camp with your outfit and stood in front of a man on a barrel and were looked at.

The man on the barrel was called Ewen Pryce. He was a Welshman out of Ohio, a little over forty, with a gray beard cut square and a voice that had been bawling at livestock for twenty-five years, and he had been elected captain by a show of hands the week before on the strength of having crossed to Fort Laramie in forty-six and come back, which made him the only man in the camp who had been further west than the Blue.

He looked at the wagon. He looked at the oxen, at length, and put his hand on the near ox’s shoulder.

Then he looked at the two of them and said, “Where’s your man?”

“There isn’t one,” Kyra said.

“Brother? Father?”

“No.”

Pryce scratched the square beard.

“I’ll tell you what I’m weighing,” he said, “and then you can tell me I’m wrong. A wagon’s four to six month of two people’s work, every day, wet and dry. Yoking, unyoking, wood, water, stock, guard. I’ve seen two grown men give out on it. If yours founders halfway up the Platte it don’t founder alone, it founders in my column, and then I’m feeding you out of other people’s flour.”

“That’s fair,” Kyra said. “Now weigh the other side.”

“Go on.”

“We’ve got four yoke, not three, and they’re sound and I picked them. We’ve no children and no furniture and no stove, and we’re nine hundred pounds under what that Ohio wagon at the end of your row is carrying, and I’ll wager you a dollar it’s carrying a walnut press.” She put her hand flat on the sideboard. “And we’ve been on roads before.”

Pryce turned his head and looked down his own row at the Ohio wagon for a while.

“It is a press,” he said.

The articles were drawn up on the last Sunday in April on a wagon tongue, with a clerk who had been a clerk in Cincinnati writing in a ledger he had bought for the purpose, and every head of a wagon in the company signed them.

There were fourteen articles. Kyra listened to all of them read out in the wind with her arms folded. The captain’s authority and how he could be unelected. Guard duty in rotation. Stock to be held in common on the drive and separate in the corral. No wagon to be abandoned while it could be drawn. Property of the dead to be held by the company and delivered to their people. Disputes to a committee of three. Whiskey at the captain’s discretion, which produced the only laugh of the afternoon.

And then the ledger went round the circle of them, and men put their names in it, and some of them made a mark and the clerk wrote the name beside it, and the ledger came to Val.

She took the pen and did not hesitate at all.

Martha Miller, and under it, in the same hand, Sarah Miller, because Kyra had said in the morning that she could do it and Val had said she would rather do both herself so that they matched, which was a sentence Kyra had thought about for the rest of the day.

Walking back to their own wagon afterward, Val said, “Ten.”

“Ten what?”

“Pieces of paper on this planet with something true on them about the two of us.” Val had her hands behind her back. “Zorzi’s minutes. The two sets out of Venice — that is three. The customs entry in New York, four. The shop books, five. A lieutenant’s notebook in Philadelphia that nobody ever read, six. The Boston list, the garrison ledger, the boarding house in Lowell — that is nine, and today is ten, and it is the first one since seventeen seventy-five that puts us both in the same document in the same hand.”

“Is that bad?”

“It is a fact.” Val walked a little way. “It is a fact that is going to a bank in Cincinnati at the end of the season, in a clerk’s baggage, with four hundred other names in it, and will be in a cellar in ten years and pulp in fifty. I have decided that I am content with it.”

“You’ve been deciding that since Sunday morning.”

“Since Thursday,” Val said.

They found out about the doctoring on the fourth of May, which was two days before the company rolled, and it happened the way Kyra had known it would happen, which was that nobody asked anybody anything.

A child in the Vance wagon went into a kettle of hot water at the knee. The mother came out of that wagon with the child in her arms screaming for a doctor, and there was no doctor, there had never been a doctor, the nearest doctor was four miles away in a town full of men paying him in gold dust to look at their gums.

And Val was across the camp before Kyra had got off the tongue.

Kyra came up behind and stood at the edge of it and watched, and did not help, because there was nothing to help with and because she had learned two centuries ago that the most useful thing she could do in the first four minutes was be a person who was not in the way.

Val had the child flat and the leg in cold water inside a minute, and kept it there, and kept it there, and went on keeping it there while the mother said four separate times that surely that was long enough and a woman behind them said that grease was what you wanted, lard or fresh butter, everybody knew that, her own mother had used lard.

“Not lard,” Val said, without looking round. “Water. Cold, and for as long as I say, and then clean linen and nothing else on it at all. If anybody puts grease on this leg tonight I will know in the morning.”

She stayed with it four hours.

When she came back to their wagon it was full dark and she sat down on the tongue and put her hands over her face for a second, which she did about twice a century.

“They’re going to ask me now,” she said.

“They are.”

“Pryce will ask me tomorrow, in front of people, because that is how a captain does a thing like this.” Val took her hands down. “And I am going to say yes.”

“I know.”

“We made a rule in September. The party or nobody. Twenty-six wagons and a hundred and four people, and it is the party, and it is inside the rule.” She was saying it to the dark rather than to Kyra. “And I want you to hear me say that I know what I am doing, because in September you made me say it out loud in a room, and it was the right thing to make me do, and I would rather do it myself tonight than have you do it for me in August.”

Kyra sat down on the tongue beside her, close enough that their arms were touching, and stayed there.

“Say the eleven,” she said.

Val breathed out through her nose, which was the nearest she got to laughing at herself.

“Sisters. Pennsylvania father. Mother dead, and the doctoring was hers. Brother gone to Texas. Uncle in the Willamette who wrote twice —”

“That’s four.”

“— no husbands and no intention, weather and stock is the younger one’s, money enough and not a great deal, we keep ourselves to ourselves, we are obliged to you.” Val let her head go back. “Eleven answers, two hundred and forty-three years, and not one of them explains why a woman knows to keep a leg in cold water for four hours.”

“Nobody’s going to ask that.”

“Somebody always asks that.”

They rolled on the seventh of May, which was a Tuesday.

Kyra walked. She had not ridden in the wagon in Westport and she did not ride in it now, because you walked beside the team and you would walk beside the team for four hundred miles before anybody thought about it differently, and the first day was nine miles and felt like nothing at all.

At the top of the long rise past the state line she turned round and looked back, because everybody did, and the whole column was strung out behind her with the white covers going and the dust up, and behind that was the low green country dropping away east, and somewhere in it was a town making departure, which would go on making it after they were gone and after everybody in this column was dead.

Val came up the slope and stood beside her.

“Three hundred and forty-eight,” she said.

Kyra did not ask what. There was only ever one arithmetic that arrived like that, with no preamble, at the top of a rise, on a day they were leaving somewhere.

“Your father.”

“If he is alive he is three hundred and forty-eight, and there is no reason at all to think he is not, and he has fifty-eight years in front of him, which is longer than every white man in this column will live put together.” Val was looking east with her hand up against the sun. “And the girls are two hundred and eighty-two, which is a perfectly ordinary age for a woman with a family, and I know what my own mother was doing at two hundred and eighty-two, and I cannot make any of it into a picture. That is the part that has never once got easier. I can do the numbers to the day and I cannot make a picture.”

Kyra put her hand on the back of Val’s neck, under the hair, and stood there with her for a minute while the column went past them on the road.

Then Pryce shouted for the wagons that were stopping to stop somewhere else, and they went on.

— end of chapter five —

A wagon company on the road was a town that took itself apart every morning and built itself again every night, and by the end of the first week Val had stopped thinking of it as a journey and had started thinking of it as a place she lived.

The day had a shape and the shape never varied. The guard fired a gun at four and you got up in the dark. You found your stock, which was somewhere out on the grass with a hundred and forty other animals and had opinions about being found. You yoked. You ate something standing up. By seven the corral of wagons came apart and the column went out onto the road in the order it had drawn by lot the night before, because the order was everything — the wagon at the head went all day in clean air, and the wagon at the tail went all day in a moving wall of dust that got in the eyes, the teeth, the flour, the water, and the seams of the cover, and the rotation of that order was the single most sacred article in the fourteen.

You made eight miles by noon. You stopped two hours in the heat. You made seven more. You corralled, and the wheels chained and the stock inside or out depending on the country, and then for two hours the whole thing was a town again: fires, and children under everybody’s feet, and a fiddle if Chilton could be got at it, and men mending what had broken that day, and somewhere in it a woman shouting a name into the dark in the particular voice of somebody whose child has gone four wagons too far.

Val liked it. She was extremely careful not to say so.

She had the company’s complaints inside a fortnight and they were not what anybody in a book would have expected.

Nobody was heroically injured. What they had was feet. They had blisters that had gone bad because a man had walked four hundred miles in boots he had bought new for the trip, which was the single stupidest thing a human being could do and which perhaps a third of them had done. They had sunburn on the backs of hands and the tops of ears. They had teeth. They had a great deal of backache and a certain amount of rash from the wool. They had two pregnancies, one of which nobody had mentioned to her yet and both of which she had known about since Westport.

And they had Rachel Vance’s daughter Nan, whose knee had been in the kettle, and who by the third week was walking on it and showing the mark to anybody who would look, with the particular pride of a seven-year-old who has come through something.

The mother brought Val a pie she could not afford to make.

“You’ll take it,” Rachel Vance said, “or I’ll be obliged to be insulted.”

“I will take it,” Val said, “and I will tell you what I told you at the camp, which is that the leg would have healed without me. It would have healed worse and slower and she would have had a scar she’d have had all her life. The water did that. You could do it yourself tomorrow for the next child, and I would like you to, because I am one woman and there are twenty-six wagons.”

Rachel Vance looked at her for a second.

“You’re a strange one,” she said, not unkindly, and went back up the line.

Kyra, who had been sitting on the tongue through all of this mending a strap and saying nothing whatsoever, waited until the woman was out of earshot.

“You told her how to do it.”

“I told her how to do it,” Val admitted.

“You’ve never once done that.”

“There is nothing in cold water that anybody could not have worked out,” Val said. “It is not knowledge. It is only attention, and attention is the one thing I can hand to a person without handing her anything.”

She said it to the strap rather than to Kyra, and Kyra let her.

The people.

Ewen Pryce, who captained by talking to men in the same voice he used on oxen, which was low and continuous and did not stop until the thing had moved. He walked the column four times a day. He had a wife buried in Ohio and two grown sons in the company, and he did not mention the first and did not favor the second two, and Val put him at about the best commander of a hundred people she had seen since a man on a wall in Trieste.

Horace and Sophia Deem, of the Ohio wagon, who did have a walnut press in it, and a rocking chair, and a case of books, and who had been advised by four separate people to leave all three and had smiled at all four. They were from a good house in Zanesville and they had sold it. Sophia Deem read in the wagon while it moved, which made her sick, and did it anyway.

The Rook brothers, who had no wagon and no interest in one, and who drove sixty head of loose cattle at the back of the column and slept under a canvas sheet and were, between them, about twenty-two years old and immortal.

Mr. Chilton, the clerk, who had the ledger with their names in it and a fiddle and a second-hand education, and who asked Val on the ninth day, over the fire, whether she had ever considered that the cholera might be a kind of animalcule too small to see, and Val said that she had heard it argued, and asked him where he had read it, and listened, and did not add one word to what he knew.

Eli and Susannah Frame, married in March, eighteen and nineteen years old, in a wagon that had been a wedding present, who were so plainly and stupidly happy that the entire company had adopted them as a sort of shared property.

And old Tarbox, seventy-one, going out to a son in the Willamette he had not seen in nine years, who walked the whole way and would not ride, and who told Kyra on the second night that she had a good eye for stock and that he had been watching her and that she needn’t pretend otherwise on his account.

Val wrote none of them down. She had kept a book of four hundred and nine names in Boston in a winter she did not talk about, and had decided on a wharf in seventeen seventy-six that she would not do that again, and she had held to it for seventy-four years.

She remembered them anyway. That was not a decision.

The Platte came up on the eleventh day out from the crossing, and it was the first thing on the road that made Kyra laugh out loud.

It was a mile wide. It was also, as far as anybody could determine, about six inches deep, and it ran brown and flat and braided between sandbars with no bank worth the name, and the water in it was so full of grit that you had to let a bucket stand half an hour before you could drink the top of it.

“It’s a road that got wet,” Kyra said.

Val did not look up from the tailgate.

“It is a river.”

“Val, I could walk across it in my boots.”

“You could walk across it in your boots and drown in it,” Val said, “because there is quicksand in four places between here and the forks, and a man from the Missouri company went into it up to the armpits last Tuesday, and they got him out with a rope and an ox, and the ox is the only one of the three who came out of it with any dignity.”

The country changed with the river. The timber gave out except in the bottoms, and then gave out altogether, and the grass went short and gray-green and went on doing it to the edge of the world in every direction. There was no wood. You burned buffalo chips, and there was an entire social order established within four days about who collected them and who was above collecting them, and Sophia Deem of the walnut press was out there with a sack on the first evening, which settled that.

Val found, to her considerable surprise, that she liked the emptiness.

She said so, once, at the back of the wagon, at dusk, with the whole flat country going violet all the way round.

“There is nothing in it,” she said. “There is nothing in it for four hundred miles and there is no reason for anybody to look at either of us, and I have not been in a place like that since a mountain.”

The last of the sun was on the side of her face and the loose of her hair had gone the color of wet copper, which happened for about four minutes a day out here and which Val had begun, without ever admitting it, to be somewhere in the vicinity of at that hour.

Kyra came and stood at her shoulder.

“You’re happy,” Kyra said.

“I am content,” Val corrected. “It is a distinct condition with different arithmetic.”

“You’re happy.”

“I am,” Val said.

The graves began at Fort Kearny.

They were not a surprise. Everybody had been told to expect them; Pryce had told them in Westport, on the barrel, that a man would see a hundred graves before Laramie and had better make his peace with the fact. But being told a number and walking past them at two miles an hour for six weeks were two different experiences, and the company went quiet in stretches that nobody planned.

They were mostly recent. That was the thing. A board with a name burned into it, or a name in pencil that the weather had already had a month at, and a date in this spring, and often nothing else. Some had a line. Aged 4 years 11 months. Of the cholera. Some had stones piled on them against the wolves and some did not, and the ones that did not were worse to walk past and nobody said why.

Chilton counted them. He could not help it; he was a clerk. By the second week of June he had eleven pages of them in the back of the ledger with the articles in the front, names and dates and where the company was from where it said, and he read the totals out at the fire one night, pleased with himself, in the way of a man who has done a piece of work.

He stopped halfway through when he saw Rachel Vance’s face.

“That’s a hundred and sixty since Kearny,” Val said into the silence, evenly, because somebody had to finish the sentence and it was better done by somebody it would not damage. “And it is four hundred miles of road with forty thousand people on it this season, and that is a smaller proportion than Boston loses to its own drinking water in a year. Mr. Chilton, that is a useful book. Keep it.”

Chilton looked at her with the gratitude of a man handed back his own dignity.

The fire went on. Somebody asked for the fiddle, and got it, and the Frames danced with about six other people in the dust between the wagons, and old Tarbox clapped on the offbeat with his hands over his head, and the Rook boys whooped from somewhere out in the dark with the cattle.

Val stood at the edge of it with her arms folded and watched a hundred and four people enjoy themselves.

Kyra came and stood beside her, and did not say anything, because there was nothing to say about it yet that would not have been a lie. Behind them the river went on making its flat noise in the dark, and ahead of them, four days up the road, a company out of Illinois was burying three in one morning and had not got word back down the line.

— end of chapter six —

The first one was not theirs.

It was a company out of Platte County that had corralled a half mile short of them on the eighteenth of June, and at about eight in the evening a boy came down the road on a mule asking whether the train ahead had a doctor in it, and stood there in the dusk with the mule blowing while twenty-six wagons looked at each other.

Kyra was at the fire. She saw it arrive in Val’s face and go out of it again, which took under a second and which nobody else in the camp had ever been able to see.

Val put down the tin she was holding.

“How long has he been sick?”

“Since dinner.”

“Since the middle of the day, or since this evening?”

The boy thought about it. “Middle of the day.”

“Then I am coming now and you will ride ahead and tell them to get every drop of water they have on to boil before I get there,” Val said. “Not the river. Any barrel water they have already drawn. Boiled and then cooled, and salt in it, and I want a spoon.”

She was walking before she finished the sentence. Kyra caught her at the wagon getting her bag out from under the seat.

“Val.”

“I know.”

“Say it, then.”

Val straightened up with the bag in her hand and stood in the near-dark with the noise of the camp going on behind her.

“It is not the party,” she said. “It is a stranger’s company half a mile up a road, and the rule we made in September says no, and I am going anyway, and I am going to do it again every time for as long as this lasts, and I would rather say all of that to you now than have us discover it separately in July.”

Kyra looked at her.

“Take the small kettle,” she said. “Theirs will be dirty.”

She was gone eleven hours and the man died anyway.

She came back at seven in the morning walking slowly with the kettle in one hand, and she did not eat and did not sit down, and she stood at the back of their wagon and told Kyra what it was in the flat voice she used when the thing was already decided and she was only informing herself.

“It is the same. It is exactly the same as June in Westport. It is not the air and it is not a chill and it is not fruit, whatever forty men on this road tell you this week. It is in the water, and the water on this river is one long trough with forty thousand people standing in it, and every company that camps below another company drinks what the company above them left.”

Kyra got up off the tongue.

“How fast?”

“He was well at midday. He was dead at four in the morning.” Val put the kettle down. “The ones who live are the ones who get water back into them from the first hour, by the mouthful, all night, with somebody sitting there doing nothing else. That is not a treatment anybody can be talked into once it has got bad, because by then he cannot keep it down and everybody in the wagon wants to do something, and what they will do is bleed him and give him laudanum until he is a dry sack, and I have never yet got one back from that.”

Kyra sat down on the tongue.

“Then what do we do?”

“We do not do anything,” Val said. “I do a thing, and it is the wrong size for the problem, and I am going to do it anyway. What you are going to do is bigger.”

Pryce heard her out standing up, by his own wagon, at half past seven in the morning, with his hat in his hand and his sons behind him.

She gave it to him in four sentences and Kyra, watching from ten feet away, thought she had never seen her sell anything better in two and a half centuries, because she did not sell it at all. She laid it in front of him the way you lay a tool on a bench.

“I want three orders from you,” Val said. “I do not want them from me. Nobody in this company is going to do a hard thing every day for six weeks because a woman in the fourth wagon asked them to.”

Pryce put the hat back on.

“Name them.”

Val counted them off on her fingers, which she did perhaps once a century.

“We do not camp below another company. Ever. If it means going on two miles in the dark, we go on two miles in the dark. Second, no man drinks out of the river where the stock has stood; the water comes from upstream of the crossing and it stands in the barrel until it is clear and then it is boiled and then it is cooled, and it is boiled whether anybody is sick or not. Third, the sinks go downstream of the camp and below the water we draw, a hundred paces, every night, and it is dug and it is filled, and there is no man in this company too proud to dig it.”

Pryce turned his hat over in his hands.

“Boiled,” he said. “Every day. Fifty gallons a day for a hundred and four people, out on the Platte where there’s no wood.”

“Yes.”

“They’ll say it’s foolishness.”

Val did not move.

“They will say it for two weeks,” she said, “and then a company we have passed will bury four people, and then they will stop saying it, and the difference between those two weeks and the ones after is how many of yours are in the ground.”

Pryce looked past her at the river for a while.

“Mr. Chilton,” he said, without turning round. “You said a thing at the fire about animalcules.”

Chilton, who had been hovering the way clerks hover, went pink.

“It’s — there’s a school of thought, Captain. In the journals. That it’s a living thing, too small to see, and it’s in the matter that comes off the sick, and so where that matter goes into the water —”

“Is it a good school of thought?”

Chilton opened his mouth and looked helplessly at Val, and Kyra watched Val do nothing at all: no nod, no encouragement, nothing a man could afterward have said had pushed him.

“I believe it is,” Chilton said.

“Then you’ll say so tonight at the fire, and you’ll say it as a man who reads,” Pryce said, “and I’ll give the orders, and we’ll see which of us they mind.”

They minded Chilton. That was the part Kyra enjoyed for the rest of her life.

A woman in the fourth wagon saying boil it was one thing. A man from Cincinnati with a ledger and a subscription to a periodical saying that learned men in London had been writing about animalcules was another thing entirely, and by the third night there were four fires going under four kettles and an argument happening about whose turn it was to collect chips, which was the sound of an order becoming a habit.

Kyra ran it.

That was what Val had meant by bigger, and she had been right, and Kyra did not particularly enjoy being right about it. She was the one who walked the column at noon finding out who had drunk out of the river because it was there and they were hot. She was the one who stood over the Frames — eighteen and nineteen and in love and utterly convinced that nothing in the world could touch them — until Eli Frame poured out a bucket he had just carried a quarter mile. She was the one who said to old Tarbox, who had been drinking out of rivers for seventy-one years without ever once being killed by it, that he could go on being right about that for another six weeks and then he could go back to it.

“You’re enjoying this,” Tarbox said.

“I’m not.”

“You’re enjoying some of it.”

“I’m enjoying you doing what I say,” Kyra allowed, “and that’s a different thing and it won’t last.”

It came into the company on the twenty-ninth of June and it took the younger Rook.

His name was Amos. He was twenty, not twenty-two, which Kyra found out that night from his brother and had not known before, and he had been well at breakfast and in the grass at noon and by the middle of the afternoon he was lying in the back of a borrowed wagon going gray.

Val was there within four minutes of the word going down the line.

What followed was eleven hours in a wagon bed that Kyra was in and out of all night, carrying water, carrying salt, holding a lamp, and what she remembered about it afterward was not the horror of it, because she had seen worse things in Trieste. What she remembered was the sheer, flat, unglamorous labor of what Val actually did: a spoon, and a mouthful, and a wait, and a mouthful, and a wait, hour after hour, with her hand under the boy’s head and her face doing nothing at all, and every twenty minutes the two fingers at the wrist.

The lamp was bad and it put everything in the wagon bed into two colors. Val had her sleeves turned back and her hair pushed into her collar out of the way, and where the light got at it, at the temple and along the loose of the plait, it went the pale of old straw and then nothing, and her face above the boy was doing exactly what it did in front of strangers, which was nothing at all. Kyra had been looking at that face in bad light for two hundred and forty-three years and could read the whole of it from the door.

Somewhere after midnight the older Rook, who was called Eben and who had not let go of his brother’s foot for five hours, said into the dark, “He ain’t going to, is he.”

“I do not know,” Val said.

“Everybody says something.”

“I am not everybody, and I have been at this a long time, and I will tell you exactly what I have. His pulse came back twice in the last hour. That is real and I am not saying it to comfort you. He is also twenty, and I would rather have him than a man of forty, and that is real too.” Her hand did not stop moving. “If he is still here at daylight I will start to hope, and I am not going to start before that, and neither should you, and I am sorry, because I know that is a rotten thing to be told at one in the morning.”

He was still there at daylight.

He was still there at noon, and he drank a half cup by himself at four in the afternoon sitting up against a wheel with his brother’s arm round him, and the whole company knew it inside the hour, and Sophia Deem sat down on a box and cried in front of everybody and did not care who saw it.

The Nemaha Company buried its first at the end of that week: a hired driver of the Deems’ called Tom Sayre, thirty-four, who had been sick for six hours before anybody thought to mention it to anybody, and who had been dead for two by the time Val got to the wagon.

They stopped at midday. Pryce read out of a book. The men piled stones because there were stones in that stretch and everyone had seen what the road looked like where there were not.

And afterward Kyra watched Chilton get down the ledger and open it at the back, behind the eleven pages of other people’s graves, and write the name in it, and the date, and where he was from.

The articles were in the front of that book. Twenty-six wagons, forty-one signatures, Martha Miller and Sarah Miller in the same hand.

Kyra stood in the sun and looked at the two halves of that ledger, and thought that of everything she had learned on this planet in two hundred and forty-three years, the thing she still could not get used to was how fast these people could go from the front of a book to the back of it.

— end of chapter seven —

The first week of July was the week she had to choose.

Up to then the arithmetic had been bearable, because up to then there had been one at a time. One wagon, one lamp, one spoon, and the whole of the night in one place, and at the end of it either the pulse came back at the wrist or it did not, and either way she had been able to say to herself that everything which could be done had been done by somebody who knew how.

On the second of July there were four at once.

Val stood in the middle of the corral at nine in the evening and understood, with complete clarity and no feeling whatsoever, that she was one person; that sitting with a body through a night was not a thing that could be hurried or divided; that she could take one of the four and give the other three to whoever she could teach in the next ten minutes; and that the three would be got at, all night, by frightened people who loved them and had never done it before.

She took Susannah Frame, because she was nineteen and had been sick two hours and was the likeliest.

Susannah Frame died at four in the morning with Val’s hand under her head.

She did not go and lie down afterward. She went to the next wagon, which was the Vances’, and found Thomas Vance six hours into it and past the point where anything worked, and sat with him anyway for the two hours he had, because his wife was there and his daughter was there and there was nothing left to do that was any use except not leaving.

Then she went and found old Tarbox, who had it and had not told anybody, because he had walked seventy-one years without troubling a doctor and did not propose to start.

“I know what it is,” he told Val. “Don’t be doing your spoon at me half the night.”

“I am going to be doing my spoon at you half the night.”

“Waste of you.” He was gray and his hands had gone cold and he was entirely himself. “There’s a young one in the Bell wagon.”

“There is somebody with the young one in the Bell wagon.”

“Ain’t you, though.”

Val sat down on the box beside him and took his wrist, and he let her, and after a while he said the thing that she carried afterward for a very long time, which was that his son in the Willamette had a place on a creek and had written that there were salmon in it so thick a man could walk across, and that he had never believed a word of that letter and had been coming anyway just to stand in the creek and call the boy a liar to his face.

He died a little after noon on the third.

She had the spoon in her hand and she had been at it for nineteen hours out of the previous twenty-four, and she sat on the box in the heat with the wagon cover glowing over her head and did the only thing available, which was to go on to the next one.

Fourteen in nine days.

That was the number, and Val had it to the hour, and she could have told anybody who asked the names in the order they went. Chilton on the fifth — Chilton, who had been so careful about the water that he boiled his shaving water, and who got it anyway, and who was sick for nine hours and apologized twice, once for the trouble and once for the noise. Two of the Bell children and not the third. A driver. A woman from the Ohio wagons whose name Val had not learned until she was writing it.

Which was the other thing.

Somebody had to keep the book. The articles said the property of the dead was to be held by the company and delivered to their people, and that meant names, ages, the place they were from, the date, the spot on the road as near as anybody could fix it, and Chilton had done that in the back of the ledger in a clerk’s hand with the pages ruled, and on the fifth of July Chilton was in the ground and the ledger was lying on a box in Pryce’s wagon with nobody’s handwriting in it after his own name.

Pryce brought it to her himself on the evening of the sixth.

“You’ll do it,” he said. It was not a question and he did not pretend it was one.

Val took the book and stood holding it.

She had made herself a promise on a wharf in Boston in seventeen seventy-six, on a day when a man asked her a question she could not answer for nineteen years, and the promise had been that she would never again keep a list of the names of people she could not save. She had held to it for seventy-four years. She had held to it through a mill town and a fever autumn and two decades in Philadelphia. It was the only promise she had ever made entirely to herself, with no one else in the world aware it existed.

“Yes,” she said.

She wrote fourteen names in a ruled ledger in a wagon by lamplight, with the dates, and the ages where anybody knew them, and Susannah Frame’s was the first because Val put them in the order they had gone rather than the order she had been given them, and it took her forty minutes, and when she had finished she sat with her hand flat on the page for a while.

Kyra came in and did not say anything and did not touch her, and sat down on the box opposite, close enough to be reached.

Val closed the ledger.

“I am all right,” she said.

“I know.”

“I am not going to be all right at some point in about three weeks, in the middle of an afternoon, over nothing whatever, and I would like you to know that it is coming so that neither of us has to be surprised by it.”

“All right.”

Val put both hands flat on the lid of the box.

“That is all of it. I do not want to talk about the book.”

“I wasn’t going to ask about the book,” Kyra said. “I was going to sit here.”

And she sat there, on a box in a stranger’s wagon, for about two hours, while Val went through the property lists of fourteen dead people and totted them and signed at the bottom, and neither of them said one further word, and it was the most use anybody was to her that whole summer.

She saved nine.

That was the figure she could never afterward make sit level beside the fourteen, and she tried for about eighty years. Nine people who had it and got water back into them in the first hours and came up out of it — Amos Rook; Nan Vance, who had already given her mother one fright that season and did it again; two of the Bell wagon; Eben Rook, who got it the day after his brother stood up; three from the Ohio company that had camped alongside them at the ford and had no one; and Rachel Vance, who was sick within a day of burying her husband and who said afterward that she had not especially wanted to come back and had done it for the child.

Nine and fourteen. Both true.

The thing that nobody in the company ever said, and that Val knew perfectly well four of them had thought, was that the nine were the ones she had sat with.

And then it stopped, the way it had stopped in Westport: not because anybody had beaten it, but because the country came up out of the river bottoms and got dry and high and the water started coming out of clean creeks off the hills instead of out of forty thousand people’s trough.

They came up on Fort Laramie on the twentieth of July.

It was not a fort. It was an adobe trading post that the army had bought off the fur company the summer before for four thousand dollars, standing above the river with a new frame building going up beside it and a flagstaff and a parade ground scraped out of the sage, and there were four hundred wagons in the bottom below it and a thousand head of stock on the flats and men swimming in the Laramie in the middle of the afternoon.

The Nemaha Company came in at the front of it twenty-four wagons strong, having started with twenty-six.

They had lost fourteen people out of a hundred and four. They had lost two wagons, one abandoned and one absorbed. Eli Frame was driving alone and had not spoken more than a sentence at a time in two weeks. Rachel Vance was driving her own team with Nan on the seat beside her and had refused four separate offers of help in a tone that ended the discussion. The Rook brothers were both alive and had sold nine head of cattle to a company that had lost its own and had charged them a fair price, which Kyra had made them do.

Pryce halted the column above the ford and rode back down it and did something Val had not seen a captain do. He took his hat off and sat there on his horse in front of all of them for a moment, and then he said that they were four hundred and thirty miles from Westport and six hundred and forty from the Sweetwater and that the worst of the country behind them was behind them, and that they would lay over three days, and that he would be obliged if nobody thanked him for anything.

Val stood at the head of her own team with her hand on the near ox’s shoulder and looked up at the walls.

She was aware of a number of things at once, which was usual, and of one that was not.

She was aware that she had been on this road eleven weeks. That she had slept perhaps forty hours in the last nine days. That her hands had a tremor in them that she could stop by deciding to, and that she had been deciding to for six days. That fourteen names were in a book in Pryce’s wagon in her own handwriting and that she was going to be carrying that particular fact for a hundred years.

And she was aware, for the first time since the nineteenth of June, that she had not thought about the other thing at all: that she had gone into thirty-one wagons in nine days, in front of everybody, and had sat with the dying and handled them and slept in their bedding, and had not so much as taken a chill.

She stood at the ox’s shoulder in the middle of four hundred wagons and let herself have that thought entire, once, properly, the way she would have read a bad line in a ledger.

Then Kyra came up on her other side, and looked where she was looking, and said, “Three days.”

“Three days.”

“You’ll sleep two of them.”

“I will sleep one of them,” Val said, “and on the second I am going to walk up to those walls and find out who in this place has been west of here and is willing to talk, because I have a page of questions about the Sweetwater and there is nobody on this road who can answer any of them.”

Kyra put her hand flat between Val’s shoulder blades and left it there while the column started down toward the water.

— end of chapter eight —

Fort Laramie had been a fur post for sixteen years and had been the United States Army for thirteen months, and both of those facts were standing in the open where anybody could look at them.

The old adobe was still there, square and yellow and beginning to go at the corners, with a gate you could drive a wagon through and a court inside that smelled of hides going back twenty years. Beside it the army was building in timber. There was a flagstaff with a parade ground scraped around it, and a line of new quarters half framed, and two companies of men in the wrong uniform for the heat, and a lieutenant of twenty-four who had been sent out here from a place with trees in it and had the expression of a man doing arithmetic about how long four years is.

And in the bottoms below, where the emigrant camps were, there were four hundred wagons and a thousand head of stock and a market of a kind Kyra had never seen in four hundred years of markets.

Because four hundred miles had taught everybody what they could not carry.

The flats outside the post were heaped with it. Anvils. Cookstoves, six or seven of them, sitting in the sage with their doors hanging open. Barrels of bacon gone rancid in the heat and stove in with an axe so that nobody could have them, which Kyra thought said more about human beings than most things she had seen. Trunks. A plow. Books in a wooden case, split open and rained on. And walking among it, men picking over other people’s ruin, and a few Lakota women going through it without much interest, and a trader’s boy loading a handcart with whatever would sell back to the next company through.

Horace Deem stood at the edge of it for a long time with his hands behind his back, and then went and got two men and had the walnut press carried out and set down in the sage with its feet in the dirt and its brasses still bright.

Sophia Deem watched it go.

“We’ll write and tell them it’s on the Laramie River,” she said to Kyra. “It’ll be a better story than the house was.”

They laid over three days and the company came back to life in a way that was almost indecent.

The Rook brothers swam in the river with about forty other young men and shouted for four hours. Nan Vance found other children and was gone from dawn. Eli Frame was taken up by the Bell family, who simply began feeding him without discussing it, and on the second night he sat at their fire and said four consecutive sentences, and Kyra saw Rachel Vance notice it and look away with her jaw set.

Pryce went up to the post and came back with three things: mail, which was a sack of it and produced an hour Kyra did not enjoy watching; flour at a price that made him swear; and the news that had been going down the line all summer, which was that the companies ahead had been dying the same way and the ones behind were worse.

And Val slept.

She slept for nineteen hours, which Kyra had not seen her do since a hut on a mountain, and woke at noon on the second day and ate an enormous amount of food and then went up to the post to find out things.

What she wanted was men who had been west of South Pass, and the post had four of them, all of whom had been trappers when there had still been such a trade and none of whom were under fifty.

Kyra went along for the second one and stood at the rail of the trader’s room and watched.

It was worth watching. Val did not ask a single thing in the way anybody else asked it. She did not ask whether the Sweetwater crossings were bad; she asked how many there were and at which of them a loaded wagon had to be double-teamed and which ones changed with the water. She did not ask how far it was to the Green; she asked what the grass was like in the last fifteen miles before it and whether there was wood or whether it was chips, and then whether that had been true in a dry year and how he knew.

The old man answered for two hours and enjoyed himself enormously.

“You’ve been asked before,” Val said at the end of it.

“Not like that, I ain’t,” the old man conceded.

“Then I am obliged to you, and I am going to write it down in a fair hand tonight, and I will bring it back tomorrow and you will tell me where I have got it wrong.”

He looked at her like a man who has been handed something.

“You’ll do that?”

“I would not get any use out of it otherwise,” Val said.

Walking back down through the wagons Kyra said, “You could have had all that out of him in twenty minutes.”

“Yes.”

“Two hours.”

“He has been sitting in that room for four years,” Val said, “and the trade that made him is finished, and the last three people who asked him anything wanted to know where the gold was. I have a page of notes and he has had an afternoon. It is the only transaction I have made this year where both sides came out ahead.”

Kyra asked her on the third night.

There was no reason for it. That was the part she thought about afterward — she had gone eleven years without asking, and there was nothing in the evening that ought to have brought it up. They were sitting on the wagon with their legs hanging off the tailgate, at that hour when the flats went blue and the fires came up in the bottoms one at a time, and somebody four wagons down was playing a jew’s-harp badly, and it was the first evening in two months with nothing whatever wrong with it.

And Kyra heard herself say, “Tell me about the second room.”

Val did not stiffen. She had stopped doing that around the fourth time.

“Trieste,” she said.

“Trieste.”

And Val gave her the paragraph.

I was taken out of the room where you were a little after four on the afternoon of the second day, and I was brought back to it on the fourth. In the interval I was held below, in a room on the court side with one window. There were four men in it. Two of them I had seen upstairs and two of them I had not. Nothing was done to me that left a mark, and I was not asked one question about you at any point. I was asked the same eleven questions in a different order for two days and I gave the same answers to all of them and none of the answers were true. At the end of it they brought me up and put me in the room, and you were asleep, and I sat down against the door. That is the whole of it. It is accurate and it is complete and there is nothing in it that you do not now have.

The same words. Not approximately the same; the same, in the same order, with the same small pause after and two of them I had not, the way it had been the first time in a kitchen in seventeen fourteen and every time since.

Kyra sat with her heels knocking gently against the tailgate.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You are welcome.”

Kyra put her heel against the tailgate and stopped it.

“That’s a hundred and forty-five years.”

“It is.”

“And you’re going to say that to me when we’re eight hundred, in whatever room we’re in, in the same order, with the pause in it.”

“I expect so,” Val said.

Kyra looked out at the fires for a while.

She could have said several things. She could have said the thing she had been carrying since seventeen five, which was not tell me what happened and never had been, and which she had known the shape of for about a century and had never once found the sentence for. She had got closer to it in a room over a saddler’s in November of ninety-five than she had ever got before or since, and had not said it then either.

“All right,” she said instead.

“Not all right forever.”

“No.” Kyra let her boots knock against the tailgate and stopped them. “All right tonight.”

“I understand the difference,” Val said, which was what she had said the first time, and which was the only part of it that had never been written down and learned.

On the last morning Kyra saw the woman at the post who would change the rest of their lives, and did not know it, and did not speak to her.

She was standing in the court of the old adobe with her back to the wall and her arms folded, between a trader in a bad coat and an emigrant captain from an Illinois company, and she was speaking — slowly, in short pieces, turning her head from one man to the other — to four Lakota men who had come in with robes and were not being paid what the robes were worth.

Kyra stopped by the gate.

She could not follow any of it. What she could follow, because it was the thing she had been reading out of rooms for four hundred years, was the shape: the trader talking fast and the captain talking over him, and the woman saying a dozen words back to the four men each time and then a dozen to the white men, and the four men getting steadily less angry while the trader got steadily less comfortable, and none of the three white men in that court having the first idea that they were being handled.

The captain said something that pleased him.

The woman said the same thing to the four men in Lakota, without the laugh, and one of the older men looked at her, and something went between them that lasted about a quarter of a second.

Kyra put her tongue in her cheek and looked at the gatepost.

Val came up behind her with the page of notes in her hand and asked what was funny, and Kyra said nothing was funny, and that Pryce had been saying for two days that the company wanted somebody for the Sweetwater who knew the crossings and could talk to the people whose country it was, and that she had just watched the best interpreter on this river take four white men apart in their own court without one of them noticing.

Val folded the page of notes.

“Which one?”

“The one against the wall.”

Val looked. She looked the way she looked at everything, which was in order and completely, and Kyra watched her do it.

“Ask Pryce tonight,” Val said.

— end of chapter nine —

Pryce brought her down to the wagons on the morning they rolled, walking beside a good dun mule with a pack on it, and introduced her to the company by saying, “This is Maud. She’s coming as far as the Green.”

Val, who had been checking a hoof, put the foot down and straightened up and got her first proper look.

She was about thirty. She was dressed the way a woman around a trading post dressed, which was neither one thing nor the other: a calico dress and a good pair of moccasins and a man’s coat that had been cut down for her, and her hair in two plaits with the part painted red. She had a face that did not offer anything and did not withhold it either, and she stood beside the mule with the reins loose in one hand and let a hundred and four people look at her, which Val estimated she had done about forty times before.

“Miller,” Val said. “Martha. That is my sister Sarah at the wheel.”

The woman put her free hand flat on the mule’s neck.

“Maud,” she said.

And Val said nothing at all, because she had been given a name in a doorway by a stranger for two hundred and forty-three years and she knew the sound of one being handed over the way you hand over a coin you have already decided to part with.

Her terms had been settled in the post and Pryce reported them to the company at the nooning with the air of a man who has been beaten in a negotiation by somebody who did not raise her voice.

Twelve dollars for the stretch, half in advance. Her own animal and her own food. She was not a guide and would not be called one; the company had a road under its wheels and did not need a guide, it needed somebody who could talk. She would talk to anybody the company met on the road or at a crossing, and she would tell Pryce what was said — all of it, she had been specific about that, all of it and not the useful part — and what the company did about it afterward was the company’s business and not hers.

And one further article, which Pryce delivered word for word and did not editorialize on.

“She says she’ll not be asked to tell anybody’s people that the company means well. She says she’ll say what we say and no more than we say, and if we want a thing said kindly, we’ll have to say it kindly ourselves.”

There was some muttering about that.

Val, sitting on the wagon tongue with a plate on her knees, thought that it was the most exact piece of work she had heard anybody do on this continent, and said nothing, and went on eating.

Four days above the fort she watched the woman earn the twelve dollars twice over in a morning.

A party of men came in along the bluff toward the column, seven of them, and came on at a walk and stopped at fifty yards. The Illinois company two miles behind had had a run-in over stock the week before and everybody in the Nemaha had heard about it in three versions, each one worse.

Pryce went out with two men and Maud on the mule.

Val, standing at the head of her team, watched the whole of it from a hundred and fifty yards away with no idea what was being said, and did what she always did, which was to read the shapes. The oldest of the seven men talked for a long time. Maud listened without moving. Then she turned the mule a little and spoke to Pryce for perhaps twenty seconds. Pryce said something short. She turned back and spoke for a good deal longer than twenty seconds.

Then everybody sat still for a while, and then two of the seven men rode back down the line and looked at the wagons, slowly, from about forty feet, and one of them said something to Nan Vance’s mother that made the woman freeze, and Maud said one word from the mule, not loudly, and the man laughed and rode on.

Afterward Pryce came back up the column looking as though he had been handed his own hat.

“Well,” he said to nobody. “We’re camping two miles on, and we’re not putting stock on that flat, and it turns out the flat’s where their horses are, and it turns out I’d have put ninety head on it at five o’clock.”

Kyra came round the wagon with a bucket.

“What was the word?” she said. “The one word, to the man who spoke to Rachel.”

Pryce scratched the square beard.

“Damned if I know. But I’d not want it said to me.”

Val began keeping a page on her that evening, and then did not.

She got as far as the heading, in the back of the notebook, and sat looking at it by the fire with the pen in her hand and the page blank under the word, and then closed the book without writing a line, and it took her the better part of an hour afterward to be honest with herself about why.

It was not the Boston promise. That promise was about the dead, and she had broken it eight days ago in a ledger in Pryce’s wagon and would be carrying that for a century.

It was that she had recognized, in the woman’s flat handing-over of a name at a wagon wheel, the exact apparatus she and Kyra had been running since a hut on a mountain, and that writing her down felt like doing to a living person the thing Val had spent four centuries making sure was never done to her.

She said so to Kyra, in the dark, in about nine words.

Kyra did not open her eyes.

“I know. I saw you shut the book.”

There were three names, and Val had all three inside a week without asking a single question, which was not deliberate and which she was not proud of.

Maud was the company’s. It had arrived from somewhere in the emigrant traffic, some driver’s approximation four or five years ago, and it had stuck the way a wrong name sticks. It was not her name and there was no version of it that was.

Madeleine was the post’s. Val saw it written twice: once in the trader’s daybook when she went back on the second morning with her page of notes for the old trapper, in a column of accounts — Madeleine, interp., 2 days — and once, later, on a list of people owed money for the previous season, in a different hand and spelled differently. A clerk had put it on her years ago, the way clerks had been putting French on everybody in that trade for a hundred years, and she answered to it in the post and nowhere else.

And there was a third. Val knew there was a third because of the way the four Lakota men in the court had said something to her that had not been either of the first two, and because of the way she had answered it.

She said nothing about any of this to anybody except Kyra, and to Kyra she said it once, lying on her back looking at the cover.

“Three,” she said. “One for the whites on the road, one for the whites in the buildings, and one that is hers.”

Kyra turned her head on the bedding.

“And how many have we got?”

“Two at present, and eleven answers underneath them, and a sister who is not my sister.” Val put her hands behind her head. “It is the same machine. She built it for the same reason we built ours, which is that a name somebody can use on you is a handle, and we are the only three people in this column who know that.”

Kyra was quiet for a minute.

“Don’t get sentimental about it,” she said. “She’s not us. We’re doing it to hide something that isn’t from here. She’s doing it in her own country because four white men in a courtyard decided what she’d be called.”

Val lay in the dark and took the correction, entire, the way she took all of Kyra’s good ones — which was silently, with something that felt like the floor coming up a half inch under her.

Val took her hands out from behind her head.

“Yes,” she said. “That is better.”

The woman noticed Kyra on the ninth day, and Val watched it happen.

They were on a long grade above the river in the afternoon with the wind coming round, and Kyra walked out ahead of the team fifty yards and stood with her face into it for about four seconds, and came back and told Pryce to make the next water and stop early, because there was weather behind them that would be on the camp by eight and he did not want to be corralling in it.

Pryce, who had learned in June, stopped early.

It came in at ten past eight.

Kyra came in under the wagon after the stock was seen to, soaked through and entirely pleased with herself, and lay down on her front on the tarpaulin with her chin on her hands. The rain had taken her plait apart and the dark of her hair was flat to her skull and running, and where it lay over her shoulder it had gone nearly black, and there was a piece of it stuck along her jaw that Val moved with one finger and did not mention.

And Val, from under the wagon with the tarpaulin dripping off the tailgate in front of her, saw the woman called Maud sitting on her heels under her own canvas thirty feet away, watching Kyra Davan across the rain with an expression that Val, who had been reading faces for four hundred years and had built a life out of it, could read perfectly well.

It was not suspicion. Val knew what that looked like; she had been looking at it since 1608.

It was recognition. It was the look of a person who has spent her life being the only one in the company who can do a particular thing, watching somebody else do a different one, and understanding in about a second and a half exactly how much of it cannot be explained to anybody who has not got it.

Then the woman turned her head and saw Val watching her.

And she did not look away, and she did not nod, and she did not do any of the things that people do. She simply looked back for about a second, the way you look at a person who has caught you doing a sum, and went on with what she was doing.

Val put her head down on her folded arms under the wagon and lay there in the noise of the rain, and thought: she is the first one in two hundred and forty-three years who would be able to tell.

And then, because she was who she was, she thought the second thing, which was: and she is also the only person on this river who would understand exactly why we would rather she did not.

— end of chapter ten —

The word came down the road the way all the words came down the road, which was from a man going the other way who had it from somebody who had it from somebody.

There was sickness in the camps on the river. Not in the emigrant camps — those had been dying since May and nobody thought that was news anymore. In the Lakota camps below the fort, and above it, and on the two creeks east of it, and it had gone through one band in nine days and there were people saying numbers that could not be right and people saying numbers that were worse.

Kyra was at the fire when Pryce brought it to them, and she watched the company receive it.

A few were decent about it straight away. Rachel Vance was one, which surprised nobody who had watched her bury a husband. Sophia Deem was another. The Rook boys wanted to know if anybody needed cattle, which was the only language they had and was meant well.

And a man from the Ohio wagons, whose name was Sims and who had lost nobody, said that it was a hard thing but that it was not their affair, and that a company that had come through the Platte with fourteen graves behind it had done its share of nursing for one season.

“It’s the same sickness,” Kyra said.

“So it is.”

“It’s the same sickness, Mr. Sims, and it got here on wheels.”

Sims looked into the fire and said that there was no call to talk like that, and Pryce let the silence sit for a moment and then said that the company would be laying over a day at the crossing regardless, on account of the stock, and that what any person did with that day was that person’s business and no one else’s, and would somebody put the coffee on.

Maud came to their wagon that night, which she had not done before.

She stood at the tailgate rather than under the cover, which Kyra came to understand in time was a thing she did everywhere, and said, without any preliminary at all, “My mother’s brother’s people are on the second creek. I am going in the morning. I have told the captain and he has my twelve dollars back for the days I am gone.”

“Is it in that camp?”

“It was in the camp above them nine days ago.” She said it flatly. “So yes.”

Kyra got down off the tailgate.

“What does Val need to bring?”

There was a pause of about a second and a half, and in it Kyra understood that the woman had come down here with a sentence prepared and had not got to use it, and was rearranging.

“I did not ask that,” she said.

“I know you didn’t. You came down here to say where you were going and to see what we’d do with it, which is what I’d have done.” Kyra put her hands in her sleeves. “So I’m telling you: she’ll go. She’s been going since the eighteenth of June and she’s gone into thirty-one wagons and she has never once asked me first. What does she need to bring?”

Maud looked at her for a while.

“Salt,” she said. “And her own water, because there will not be any to spare, and I will not have her drinking theirs.”

They rode out at first light, the three of them, with the dun mule and two of the company’s saddle horses and a keg of boiled water lashed on behind.

It was six miles. Kyra remembered the ride afterward in a good deal of detail, because it was the last hour of that whole summer in which she did not know something.

Maud talked, a little, which she had not done before either. Her husband had died in the winter before last and that was why she was doing this work and not some other. Her mother’s people were Sicangu. Her father had been a trader out of the post, French, dead nine years, and he had taught her English because he was proud of it and Lakota was her mother’s and the French had come off the two of them together in the house. She had been interpreting since she was fifteen. She said all of this in about four minutes, in the tone of a person giving the eleven dull answers, and Kyra recognized the tone so completely that she nearly laughed out loud on the horse.

“How many did you say?” Val asked from behind.

“How many what?”

“In the camp above them. You said it went through in nine days. How many were in it?”

Maud rode for a little while.

“Sixty lodges,” she said. “Before.”

What Val did in that camp over the next four days, Kyra thought about for the rest of her life, and the thing she remembered was not any of the things a person would expect.

It was that Val asked permission and then did what she was told.

There was a woman there — older, perhaps sixty, with a bad hip and authority that arrived in a space before she did — who had been doctoring in that camp since before Val and Kyra had set foot in North America, and who had been at this sickness for nine days already and had worked out a good deal of it herself. Maud took Val to her and said something short, and then said something longer, and then stood back.

Val did not offer anything. She put her bag down and stood there and waited, which took about six minutes, and the two of them looked at each other across the fire in a language neither had.

Then the older woman said four words and pointed with her chin at the two lodges nearest the water.

“Those two are hers now,” Maud said. “She says the ones in the middle are hers and you are not to go in them.”

“Tell her I understand.”

“She knows you understand. She watched you stand there for six minutes.” A pause. “Tell her yourself. Take the salt in your hand and show her the water and hold up the spoon and she will know it in four seconds, and she will know it better from you than from me.”

So Val did that, and the older woman took the spoon out of her hand and looked at it and gave it back, and said one more thing, and turned away.

“What did she say?”

“She said she has been giving them water since the second day and it is not enough.”

“It is not enough,” Val agreed. “It is only more than nothing. Tell her I have buried fourteen people in three weeks doing exactly this, and I would like her to know that before she watches me do it in her camp.”

Maud turned that around and delivered it, and the older woman stopped where she was and looked back at Val over her shoulder for a moment.

And Kyra, standing at the edge with the keg on her hip and nothing whatever to contribute, saw the two of them arrive at an understanding that had taken nine words and no shared language at all, and thought that she had watched Val Sorin talk her way through a blood court in Trieste and had never seen her do anything as good as that.

The four days themselves did not make a story and Kyra never tried to make one of them.

There was a great deal of water carried. There was salt measured out into a horn cup over and over. There was the same flat labor Kyra had watched in a wagon bed on the Platte, except that this time it was inside a lodge that smelled of smoke and hide and sickness, with people who had no reason on earth to be glad that a white woman had come, and who were nevertheless civil to her, which Kyra found harder to bear than if they had not been.

Some lived. Some did not. In the two lodges that were Val’s she lost four and kept six, and in the ones that were the older woman’s Kyra never learned the numbers and did not ask.

On the third day a young man stood outside the lodge Val was in and said something to Maud in a hard voice with his hand out toward the wagons, meaning the road, meaning all of it, and Maud answered him in about the same number of words and he went away.

“What did he say?”

“He said what you would say.”

“Say it anyway.”

Maud looked at the horizon for a second.

“He said that the people who brought it have come to help with it, and that we should be grateful, and that his brother is dead.”

Kyra stood there.

“And what did you say to him?”

“I said that his brother is dead and that the woman in that lodge has been awake for two days and that both of those are true at once.” She shifted the keg on her own hip. “It is not a thing you fix by saying a sentence. He knows that. He wanted it said out loud where somebody heard it, and now it has been.”

They went back to the company on the fifth morning.

Maud rode ahead a hundred yards, which she did when she did not want to talk, and Val rode with her hands loose on the reins and her face doing nothing at all, and Kyra rode beside her and said nothing for four miles.

Val had been in the sun for four days without a hat and the pale of her hair had gone almost white along the crown and there was a line across her forehead where the shade had ended. She was upright in the saddle in the way she was upright when there was nothing left underneath it.

“Ten,” she said, eventually.

“Ten.”

“Six and four. I have been doing it since the crossing and it will not come out to anything.” She looked straight ahead. “In Westport it was five out of forty-one. On the Platte it was nine and fourteen. Here it is six and four, and the six are alive because I sat there, and the four are dead although I sat there, and there is no sentence I can build out of those numbers that means anything at all.”

Kyra let the horses take four more steps.

“There isn’t one.”

“No.”

“You want there to be one, Val.”

“I want there to be one very much,” Val said, “and there is not, and I would like to be somewhere with a door tonight.”

They came up over the last rise and the corral of white covers was in the bottom below them with the stock out on the grass, and somebody had got the fiddle going, and Kyra reached across between the two horses and put her hand flat on Val’s forearm for a moment, which was the most either of them could do in the open at ten in the morning in front of a hundred people, and had been for two hundred and forty-three years.

— end of chapter eleven —

Independence Rock was a whale lying in the sage, and it was covered in people’s names.

They came up on it on the eighth of August, late, with the light going long and gold across the Sweetwater, and the whole company walked out to it the way every company did, and stood underneath it and looked up.

Thousands. Val gave up counting inside a minute, which she almost never did. They were painted on in tar and in wagon grease and in red paint somebody had carried four hundred miles for the purpose; they were cut in with chisels by men who had brought a chisel; they were scratched with a knife point by men who had not. Some were beautifully done. Most were not. There were names from forty-one and forty-three and forty-six already weathering out, and names from June of this year still black, and names of people who had certainly died since, because there were fourteen in Val’s own hand in a ledger four hundred miles back and every one of those had walked past a rock like this one wanting to be written somewhere.

The company set to it with everything they had. Pryce cut his in with a cold chisel, deep, in letters an inch high. The Rook brothers painted theirs enormously, and then painted a steer, badly. Eli Frame stood at the bottom of the rock for a long time with a brush in his hand and then climbed up and put S. FRAME on it, and nothing else, and came down.

Rachel Vance wrote hers and Nan’s and then, after a moment, her husband’s.

Val and Kyra did not write anything.

They had discussed it that morning in about six words, and the six words had been Kyra saying no and Val saying no, and that had been the whole of the discussion, because a name cut in a rock that thousands of people walked past every summer was precisely the kind of object they had spent two and a half centuries not owning.

They stood at the bottom in the last of the light and watched other people do it.

“It’s not vanity,” Kyra said. “That’s what I keep wanting it to be and it isn’t.”

“No.”

“They’re not saying look at me. They’re saying I came past here.” She had her arms folded and her head back. “That’s all it is. I existed on a particular Tuesday and here’s the proof, and the proof will still be here when I’m not.”

Val looked up at four thousand names.

“Yes,” she said, and did not trust herself with any more of it than that.

Maud found them at the wagon that night with her own supper in her hand, and sat down on the ground near the fire rather than on anything, and said, “You did not put your names up.”

“No,” Kyra said.

“Why not?”

And Kyra, who had lied to strangers in nine languages for two hundred and forty-three years, looked at the fire and said, “Because we’ve spent our whole lives being careful and it’s a habit now, and about an hour ago I stood at the bottom of that rock and found out I minded.”

Maud ate for a while.

Then she put her plate down and turned her left hand over, and held her wrist to the firelight, and there were three small marks on it, close together, blue-black under the skin and slightly spread with age.

Val leaned in without asking and then stopped herself.

“May I?”

“You may look. Do not hold it.”

They were tiny. Two short lines and a dot, no bigger than a fingernail between them, and they had been there long enough to go soft at the edges the way old ink does.

“My mother’s sister did them,” Maud said. “When I was twelve.”

“For what?” Val said.

She picked her plate back up.

“When you die you go along the road of stars,” she said. “There is an old woman who stands at the place where it begins and she looks at your hands, or your chin, or your forehead, wherever they were put on you. If the marks are there she lets you by. If they are not she turns you back, and you come back down and go about where you used to live and do not belong anywhere.” She said it the way a person says a thing that is simply true and is not being offered as a curiosity. “That is what they are for. They are not a decoration and they are not a charm. They are so that I am known.”

Val did not say anything, and neither did Kyra.

The fire did what fires do. Out beyond the wagons the Sweetwater made its noise, and behind them the rock stood up black against a sky that had, running across the top of it, the great pale road the Northern Hemisphere has been looking at and naming for as long as there have been people to do it.

Val was aware of Kyra’s shoulder about four inches from her own and of the fact that neither of them was going to look at the other for at least the next minute, because if they did it would be visible from the fire.

“That is a good reason,” she said, eventually. Her voice was completely level. “That is a better reason than any of the reasons on that rock.”

“It is the same reason,” Maud said. “They want to be known too. They are only doing it on a rock, where it can be walked past, and where a man with a chisel can cut over the top of it next year.”

She came back to it two nights later, at the nooning, when the two of them were alone with the stock and Kyra was checking feet.

“You want them,” she said.

Kyra put the hoof down. “Yes.”

“Then you are thinking about your hands, and you have already decided against it, because you are two women who travel alone and who are asked a question about it at every stop, and a mark on a white woman’s hand is one more question.” Maud was leaning on the mule with her arms folded. “That is why you have not asked me.”

“That’s why.”

“Then put it where nobody looks.”

Val, ten feet away with a bucket in her hand, stopped moving entirely.

“There is no rule about where,” Maud said. “The old woman looks at your hands because that is where my mother’s people put them. Other people put them other places. There are women I know who have them where their husbands never saw them, and one of them was married thirty years.” She turned her hand back over. “It is between you and what you think it is for. If what it is for is the two of you, then put it where only the two of you will ever be.”

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Then Kyra said, “Would you show us how?”

“I will show you how,” Maud said. “I will not do it. It is not mine to put on you and you would not want it from me, whatever you say now.” She unfolded her arms. “You will do it to each other. That is it anyway. The doing is the thing, not the mark.”

She taught them in an hour, on a piece of rawhide, by a fire, with the whole company forty yards away arguing about a wheel.

Three needles bound to a splinter of bone with sinew, so they went in together and to the same depth. Soot from the underside of a kettle, worked fine and mixed with a little water, which was the pigment; charcoal would do and was not as black. You stretch the skin. You do not stab; you dip and tap, and the tapping is a rhythm, and the rhythm is the skill because a rhythm is what keeps the depth even. Too shallow and it goes with the scab. Too deep and it spreads out under the skin over the years into a blur with no edges.

“How deep?” Val asked.

“You will know when the blood comes up and stays in a bead instead of running. Not before.”

Val practiced on the rawhide for two hours after Maud had gone to her own fire, which was exactly what everybody who knew her would have predicted, and then for another hour on the back of her own left forearm, low down, in a place nobody would look at, until the little line she was putting in came out even.

Kyra sat and watched her do it and did not say the obvious thing.

They did it on the fourteenth of August, at a dry camp above the Sweetwater with the company a hundred yards off and the fire out.

It was a ring. That was Kyra’s, and she said it in the afternoon in about eleven words and then would not look at Val for a second afterward: that the thing she had wanted since a widow on a Missouri street had worn her husband round her neck was a plain band, and that she had known for four months exactly which finger it was not going on.

So: a ring, closed, a little smaller than a thumbnail, with no mark in it and no letter and nothing that any living person could read.

Val had insisted on that part and had given the reason once. Anything legible was an object that could be understood by somebody who was not them, and there was nothing on this planet or off it that could be written in a skin and be safe, and a circle was a circle. Kyra had said that Val was doing the thing where she made a true argument to avoid saying a plain sentence, and Val had said yes, and had then said the plain sentence, which was that she did not want a word on Kyra that anybody else could ever read.

Kyra went first, because Val’s hands were the steadier of the two and because Kyra would not have been able to wait.

It took a little under an hour, and low down, where nothing would ever show — not in any bath house, not to any doctor, not to anybody living — and Val worked in the dark by feel and the last of the light and did not speak for the first twenty minutes except to say stay still twice.

What she felt, and what she did not say at the time, and what she thought about for a hundred and seventy years afterward: that she had put her hands inside people for two and a half centuries in order to keep them alive, and that this was the first time in her life she had made a wound in someone on purpose and for no reason at all except that both of them wanted it there.

When she finished she put her thumb flat beside it, not on it, and held it there.

“Well?” Kyra said. Her voice was not entirely under her.

“It’s a ring.”

“Say something else.”

“It is a ring,” Val said, “on the one person in the universe I would have taken one from, and I am not going to be able to improve on that tonight, so you will have to have it as it stands.”

Kyra got an arm up across her face, and what came out of her was half a laugh and did not finish.

Hers took longer, because Kyra was not steady and knew it, and stopped twice, and swore in Sethal, which she had not done in about sixty years.

“You can stop.”

“I’m not stopping.”

“I am telling you that you can.”

“Val.” Kyra had the needles in her hand and her hair pushed back off her face with her wrist and a smear of soot along her cheekbone, dark against the flush the work had put there, and she was concentrating so hard that her whole face had gone young. “If you say one more encouraging thing I’m going to put a wobble in it and you’ll have it for four hundred years.”

So Val lay still and shut up, and about forty minutes later it was done, and Kyra sat back on her heels and looked at what she had made.

“It’s not as good as yours.”

“It is a ring.”

“It’s a ring with a flat bit.”

“It is a ring with a flat bit,” Val agreed, “and it will be there when this entire continent is under something else, and I intend to be extremely fond of the flat bit.”

Afterward they lay in the wagon in the dark and did not touch either of the marks and were entirely aware of both of them.

“It might not take,” Kyra said.

“It might not.”

“Nobody’s ever put ink in one of us. Not in four hundred years, not on Sethal, nobody. It could be gone by Christmas.” She turned her head. “Say the odds. You’ll have done the odds.”

“I have not done the odds. There is nothing to do them with.” Val was looking at the underside of the cover. “I have a body that closes a cut in nine days that takes an Earth woman three weeks, and I do not know whether that means it will push the soot out as a foreign thing or bury it and keep it, and there is no book on this planet with the answer in it, and there never will be one.”

“So we wait.”

“So we wait, and find out with everyone else, which is a novel experience and which I find I am enjoying rather more than I expected to.”

Kyra rolled over toward her.

The ink had been the whole of the day, and Val had believed, right up until that moment, that it was going to be the whole of the night as well: that they were both too sore and too tired and too full of the thing they had just done to want anything else.

She was wrong, and she was glad to be wrong, and afterward she could not identify the point at which one had turned into the other.

It was slow. Neither of them could be hurried and neither of them wanted to be. There was no lamp and there was no fire and there was a company of a hundred people asleep a hundred yards away, so there was nothing above a whisper the entire time, and Val discovered — with the small clear astonishment she still got about things like this after two hundred and forty-three years — that having to be silent made her say more rather than less, close in, into the hair behind Kyra’s ear, every plain thing she had been carrying since a room above a harness maker’s in March.

Somewhere in it the light came up in her arms and her throat, low and steady, and it lay along Kyra’s collarbone and the edge of her jaw and made a small pale country under the wagon cover that nobody else on the continent would ever see. Val saw Kyra’s go gold and stay gold. Neither of them mentioned it, then or afterward, because it had not needed mentioning since about 1650.

And at some point, very late, Kyra put her hand down and rested two fingers just above the new mark on herself, not touching it, and said, “It’s there.”

“It is there.”

“That’s what I keep doing. Checking it’s there.”

“I have checked mine four times,” Val said, “and I intend to go on doing it, and you may put it down somewhere that I have not been able to stop smiling for approximately two hours, which is a thing that has not happened to me since a hut.”

“It shows in the dark, you know.”

“I am aware of what shows in the dark,” Val said, and pulled her in.

— end of chapter twelve —

South Pass was the great disappointment of the road and everybody had been warned and nobody believed it until they were standing on it.

There was no pass. There was a wide sage saddle twenty miles across with hills a long way off on either side, and the wagons went up it at a grade you could not feel, and at some point in the middle of an ordinary afternoon you were over the top of the continent and nothing whatever had happened. Men who had spent four months imagining a gate in the mountains stood in the sage looking irritated.

The Rook boys rode up and down the column asking people if they had noticed anything.

But two miles on there was a boggy green place where springs came up, and Pryce stopped the column, and got down, and told everybody to come and look at the water.

It was running west.

That was all it was doing — running west, in a marshy little channel four feet wide, off toward the Green and the Colorado and, eventually and by a route nobody in that company could have drawn, to an ocean none of them had ever seen.

Kyra crouched down and put her hand in it.

She was aware that Val had come up behind her and had stopped a little way off, and that Val was not looking at the water at all, and she did not turn round, and she thought about a thing Val had said out loud once, on a hill above a port, in the third year of a place they did not talk about, and she did not say one word of it.

Kyra stood up and shook the water off her hand.

“Cold,” she said.

“It is snow,” said Val. “That is all any of this is. It is snow that has made a decision.”

The parting came at the Little Sandy on the twenty-fourth of August, because that was where a returning party was camped — nine men with a pack string going back to the fort with mail and hides — and a woman going east alone in that country did not, and Maud had no intention of it.

She had been shortening for two days. Kyra had watched her do it and had recognized the whole process: the careful reduction of a person’s presence in a camp before she leaves it, so that by the time she goes she has already mostly gone. Kyra had been doing the same thing in towns since 1608.

The evening before, the company gave her a supper.

It was not a good idea and Pryce knew it was not a good idea, and he did it anyway because the company had wanted to. There were speeches. Sims, who had said in July that the camps on the creek were not their affair, stood up and said several sentences about the noble qualities of the race, and about how she had been a credit, and Kyra sat with a plate on her knee and watched a woman of thirty receive it with her face absolutely still.

Afterward Maud came over to their wagon and sat down on the ground and said, “He is not a bad man.”

Kyra set her plate down in the sage.

“He’s a fool.”

“He is a fool, and he will tell that story for thirty years, and in his story I will be a sort of animal that did a clever thing.” She said it without heat, as an observation about the weather. “And his daughter will hear it. That is the part that matters and there is nothing to be done about it from here.”

Val, who had been quiet all evening, said, “What would you have said, if you could have said anything?”

Maud thought about it.

“I would have said that the grass is finished,” she said. “From the fort to here, both sides of the river, forty miles wide — the grass is finished, and the buffalo have gone off it, and every year there are more wagons than the year before, and every man in that column thinks he is passing through. Not one of them is passing through. They are a river and they think they are a boat.” She picked up a piece of sage and turned it over. “I would have said that to him and he would have said that it was a hard thing, and that it was not his affair.”

Nobody argued with any of it, because it was true, and because both of them had sat in a hundred rooms across four centuries watching people do a thing to a place and then be surprised by the place afterward.

“You could tell Pryce,” Kyra said.

“Pryce knows. Pryce was here in forty-six.” She dropped the sage. “Pryce is one man with twenty-four wagons and he is already doing more than most. That is not nothing and it is also not anything.”

In the morning she came to get her mule, and the three of them walked it out to where the returning party was making up their string, a quarter mile from the corral, and the last hundred yards of that walk was the only time in six weeks that none of them said anything.

At the edge of the camp she stopped and turned round.

“Sarah,” she said, to Kyra. “Martha,” to Val. “Those are not your names.”

Kyra’s stomach went over.

“No,” she said.

“I have known since the second week. You answer to them a half second late.” Maud took the mule’s reins in her hand. “I have not said it to anybody and I am not going to, and I am not asking you for the other ones. I am telling you that I know, because you have been careful with me for six weeks and I would like you to be able to stop for a minute.”

Kyra could not get anything out at all.

Val could. Val said, “Thank you,” and then, after a moment, in a voice Kyra had heard perhaps forty times in two hundred and forty-three years, “We are not sisters, either.”

Maud nodded slightly, as though a small account had been settled.

“No,” she said. “You are not.”

And that was the whole of it. She did not ask what they were instead and there was no expression on her face that required an answer, and Kyra stood in the sage at eight in the morning and understood that they had been handed, by a woman who owed them nothing, the single most restful ninety seconds either of them had had on this planet since a hut.

Then Maud said, “Kȟáŋtawiŋ.”

She said it once, at the speed she would have said it to her own people, and did not repeat it or slow it down.

“It is plum,” she said. “The fruit. There are thickets of them along the creeks below the fort and the women go out and get them in the autumn and they dry them on skins. My mother’s sister had the name before me. It is nothing.” She looked at the two of them. “That is the third one. You knew there was a third one in the first week, and you have never once asked me, and that is why you are getting it.”

Kyra said it back to her, carefully, and got it about three-quarters right. The sun was barely up and coming in flat along the sage, and it had got into the loose of her own hair where it had come out of the plait overnight, so that she could see the copper of it at the edge of her own vision while she was concentrating on a word.

Maud corrected her once, and Kyra got it closer, and Maud said that was good enough and that her own father had said it worse than that for twenty years.

Val said it too. Val got it right, because Val had been listening to her say it to other people for six weeks and had been storing it, which Kyra knew and Maud plainly guessed, because she gave Val a look that was almost amused.

“Of course you did,” she said.

The last thing was the marks, and it was quick, and it was at the mule’s shoulder with the men shouting about a pack fifty yards away.

“Has it held?”

“Ten days,” Kyra said. “The scab’s come off mine.”

“And?”

“It’s there.”

“Then it will hold,” she allowed. The first ten days is the whole of it.“ Kȟáŋtawiŋ got a hand on the mule’s mane and went up onto it in one motion. ”Do not put a thing on it. Not grease, not ash, not anybody’s poultice. It is finished."

Val stepped forward and put a hand on the mule’s neck.

“If you are ever,” she said, and stopped, and started again, which she did not do. “We will be in Oregon. I do not know where yet. If you are ever in that country, or if anybody you know is, and they need doctoring, a woman called Martha Miller will do it for nothing and will not ask a single question about anybody.”

Kȟáŋtawiŋ looked down at Val for a second longer.

“I will not be in that country,” she said.

“No.”

“But I will know that the offer was made.”

She turned the mule. Then she said, over her shoulder, without any particular emphasis, in exactly the tone she had used for six weeks about crossings and grass and men, “Whatever the two of you are, you are not the first, and you will not be the last, and there is nothing wrong with you.”

And she rode over to the pack string and did not look back, and inside ten minutes the whole party was strung out and going east along the Little Sandy in the flat morning light.

Kyra stood there and watched until she could not tell which one she was.

Val was beside her, and did not say anything for a long moment, and then said, in a voice that was almost entirely steady and not quite, “Two hundred and forty-three years.”

“I know.”

Val had not moved from where she stood.

“Nobody has ever said that to us. Not once. Not in any language.”

“I know, Val,” Kyra said.

The dust of the pack string went up and thinned out and stopped being a thing you could see, and behind them the corral was coming apart and Pryce was shouting about the second wagon, and the Sweetwater was five miles behind and the Green was two days in front, and the two of them stood in the sage for as long as they could reasonably be seen to be standing there and then went back and yoked their oxen.

— end of chapter thirteen —

They came down the Barlow Road in the last week of October with the mountain behind them and the rain starting, and the Nemaha Company stopped being a thing in the world over the course of about four days.

That was what nobody had told them. Val had been braced for an arrival and there was no arrival. There was a wet meadow east of Oregon City with sixty wagons in it and men coming out from the settlements to look at stock, and people simply began to leave: the Bells went south on the second morning because a cousin had written; the Rook brothers sold their cattle in two hours at a price that made Kyra laugh out loud and were gone before dark; Sims left without saying goodbye to anybody, which surprised no one.

Pryce went round every wagon and shook every hand. He got to theirs in the rain with his hat in his hand and said that they were the two best hands he had had in the column, that he had told four men so, and that if either of them was ever in the Tualatin country they were to ask for him and not stand on ceremony.

Then he put his hat on and walked off up the line and did it again at the next wagon.

Val stood in the mud and watched him go, and had a feeling she could not immediately file.

Kyra came round the tailgate and stood beside her in the rain.

“You’ll not see him again.”

“No.”

“That’s the one you’ll mind.”

“It is already the one I mind,” Val said, “and he has been gone four minutes.”

Rachel Vance and Nan went to a widowed brother-in-law near Salem, and did not want to, and had no choice about it, and Rachel said so out loud to Kyra while Nan was loading the last of the crockery.

Eli Frame went north with the Bells’ hired man to look at the country round the falls, and he was nineteen and had buried a wife in July and he did not know yet that he was going to be all right, but Val had watched him eat a great deal at supper for eleven consecutive nights and had formed a view.

The Deems took a room in Oregon City. Horace had a letter to a man in the milling business and he meant to present it, and Sophia was going to teach eleven children in a front parlor within a month and be entirely happy, and Val, who had put her hands on most of the bodies in that column, thought the Deems had come through the best of anybody because they had lost a walnut press and nothing else.

And on the third of November the last wagon went off the meadow and left theirs standing in it, and the rain came down, and the two of them sat under the cover with the tailgate down and looked out at Oregon.

Kyra put her boots up on the tailgate.

“Well.”

“Yes.”

“Say something about it.”

“It is green in November,” Val said, “and there is a mountain over there with snow on it that is the same shape as a mountain I spent eleven months under in 1607, and there is a river below us going the wrong way, and I have not decided anything about it yet.”

The Act came into her hands on the eighteenth of November, in a newspaper, in a room above a store in Oregon City, and she read it the way she had read Polk’s message outside a post office in Missouri two years before, which was standing up and twice.

Congress had passed it on the twenty-seventh of September. The news had come round the Horn and up the coast and had been in the Territory about ten days, and half the men in the valley already knew the numbers better than they knew scripture.

It was simple enough. A white settler over eighteen who was a citizen, or had declared he meant to become one, and who was in the Territory before the first of December, could have three hundred and twenty acres for four years’ residence and cultivation. If he was married, six hundred and forty — and this was the part everyone talked about, and the part that was genuinely remarkable for its time — half of it in the wife’s own name, to hold in her own right.

After December of fifty the figures halved. Everything had to be surveyed and notified and proved up.

Val read it four times and then sat down on the end of the bed with the paper on her knees.

Kyra came in with her hair dripping and stood in the doorway. She had been out in it since seven and it had brought the whole weight of her hair down out of its pins, dark as a wet roof and going to copper only where the lamp got under it, and there was rain standing on her forearms.

Val did not look up from the paper.

“Say it.”

“There is nothing wrong with it,” Val said. “That is what I want to be clear about before I say the rest. It is a better law than I expected. A married woman in this Territory can hold ground in her own name against her husband’s creditors, which she cannot do in New York, or in England, or in most of the world I have lived in. Somebody argued for that and got it, and I would like to shake his hand.”

Kyra pushed the wet hair back off her face.

“And.”

“And there is no shape in it for us.” She put the paper down. “Not a prohibition. There is no line in this act that says two women may not. It is simply that the entire instrument is built out of one man, or one man and his wife, and if you are neither of those things you are not forbidden, you are absent. I have read it four times looking for the sentence that excludes us and there is no such sentence. We do not appear.”

Kyra sat down on the chair by the door with her boots still on.

“There’ll be a clerk.”

“There will be a clerk, and he will be a decent man, and he will turn it over for a while and say that he supposes a single woman might notify a claim, and then he will go and ask somebody, and the somebody will say that it has never been done, and then there will be a second conversation about whether we are in fact single, and a third about why two sisters of our age are not married, and by the end of the winter there will be four men in this valley who find us interesting.” Val had her hands flat on her knees. “And that is the part that decides it. Not the acres.”

Kyra thought about that for a moment.

“So we buy.”

“So we buy. Improved ground, off a man who wants out, with a deed, in front of a notary, in a name we have made up.” Val looked at the wall for a moment. “Which is the eleventh.”

“The eleventh what?”

“Piece of paper with something true on it about the two of us. Zorzi’s minutes, the two out of Venice, the New York entry, the shop books, a lieutenant’s notebook, Boston, the garrison, Lowell — nine — and Chilton’s ledger, ten, and now a deed, which is worse than all of them, because a deed does not go into a cellar in Cincinnati and rot. A deed gets copied. A deed is the one kind of paper that a country takes care of.”

Kyra was quiet for a second.

“You already know we’re doing it.”

“I have known since the meadow,” Val said.

They took a room for the winter above a saddler’s on the Oregon City road, which Kyra said was the third saddler in a hundred and forty years and asked whether Val was doing it on purpose.

Val doctored. There was no shortage of that; the valley had four thousand people in it who had all arrived in the last seven years and there were three men calling themselves physicians within twenty miles, two of whom were, and Val kept clear of them and took what they did not want, which was the women and the children and the poor and the ones who could not pay.

Kyra took work with a man named Tolliver who ran pack strings up to the mines in the south, and was worth more to him in a week than his own judgment had been in a year, and got paid about a third of what she was worth, and said that was normal and she would fix it by spring.

And in the evenings, with the rain going on the roof in a way it did not stop doing from November to April, they looked at the map.

It was a bad map. Everybody’s map was bad. What it showed clearly enough was the valley — the Willamette going north between the hills, and the settlements strung along it, and every decent piece of bottom ground from the falls to the forks spoken for since forty-three by men who had walked here first.

What it did not show was the country west.

“Nobody’s marked any of it,” Kyra said, with her finger on the blank between the valley and the sea.

“Because nobody wants it. It is timber. It is the worst possible country for a man with a plow and four years to prove up in, and it is eight days from a market in the wet, and there is a whole valley of better ground standing open to anybody with a wife.”

Kyra moved her finger an inch west.

“And a river through it?”

“Several, and none of them are on that map correctly, and a man in the store told me on Tuesday that there is a lake in there.” Val put her finger down two inches from Kyra’s. “I asked him where. He said he had not been. I asked him who had. He said a man he knew had gone in after elk in forty-eight and had come out saying there was more water in there than a man would think and nothing whatever worth having.”

Kyra looked at the blank space for a while.

“That’s the first useful thing anybody in this Territory has said to us.”

“That is what I thought.” Val folded the map. “In the spring.”

Kyra got up and put another stick on.

“In the spring.”

She said it lightly, and went to see to the fire, and Val sat with the folded map under her hand and kept back the part that had been sitting in her since the third reading of a newspaper in a room above a store.

A deed did not expire. A deed was a name in a book in a courthouse, and the name would have to go on being answered to by somebody, in that county, for as long as the ground was theirs — which meant that the rule she had made on a road out of Boston in seventeen twenty-five, the one that said nothing you cannot walk away from inside an hour, was about to be broken by her own hand and with her eyes open.

She had run it four times.

It came out the same each time, which was that there was no other way to have a place in this country that did not involve a man, and that Kyra had stood in the sage at the Little Sandy in August and been told by a woman on a mule that there was nothing wrong with them, and had not been able to speak.

Val turned the map over and put it in the box with the notebook.

— end of chapter fourteen —

They went in on the fourteenth of April with two horses, a mule Kyra had got off Tolliver at a price he regretted, and nine days of food.

The first two days were plain enough. They went west out of the Tualatin plains on a track that was a track because people had ridden it, past the last two claims with fences on them, and then past a cabin with a man outside it who said he had been there since forty-seven and asked them where they thought they were going.

“West,” Kyra said.

“There’s nothing west.”

“That’s what we heard,” Kyra allowed.

He looked at the mule and the packs and the two of them and said, “You’ll want to be out before the rain comes back,” and then, after a moment, in a different voice, “It’s big country in there. It don’t look it from here.”

He was right and the map was wrong and everything anybody had told them was wrong in the same direction, which was that they had all been thinking about distance and the country was not about distance.

It was about the fact that you could not see.

Kyra had crossed a plain that took nine weeks and had never once felt shut in. Four hours into the Coast Range she was in a world with a ceiling. Fir a hundred and eighty feet up with no branch on them for sixty, and under that a second forest of vine maple and salal and devil’s club that closed in behind the horses, and under that a floor of fallen timber six feet through that you did not climb over, you went around, and the going around cost you a quarter mile at a time. There was no horizon. There was a green half-light and a great deal of water in the air that was not rain, and moss hanging off everything in sheets, and a smell of cedar and rot that she liked immediately and could not have defended.

On the third day they made four miles.

On the fourth they came out on a ridge with a burn on it — old, forty or fifty years, with the snags standing black and the huckleberry grown up through — and for the first time since Tuesday they could see something, and what they could see was ridge after ridge going west, dark green and blue and paler blue, and nothing in any of it. No smoke. No cut. Nothing.

Val stood on the burn with her hand up against the light and did not say anything for about a minute and a half.

“Well?” Kyra said.

“I am recalculating a number I have been carrying since November.”

“Which one?”

“Eight days to a market.” Val put her hand down. “It is not eight days. It is eight days if there is a road, and there is not going to be a road in here for thirty years, and I have just watched us do four miles on Wednesday. Everything I said in Oregon City about this country was correct and I said it in the wrong units.”

Kyra sat down on a log.

“You want to turn round.”

“I did not say that,” Val objected.

“You’ve said four things since Tuesday and three of them were arithmetic.”

“Yes.” Val came and sat down on the log beside her, which took her some effort in the huckleberry and did nothing for her dignity. “I am frightened of it. I would like that said plainly and then I would like to go on, because being frightened of a place is not a reason and I have never yet met a piece of country that made me feel as well as I felt on that burn for the first fifteen seconds.”

They found the lake on the sixth day and they found it by ear.

Kyra had been following water all morning — a creek running east that had to be coming from somewhere — and about noon the ground went flat and the timber opened and the noise of the creek stopped, and there it was through the trunks: a long sheet of water lying north and south in a bench between two ridges, perhaps three quarters of a mile of it, with a beaver-cut point at the near end and a marsh at the far one and a fringe of good grass along the eastern shore where the light came in.

It was absolutely silent except for the birds. Val came up beside her at the edge of the trees and stopped, and the light off the water got at her from below the way it does at the edge of a lake, so that the pale of her hair went to nothing at all at the ends and her whole face was lit from underneath like a woman holding a candle.

They stood at the edge of it for a long time. Then Kyra took her boots off and walked into it up to the knees and stood there with her skirt bunched in her fists.

“Cold?” Val said, from the bank.

“Snow that’s made a decision.”

There were nine things wrong with it. Val counted them out that evening and Kyra let her, because it was how she loved a place, and because every one of them was true.

There was no bottom land worth plowing; the flat was bench and it was thin. There was no road and would not be one. There was no mill within forty miles, so the timber standing around them in quantities that would have made a Maribor merchant faint was worth precisely nothing. It rained from October to May. It was two days’ hard travel to the nearest cabin and four to the nearest store. There was no survey — the government’s men had not been within twenty miles of this water and would not be for years — which meant there was nothing here to buy and nobody to buy it from and no deed to be had at any price.

And there was the tenth thing, which was not wrong with it, and which Val said last and quietly.

“There is no one here.”

Except that there had been.

Kyra found it on the second morning, along the north end where the marsh came in: four shallow round depressions in the ground in a line, grown over with salal but too regular to be anything else, and forty yards off a scatter of cracked cobbles in the black soil where a fire had been for a very long time.

She stood looking at them until Val came and stood beside her.

“House pits,” Val said.

“Yes.”

“Not old. Forty years. Perhaps less.” Val crouched and put her hand flat in the hollow of one of them and did not disturb anything. “There will be a weir in that creek if you look, or the stakes of one.”

There was. They found it in the afternoon, a line of rotted stubs across the creek mouth, and Kyra stood on the bank and looked at it and felt the last eleven months rearrange itself behind her eyes.

Because she knew what had happened here. Everybody in the Territory knew and almost nobody said it: that the fevers had come up this river system in the thirties, ahead of the wagons, ahead of the Act, ahead of everything, and had gone through the villages on the lower river and taken most of them inside three years. The valley the Nemaha Company had come down into in October, which four thousand Americans were currently dividing into three-hundred-and-twenty-acre pieces on the strength of being first, had been the most densely peopled country in the whole of the west fifteen years before that.

“It isn’t empty,” she said.

“No. It was emptied.”

“There’s a difference and nobody down there is making it.”

“There is a difference and I would like to be extremely clear with myself about which side of it we are on,” Val said. “We did not do this. We were in a mill town in Massachusetts when it happened and we did not know this river existed. And it is also true that if it had not happened we would not be standing here, and that the reason there is nobody to ask is that the people you would ask are dead.”

Kyra stood with her arms folded.

“So what do we do?”

“We do not tell ourselves a story about it.” Val stood up out of the hollow. “We do not decide that it was meant, or that we are keeping it for anybody, or that being sorry is a kind of payment. We know what this place is. We say it out loud once a year to each other and never to anybody else, and we do not put a cabin on top of those.” She nodded at the four depressions. “Fifty yards south. There is better ground anyway.”

“That’s it? That’s the whole answer?”

“That is the whole honest answer available to two people who are going to live here,” Val said. “If you have a better one I will take it. I have been looking for one since yesterday morning and I have not got a better one.”

Kyra did not have a better one either.

They built fifty yards south.

The decision itself took four minutes and happened on the eighth evening, on the grass at the eastern shore, with the light going and the water flat as tin.

Val laid it out, which was what Val did. Everything against: no road, no market, no paper, no neighbor, four days from a doctor for anybody but themselves, and a winter about which neither of them knew one single thing. Everything for: nobody would ever come and look at them; the ground could not be claimed by anyone else because no one wanted it; they could work when they liked and be seen when they chose; and it was two days’ ride from a valley that was filling up with people who would all, within forty years, be dead.

Then she stopped talking and looked at the water.

“And?” Kyra said.

“And I am not going to decide it.”

Kyra turned her head.

“You did this at Dymná,” she said.

“I did this at Dymná, and you stood above the treeline and chose, and you were right, and I have thought about that one hour more often than you know.” Val had her knees drawn up and her arms around them. “I can tell you what everything costs. I cannot tell you what it is worth. You are the one who walks into a place and knows what it is, and you have known what this one is since Thursday, and I have been watching you not say it for four days out of consideration for my arithmetic.”

Kyra looked out at the lake.

She had known since Thursday. She had known standing in it up to her knees with her skirt in her fists, in a piece of country with a ceiling on it, where the only sound for three miles was birds and the only two people were the two of them.

“Here,” she said.

“Here,” said Val, and put her hand over on the grass and left it palm-up, and Kyra put hers in it, out in the open, in the last of the light, where nobody at all could see.

— end of chapter fifteen —

The first house was twelve feet by fourteen and they lived in it for three years and Val was fonder of it than of anything she had owned since Trieste.

They built it out of cedar because cedar was what fell down around them and because it split, and they built it badly, and then in fifty-four they built a second one forty feet away that was better in every respect and had two rooms and a stone chimney and a floor, and Kyra stood in the yard and cried about the first one being pulled down, for about ninety seconds, furiously.

“It’s a shed,” Kyra said, wiping her face with the back of her wrist. “I’m crying about a shed.”

“You are crying about three winters.”

“I’m crying about a shed, Val.”

“Then you are crying about a shed,” Val said, “and I am going to put the good door on the new one, which came out of that shed, and neither of us is going to mention it again.”

The work of those years was not romantic and Val kept a page on it because she kept a page on everything.

They cleared four acres and it took two summers. They had a cow by fifty-three and nine head by fifty-eight. They put in oats and a garden and lost the garden twice to elk before Kyra built a fence that an elk respected. They learned that a Coast Range winter was not cold — it was wet, continuously, from October until you stopped believing in April — and that the only thing that mattered in a house in that country was whether you could get anything dry, and the second house had a hearth built for exactly that.

And they worked out, over about four years, what they were going to be to the people around them, because the people around them were coming.

That had been the flaw in the plan and Val had known it on the burn. Nobody wanted this country in fifty-one. By fifty-five there were two families on the creek below them and a man alone on the ridge north, and by fifty-nine there were fourteen households inside a day’s ride and somebody was talking about a road.

So: Miss Miller doctored, and Miss Miller’s sister knew stock and weather, and the two of them lived up at the lake and kept themselves to themselves and were civil and were not intimate with anybody, and within six years they were a fixed feature of that country in the way a rock is a fixed feature.

They were asked about husbands perhaps forty times in that decade. The sister story did what it had done since Maribor. Nobody in the Nehalem country ever asked them a second time, because the country was full of people who had left something behind and had a story about it, and a man who has told you the story of his own brother does not press you on yours.

The deed came in fifty-eight and Val went down to the land office at Oregon City to get it, and was gone nine days, and came back with a folded paper and an expression Kyra read from forty yards away.

They had held the ground for seven years with nothing. The survey had finally come through the year before — two men with a chain and a compass who had walked out of the timber in August of fifty-seven, taken a meal, told them the township and range numbers, and walked off west — and once the lines existed, the ground could be bought, and once it could be bought it could also be bought by somebody else.

So Val bought it. A hundred and sixty acres at a dollar and a quarter, in cash, and the receiver’s receipt in the name of Martha Miller of the county of Washington, and a note in the book.

She put it on the table that evening and the two of them looked at it.

“Eleven,” Val said.

“Eleven.”

“And this one is different in kind from the other ten, and I have said so before and I am going to say it once more and then stop.” She had her hands flat on either side of the paper. “It does not rot. It gets copied into a book and the book gets copied into another book. In a hundred years there will be a clerk in a courthouse who can put his hand on Martha Miller’s name in four minutes. And Martha Miller is going to have to still be here, and be the right age, for as long as we hold this ground.”

Kyra sat down opposite her.

“How long do we hold it?”

“That is the question I have been carrying up and down that road for nine days.”

“And?”

“And the honest answer is that I do not know, and that I have stopped being able to say twenty years the way I used to be able to say it.” Val looked at the paper. “In Maribor I knew we were leaving from the first week. In Trieste I knew. Here I have caught myself four separate times this year thinking about what a thing will be like in thirty years, and the fourth time was the orchard, and I planted it anyway.”

Statehood came in fifty-nine, in February, and they heard about it in March.

Val read the constitution in a borrowed newspaper over two evenings and was mostly favorably impressed, and then got to the clause the voters had put in on their own account, separately, by a majority of eight to one: that no free negro or mulatto not residing in this state at the time of the adoption of this constitution should come, reside, or be within the state, or hold any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein.

She read it twice and put the paper down and went outside and split wood for an hour and a half.

Kyra came out and sat on the block and waited until she stopped.

“I have been in four countries that burned people,” Val said at last, with the axe in her hand. “I have been in a room where a court read out the articles under which they proposed to do it to us. I am not naive and I am not shocked. What I am is tired, and the particular thing I am tired of tonight is the arithmetic of it, which is that these people voted on it, in a schoolhouse, on a Monday, and then went home and had supper.”

“Say the rest.”

“There is no rest. That is all there is.” She set the axe down. “Except that we are going to be here a long time, and that clause will be in that book for fifty years, and I am going to have to be civil to men who put it there.”

The census man came out in the summer of sixty and sat on their porch with a printed schedule and a pen and asked eleven questions, and Val answered all of them.

Dwelling number. Family number. Name. Age. Sex. Color. Profession. Value of real estate owned. Value of personal estate. Place of birth. Whether married within the year, attended school, cannot read and write.

Miller, Martha, 31, F, W, physician — which he wrote down as nurse without consulting her — 800, 200, Pennsylvania. Miller, Sarah, 29, F, W, farmer, Pennsylvania.

He thanked them for the water and went on to the Wilmots.

Val sat on the step afterward for some time.

“Thirty-one,” Kyra said.

“Thirty-one, and you are twenty-nine, and in eighteen seventy you will be thirty-nine and I will be forty-one, and in eighteen eighty you will be forty-nine.” Val had her hands hanging between her knees. “I have been putting those numbers in a column since Trieste and I have never once had to put them in a government’s book with my own mouth.”

“Does it matter? He’s a farmer with a pen.”

“He is a farmer with a pen and that schedule goes to Washington and it does not come back.” Val looked out at the lake. “Twenty years from now a clerk can lay three of those side by side and see two women who aged twenty years in twenty years, which is the answer I want, and a man in this county can lay his eyes on us and see the same two women he saw in sixty. Those are different records and only one of them is on paper.”

“So we’re fine.”

“We are fine on paper for as long as we are here,” Val said, “and that is the first time in four hundred years that the paper has been the easy half.”

The twenty-fourth peak came in December of sixty.

It was the first one in their lives that arrived in a house that was theirs, with a door they had hung themselves and a bar they had cut, and no landlord under the floor and no company on the other side of a wall and nobody within four miles.

Kyra got the half-second on the stairs.

They had three days of it. Afterward, on the fourth morning, Val lay looking at the boards of their own ceiling and did an accounting she had been avoiding for two hundred and fifty years, which was that the thing had happened twenty-four times and that twenty-three of those had been got through in somebody else’s building.

“It was not better,” she said.

“No.”

“I thought it might be better, in a house. It was not better.”

“It was quieter,” Kyra said. “You could shout.”

Val turned her head on the pillow and looked at her — at the dark chestnut of her hair spread out over the bolster with the copper in it where the window got at it, and at the line of the jaw that had always been firmer than her own, and at the one gray thread that was not gray and never had been, that was only the light, and that Val had gone at four times over the years with a candle like a fool — and thought, not for the first time, that four hundred years was a perfectly ridiculous span for a species to have and that she had still not got used to being looked after by somebody.

The men came in sixty-one, three weeks apart, which Val maintained afterward was a coincidence and which Kyra never once believed.

Kyra’s was a farrier at Forest Grove called Asa Pruitt, who had shod for her twice, and who in April enlisted with the mounted volunteers the state was raising, and who had the useful quality of being entirely uninterested in why a woman knew what the weather would do on Thursday. He simply believed her and got on with it. Kyra came back from the Grove at the end of the month, put her hat on the table, and said, “I’m going to, if he asks. He’ll ask.”

“Then he will ask.”

“That’s all you’re saying?”

“That is all I am saying at present,” Val said. “I have four questions but three of them are impertinent and the fourth is about his hands, and you would take it the wrong way.”

Kyra laughed for about a minute.

Val’s was a millwright called Elias Mott who had come up from Missouri in fifty-six and was putting in a sash mill on the Nehalem, and who had a family still in Missouri he did not talk about and opinions about the coming trouble that he had the sense not to say out loud in Oregon and that everybody in the county had assigned him anyway. By the summer of sixty-one he was a copperhead as far as the Grove was concerned, on the strength of not saying anything.

Val told Kyra in the second week of May, in the evening, at the table, in the flattest available sentence, because that was the pact and because she had been managing it badly for four days.

Kyra tipped her chair back against the wall.

“Him? The mill one?”

“The mill one.”

“He hardly says a word.”

“He is a man who has been decided about by an entire county on the basis of a silence,” Val said, “and I have spent two hundred and fifty-four years being whatever the room decided I was, and I find that I am extremely interested in that, and I would rather you had that reason than a better-looking one.”

Kyra thought about it.

“How long?” she asked.

“Not long. It never is.”

“That’s not what I asked. I asked how long.”

Val looked at the fire for a moment.

“It will not be long,” she said, “and I know that on the first day now, which I did not use to, and I have not decided whether that is wisdom or something worse.”

Neither of them remarked on the curve. It did not occur to either of them that there was one.

— end of chapter sixteen —

The war arrived in the Nehalem country the way weather arrives on a coast, which is to say late, sideways, and already half spent.

The wire came through to Portland in the autumn of sixty-one, and after that the news was four days old instead of six weeks, and the effect of that on a country where the mail still came out from the Grove on a man’s horse when the man felt like it was a peculiar kind of whiplash. A store at a crossroads would have Shiloh in it on a Tuesday, in a paper somebody had carried out wrapped round a wheel hub, and the men would stand at the counter and read the casualty columns out loud for the names of counties in Ohio and Missouri and Indiana where they had people, and then go back out and go on splitting shakes.

Kyra watched it happen in a dozen small ways and formed her own view early, which was that Oregon was doing the thing she had watched people do in every province of Europe: having a very great deal of opinion about a fight it was not in.

Nobody in that country was going to be conscripted. Nobody’s fields were going to be ridden over. What they had instead was a mounted regiment of their own, raised to hold the posts the regular army had emptied when it went east, and which spent the whole of the war chasing stock thieves, escorting emigrants and freezing in eastern Oregon. It was not nothing. It was not Antietam either, and every man in the ranks of it knew the difference and minded.

Asa Pruitt went into it in the winter of sixty-one and was posted to The Dalles.

He wrote to her four times in two years, which for a farrier was a considerable undertaking.

He came down twice. The second time was August of sixty-two, and he had four days, and on the second of them he found the mark.

Kyra had known it would happen eventually and had been entirely unbothered about it, and what she had not predicted was how funny it was going to be.

“That’s ink.”

“It is.”

“Under the skin. That’s — ” He propped himself up on an elbow, wholly diverted, a man who had spent two years around soldiers and had opinions about tattooing as a class of activity. “Only sailors have those.”

Kyra did not move.

“And me.”

“How in the — ” He stopped. “Sarah Miller.”

“Yes.”

“Where’d you get a thing like that, Sarah?”

And Kyra, lying on her back in a rented room in Forest Grove with her hands behind her head, said that there had been a Portuguese sailmaker in New Bedford with a needle and a great deal of rum, and that it had been her twenty-first birthday, and that her sister had not spoken to her for a month.

Asa Pruitt received this as one of the great disclosures of his life.

“Your sister,” he said.

“Well, quite.”

She reported the whole of it to Val at the table four days later, in order, with the pauses in the right places, and Val put her head in her hands.

“New Bedford.”

“It came to me in the moment.”

“You have never been to New Bedford.”

“I’ve been to Boston,” Kyra said. “That’s practically the same thing, to a farrier from Yamhill.”

“And the rum.”

“The rum was the best part. He’s a man who’s had two years of soldiers and he’d never once heard of a woman doing it, and he needed a story where it wasn’t quite my fault, so I gave him one.” She was enjoying herself enormously. “And now there’s a man in the Oregon cavalry who thinks I was a wild girl in Massachusetts, and that’s a better hedge than any lie you ever built me.”

Val took her hands down from her face.

“Sarah Miller is twenty-nine,” she said.

“She is.”

“On a printed schedule, in my own voice, to a man with a pen, in June of sixty. Which makes her thirty-one now.” Val put her chin on her hand. “A twenty-first birthday puts your sailmaker in eighteen fifty-two, and in eighteen fifty-two you were nine hundred miles from New Bedford standing in a lake up to your knees.”

Kyra considered this.

“He won’t do the sum.”

“He will not do the sum. No man who has just been told that story does the sum.” Val shook her head slowly. “That is actually very good, and I hate it.”

“I know it is.”

“I am going to be annoyed about how good it is for several days.”

“I know you are,” Kyra said.

Elias Mott lasted from the spring of sixty-two to the end of that year, and Kyra met him exactly once.

It was at the mill site on the Nehalem in June. She had come down with Val on some business about a horse and he was up on the frame with a plumb bob, and he came down and shook her hand and said four sentences, and three of them were about the water and the fourth was that he was glad to meet Miss Miller’s sister at last.

Then he went back up the frame.

Riding home Kyra said, “He’s not what I expected.”

“You expected somebody louder.”

“I expected somebody who’d been decided about to act like it. He doesn’t. He just goes on doing the job.” Kyra ducked a branch. “That’s the thing you like.”

“That is the thing I like,” Val agreed, “and I would be obliged if you did not put it any more accurately than that, because I have been avoiding the sentence for a month.”

The evening both of them were in the same room was the Fourth of July in sixty-three, in a barn on the Grove road that somebody had cleared for a subscription dance, with lanterns on the beams and a fiddle and two hundred people in from forty miles.

Kyra saw Asa first because Asa was on furlough and had come looking for her, which was flattering and slightly alarming. Mott was over by the door, where he stood at every gathering in that county, being a man nobody talked to and who had long ago stopped noticing.

And Vicksburg had fallen on the Fourth and the news was four days out and the barn did not have it yet, but it had Gettysburg, in a two-day-old paper, and a man had read it out on a box before the fiddling started.

So the room was in a particular state.

Kyra watched it sort itself over the course of about ten minutes: the men with Union people in the ranks in one half of the barn getting louder and closer together, and the four or five men in that county who had southern connections drifting without appearing to drift toward the wall by the door, and the women in the middle keeping everything from happening.

She looked round for Val.

Val was standing by the trestle with a cup of something in her hand and her face doing absolutely nothing at all, and she was looking at the door, and Kyra realized in the same instant that Val had been looking at the door for some time, and that Val had seen the whole of this arrive about four seconds before she had.

They got to each other by the corner post.

“Both of them,” Kyra said.

“Both of them.”

“In a barn.”

“In a barn, on the Fourth of July, on the day after that paper.” Val took a swallow of whatever it was and did not change expression by any measurable amount. “Your one is going to come across this floor in about a minute and ask you to dance, in front of everybody, because he is twenty-eight and pleased with himself. Mine is going to stand by that door until nine o’clock and then go home, because he has worked out — correctly — that leaving early is a statement and staying is a statement and the only thing left is to be present and dull.”

Kyra got her face straight with an effort that she could feel.

“It’s funny,” she said.

“It is.”

“It’s very funny. We’ve done this on two continents.”

“Trieste,” Val said.

“Trieste was different, Trieste was four months —”

“Trieste was your Jakob and my four months and the two of us at the end of a table doing exactly this,” Val said, “and you enjoyed every bit of it, and you told me so.”

And then it stopped being funny, the way it always did, and it stopped being funny for Kyra about half a second before it stopped for Val, which was usual.

Because the barn was full of people who were going to be dead inside sixty years, taking sides in a thing that would be settled inside two, and one of those sides was going to win, and neither man by the wall nor the men across the floor had the faintest idea that the two women at the trestle had watched the Thirty Years’ War from a house in Styria and had formed no opinion about it that either of them had ever said out loud.

“We don’t get to have a side,” Kyra said.

“No.”

“Not that I want one. I’ve got one, actually, about this — ”

“I know you have. So have I. We are not going to say it in this barn.” Val set the cup down. “That is the entire discipline and it has never once got easier, and the only thing I have ever found that makes it bearable is that I can say it to you in a kitchen.”

Asa Pruitt came across the floor.

Kyra danced with him, twice, in front of two hundred people, and enjoyed it, and afterward saw Val standing by the trestle exactly where she had left her, perfectly sealed, in a good dress, with the lantern light coming down across her and putting the pale of her hair almost white at the crown and nothing at all in her face — and Kyra, in the middle of a reel, with a farrier’s hand on her waist, thought: there is one person in this barn who knows what I look like in the dark, and she is standing by the cake.

They were both gone by Christmas.

Mott left the county in October. The mill was finished and there was talk about a second one at Scappoose, and he told Val two weeks before he went and did not make anything of it, and what he actually said at the door was that he had been treated fairly by exactly one person in four years and he was aware of it.

“I did not treat you fairly,” Val said. “I was honest with you, which is a different article, and I was honest with you because I was never going to be anything else, and you took that for kindness because you have not been offered much.”

He thought about that.

“That’s the most anybody’s said to me in this county,” he said, and put his hat on, and rode down to the Nehalem, and Val stood in the door until he was out of the trees.

Asa Pruitt’s company went east of the mountains in November and he wrote twice from there, once in the winter and once in the spring, and the second letter said that he had met a widow at Walla Walla and that he hoped Miss Miller would not think badly of him.

“He’s twenty-nine,” Kyra said, reading it at the table. “And he’s apologizing to me.”

“He is a decent man.”

“He’s a decent man and I’d have been sorry if he wasn’t, and I’m going to write back and tell him I’m pleased, and I am.” She folded it. “Two years, Val.”

“Nearly two.”

“And yours was — what, seven months?”

“Seven months and a week,” Val said, “and it will be shorter next time, and I have known that since the second one, and I am going to want to talk about it eventually and not tonight.”

Kyra looked at her across the table for a moment.

“All right,” she said. “Not tonight.”

And she put the letter in the box with the notebook and the deed, and neither of them said anything more about it for fifty years.

— end of chapter seventeen —

Val worked it in March of sixty-three, at the table, in the morning, and did not mention it to anybody for six months.

It was not a difficult sum. She had been carrying the two ends of it since a hill above Trieste in the third year there, when she had stood at the wall with her arms folded against the cold and said a thing she had no information for, and had then said so, and Kyra had told her she was allowed to.

A hundred and eighty years. It came out at this year.

She looked at the figure for a while and then closed the notebook and went out and dug in the garden, because she had learned over about four centuries that there were certain arithmetics you did not want to be sitting still with.

She raised it in September.

“I want to go to the sea,” she said.

Kyra looked up from the churn.

“It’s four days.”

“It is two and a half if we take the horses down the Nehalem and leave them at the Ellis place, and it is October I want, not now.” Val had her hands in her pockets. “The nights are clear in October and the thing is up and it is high by nine o’clock, and I would like to see it off water and not off a ridge, and I have wanted that since the fourth of March and I have been failing to say so for six months.”

“Six months.”

“Six months and eleven days.”

Kyra left the churn where it was and came and stood in front of her with her sleeves rolled, and got hold of the front of Val’s dress in one fist, gently, and shook her about half an inch.

“Say the actual sentence.”

“It is a hundred and eighty years,” Val said. “This year. The one I said on the wall.”

Kyra let go of her dress very slowly.

“You’ve been sitting on that since March.”

“I have.”

“Val Sorin.”

“I did not want it to be the sort of thing where we make a plan around it and then the weather is bad,” Val said, “and I also did not want to say it out loud and find that you had forgotten it, which would have been entirely reasonable after a hundred and eighty years and which I would have minded more than I can properly account for.”

Kyra stood there.

“I haven’t forgotten one word of it,” she said.

They went down in the third week of October, and the country changed under them twice.

The first change was the Nehalem going west, the valley opening and the timber getting older and bigger, three hundred feet and dead straight, with a light under it like the inside of a church. The second was the smell, which arrived about four miles before anything else did, and which Val got first and did not say anything about, and then Kyra got it and pulled up the horse.

Salt. Wet salt and rot and kelp, coming up the river on the tide.

They came out at the bay in the afternoon of the second day, and left the horses, and walked out over the grass and the low dunes and the bent grass, and stopped.

Kyra did not say anything for a long time. Val stood beside her and let her have it.

It was flat and gray-green and enormous and it went to the edge of the world, and it made a noise that the Adriatic had never made and that the Atlantic off New York had not made either, a long unhurried collapse every eleven seconds with a mile of beach to do it on. There was no shipping in it. There was nothing in it at all, all the way out, except weather forty miles off standing up like a wall.

“Two hundred and fifty-six years,” Kyra said, eventually.

“Two hundred and fifty-six.”

“That’s how long we’ve been on this planet without standing in front of that.”

“Yes.”

Kyra put her hands on top of her head and laughed at it, at the ocean, out loud, with nobody inside four miles, and the wind took her hair out sideways — dark chestnut and going to copper at the ends where the low sun got into it, and the whole of it lifting and flying east.

Val, watching her do it, was aware of arriving at something she did not have a word for in either language and had stopped looking for one in 1705.

They waited for dark on the dry sand above the tide line with a driftwood fire, and it came in clear, which Kyra had said it would on Tuesday.

The sky over the Pacific in October with no town within twenty miles and no moon is not a thing that most people in the nineteenth century ever saw, and it was not a thing that Val, who had been under skies on two worlds, was ever able to be casual about.

It came up in the east after nine.

She found it the way she had found it every clear autumn for two hundred and fifty-six years, which was without looking for it: off the corner of the eye, in the low part of the sky with the great square coming up under it, a smudge the size of a thumbprint at arm’s length, with no edges.

“There,” Kyra said.

“I know.”

“Say it.”

Val sat on the sand with her arms round her knees and the fire going down beside her and the ocean doing its enormous unhurried work forty yards away, and she looked at the place she was born.

“It is somewhere else in the sky,” she said.

“It is.”

“It is higher than it was on that wall by — I would want to measure it, and I am going to, and it is higher. And we are looking at it out of a different ocean entirely, which is a sentence I said with my arms folded in about sixteen eighty-three, in a bad temper, with no information of any kind, and which I have thought about perhaps four hundred times since and have never been able to account for.”

Kyra leaned back on her hands.

“You’re allowed to say things that aren’t information.”

“You said that at the time.”

“I did. It was a good line then and it’s a better one now.” She put her head over on Val’s shoulder. “A hundred and eighty years, and you got the ocean and the sky and the timing, and you were annoyed about the wine.”

“I was annoyed about the wine.”

They sat there for a long while.

And at some point Val became aware that she was doing the thing she had promised herself in 1789 she would stop doing, which was building, without permission and in silence, out of a smudge and a bearing and a speed and a number she did not trust — and that for once she was not going to stop, because it was the eighteenth of October in a year she had been walking toward since Trieste, and because the only person in the universe who could check her working was asleep against her shoulder.

The other thing came the next winter, in a journal, and she nearly missed it.

She had been taking periodicals since fifty-nine. They came out from Portland to the Grove and sat there until somebody remembered, and arrived at the lake in bundles four to seven months old, and Val read every one of them front to back including the agricultural notices, because that was how you kept a shape of a world when you lived in timber.

It was a notice of perhaps four sentences, reprinted from an English journal, in a number that reached her in the second week of December.

An observer named Huggins had put a prism on a telescope and turned it on the nebulae. Some of them, he reported, gave a spectrum of a few bright lines only, which was the signature of a luminous gas. Others gave a continuous band crossed by dark lines, like the sun.

Val read it standing up in the doorway with her coat still on.

Then she sat down on the step.

Kyra found her there some time later with the journal open on her knees and her hands perfectly still on top of it, and said, “What.”

“Fraunhofer,” Val said.

“That’s the lines. In the sunlight. Eighteen-fourteen.”

“Eighteen-fourteen. Three hundred and twenty-four dark lines in a band of sunlight, catalogued by a man who made glass, and nobody knew what a single one of them was for.” Val’s voice was not quite level and she made no attempt to make it so. “And Kirchhoff worked out four years ago what they are, which is elements. Sodium. Iron. The sun has iron in it and it says so in its own light, and a man in a room in Heidelberg can read it off a wall.”

“All right.”

“And now somebody has pointed the same instrument at the nebulae.” Val turned the journal round, uselessly, because there was nothing in it to see but four sentences of type. “Kyra. They can find out what a thing is made of without going anywhere near it. They can stand on this planet and take a piece of light that left something two million years ago and tell you what was burning.”

Kyra sat down on the step beside her.

“Say the rest of it.”

“The rest of it is that in sixteen eighty-three the argument was whether there was anything out there at all, and in seventeen twenty-eight a man got the speed of light out of a mistake, and in eighteen thirty-eight a man got the distance to one star out of six months of patience, and now they are reading the composition of a smudge.” Val put the journal down on the step. “That is four men and a hundred and eighty years and they are not building toward us and they do not know we exist. And they are coming in the right direction.”

“Val.”

“I am not going to say the next part.”

“I know you’re not.” Kyra got hold of her hand. “Say this part, then. Out loud. In our own yard, with nobody within four miles.”

Val sat on the step of a house she had built in a country nobody wanted, sixty-four years into the nineteenth century of a planet she had been marooned on since she was seventy-seven years old, and she said it out loud for the first time since a mountain.

“There is going to be a way home,” she said. “Not for us to make. For them to make, without knowing they are making it, and for us to be standing there when they do. I have thought so since seventeen eighty-nine and I have not said it in the open air in two hundred and fifty-seven years, and I am saying it now, and I am not going to be able to say how long, and I have wanted to say it in a yard since seventeen eighty-nine.”

Kyra did not answer for a moment.

Then she said, “Say it again next year,” and did not let go of her hand.

— end of chapter eighteen —

The two ends of the railroad met in Utah in May of sixty-nine and the news came to the lake in a newspaper Kyra carried up from the Grove in her saddlebag, and she read it out loud at the table while Val was cutting bread.

Val stopped cutting bread.

“Seven days,” she said.

“That’s what it says,” Kyra confirmed. “New York to San Francisco.”

“Seven days.” Val put the knife down. “We did it in five months and four of those days were spent getting one wagon out of the Snake.”

They did not say anything else about it for two years, and both of them thought about it every week.

Val raised it in the spring of seventy-one, at the table, in the flat voice she used for things she had already decided and had been carrying around for a season.

“The hull,” she said. “I want to look at it.”

Kyra put her cup down.

“It has been eighty-two years since anybody has been within four thousand miles of it, and it was waking by degrees when we left, and I do not know what waking by degrees means over eighty-two years because nobody has ever done this.” Val had her hands round her own cup. “And there is a railway in the Tatra valleys now. There is one. I read it in a Vienna notice in a bundle from Portland in February, and it goes from Kassa up through the Poprad valley, and it opened last autumn.”

“A railway. Under the mountain.”

“Within a day’s walk of the pasture.”

Kyra sat with that for a moment.

There were two reasons in the room and both of them knew both of them. Val’s was concealment and was entirely genuine and she would have gone for it alone. Kyra’s was a locker with a child’s drawing in it, three books, and a set of plates, which she had last stood in front of in the autumn of 1700, and which she had thought about at least once a month for a hundred and seventy-one years.

Neither of them said the second one. They had not said it in 1700 either.

“When?”

“We leave in August,” Val said, “and we are back before the middle of December.”

“That’s tight.”

“It is tight,” Val allowed, “and it is what I want.”

Kyra looked at her across the table.

Val was doing the thing where she was perfectly still and perfectly pleasant and entirely closed, which she did in front of strangers about four times a day and which she did in front of Kyra perhaps twice a decade, and which meant there was a third reason and that Kyra was not going to be told it.

Kyra did the arithmetic herself that evening, in her head, on the porch, and got it inside a minute, because she had been keeping the same column in her own way for two hundred and sixty-four years and did not need a notebook for it.

Seventy-one was a peak year.

She said nothing about it at all. She went in and told Val that August was fine.

They told the Ellis family that there was a legacy in the east — an uncle’s estate in Pennsylvania, tangled, with a lawyer and two cousins in it — which was a story with no end to it and which nobody would ask about twice. Ellis’s eldest took the stock for the four months and would have the use of them, and the orchard did not need anybody, and the house was shut up on the eleventh of August.

Kyra stood in the yard with the door shut behind her and found that she minded a great deal more than she had expected.

“Twenty years,” she said.

“Twenty years and four months,” Val corrected.

“That’s longer than Maribor.”

“It is two years longer than Maribor,” Val said, “and it is the longest we have been anywhere, and we are coming back, and I am going to say that once and then we are going to get on a horse.”

They went down the Columbia to Portland and up to Kalama and across, and took the cars from Sacramento, and Kyra did not sleep much for seven days.

She had expected the speed to be the thing. It was not the thing. Twenty-two miles an hour was remarkable for about six hours and then it was simply what the world did now, and the passengers around her — drummers and a family of Danes and two mining men and a woman going to a husband in Nevada — had already absorbed it entirely and spent most of the daylight complaining about the food.

What she had not expected was the ground.

Because the line ran up the Platte.

It came on her on the fourth morning east of the mountains, when she woke up in a jolting car with her cheek against the glass and looked out and knew, instantly and in her body, exactly where she was. The flat brown river with the sandbars braided in it. The bluffs standing back three miles on the north side. The short gray-green grass going out to the edge of everything.

She sat up with her heart going.

Val was already awake beside her with her hands in her lap.

“How long have you been looking at it?”

“Since about four,” Val said.

They went along it all day at twenty-two miles an hour. Kyra kept her face at the window and did not talk. Somewhere out there on the south side was a stretch of road where they had made eight miles by noon and seven more after, and a place where Val had sat in a wagon bed for eleven hours with a spoon, and a piece of ground with stones piled on it where a hired driver named Tom Sayre had gone in on a Thursday, and none of it was findable and all of it was out there.

Twice she saw graves from the train. Boards leaning, a long way off, nobody’s.

At Julesburg a man across the aisle told her cheerfully that this had been a hard road once, and that people had died all along here in the emigrant days, before the railroad.

“How long ago was that?” Kyra said.

“Oh — twenty year. Twenty-five.” He waved his hand. “Before my time.”

She thanked him and looked back out of the window.

She said it to Val in the sleeping car that night, in a whisper, with a curtain and four feet between them and forty strangers breathing.

“Twenty-one years.”

“Twenty-one.”

“There’s a man out there who thinks it’s history. It’s twenty-one years. Rachel Vance is alive. Nan Vance is alive and she’s twenty-eight and she’s probably got children.” Kyra had her hands over her face. “And we went past the whole of it in a day, Val, in a day, eating a bad chicken pie, and I couldn’t find one piece of it.”

“No.”

“How do you stand it?”

There was a long pause with the wheels going under them.

“I do not stand it well,” Val said, into the dark, “and I am not going to pretend to tonight. I have been sitting here since four o’clock in the morning doing the thing I do, which is putting numbers on it. Sixty-two people I could name went past that window today and fourteen of them are in it. And the part I cannot get round, and which I have been turning over for nineteen hours, is that everybody on this train thinks the road is finished.”

“It isn’t finished.”

“It is not finished,” Val agreed. “It is under us.” Val’s hand came through the curtain gap and found hers. “They have put a rail on top of it and in another twenty years there will be nobody alive who walked it, and all of it will be a thing people say happened in the old days, and you and I will be sitting in a house in Oregon knowing better.”

Kyra held on to her hand.

“That’s what we’re for, then,” she said.

“That is increasingly what we are for,” Val admitted.

They came into New York on the twelfth day and did not stay one hour longer than they had to, because Val looked at it for about ten minutes — at the cars and the gaslight and the six-story fronts and the traffic on Broadway — and said that she had helped set type on a street four blocks from here in seventeen twelve and that she would rather not.

The steamer was nine days to Bremen. The German railways got them to Vienna and then east, and they came up the Poprad valley on the eighteenth of September in a second-class carriage with three farmers and a priest, and Kyra sat with her face at that window too.

The mountains came up on the left the way they had come up in 1607, which was all at once, out of a flat valley, with no foothills worth the name — gray rock and the first snow on the high part and the whole range standing there like something that had been dropped.

She had last seen them from below in 1700 and from above in 1608.

“There,” she said.

Val did not answer for a moment. When Kyra looked over, Val had her hand flat on the glass, which was not a thing Val did, and her face was entirely still, and there was nothing whatever in it that anybody in that carriage could have read.

But the pale of her hair had come loose at the temple where she had been leaning against the window for an hour, and Kyra had been reading that face for two hundred and sixty-four years and could see the whole of it.

“Not far now,” Kyra said.

“No,” Val said. “Not far now.”

— end of chapter nineteen —

The valley had a hotel in it.

Not a large one and not a new one — there had been a bath-house down there since before they left, and somebody had been selling the water to invalids since the seventeen nineties — but there were now two coaches a day up from the station, and a signboard, and a man in the village who hired himself out with a rope and a pair of hobnailed boots to gentlemen who wanted to be taken up to a saddle and shown the view.

Val stood in the street of a place she had walked out of in 1608 and watched a party of four Austrians in checked coats set off up the path with him, at half past seven in the morning, talking.

“Guides,” she said.

“There’s a tariff,” Kyra said. “It’s on a board. Three florins to the green lake and five to the saddle, and it says gentlemen are advised to engage two.”

“In eleven months on that mountain we saw four human beings, and two of them were shepherds, and one was a charcoal man we never met.”

“And now there’s a tariff.”

They went up at four the next morning, in the dark, to avoid exactly that, and the way up went past the end of Dymná, and Kyra stopped at the churchyard wall for as long as it takes to count to twenty.

They did not go in. There was no point and they both knew it: the churchyard had been reordered twice since 1700 and the corner where a man called Frederick had been put was under a path now, and the stone that had been leaning there when Val said her whole name to it in the dark of a night a hundred and seventy-one years before was not anywhere.

“He’d be pleased about the railway,” Kyra said, on the road above the village.

“He would be insufferable about the railway. He went to England once and told us about it for eleven months.”

“He told you about it for eleven months.”

“He told me about it for eleven months,” Val agreed, “because you would not sit still.”

And by the time the sun got on to the high rock they were above the last of the path.

The country itself had not changed in two hundred and sixty-four years and Val found that she could not think about that in any useful way at all.

The stream crossed on two stones. The place where the trees gave out. The gap where you could see the whole valley at once and had to stop whether you wanted to or not — she stopped, exactly as she had stopped in the spring of 1607 with a leg that had not yet mended, and found that her body had been carrying the shape of that view for two and a half centuries without being asked to.

They went up past the high pasture with the hut on it. There was smoke coming out of it.

“Somebody’s up,” Kyra said.

“Somebody has been up every summer for two hundred and sixty-four years. It is a good pasture.” Val kept walking. “Tomorrow. When they take the stock down. Not today.”

Kyra looked back at it twice and did not argue.

The hull was where it had been, which in eighty-two years Val had never once been sure of, and had told herself she was sure of, and had known she was lying.

You could not see it. You could not see it from four feet away. What you could see was a slope of gray scree under the north face with a long low swell in it that read as a rock shoulder with turf grown over, and a crack running down it that was a crack in the same way that a seam in a coat is a tear.

Val put both hands flat on it and stood still.

It knew her. That was not a sentence she would have said out loud to anybody living, and it was the only accurate description she had ever found: it went warm under her palms, in about four seconds, the way a hand goes warm when somebody takes hold of it — and then the whole of the swell went transparent in a single slow stroke from the top down, like frost going off a window, and what had been a piece of the mountain was a hundred and ten feet of the second section of the Sorren lying in the scree with its back broken in two places.

Kyra let out a breath.

“Eighty-two years,” she said.

“Eighty-two years, and it has not moved, and nobody has been near it. Look at the scree above it — that has not been disturbed since the last slide, which is old.” Val had her hand still flat against it. “And it is warmer than it was in eighty-nine.”

“Is that good?”

“I have no idea,” Val said. “That is the honest answer and I am going to give it to you now rather than dress it up: I do not know what this thing is doing. It was built to be a ship for about four months and it has been something else for two hundred and sixty-four years and there is nobody alive to ask.”

Inside was the same and was not.

The second section had been built to hold two people for a season and had come down with nineteen in it, and the back of it was crushed to about half its height and had been since the day they came down, and the front of it was intact and dry and had a smell in it — clean, faintly resinous, entirely unlike anything on this planet — that hit Val in the chest every single time and had done so in 1700 and in 1789 and did so now.

They went through it slowly.

Kyra went to the stowage bay first, as she always did, and Val let her go alone, as she always did. She was in there some time. Val stood in the passage with her hand against the wall and did not listen and did not go in, and when Kyra came out her face was wet and perfectly composed and she said, “It’s fine. It’s all fine. The drawing’s fine,” and Val said, “Good,” and that was how it went, as it had been twice before.

Then they went and looked at the lockers.

There were eight. Eight had been shut in the winter of 1607 and one had been opened in the autumn of that first year, and seven had been shut ever since, and Val had put her hand on each of them on each of her three visits and had opened none.

She stood in front of them for about a quarter of an hour.

“You’ve been wanting to since seventeen hundred,” Kyra said from the hatch.

“I have been wanting to since sixteen oh eight.”

“So what’s the argument?”

“The argument has always been that there are seven, and that seven is not a number, it is a budget, and that whatever is in them cannot be put back.” Val had her hand on the second from the left. “And the counter-argument, which I have had for eighty-two years and have never once said out loud, is that I am the only person in this universe who will ever open them, and that I have been treating them as though somebody else would need them later, and that there is nobody later. There is us.”

Kyra came and stood beside her.

“Which one?”

“This one,” Val said, and opened it.

It made a sound.

That was the thing about the ship and it never stopped being the thing: it did not hiss or clang or do anything that a machine does. The locker came open with a small wooden knock, like a cupboard door in a kitchen, and the sound went down the passage and came back, and Val stood in a broken hull on a mountain in Hungary in 1871 and had to put her hand on the wall.

It was food.

Three hundred and forty sealed units of it, stacked and racked, the plain crew ration that every second section in the fleet carried, that nobody ever thought about, that Val had eaten every third day for the whole of her adult life and had not tasted since the fourth month of the year they came down.

They ate it on the scree outside with their backs against the hull and the whole valley three thousand feet below them going blue.

Neither of them could speak for the first while.

It was not good food. That was the thing Val had not braced for. It had never been good food — it was flat, faintly sweet, designed by a committee to be adequate for a person working, and on Sethal she had complained about it for fifty years, and Kyra had complained about it more.

And it was the first thing either of them had put in her mouth since 1607 that had not been grown out of the soil of this planet.

Kyra got about four mouthfuls in before she had to stop and put the heels of her hands against her eyes.

The wind came up the scree and took Kyra’s hair across her face, dark chestnut with the copper in it where the late sun got at the loose of it, and she did not push it back. Val sat beside her and did not touch her, because Kyra did not want to be touched in the first minute of a thing, and had not since about 1650, and waited, and when the hands came down she put the back of her own hand against Kyra’s cheek for a second.

“It’s horrible,” Kyra said.

“It is horrible.”

“It’s exactly as horrible as it was.”

“It is precisely, identically, unimprovably as horrible as it was,” Val said, “and I have thought about it four times a year for two hundred and sixty-four years.”

They ate two more between them and put the rest back, and Val shut the locker.

Six.

The slope was the next morning and it was half a mile east and four hundred feet up, and neither of them had been on it since the spring of 1608.

There was nothing there. That was correct and it was what they had decided in 1608 and again in 1700, and Val had been over the reasoning so many times that it had worn smooth: a marked grave is a marked grave, and a marked grave on a mountain with a tariff at the bottom of it is a thing a man with hobnailed boots will find inside ten years and will tell a priest about.

They stood on it for a while. The scree had settled. The grass had got into the lower part of it and there was a great deal of moss.

Val had the notebook in her coat. The seventeen names were in the front of it in her own hand, written in the hut in the winter of 1607 by lamplight when she could not sleep, and she had copied them forward twice into new books when the old ones filled, and she had never once been able to look at the list without reading all of it.

She did not take the notebook out.

“Say it,” Kyra said.

“I have twelve arguments for putting up a cairn and I have gone through all of them on the way up here, and every one of them is about me.” Val stood with her hands in her pockets. “There is nobody left to find it. There is nobody on this planet who knew them, and nobody on ours who knows where they are, and a pile of stones on this slope does not do one thing for seventeen dead people. It does something for me. And the cost of it is not mine to pay, because if anybody ever works out what is under that scree, the thing they find is not a grave, it is a ship.”

“So no.”

“So no. Again.” She let out a breath. “And I have now said no on this slope three times in two hundred and sixty-four years, and I would like it noted that it has not got easier, and that I expect to stand here a fourth time.”

Kyra put her arm through Val’s, out in the open, above the treeline, where there was nobody within three miles.

“Then we’ll come back and you can not do it again,” she said.

They went down before the light went, past the tarn and the rotten snow and the place where the trees started, and the smoke was still going up from the hut on the high pasture, and it was the twenty-ninth of September.

— end of chapter twenty —

They went up on the second of October, after the stock had gone down, and the door was shut with a stone against it and no lock, because there had never been a lock on that door and there was no reason for one three thousand feet above a valley.

Val moved the stone with her foot and stood there with her hand on the latch for a moment.

“Go on,” Kyra said.

She went on.

The hut had been rebuilt at least twice. She knew that inside four seconds: the walls were stone to shoulder height now where they had been stone to the knee, and the roof was a different pitch and had shakes on it instead of turf, and the door frame was new within thirty years and had been cut by somebody who knew what he was doing.

It was also, unmistakably and in every particular, the same building.

The hearth was in the same corner, because the hearth had been in the right corner. The bench was along the same wall, because that was the wall out of the draught. The window hole was in the same place and still had no glass in it and still had the same piece of oiled hide on a peg beside it, or a piece like it, the fortieth piece like it.

Val stood in the doorway and did the circuit.

She did it in order, from the door round to the door, which was how she had done it on the last morning of March in 1608 with Kyra going through the place behind her taking everything that was theirs and scuffing the ash flat. She had looked round it then and said nothing, and what she had thought, in the exact words, was: everything as it had been, nothing of theirs.

So: the tub. Not their tub. A better one, iron-bound, forty years old.

The shelf. There. Somebody’s molds on it, three of them, and a tin, and a bundle of tallow dips.

The bench and its straw. Fresh straw, cut this summer, still smelling of it.

The hearth, swept, with a white ash in it and a stack of split pine.

And on the back wall, a foot to the left of the corner post, four feet up, where it had been in the spring of 1607 when they came up out of the timber with nothing and found a door open on a mountain: a hand-forged iron hook, black, pitted, the head of it worn bright on the underside from two hundred and sixty-four years of things being hung on it and taken down again.

Val put her thumb on the bright part.

Kyra came and stood behind her and did not say anything for a while.

Then she said, “Same one.”

“Same one.”

“You’re sure.”

“It was made by somebody who was bad at it.” Val turned it over with her finger. “Look at the return. He did not get the heat right and he hit it cold and there is a fold in it that will not come out. I looked at that fold in the winter of sixteen oh seven for about four hundred consecutive hours because it was at eye height from the bench, and if you would like me to draw it from memory I will do that now.”

Kyra put her forehead between Val’s shoulder blades.

They lit the fire with somebody else’s wood and meant to pay for it, and did, later, by leaving money under the tin.

And at some point in the first hour, with the door shut and the hide over the window and the light down to what a fire gives, they started getting it wrong.

“The haircut was after the first snow.”

“The haircut was before the first snow,” Val said. “I cut your hair in the afternoon and it snowed that night and you said something about having no ears left.”

“That was the second snow.”

“There was no second snow. There was the first snow, and then eleven days of nothing, and then the weather came in from the north-west and did not stop.”

“Val.” Kyra sat up on the straw. “There were two snows. The first one didn’t lie. It came down in the morning and it was gone off the pasture by noon and you didn’t even go out in it.”

Val opened her mouth and found nothing in it.

Because there might have been. There might have been a morning with snow on the grass that went off by noon, and she might have been inside doing something else, and if there had been, then the sequence she had been carrying for two hundred and sixty-four years had a piece in the wrong place.

She got the notebook out.

It was not the first notebook. It was the fourth, and the first entries in it were copies of copies, and she went back through the copied pages by firelight for perhaps ten minutes with Kyra watching her, and then closed it.

“It is not in here.”

“What isn’t?”

“Any of it. I have the seventeen names and I have the two reckonings of the year and I have the date we came down and the date the leg mended and the first peak and the day we went down to the village for salt.” Val put the book on her knee. “I did not write down the snow. I did not write down the haircut. I have eleven items from eleven months and every one of them is a fact, and there is not one thing in this book about what any of it was like.”

Kyra was quiet.

“So there’s us,” she said.

“There is us. There are two witnesses and no record, and the two witnesses disagree, and there is no third thing in this galaxy that can settle it.”

“That’s — ” Kyra stopped. Started again. “I don’t like that as much as I thought I would.”

“No.”

“I thought that was going to be a nice thing.”

“So did I, about four sentences ago,” Val said. “It is not a nice thing. It is only true. And in about nine hundred years, if we are extraordinarily lucky, there will be two very old women somewhere who cannot agree about whether it snowed twice.”

Kyra started laughing and then stopped, and the stopping took longer than the starting had.

It was Val who moved the bench.

Not far — a foot and a half, out from the wall, to where it must have stood when the room was smaller, and Kyra watched her do it and did not ask why, because she had worked it out before Val’s hands were on it.

“Four nights,” Val said.

“Four nights back to back, because there was one bench.”

“And on the fifth the wind turned and came off the snow and this building, which was built for summer, let it in at every seam.” Val sat down on it. “And you put your hand flat under my ribs and pulled, and you did not say one word about it, and neither did I, and we did that for the rest of the winter and called it cold.”

“It was cold.”

“It was extremely cold,” Val agreed. “It was also the first time in seventy-seven years that I had been held by somebody who was not required to and I did not have one single word for what it was and I did not sleep for two hours.”

Kyra came and stood in front of her.

The fire was behind her so her face was dark, and the light came round the outside of her hair and made a copper edge along the whole of it where it had come out of the plait, and she got her hands into the front of Val’s collar and stood there for a second not doing anything.

“Say the rest,” she said.

“There is no rest. I wanted to put the bench back where it was, and I have wanted to since about the eighteenth of September, and I decided on it standing in the valley looking at a signboard with a tariff on it.” Val had her hands loose in her lap. “I have had it in front of me for a fortnight, under everything else, including a locker and a slope. I would like you to know that. I would like you to know that I was doing arithmetic about a ship with this underneath it.”

“I knew.”

“You did not.”

“Val.” Kyra got down on her knees on the straw between Val’s feet and put her arms round her waist and her face against her middle. “You’ve been walking about like a woman carrying a full cup since the train.”

What happened on that bench is theirs and belongs in no register.

It was slow, because there was nothing in the world to be quick for, and it was quiet, not because anybody would hear — there was nobody within four miles and the nearest of those was asleep — but because quiet was what the room had always been. It smelled of new straw and pine smoke and wet wool, which is what it had smelled of in 1607, and there is nothing in the universe that gets in under two and a half centuries the way a smell does.

Somewhere in it Val stopped being able to tell which one of them she was remembering.

She said so, afterward, with her mouth against Kyra’s hair, in the dark, with the hide moving a little at the window and the last of the pine going in the hearth. That she had spent two hundred and sixty-four years being precise about everything, and that lying on that bench she had lost the join entirely between the woman of seventy-seven who had not slept for two hours and the woman she was now, and that for about a quarter of an hour there had been no difference between them at all and she had not wanted there to be.

The light was up in her arms the whole time. She did not put it out and did not think about putting it out.

And Kyra, who had said the first true thing anybody had ever said to her about it on a mountain in this exact room, said, “There you are,” and went to sleep against her shoulder with one hand flat on her ribs.

In the morning it was cold and clear and Val was awake before the light.

She got up and put the bench back against the wall, and folded what they had used, and set the straw straight, and stood for a while in the middle of the room in her shift with her arms wrapped round herself, looking at the hook.

Then she knelt down at the hearth.

The fire was out and the ash was fine and white and deep, the way pine ash goes, and she put her finger into it and wrote, in the Sethal she had not used for anything but counting since 1608, four words that nobody on this planet would ever be able to read and that would be gone the first time anybody in that hut laid a fire.

She looked at them for a moment.

Then she stood up and did not scuff them out.

That was all of it. It took perhaps ninety seconds and she did not tell Kyra she had done it, and Kyra, who woke while she was still kneeling there and watched her from the straw with her eyes half shut and said nothing at all, did not tell her either, and neither of them mentioned it for a hundred and forty years.

They put the stone back against the door at eight in the morning and went down.

At the gap in the trees where you can see the whole valley at once Val stopped, because you have to.

“Nineteen days,” Kyra said. “Bremen on the fourteenth.”

“Nineteen days.” Val stood looking down the valley with the light coming up it. “And then a house, and the stock, and Ellis’s boy wanting paying, and an orchard I planted in fifty-nine that I would like to see.”

“That’s a lot of sentences about a house.”

“I am aware of what it is,” Val said, and went on down.

— end of chapter twenty-one —

Home was on the ninth of December and the peak was on the twenty-eighth, and Kyra never once said out loud that she had known in March why August had been August.

Val did not say it either.

What she did, on the fourth morning afterward, was put a cup of tea down in front of Kyra and say, “You worked it out on the porch in the spring,” and Kyra said, “Inside a minute,” and Val said, “I thought so,” and that was the whole conversation, and it was entirely satisfactory to both of them.

The fourteen years after that were the quietest either of them had had since Maribor, and Kyra found — to her own considerable surprise, at three hundred and forty-one years old — that she was good at quiet.

The country came to them. That was the shape of it. In seventy-one the lake was two days from a cabin; by seventy-six there was a settlement down the Nehalem with a store in it and a post office and a name, and by eighty-two there was a road of a kind and men talking about getting timber out, and the talk about timber got more serious every year because the men who understood what was standing in that country had begun to arrive.

They did not fight any of it. There was no fighting it.

What they did was the thing they had done in Maribor and Trieste and Philadelphia, which was to become so thoroughly a feature of the place that nobody could see them. Miss Miller had been doctoring in that country since before there was a road. Miss Miller’s sister had the best eye for stock between the lake and the Columbia and would not be argued with about weather. They had a good orchard. They kept to themselves and they came when they were sent for, and when a Vernonia man’s wife had a bad birth in eighty-three it was Martha Miller who was got out of bed at two in the morning and it was Martha Miller who sat there until six.

And every year, in a way that was slow enough to live with and fast enough to feel, the arithmetic got worse.

Kyra counted it herself in the spring of eighty-four, standing in the orchard.

Thirty-three years. They had been at that lake for thirty-three years. The Ellis boy who had taken their stock in seventy-one had been nineteen and was now thirty-two with four children, and had gray in his beard, and had said to her in February, not unkindly and not meaning anything by it, that the Miller sisters must have been favored by Providence in the matter of health.

She had laughed and said something about the water.

The census man had been out again in June, a different one, younger, with a longer schedule than the one in sixty. Miller, Martha, 51. Miller, Sarah, 49. Val had given him the figures without a flicker and had gone inside afterward and stood at the window with her arms folded for a quarter of an hour, and had said, when Kyra came in, that it was the first time she had told a lie on paper and been looked at while she did it by somebody who could see her hands.

She had gone home and not mentioned it, and then had mentioned it three days later, because of the pact.

“Ten years,” Val said, when she had heard the whole of it.

“That’s your number?”

“That is my number and I have had it since eighty-one. Ten, and then we are a curiosity, and about four years after that we are a story, and the story travels further than we do.” Val had been splitting kindling and she did not stop. “I do not want to go. I would like that said first, before anything else about it. I have an orchard in bearing and a house I built and a lake I know the bottom of, and I am three hundred and fifty-four years old and it is the first place since Sethal I have not been able to be sensible about.”

Kyra sat down on the block.

Kyra looked at the pile of kindling.

“Ninety-four, then,” she said.

“Approximately ninety-four.”

“Then we’ve got till ninety-four.”

The star came in the autumn of eighty-five, and it came in a newspaper, four days old, which Kyra brought up from the store in the rain on the second of September.

Val read it at the table with her coat still on.

A new star had been seen in the great nebula in Andromeda. It had been picked up at a place called Dorpat in the third week of August and by half the observatories in Europe since; it was small and it was there and nothing like it had been seen in that object before; and there was a great deal of speculation in the notice about what the nebulae were, which was a question, the writer observed, that had exercised philosophers for a century and a half.

Kyra watched her read it twice.

Then Val got up and went outside without her hat and stood in the rain in the yard.

They looked at it that night, because the weather broke at eight, which Kyra had said it would.

They had the glass out on the grass. Not the old one — the old one was eleven feet of very bad Dutch tube that Val had bought off a man on the quay at Trieste in the last century and had got some of the price back out of him afterward, and it was in its box in the house and had been in every house since, and she would no more have left it behind than her own hands. What was on the grass was a three-inch refractor she had bought in Portland in seventy-eight, on which she had spent more money than on any other object she had owned on this planet, and about which she had been sheepish for a week.

Two hundred years of somebody else’s opticians, Val had said at the time, and all of it going in one direction.

The smudge came up out of the east the way it had come up every autumn of their lives, and Kyra found it first without the glass, in the corner of her eye, the way you always find it. Then Val put the glass on it.

She was a long time.

“It’s there,” she said at last, and her voice did something on the second word.

Kyra took the eyepiece. Val stepped back from the tube to let her at it and stood with her arms folded in the cold, and there was enough starlight off the wet grass to put the pale of her hair almost white along the crown and nothing at all in her face.

And it was there: inside the smudge, off the middle, a hard bright point that did not belong, sitting in the soft light like a nail driven into a cloud. Kyra had been looking at that object for two hundred and seventy-eight years. She knew its shape the way she knew the ridge line above the house.

“What is it?”

“I do not know.”

“Val.”

“I am telling you the truth. I do not know.” Val’s hands were down at her sides. “It is in our sky. It is inside the thing itself; that is not a foreground star, it is sitting in the body of it and you can see that from here with a hundred-and-seventy-year-old glass. And whatever it is, for it to be visible here at all, at that distance —”

She stopped.

“Say it.”

“For it to be visible here,” Val said, “it has to be putting out something on the order of a hundred million suns, and I do not know of one single thing in astronomy or in anything I was ever taught that does that. And I have been standing in a wet yard for two hours trying to construct something that does, and everything I build is worse than the last one.”

Kyra straightened up from the eyepiece.

“Is it near them?”

And there it was, out loud, in the middle of a field in Oregon.

Val did not answer straight away. When she did, she did it in the flat voice, the one she used for the things that had to be got through in order.

“The light left before there were people on this planet,” she said. “Whatever happened, happened before anybody on Earth stood upright. It is not news. It cannot be news. There is no arrangement of physics in which that point of light tells me one single thing about where my father is standing tonight.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I know what you asked.” Val put her hand over her mouth for a second and took it away. “You asked whether it is near them. And I have known the answer to that since I was a girl and it has never once been of the slightest use to me, which is that I cannot know anything about home. Not one thing. Not ever. Everything I can see of it is two million years stale and everything I can calculate is arithmetic, and the actual, current, breathing state of my father and my daughters is — ” she moved her hand at the sky — “is behind that. Permanently. And tonight there is a bright point in it and I have absolutely no way to find out what it is, and that is the exact condition I have been living in since sixteen oh seven and tonight is the first night it has had a light on it.”

Kyra took hold of her.

They stood in the wet grass for a long time with the telescope forgotten on its legs beside them, and Val did not cry, because she was not going to, and what she did instead was shake very slightly for about four minutes and then stop.

“Three hundred and seventeen,” she said at last, against Kyra’s shoulder.

“The girls.”

“The girls are three hundred and seventeen and my father is three hundred and eighty-three, and I do the sum on the first of every month, and I did it this morning before I knew there was anything in the paper.”

“I know you do.”

“You have never said anything about it.”

“No,” Kyra said. “And I’m not going to.”

It faded out over the winter. By February there was nothing in the smudge at all and the papers had stopped mentioning it, and the argument the notice had raised — what the nebulae were — went on exactly as it had before, unsettled, with learned men on both sides.

Val watched it go and wrote four lines about it in the notebook and did not speculate in them, which cost her something.

And on the last clear night of that February, coming in from the barn, Kyra found her standing in the yard with her head back and her hands in her pockets, looking at nothing at all, because there was nothing to look at now.

“Come in,” Kyra said. “It’s freezing.”

“In a minute.”

“Val.”

“I am going to tell you a thing and then I am going to come in and not say it again for some years.” Val did not take her eyes off the sky. “They will find out what that was. Not this year and not in our lifetime in this county, but they will find out, because in sixteen eighty-three they were arguing about whether there was anything out there and tonight there is a man in Ireland who can tell you what the sun is made of. They will find out what it was and how far away it is and they will not be doing it for us.”

“No.”

“It is going to take them longer than I would like,” Val said, “and I am going to be standing here.”

Then she came in, and put the bar across the door, and did not mention it again for nine years.

— end of chapter twenty-two —

The shakes on the north slope of the roof had come to the end of what could be done with them, and Val had known it for two winters and had been patching instead, which was not like her.

They got at it in July, in the one stretch of that country’s year when a roof can be opened with any confidence, and by the second afternoon they had the north side stripped to the rafters and a stack of new cedar in the yard riven out of a log Ellis’s boy had brought up in April.

Kyra was on the ridge with a hammer, in a man’s shirt with the sleeves cut off at the elbow, her hair up off her neck and pinned anyhow and losing the argument, and where the July sun got into the loose of it at the temple it went the color of wet copper against the cedar. Val was on the ladder handing shakes up, which was the arrangement they had arrived at some years earlier on the grounds that Kyra liked being on a roof and Val did not.

“How many courses?”

“To the ridge? Forty-one.”

“That’s a lot of splitting,” Kyra observed.

“It is a lot of splitting and it is done,” Val said, “and I would like you to notice that I did it in May, before you asked, which has never once happened in three hundred years.”

Kyra laid a shake and drove it.

“How long’s a roof?” she said.

“Twenty-five years, if it is cedar and if it is this pitch and if we keep the moss off the north side, which we will not.”

“So thirty.”

“So thirty,” Val agreed, and then whoever is here does it again."

And Kyra stopped, with the hammer up, and did not put it down for about four seconds.

“Whoever’s here,” she said.

Val stood on the ladder with a shake in her hand and heard the whole of the sentence come back at her, and found that she could not put it anywhere.

They did not talk about it for the rest of the afternoon. They finished the north slope and got the ridge capped by six and came down and ate on the porch with their hands aching, and the whole of it sat in the middle of the table like something neither of them had ordered.

Because since the second week of December in sixty-four there had been a whoever is here.

Val had said it in the yard, out loud, that day. Not for us to make — for them to make, without knowing. And they had lived with that for twenty-two years in a way that Val had thought was healthy, which was to say it about twice a decade and not otherwise, and what she had not noticed, and what she noticed on a ladder in July with a shake in her hand, was that neither of them had ever once said a single word about what it would be like.

“I want to say a thing,” Kyra said, when it was nearly dark.

“Say it.”

“Tell me about the second room.”

Val did not stiffen. She had not stiffened at that sentence since about 1730.

“Trieste,” she said.

“Trieste.”

And she gave her the paragraph.

I was taken out of the room where you were a little after four on the afternoon of the second day, and I was brought back to it on the fourth. In the interval I was held below, in a room on the court side with one window. There were four men in it. Two of them I had seen upstairs and two of them I had not. Nothing was done to me that left a mark, and I was not asked one question about you at any point. I was asked the same eleven questions in a different order for two days and I gave the same answers to all of them and none of the answers were true. At the end of it they brought me up and put me in the room, and you were asleep, and I sat down against the door. That is the whole of it. It is accurate and it is complete and there is nothing in it that you do not now have.

The same words, in the same order, with the pause after and two of them I had not.

Kyra let it finish. She always let it finish.

“A hundred and eighty-one years,” she said.

“A hundred and eighty-one.”

“Do you know what I’m doing when I ask?”

Val looked at her across the table in the dark.

“I have four theories,” she said, “and I have had all four of them for a century, and I have never once asked you which is right, because asking would have been a way of making you stop.”

“Then I’ll tell you.” Kyra had her hands flat on the boards. “I’m not trying to find out what happened. I stopped trying to find that out somewhere in the seventeen-forties. I know you’re not going to tell me and I’ve made my peace with it and I’d like that said plainly so you can stop bracing for it.”

“All right,” Val allowed.

“What I’m doing is asking you to hand me something.” Her voice was entirely level and it cost her; Val could hear the cost in the levelness. “That’s all it’s ever been. It’s the one place you’ve ever shut a door on me, in four hundred years, and every so often I go and knock on it — not to get in. To make sure you know I’m out here. And you say the paragraph, which means I know, and then you say the last bit, which isn’t in the paragraph, and that means thank you for knocking.”

Val sat very still.

“I understand the difference,” she said.

“That’s the bit. You’ve never written that one out. You say it fresh every time and you’ve said it eleven times and it’s the only part of the whole business that’s alive.” Kyra looked up. “So no, I don’t want in. I want you to know I’ve been standing out there for a hundred and eighty-one years and that I’m not going anywhere, and I’ve never said so, and tonight I’m saying so, because of a roof.”

Val got up and walked to the end of the porch and stood looking out at where the lake was.

What she felt she could name, exactly; that was the curse of the thing. She had been able to name every feeling she had ever had since she was about nine years old, and the naming had never once made any of them easier to say.

She came back and sat down.

“I am going to answer the roof,” she said.

“Val — ”

“No. You have just handed me a hundred and eighty-one years of something in about ninety seconds and I am not going to leave it lying on the table, and this is the only currency I have got.” She put both hands flat, the way Kyra’s were. “When we get home. And I am going to say when, tonight, in this house, and you may hold me to it or not as you please.”

Kyra did not say anything at all.

“When we get home,” Val said, “I am not going to do this.”

“Do what?”

“This. What I do. What I have done on this planet since a hut and did on Sethal before it and have never once stopped doing in three hundred and fifty-six years.” She had her chin up and her voice was doing the thing it did under load, which was going flatter rather than higher. “In front of Genie and Kal. In front of my father, if he is standing. In front of whoever is in the room and whoever asks and whoever does not ask. I am going to say what you are to me, out loud, in the Sethal for it, in a room with the door open.”

Kyra went completely still.

“I have thought about it for a long time and I want you to hear the whole of it including the part that is not admirable,” Val went on, “which is that I am frightened of it in a way that I am not frightened of a blood court, and that I have known since sixteen oh seven that it would have to be done and I have used four centuries of extremely good reasons not to have to look at it, and that the reasons were real and the using was cowardice, and both of those are true at once.”

“You don’t have to — ”

“I do have to. Not for them.” Val’s hand came off the table and went round Kyra’s wrist. “You have been doing it in front of me since the day we met. In every room, in every language, in front of every man either of us ever had, without one hour of hesitation in four hundred years, and you have never once asked me to do it back, and I have taken that and taken it and taken it and given you a barred shutter and a house with no neighbors.”

“That’s not — ”

“It is what I have given you and it has been enough for you, which is the part I cannot get round.” Val stopped. Her voice had gone somewhere and she waited for it. “So. When we are home. Out loud, in front of my daughters. That is what I have got and it is a promise about a thing that may never happen and I am making it anyway.”

Kyra sat there in the dark with tears going down her face and did not wipe them.

“Say it now,” she said.

“Now?”

“There’s nobody here. There’s nobody within four miles. I’m not asking for the room with the door open — I know what that costs and I’ll wait a thousand years for it.” She turned her hand over under Val’s and took hold. “Say it here. On a porch. To me.”

And Val Sorin, three hundred and fifty-six years old, on the boards of a house she had built in a country nobody had wanted, said it in Sethal, out loud, in the open air, in a voice that broke in the middle of the second word and did not stop.

Afterward, later, inside, Kyra said the other thing.

“I wanted a ring.”

Val had her arms round her from behind and her face in her hair and did not move.

“In Westport,” Kyra said. “The widow with the hair in the glass. I told you I wanted one and didn’t want one and I let you think the wanting was a sort of joke about jewelry, and it wasn’t. I wanted a ring on my hand where the whole of Missouri could see it and I have wanted that every day since and I have never said so, because you’d have got one made and you’d have been right that we couldn’t wear them and you’d have hated it.”

“Thirty-six years.”

“Thirty-six years.” Kyra’s thumb went, without either of them looking, to a place below her own waist where a plain band was inked into the skin and had been since the fourteenth of August, 1850. “And then you put one on me anyway, with three needles and a splinter of bone, in the dark, in the sage, where nobody in this universe will ever see it but you.”

Val’s arms tightened.

“I did not know that was what I was doing.”

“You did,” Kyra said. “You just didn’t have the sentence.”

Val had decided at four o’clock, on the ladder, with a shake in her hand, before any of the rest of it happened.

That was the part she never told her and never needed to, because Kyra had read it off her in the yard at half past five — the particular stillness, the not quite meeting the eye, the hands doing an ordinary job with a slightly different attention — and had gone about the evening knowing perfectly well what was coming and had let the whole of the porch happen first.

And when it did come, it was slow, and it was not careful.

Val had the lamp out and the window open because it was July and the night air off the lake came in cool over everything, and afterward she could not have said whether the light had been up in her arms for a minute or an hour. Kyra’s eyes were gold from the first and stayed gold, and Val, who had been looking at her since a stair on a mountain in 1607, told her so, in three hundred-year-old words and in English and in whatever the other thing was that she had never found a name for, and said things she had been carrying since before there was a house to say them in.

At about two in the morning Kyra put her mouth against Val’s ear and said, “Forty-one courses.”

“What?”

“You counted them on the ladder. Before you decided.”

“I counted them after I decided,” Val said, “and I got it wrong twice.”

— end of chapter twenty-three —

The road came through in eighty-nine.

It was not much of a road and it did not come as far as the lake, but it came within four miles, and a man could get a wagon over it in August, and what that meant was that in the summer of ninety there were two families on the creek below them where there had been none, and a crew of six taking cedar off the ridge north, and a surveyor’s line blazed across the top end of their own ground that had not been there in April.

Kyra stood and looked at the blazes for a while and then went home and did not mention them until after supper.

“I saw them,” Val said.

“When?”

“Tuesday. I have been waiting to see how long you would carry it.” She was at the table with her spectacles on, which she had begun wearing four years earlier for reading and which were, she maintained, entirely cosmetic and extremely useful. “Ninety-four.”

“That’s what I make it.”

“Four more summers. The orchard will have four more crops in it, and I will get the roof to ninety-four without doing another thing to it, and after that whoever has this place can do the north slope themselves.” Val took the spectacles off. “I have been saying ninety-four out loud since February to get used to the sound of it.”

“And?”

“And it still sounds like somebody else’s plan,” Val said.

The paper came up with the mail on a Thursday at the end of October, four days old, out of Portland.

Kyra had been down at the barn and came in wet and found Val at the table with the lamp lit early and the paper flat in front of her and both hands on the edge of it, absolutely still, in the particular way that meant the room had stopped being the room.

“What.”

Val did not look up. She turned the paper round and put her finger on a column.

It was the dullest thing imaginable. It was a reprinted extract from a report — an appendix, a list of persons employed at one of the Dakota agencies with their positions and their pay, the kind of column a newspaper fills a corner with when there is nothing else and a man in an office thinks the public ought to know where the money goes.

Farmer. Blacksmith. Clerk. Additional farmer. Physician. Two laborers.

Interpreter — Madeline Plum, $300.

Kyra read it three times.

They had spelled it with one e. There was no telling whether that was the clerk in Dakota or the compositor in Portland, and it did not matter at all, and Kyra found that she minded it out of all proportion.

Kyra put her wet hands on the table edge.

“It’s her.”

“It is her.”

“It could be anybody. It could be four hundred women — ”

“It is a Sioux agency, and it is an interpreter, and it is a woman, and the name is a translation of the third one,” Val said. “I have been sitting here for forty minutes doing exactly what you are doing now, which is looking for a way for it not to be her, and there is not one.”

Kyra sat down slowly.

“Sixty-nine,” she said.

“Sixty-nine this year, if she was thirty in fifty.”

“She’s alive.”

“She is alive, and she is drawing three hundred dollars a year off the government of the United States for doing the thing she did for us for twelve, and she has been doing it for forty years, and somebody in Washington has finally put her in a book.”

And then Val put her hand flat over the column, over the whole of that little block of type, and kept it there.

She did not say anything for a while and Kyra did not make her.

What she said, when she did, came out in no order at all, which from Val was the equivalent of a shout.

That she had been thirty and had come down to the wagons with her own supper in her hand and sat on the ground rather than on anything. That she had stood by a mule at the Little Sandy and said whatever the two of you are, you are not the first to two women who had been on this planet for two hundred and forty-three years and had never once heard it. That she had refused twelve dollars for the days she was away and had gone into a camp where people were dying of a thing the wagons brought, and had told Val to speak for herself with the salt in her hand because it would be known better from her. That she had said his brother is dead and the woman in that lodge has been awake for two days and both of those are true at once — in English, translating, at four in the afternoon, having had about six seconds to build the sentence.

“And I said,” Val said, “that if she was ever in Oregon.”

“I remember.”

“And she said she would not be in that country.”

“And that she’d know the offer was made.”

“She has been in Dakota for forty years and I have been in Oregon for forty years and we were both of us exactly where we said we would be.” Val’s hand was still on the column. “And I have thought about her — Kyra, I have thought about her perhaps once a fortnight for four decades, and I have never had one single piece of information, and tonight I have a spelling mistake and a salary.”

“It’s not nothing.”

“It is not nothing at all,” Val said. “It is the most I have ever been given about anybody I have had to leave.”

She cut it out.

She did it the next morning with the sewing scissors, neatly, three lines of type and the two above and below so that it would not look like a keepsake to anybody who found it, and she put it in the box with the notebook and the deed and Asa Pruitt’s second letter.

Kyra watched her do it from the doorway and did not say the thing she was thinking, which was that Val Sorin had made a rule on a wharf in Boston in 1776 about never again keeping the names of people she could not help, and had broken it in a wagon on the Platte in 1850, and had been quietly keeping a box ever since.

Some rules you let a person go on believing they still have.

The last clear night of that year was the eleventh of December, and they took the Dollond out because Val wanted to look at nothing in particular.

The smudge came up in the east with the great square under it. There was nothing in it. There had been nothing in it since February of eighty-six and there would be nothing in it again in their lifetimes on that continent, and they looked at it for a while anyway, the way you look at a house you used to live in.

“Three hundred and eighty-eight,” Val said.

Kyra did not have to ask.

“He has eighteen years,” Val said. “If he gets what Teor Casse got, he has eighteen years, and he has had two hundred and eighty-three years of it without me, and I have counted it on the first of every month since a wall in Trieste and it has never once come out anywhere I wanted it to.”

“And the girls?”

“Three hundred and twenty-two. Which is nothing. Which is the middle of a life.” She had her eye to the glass and her voice quite level. “They will be alive when we get back. That is not hope, that is arithmetic, and it is the only thing in my entire existence where the arithmetic is on my side, and I hold on to it with both hands and I do not let anybody touch it, including you.”

“I’ve never touched it.”

“No,” Val said. “You never have.”

She stood back from the telescope and put her hands in her pockets. The lamp was in the window behind her and it took the pale of her hair at the crown and left the rest of her a shape against the dark, which was how Kyra had been seeing her out of doors at night for two hundred and eighty-three years and had never once got tired of.

“Four more summers,” she said.

“Four more summers. And then?”

“And then a town, I think. Not a big one. Somewhere with a river and a bank and a newspaper that comes the same day.” Val looked up at the sky over a lake that nobody had wanted. “Somewhere a person can subscribe to things.”

Kyra started laughing.

“Say that again.”

“I said somewhere a person can subscribe to things, and I am aware of how it sounded, and I stand by it,” Val said. “I have spent forty years reading journals that were seven months old. There are men in Europe this minute doing the work that matters and I am finding out about it the following spring in a bundle tied with string. I would like, before this century is out, to read a thing in the week it was printed.”

“That’s what you want. Out of the whole world.”

“That is what I want out of the whole world,” Val said, “at present, on the eleventh of December, standing in a wet field.”

And Kyra came and stood behind her and put both arms round her in the dark and her chin on her shoulder, out in the open, where there was nobody within four miles, and the two of them stood in the cold looking up at a smudge the size of a thumbprint at arm’s length.

“Four more summers,” Kyra said.

“Four more.”

“And then we go and read the paper.”

“And then,” said Val, “we go and read the paper.”

— end of book thirteen —