Chương 177: CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-SEVEN: THE FOURTH NIGHT

[From Calla's account to the council, given in the third week of July.] They rode west on the second morning after the ruling — later than planned, because copying the records had taken four days longer than the estimate and because Denise Okonkwo had refused to leave until the last page was done. She had been silent for most of the first three days. Not sullen. Calla was specific about this in her account.

Silent in the manner of someone whose language had been reduced by nine years of disuse and who was finding, with visible effort, that English had gone stiff on her.

"She kept starting sentences and stopping," Calla said.

"Not because she didn't know what she wanted to say. Because the words came out wrong when she reached for them. She'd say three words and stop and start again." On the second day Holloway had stopped trying to draw her into conversation, which Calla said was the correct decision and which she had not been sure of at the time.

On the fourth night they camped at a waystation on the eastern road and it rained, and the four garrison soldiers and Holloway went into the waystation's common room, and Calla went out to check the horses because she could not sleep. Denise Okonkwo was already there, standing under the eave with the rain coming off the roof a foot in front of her. They stood there for a while. Then Denise said: "Say the number again."

"A hundred and thirty-one," Calla said.

"A hundred and thirty-one." She said it slowly.

"And they all — they're all somewhere. Doing things."

"Most of them in the march," Calla said.

"Some further out. There's a woman in the northeast who runs a lord's whole household administration. There's a man who has a farm north of the boundary." She paused.

"The engineer who runs our forge is one of yours. He's seventy-two and his knees are bad and he's building something right now that he says will take three more years." The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Denise laughed. It was, Calla said, the first sound of that kind she had made in four days, and it stopped almost at once, as if it had surprised her.

"Briggs," she said.

"You know him?"

"Everybody knew Briggs." She was quiet for a moment.

"Seventy-two."

"He complains about it constantly. Nobody believes him." Denise put her hand out past the eave into the rain and held it there.

"I stopped speaking English in year four," she said.

"Not on purpose. I just — there was no one. And then one day I tried to and it came out wrong and I thought: that's what happens, then." She took her hand back.

"I kept writing it. The records. That was the only place it stayed."

"That's why they're in English," Calla said.

"That's why they're in English." She was quiet again.

"The magistrate said something about that. About writing in a language nobody could read."

"He said a person who writes falsely for a court writes in the court's language," Calla said.

"He said you wrote in a language nobody within two hundred miles could read, and that isn't the practice of a person building a defence. It's the practice of a person keeping a record." Denise Okonkwo stood in the dark under the eave for a long moment.

"I want to tell you something," she said, "and I need you to not make it a kind thing. I need it to just be a thing."

"All right," Calla said.

"I stopped believing anyone was coming in year three," Denise said.

"Not gradually. There was a day. I remember the day. And after that I wasn't waiting anymore, I was just living there." She paused.

"So when you came into that cell and said what you said, I thought you were something my head had made. I've been alone a long time and I know what that does." She paused again.

"I asked you to tell me the name of the town I came from. On Earth. You didn't know it. And I thought — of course, because you're not real, you don't know it."

"I remember," Calla said.

"And then you said: I don't know it, but there's a man in Greyhold who has a list of three hundred and twenty-three names and he'll know it, because he's had that list for nine years." She stopped.

"That's when I believed you. Not the rescue. The list." Calla did not say anything.

"Somebody kept a list," Denise said.

"For nine years. With my name on it and nothing next to it." Her voice did something and she let it.

"I kept records nobody would read and somebody kept a list nobody would answer. That's the same thing. That's the exact same thing." The rain came off the roof.

"His name is Marcus Cole," Calla said.

"He was a sergeant. He writes the number in a book every year."

"What's the number now?"

"Eighty-two," Calla said.

"As of you." Denise Okonkwo laughed again, and this time she let it go on, and then it turned into something else for a while, and Calla stood next to her under the eave and did not touch her and did not say anything, because she had grown up in a house where her mother had taught her that some things you stand next to and do not touch.