The Marks

The boat puts 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 stands on the wet stone and understands that they have arrived at a place whose entire purpose is to be left. It is not a town; it is a landing with a town four miles behind it. The bluff goes up green and raw with a cut in it where the wagons come down, and the cut is full of mud and men, and the men are not stopping to look at anything, which is how she knows the place is serious: in Lowell the men had looked, and on the Delaware the men had looked, and here a woman can stand in the open in the rain with her hair coming down and a bundle at her feet and nobody has a single second to spend on her, because the season is going and the grass is coming up somewhere west of here and every hour on this ledge is an hour not spent walking. Two thousand miles, Val says beside her. You've been saying that since Wheeling. I have been refining it since Wheeling. It was two thousand and eighty from the Ohio and 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. Which one do you believe? None of them yet. Halfway up the cut a freighter's team has gone into the mud to the hocks, and the freighter is 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 cannot hear and does not need to, and she slows without meaning to and Val slows with her. He'll get it out. 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. And then in twenty minutes you'll tell me how long it took. Westport had been a store and is now an industry: you come up off the river road and the first thing is the smell, which is oxen and pine resin and hot iron and rope, and the second is the noise, which is hammering from four directions at once and does not stop while they are there and does not stop for two years afterward. The wagon yards run back behind the main street in rows; there are men laying tires on wheels in the open, a tire going on glowing and coming off gray with the water hissing up in a sheet, and a boy walking the finished wheels down the row one at a time like a man walking cattle. And the street has 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 is buying; Delaware; Wyandot in coats and hats who look like any clerk in Pennsylvania except that they are speaking Wyandot; Kaw wrapped in blankets against the wet; Santa Fe men with two years of sun on them; Missouri farmers in for the day; a knot of Germans arguing about a wagon tongue in German; and a dozen Mormons going quietly along the far side who are not arguing about anything. Kyra stands in the middle of it and lets it come at her, and this is the part Val does not have: Val can stand in a street and count it — she once told Kyra on a wall above a port exactly how many people were in a square and what four of them were doing wrong — but she counts it the way you read a page, one line after another, and she is never finished. Kyra takes a street the way you take weather, and one breath of Westport in the rain gives her the whole of it: a town with no interest whatsoever in who you are, only in whether you are buying, and going somewhere. I like it. You have been here nine minutes. I like it. I have no objection. I am noting the nine minutes. They take a room above a harness maker, because the harness maker's wife has a room and does not ask anything except whether they can pay, and the rain comes on harder in the evening and the smell of new leather comes up through the floor, and Kyra lies on her back and listens to the hammering go on in the dark. They're still working. They will work until the last party is gone. 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 does not turn round from the window. 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. You've been composing that since the ledge. Since the cut, Val admits. The question comes on the fourth day, which is later than either of them expected, from a man in the doorway of an outfitter's — heavy, with a good coat and a pencil — who has watched them price flour and then salt and then flour again, and who says, with no particular malice and no particular interest, that it is a strange thing, two women buying an outfit with no man behind them, and what exactly are they for. Kyra gives him the answers, in the order they have been given in for two hundred and forty years, because the order is the whole of it — the order is what makes them sound like a life instead of a story. Sisters. Their father had been a Pennsylvania man. Their mother is dead. There had been a brother and the brother went to Texas and they have not heard. They are going out to their uncle's people in the Willamette because the uncle has written twice. The elder one does doctoring, which had been their mother's trade. The younger one has a hand with weather and stock. They have money enough and not a great deal more. They keep themselves to themselves, and they are obliged to him, and will he take four dollars for the barrel or five. The man takes four and a half and forgets them inside the week. Outside, Val falls in beside her. You put the uncle in early. He had a pencil. He did. Four or five steps of quiet, and then: 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 looks sideways at her and does not say anything — because Val will 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 know exactly where that line runs and neither of them has ever once drawn it out loud. The register this time is a marriage book in the county clerk's office, and Val spends an evening with it that she has no business spending, in the way she spent an evening with a parish book in Burlington a hundred and eighteen years before. She comes back up the stairs and takes her boots off before she says anything, which means she is pleased with herself. Miller. Smith, Brown and Jones are 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, none related to each other, and two of them cannot spell it the same way twice. Miller is a noise. And the front of it? Sarah and Martha. You're Sarah. I'm always the common one. You were Mary in Philadelphia. Sarah is an improvement of some magnitude. You were Ann in Philadelphia, Kyra says to the ceiling, and I have never stopped enjoying it. I am aware. Ann. Martha, Val says, and I am going to be Martha for some time, so you may as well begin. Kyra turns her head: Val is 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 does with her hands when a piece of work is finished, which is nothing at all. Two hundred and forty-one years of rooms above other people's trades. A dozen names apiece. And Kyra has a clear memory, that arrives unasked and does 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 says. Thank you. The wagon yards take Val on the strength of a hand. Kyra is there for it because she has gone down to price a yoke and stayed to watch a man lay a tire, so she sees all of it from the fence: a yard hand has got two fingers between a wheel and the stone the week before, and the yard's own opinion is that he will lose the hand at the wrist and the sooner it comes off the better, and the man's opinion is that he will keep it, and the two opinions have been circling each other in the yard for four days with the man getting quieter. Val asks whether she might look — and asks it of the man and not of the owner, which Kyra notices and the owner does not. Then she is down on one knee in the dirt with the hand held flat in both of hers, turning it to the light, and she does not say anything at all for a long time. That is the part people always misread: they think the silence is doubt, and Kyra has watched it for two hundred and forty years and knows what it is, which is a woman reading a page and refusing to be hurried off it. You keep the two fingers or you keep the hand. Not both. The man says 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 turns 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 comes over with his thumbs in his belt and asks what she charges. For that, nothing. I have not done anything yet. And for the rest of the season? Val stands up and wipes her hands and does not look pleased and does not look anything, which is what she does in front of strangers and has done for as long as there have been strangers. A dollar a week, 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 looks at her a while. Two bits a week and the coffee. Six bits and the coffee. Half a dollar. Half a dollar, Val says, and I want the stone moved. Kyra, on the fence with her chin on her arms, watches her win and go on looking at nothing in particular, and thinks that there are 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 has just seen, which is the slight and entirely private straightening of the shoulders of somebody who wanted the work and did not say so. Val does the arithmetic in the second week and brings it to the bed in the notebook — the one she has kept since 1608, with the seventeen names in the front and everything else behind — and does not hand it over but reads it out, which is 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 means the party does the arithmetic on you at the first hard crossing and decides which wagon gets left. Eight hundred pounds of flour. Two hundred of bacon. Coffee, rice, salt, saleratus. A sheet-iron stove nobody will want by the Platte and everybody will carry to the Platte anyway. Sixty dollars against sickness and breakage, because there will be both. Three hundred and forty. 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. Then we go in the spring. Not this spring. Next. She closes the notebook on her finger: she can get the rest in one winter, because Kyra has weather and stock in a town that cannot get enough of either, and she has 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 says it the way she says things she has checked. And Kyra, who has spent two hundred and forty-one years learning the difference between Val being right and Val being certain, and who can usually tell, lies back down on the bed above the harness maker's and listens to the hammering going on in the dark, and believes her.

The news comes up the river in December, in a newspaper four weeks old printed in Washington, and Val reads it standing in the cold outside the post office because she cannot wait to get up the street. It is a message to Congress and it is not an exciting document: it says, in the flattened voice official documents use when they are about to change the world, that the accounts of the abundance of gold in California are of such extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service. Val reads that sentence twice. Then she reads the rest, which is mostly about Mexico, and folds the paper and gives it back to the man who let her look at it and thanks him, and walks up to the yard and cleans a hand and splints a thumb and says nothing about it for two days. She is not slow; she understood it on the step. What she does in the two days is the arithmetic, four times, in four different ways, because the first three come out the same and she does not want them. By February the town has begun to fill and by March it is not a town any more. They come up the river on every boat, and overland from Iowa and Illinois and down from the north and up from Arkansas, and they are not emigrants in the way the people going to Oregon had been emigrants, because emigrants brought their mothers. These men bring pistols and pans and a great deal of confidence, and they arrive with money in their pockets and no intention of spending a single day longer in Missouri than they have to. Which means they buy: wagons at whatever wagons cost, flour at whatever flour costs, a mule that had been worth twenty dollars in November for ninety in April, and off down the Santa Fe road on it looking pleased. Val watches the whole thing happen from a wagon yard where she is paid half a dollar a week and the coffee, and keeps the figures in the back of the notebook, on the page after the one where the seventeen names are, because it is the only clean page left and because she 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 goes down to price the oxen on the first Tuesday in April, in the morning, early, because she learned in Trieste that the first price of the day is the honest one. Kyra's winter is mules. It began with weather, because weather is what she sells, and a freighter on the Santa Fe road paid her four bits in January for an opinion about the third week of the month and came back in February to say the opinion had been worth a good deal more than four bits and could she do it again. But the weather work is slow money and the town is full of men buying animals they cannot judge, so by the end of February Kyra is standing in the pens three mornings a week with her hands in her sleeves, paid two dollars a head to walk down a line of mules and say which ones will still be walking at the Little Blue. Val comes down to watch her do it exactly once and then does not come again, because it turns out to be difficult to watch. Kyra goes along the line slowly and does not touch anything: she looks at feet and she looks at eyes and she stands behind them and watches them stand, and then goes back to one particular animal and stands in front of it doing nothing whatsoever for about a minute and a half, and then says that one, and the man says what's wrong with him, and Kyra says nothing's wrong with him today. She is right four times out of five and could not have told anybody how. Val could have told them: she has 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 knows perfectly well that what looks like a gift is a hundred small readings performed at a speed nobody can introspect — and she once spent an evening trying to break it into its parts so that she could write it down, and failed, and was obscurely pleased about failing. What she has not expected, standing at the rail in February with her collar up, is how long she goes on looking. The light is flat and cold and Kyra has her hair down her back in the one thick plait she wears for work, dark and going to the color of wet copper where the low sun gets into the loose of it, and her sleeves pushed up despite the weather, and her whole attention on a mule. And Val stands at the rail with her hands in her pockets — sealed, unremarkable, a woman waiting for somebody — and looks at her for a length of time she notices only when the man counts the money into Kyra's hand and the two of them turn toward the gate. Eleven minutes, at a conservative estimate. She puts it away where she puts things like that, which is not nowhere, and walks up to meet her at the gate and says that the roan had been the obvious one, and Kyra says that the roan had been the obvious one to everybody and that was why it was worth saying the other one out loud. The man wants a hundred and ten. He is not gouging her and he does not enjoy telling her: he is a Missouri farmer who has brought in eleven yoke from his brother-in-law's place and sold six of them before breakfast to a company of young men from Ohio who did not ask the price before they said yes, and he tells her that too, because he is the sort of man who would rather be understood than admired. I'd take ninety from you. 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 scratches 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 thanks him and does not buy. She stands in the road outside the pens afterward for rather longer than there is any reason to, with the noise of the yards behind her and the whole street moving west past her elbow, and runs it one final time, standing up, with nothing to write on. Four yoke at ninety is three hundred and sixty dollars. They have a hundred and ninety-four and the two of them and a wagon they have not bought yet. She has been wrong — not by a little, and not because she made an error: she goes back through it in the road and there is no error in it, and the arithmetic of November had been correct arithmetic about November. She has been wrong because the world did something in December that no amount of care in November could have anticipated, and there is 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 finds that she minds this considerably more than she expected to. Kyra is on the bed with her boots on when Val comes in, which she does when she has been out in weather and wants to be told about it. How much? A hundred and ten. Ninety to us. Kyra sits up. Yes, Val says. 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. She puts the notebook on the table and does not open it: the wagon has gone from fifty-five to ninety; a tent is a dollar and a half a yard and 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. You're telling me the figures in a voice. Kyra puts her feet on the floor. Say the other thing. Val stands with her hands at her sides — and there is a particular quality to being looked at by Kyra Davan in a small room, which two hundred and forty-one years have not worn down at all and which she has given up trying to describe to herself with any accuracy. It is not pressure; it is the reverse of pressure. It is the sensation of a door being left open in a house where every other door is one she shut herself, and it makes her want, every single time, to walk out of the room. She does not walk out of the room. That has been the work of a century and a half, and it is, on the whole, done. We are not going this year. 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 looks at her for a moment. Then she says: four minutes. What? The freighter. In the cut, the first day. She is working her boot off. Took him four minutes. You never told me and I've been waiting fourteen months. Val opens her mouth and shuts it again. You said twenty. I said twenty because you said a quarter of an hour, and you're unbearable when you're right about oxen. The boot comes off. Four minutes. He had the off ox out before you'd finished telling me we weren't betting. And that is the whole of it, and it is done, and Val — who came up the stairs with a speech and a column of figures and a small hard knot under the ribs that has been there since the road — stands in the middle of the room and finds that the knot has gone and that she cannot identify the exact moment of its going. They do not talk about the year they are losing until the middle of the night, which is when they talk about things. It's an object. 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. Your rule was a key and a room in anybody's house and a place at a table laid for us. Kyra says 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 lies in the dark and considers that, and cannot fault it, and is aware that Kyra has produced in nine words a distinction it would have taken her four pages to be satisfied with. That is true. Say it properly. It is a room that runs, and it is therefore exempt. She turns her head on the pillow. 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 has stopped for the night. Somewhere down the street a company of men is singing and doing it badly, going at it with the conviction of people who are leaving in the morning and will be rich by autumn — and perhaps two of them will be and the rest will not, and Val listens to them and does not begrudge them any of it. How much longer? Honestly. A winter. One. April of fifty and I will not be wrong twice. That's what I thought. Kyra turns over. Not far now. No, Val says. Not far now. And neither of them says anything after that, and outside the men go on singing, and the town goes on making the thing it makes, which is departure, for everybody in it except the two of them.

It comes up the river with everybody else, which is the thing nobody in Westport can get their mouth around afterward and the thing Kyra understands before the end of the first week: the sickness has not come to them, it has come with them. It got on a boat in New Orleans in the winter and went up to St. Louis and killed people there by the thousand through the spring, and then came on up the Missouri in the same cabins as the men going to California, and 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 knows of it is a boy running up the street for Val by name. By the second week the town has two opinions and both of them are about air. The first is that it is the air off the river bottoms, and the remedy is to be up on the high ground with your windows shut and burn tar in the street. The second is that it is the air in the camps, where the emigrant companies are lying four thousand strong along the creeks waiting for grass, living in their own filth in the heat, and the remedy is to keep the camps out of the town. There is a great deal of tar burned. There is a great deal of talk about the camps. Men who have been in the pens all spring buying mules from Kyra now cross the street rather than pass an Ohio company on the walk, and the Ohio company crosses back, and both of them go on drinking out of the same creek. Val comes in on the ninth night, puts her bag down, and sits on the floor with her back against the door. Tell me. Fourteen dead in the camps on the Blue. Six in the town. Her head is back against the wood and her eyes are 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 says it flatly, without any weight on it, which is how she says things that have 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, and the man who bleeds them trained in Philadelphia. She gets it in the fourth week, and she gets it from a well. Kyra comes back from the pens in the afternoon and finds her at the table with the notebook open and a page of columns in front of her, and knows from the doorway that something has changed, because Val has the particular stillness she gets when a thing has gone from a suspicion to a fact and she has not yet decided what to do about it. Twenty-two houses. 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 sits down. The nine take their water from the well behind the lower cross street. The thirteen do not. She turns 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 puts 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. She closes 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 looks at her across the table for a long moment: the summer has got into her — there is a hollow under the cheekbone that was not there in April, and the pale of her hair is pushed back and pinned anyhow, and her hands on the closed notebook are a working woman's hands and have been for two hundred years. What do you do that works? Water and salt. Continuously, in small quantities, by the mouthful, for as long as it takes, with somebody sitting there to give it. She looks 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 concedes, 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 gets up and goes round the table and stands behind her chair and puts both hands flat on her shoulders, and Val lets her head go forward, and neither of them says anything for a while. The tar smoke comes in through the shutter, which does nothing for anybody and smells like a roofing job, and somewhere down the hill a bell is going for somebody's funeral, which it has done most days for a month and will go on doing until the first cold. The near thing does not happen in August; it happens in the second week of September, when the sickness is going off and the town is beginning to believe it might be over. Kyra comes up the stairs and Val is at the window with her sleeves rolled, and she has been in the same three houses on the lower cross street for nine days running, and she is not tired in the way that shows on a person and she is tired in the way that does not. The Bakers' second girl came through it. 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 stops. Count the houses, Kyra says. There is a silence in the room of a particular quality. Say the rest of it, Val says, and her voice has 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 shuts 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 stands at the window with her back to her for what feels like a long time. Boston, she says. Boston. Kyra does 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 turns 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 allows. 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 — which means you'd already made it. Some time ago. And didn't say. Val does not deny it. What she does instead is 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 uses once a decade, that she made the calculation in the second week and made it again in the fourth, and that on both occasions the answer came 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. I know. So ask me. Val looks up from the floor. I am asking you. Then yes, obviously, and next time ask me in June. They make the rule that night, sitting on the floor with their backs against the bed, and it is a short rule and both of them say it and neither of them writes 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 is twenty wagons and a hundred people who will scatter across a territory the size of Europe and never be in one room again. It is a good rule. It is the correct rule. It holds for nine months. The cold comes at the end of October and takes the sickness with it, and the town goes back to making departure. They had a hundred and ninety-four dollars in April and they have 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 puts the figure in the notebook and looks at it for a while and does not say anything that Kyra can 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 comes. Kyra knows before Val does; she always has. The half-second is not a warning so much as an announcement, and it arrives while she is carrying wood up the stairs, and she stands on the landing with an armful of oak and feels the whole of it go through her like the ground going soft, and then she goes in and puts the wood down and says it's today. Val is already up and turning the key. They get the shutter barred and the fire in and the water where it can be reached, and then there is nothing to do but the thing they have done twice a century for two hundred and forty-two years, which the two of them never once discussed on Sethal and have talked about, in the dark, by now, perhaps forty times. It is the twenty-third since the hut. Kyra counts 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 was the same hand on a mountain in 1608. She gets through it. Val gets through it. Somewhere in the worst of the second night Val says something into her hair that Kyra does not catch and does not ask her to repeat, and in the morning the fire is out and the room is cold and the street is going about its business, and neither of them is any different to look at than they had been on Monday. April, Kyra says from under the blanket. April, Val says. 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.

The wagon stands in the yard behind the harness maker's from the middle of February, and Val goes out to look at it more often than there is any reason to. It is not a handsome thing: a farm wagon with a new bed and a good tongue and iron laid by somebody who cared, the cover not on it yet, ninety-two dollars — and the first object either of them has owned outright since a house in Trieste with a walnut table in it that they walked out of at two in the morning with nothing. She stands in the cold with her hand flat on the sideboard. It has a smell, which is new wood and linseed. It has a weight. If you put your shoulder against the box you can feel the whole of it want to go. A room that runs, Kyra had said, lying on her back with her eyes shut, thereby repairing a rule Val had kept for a hundred and twenty-four years in nine words, and then going to sleep. Val has not stopped thinking about it — and it is not the cleverness: it is 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 talk about it on a Thursday, over the last of the packing lists, and it begins as a joke about a widow. The widow is a real woman on the lower cross street who buried a husband in the summer and has got herself a brooch made of his hair, woven flat under glass and set in gold, and wears it at her throat every day where the whole street can see it — and Kyra has thought this the most extraordinary object she has ever heard of and has been unable to leave it alone for a week. She's got him round her neck. 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. She pushes 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 puts her pen in the ink and leaves it there. Go on. They all have something. 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 turns 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 looks at the hand on the table for slightly too long, and then at the pen. Say the rest. 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 says, and I want a ring, and I know exactly what would happen if we had them. She says it flatly, and it is true, and both of them know the shape of it without going through it: two women with matching rings in a town whose entire business is 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 says. Everything you can put on can be taken off you. They were robbed once on a road and lost every portable thing they owned except the bundle she slept on, which was a notebook and two books and eleven sheets of a record, and the only reason they 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. I am agreeing with you at length because I have nothing else to offer and I would rather talk than sit here. Kyra puts her head back and lets out a breath, and the thing goes on standing where it is. It is Val who brings up the sailors, two days later, out of nowhere, in the middle of doing something else, which is how she introduces subjects she has been carrying around: she is oiling the harness and says, without looking up, that there are men on every wharf from Venice to Boston with marks on their hands. Kyra comes over and sits on an upturned bucket. Pricked in with a needle and ink or powder. 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 agrees. Kyra thinks about it with her elbows on her knees. Where do they put them? Hands. Forearms. The back of the wrist. Val goes 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. She sets 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 hears herself say it and does not take it back. Kyra is looking at her from the bucket with an expression Val learned to read at Casse and has been getting wrong ever since. You have a want. 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 says. Leave it on the shelf. It isn't going anywhere and neither are we, not till April. She stands up off the bucket. We're not the sort of people who solve a thing by wanting it harder. And Val, who has never in four hundred years left an unsolved thing on a shelf if there was any possibility of taking it apart instead, puts it down. She decides at four in the afternoon on the last Sunday in March, the way she decides everything, which is completely and in advance and in silence: she is rolling flour sacks in the back room and stops with one in her hands and thinks tonight, and then goes on rolling flour sacks, and says nothing for five hours. There is a stage of this that frightened her for the first eighty years or so, which is 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 goes under the bed or in the bed. She had assumed at first that it was a kind of lying, and it took her a shamefully long time to understand what it actually was, which is the only thing in her life she has ever built entirely on purpose, from nothing, for the sake of another person. Kyra knows by about seven. She does not say so; she never says so. What she does is 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 are entirely steady and she notes with some interest that her pulse is not. The canvas has come that week and is in the room with them, folded on the floor in the corner, because there is nowhere else in Westport to put forty dollars of new duck and Val will not leave it in the yard. It makes the room smell of a sail loft. It is the last thing Val sees before she turns the lamp down, and afterward she can never smell hot canvas anywhere on the continent without being put straight back into that room. She starts at the temple, where the hair is pinned, and takes the pins out one at a time and puts them on the sill, and it is slow and she means it to be slow. Kyra stands and lets her, with her hands at her sides, which Kyra can only do for about a minute at a time and does for rather longer than that. You're enjoying this. Enormously. You've got that face. I have no face, 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 is close enough to be worth not answering, so Val puts the last two pins on the sill and puts her mouth just under the ear instead, where the pulse is, and feels the whole length of Kyra go still. Say it. Which. Whatever you've been holding since four o'clock. It's been in the room all evening like a third person. So Val says it, low, against the skin under her ear: that she decided while rolling flour sacks and went on rolling flour sacks; that she has spent five hours unable to look at her straight on; that she has wanted to put a mark on her since Thursday week and spent two days calling it a logistical problem, out of cowardice, and was caught at it inside a minute. And that she cannot explain, tonight or at any point in the next four hundred years, why a thing under the skin that nobody on this planet will ever see has gone through her like a bell going off in an empty house. Then don't explain it, Kyra says, and gets a hand into the back of her hair, and that is the end of the talking for a while. Then the light is in her arms and her throat, the way it goes when it is feeling and not one other thing, and it puts a low edge on everything in the room that is nearer than the wall: Kyra's shoulder, the hollow at the base of her neck. The two of them do not remark on it; neither of them has said a word about it in a hundred and fifty years. What it does, in practice, is hand Val a quarter of an hour in which she can see her properly with the lamp out — which is the only practical advantage either of them has ever got out of four centuries on this planet and which Val has never once described out loud. Kyra's goes gold at the edges and stays, and Val watches it happen from four inches away, and is glad, and says nothing at the time. She wakes before it is light, as she does, and the fire is ash and the canvas is a pale block in the corner and Kyra is face down with one arm off the side of the bed. Val does not move for a while: she has nine days and a list of forty-one items and a wagon in the yard with no cover on it, and she lies in the cold with all of that stacked up behind her eyes and does not get up and start on any of it, which for her is a considerable act. You're awake. For some time. Doing the list. I was doing the list. I have stopped doing the list. Kyra gets the loose arm up and puts it across Val's middle without opening her eyes, which she has been doing since a hut with one bench in it and which started because it was cold. Val. Mm. The mark. On the shelf. Her voice has gone level in the way it does 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 lies with the weight of her arm across her ribs and the day waiting on the other side of the shutter, and feels the thing turn over in her chest that has been turning over since Thursday week. It is on the record, she says.

Nobody leaves when they mean to, which is the first thing about the season: the men who spent all winter telling each other they would be off on the fifteenth of April go out to look at the grass on the fifteenth of April and come back and do not say much. Grass is the whole of it — an ox cannot eat a calendar — and the companies sit 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 walks out every third day to look at it for them and is paid in coffee and opinions. Another week, she tells 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. Another week. The company they go with calls itself the Nemaha Company, after a river most of them have never seen, because somebody said the name in a meeting and nobody had a better one. It is twenty-two wagons when they join it and twenty-six when it rolls, and the way you join is that you go out to the camp with your outfit and stand in front of a man on a barrel and are looked at. The man on the barrel is Ewen Pryce: a Welshman out of Ohio, a little over forty, gray beard cut square, a voice that has been bawling at livestock for twenty-five years, 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 makes him the only man in the camp who has been further west than the Blue. He looks at the wagon. He looks at the oxen, at length, and puts his hand on the near ox's shoulder. Then he looks at the two of them and says: where's your man? There isn't one. Brother? Father? No. Pryce scratches the square beard. I'll tell you what I'm weighing, 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 says. 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 puts her hand flat on the sideboard. And we've been on roads before. Pryce turns his head and looks down his own row at the Ohio wagon for a while. It is a press, he says. The articles are 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 bought for the purpose, and every head of a wagon in the company signs them. There are fourteen articles and Kyra listens to all of them read out in the wind with her arms folded: the captain's authority and how he can be unelected; guard duty in rotation; stock held in common on the drive and separate in the corral; no wagon to be abandoned while it can 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 produces the only laugh of the afternoon. And then the ledger goes round the circle and men put their names in it, and some of them make a mark and the clerk writes the name beside it, and the ledger comes to Val. She takes the pen and does 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 herself and Val had said she would rather do both so that they matched, which is a sentence Kyra thinks about for the rest of the day. Walking back afterward: ten. Ten what? Pieces of paper on this planet with something true on them about the two of us. Hands behind her back, she counts them: Zorzi's minutes; the two sets out of Venice, 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 — 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. She walks 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 says. They find out about the doctoring on the fourth of May, two days before the company rolls, and it happens the way Kyra knew it would, which is that nobody asks anybody anything. A child in the Vance wagon goes into a kettle of hot water at the knee, and the mother comes out of that wagon with the child in her arms screaming for a doctor — and there is no doctor, there has never been a doctor, the nearest doctor is four miles away in a town full of men paying him in gold dust to look at their gums. And Val is across the camp before Kyra has got off the tongue. Kyra comes up behind and stands at the edge of it and watches and does not help, because there is nothing to help with and because she learned two centuries ago that the most useful thing she can do in the first four minutes is be a person who is not in the way. Val has the child flat and the leg in cold water inside a minute, and keeps it there, and keeps it there, and goes on keeping it there while the mother says four separate times that surely that is long enough and a woman behind them says that grease is what you want, lard or fresh butter, everybody knows that, her own mother used lard. Not lard, Val says 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 stays with it four hours. When she comes back to their wagon it is full dark and she sits down on the tongue and puts her hands over her face for a second, which she does about twice a century. They're going to ask me now. They are. Pryce will ask me tomorrow, in front of people, because that is how a captain does a thing like this. She takes 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 is 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 sits down on the tongue beside her, close enough that their arms are touching, and stays there. Say the eleven, she says. Val breathes out through her nose, which is the nearest she gets 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. She lets 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 roll on the seventh of May, which is a Tuesday. Kyra walks — she did not ride in the wagon in Westport and does not ride in it now, because you walk beside the team and you will walk beside the team for four hundred miles before anybody thinks about it differently — and the first day is nine miles and feels like nothing at all. At the top of the long rise past the state line she turns round and looks back, because everybody does, and the whole column is strung out behind her with the white covers going and the dust up, and behind that is the low green country dropping away east, and somewhere in it is a town making departure, which will go on making it after they are gone and after everybody in this column is dead. Val comes up the slope and stands beside her. Three hundred and forty-eight, she says. Kyra does not ask what; there is only ever one arithmetic that arrives like that, with no preamble, at the top of a rise, on a day they are 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. She is 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 puts her hand on the back of Val's neck, under the hair, and stands there with her for a minute while the column goes past them on the road. Then Pryce shouts for the wagons that are stopping to stop somewhere else, and they go on.

A wagon company on the road is a town that takes itself apart every morning and builds itself again every night, and by the end of the first week Val has stopped thinking of it as a journey and started thinking of it as a place she lives. The day has a shape and the shape never varies: the guard fires a gun at four and you get up in the dark; you find your stock, which is somewhere out on the grass with a hundred and forty other animals and has opinions about being found; you yoke; you eat something standing up. By seven the corral comes apart and the column goes out in the order it drew by lot the night before — because the order is everything: the wagon at the head goes all day in clean air and the wagon at the tail goes all day in a moving wall of dust that gets in the eyes, the teeth, the flour, the water and the seams of the cover, and the rotation of that order is the single most sacred article in the fourteen. Eight miles by noon. Two hours in the heat. Seven more. Then the corral, wheels chained, stock inside or out depending on the country — and then for two hours the whole thing is a town again: fires, children under everybody's feet, a fiddle if Chilton can be got at it, men mending what has 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 likes it. She is extremely careful not to say so. She has the company's complaints inside a fortnight and they are not what anybody in a book would have expected. Nobody is heroically injured. What they have is feet — blisters gone bad because a man has walked four hundred miles in boots he bought new for the trip, which is the single stupidest thing a human being can do and which perhaps a third of them have done. Sunburn on the backs of hands and the tops of ears. Teeth. A great deal of backache and a certain amount of rash from the wool. And two pregnancies, one of which nobody has mentioned to her yet and both of which she has known about since Westport. And they have Rachel Vance's daughter Nan, whose knee was in the kettle, who by the third week is walking on it and showing the mark to anybody who will look, with the particular pride of a seven-year-old who has come through something. The mother brings Val a pie she cannot afford to make. You'll take it, or I'll be obliged to be insulted. I will take it — and then the thing Val has never once done: 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 looks at her for a second. You're a strange one, she says, not unkindly, and goes back up the line. Kyra, who has been on the tongue through all of this mending a strap and saying nothing whatsoever, waits until the woman is out of earshot. You told her how to do it. I told her how to do it. You've never once done that. There is nothing in cold water that anybody could not have worked out. 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 says it to the strap rather than to Kyra, and Kyra lets her. The people, who are the chapter's real inventory. Ewen Pryce, who captains by talking to men in the same voice he uses on oxen, which is low and continuous and does not stop until the thing has moved; he walks the column four times a day, has a wife buried in Ohio and two grown sons in the company, does not mention the first and does not favor the second two — and Val puts him at about the best commander of a hundred people she has seen since a man on a wall in Trieste. Horace and Sophia Deem of the Ohio wagon, which does have a walnut press in it, and a rocking chair, and a case of books, who have been advised by four separate people to leave all three and have smiled at all four; they are from a good house in Zanesville and they have sold it, and Sophia Deem reads in the wagon while it moves, which makes her sick, and does it anyway. The Rook brothers, who have no wagon and no interest in one, who drive sixty head of loose cattle at the back of the column and sleep under a canvas sheet and are, between them, about twenty-two years old and immortal. Mr. Chilton, the clerk, who has the ledger with their names in it and a fiddle and a second-hand education, and who asks Val on the ninth day over the fire whether she has ever considered that the cholera might be a kind of animalcule too small to see — and Val says she has heard it argued, and asks him where he read it, and listens, and does not add one word to what he knows. Eli and Susannah Frame, married in March, eighteen and nineteen, in a wagon that was a wedding present, so plainly and stupidly happy that the entire company has adopted them as a sort of shared property. And old Tarbox, seventy-one, going out to a son in the Willamette he has not seen in nine years, who walks the whole way and will not ride, and who tells Kyra on the second night that she has a good eye for stock and that he has been watching her and that she needn't pretend otherwise on his account. Val writes none of them down: she kept a book of four hundred and nine names in Boston in a winter she does not talk about, and decided on a wharf in 1776 that she would not do that again, and has held to it for seventy-four years. She remembers them anyway. That is not a decision. The Platte comes up on the eleventh day out from the crossing and is the first thing on the road that makes Kyra laugh out loud. It is a mile wide and, as far as anybody can determine, about six inches deep, running brown and flat and braided between sandbars with no bank worth the name, and the water so full of grit that you have to let a bucket stand half an hour before you can drink the top of it. It's a road that got wet. 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, 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 changes with the river: the timber gives out except in the bottoms and then altogether, and the grass goes short and gray-green and goes on doing it to the edge of the world in every direction. There is no wood — you burn buffalo chips, and an entire social order is established within four days about who collects them and who is above collecting them, and Sophia Deem of the walnut press is out there with a sack on the first evening, which settles that. Val finds, to her considerable surprise, that she likes the emptiness, and says 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. 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 is on the side of her face and the loose of her hair has gone the color of wet copper, which happens for about four minutes a day out here and which Val has begun, without ever admitting it, to be somewhere in the vicinity of at that hour. Kyra comes and stands at her shoulder. You're happy. I am content. It is a distinct condition with different arithmetic. You're happy. I am, Val says. The graves begin at Fort Kearny. They are not a surprise — Pryce 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 are two different experiences, and the company goes quiet in stretches nobody plans. They are mostly recent, which is the thing: a board with a name burned into it, or a name in pencil the weather has already had a month at, and a date in this spring, and often nothing else. Some have a line. Aged 4 years 11 months. Of the cholera. Some have stones piled on them against the wolves and some do not, and the ones that do not are worse to walk past and nobody says why. Chilton counts them, because he cannot help it, because he is a clerk — and by the second week of June he has 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 says. And he reads 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 stops halfway through when he sees Rachel Vance's face. That's a hundred and sixty since Kearny, Val says into the silence, evenly, because somebody has to finish the sentence and it is better done by somebody it will 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 looks at her with the gratitude of a man handed back his own dignity. The fire goes on; somebody asks for the fiddle and gets it, and the Frames dance with about six other people in the dust between the wagons, and old Tarbox claps on the offbeat with his hands over his head, and the Rook boys whoop from somewhere out in the dark with the cattle. Val stands at the edge of it with her arms folded and watches a hundred and four people enjoy themselves. Kyra comes and stands beside her and does not say anything, because there is nothing to say about it yet that would not have been a lie. Behind them the river goes on making its flat noise in the dark, and ahead of them, four days up the road, a company out of Illinois is burying three in one morning and has not got word back down the line.

The first one is not theirs. It is a company out of Platte County that has corralled a half mile short of them on the eighteenth of June, and at about eight in the evening a boy comes down the road on a mule asking whether the train ahead has a doctor in it, and stands there in the dusk with the mule blowing while twenty-six wagons look at each other. Kyra is at the fire and sees it arrive in Val's face and go out of it again, which takes under a second and which nobody else in the camp has ever been able to see. Val puts down the tin she is holding. How long has he been sick? Since dinner. Since the middle of the day, or since this evening? The boy thinks 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. Not the river. Any barrel water they have already drawn. Boiled and then cooled, and salt in it, and I want a spoon. She is walking before she finishes the sentence. Kyra catches her at the wagon getting her bag out from under the seat. Val. I know. Say it, then. Val straightens up with the bag in her hand and stands in the near-dark with the noise of the camp going on behind her. It is not the party. 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 looks at her. Take the small kettle. Theirs will be dirty. She is gone eleven hours and the man dies anyway. She comes back at seven in the morning walking slowly with the kettle in one hand, and does not eat and does not sit down, and stands at the back of their wagon and tells Kyra what it is in the flat voice she uses when the thing is already decided and she is 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 gets up off the tongue. How fast? He was well at midday. He was dead at four in the morning. She puts 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 — and 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. Then what do we do? We do not do anything. 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 hears 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 gives it to him in four sentences, and Kyra, watching from ten feet away, thinks she has never seen her sell anything better in two and a half centuries — because she does not sell it at all; she lays it in front of him the way you lay a tool on a bench. I want three orders from you. 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 puts the hat back on. Name them. Val counts them off on her fingers, which she does perhaps once a century. They do not camp below another company — ever; if it means going on two miles in the dark, they go on two miles in the dark. No man drinks out of the river where the stock has stood; the water comes from upstream of the crossing and stands in the barrel until it is clear and then is boiled and then cooled, and it is boiled whether anybody is sick or not. And the sinks go downstream of the camp and below the water they draw, a hundred paces, every night, dug and filled, and there is no man in this company too proud to dig it. Pryce turns his hat over in his hands. Boiled. 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 does not move. They will say it for two weeks, 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 looks past her at the river for a while. Mr. Chilton, he says, without turning round. You said a thing at the fire about animalcules. Chilton, who has been hovering the way clerks hover, goes pink: there is a school of thought, Captain, in the journals, that it is a living thing too small to see, and it is 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 opens his mouth and looks helplessly at Val, and Kyra watches Val do nothing at all: no nod, no encouragement, nothing a man could afterward have said had pushed him. I believe it is, Chilton says. Then you'll say so tonight at the fire, and you'll say it as a man who reads, Pryce says, and I'll give the orders, and we'll see which of us they mind. They mind Chilton, which is the part Kyra enjoys for the rest of her life. A woman in the fourth wagon saying boil it is one thing; a man from Cincinnati with a ledger and a subscription to a periodical saying that learned men in London have been writing about animalcules is another thing entirely — and by the third night there are four fires going under four kettles and an argument happening about whose turn it is to collect chips, which is the sound of an order becoming a habit. Kyra runs it. That is what Val meant by bigger, and she was right, and Kyra does not particularly enjoy being right about it: she is the one who walks the column at noon finding out who has drunk out of the river because it was there and they were hot; the one who stands over the Frames — eighteen and nineteen and in love and utterly convinced that nothing in the world can touch them — until Eli Frame pours out a bucket he has just carried a quarter mile; the one who tells old Tarbox, who has been drinking out of rivers for seventy-one years without ever once being killed by it, that he can go on being right about that for another six weeks and then he can go back to it. You're enjoying this, Tarbox says. I'm not. You're enjoying some of it. I'm enjoying you doing what I say, and that's a different thing and it won't last. It comes into the company on the twenty-ninth of June and it takes the younger Rook. His name is Amos. He is twenty, not twenty-two, which Kyra finds out that night from his brother and had not known before, and he was well at breakfast and in the grass at noon and by the middle of the afternoon he is lying in the back of a borrowed wagon going gray. Val is there within four minutes of the word going down the line. What follows is eleven hours in a wagon bed that Kyra is in and out of all night, carrying water, carrying salt, holding a lamp — and what she remembers about it afterward is not the horror of it, because she has seen worse things in Trieste. What she remembers is the sheer, flat, unglamorous labor of what Val actually does: 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 is bad and puts everything in the wagon bed into two colors; Val has her sleeves turned back and her hair pushed into her collar out of the way, and where the light gets at it, at the temple and along the loose of the plait, it goes the pale of old straw and then nothing, and her face above the boy is doing exactly what it does in front of strangers, which is nothing at all. Kyra has been looking at that face in bad light for two hundred and forty-three years and can read the whole of it from the door. Somewhere after midnight the older Rook, who is called Eben and who has not let go of his brother's foot for five hours, says into the dark: he ain't going to, is he. I do not know. 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 does 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 is still there at daylight. He is still there at noon, and he drinks 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 knows it inside the hour, and Sophia Deem sits down on a box and cries in front of everybody and does not care who sees it. The Nemaha Company buries 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 stop at midday. Pryce reads out of a book. The men pile stones, because there are stones in that stretch and everyone has seen what the road looks like where there are not. And afterward Kyra watches 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 are in the front of that book — twenty-six wagons, forty-one signatures, Martha Miller and Sarah Miller in the same hand. Kyra stands in the sun and looks at the two halves of that ledger, and thinks that of everything she has learned on this planet in two hundred and forty-three years, the thing she still cannot get used to is how fast these people can go from the front of a book to the back of it.

The first week of July is the week she has to choose. Up to then the arithmetic has been bearable, because up to then there has been one at a time: one wagon, one lamp, one spoon, 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 could say to herself that everything which could be done had been done by somebody who knew how. On the second of July there are four at once. Val stands in the middle of the corral at nine in the evening and understands, with complete clarity and no feeling whatsoever, that she is one person; that sitting with a body through a night is not a thing that can be hurried or divided; that she can take one of the four and give the other three to whoever she can teach in the next ten minutes; and that the three will be got at, all night, by frightened people who love them and have never done it before. She takes Susannah Frame, because she is nineteen and has been sick two hours and is the likeliest. Susannah Frame dies at four in the morning with Val's hand under her head. She does not go and lie down afterward. She goes to the next wagon, which is the Vances', and finds Thomas Vance six hours into it and past the point where anything works, and sits with him anyway for the two hours he has, because his wife is there and his daughter is there and there is nothing left to do that is any use except not leaving. Then she goes and finds old Tarbox, who has it and has not told anybody, because he has walked seventy-one years without troubling a doctor and does not propose to start. I know what it is. 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 is gray and his hands have gone cold and he is 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 sits down on the box beside him and takes his wrist, and he lets her — and after a while he says the thing she carries afterward for a very long time, which is that his son in the Willamette has a place on a creek and has written that there are salmon in it so thick a man could walk across, and that he has never believed a word of that letter and has been coming anyway just to stand in the creek and call the boy a liar to his face. He dies a little after noon on the third. She has the spoon in her hand and has been at it for nineteen hours out of the previous twenty-four, and she sits on the box in the heat with the wagon cover glowing over her head and does the only thing available, which is to go on to the next one. Fourteen in nine days. That is the number, and Val has 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 did not learn until she was writing it. Which is the other thing. Somebody has to keep the book: the articles say the property of the dead is to be held by the company and delivered to their people, and that means names, ages, the place they were from, the date, the spot on the road as near as anybody can 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 is in the ground and the ledger is lying on a box in Pryce's wagon with nobody's handwriting in it after his own name. Pryce brings it to her himself on the evening of the sixth. You'll do it, he says. It is not a question and he does not pretend it is one. Val takes the book and stands holding it. She made herself a promise on a wharf in Boston in 1776, on a day when a man asked her a question she could not answer for nineteen years, and the promise was that she would never again keep a list of the names of people she could not save. She has held to it for seventy-four years — through a mill town and a fever autumn and two decades in Philadelphia. It is the only promise she has ever made entirely to herself, with no one else in the world aware it existed. Yes, she says. She writes fourteen names in a ruled ledger in a wagon by lamplight, with the dates, and the ages where anybody knows them, and Susannah Frame's is the first because Val puts them in the order they went rather than the order she was given them, and it takes her forty minutes, and when she has finished she sits with her hand flat on the page for a while. Kyra comes in and does not say anything and does not touch her, and sits down on the box opposite, close enough to be reached. Val closes the ledger. I am all right. 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 puts 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 says. I was going to sit here. And she sits there, on a box in a stranger's wagon, for about two hours, while Val goes through the property lists of fourteen dead people and tots them and signs at the bottom, and neither of them says one further word, and it is the most use anybody is to her that whole summer. She saves nine. That is the figure she can never afterward make sit level beside the fourteen, and she tries 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 has already given her mother one fright that season and does it again; two of the Bell wagon; Eben Rook, who gets it the day after his brother stands up; three from the Ohio company that camped alongside them at the ford and had no one; and Rachel Vance, who is sick within a day of burying her husband and who says afterward that she had not especially wanted to come back and had done it for the child. Nine and fourteen. Both true. The thing nobody in the company ever says, and that Val knows perfectly well four of them have thought, is that the nine were the ones she sat with. And then it stops, the way it stopped in Westport: not because anybody has beaten it, but because the country comes up out of the river bottoms and gets dry and high and the water starts coming out of clean creeks off the hills instead of out of forty thousand people's trough. They come up on Fort Laramie on the twentieth of July. It is not a fort: it is an adobe trading post the army 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 are 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 comes in at the front of it twenty-four wagons strong, having started with twenty-six. They have lost fourteen people out of a hundred and four, and two wagons, one abandoned and one absorbed. Eli Frame is driving alone and has not spoken more than a sentence at a time in two weeks. Rachel Vance is driving her own team with Nan on the seat beside her and has refused four separate offers of help in a tone that ended the discussion. The Rook brothers are both alive and have sold nine head of cattle to a company that lost its own and charged them a fair price, which Kyra made them do. Pryce halts the column above the ford and rides back down it and does something Val has not seen a captain do: he takes his hat off and sits there on his horse in front of all of them for a moment, and then says that they are four hundred and thirty miles from Westport and six hundred and forty from the Sweetwater and that the worst of the country behind them is behind them, and that they will lay over three days, and that he would be obliged if nobody thanked him for anything. Val stands at the head of her own team with her hand on the near ox's shoulder and looks up at the walls. She is aware of a number of things at once, which is usual, and of one that is not. That she has been on this road eleven weeks. That she has slept perhaps forty hours in the last nine days. That her hands have a tremor in them she can stop by deciding to, and that she has been deciding to for six days. That fourteen names are in a book in Pryce's wagon in her own handwriting and that she is going to be carrying that particular fact for a hundred years. And she is aware, for the first time since the nineteenth of June, that she has not thought about the other thing at all: that she has gone into thirty-one wagons in nine days, in front of everybody, and sat with the dying and handled them and slept in their bedding, and has not so much as taken a chill. She stands at the ox's shoulder in the middle of four hundred wagons and lets herself have that thought entire, once, properly, the way she would read a bad line in a ledger. Then Kyra comes up on her other side and looks where she is looking and says: three days. Three days. You'll sleep two of them. I will sleep one of them, Val says, 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 puts her hand flat between Val's shoulder blades and leaves it there while the column starts down toward the water.

Fort Laramie has been a fur post for sixteen years and the United States Army for thirteen months, and both of those facts are standing in the open where anybody can look at them. The old adobe is still there, square and yellow and beginning to go at the corners, with a gate you can drive a wagon through and a court inside that smells of hides going back twenty years; beside it the army is building in timber — a flagstaff with a parade ground scraped around it, a line of new quarters half framed, two companies of men in the wrong uniform for the heat, and a lieutenant of twenty-four who has been sent out here from a place with trees in it and has the expression of a man doing arithmetic about how long four years is. And in the bottoms below, where the emigrant camps are, there are four hundred wagons and a thousand head of stock and a market of a kind Kyra has never seen in four hundred years of markets — because four hundred miles has taught everybody what they cannot carry. The flats outside the post are heaped with it: anvils; six or seven cookstoves 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 thinks says more about human beings than most things she has 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, a few Lakota women going through it without much interest, and a trader's boy loading a handcart with whatever will sell back to the next company through. Horace Deem stands at the edge of it for a long time with his hands behind his back, and then goes and gets two men and has the walnut press carried out and set down in the sage with its feet in the dirt and its brasses still bright. Sophia Deem watches it go. We'll write and tell them it's on the Laramie River, she says to Kyra. It'll be a better story than the house was. They lay over three days and the company comes back to life in a way that is almost indecent. The Rook brothers swim in the river with about forty other young men and shout for four hours. Nan Vance finds other children and is gone from dawn. Eli Frame is taken up by the Bell family, who simply begin feeding him without discussing it, and on the second night he sits at their fire and says four consecutive sentences, and Kyra sees Rachel Vance notice it and look away with her jaw set. Pryce goes up to the post and comes back with three things: mail, which is a sack of it and produces an hour Kyra does not enjoy watching; flour at a price that makes him swear; and the news that has been going down the line all summer, which is that the companies ahead have been dying the same way and the ones behind are worse. And Val sleeps. She sleeps for nineteen hours, which Kyra has not seen her do since a hut on a mountain, and wakes at noon on the second day and eats an enormous amount of food and then goes up to the post to find out things. What she wants is men who have been west of South Pass, and the post has four of them, all of whom were trappers when there was still such a trade and none of whom are under fifty. Kyra goes along for the second one and stands at the rail of the trader's room and watches, and it is worth watching, because Val does not ask a single thing in the way anybody else asks it. She does not ask whether the Sweetwater crossings are bad; she asks how many there are and at which of them a loaded wagon has to be double-teamed and which ones change with the water. She does not ask how far it is to the Green; she asks what the grass is like in the last fifteen miles before it and whether there is wood or whether it is chips, and then whether that had been true in a dry year and how he knows. The old man answers for two hours and enjoys himself enormously. You've been asked before, Val says at the end of it. Not like that, I ain't, the old man concedes. 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 looks 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 says. Walking back down through the wagons: 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, 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 asks her on the third night, and there is no reason for it — which is the part she thinks about afterward: she has gone eleven years without asking, and there is nothing in the evening that ought to have brought it up. They are sitting on the wagon with their legs hanging off the tailgate, at that hour when the flats go blue and the fires come up in the bottoms one at a time, and somebody four wagons down is playing a jew's-harp badly, and it is the first evening in two months with nothing whatever wrong with it. And Kyra hears herself say: tell me about the second room. Val does not stiffen; she stopped doing that around the fourth time. Trieste. Trieste. And Val gives her the paragraph: that she was taken out of the room where Kyra was a little after four on the afternoon of the second day and brought back to it on the fourth; that in the interval she was held below, in a room on the court side with one window; that there were four men in it, two of whom she had seen upstairs and two of whom she had not; that nothing was done to her that left a mark and she was not asked one question about Kyra at any point; that she was asked the same eleven questions in a different order for two days and gave the same answers to all of them and none of the answers were true; and that at the end of it they brought her up and put her in the room, and Kyra was asleep, and she 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 1714 and every time since. Kyra sits with her heels knocking gently against the tailgate. Thank you. You are welcome. She puts her heel against the tailgate and stops 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 says. Kyra looks out at the fires for a while. She could say several things. She could say the thing she has been carrying since 1705, which is not tell me what happened and never has been, and which she has known the shape of for about a century and has never once found the sentence for — she got closer to it in a room over a saddler's in November of ninety-five than she has ever got before or since, and did not say it then either. All right, she says instead. Not all right forever. No. She lets her boots knock against the tailgate and stops them. All right tonight. I understand the difference, Val says — which is what she said the first time, and which is the only part of it that has never been written down and learned. On the last morning Kyra sees the woman at the post who will change the rest of their lives, and does not know it, and does not speak to her. She is 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 is speaking — slowly, in short pieces, turning her head from one man to the other — to four Lakota men who have come in with robes and are not being paid what the robes are worth. Kyra stops by the gate. She cannot follow any of it. What she can follow, because it is the thing she has been reading out of rooms for four hundred years, is 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 gets steadily less comfortable — and none of the three white men in that court having the first idea that they are being handled. The captain says something that pleases him. The woman says the same thing to the four men in Lakota, without the laugh, and one of the older men looks at her, and something goes between them that lasts about a quarter of a second. Kyra puts her tongue in her cheek and looks at the gatepost. Val comes up behind her with the page of notes in her hand and asks what is funny, and Kyra says nothing is funny, and that Pryce has been saying for two days that the company wants somebody for the Sweetwater who knows the crossings and can talk to the people whose country it is — and that she has just watched the best interpreter on this river take four white men apart in their own court without one of them noticing. Val folds the page of notes. Which one? The one against the wall. Val looks. She looks the way she looks at everything, which is in order and completely, and Kyra watches her do it. Ask Pryce tonight, Val says.

Pryce brings her down to the wagons on the morning they roll, walking beside a good dun mule with a pack on it, and introduces her to the company by saying: this is Maud. She's coming as far as the Green. Val, who has been checking a hoof, puts the foot down and straightens up and gets her first proper look. She is about thirty, dressed the way a woman around a trading post dresses, which is neither one thing nor the other — a calico dress and a good pair of moccasins and a man's coat that has been cut down for her, her hair in two plaits with the part painted red — and she has a face that does not offer anything and does not withhold it either, and she stands beside the mule with the reins loose in one hand and lets a hundred and four people look at her, which Val estimates she has done about forty times before. Miller, Val says. Martha. That is my sister Sarah at the wheel. The woman puts her free hand flat on the mule's neck. Maud, she says. And Val says nothing at all, because she has been given a name in a doorway by a stranger for two hundred and forty-three years and she knows the sound of one being handed over the way you hand over a coin you have already decided to part with. Her terms were settled in the post and Pryce reports 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 is not a guide and will not be called one — the company has a road under its wheels and does not need a guide, it needs somebody who can talk. She will talk to anybody the company meets on the road or at a crossing, and she will tell Pryce what was said: all of it, she has been specific about that, all of it and not the useful part — and what the company does about it afterward is the company's business and not hers. And one further article, which Pryce delivers word for word and does 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 is some muttering about that. Val, sitting on the wagon tongue with a plate on her knees, thinks it is the most exact piece of work she has heard anybody do on this continent, and says nothing, and goes on eating. Four days above the fort she watches the woman earn the twelve dollars twice over in a morning. A party of men comes in along the bluff toward the column, seven of them, and comes on at a walk and stops at fifty yards — and the Illinois company two miles behind had a run-in over stock the week before and everybody in the Nemaha has heard about it in three versions, each one worse. Pryce goes out with two men and Maud on the mule. Val, standing at the head of her team, watches the whole of it from a hundred and fifty yards away with no idea what is being said, and does what she always does, which is read the shapes: the oldest of the seven men talks for a long time; Maud listens without moving; then she turns the mule a little and speaks to Pryce for perhaps twenty seconds; Pryce says something short; she turns back and speaks for a good deal longer than twenty seconds. Then everybody sits still for a while, and then two of the seven ride back down the line and look at the wagons, slowly, from about forty feet, and one of them says something to Nan Vance's mother that makes the woman freeze — and Maud says one word from the mule, not loudly, and the man laughs and rides on. Afterward Pryce comes back up the column looking as though he has been handed his own hat. Well. 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 comes round the wagon with a bucket. What was the word? The one word, to the man who spoke to Rachel. Pryce scratches the square beard. Damned if I know. But I'd not want it said to me. Val begins keeping a page on her that evening, and then does not. She gets as far as the heading, in the back of the notebook, and sits looking at it by the fire with the pen in her hand and the page blank under the word, and then closes the book without writing a line — and it takes her the better part of an hour afterward to be honest with herself about why. It is not the Boston promise; that promise was about the dead, and she broke it eight days ago in a ledger in Pryce's wagon and will be carrying that for a century. It is that she has recognized, in the woman's flat handing-over of a name at a wagon wheel, the exact apparatus she and Kyra have been running since a hut on a mountain — and that writing her down feels like doing to a living person the thing Val has spent four centuries making sure was never done to her. She says so to Kyra, in the dark, in about nine words. Kyra does not open her eyes. I know. I saw you shut the book. There are three names, and Val has all three inside a week without asking a single question, which is not deliberate and which she is not proud of. Maud is the company's: it arrived from somewhere in the emigrant traffic, some driver's approximation four or five years ago, and it has stuck the way a wrong name sticks. It is not her name and there is no version of it that is. Madeleine is the post's — Val sees it written twice: once in the trader's daybook when she goes 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 put it on her years ago, the way clerks have been putting French on everybody in that trade for a hundred years, and she answers to it in the post and nowhere else. And there is a third. Val knows there is a third because of the way the four Lakota men in the court said something to her that was not either of the first two, and because of the way she answered it. She says nothing about any of this to anybody except Kyra, and to Kyra she says it once, lying on her back looking at the cover. Three. One for the whites on the road, one for the whites in the buildings, and one that is hers. Kyra turns 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 puts 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 is quiet for a minute. Don't get sentimental about it. 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 lies in the dark and takes the correction, entire, the way she takes all of Kyra's good ones — which is silently, with something that feels like the floor coming up a half inch under her. Yes, she says. That is better. The woman notices Kyra on the ninth day, and Val watches it happen. They are on a long grade above the river in the afternoon with the wind coming round, and Kyra walks out ahead of the team fifty yards and stands with her face into it for about four seconds, and comes back and tells Pryce to make the next water and stop early, because there is weather behind them that will be on the camp by eight and he does not want to be corralling in it. Pryce, who learned in June, stops early. It comes in at ten past eight. Kyra comes in under the wagon after the stock is seen to, soaked through and entirely pleased with herself, and lies down on her front on the tarpaulin with her chin on her hands. The rain has taken her plait apart and the dark of her hair is flat to her skull and running, and where it lies over her shoulder it has gone nearly black, and there is a piece of it stuck along her jaw that Val moves with one finger and does not mention. And Val, from under the wagon with the tarpaulin dripping off the tailgate in front of her, sees 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 has been reading faces for four hundred years and has built a life out of it — can read perfectly well. It is not suspicion; Val knows what that looks like, she has been looking at it since 1608. It is recognition. It is 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 turns her head and sees Val watching her. And she does not look away, and she does not nod, and she does not do any of the things that people do: she simply looks back for about a second, the way you look at a person who has caught you doing a sum, and goes on with what she is doing. Val puts her head down on her folded arms under the wagon and lies there in the noise of the rain, and thinks: she is the first one in two hundred and forty-three years who would be able to tell. And then, because she is who she is, she thinks the second thing: and she is also the only person on this river who would understand exactly why we would rather she did not.

The word comes down the road the way all the words come down the road, which is from a man going the other way who had it from somebody who had it from somebody. There is sickness in the camps on the river — not the emigrant camps, which have been dying since May and which nobody thinks is news any more, but in the Lakota camps below the fort, and above it, and on the two creeks east of it; and it has gone through one band in nine days and there are people saying numbers that cannot be right and people saying numbers that are worse. Kyra is at the fire when Pryce brings it, and she watches the company receive it. A few are decent about it straight away: Rachel Vance, which surprises nobody who has watched her bury a husband; Sophia Deem; and the Rook boys, who want to know if anybody needs cattle, which is the only language they have and is meant well. And a man from the Ohio wagons called Sims, who has lost nobody, says that it is a hard thing but that it is not their affair, and that a company which has come through the Platte with fourteen graves behind it has done its share of nursing for one season. It's the same sickness, Kyra says. So it is. It's the same sickness, Mr. Sims, and it got here on wheels. Sims looks into the fire and says there is no call to talk like that — and Pryce lets the silence sit for a moment and then says that the company will be laying over a day at the crossing regardless, on account of the stock, and that what any person does with that day is that person's business and no one else's, and would somebody put the coffee on. Maud comes to their wagon that night, which she has not done before. She stands at the tailgate rather than under the cover, which Kyra comes to understand in time is a thing she does everywhere, and says, 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 says it flatly. So yes. Kyra gets down off the tailgate. What does Val need to bring? There is a pause of about a second and a half, and in it Kyra understands that the woman came down here with a sentence prepared and has not got to use it, and is rearranging. I did not ask that. 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 puts 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 looks at her for a while. Salt. And her own water, because there will not be any to spare, and I will not have her drinking theirs. They ride 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 is six miles. Kyra remembers the ride afterward in a good deal of detail, because it is the last hour of that whole summer in which she does not know something. Maud talks, a little, which she has not done before either: her husband died in the winter before last and that is why she is doing this work and not some other; her mother's people are Sicangu; her father had been a trader out of the post, French, dead nine years, and he taught her English because he was proud of it and Lakota was her mother's and the French came off the two of them together in the house; she has been interpreting since she was fifteen. She says all of this in about four minutes, in the tone of a person giving the eleven dull answers — and Kyra recognizes the tone so completely that she nearly laughs out loud on the horse. How many did you say? Val asks from behind. How many what? In the camp above them. You said it went through in nine days. How many were in it? Maud rides for a little while. Sixty lodges, she says. Before. What Val does in that camp over the next four days Kyra thinks about for the rest of her life, and the thing she remembers is not any of the things a person would expect. It is that Val asks permission and then does what she is told. There is a woman there — older, perhaps sixty, with a bad hip and authority that arrives in a space before she does — who has been doctoring in that camp since before Val and Kyra set foot in North America, and who has been at this sickness for nine days already and has worked out a good deal of it herself. Maud takes Val to her and says something short, and then something longer, and then stands back. Val does not offer anything: she puts her bag down and stands there and waits, which takes about six minutes, and the two of them look at each other across the fire in a language neither has. Then the older woman says four words and points with her chin at the two lodges nearest the water. Those two are hers now, Maud says. 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 does that, and the older woman takes the spoon out of her hand and looks at it and gives it back, and says one more thing, and turns 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 agrees. 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 turns that around and delivers it, and the older woman stops where she is and looks 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, sees the two of them arrive at an understanding that has taken nine words and no shared language at all, and thinks that she has watched Val Sorin talk her way through a blood court in Trieste and has never seen her do anything as good as that. The four days themselves do not make a story and Kyra never tries to make one of them. There is a great deal of water carried. There is salt measured out into a horn cup over and over. There is the same flat labor Kyra watched in a wagon bed on the Platte, except that this time it is inside a lodge that smells of smoke and hide and sickness, with people who have no reason on earth to be glad that a white woman has come, and who are nevertheless civil to her, which Kyra finds harder to bear than if they had not been. Some live. Some do not. In the two lodges that are Val's she loses four and keeps six, and in the ones that are the older woman's Kyra never learns the numbers and does not ask. On the third day a young man stands outside the lodge Val is in and says something to Maud in a hard voice with his hand out toward the wagons, meaning the road, meaning all of it, and Maud answers him in about the same number of words and he goes away. What did he say? He said what you would say. Say it anyway. Maud looks 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 stands 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 shifts 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 go back to the company on the fifth morning. Maud rides ahead a hundred yards, which she does when she does not want to talk, and Val rides with her hands loose on the reins and her face doing nothing at all, and Kyra rides beside her and says nothing for four miles. Val has been in the sun for four days without a hat and the pale of her hair has gone almost white along the crown and there is a line across her forehead where the shade ended; she is upright in the saddle in the way she is upright when there is nothing left underneath it. Ten, she says eventually. Ten. Six and four. I have been doing it since the crossing and it will not come out to anything. She looks 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 lets 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 says, and there is not, and I would like to be somewhere with a door tonight. They come up over the last rise and the corral of white covers is in the bottom below them with the stock out on the grass, and somebody has got the fiddle going, and Kyra reaches across between the two horses and puts her hand flat on Val's forearm for a moment — which is the most either of them can do in the open at ten in the morning in front of a hundred people, and has been for two hundred and forty-three years.

Independence Rock is a whale lying in the sage, and it is covered in people's names. They come up on it on the eighth of August, late, with the light going long and gold across the Sweetwater, and the whole company walks out to it the way every company does, and stands underneath it and looks up. Thousands. Val gives up counting inside a minute, which she almost never does. They are painted on in tar and in wagon grease and in red paint somebody has carried four hundred miles for the purpose; cut in with chisels by men who brought a chisel; scratched with a knife point by men who did not. Some are beautifully done; most are not. There are 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 have certainly died since — because there are 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 sets to it with everything they have. Pryce cuts his in with a cold chisel, deep, in letters an inch high. The Rook brothers paint theirs enormously, and then paint a steer, badly. Eli Frame stands at the bottom of the rock for a long time with a brush in his hand and then climbs up and puts S. FRAME on it, and nothing else, and comes down. Rachel Vance writes hers and Nan's and then, after a moment, her husband's. Val and Kyra do not write anything. They discussed it that morning in about six words, and the six words were Kyra saying no and Val saying no, and that was the whole of the discussion, because a name cut in a rock that thousands of people walk past every summer is precisely the kind of object they have spent two and a half centuries not owning. They stand at the bottom in the last of the light and watch other people do it. It's not vanity. 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. Her arms are folded and her head is 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 looks up at four thousand names. Yes, she says, and does not trust herself with any more of it than that. Maud finds them at the wagon that night with her own supper in her hand, and sits down on the ground near the fire rather than on anything, and says: you did not put your names up. No. Why not? And Kyra, who has lied to strangers in nine languages for two hundred and forty-three years, looks at the fire and says: 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 eats for a while. Then she puts her plate down and turns her left hand over and holds her wrist to the firelight, and there are three small marks on it, close together, blue-black under the skin and slightly spread with age. Val leans in without asking and then stops herself. May I? You may look. Do not hold it. They are tiny — two short lines and a dot, no bigger than a fingernail between them, there long enough to have gone soft at the edges the way old ink does. My mother's sister did them. When I was twelve. For what? She picks her plate back up. When you die you go along the road of stars. 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 says 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 does not say anything, and neither does Kyra. The fire does what fires do. Out beyond the wagons the Sweetwater makes its noise, and behind them the rock stands up black against a sky that has, 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 is aware of Kyra's shoulder about four inches from her own and of the fact that neither of them is going to look at the other for at least the next minute, because if they do it will be visible from the fire. That is a good reason, she says eventually, her voice completely level. That is a better reason than any of the reasons on that rock. It is the same reason, Maud says. 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 comes back to it two nights later, at the nooning, when the two of them are alone with the stock and Kyra is checking feet. You want them. Kyra puts 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 is 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, stops moving entirely. There is no rule about where. 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 turns 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 says anything for a moment. Then Kyra says: would you show us how? I will show you how. 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 unfolds her arms. You will do it to each other. That is it anyway. The doing is the thing, not the mark. She teaches 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 go in together and to the same depth; soot from the underside of a kettle, worked fine and mixed with a little water, which is the pigment, charcoal doing at a pinch and 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 asks. You will know when the blood comes up and stays in a bead instead of running. Not before. Val practices on the rawhide for two hours after Maud has gone to her own fire, which is exactly what everybody who knows 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 is putting in comes out even. Kyra sits and watches her do it and does not say the obvious thing. They do 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 is a ring. That is Kyra's, and she says it in the afternoon in about eleven words and then will not look at Val for a second afterward: that the thing she has wanted since a widow on a Missouri street wore her husband round her neck is a plain band, and that she has known for four months exactly which finger it is 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 insisted on that part and gave the reason once — that anything legible is an object which can be understood by somebody who is not them, and there is nothing on this planet or off it that could be written in a skin and be safe, and a circle is a circle. Kyra said that Val was doing the thing where she makes a true argument to avoid saying a plain sentence, and Val said yes, and then said the plain sentence, which was that she did not want a word on Kyra that anybody else could ever read. Kyra goes first, because Val's hands are the steadier of the two and because Kyra would not have been able to wait. It takes a little under an hour, low down, where nothing will ever show — not in any bath house, not to any doctor, not to anybody living — and Val works in the dark by feel and the last of the light and does not speak for the first twenty minutes except to say stay still twice. What she feels, and does not say at the time, and thinks about for a hundred and seventy years afterward: that she has put her hands inside people for two and a half centuries in order to keep them alive, and that this is the first time in her life she has made a wound in someone on purpose and for no reason at all except that both of them wanted it there. When she finishes she puts her thumb flat beside it, not on it, and holds it there. Well? Kyra says. Her voice is not entirely under her. It's a ring. Say something else. It is a ring 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 gets an arm up across her face, and what comes out of her is half a laugh and does not finish. Hers takes longer, because Kyra is not steady and knows it, and stops twice, and swears in Sethal, which she has not done in about sixty years. You can stop. I'm not stopping. I am telling you that you can. Val. She has 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 has put there, and she is concentrating so hard that her whole face has 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 lies still and shuts up, and about forty minutes later it is done, and Kyra sits back on her heels and looks at what she has 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 agrees, 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 lie in the wagon in the dark and do not touch either of the marks and are entirely aware of both of them. It might not take. 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 turns 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 is 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 rolls over toward her. The ink has been the whole of the day, and Val has believed right up until that moment that it is going to be the whole of the night as well — that they are both too sore and too tired and too full of the thing they have just done to want anything else. She is wrong, and she is glad to be wrong, and afterward she cannot identify the point at which one turned into the other. It is slow; neither of them can be hurried and neither wants to be. There is no lamp and no fire and a company of a hundred people asleep a hundred yards away, so there is nothing above a whisper the entire time — and Val discovers, with the small clear astonishment she still gets about things like this after two hundred and forty-three years, that having to be silent makes her say more rather than less: close in, into the hair behind Kyra's ear, every plain thing she has been carrying since a room above a harness maker's in March. Somewhere in it the light comes up in her arms and her throat, low and steady, and lies along Kyra's collarbone and the edge of her jaw and makes a small pale country under the wagon cover that nobody else on the continent will ever see. Val sees Kyra's go gold and stay gold. Neither of them mentions it, then or afterward, because it has not needed mentioning since about 1650. And at some point, very late, Kyra puts her hand down and rests two fingers just above the new mark on herself, not touching it, and says: it's there. It is there. That's what I keep doing. Checking it's there. I have checked mine four times, Val says, 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 says, and pulls her in.

South Pass is the great disappointment of the road and everybody has been warned and nobody believes it until they are standing on it. There is no pass: there is a wide sage saddle twenty miles across with hills a long way off on either side, and the wagons go up it at a grade you cannot feel, and at some point in the middle of an ordinary afternoon you are over the top of the continent and nothing whatever has happened. Men who have spent four months imagining a gate in the mountains stand in the sage looking irritated; the Rook boys ride up and down the column asking people if they have noticed anything. But two miles on there is a boggy green place where springs come up, and Pryce stops the column and gets down and tells everybody to come and look at the water. It is running west. That is all it is 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 has ever seen. Kyra crouches down and puts her hand in it. She is aware that Val has come up behind her and stopped a little way off, and that Val is not looking at the water at all, and she does not turn round — and she thinks about a thing Val said out loud once, on a hill above a port, in the third year of a place they do not talk about, and she does not say one word of it. She stands up and shakes the water off her hand. Cold, she says. It is snow, says Val. That is all any of this is. It is snow that has made a decision. The parting comes at the Little Sandy on the twenty-fourth of August, because that is where a returning party is 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 does not, and Maud has no intention of it. She has been shortening for two days. Kyra has watched her do it and 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 has been doing the same thing in towns since 1608. The evening before, the company gives her a supper. It is not a good idea and Pryce knows it is not a good idea and does it anyway because the company wanted to. There are speeches. Sims, who said in July that the camps on the creek were not their affair, stands up and says several sentences about the noble qualities of the race, and about how she has been a credit — and Kyra sits with a plate on her knee and watches a woman of thirty receive it with her face absolutely still. Afterward Maud comes over to their wagon and sits down on the ground and says: he is not a bad man. Kyra sets 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 says 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 has been quiet all evening, says: what would you have said, if you could have said anything? Maud thinks about it. I would have said that the grass is finished. 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 picks up a piece of sage and turns 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 argues with any of it, because it is true, and because both of them have 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. Pryce knows. Pryce was here in forty-six. She drops 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 comes to get her mule, and the three of them walk it out to where the returning party is making up their string, a quarter mile from the corral, and the last hundred yards of that walk is the only time in six weeks that none of them says anything. At the edge of the camp she stops and turns round. Sarah, she says, to Kyra. Martha, to Val. Those are not your names. Kyra's stomach goes over. No, she says. I have known since the second week. You answer to them a half second late. Maud takes 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 cannot get anything out at all. Val can. Val says thank you, and then, after a moment, in a voice Kyra has heard perhaps forty times in two hundred and forty-three years: we are not sisters, either. Maud nods slightly, as though a small account has been settled. No, she says. You are not. And that is the whole of it. She does not ask what they are instead and there is no expression on her face that requires an answer, and Kyra stands in the sage at eight in the morning and understands that they have been handed, by a woman who owes them nothing, the single most restful ninety seconds either of them has had on this planet since a hut. Then Maud says: Kȟáŋtawiŋ. She says it once, at the speed she would have said it to her own people, and does not repeat it or slow it down. It is plum. 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 looks 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 says it back to her, carefully, and gets it about three-quarters right. The sun is barely up and coming in flat along the sage, and it has got into the loose of her own hair where it came out of the plait overnight, so that she can see the copper of it at the edge of her own vision while she is concentrating on a word. Maud corrects her once, and Kyra gets it closer, and Maud says that is good enough and that her own father said it worse than that for twenty years. Val says it too. Val gets it right, because Val has been listening to her say it to other people for six weeks and has been storing it, which Kyra knows and Maud plainly guesses, because she gives Val a look that is almost amused. Of course you did, she says. The last thing is the marks, and it is quick, and it is at the mule's shoulder with the men shouting about a pack fifty yards away. Has it held? Ten days, Kyra says. The scab's come off mine. And? It's there. Then it will hold. The first ten days is the whole of it. Kȟáŋtawiŋ gets a hand on the mule's mane and goes 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 steps forward and puts a hand on the mule's neck. If you are ever — and stops, and starts again, which she does 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 looks down at Val for a second longer. I will not be in that country. No. But I will know that the offer was made. She turns the mule. Then she says, over her shoulder, without any particular emphasis, in exactly the tone she has 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 rides over to the pack string and does not look back, and inside ten minutes the whole party is strung out and going east along the Little Sandy in the flat morning light. Kyra stands there and watches until she cannot tell which one she is. Val is beside her, and does not say anything for a long moment, and then says, in a voice that is almost entirely steady and not quite: two hundred and forty-three years. I know. Val has not moved from where she stands. Nobody has ever said that to us. Not once. Not in any language. I know, Val, Kyra says. The dust of the pack string goes up and thins out and stops being a thing you can see, and behind them the corral is coming apart and Pryce is shouting about the second wagon, and the Sweetwater is five miles behind and the Green is two days in front — and the two of them stand in the sage for as long as they can reasonably be seen to be standing there, and then go back and yoke their oxen.

They come down the Barlow Road in the last week of October with the mountain behind them and the rain starting, and the Nemaha Company stops being a thing in the world over the course of about four days. That is what nobody has told them: Val has been braced for an arrival and there is no arrival. There is 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 begin to leave — the Bells go south on the second morning because a cousin has written; the Rook brothers sell their cattle in two hours at a price that makes Kyra laugh out loud and are gone before dark; Sims leaves without saying goodbye to anybody, which surprises no one. Pryce goes round every wagon and shakes every hand. He gets to theirs in the rain with his hat in his hand and says that they were the two best hands he had in the column, that he has told four men so, and that if either of them is ever in the Tualatin country they are to ask for him and not stand on ceremony. Then he puts his hat on and walks off up the line and does it again at the next wagon. Val stands in the mud and watches him go and has a feeling she cannot immediately file. You'll not see him again. No. That's the one you'll mind. It is already the one I mind, and he has been gone four minutes. Rachel Vance and Nan go to a widowed brother-in-law near Salem, and do not want to, and have no choice about it, and Rachel says so out loud to Kyra while Nan is loading the last of the crockery. Eli Frame goes north with the Bells' hired man to look at the country round the falls, and he is nineteen and has buried a wife in July and does not know yet that he is going to be all right — and Val has watched him eat a great deal at supper for eleven consecutive nights and has formed a view. The Deems take a room in Oregon City: Horace has a letter to a man in the milling business and means to present it, and Sophia is going to teach eleven children in a front parlor within a month and be entirely happy, and Val, who has put her hands on most of the bodies in that column, thinks the Deems have come through the best of anybody because they lost a walnut press and nothing else. And on the third of November the last wagon goes off the meadow and leaves theirs standing in it, and the rain comes down, and the two of them sit under the cover with the tailgate down and look out at Oregon. Kyra puts her boots up on the tailgate. Well. Yes. Say something about it. It is green in November, 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 comes into her hands on the eighteenth of November, in a newspaper, in a room above a store in Oregon City, and she reads it the way she read Polk's message outside a post office in Missouri two years before, which is standing up and twice. Congress passed it on the twenty-seventh of September; the news has come round the Horn and up the coast and has been in the Territory about ten days, and half the men in the valley already know the numbers better than they know scripture. It is simple enough: a white settler over eighteen who is a citizen, or has declared he means to become one, and who is in the Territory before the first of December, can have three hundred and twenty acres for four years' residence and cultivation — and if he is married, six hundred and forty, and this is the part everyone talks about and the part that is 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 halve. Everything has to be surveyed and notified and proved up. Val reads it four times and then sits down on the end of the bed with the paper on her knees. Kyra comes in with her hair dripping and stands in the doorway — out in it since seven, the whole weight of her hair brought down out of its pins, dark as a wet roof and going to copper only where the lamp gets under it, rain standing on her forearms. Val does not look up from the paper. Say it. There is nothing wrong with it. 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 Val has lived in. Somebody argued for that and got it, and I would like to shake his hand. Kyra pushes the wet hair back off her face. And. And there is no shape in it for us. She puts 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 sits 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. Her hands are flat on her knees. And that is the part that decides it. Not the acres. Kyra thinks 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. She looks 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 is quiet for a second. You already know we're doing it. I have known since the meadow, Val says. They take a room for the winter above a saddler's on the Oregon City road, which Kyra says is the third saddler in a hundred and forty years and asks whether Val is doing it on purpose. Val doctors — there is no shortage of that; the valley has four thousand people in it who have all arrived in the last seven years and there are three men calling themselves physicians within twenty miles, two of whom are, and Val keeps clear of them and takes what they do not want, which is the women and the children and the poor and the ones who cannot pay. Kyra takes work with a man named Tolliver who runs pack strings up to the mines in the south, and is worth more to him in a week than his own judgment has been in a year, and gets paid about a third of what she is worth, and says that is normal and she will fix it by spring. And in the evenings, with the rain going on the roof in a way it does not stop doing from November to April, they look at the map. It is a bad map; everybody's map is bad. What it shows clearly enough is the valley — the Willamette going north between the hills, 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 walked here first. What it does not show is the country west. Nobody's marked any of it, Kyra says, 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 moves 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 puts 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 looks 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 folds the map. In the spring. Kyra gets up and puts another stick on. In the spring. She says it lightly and goes to see to the fire, and Val sits with the folded map under her hand and keeps back the part that has been sitting in her since the third reading of a newspaper in a room above a store: that a deed does not expire. A deed is a name in a book in a courthouse, and the name will have to go on being answered to by somebody, in that county, for as long as the ground is theirs — which means that the rule she made on a road out of Boston in 1725, the one that says nothing you cannot walk away from inside an hour, is about to be broken by her own hand and with her eyes open. She has run it four times. It comes out the same each time, which is that there is no other way to have a place in this country that does not involve a man — and that Kyra stood in the sage at the Little Sandy in August and was told by a woman on a mule that there was nothing wrong with them, and had not been able to speak. Val turns the map over and puts it in the box with the notebook.

They go in on the fourteenth of April with two horses, a mule Kyra has got off Tolliver at a price he regrets, and nine days of food. The first two days are plain enough: west out of the Tualatin plains on a track that is a track because people have ridden it, past the last two claims with fences on them, and then past a cabin with a man outside it who says he has been there since forty-seven and asks them where they think they are going. West. There's nothing west. That's what we heard, Kyra allows. He looks at the mule and the packs and the two of them and says 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 is right and the map is wrong and everything anybody has told them is wrong in the same direction, which is that they have all been thinking about distance and the country is not about distance. It is about the fact that you cannot see. Kyra has crossed a plain that took nine weeks and never once felt shut in; four hours into the Coast Range she is 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 closes in behind the horses, and under that a floor of fallen timber six feet through that you do not climb over, you go around — and the going around costs you a quarter mile at a time. There is no horizon. There is a green half-light and a great deal of water in the air that is not rain, and moss hanging off everything in sheets, and a smell of cedar and rot that she likes immediately and could not have defended. On the third day they make four miles. On the fourth they come 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 can see something, and what they can see is ridge after ridge going west, dark green and blue and paler blue, and nothing in any of it: no smoke, no cut, nothing. Val stands on the burn with her hand up against the light and does not say anything for about a minute and a half. Well? I am recalculating a number I have been carrying since November. Which one? Eight days to a market. She puts 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 sits down on a log. You want to turn round. I did not say that. You've said four things since Tuesday and three of them were arithmetic. Yes. Val comes and sits down on the log beside her, which takes her some effort in the huckleberry and does 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 find the lake on the sixth day and they find it by ear. Kyra has been following water all morning — a creek running east that has to be coming from somewhere — and about noon the ground goes flat and the timber opens and the noise of the creek stops, and there it is 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 comes in. It is absolutely silent except for the birds. Val comes up beside her at the edge of the trees and stops, and the light off the water gets at her from below the way it does at the edge of a lake, so that the pale of her hair goes to nothing at all at the ends and her whole face is lit from underneath like a woman holding a candle. They stand at the edge of it for a long time. Then Kyra takes her boots off and walks into it up to the knees and stands there with her skirt bunched in her fists. Cold? Val says from the bank. Snow that's made a decision. There are nine things wrong with it, and Val counts them out that evening and Kyra lets her, because it is how she loves a place and because every one of them is true. There is no bottom land worth plowing; the flat is bench and it is thin. There is no road and will not be one. There is no mill within forty miles, so the timber standing around them in quantities that would have made a Maribor merchant faint is worth precisely nothing. It rains from October to May. It is two days' hard travel to the nearest cabin and four to the nearest store. And there is no survey — the government's men have not been within twenty miles of this water and will not be for years — which means there is nothing here to buy and nobody to buy it from and no deed to be had at any price. And there is the tenth thing, which is not wrong with it, and which Val says last and quietly. There is no one here. Except that there had been. Kyra finds it on the second morning, along the north end where the marsh comes 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 stands looking at them until Val comes and stands beside her. House pits, Val says. Yes. Not old. Forty years. Perhaps less. Val crouches and puts her hand flat in the hollow of one of them and does not disturb anything. There will be a weir in that creek if you look, or the stakes of one. There is. They find it in the afternoon, a line of rotted stubs across the creek mouth, and Kyra stands on the bank and looks at it and feels the last eleven months rearrange itself behind her eyes. Because she knows what happened here. Everybody in the Territory knows and almost nobody says it: that the fevers came up this river system in the thirties — ahead of the wagons, ahead of the Act, ahead of everything — and went through the villages on the lower river and took most of them inside three years. The valley the Nemaha Company came down into in October, which four thousand Americans are 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. 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 says. 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 stands with her arms folded. So what do we do? We do not tell ourselves a story about it. Val stands 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 nods 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. 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 does not have a better one either. They build fifty yards south. The decision itself takes four minutes and happens on the eighth evening, on the grass at the eastern shore, with the light going and the water flat as tin. Val lays it out, which is what Val does. 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 knows one single thing. Everything for: nobody will ever come and look at them; the ground cannot be claimed by anyone else because no one wants it; they can work when they like and be seen when they choose; and it is two days' ride from a valley that is filling up with people who will all, within forty years, be dead. Then she stops talking and looks at the water. And? And I am not going to decide it. Kyra turns her head. You did this at Dymná, she says. 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 has 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 looks out at the lake. She has known since Thursday — 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 is birds and the only two people are the two of them. Here, she says. Here, says Val, and puts her hand over on the grass and leaves it palm-up, and Kyra puts hers in it, out in the open, in the last of the light, where nobody at all can see.

The first house is twelve feet by fourteen and they live in it for three years and Val is fonder of it than of anything she has owned since Trieste. They build it out of cedar because cedar is what falls down around them and because it splits, and they build it badly — and then in fifty-four they build a second one forty feet away that is better in every respect and has two rooms and a stone chimney and a floor, and Kyra stands in the yard and cries about the first one being pulled down, for about ninety seconds, furiously. It's a shed. 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, 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 is not romantic and Val keeps a page on it because she keeps a page on everything. They clear four acres and it takes two summers. They have a cow by fifty-three and nine head by fifty-eight. They put in oats and a garden and lose the garden twice to elk before Kyra builds a fence that an elk respects. They learn that a Coast Range winter is not cold — it is wet, continuously, from October until you stop believing in April — and that the only thing that matters in a house in that country is whether you can get anything dry, and the second house has a hearth built for exactly that. And they work out, over about four years, what they are going to be to the people around them, because the people around them are coming. That had been the flaw in the plan and Val had known it on the burn. Nobody wants this country in fifty-one; by fifty-five there are two families on the creek below them and a man alone on the ridge north; and by fifty-nine there are fourteen households inside a day's ride and somebody is talking about a road. So: Miss Miller doctors, and Miss Miller's sister knows stock and weather, and the two of them live up at the lake and keep themselves to themselves and are civil and are not intimate with anybody — and within six years they are a fixed feature of that country in the way a rock is a fixed feature. They are asked about husbands perhaps forty times in that decade. The sister story does what it has done since Maribor. Nobody in the Nehalem country ever asks them a second time, because the country is full of people who have left something behind and have 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 comes in fifty-eight and Val goes down to the land office at Oregon City to get it, and is gone nine days, and comes back with a folded paper and an expression Kyra reads from forty yards away. They have held the ground for seven years with nothing. The survey finally came through the year before — two men with a chain and a compass who walked out of the timber in August of fifty-seven, took a meal, told them the township and range numbers, and walked off west — and once the lines exist the ground can be bought, and once it can be bought it can also be bought by somebody else. So Val buys 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 puts it on the table that evening and the two of them look at it. Eleven, Val says. 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. Her hands are 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 sits 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. She looks 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 comes in fifty-nine, in February, and they hear about it in March. Val reads the constitution in a borrowed newspaper over two evenings and is mostly favorably impressed — and then gets to the clause the voters 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 reads it twice and puts the paper down and goes outside and splits wood for an hour and a half. Kyra comes out and sits on the block and waits until she stops. I have been in four countries that burned people, Val says 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 sets 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 comes out in the summer of sixty and sits on their porch with a printed schedule and a pen and asks eleven questions, and Val answers 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 writes down as nurse without consulting her — 800, 200, Pennsylvania. Miller, Sarah, 29, F, W, farmer, Pennsylvania. He thanks them for the water and goes on to the Wilmots. Val sits on the step afterward for some time. Thirty-one, Kyra says. 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. Her hands hang 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. She looks 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 says, and that is the first time in four hundred years that the paper has been the easy half. The twenty-fourth peak comes in December of sixty, and it is the first one in their lives that arrives in a house that is theirs — with a door they have hung themselves and a bar they have cut, and no landlord under the floor and no company on the other side of a wall and nobody within four miles. Kyra gets the half-second on the stairs. They have three days of it. Afterward, on the fourth morning, Val lies looking at the boards of their own ceiling and does an accounting she has been avoiding for two hundred and fifty years, which is that the thing has happened twenty-four times and that twenty-three of those were got through in somebody else's building. It was not better, she says. No. I thought it might be better, in a house. It was not better. It was quieter, Kyra says. You could shout. Val turns her head on the pillow and looks at her — at the dark chestnut of her hair spread out over the bolster with the copper in it where the window gets at it, and at the line of the jaw that has always been firmer than her own, and at the one gray thread that is not gray and never has been, that is only the light, and that Val has gone at four times over the years with a candle like a fool — and thinks, not for the first time, that four hundred years is a perfectly ridiculous span for a species to have and that she still has not got used to being looked after by somebody. The men come in sixty-one, three weeks apart, which Val maintains afterward was a coincidence and which Kyra never once believes. Kyra's is a farrier at Forest Grove called Asa Pruitt, who has shod for her twice, and who in April enlists with the mounted volunteers the state is raising, and who has the useful quality of being entirely uninterested in why a woman knows what the weather will do on Thursday — he simply believes her and gets on with it. Kyra comes back from the Grove at the end of the month, puts her hat on the table, and says: 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. 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 laughs for about a minute. Val's is a millwright called Elias Mott who came up from Missouri in fifty-six and is putting in a sash mill on the Nehalem, and who has a family still in Missouri he does not talk about and opinions about the coming trouble that he has the sense not to say out loud in Oregon and that everybody in the county has assigned him anyway. By the summer of sixty-one he is a copperhead as far as the Grove is concerned, on the strength of not saying anything. Val tells Kyra in the second week of May, in the evening, at the table, in the flattest available sentence, because that is the pact and because she has been managing it badly for four days. Kyra tips 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 says, 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 thinks about it. How long? she asks. Not long. It never is. That's not what I asked. I asked how long. Val looks at the fire for a moment. It will not be long, she says, 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 remarks on the curve. It does not occur to either of them that there is one.

The war arrives in the Nehalem country the way weather arrives on a coast, which is to say late, sideways, and already half spent. The wire comes through to Portland in the autumn of sixty-one, and after that the news is four days old instead of six weeks, and the effect of that on a country where the mail still comes out from the Grove on a man's horse when the man feels like it is a peculiar kind of whiplash: a store at a crossroads will have Shiloh in it on a Tuesday, in a paper somebody has carried out wrapped round a wheel hub, and the men will stand at the counter and read the casualty columns out loud for the names of counties in Ohio and Missouri and Indiana where they have people, and then go back out and go on splitting shakes. Kyra watches it happen in a dozen small ways and forms her own view early, which is that Oregon is doing the thing she has watched people do in every province of Europe: having a very great deal of opinion about a fight it is not in. Nobody in that country is going to be conscripted; nobody's fields are going to be ridden over. What they have instead is a mounted regiment of their own, raised to hold the posts the regular army emptied when it went east, which spends the whole of the war chasing stock thieves, escorting emigrants and freezing in eastern Oregon. It is not nothing. It is not Antietam either, and every man in the ranks of it knows the difference and minds. Asa Pruitt goes into it in the winter of sixty-one and is posted to The Dalles. He writes to her four times in two years, which for a farrier is a considerable undertaking, and comes down twice. The second time is August of sixty-two, and he has four days, and on the second of them he finds the mark. Kyra has known it would happen eventually and has been entirely unbothered about it, and what she has not predicted is how funny it is going to be. That's ink. It is. Under the skin. That's — he props himself up on an elbow, wholly diverted, a man who has spent two years around soldiers and has opinions about tattooing as a class of activity. Only sailors have those. Kyra does not move. And me. How in the — he stops. 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, says 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 receives this as one of the great disclosures of his life. Your sister, he says. Well, quite. She reports the whole of it to Val at the table four days later, in order, with the pauses in the right places, and Val puts 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. 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 is 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 takes her hands down from her face. Sarah Miller is twenty-nine. 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. She puts 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 considers 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 shakes 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 says. Elias Mott lasts from the spring of sixty-two to the end of that year, and Kyra meets him exactly once: at the mill site on the Nehalem in June, where she has come down with Val on some business about a horse and he is up on the frame with a plumb bob, and he comes down and shakes her hand and says four sentences, three of them about the water and the fourth that he is glad to meet Miss Miller's sister at last. Then he goes back up the frame. Riding home: 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 ducks a branch. That's the thing you like. That is the thing I like, Val agrees, 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 are in the same room is the Fourth of July in sixty-three, in a barn on the Grove road that somebody has cleared for a subscription dance, with lanterns on the beams and a fiddle and two hundred people in from forty miles. Kyra sees Asa first because Asa is on furlough and has come looking for her, which is flattering and slightly alarming. Mott is over by the door, where he stands at every gathering in that county, being a man nobody talks to and who long ago stopped noticing. And Vicksburg has fallen on the Fourth and the news is four days out and the barn does not have it yet — but it has Gettysburg, in a two-day-old paper, and a man has read it out on a box before the fiddling started. So the room is in a particular state. Kyra watches 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 with southern connections drifting without appearing to drift toward the wall by the door, and the women in the middle keeping everything from happening. She looks round for Val. Val is standing by the trestle with a cup of something in her hand and her face doing absolutely nothing at all, and she is looking at the door — and Kyra realizes in the same instant that Val has been looking at the door for some time, and that Val saw the whole of this arrive about four seconds before she did. They get to each other by the corner post. Both of them, Kyra says. Both of them. In a barn. In a barn, on the Fourth of July, on the day after that paper. Val takes a swallow of whatever it is and does 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 gets her face straight with an effort she can feel. It's funny, she says. It is. It's very funny. We've done this on two continents. Trieste, Val says. 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, and you enjoyed every bit of it, and you told me so. And then it stops being funny, the way it always does, and it stops being funny for Kyra about half a second before it stops for Val, which is usual. Because the barn is full of people who are going to be dead inside sixty years, taking sides in a thing that will be settled inside two, and one of those sides is going to win — and neither the man by the wall nor the men across the floor have the faintest idea that the two women at the trestle watched the Thirty Years' War from a house in Styria and formed no opinion about it that either of them ever said out loud. We don't get to have a side, Kyra says. 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 sets 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 comes across the floor. Kyra dances with him, twice, in front of two hundred people, and enjoys it — and afterward sees Val standing by the trestle exactly where she 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, thinks: there is one person in this barn who knows what I look like in the dark, and she is standing by the cake. They are both gone by Christmas. Mott leaves the county in October: the mill is finished and there is talk about a second one at Scappoose, and he tells Val two weeks before he goes and does not make anything of it, and what he actually says at the door is that he has been treated fairly by exactly one person in four years and he is aware of it. I did not treat you fairly, Val says. 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 thinks about that. That's the most anybody's said to me in this county, he says, and puts his hat on, and rides down to the Nehalem, and Val stands in the door until he is out of the trees. Asa Pruitt's company goes east of the mountains in November and he writes twice from there, once in the winter and once in the spring, and the second letter says that he has met a widow at Walla Walla and that he hopes Miss Miller will not think badly of him. He's twenty-nine, Kyra says, 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 folds it. Two years, Val. Nearly two. And yours was — what, seven months? Seven months and a week, Val says, 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 looks at her across the table for a moment. All right. Not tonight. And she puts the letter in the box with the notebook and the deed, and neither of them says anything more about it for fifty years.

Val works it in March of sixty-three, at the table, in the morning, and does not mention it to anybody for six months. It is not a difficult sum: she has been carrying the two ends of it since a hill above Trieste in the third year there, when she stood at the wall with her arms folded against the cold and said a thing she had no information for, and then said so, and Kyra told her she was allowed to. A hundred and eighty years. It comes out at this year. She looks at the figure for a while and then closes the notebook and goes out and digs in the garden, because she has learned over about four centuries that there are certain arithmetics you do not want to be sitting still with. She raises it in September. I want to go to the sea. Kyra looks 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 has 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 leaves the churn where it is and comes and stands in front of her with her sleeves rolled, and gets hold of the front of Val's dress in one fist, gently, and shakes her about half an inch. Say the actual sentence. It is a hundred and eighty years. This year. The one I said on the wall. Kyra lets 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 says, 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 stands there. I haven't forgotten one word of it, she says. They go down in the third week of October, and the country changes under them twice. The first change is 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 is the smell, which arrives about four miles before anything else does, and which Val gets first and does not say anything about, and then Kyra gets it and pulls up the horse. Salt. Wet salt and rot and kelp, coming up the river on the tide. They come out at the bay in the afternoon of the second day, and leave the horses, and walk out over the grass and the low dunes and the bent grass, and stop. Kyra does not say anything for a long time. Val stands beside her and lets her have it. It is flat and gray-green and enormous and goes to the edge of the world, and it makes a noise the Adriatic never made and the Atlantic off New York did not make either — a long unhurried collapse every eleven seconds with a mile of beach to do it on. There is no shipping in it. There is 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 says eventually. Two hundred and fifty-six. That's how long we've been on this planet without standing in front of that. Yes. Kyra puts her hands on top of her head and laughs at it, at the ocean, out loud, with nobody inside four miles, and the wind takes her hair out sideways — dark chestnut and going to copper at the ends where the low sun gets into it, and the whole of it lifting and flying east. Val, watching her do it, is aware of arriving at something she does not have a word for in either language and stopped looking for one for in 1705. They wait for dark on the dry sand above the tide line with a driftwood fire, and it comes in clear, which Kyra 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 most people in the nineteenth century ever saw, and it is not a thing that Val, who has been under skies on two worlds, is ever able to be casual about. It comes up in the east after nine. She finds it the way she has found it every clear autumn for two hundred and fifty-six years, which is 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 says. I know. Say it. Val sits 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 looks at the place she was born. It is somewhere else in the sky. 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 leans 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 puts 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 sit there for a long while. And at some point Val becomes aware that she is doing the thing she promised herself in 1789 she would stop doing — building, without permission and in silence, out of a smudge and a bearing and a speed and a number she does not trust — and that for once she is not going to stop, because it is the eighteenth of October in a year she has been walking toward since Trieste, and because the only person in the universe who could check her working is asleep against her shoulder. The other thing comes the next winter, in a journal, and she nearly misses it. She has been taking periodicals since fifty-nine; they come out from Portland to the Grove and sit there until somebody remembers, and arrive at the lake in bundles four to seven months old, and Val reads every one of them front to back including the agricultural notices, because that is how you keep a shape of a world when you live in timber. It is a notice of perhaps four sentences, reprinted from an English journal, in a number that reaches her in the second week of December: an observer named Huggins has put a prism on a telescope and turned it on the nebulae, and some of them, he reports, give a spectrum of a few bright lines only, which is the signature of a luminous gas — and others give a continuous band crossed by dark lines, like the sun. Val reads it standing up in the doorway with her coat still on. Then she sits down on the step. Kyra finds her there some time later with the journal open on her knees and her hands perfectly still on top of it, and says what. Fraunhofer, Val says. 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. Her voice is not quite level and she makes 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. She turns the journal round, uselessly, because there is 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 sits 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. She puts 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 gets hold of her hand. Say this part, then. Out loud. In our own yard, with nobody within four miles. And Val sits on the step of a house she has built in a country nobody wanted, sixty-four years into the nineteenth century of a planet she has been marooned on since she was seventy-seven years old, and says it out loud for the first time since a mountain. There is going to be a way home. 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 does not answer for a moment. Then she says: say it again next year — and does not let go of her hand.

The two ends of the railroad meet in Utah in May of sixty-nine and the news comes to the lake in a newspaper Kyra carries up from the Grove in her saddlebag, and she reads it out loud at the table while Val is cutting bread. Val stops cutting bread. Seven days, she says. That's what it says. New York to San Francisco. Seven days. She puts the knife down. We did it in five months and four of those days were spent getting one wagon out of the Snake. They do not say anything else about it for two years, and both of them think about it every week. Val raises it in the spring of seventy-one, at the table, in the flat voice she uses for things she has already decided and has been carrying around for a season. The hull. I want to look at it. Kyra puts 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. Her hands are 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 sits with that for a moment. There are two reasons in the room and both of them know both of them: Val's is concealment and is entirely genuine and she would have gone for it alone; Kyra's is a locker with a child's drawing in it, three books, and a set of plates, which she last stood in front of in the autumn of 1700 and has thought about at least once a month for a hundred and seventy-one years. Neither of them says the second one. They did not say it in 1700 either. When? We leave in August, and we are back before the middle of December. That's tight. It is tight, and it is what I want. Kyra looks at her across the table. Val is doing the thing where she is perfectly still and perfectly pleasant and entirely closed, which she does in front of strangers about four times a day and in front of Kyra perhaps twice a decade — and which means there is a third reason and that Kyra is not going to be told it. Kyra does the arithmetic herself that evening, in her head, on the porch, and gets it inside a minute, because she has been keeping the same column in her own way for two hundred and sixty-four years and does not need a notebook for it. Seventy-one is a peak year. She says nothing about it at all. She goes in and tells Val that August is fine. They tell the Ellis family there is a legacy in the east — an uncle's estate in Pennsylvania, tangled, with a lawyer and two cousins in it — which is a story with no end to it and which nobody will ask about twice. Ellis's eldest takes the stock for the four months and will have the use of them, and the orchard does not need anybody, and the house is shut up on the eleventh of August. Kyra stands in the yard with the door shut behind her and finds that she minds a great deal more than she expected. Twenty years. Twenty years and four months, Val corrects. That's longer than Maribor. It is two years longer than Maribor, Val says, 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 go down the Columbia to Portland and up to Kalama and across, and take the cars from Sacramento, and Kyra does not sleep much for seven days. She has expected the speed to be the thing, and it is not the thing: twenty-two miles an hour is remarkable for about six hours and then it is simply what the world does 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 — have already absorbed it entirely and spend most of the daylight complaining about the food. What she has not expected is the ground. Because the line runs up the Platte. It comes on her on the fourth morning east of the mountains, when she wakes in a jolting car with her cheek against the glass and looks out and knows, instantly and in her body, exactly where she is: 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 sits up with her heart going. Val is already awake beside her with her hands in her lap. How long have you been looking at it? Since about four, Val says. They go along it all day at twenty-two miles an hour. Kyra keeps her face at the window and does not talk. Somewhere out there on the south side is a stretch of road where they made eight miles by noon and seven more after, and a place where Val 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 went in on a Thursday — and none of it is findable and all of it is out there. Twice she sees graves from the train: boards leaning, a long way off, nobody's. At Julesburg a man across the aisle tells 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 says. Oh — twenty year. Twenty-five. He waves his hand. Before my time. She thanks him and looks back out of the window. She says 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. Her hands are 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 is a long pause with the wheels going under them. I do not stand it well, Val says 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 she cannot get round, and has 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. It is under us. Val's hand comes through the curtain gap and finds 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 holds on to her hand. That's what we're for, then. That is increasingly what we are for, Val admits. They come into New York on the twelfth day and do not stay one hour longer than they have to, because Val looks at it for about ten minutes — at the cars and the gaslight and the six-story fronts and the traffic on Broadway — and says that she helped set type on a street four blocks from here in 1712 and that she would rather not. The steamer is nine days to Bremen; the German railways get them to Vienna and then east; and they come up the Poprad valley on the eighteenth of September in a second-class carriage with three farmers and a priest, and Kyra sits with her face at that window too. The mountains come up on the left the way they came up in 1607, which is 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 has been dropped. She last saw them from below in 1700 and from above in 1608. There, she says. Val does not answer for a moment. When Kyra looks over, Val has her hand flat on the glass, which is not a thing Val does, and her face is entirely still, and there is nothing whatever in it that anybody in that carriage could have read. But the pale of her hair has come loose at the temple where she has been leaning against the window for an hour, and Kyra has been reading that face for two hundred and sixty-four years and can see the whole of it. Not far now, Kyra says. No, Val says. Not far now.

The valley has a hotel in it. Not a large one and not a new one — there has been a bath-house down there since before they left, and somebody has been selling the water to invalids since the seventeen nineties — but there are now two coaches a day up from the station, and a signboard, and a man in the village who hires himself out with a rope and a pair of hobnailed boots to gentlemen who want to be taken up to a saddle and shown the view. Val stands in the street of a place she walked out of in 1608 and watches 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 says. There's a tariff, Kyra says. 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 go up at four the next morning, in the dark, to avoid exactly that, and the way up goes past the end of Dymná, and Kyra stops at the churchyard wall for as long as it takes to count to twenty. They do not go in; there is no point and they both know it, because the churchyard has been reordered twice since 1700 and the corner where a man called Frederick was put is under a path now, and the stone that was leaning there when Val said her whole name to it in the dark of a night a hundred and seventy-one years before is not anywhere. He'd be pleased about the railway, Kyra says 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 agrees, because you would not sit still. And by the time the sun gets on to the high rock they are above the last of the path. The country itself has not changed in two hundred and sixty-four years and Val finds she cannot think about that in any useful way at all. The stream crossed on two stones. The place where the trees give out. The gap where you can see the whole valley at once and have to stop whether you want to or not — she stops, exactly as she stopped in the spring of 1607 with a leg that had not yet mended, and finds that her body has been carrying the shape of that view for two and a half centuries without being asked to. They go up past the high pasture with the hut on it. There is smoke coming out of it. Somebody's up, Kyra says. Somebody has been up every summer for two hundred and sixty-four years. It is a good pasture. Val keeps walking. Tomorrow. When they take the stock down. Not today. Kyra looks back at it twice and does not argue. The hull is where it was — which in eighty-two years Val has never once been sure of, and has told herself she was sure of, and has known she was lying. You cannot see it; you cannot see it from four feet away. What you can see is a slope of gray scree under the north face with a long low swell in it that reads as a rock shoulder with turf grown over, and a crack running down it that is a crack in the same way that a seam in a coat is a tear. Val puts both hands flat on it and stands still. It knows her. That is not a sentence she would say out loud to anybody living, and it is the only accurate description she has ever found: it goes 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 goes 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 is a hundred and ten feet of the second section of the Sorren lying in the scree with its back broken in two places. Kyra lets out a breath. Eighty-two years, she says. 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 has her hand still flat against it. And it is warmer than it was in eighty-nine. Is that good? I have no idea. And then, plainly: 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 is the same and is not. The second section was built to hold two people for a season and came down with nineteen in it, and the back of it is crushed to about half its height and has been since the day they came down, and the front of it is intact and dry and has a smell in it — clean, faintly resinous, entirely unlike anything on this planet — that hits Val in the chest every single time and did so in 1700 and in 1789 and does so now. They go through it slowly. Kyra goes to the stowage bay first, as she always does, and Val lets her go alone, as she always does. She is in there some time. Val stands in the passage with her hand against the wall and does not listen and does not go in, and when Kyra comes out her face is wet and perfectly composed and she says it's fine. It's all fine. The drawing's fine — and Val says good, and that is how it goes, as it has gone twice before. Then they go and look at the lockers. There are eight. Eight were shut in the winter of 1607 and one was opened in the autumn of that first year, and seven have been shut ever since, and Val has put her hand on each of them on each of her three visits and has opened none. She stands in front of them for about a quarter of an hour. You've been wanting to since seventeen hundred, Kyra says 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. Her hand is 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 comes and stands beside her. Which one? This one, Val says, and opens it. It makes a sound. That is the thing about the ship and it never stops being the thing: it does not hiss or clang or do anything a machine does. The locker comes open with a small wooden knock, like a cupboard door in a kitchen, and the sound goes down the passage and comes back — and Val stands in a broken hull on a mountain in Hungary in 1871 and has to put her hand on the wall. It is 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 ate every third day for the whole of her adult life and has not tasted since the fourth month of the year they came down. They eat 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 can speak for the first while. It is not good food, which is the thing Val has not braced for: it was never good food — flat, faintly sweet, designed by a committee to be adequate for a person working, and on Sethal she complained about it for fifty years and Kyra complained about it more. And it is the first thing either of them has put in her mouth since 1607 that was not grown out of the soil of this planet. Kyra gets about four mouthfuls in before she has to stop and put the heels of her hands against her eyes. The wind comes up the scree and takes Kyra's hair across her face, dark chestnut with the copper in it where the late sun gets at the loose of it, and she does not push it back. Val sits beside her and does not touch her, because Kyra does not want to be touched in the first minute of a thing and has not since about 1650 — and waits, and when the hands come down she puts the back of her own hand against Kyra's cheek for a second. It's horrible, Kyra says. It is horrible. It's exactly as horrible as it was. It is precisely, identically, unimprovably as horrible as it was, Val says, and I have thought about it four times a year for two hundred and sixty-four years. They eat two more between them and put the rest back, and Val shuts the locker. Six. The slope is the next morning and it is half a mile east and four hundred feet up, and neither of them has been on it since the spring of 1608. There is nothing there. That is correct and it is what they decided in 1608 and again in 1700, and Val has been over the reasoning so many times that it has 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 stand on it for a while. The scree has settled. The grass has got into the lower part of it and there is a great deal of moss. Val has the notebook in her coat — the seventeen names are 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 has copied them forward twice into new books when the old ones filled, and she has never once been able to look at the list without reading all of it. She does not take the notebook out. Say it, Kyra says. 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 stands 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 lets 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 puts her arm through Val's, out in the open, above the treeline, where there is nobody within three miles. Then we'll come back and you can not do it again, she says. They go down before the light goes, past the tarn and the rotten snow and the place where the trees start, and the smoke is still going up from the hut on the high pasture, and it is the twenty-ninth of September.

They go up on the second of October, after the stock has gone down, and the door is shut with a stone against it and no lock, because there has never been a lock on that door and there is no reason for one three thousand feet above a valley. Val moves the stone with her foot and stands there with her hand on the latch for a moment. Go on, Kyra says. She goes on. The hut has been rebuilt at least twice, which she knows inside four seconds: the walls are stone to shoulder height now where they were stone to the knee, the roof is a different pitch and has shakes on it instead of turf, and the door frame is new within thirty years and was cut by somebody who knew what he was doing. It is also, unmistakably and in every particular, the same building. The hearth is in the same corner, because the hearth was in the right corner. The bench is along the same wall, because that is the wall out of the draught. The window hole is in the same place and still has no glass in it and still has the same piece of oiled hide on a peg beside it — or a piece like it, the fortieth piece like it. Val stands in the doorway and does the circuit, in order, from the door round to the door, which is how she did 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, with 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 was 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 puts her thumb on the bright part. Kyra comes and stands behind her and does not say anything for a while. Then: same one. Same one. You're sure. It was made by somebody who was bad at it. Val turns 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 puts her forehead between Val's shoulder blades. They light the fire with somebody else's wood and mean to pay for it, and do, 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 start getting it wrong. The haircut was after the first snow. The haircut was before the first snow, Val says. 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 sits 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 opens her mouth and finds 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 was, then the sequence she has been carrying for two hundred and sixty-four years has a piece in the wrong place. She gets the notebook out. It is not the first notebook; it is the fourth, and the first entries in it are copies of copies, and she goes back through the copied pages by firelight for perhaps ten minutes with Kyra watching her, and then closes 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. She puts 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 is quiet. So there's us, she says. 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 stops. Starts 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 says. 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 starts laughing and then stops, and the stopping takes longer than the starting had. It is Val who moves 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 watches her do it and does not ask why, because she worked it out before Val's hands were on it. Four nights, Val says. 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. She sits 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 agrees. 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 comes and stands in front of her. The fire is behind her so her face is dark, and the light comes round the outside of her hair and makes a copper edge along the whole of it where it has come out of the plait, and she gets her hands into the front of Val's collar and stands there for a second not doing anything. Say the rest, she says. 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 has 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 gets down on her knees on the straw between Val's feet and puts 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 happens on that bench is theirs and belongs in no register. It is slow, because there is nothing in the world to be quick for, and it is quiet — not because anybody will hear, since there is nobody within four miles and the nearest of those is asleep, but because quiet is what the room has always been. It smells of new straw and pine smoke and wet wool, which is what it 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 stops being able to tell which one of them she is remembering. She says 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 has spent two hundred and sixty-four years being precise about everything, and that lying on that bench she lost the join entirely between the woman of seventy-seven who had not slept for two hours and the woman she is now — and that for about a quarter of an hour there was no difference between them at all and she had not wanted there to be. The light is up in her arms the whole time. She does not put it out and does not think about putting it out. And Kyra, who said the first true thing anybody had ever said to her about it on a mountain in this exact room, says there you are, and goes to sleep against her shoulder with one hand flat on her ribs. In the morning it is cold and clear and Val is awake before the light. She gets up and puts the bench back against the wall, and folds what they have used, and sets the straw straight, and stands for a while in the middle of the room in her shift with her arms wrapped round herself, looking at the hook. Then she kneels down at the hearth. The fire is out and the ash is fine and white and deep, the way pine ash goes, and she puts her finger into it and writes, in the Sethal she has not used for anything but counting since 1608, four words that nobody on this planet will ever be able to read and that will be gone the first time anybody in that hut lays a fire. She looks at them for a moment. Then she stands up and does not scuff them out. That is all of it. It takes perhaps ninety seconds and she does not tell Kyra she has done it — and Kyra, who wakes while she is still kneeling there and watches her from the straw with her eyes half shut and says nothing at all, does not tell her either, and neither of them mentions it for a hundred and forty years. They put the stone back against the door at eight in the morning and go down. At the gap in the trees where you can see the whole valley at once Val stops, because you have to. Nineteen days, Kyra says. Bremen on the fourteenth. Nineteen days. Val stands 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 says, and goes on down.

Home is on the ninth of December and the peak is on the twenty-eighth, and Kyra never once says out loud that she knew in March why August had been August. Val does not say it either. What she does, on the fourth morning afterward, is put a cup of tea down in front of Kyra and say you worked it out on the porch in the spring — and Kyra says inside a minute, and Val says I thought so, and that is the whole conversation, and it is entirely satisfactory to both of them. The fourteen years after that are the quietest either of them has had since Maribor, and Kyra finds — to her own considerable surprise, at three hundred and forty-one years old — that she is good at quiet. The country comes to them, which is the shape of it: in seventy-one the lake is two days from a cabin; by seventy-six there is a settlement down the Nehalem with a store in it and a post office and a name; and by eighty-two there is a road of a kind and men talking about getting timber out, and the talk about timber gets more serious every year because the men who understand what is standing in that country have begun to arrive. They do not fight any of it; there is no fighting it. What they do is the thing they did in Maribor and Trieste and Philadelphia, which is to become so thoroughly a feature of the place that nobody can see them: Miss Miller has been doctoring in that country since before there was a road; Miss Miller's sister has the best eye for stock between the lake and the Columbia and will not be argued with about weather; they have a good orchard; they keep to themselves and they come when they are sent for — and when a Vernonia man's wife has a bad birth in eighty-three it is Martha Miller who is got out of bed at two in the morning and Martha Miller who sits there until six. And every year, in a way that is slow enough to live with and fast enough to feel, the arithmetic gets worse. Kyra counts it herself in the spring of eighty-four, standing in the orchard: thirty-three years. They have been at that lake for thirty-three years. The Ellis boy who took their stock in seventy-one had been nineteen and is now thirty-two with four children, and has gray in his beard, and 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 laughed and said something about the water. The census man has 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 gave him the figures without a flicker and went inside afterward and stood at the window with her arms folded for a quarter of an hour, and 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 went home and did not mention it, and then mentioned it three days later, because of the pact. Ten years, Val says, when she has 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. She has been splitting kindling and she does 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 sits down on the block and looks at the pile of kindling. Ninety-four, then, she says. Approximately ninety-four. Then we've got till ninety-four. The star comes in the autumn of eighty-five, in a newspaper four days old, which Kyra brings up from the store in the rain on the second of September. Val reads it at the table with her coat still on. A new star has been seen in the great nebula in Andromeda: picked up at a place called Dorpat in the third week of August and by half the observatories in Europe since; small, and there, and nothing like it seen in that object before — and there is a great deal of speculation in the notice about what the nebulae are, which is a question, the writer observes, that has exercised philosophers for a century and a half. Kyra watches her read it twice. Then Val gets up and goes outside without her hat and stands in the rain in the yard. They look at it that night, because the weather breaks at eight, which Kyra said it would. They have the glass out on the grass — not the old one; the old one is eleven feet of very bad Dutch tube that Val bought off a man on the quay at Trieste in the last century and got some of the price back out of him afterward, and it is in its box in the house and has been in every house since, and she would no more have left it behind than her own hands. What is on the grass is a three-inch refractor she bought in Portland in seventy-eight, on which she spent more money than on any other object she has owned on this planet, and about which she was 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 comes up out of the east the way it has come up every autumn of their lives, and Kyra finds it first without the glass, in the corner of her eye, the way you always find it. Then Val puts the glass on it. She is a long time. It's there, she says at last, and her voice does something on the second word. Kyra takes the eyepiece. Val steps back from the tube to let her at it and stands with her arms folded in the cold, and there is 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 is there: inside the smudge, off the middle, a hard bright point that does not belong, sitting in the soft light like a nail driven into a cloud. Kyra has been looking at that object for two hundred and seventy-eight years; she knows its shape the way she knows the ridge line above the house. What is it? I do not know. Val. I am telling you the truth. I do not know. Her hands are 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 stops. Say it. For it to be visible here, 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 straightens up from the eyepiece. Is it near them? And there it is, out loud, in the middle of a field in Oregon. Val does not answer straight away. When she does, she does it in the flat voice, the one she uses for the things that have to be got through in order. The light left before there were people on this planet. 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. She puts her hand over her mouth for a second and takes 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 moves 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 takes hold of her. They stand in the wet grass for a long time with the telescope forgotten on its legs beside them, and Val does not cry, because she is not going to, and what she does instead is shake very slightly for about four minutes and then stop. Three hundred and seventeen, she says 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 says. And I'm not going to. It fades out over the winter. By February there is nothing in the smudge at all and the papers have stopped mentioning it, and the argument the notice raised — what the nebulae are — goes on exactly as it had before, unsettled, with learned men on both sides. Val watches it go and writes four lines about it in the notebook and does not speculate in them, which costs her something. And on the last clear night of that February, coming in from the barn, Kyra finds her standing in the yard with her head back and her hands in her pockets, looking at nothing at all, because there is nothing to look at now. Come in. 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. She does 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 says, and I am going to be standing here. Then she comes in, and puts the bar across the door, and does not mention it again for nine years.

The shakes on the north slope have come to the end of what can be done with them, and Val has known it for two winters and has been patching instead, which is not like her. They get 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 have the north side stripped to the rafters and a stack of new cedar in the yard riven out of a log Ellis's boy brought up in April. Kyra is 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 gets into the loose of it at the temple it goes the color of wet copper against the cedar. Val is on the ladder handing shakes up, which is the arrangement they arrived at some years earlier on the grounds that Kyra likes being on a roof and Val does not. How many courses? To the ridge? Forty-one. That's a lot of splitting. It is a lot of splitting and it is done, Val says, 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 lays a shake and drives it. How long's a roof? 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 — and then whoever is here does it again. And Kyra stops, with the hammer up, and does not put it down for about four seconds. Whoever's here, she says. Val stands on the ladder with a shake in her hand and hears the whole of the sentence come back at her, and finds she cannot put it anywhere. They do not talk about it for the rest of the afternoon. They finish the north slope and get the ridge capped by six and come down and eat on the porch with their hands aching, and the whole of it sits in the middle of the table like something neither of them ordered. Because since the second week of December in sixty-four there has been a whoever is here: Val said it in the yard, out loud, that day — not for us to make; for them to make, without knowing — and they have lived with it for twenty-two years in a way Val thought was healthy, which was to say it about twice a decade and not otherwise. And what she has not noticed, and notices on a ladder in July with a shake in her hand, is that neither of them has ever once said a single word about what it would be like. I want to say a thing, Kyra says, when it is nearly dark. Say it. Tell me about the second room. Val does not stiffen; she has not stiffened at that sentence since about 1730. Trieste. Trieste. And she gives her the paragraph — the same words, in the same order, with the pause after and two of them I had not. Kyra lets it finish. She always lets it finish. A hundred and eighty-one years, she says. A hundred and eighty-one. Do you know what I'm doing when I ask? Val looks at her across the table in the dark. I have four theories, 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 has 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 allows. What I'm doing is asking you to hand me something. Her voice is entirely level and it costs her, and Val can 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 sits very still. I understand the difference, she says. 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 looks 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 gets up and walks to the end of the porch and stands looking out at where the lake is. What she feels she can name, exactly, which is the curse of the thing: she has been able to name every feeling she has ever had since she was about nine years old, and the naming has never once made any of them easier to say. She comes back and sits down. I am going to answer the roof. 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 puts both hands flat, the way Kyra's are. 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 does not say anything at all. When we get home, Val says, 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. Her chin is up and her voice is doing the thing it does under load, which is 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 goes 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 goes 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 comes off the table and goes 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 stops; her voice has gone somewhere and she waits 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 sits there in the dark with tears going down her face and does not wipe them. Say it now, she says. 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 turns her hand over under Val's and takes 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 built in a country nobody had wanted, says it in Sethal, out loud, in the open air, in a voice that breaks in the middle of the second word and does not stop. Afterward, later, inside, Kyra says the other thing. I wanted a ring. Val has her arms round her from behind and her face in her hair and does not move. In Westport. 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. And Kyra's thumb goes, without either of them looking, to a place below her own waist where a plain band is inked into the skin and has 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 tighten. I did not know that was what I was doing. You did, Kyra says. 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 — which is the part she never tells her and never needs to, because Kyra 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 went about the evening knowing perfectly well what was coming and let the whole of the porch happen first. And when it does come, it is slow, and it is not careful. Val has the lamp out and the window open because it is July and the night air off the lake comes 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 are gold from the first and stay gold, and Val, who has been looking at her since a stair on a mountain in 1607, tells her so — in three-hundred-year-old words and in English and in whatever the other thing is that she has never found a name for — and says things she has been carrying since before there was a house to say them in. At about two in the morning Kyra puts her mouth against Val's ear and says: forty-one courses. What? You counted them on the ladder. Before you decided. I counted them after I decided, Val says, and I got it wrong twice.

The road comes through in eighty-nine. It is not much of a road and it does not come as far as the lake, but it comes within four miles, and a man can get a wagon over it in August — and what that means is that in the summer of ninety there are 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 stands and looks at the blazes for a while and then goes home and does not mention them until after supper. I saw them, Val says. When? Tuesday. I have been waiting to see how long you would carry it. She is at the table with her spectacles on, which she began wearing four years earlier for reading and which are, she maintains, 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. She takes 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 says. The paper comes up with the mail on a Thursday at the end of October, four days old, out of Portland. Kyra has been down at the barn and comes in wet and finds 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 means the room has stopped being the room. What. Val does not look up. She turns the paper round and puts her finger on a column. It is the dullest thing imaginable: 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 reads it three times. They have spelled it with one e, and there is no telling whether that was the clerk in Dakota or the compositor in Portland, and it does not matter at all, and Kyra finds that she minds it out of all proportion. She puts 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 says. 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 sits down slowly. Sixty-nine, she says. 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 puts her hand flat over the column, over the whole of that little block of type, and keeps it there. She does not say anything for a while and Kyra does not make her. What she says, when she does, comes out in no order at all, which from Val is 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 says, 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. Her hand is 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 says. It is the most I have ever been given about anybody I have had to leave. She cuts it out. She does it the next morning with the sewing scissors, neatly — three lines of type and the two above and below, so that it will not look like a keepsake to anybody who finds it — and puts it in the box with the notebook and the deed and Asa Pruitt's second letter. Kyra watches her do it from the doorway and does not say the thing she is thinking, which is that Val Sorin made a rule on a wharf in Boston in 1776 about never again keeping the names of people she could not help, and broke it in a wagon on the Platte in 1850, and has 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 is the eleventh of December, and they take the Dollond out because Val wants to look at nothing in particular. The smudge comes up in the east with the great square under it. There is nothing in it. There has been nothing in it since February of eighty-six and there will be nothing in it again in their lifetimes on that continent, and they look at it for a while anyway, the way you look at a house you used to live in. Three hundred and eighty-eight, Val says. Kyra does not have to ask. He has eighteen years. 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. Her eye is to the glass and her voice is 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 says. You never have. She stands back from the telescope and puts her hands in her pockets. The lamp is in the window behind her and it takes the pale of her hair at the crown and leaves the rest of her a shape against the dark, which is how Kyra has been seeing her out of doors at night for two hundred and eighty-three years and has never once got tired of. Four more summers, she says. 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 looks up at the sky over a lake that nobody had wanted. Somewhere a person can subscribe to things. Kyra starts 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 says. 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, at present, on the eleventh of December, standing in a wet field. And Kyra comes and stands behind her and puts both arms round her in the dark and her chin on her shoulder, out in the open, where there is nobody within four miles, and the two of them stand in the cold looking up at a smudge the size of a thumbprint at arm's length. Four more summers, Kyra says. Four more. And then we go and read the paper. And then, says Val, we go and read the paper.