unclaimed-recollection / 13 - A Day Rate.md# 13. A Day Rate > **Narrator:** Odran Maresh · **Setting:** Pinecliff, the Saddle Line, Crownward Terminus · **Act 2, Part 3** > Odran goes back to his ordinary work out of Crownward.  I put the third chair back in the back room on the fourth morning. I want to be exact about that, since I have been exact about everything else. It was not a gesture. The chair had been out because a man was staying, and the man was not staying, and a chair that has no use in the front of a house goes in the back, where the spare things are kept. I carried it through, and set it against the wall beside the lamp oil and the crate of dead cells I mean to take to Tern, and I came back and sat in the chair I have always sat in. It faces the window. I know that because I looked. The house is the right size for one. I would like that on the record as a fact, not a complaint. A small square table, a hook for the satchel, a narrow bed against the left wall, and on a stool under the window the old light in the lumpy brown cosy Resa knitted it, which I have not taken off, because it does not matter to a light whether it has a cosy. It brightens when I come in. It did before. I do not think it has ever done anything for me that it would not do for a stray. I woke before it was light, because I always do when there is a train to make, and I lay and listened to nobody reciting chimes. Then I got up, and made one cup of tea, and drank it standing.  * * * The Pinecliff halt is one platform, a cistern, a shed and the line lights the wind keeps trying to put out. I walked down in the dark and the three bells rang as the first local came into sight, rising, with the third one flat. I stopped at the edge of the boards. I had not decided to. My feet did it, the way they find a stair in the dark. It is a habit I picked up, then. I did not have it a month ago. A man can catch a habit off another man like a cold, and the only cure is to wait until you stop breathing near him. Under the shed, in chalk, our priority slot on the noon express was still marked unclaimed. It lapses if nobody uses it. I looked at it as long as I looked at the bell, and I got on the local. At Tern the local sets you down on the wrong side of the junction from the Saddle line, which is the whole difficulty of Tern. You have nine minutes, and a footbridge, and a wind that has been looking for you since the Basin. A man who knows the junction can do it in seven. I have done it in six with a freight crew's gear on my back. I did it in six. I want that understood too. I did not look toward the yard. It is on the north side. The tall gantry stands over it, and the long shed where Zdena Hrul's hands work, and the low kitchen at the back with its door open because in a Kandren house at midday it always is. I have known where all of it is for years. I have eaten there. I went over the footbridge with my eyes on the Late Board's departure leaf at the far end, which I did not need, because I know what the Saddle train does, and I read it twice. I wished for one glimpse. I will say that and then not say it again. The back of a head across the freight, a hat in somebody's hand, anything at all with the right set of shoulders, anywhere, at any distance, for as long as it takes a bell to ring. Not to speak. A man in the course of his training has no use for his old guide on a footbridge, and a guide who thinks otherwise is a nuisance with a satchel. I held my eyes on the board and got on the Saddle line, and sat on the aisle, which is where a guide sits, with the window seat beside me empty and the leaf in the seat-back dark. I put my wrist to it, because it was there. My own things came up: my Guild standing, a rail endorsement, a chit I was owed. They showed me nothing else. A leaf never does. It shows whoever touches it what is theirs, and then you let go, and it forgets. I let go. * * * Crownward is the last street before everywhere, and the good thing about it is that nobody lives there. Everyone is between trips. You can stand in the Terminus concourse at seven in the morning with a satchel and a face like a shut door, and be one of four hundred. The Charter Hall is the Field Guild's hiring hall, a long stone room off Outfitters' Row with a public leaf the size of a barn door and a board of charters in front of it. The board is public. The good berths are filled in the bar next door, and everyone knows it, and the clerks pretend not to. I had a day booked. Not a charter. A day. That is a thing a rated guide is paid for, and few people outside the Guild know it. An expedition that is going to a place you have been will pay for a day of your head. You sit at a table in a back room with their maps open and their lead across from you and a scholar or two with a list of questions, and you tell them what the guide book does not. That the halt shown on the sheet has been moved. That the counter at the second station will not take a permit before noon, and that a clerk named something like Tev will, if you ask him how his mother is. That a certain kind of weather arrives not as weather but as a change in how far you can hear. It is easy money and I was good at it. I had been good at it for twelve years. I had been paid for a day's work in a back room in Crownward more times than I could count, and went home on the late local and ate whatever there was. The team had five in the room and one by the door, and the one by the door was the lead. She was called Perrin Vasko and she had come up from a Lumen field school, a lean fair woman who held a pencil like a surgical instrument. Their object was a survey of the Pale March stations in winter, and a sled day north of Coldharbor to see the Counting Stones, and they had a ten-week permit and a six-week budget, which is a thing you do not say to a guide. I knew the ground. I had known it since I was twenty-six, and a woman in a Halloway infirmary had once put me back together after I went through a pale lichen skin that was not ice and not ground, and neither of us has mentioned it since. "Start with the stations," said Perrin Vasko. I started with the stations. I told them the third halt had a Kandren cook who would feed the crew if they ate at the long bench and not their own tent, and that if they did not eat at the bench she would remember it for ten years. I told them to bring salt, because salt is money in a place where cells are only batteries. I told them that in a whiteout, chalk is worse than useless, because the lichen takes it and gives it back wrong, and that what they wanted were pole markers and a man at the end of every length of rope who did not let go. I said that last in the voice I use for the weather. The quartermaster, who was a short man with a rope-burn on his chin, wrote it down and underlined it, and I thought: *good.* They asked what I would take if I were them. I told them. They asked where I would chalk the way home, and I said at every post, and not on the north side, because the north side is the one you do not want to be reading at dusk. A scholar named Ebba laughed. It was a good laugh. It was the laugh of a person who has been told a truth by somebody who does not make a fuss of it. It went on like that for most of the day, and I was good at it. I gave them the Counting Stones and the proper way to ask a Sivaq family whether you may record a song, which is to ask once, in their language, and then say nothing at all. I gave them the smoked fish at Coldharbor. I gave them the way the wind comes off the plain at night like a hand laid flat on the back of the neck.  At six, the lead asked for the berth. "We have a guide's berth," said Perrin Vasko. "Day rate, plus a share. We would like it to be you. Six weeks, in the middle of winter, and I will be honest, I do not think anyone else in the Guild would give me the answers I got today." I looked at the map. The stations were laid out down the long white plain like beads on a cord. "I cannot," I said. "The dates sit across something at home." "A family matter?" "A bell," I said, which was not a thing I had meant to say, and I watched her decide it was a figure of speech. "It is a long story. A short one. There is a man at Coldharbor, Hrolf, who keeps the permit counter. Ask for him. He will do all of it for you, and he knows the ground better than I do." She nodded slowly, as you do with a good thing you are not going to get, and I did the only thing a guide has for that, which is to be useful. I wrote Hrolf's name on the corner of the map and the name of the cook at the third halt, and she wrote me a chit, and the room went on being the room. It was not a bad day. I want to say that. It was a very good day. I was warm and fed, and a team of six strangers had listened to me for eight hours as if what I knew mattered, and it did. I have been a rated guide for twelve years. This is the most I have ever been, and it was enough, and walking out of the Charter Hall into the evening I thought it, clearly and without any pleasure: *it was enough, and it is not.* * * * The Late Board is on the north concourse, and it takes the whole of one wall. I have seen it every working week of my life. A card for every crew with a return date on file, hung in rows under the lamps, some of them with their little white faces turned out and some of them turned over. A crew that comes home turns its own card face down. A crew that does not has a red one by the end of the week, and the Field Guild starts asking questions up the line. People who have never set foot outside the city know the Late Board from the news. *Who came back and who didn't.* For most of them, it is all they ever see. There is a custom. When you turn your card, you buy a drink for anyone who is still standing there waiting for theirs. I stood in front of it with my satchel across me and the chit in my pocket. There was a woman at the end of the third row with her hands in her sleeves, as people stand there, looking at nothing, the way a mother looks at a road. I watched her not move. I thought about the lead from Lumen and the card she would hang on that wall in a week, with a date on it, and about the man at Coldharbor with the permit counter. I did not look for a card. I want to be clear about what I did not do. I did not scan the rows. I did not walk the length of the wall and the corner after it, where the Long Side is. I know what is on the Long Side. I know what is not on the Board, which is a man who has no crew and has filed no date and has not been missing for one day of his life, because nobody ever wrote him down. I stood there for exactly as long as a decent man stands at a wall like that, and I went to the platform. It was not looking, I told myself. It was knowing there was nothing to look for. They are different. I hold them in different hands, and I know which is which. * * * I came back by the same way, in the opposite direction, and at Tern the Saddle line puts you down on the north side. There is a footbridge, and the local waits on the south platform with its engine ticking over. Seven minutes this time. I had the full width of the yard on my left the whole way over, and the gantry, and the long low shed with the lamps coming on,. I looked at the planks. It was not a wise thing to do, and no one has ever accused me of wisdom on a footbridge. At the top step, I let myself have the first four notes, falling, clean as a dropped spoon, and I got a third of the way down the stair before I noticed my lips had moved. That was all. I got on the local. I sat by the window, since there was nobody to sit by it.  I will say one thing in my own defence. I did not go looking. If a man in a Guild coat had been standing at the end of the northbound platform with his hat in his hand and his head tilted toward the bells, I would not have known it, because I was reading the planks. I was very careful about that. The local runs past two cisterns and a halt that is only a lamp, and the three bells rang as it came in. I went to the house. I did not go to the kitchen. There is a window on the south wall of Resa's with a lamp in it, and I could see the whole of it from the top of the hill: the light on the counter, the range, the long table with its benches turned up. I know it as I know the back of my own hand. I know what is set at the head. I looked at the lit window for as long as it takes to climb a stair, and went home to the dark one. I made tea. I drank it standing. * * * I went to Resa's for breakfast four days later, on the first morning I had the time. It is a Kandren kitchen the way Pinecliff is a town. By decision. The first local comes through, and the range roars, and Old Teva takes his place by the stove without being asked and tells whoever is nearest what is wrong with the weather. Resa had the long table half set. She put a bowl in front of me before I had my coat off, because a man who stays on his feet in her kitchen is a man she cannot feed. "You look like a wall," she said. "I look like me." "You look like a wall that has been told it is a wall." She put bread beside the bowl. She did not say anything about the head chair, which was at the end of the table with the board across it, empty, the way it had been the whole of the week. I put the satchel on the floor. I want that on the record. I did not put it on the chair. She stood over me with the ladle. She is a short, broad, loose-curled woman, and she has stood over me since I was six. I knew she was going to say something because she wiped her hands on the apron twice, which is a thing she does and does not know she does. "Anka sent word," she said. I had a spoon halfway up. I put it down. "A message. On the leaf at the halt, by the chalk board. It was there when I went down to send for the flour. It had been there since the week before." She said it to the stove. "I only touch the cord when I need something from Tern or the city. You know that. You have said so many times. I took the pulse bead off in the winter that the soup kept going cold while it tapped me." "It was private," I said. "It was to me." She turned the ladle in the pot. "Nobody else's cord opens it. That is what it is for." I did not say anything, because she had reached the part where she tells it, and there is no use getting in the way. "It is four words," said Resa. "*Window. Stove. He ate.*" I looked at the table. "I asked her," said Resa. "Over the bread, the morning she came for him. Whether the room had a window. I do not know why. I did not know whether it did, and I could not stand not knowing. A room with no window is a hard thing to put a person in. And she goes to the first leaf in Zdena Hrul's kitchen the moment she has seen it and tells me. In four words. I touched my cord to the leaf, and it was there, and I stood at the halt in the wind and read it three times, and then I went to see about flour." "A window," I said. "West. She did not say that. I assumed. They are built that way, up at the Saddle." She put down the ladle. "There was a stove. And he ate." I did not say anything to that. I did not say anything for a long time, and Old Teva, by the range, had the grace to start telling somebody about a lorry. I had my hand on the strap of the satchel, on the floor, where it was. I took it off. "Mm," I said. She looked at me with her whole face, the way she does, with a great deal more than I would have liked, and nothing at all that I could answer.  "You are going to eat that before it goes cold," said my sister. I ate it. It was an excellent breakfast, as her breakfasts are. A dark loaf, a hot bean broth with smoked root and a little sour on the top. I do not think I have ever tasted anything so thoroughly. A window. A stove. I had never seen the room. That was the plain fact of it. I had been told there would be one, and a stove, and a Kandren landlady who would not let a person starve, and I had put it in the same drawer as the Guild's repayment policy and the field-school course, with the things that are true and are not mine. Now I had a window to put in it. It was a small thing. It went in with a weight I had not expected, as if it had been the one thing in the drawer I had not known I was waiting for. *He ate.* When I had finished, I picked up my satchel, and Resa took the bowl, and neither of us said anything about the chair. I went out into the morning. The local was pulling out. Down on the platform the three bells rang rising, with the third one flat, and I stood at the end of the boards, for a moment longer than I needed to, and listened to it as if it were a sentence with a word missing.