Chapter 11: Three Years

Three Years

The talk stayed in the yard behind him.

He went along the front of the house, past the shut doors and the two new rooms at the gate, walled to the tops of their doorways and no higher. The lamp over the door stayed behind him, and when he turned the corner the dark came up close on that side of the house and went along with him the rest of the way. He did not need a light in the back of his own house.

Three doors stood along the back. The middle one was the widest. He put his hand flat on it and pushed it in and went through.

The chapel smelled of stone and cold and, under that, of the apples on the shelf. He stood still a moment and let his eyes settle, and then he crossed the floor without hurrying.

The stones stood in a row on the shelf, the names cut small into them: six generations of Hales, the names dug out of the parish books one at a time by a clerk who had been paid to sit with the books until he had them all. The last of the six was his father Osric’s. Below them on the board stood a dish of apples.

He set his hand against the wall beneath the stones and pushed. The panel went in and swung, slow, without noise, and the white light came out of the opening and lay along the floor in front of his boots.

The niche behind the wall was not much bigger than a closet, and there was no lamp in it, and it needed none. A square was cut in its roof with a pane set in it, and the moon had climbed to where it stood over the square and looked straight down through it, and the light of it came down in a column onto a block of gray stone set into the floor like a table. On the stone stood the glass.

It was a round of gray metal, the kind a man is meant to look into, and there was no shine in it. It was lit anyway. The white stood off its face and moved on it the way water moves in a cup a man is carrying, and it was the only light there was in that room.

He did not go up to it. He stood at the edge of the light, out of it, and looked at it with his brows down.

“Three years,” he said, low.

The boy had followed him.

He had heard him on the stones out in the yard, coming along past the pool, and had not turned around and had not sent him back, and now Corin stood in the chapel doorway with his hands behind his back and his eyes on the opening in the wall.

He was nine years old. He had come in from the front of the house with the word and gone straight to his father’s ear with it, and said it to nobody else.

“Corin,” Elias said.

The boy came in over the floor and stood off to the side, where the light did not fall on him, and waited.

“Go and get your brothers.”

He did not ask which ones, though one of his brothers had been out in the yard the whole time with a cup in his hand.

“Yes, sir.” He said it low, the way he had said the other thing, at his father’s ear. Then he was gone, and he drew the door to behind him, and he did not let it bang.

There was no one left in the back of the house then but Elias and the glass on the stone, and out in the yard the boy’s feet went quick over the stones and away toward the front.

He came awake with his head full, and for a while after that he stayed where he was and let the weight sit.

Waking was always the same shape. There was nothing, and then there was the room—the low roof over him, the square of moon coming down through the opening, the cold stone under the metal of him—and no breath in him, and no pulse to count, and nothing to be done about any of it. What changed, when anything changed, was what he brought up with him.

He had gone down with the jade, and he had come up with it turned into knowing.

It was not memory and it was not a picture. It lay in him the way a swallowed thing lies, and it was heavy, and it would not come apart at first; and the square of moonlight had moved a hand’s width across the stone before he could begin to take it a piece at a time.

The first piece had a name on it. The Lunar Wheel.

It was a method, and plain enough to be said to a child, if he had had a mouth to say it with. A body has gates in it, and they are not the eyes and not the mouth, and the text did not argue the point; it was written for people who had bodies and knew where their own doors were. Through those gates a practitioner draws down the light of the moon and holds it inside himself and turns it there, six turns, one over the last, until the turns are six wheels; and when the last wheel is full—full the way the moon is full once in the month—the man steps over into the next realm, which is called Drawing.

The six wheels have names, and the text set them down in a column and did not spend another word on any one of them. Dusklights. Clear Light. The Circuit. Blue Root. Highcourt. First Spirit. Six names with nothing under them, and nothing to do with them but keep them in the order they came. He counted them twice. Six was right.

Then the realms, and the text gave those out the same way, in the same hand, as if it were writing down what everybody already knew. The six wheels are the whole of the first realm, and the first realm is called the Kindling; and above the Kindling stand five more, in their order: Drawing, the Founding, the Sanctum, the Seat, and the Second Self. Twelve names in all, flat on the page, and not one of them any use to him until the moon came round again.

A beginner, he guessed, likes to see the top of the ladder from the step he is standing on. The man who wrote it had put them there on purpose, and if that was all he was going to get out of them tonight, he would take it.

It said what a man is paid for finishing the first of them. It said a hundred and twenty years, and it did not say it as though it were generous. He had nothing to weigh the number against, so he set it down and went on.

It said, too, where it had come from. It had not been made here. It was a text for beginners, handed out, it said, to everyone who came in at the bottom door, and the house that handed it out was a house of the moon standing somewhere a long way off; and the text had come to him, by some road he could not see, into a valley where nobody had ever heard of a gate in a body. Handed out. He turned that over. Somewhere past the valley there were beginners enough to make the handing out worth doing. Whatever this house was, and whatever this valley was, they were not the top of anything. The ladder had six realms in it and he was somewhere under the first.

Then came the last pages, and those he went over twice. Five small things a man can do once he has the wheels in him. A light to hold in the hand, for looking into corners. A way to take a shirt off and put it on again clean. A way to go under water and come up where you meant to. A ward to keep out of a house what has no business in it. And one more, and that one the text named and went past without explaining, so he kept the name of it: the heart-thread.

Every one of the five wanted the same two things, the wheels and moonlight to spend. He had moonlight. Whether he had a gate in him, or a wheel, the text did not say, and there was no one in the house to ask, and that was an old problem of his and not a new one.

One thing on the last page did apply to him, though, and he set it down carefully. The arts could be worked out from the glass—a step and no farther. Whatever he did, he did from where he sat. The work would have to come to him.

The reach had gone out with the rest of it. Before, he had known the floor under the opening and the room he stood in and nothing past the wall. Now the walls of the house were his, all four sides of them and the beams with them, and the ground outside as far as he cared to put his mind; and the moonlight he could gather and hold was not twice what it had been, or three times. It was many times. He could not put a number on it, and there was no one to check him, so he took it the way it came.

He put the whole of it into the shape he had used since he came into the glass, which was the shape of an account. What he had. What it was good for. What it cost, and who was going to pay it. He had more than he had ever had. It was good for a light, and a step of reach, and no more of the map than a beginner’s text draws; and the price written on the last page was moonlight, which he did not have to earn and could not hurry, and which came back to him on the moon’s hours and not on his. That was the account, and the rest of it he could not see from where he sat.

And there was one thing more, and it did not come out of the text.

It came up out of the metal of him, the way a word comes up into a man’s mouth that he has not said in years and cannot place. The Rite of the Woven Pearl.

That was all of it. The name came up and lay there and brought nothing with it—no shape for it, no use, no price, no hand it had ever been in. He turned it over a while and found nothing under it, and left it where it was.

Above the opening the moon stood where the sky had put it. The white came down through the square and lay along the stone and did not go out.