Forty-one is flat.
Not by much. I stand at its foot with my weight forward and the hum comes up through my soles the way it has every morning since I was five, a low steady note you’d miss if you were thinking about breakfast, and under it, a fraction under, is the place where the note used to sit. Like a stair you know in the dark that’s turned out a finger lower than your foot expected.
Gran is two pillars down with her hood up. She hasn’t moved since the bell at the top of the stair stopped swinging. The lamp-stone by her feet makes a small yellow room around her, eighty years old and about the size of a ten-year-old, and past her the dark goes on in rows. Pillar after pillar, each one as wide as our kitchen, each one holding up a piece of Harrowmouth that people are about to walk on to go and buy bread.
The Abundance raised them. That’s what everybody says, and it’s true as far as anyone can check, which isn’t far. Two thousand years ago somebody stood a hall of pillars in this valley and bound them, and the binding is still in the stone. You can’t see it except where a seam runs up a pillar’s face, thin as a hair, with a faint gold to it, like light coming round a door that’s nearly shut. You can hear it, though, if you stand still enough. Every binding has its note. A good one sits on it. A tired one goes flat, then slides, then lets go, and the order of those three things is the whole of our trade. Grandad started chalking them sixty-two years ago. The town built itself on top of the pillars before that, because they were there and they held, and it’s been building ever since, houses on the pillar heads and streets across the spans, and nobody up there thinks about what’s underneath unless the Tallises ring the bell.
“Say it,” Gran says.
“It’s flat.”
“How flat?”
“A hair.” I wait. The note doesn’t move. “Less than a hair. It was a hair last spring.”
“And today?”
“Not today.”
“Then mark it.”
The chalk lives in a tin on the catwalk rail, one tin per ten pillars. I take a stub and kneel. The ticks on forty-one run in a column from higher than I can reach kneeling down to the stone, sixty-two years of them, the oldest so faint they’re more stone than chalk. Grandad made the top one. You can only find it if you know where to look, and I know where to look, so I always do.
My tick goes at the bottom. It’s not straight. Under the chalk the stone is cold and a bit greasy. The foundations always are, before the street heats up.
“It’s been a hair for a year,” I say.
Gran pushes her hood back. Her hair is white and wound up in a bun with one long wooden pin through it, a plain pin, brown with handling. It’s the thing she forged at her own graduation sixty-five years ago. People in town who don’t know her ask what it does. “It holds my hair up,” she tells them, and then she waits for them to name a sword that’s done as much.
“Because one morning it won’t be a hair,” she says. “And that morning, somebody has to be standing here.”
She says it the way she says pass the salt.
Over our heads the boards start. Not the pillars, the town: a door on Ropewalk Street, a cart going over the span by the well with one wheel that ticks, somebody’s shutters. Then a set of feet going too fast on the stair at the back of the glassworks, missing the last step and saving it.
“Tova’s late,” I say.
From the Dunne kitchen, three pillar heads east, a bench creaks the slow creak it only makes when somebody is leaning on their elbows over a bowl.
“Holt’s eating,” Gran says.
We say the next bit at the same time, which is that he’s always eating, and she laughs, which sounds like a gate.
We do the rest of the row together, the south row of the north half, the one that runs under the main street. Forty-two sits right. Forty-three sits right. Forty-four I don’t even stop at, because it’s never had a tick and it hums like it was raised last week, low and fat and pleased with itself. Gran stops at fifty-one for thirty breaths and then moves on without saying anything, which means fifty-one is fine and she just likes it.
There’s a thing about seventeen nobody can explain. Low on the north face, below the ticks, somebody scratched JUNO into the stone in square letters, deep, with something harder than chalk. The letters are older than Grandad’s first tick. Nobody knows who Juno was or why they came down here to do it. Every Tallis since has walked past it, every morning, and none of us has ever rubbed it out.
On the way back to the stair we pass twenty-nine.
Twenty-nine is quiet. Not flat, not sliding. Quiet as a fence post. It’s river stone and lime mortar, town work, put up after the old twenty-nine let go, and it holds the street up perfectly well and has nothing to say about it. We walk past it without stopping. Everybody walks past it without stopping.
Grandad called thirty-one, that morning. Twenty-nine came down on the old tannery. The tannery is next to the school, and the school had forty children in it, and the tannery was empty because it was a holy day, and that’s the only reason any of this family can still look anyone in the face. Nobody in our house tells that as a story. Everybody in our house knows it.
Gran climbs the stair ahead of me without using the rope. At the top she reaches for the bell to stop it ringing when the trapdoor knocks it, and then she doesn’t, she lets it ring, one clear note that goes down into the dark and comes back from about forty pillars away.
It comes back a fraction under. Not much. Less than a hair, from somewhere out in the rows I can’t place, and then it’s gone. Echoes do that. Mostly.
I don’t say anything.
“Breakfast,” she says. “Before your father starts a speech.”
He’s already started.
My father makes his speeches in his head first. He’s at the table with the heel of yesterday’s loaf, cutting it into slices so thin you could read through them, which is what he does when he’s working out how to say a thing. My mother is at the stove with one palm on the side of the kettle, not holding it, just resting there, the way other people feel a child’s forehead. That’s how she listens. Through her hands. The rest of us use our feet, and she says that’s because the rest of us are lazy.
“Forty-one?” Dad says.
“A hair,” Gran says, before I can. “Less. The boy marked it.”
“Good.”
The kitchen smells of the stove and wet wool from the hoods drying by the door. Dad’s listening rod leans in the corner by the bell rope, worn pale at the grip. Gran props her own rod against the table, unscrews the cap at the top, and takes her teeth out of it.
“Don’t,” my mother says, without turning round.
“Where else would I keep them?”
“A cup.”
“Anyone can find a cup.” Gran puts them in. She reaches across me for the bread.
Dad finishes cutting. He lines the slices up. Then he puts the knife down, square to the board, and looks at me, and the speech is ready.
“After today,” he says, “you’ll take the north half.”
I’ve known since I was nine. It still lands somewhere under my ribs and stays there.
“Pillars one to sixty,” he says. “From Monday. Five o’clock, before the guild. I’ll take the south half with your gran, your mother takes the arches, and the north half is yours.” He waits. “That’s how it was given to me.”
“Yes,” I say.
“You’ll be at the guild at eight with the others, and I don’t mind that, a trade’s a trade. But five o’clock is five o’clock.” He lifts one slice of bread and puts it back. “Forty years, this town hasn’t lost a street.”
“I know.”
“Nobody thanks you.” He says it gently. He says everything gently. “That’s how you know it’s working.”
My father is the best listener in Harrowmouth. The town says so, at the well, at the guild, when somebody’s cellar starts to sweat and they knock on our door with their cap already off. He can stand on the walk without a lamp and tell you which pillar a cart is crossing over. He was sure about forty-one before I was born. He’s been sure about it every spring since.
“Thank you,” I say, which makes Gran snort into her bread.
“Don’t thank him,” she says. “You heard him. If you thank him it’s not working.”
Dad smiles at that, a bit. It’s a tired smile, the smile of someone who’s got up at half past four for twenty-five years.
“What do you want it to be?” Gran says. “The thing.”
“I don’t know.”
“Everybody knows. Even the Sard girl knows. She’s had it written on her arm since Tuesday.”
“Something useful,” I say.
“Useful to who?”
I’ve got nothing for that. The walk already has two rods and a bell and four Tallises. Useful to the guild, then, except I don’t know what the guild wants either. A bucket, Holt’s brothers say, whenever anyone asks them, and then they laugh and won’t explain.
“Leave him,” Dad says.
“Useful to who,” Gran says again, to her bread this time, and chews.
My mother takes the kettle off. She pours four cups and puts mine down by my hand, and next to it, folded small, a piece of cloth.
It’s plain. Undyed wool, the colour of porridge, a long strip of it rolled and folded over, the kind of cloth people wrap their feet in before their boots in winter. But there’s a thread run through the edge of it, very fine, silver, and when I pick it up the silver catches the stove light and lets it go.
“My mother spun that,” she says.
I didn’t know my grandmother on that side. She was from somewhere up the valley, where the towns are smaller, and she died before I was walking. I have her eyebrows, apparently. Nobody’s told me more than that.
“For the forge,” my mother says. “They say take something in with you. The circle takes what you bring.”
“And what you are,” Gran says, with her mouth full. “It takes what you are and makes the thing out of it, and you get what you get.” She taps the pin in her bun. “Sixty-five years.”
I turn the cloth over. It weighs almost nothing. The silver thread runs the whole length of it, end to end, and doesn’t break anywhere.
“It doesn’t have to be what your father wants,” my mother says.
She says it to the cloth, not to me. It’s very quiet. Everyone at this table is a Tallis, so everyone hears it.
Dad looks up. “What else would it be?”
He isn’t cross. He honestly wants to know. He waits for the rest of the sentence.
My mother picks up her cup. She drinks from it. She puts it down again and moves the bread board an inch to the left, and the question sits on the table between the four of us next to the butter, and nobody touches it.
I file it, with its pillar number on, to listen to later.
Up on the street the town is properly awake. A milk cart, the one with the bad wheel. The Sards’ furnace door going back on its hinge with that iron cough it makes, and somebody shouting at somebody else to mind out. Graduation is at nine. The whole of Spanhold will be in the great hall, every family that has a child finishing this year, and most of the families that don’t, because there’s cake after.
I go up to my room and change into the shirt my mother washed for it. It’s still a bit damp at the collar. I put the cloth in the pocket over my chest, where I can feel it.
When I come down Gran is asleep in her chair by the stove with her mouth open and her rod leaning on the chair arm. She isn’t really asleep. Her feet are flat on the floor, and her feet are never flat on the floor when she’s asleep.
“Good luck,” she says, eyes shut.
“It’s not luck. You stand in the circle and it makes what it makes.”
“That’s what luck is,” she says. “Go away.”
Dad is in the yard checking his rod’s grip for splinters, which he does every morning and which there never are. He stays bent over it when I come out and just says, “North half. Monday,” like he’s reminding himself, and I say, “Monday,” and that’s us.
My mother walks me to the gate.
It’s a short walk. The Tallis house sits on the head of pillar six, and the gate opens straight onto the span that runs down towards the square, maybe twelve steps from the door. She takes all twelve of them with me. She doesn’t usually.
The egg woman from the corner of the square goes past the gate with a basket of eggs on her hip and her grandson’s good coat over her arm, still with the pins in. “Big day, Tallis,” she says to me, and then, to my mother, “Is it one of yours graduating or both?” which is a joke she has made every year since I was born, about my father, who graduated thirty years ago and is still, she says, a boy.
“Just the one,” my mother says.
“Well. Give him a good breakfast. They faint, in that circle. My sister’s boy fainted.” She goes on down the span, still talking, to nobody.
At the gate my mother stops, and I stop, and she reaches up and rests her fingertips on the gatepost. It’s an old post, Abundance stone with a town-made cap on it. She leaves them there a moment longer than she needs to.
“Do you know what your grandmother used to say?” she says. “My mother.”
“No.”
“She said it about weather. Mostly.” She takes her fingers off the post and wipes them on her apron, though there’s nothing on it. “Something comes. It always comes.” She looks down the span towards the square, where the first families are already going by in their good coats. “It just doesn’t always ask your permission.”
I wait for the rest of it.
There isn’t any rest of it. She opens the gate for me, which I can do myself, and holds it, which she doesn’t need to.
So I file that one too, next to the first, and I step out onto the span. It’s a good span, old, well bound; it sits right on its note all the way down. Under my feet there’s nothing wrong at all.
I’m nearly sure there’s nothing wrong at all.
