unclaimed-recollection / 21 - Halloway.md# 21. Halloway > **Narrator:** Sevran Hallow · **Setting:** Halloway Station, the east bank, the field camp · **Act 2, Part 11** > Sevran arrives at Halloway for a ten-day job, with a plan for the first morning.  I had a plan. I should like that set down first, because it was a good plan, and because it is the reason that what followed was so very much worse. I made it on the train. It had a beginning, a middle and an end, and it had been revised on the two evenings before in the room above Zdena's kitchen, with the fount in the window as my only witness. The beginning was that I would see him first. The middle was that I would walk the length of the platform at an even pace, and he would turn, and I would say his name, once, plainly, as one says the name of a person one is glad of. The end was that I would hold out my hand, because that is what people do, and he would take it, and say what he would say, and we would go on to the muster as two men who had been apart for a time and were not, now, going to be. I went over it every night in the dark, in whatever words came, and on the third night the words that came made it sound as though it would turn out well. *Voy a decir su nombre. Voy a darle la mano. Es muy simple.* It was not simple. I will come to that. * * * Halloway is a station that the stones came to first. I had been here once before, briefly, with Anka and Odran, and once from the south with Ayuk, at the end of a day with a rod. I had not stood on its platform in the morning. It is long and low and built of the same dark weathered timber as everything on the Corridor, with the roof coming down over it in the Kandren manner, and behind it, standing up out of the larch and the fog like the stumps of something that had been very much larger, are the stones. They are tall and grey and furred green with moss at the foot, and in the early cold a white frost sat on the moss in a thin dry pelt. The larches had gone to the colour of old brass. Somewhere out in the fog a wire hummed. Our train had come in at a quarter to ten with a long sigh and three whistles. Idrin got down first and looked at the sky, the line and the edge of the trees, in that order, and counted the platform. Zahir got down second, with a pack on his chest, a roll of pegs, and an expression of being about to say a wonderful thing to the day. And I got down third, one hand on the rail, and bowed to the step. It was only when I was standing on the platform that I understood that I had put my hat in my hand. "You are holding it," said Zahir, "as one holds a hat at a funeral." "It is cold," I said. "It is a hat. It is for the cold. You put it on." "I shall put it on directly." I did not put it on. The team stood in a loose cluster at the north end, where the platform had been extended with planks for the season. Perrin Vasko, in her mended coat and her field-school cap, with a leaf under her arm. A slight, bright, untidy woman in a long grey scarf, with a roll of drawings in her hand and ink to the elbow, who was introduced to me as Lian Sarro and who shook my hand with both of hers and looked past me at the stones. A square quiet woman in a canvas apron with a hide roll on her belt, whom Vasko named as Marit Sove, the door-hand, and who nodded once and went on counting something in a tin. And Ayuk, with the long case on his back, who lifted his bad hand to me and to Zahir and to Idrin in a single movement and said, "Ground's firm. Frost's on it." That was the whole of his report, and it was a good one. "A word," said Vasko, when she had said good morning to everyone, "before the muster. Every one of you is to be cleared at the medical post before we go. It is Dorrin's, as always, and she has been told to expect you. I want it done today, and I want it done before we head out, so make sure to check in with her sometime this afternoon. It is a formality. She will see you for a moment and sign." "Anka," said Zahir, with a look at me, the look of a man putting a name to a dear face. "Dorrin," said Vasko, who does not hold with first names before noon. I said that I would go directly after the muster. It is a thing that I can do, say a sentence in a steady voice while some other part of me is attending to a different matter entirely. The different matter, that morning, was a leaf at Vasko's elbow, on which were written, in a clean plain hand, the names of the persons who had been placed on the sheet. I had not meant to read it. It was held at a slant, and I am a person who reads what is placed in front of him. *Maresh, O.* it said, in the guide's line. And beside it, in the small neat pencil that the Guild uses for a thing not yet confirmed, the word *arriving.* * * * He came on the eleven-forty. I knew that it would be the eleven-forty, because I had asked. I had asked in the careless voice that I have been practising, of the clerk, as one asks the time of a train in which one has no interest, and the clerk had told me, and I had thanked him, and counted that as the first of the day. The platform had cleared a little by then. Zahir had gone to the stove at the end for tea and was explaining to the stove-keeper what a flask was for. Idrin was sitting on a crate with his folding rule, doing nothing in the careful way that he does it. Ayuk had gone to look at a stone. Vasko and Lian were bent over a drawing on the lid of a barrel. I was standing a little apart, beside a pile of coiled rope, with my hat in my hand and my back to the line, looking at nothing in the world, when I heard the northbound come in. I will set down what I knew in the next quarter of a minute, in order, so that nobody may say that I did not have the facts. I knew that the sound of the doors was the sound of the doors of a train. I knew that a great many people get down from a train at a station, and that the great majority of them are strangers. I knew that the person I was waiting for, if he was on it, would get down with his satchel strap in his left hand, because that is how he gets down from a train, and that the way he looks at a platform when he first steps onto it is the way a man looks at a room in which he is going to have to count the exits. And I turned around, and he was there. It was not at all as I had arranged it. In the plan I saw him first, at a distance, with all the time in the world, and walked. In life he was at about eleven paces, which is not a distance at which anything can be arranged, and he was looking straight at me. He had stopped on the platform with one boot on the plank and one still on the step. He was in the moss-green coat, the one that has been mended at both elbows, and the strap was in his left hand, and he had his hair cut shorter than I remembered, and there was a little more grey in his beard than there had been in the summer. He looked like a man who has been walking for a long time in the rain and come into a lit room. And then he smiled. It was the one I know. It is not a large smile. It begins at the left side, a little crooked, and goes up into the eyes last, as if it had first to be sure that it was permitted. I have seen it given to a clerk, to a stove, to a very old woman on an express, to a fount. I had not, I find, ever seen it given to me from eleven paces, on a platform, in the morning. I walked. That was the plan, and I did it. I walked the length of the platform at an even pace, as I had arranged, and the pace was even, and my hat was in my hand, and I counted my steps, which were nine, because I have long legs and the platform was a little shorter than it had looked. At the ninth step, which was four paces from him, I stopped. I do not know why. I have thought about it a good deal since, more than the occasion warranted. It was not a decision. It was something like what happens to a horse at a fence. My back went straight. My free hand went to my side. My face did what it does when I have been given a thing to carry that I do not understand, which is to arrange itself into a composed and careful shape, and I heard my own voice say, in the formal Kandren that Zdena calls my grandmother's hymn-book: "Guide Maresh." I wish to be clear that I did not intend this. I had a name. I had a perfectly good name, which I had been carrying about for nine days in every form of words I own, and what I said was *Guide Maresh,* in the voice of a man reading a sign. There was a short pause. The wire hummed. "Mr. Hallow," said Odran gravely, and stepped the rest of the way onto the platform. The smile did not go. It only went a little further in. "I had heard that you were here." "I am here," I said, which was true, and was the only true thing I had been able to find. "I trust that the journey was not unpleasant." "It was a train," said Odran. "Mm." I did not hold out my hand. I had thought that I would. I found that it was occupied with the hat, and that I had no intention of putting the hat anywhere, and the whole question of the hand became in that moment a problem of such difficulty that I let it go. He looked at the hat. He looked, I thought, as though he would have liked to say something about the hat. Then he looked somewhere over my left shoulder, in the way he has when a thing is too much for his face, and it was then that Zahir arrived with the tea. "You *know each other,*" said Zahir, with pure joy. He had three glasses in one hand and a fourth in the other and a face like a lamp. "You are the small house. You are the one with the dates! Sevran. Sevran, it is the *dates.* He brought me a *goat,* in a manner of speaking. Guide Maresh, I am Zahir, and you have met, and I will not say that I have heard everything." "You have not heard everything," said Odran. "I have heard a great deal." "Mm." I looked at the third lamp. I examined it with attention. It had been lit, though it was noon, as they are at Halloway, against the fog, and it was an extremely ordinary lamp. Behind Zahir, on his crate, with his folding rule shut in his two hands, sat Idrin. He had not moved. He did not have to. He was not looking at me and he was not looking at Odran, and the whole of his face was kept very still, in the way of a man who has been handed a full bowl on a crowded boat. * * *  The muster was held at the north end, under the planking, with a barrel for a table. We stood in a half circle, which Vasko prefers, because she says a man can lie in a line but it is harder to do it in a curve. She read the roster aloud. She had every name by heart and she read it from the leaf anyway, to let us see that she did, and as each name came she held the leaf out and the person touched a cord to it, and the leaf took the bead and warmed, and she read the line that came up. *Orek, I.* The relay chain. *Dasan, Z.,* hands. *Hallow, S.,* hands. I put my cord to the leaf. The little warmth went through the bead and I read my own entry, *retraining, instructor of record Orek,* and heard, a pace from my left shoulder, the soft sound of someone else's strap being shifted from one hand to the other. "*Maresh, O.,*" said Vasko. "Guide. Confirmed on the morning's train." She held out the leaf. He put out his wrist. I did not look. I should like that known. I looked at the barrel, at the leaf, at the grain of the lid, and I found that I knew without looking how the bead on his cord would sit against the leaf, a small dull amber thing, a little scratched. And I did look. That was the end of that. He was looking at me. It was not a long look. It was an ordinary glance, such as one gives a man whom one has been told is in the party. But I was looking at him at the same moment, and we had no time to arrange it, and for the length of one breath we looked at each other across the lid of a barrel, in front of a leaf, in front of six people, and neither of us was able to find anything to do with our faces. He looked away first. I think. I am no longer sure. I looked at Vasko, who was reading a line about water. I looked at the leaf. I looked at Lian's drawings, which showed a bank and a door. I looked at Ayuk's hands, which were still. And somewhere in the next minute and a half, when Vasko said that we would be on the east bank by two, and Zahir said "By two!" with a rapture that I cannot account for, I looked at Odran again, quickly, as one steals a look at the clock, and found that he was looking at the leaf with great attention and that the tips of his ears were red. *Il a les oreilles rouges,* I thought, and then, from I do not know where, *dan dia tidak tahu, y yo no sé qué hacer con esto.* I have no name for the thing that I felt then. I have been looking for one for some time. It is not fear, though it has the same speed. It is not shame, though it makes a man look at his boots. It is not the old plain gladness that I had had in the kitchen at Pinecliff, which I could have named at once, because it was the whole of what I was. It is something that happens when one thing one has been missing is set down, a little too suddenly, in front of one's face, and the face has no instructions. "Good," said Vasko. "Medical at the post, all of you. Not at once. In turn. Orek holds the chain. Maresh with me for the route. We go at one." * * * I went to the medical post directly, because I had said that I would, and because I wanted to be somewhere with a door. It is a low stone hut at the end of the platform with a stove in it and a lamp in the window, and a cupboard in which are kept bandages, a great many small bottles, and a chart of the human hand. Anka was at the table with her sleeves rolled. She is smaller than one remembers, and sturdier, and every time one sees her she looks as though she has been made of something that was designed to last. She looked up and put down her pen. "There you are," she said. "Sit." I sat. She took my wrist, and looked at my eyes with a small lamp, and made me breathe, and asked me whether I was sleeping, and whether I was eating, and whether Zdena was still putting fish in everything, and I told her the truth, which was yes, and yes, and that it was a Tuesday soup. She wrote on a sheet. She has a good plain hand. She listened to me with a rubber tube, and when she had finished she took the tube out of her ears and looked at me over the top of the sheet for slightly longer than was necessary. "You are well," she said. "I am well." "I am glad to see it." She said it simply, as one reports a reading, and then she put the pen behind her ear, which is a habit of the Collegium that I think she caught from the doctor and does not know she has. "You look as though you have put on a little weight. That is Zdena's doing. I shall write to her." "She will be pleased." "She will pretend to be furious." Anka signed the sheet. She blotted it. "Sevran. You will be at the east bank for ten days or so. It is a short job, near the Archive but not at it, and you will be with people who count heads. I have no worries about it." She held out the sheet. "But if ever you feel odd out there, or you feel unsafe, or you simply want to sit down somewhere that is not a field, you come to me. You do not need a reason. You do not need to be hurt. You come." I took the sheet. It was warm from her hand. "Thank you," I said. "That is the second," said Anka, "and I will let it count." She looked at the window, where the stones stood up in the fog. "Go on. They are waiting." She bent again to her book, and I went out into the cold with the sheet in my hand and a good deal more steadiness than I had come in with. * * * We went out at one, in a long line, along a path that the Guild had trodden up through the larches east of the station. Vasko led with her map. Lian and Marit went behind her. Zahir came next, with a pack on his chest and a pack on his back and a coil of rope over each shoulder, and then Ayuk with the rod case, and then myself, with a bundle of five lamps and a pouch of chalk, and at the rear, because a guide goes where he can count, Odran.  I knew that he was at the rear. I knew it with the whole of my back. It is a very odd sensation, to walk for two kilometres through frosted larches, with a path of wet gold leaves under one's boots and fog coming up between the trunks, and to be aware at every moment of exactly where a person is behind one, as a man is aware of the sea. It was not a comfortable arrangement. I tried to put my attention on the larches. They are fine trees. They go gold and then bare, and they drop their needles in a soft dry rain, and the path was all needles and moss, and every so often a small bird got up from the bracken with a noise like a dropped pin. I looked back. I did not mean to. It was at a place where the path bent, to see whether Marit had kept her footing on a root, and the line behind me was in view, and so was he. He had his head down and his eyes on the ground, in the way that he has on a bad path, and his lips were moving. He was counting us. I saw the end of it. His eyes came up and went along the line from Vasko to Zahir to Ayuk to me, one, two, three, four, five, six, and arrived at my face. I looked at the path. So did he. At the next bend I did it again. I should say that I was ashamed of this the first time and was much less ashamed the second, and by the fifth I had stopped counting my shame and begun to count instead the number of times that he looked up in the same moment as I looked back. I think it was four. It would have been five, but at the fifth Zahir turned round and said, "Is something wrong?" "A root," I said. "A *root,*" said Zahir, with great satisfaction, as if I had provided him with a rare specimen, and turned round again. Idrin had dropped back, I found. I had not noticed him do it. He had fallen in beside me, a pace off, with his hands in his coat and his eyes on the trees, and he walked like that for a hundred paces without a word, which is his way of beginning one. "Sevran," he said at last. Mildly, to the larches. "Yes." "I am going to say a thing once. At the door, or after it, you may find that you do not like the look of the place. Some people do not. There is no reason in it. It is old, and it is a long way down, and a good many perfectly sound men have found that they would rather stand somewhere else." He did not look at me. "If you are not well, or if you feel that you would rather not, you will say so. Or you do not even have to say. You step back, and I will see it. You can always stay back a bit more." It was not a question and he did not wait for me to say that it was kind. He said it, and he walked on, and I understood that it was to be left on the path like a coin. "I am well," I said. "But I shall remember." "Good," said Idrin. "It is a short job." And after a moment, with great care: "He counts as I do. It will be very restful." I did not ask who. There was a root, I think, at that point, and I attended to it. * * * The bank is on the east side of the stones, where the river has cut a low cliff in the rock and the rain, some weeks before, had brought down a slice of it into the water. It was a raw place when we came out of the trees onto it. Torn earth, wet roots, a slope of stone-grey clay, and in the middle of the cut, plain as a door in a wall, a rectangle of dark iron set into the rock. I can tell you how it was made, because I stood and looked at it for a long time. It was higher than a man and not very wide, with a flat lintel, and it was set deep in the rock with a lip of the same iron round it. It was not pretty. It had no ornament at all. The iron was the colour of an old pan and the damp had left a line of green along the foot of it. Across it, at about the height of a man's heart, ran a single bar, with a plate, and on the plate a small round socket with nothing in it. Marit went forward with her hide roll and knelt in the clay and began to lay out her tools in a row. Lian put her hand on the lintel, as she had done the first time, and I saw her mouth form a word that I did not catch. Vasko walked the length of the bank and looked at the sky and said, "We will open it. We will not go past the first threshold. We will map to that threshold and come back, and that is the whole day. Any person who wishes to go further will do so on his own time and without my sheet." "Is it dangerous?" said Zahir. He said it as a man says *Is it magnificent?* "It is shut," said Vasko. "That is the nicest thing a door can be." Ayuk had gone to the far end of the bank and was kneeling with the rod. He pushed it in. He unrolled the leaf on a flat stone. He studied it. I did not go and look. I had been told where to stand, and I stood there, with the lamps on my arm, in the place where I had been put, and I looked at the door. I should like to be exact about what I felt, because a man who is asked later will want to know. I felt cold. It was a plain cold, from the iron, which was the temperature of the stones. I felt, for a moment, a pressure behind the eyes, which is a thing that comes when I have been standing in the wind. And I felt the particular quiet that comes when one is looking at a door that is a door, and nothing else. A thing in a wall. It did not look at me. I did not look at it with any expression that I know. Ayuk stood up. He said, "It's good ground. It's all right, the whole run. A bit of water at the sill." He rolled the case shut. Behind me, a long way behind me, I felt that I was being watched. I turned my head. Odran was standing at the edge of the clay with the satchel strap in his hand. He was not looking at the door. He was looking at me. It was a look I had seen before, once or twice, in the summer, from the other side of a fire, when he had thought I could not see: a patient look, a look that went over me as a man goes over a map he does not wish to admit that he has already memorised. There was no word in it. I do not think there could have been. He saw me turn. He did not look away at once. I saw him make up his mind. Then he looked at the door with a quite elaborate attention, and the hand on the strap tightened and let go, and he said, to nobody, to the bank, "Mm." I did not know what I had been looking at. I still do not. It was a man, standing in some clay, being very careful. * * * Marit opened the door at about half past two. It took her the best part of an hour. She did it with a rod of her own, and a flat brass thing like a key without teeth, and a patience that I have never in my life seen equalled, and when at last the bar moved, it moved without a sound. There was a breath of cold air out of the dark. It smelled of stone and of something very old and very dry, such as the inside of a drawer. And the door swung in on its own weight, a hand's breadth at a time, and stopped. "Right," said Vasko. "Lamps." I handed them out. I had been given the lamps and I had counted them, and there were five, and they were all lit. That was one thing I had in hand. We went in by twos, with the chalk. Vasko and Lian went first. Marit went behind. Then Zahir, who was permitted to carry a lamp and nothing else, and who went in with the face of a boy being allowed into a cathedral, and then I, with the chalk and the second lamp, and then Odran, who counted us through the door aloud. "One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six." A pause, and then, in a rather different voice, because I had turned, because I had been unable not to: "Six. Mm. Six in. Orek, you have the mouth." "I have the mouth," said Idrin, from outside, and I heard him say it again in his head, as he does. And then the two of them said together, one in the dark and one in the light, "Six in," and I understood that they had said it at exactly the same moment and were both, for an instant, rather astonished. The passage went down. It was not long. It was a tunnel of plain grey stone, a little wider than my arms, lined along one side with a pipe and along the other with a groove. It sloped gently. The air got colder. Our lamps showed the walls in a small bright circle, and past the circle there was the dark going away, and I marked the way with chalk, an arrow, a number, an arrow, as I had been taught, one, two, three, *chalk the way home.* It was the first lesson. I had a thought, for the length of a heartbeat, that the lesson had not been about the chalk. At a hundred and forty paces by Marit's count, we came to the first sealed threshold. It was a plate. That is all that I can tell you of it. It was a plate of the same dark iron, set flush into the end of the passage from floor to roof, with no bar and no socket and no seam. It was perfectly smooth. Vasko laid her palm against it and held it there for the length of a breath, and then took it away and looked at her hand as though it had said something. Lian put out a finger and touched it, and drew the finger back quickly, and laughed, once, quite softly, as a woman laughs in a library. "Lamp here," said Marit. She was pointing at the foot of the plate. "I want the line of the floor." I stepped forward and held the lamp where she said. I held it low, at the angle that she wished, with both hands. The light went along the foot of the iron. It showed a thin dark line where the plate met the stone, as exact as a drawn line, and above it a surface so even that the lamp lay on it in a small steady drop. It was very cold. I stood there with the lamp, and I looked at it, and I counted. I did it in the old way. It was a good plain thing, a count of twenty, and it went exactly as it should. I held the lamp. I breathed. Behind me there was no sound. Then I heard a boot shift on the stone, a pace behind my right shoulder, and a very small breath, as though somebody had been about to say a word and had thought better of it. I did not turn. I held the lamp. And I thought, for no reason that I can name, that if I did turn, I should find that he had put out a hand, and was holding it a little way from my sleeve in the dark, and that neither of us would say a word about it. "Good," said Marit. "That is the line. Thank you." "You are welcome," I said, and stepped back, and the hand, if there had been a hand, was not there.  We mapped the threshold. It took the best part of an hour. Lian drew, and Vasko measured, and Zahir read out numbers in a quiet reverent voice, and I chalked the arrows back, and Odran stood at the rear and counted. And when at last Vasko said, "That is the first run. That is what the sheet says. Out," we went out in the same order, one, two, three, four, five, six, and at the door there was Idrin with his leaf in his hand and his rule in his belt, standing as a man stands who has been standing for a long time. "Six out," said Odran. "Six out," said Idrin. And then, in the voice he uses on the first day of the course: "Adequate." Zahir gave a sort of small, ecstatic squeak. * * * We made camp on the bank, under the larches, a little back from the cut, on a flat place of moss and needles that Marit had looked at and approved. Four tents, a stove, a fire ring, a barrel of water and a long crate for the supplies. Lian had been walking round the camp with her hands behind her back, like a woman who has been given her own island. Vasko had her leaf on her knee. Ayuk had pitched his small tent a little apart. Idrin had gone back to the mouth with a lantern to sit with the chain, as he said he would, and as he plainly did not need to. Zahir was asleep. I will not claim that he fell asleep, since it was done with such abruptness and so many questions still in the air that I should say rather that he was taken. He lay on his side by the fire in his rust vest, with the third lamp beside his head, and one hand open on the moss.  It grew dark. It does so early, in that season, and the fog came up out of the river and put a halo on the lamps. The frost began again, with the small dry sound that frost makes on canvas. The stones stood up behind the trees. I had a bowl of Zdena's lentils, which Zahir had carried for the whole of the walk in a flask, and had been warmed in the pot. I held the bowl in both hands and looked at the fire, and was, I found, in an extremely unsettled state, having been so for eleven hours. I should add that I had had a good deal of time to consider what I had done. I had said *Guide Maresh.* I had said it in the voice of a notice-board. I had had nine days, and every form of words I own, and a fount who had heard the whole of the plan, and I had said *Guide Maresh,* and put out no hand, and been looked at by my own instructor, and by a woman with a rubber tube who had seen it through a window. And what was worse, and I came at it now by slow degrees, as a man comes at a cold bath, was that I knew perfectly well what I should have said. It was there, in the plan. *Voy a decir su nombre.* It was only a name. It had two syllables. I had said it in my head a hundred times, in a warm room, to the dark. I had said it to a fount. *Quel idiot,* I thought. *Dan dia tersenyum. Y yo dije Guide.* The log on my right shifted. I did not look up. I knew the sound of that boot. "Is there room?" said Odran. It was a long crate, and there was room at either end of it, and a good deal in the middle. I looked at the crate. I looked at the fire. I heard my own voice say, quite calmly: "There is room," I said. "I should not object." There was a short pause. "That is not no," said Odran. He sat. He put down his own bowl, and the strap of the satchel on the moss, and he sat on the crate about a hand and a half from me. I could feel the warmth of him through the cold, as one feels a stove in the next room. He did not look at me. He took up a spoon, and put it in the lentils, and held it there. I did the same. For a long time neither of us said anything. I should say that it was not an awkward silence. I had been prepared for one. I had been prepared for a silence in which every word is a plank thrown across a gap, and one must go one at a time, and not look down. This was not that. It was the other silence, the one we had had in a kitchen in Pinecliff, with a pot on the stove and a loaf on a board and the whole slow business of two people in the same room, eating. The fire spat. A log fell in. Somewhere in the fog a bird that I did not know said one note and thought better of it. "The fount," said Odran at last, to the lentils. "Is it well?" "It is in the window above the range. It has taken. I tell it about the day." I considered. "I told it about this." "Mm." It was a very small sound. "What did it say?" "It does not say. It merely listens." "That's the best kind." I looked at my bowl. A corner of my mouth, I found, was doing something that I had not authorised, and I let it. "Zahir told me," said Odran, "about the shirt." "I said that I should admire it." "He told me that too." There was a very small pause. "I laughed." "He told me that, as well." I turned my spoon over. "I am glad." "Resa sends her regards," said Odran. "She said I was to say it in those words. Her regards. She said you would know the way to take it." He looked at the fire. "The pot is on." I could not, for the moment, have said anything at all. I looked at the flames, and the flames did what flames do, and after a time I found that I had put down the spoon, as I do, along the rim of the bowl, at its exact angle. I did not know that I had done it until I saw him look at it. He looked at the spoon for the space of a breath. And there came across his face, in the firelight, the smile that I know, the small crooked one, not for a clerk and not for a stove, and he did not hide it. "Mm," said Odran. I think that is when it happened. I should not like to say so with certainty. I only know that the hand and a half had become, in some manner that I did not see, a hand. That we were sitting nearer than we had been. That nobody had moved. That the fire, and the lamps, and the stones in the fog, and the long cold bank with a door in it that was shut, had all gone a little further off, and that I could hear him breathe. I do not have a name for it. I have said so. I looked for one, there on the crate, with a bowl in my hands, and found only the old plain thing, the one I had had at Pinecliff, that does not need one. It was not what I had planned. It was a great deal better. *C'est bon,* I thought. And then, unasked, very quietly, as a man sets his hand on a wall that he is glad to find: *Itu baik. Está bien.* We ate. We did not say a great deal more. At some point Ayuk got up, in the dark, to look at his rod, and came back, and sat down again. At another Vasko said "Bed, all of you," in a voice that was not meant to be obeyed. Zahir, asleep, said the word *goat,* and a long silence came after it, which neither of us interrupted. And it was very late, and the fire had burned down to a red eye, and I had the faintest idea that my shoulder was warm on the right side, when he said, so low that I thought at first that I had imagined it: "I was going to say your name." I turned my head. "On the platform." He was looking at the embers. "I had it ready. I'd had it ready since Tern. I had a whole... I'd thought about it for nine days." He made a short sound that was nearly a laugh. "And you said *Guide Maresh.*" "I did." "In that voice." "It is the only one I have for notices." "I know," said Odran, and he laughed, quietly, properly, with his head down, and it was a long time before he stopped. I listened to it. I listened to the whole of it, and I did not need to count anything. When it was done he wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand and sat for a time, in the red light, with his shoulder against mine, and said, "It's good to see you, Sevran." "It is good," I said, "to see you, Odran." There. I had said it. It had taken eleven hours. It was a plain name and it had two syllables, and it came out as it was always going to, in the dark, to a man who was sitting a hand's breadth away, and he heard it, and I heard it, and the frost went on settling on the tents in its small dry way, and out in the fog, a long way off, the station lamps burned yellow along the line. We sat. Nobody told us to go to bed. The stones stood, and the iron door in the bank stayed shut in the dark, as it had for a very long time, and did nothing; and on a crate by a failing fire, two men finished their lentils and put their spoons down together, along the rims, at the same angle, and neither of them remarked on it.