Chapter 2: One Step Between

One Step Between

Somewhere in the middle of those ten thousand good years, a boy is born. He is flesh — the ordinary kind, the kind that splits and scabs and takes a season to heal a bone — and that is the whole of what he has. No house with a seal worth pressing into wax. No bloodline anyone has troubled to write down. Every rule that has been agreed on for a very long time says, clearly, that he is not going to amount to anything.

He goes up anyway.

At first that is the whole of it. Walking. The stairs everyone walks, and then the stairs past them, the ones with a gate at the bottom and a man at the gate whose entire position exists to say no. He goes down into places that were shut. He comes back out of them, usually, though not always in the condition he went in. He stands in front of peoples who are not his — whose words he does not have, whose dead he has never been taught to name — and he does not step aside, and it goes the way those meetings go.

Then he starts breaking things, and the story never settles on why. One telling has him doing it for everybody who wanted to and was never allowed, on the grounds that somebody has to. The other has him doing it because he was told no one time too many and has been paying it back ever since. The same act, two reputations, and the people who repeat the first telling are not the people who repeat the second.

The myths first. He puts his hand through them one at a time and finds ordinary plaster on the far side, ordinary timber, and behind it ordinary men who have been standing behind the myth the whole while, collecting. Then the rules. Not the small ones — he eats at tables and sleeps under roofs and keeps the small ones — but the large ones, which nobody alive can remember agreeing to. Then the people who own the rules. Then the people who own the people who own the rules.

He is not careful about it. The accounts of him are not written by anyone he was careful with.

He has a sword by then; the stories are careful to give him one. He points it up. Not at a man, not at an army — at the sky, which has never answered anybody, and which he will have a question for later, when the road runs out.

There are names for what the sword does, and the stories use them freely; they are good names, the sort that get carved over gates. What the stories do not say is where he was standing, or what it cost him, or what he had to put down to get there, or who had stopped writing to him by then. Names are for the outside of a thing.

At the end of the road he arrives. He stands where the road runs out, on top of everything that can be climbed, and stops being a person who can die. It is not a reward. Nobody offered it to him.

And then he asks.

That is where it turns. Standing at the top of everything — the summit every child is pointed at before they can read — he puts a question up into the silence and gets an answer back, and the answer does not stay one answer. It unpacks. It keeps unpacking well past the point where he wants it to. Behind every year of it there is another year, and behind the years there is the first age, and behind the first age there is a lie, and the lie has edges on it; it did not grow there on its own.

The cold comes into him then and stays, the way cold does when it is not the weather.

He is not afraid of what he has been told. He has met worse and hit it. What he cannot get past is smaller than that: he has been standing on this floor for a very long time, and so has everyone he has ever loved, and it has never once occurred to him to ask what holds it up.

A lie that size is not left standing on its own, either. Somebody tells it again every morning. Somebody writes it down. Somebody decides, again, that today is not the day to let go of it.

It leaves him at the top of the road, cold, with one question the answer never touched. Who keeps it true, and how much longer do they need him not to know.