unclaimed-recollection / 14 - The Course.md# 14. The Course > **Narrator:** Sevran Hallow · **Setting:** Tern Junction, the Reach · **Act 2, Part 4** > Sevran learns what he is good at and what he is not, in the first month of a course at Tern.  The first thing the course taught me was that a leaf is not a lock. Idrin said it on the second morning, at the head of the long table in the Guild's classroom behind the check-in glass, with the practice leaf lit in front of him and the wind working at the shutters. "People treat it as a door," he said. "They touch their cord to it and think they have gone in. It is a window. It shows you what is yours, and when you let go it shows nothing, and it has forgotten you were there. Open it for as long as you need and not a breath longer. A crew that leaves a leaf lit in a strange hall has told the hall its business." I touched my cord to it. Not too lightly, not too hard. The two beads warmed, and the leaf gave me the Tern bead and the Guild's associate bead and the line that says *retraining, instructor of record Orek*, and I read it, and let go. It forgot me. I had the odd small feeling of having been polite to something. "Again," said Idrin, and I did, and he said nothing, which is how I knew. It was only later, going down the stair, that I understood what I had noticed. There had been no hand. Nobody's hand had lifted from a knee and gone back. I had touched the leaf and it had answered and the room had gone on, and no one had been watching me do it in the way you watch a man on a stair in the dark. I stood on the third step with my cord in my hand and felt it, quite clearly, the way you feel a draught from a door you had not known was open. *Il aurait dit « mm ».* I let it finish. *Il aurait dit « mm », dan itu sudah cukup, y yo lo habría entendido.* I put it where I put such things. It is a short shelf, and there is more on it than there used to be. * * * I am good at some of it. I will say so plainly, because I was not told what I was good at and I had to find out by being tested. I am good at anything that must be kept. A route sheet read once is a route sheet, and a crew's kit called out at a halt is a list I can say back in the order it was said, and Idrin discovered this on the fourth day by reading me forty items and asking for them again at supper. I gave them to him. He looked at me across the stew with an expression I could not read, and then he got out the notebook he thinks nobody knows about and wrote something short. "It is not a skill," he said. "A skill you earn. Do not let it make you careless." "I will try not to be careless," I said, and was, for a moment, so pleased that I forgot to thank the stew. I am good at chalk. I make my marks as I made them on the first day and they are as even as a ruled page, and Zahir makes his by heat, and between the two of us Idrin says we would make one very tiresome guide. And I am bad at rope. I had not known there was a bad. It is the old rope, the pale grey length of it that cannot be cut, which every crew coils and knots in the lengths it has and hands down. It barely stretches. It will not fray. And it unties, Idrin says, with a gentle pull on the right end, and the whole of the skill lies in knowing which end is right, which is a thing that cannot be taught by describing it. I could not find it. I pulled the wrong end of a hitch for two days. I pulled the wrong end of a bowline and it sat there in my hands like a fact. The rope seemed to have a view about me. Zahir sat down beside me on the practice ground, in the grey ballast, in the cold, with his own coil across his knees, and said, "You are looking at it." "I am meant to be looking at it." "No. You are *looking* at it. You are trying to read it like a sheet. It does not have a sheet." He took my hitch out of my hands, pulled the end I had not, and the whole of it fell open as if it had been relieved. "You feel it. Which end is warmer. It is the one that has been held longer." "That is not in the course." "It is not in anything. My father told me. It is the end that remembers a hand." He put the coil back in my lap. "Do it with your eyes shut." I did it with my eyes shut. I got it wrong eleven times. On the twelfth the right end was simply warmer, as he had said, a small dull comfort in the palm, and the knot came undone like a sentence finishing. "There," said Zahir, with such honest delight that I looked up. "There. That is the whole of it. You were thinking about it too hard." "I am told that is my fault in general." "It is *everybody's* fault in general. Do the bowline." I did the bowline, and he did the bowline, and it was a cold bright morning at the edge of the yard with a freight going by, and I could not have said who was teaching whom. At supper that night he put two glasses on the tray without asking whether I wanted tea, and I took the one he held out, and neither of us remarked on it. When I think of who in the building would notice if I did not come down for supper, the list is Zdena, and Idrin, because he counts heads, and Zahir. Zahir is third, but he would be first to come up the stair. It is a plain fact. I put it with the others. * * * The Guild counter is a harder thing than rope. Idrin sent me to it on the ninth day, alone, with a course chit that wanted a stamp, and sat himself in the hall by the notice board with a paper he was not reading, which is how I knew it was an examination. The glass door. The clerk with ink to the wrist on his cuff. He looked up with the particular grey patience of a man who reads a hundred and eleven beads a day, and held out his hand for the chit without a word. I had my Aurevian, which is better than it was, and my Kandren, and I had watched a man do this. I will describe what Odran does at a counter. He does not ask for anything. He stands in the way a man stands who has all morning, and then he finds the one small human thing about the person behind the glass and puts a question about it as if he had been wondering for years. He asks after a mother. He asks after a hand. He asks whether the stove at the second station was ever mended. And the person at the counter, who has been spoken to by four hundred strangers that day in the voice of a form, looks up and finds that someone has noticed there is a person in the room. I had seen him do it a good many times. I had thought it was a craft. I had not understood it was a kindness he had made into a craft so that it could be used. "You have ink to the wrist," I said. The clerk looked at his cuff, and then at me. "It is a long stain," I said. "A pen with a fault? I have noticed it every day that I have come here. I should not like to think that it is a bad pen." There was a short and very ordinary silence. The clerk looked at his own hand as if it had been introduced to him. "It is a bad pen," he said. "It has been a bad pen since the spring. The stores will not issue another until the old one is used up." "Then I hope it is used up soon," I said. He stamped the chit. It made the small flat sound like a cup set down, and he pushed it back under the glass with the corner turned up, which I think is the way he does it for people he intends to remember. "Hallow," he said. "You are the one with the lovely manners." "I am told it is the injury." "Mm," said the clerk, which was a thing I had not expected, and which went through me strangely, like a note from a bell I knew. I thanked him once, which is within the rule, and I took my chit and went out through the hall, and Idrin did not look up from his notice. But the paper he held was upside down.  *Odran aurait demandé pour sa mère,* I thought, in the corridor, *dan clerk itu pasti tersenyum, y yo no sé cómo lo hace.* And then, less clearly, as the thought went down the stair: *I did it. Perhaps I know a little.* I let that one stay where it was. It was a warm thing, and I did not want to put it away. * * * Zahir drags me into conversations. I will say that, because it should be on the record that I did not volunteer. On the sixteenth day, or thereabouts, the freight from the south came in with a cell broker on it, a wide red-faced man from Varrow with a pack on his chest and the aggrieved bearing of someone whose trade is persuading people, and Zahir took me by the sleeve and said in a very low voice that I must watch this, it was the best entertainment on the Saddle. We stood against a gantry leg. The broker laid out his wares on a crate in the cold: standard cells, which are honest; jank cells, which are honest in a different way, as Zahir says; and one thing that he took out of his coat, wrapped in a spare shirt, and held up so that the whole yard could see the shirt. "Relic pattern," he said. "Not for sale. Not for looking at. A man has to have *something* in a shirt." I said, with no preparation whatever, in the Aurevian I have got since Pinecliff: "Then I shall admire the shirt." It was out before I had heard it. The broker's face went through two expressions and came out the far side of a laugh, a great bark of one, and he slapped the crate with his flat hand, so that the standard cells jumped. "Admire the shirt!" he said to the yard. "Did you hear him? He will admire the *shirt*! It is a good shirt!" "It is an excellent shirt," I said, gravely, because it would not have been fair to stop. Zahir had his face in both hands and was shaking quite silently against the gantry leg. When he could speak he said, from behind his fingers, "That was the first one." "The first what?" "The first joke. You have never. In all this time. You have said very good things, very carefully, to people who did not know whether to laugh." He took his hands away. His whole face was alight. "Now you have made a man from Varrow admire a *shirt.*" "I did not know I had it," I said. "Nobody does. That is what makes it a joke."  I turned that over, afterward, in the kitchen, with a glass in both hands. It was an odd thing to find: a small bright object I had not been given and had not kept, only made, on the spot, from nothing, with a stranger. I do not think I have been able to say that of anything else since the Archive. I wrote it down at night, in the margin of the notebook, where I put the things that are not lines. I looked at what I had written. *He will admire the shirt.* I thought of Odran at the long table in the Foundries, his face when Ostrel said what he said, and the silence he made then, and the one line I had found to answer it, *It is permitted to put it down.* It had not been a joke. It had been the nearest thing I had. And I wished, with a plainness that startled me, that he had been standing at the gantry leg. *Il aurait ri,* I thought. *Pelan-pelan. Y luego habría mirado hacia otro lado, para que yo no lo viera.* * * * The fount nearly died in the fourth week. It was a cold week, even for Tern. The wind came off the Saddle for six days without once changing its mind, and the old range in Zdena's kitchen, which can keep a window warm against anything, could not quite do it. I came down on the sixth morning to find the crock in its place on the sill with the lid on, and when I lifted the lid the smell was wrong. I know what a fount smells like. It is sour and sweet and a little like a cellar. It is the smell of a thing that is alive and does not mind being so. This was only the sour. It had gone flat and grey at the edge, like a face at the end of a night. I stood there with the lid in my hand. I had fed it every morning. Vessa water, a little, at the turn of the day, and the scraps, and no onion, and I had said the rule aloud each time as Zdena taught me, so that I should not be able to forget. I had not forgotten. I did not understand what had been wrong. "It is sulking," said Zdena. I had not heard her. She stood in the door with her arms folded and her hair already up for the day. She crossed the kitchen as she crosses all of it, like a disagreement that is going to be settled, and put one finger in the crock, and tasted it, and made a face that would have shamed a priest. "You have fed it. Good. It is not hungry. It is *cold*, and it is lonely." She lifted it herself and moved it from the sill to the shelf above the range, and set it down very gently. "A fount is a household. It is not a pot. You have been very correct with it, and a thing that is only treated correctly in a cold house will go quiet, and then it will go sour. Talk to it." "I do not understand," I said. "What did you do today?" "I have not done anything yet. It is morning." "What did you do *yesterday*?" So I told it. I stood in Zdena's kitchen at dawn in my shirtsleeves and told a crock of dough about yesterday, in the old careful Kandren, with Zdena at the table behind me pretending to peel a root. I told it about the rope and the right end, and Zahir, and the shirt. I told it about a bad pen. I told it that a woman in a halt called Pinecliff had kept it alive for a very long time, and that I had a very great deal to be grateful for, and that it was perfectly welcome to be sour if it must, but that I should regret it. The old light over the range brightened, a little, as it does. I put the lid back on, and wiped my hands, and said good morning to it, because it seemed right. When I came back at noon the smell had changed. It was not the whole smell, not yet. But there was a little of the sweet in it, like the first note of a bell after a long wind.  "There," said Zdena, to the root. "It likes to be told." It was the same thing I had said to Odran about the bell, on a morning at Pinecliff, and I stood there in the kitchen with the lid in my hand and could not for a moment speak. * * * I should say something about the platform, since it is where I spend most of my afternoons. The southern platform at Tern is where the local to Pinecliff stands between its runs, with its engine ticking over and its two green cars. I pass it every day on the way to the practice ground, over the footbridge, and there is a point on the bridge where you can see the whole length of the local and the board at its head. I am not given to looking at it. I have the course, and the shed, and the yard. I look at the sky, mostly, when I am on the bridge, because it is very large at Tern. On a Tuesday in the fourth week, between the rope and the supper, I stopped on the bridge to retie my boot and found that the local was standing under me, with the first of its doors open. It was nothing. It was an ordinary train in an ordinary light. A fare, I thought, and a day, and a bowl of something with a dark loaf in it; one could go and be back on the evening local, if one did not stay. It was one of those thoughts that one has in passing and puts back where it was found. It was the kind that lasts as long as it takes for a hand to finish a lace. Down below, a conductor lifted his flag. The doors closed. The local drew out, and I watched it go as far as the first cistern. Then I went to see about the fount, which was my business, and was waiting. * * * I write in the notebook at night, at the table by the window, with the old light over the bed come up to meet me and the wind trying the frame like a man who does not expect it to open. The notebook is the green cloth one from Glasswater. It has the first word of a line in it that I cannot place, and under that, in my own hand, *Pinecliff.* That was the second line. It was a decision, not a memory. I knew that when I wrote it. I had meant to put something else beneath it for weeks. A name, a fact, a good line from Idrin. They were all too large, or too borrowed. They did not feel like mine. That night I sat with the pen over the page, and my cord on the table, and the sand-coloured cloth Zahir had lent me hung over the back of the chair, because he had not asked for it back and I had not offered. The tea was on the sill in the glass with the gilt rim. I had been given it that evening on the stair, from a height, poured three times so that the mint knows it is wanted. I wrote the third line. *Tea, three times, from a height.*  It is not a lesson. It is not a fact I could have kept and been given. It is a thing that happened to me on a stair, that I chose to set down because I should like to remember it. I looked at it for some time. Below me, on the platform, something went by, one of the long slow freights, with a sound like a very great animal being patient. The window was dark and then the lamps of the yard came up in it, and there was the long shine of the northern line going away to Halloway and the birches, a thing I had not known to want. *It is a good line,* I thought. And then, unasked, as a hand finds the wall: *C'est à moi. Itu milikku. Es mío.* The light over the bed was already up. I put down the pen.