unclaimed-recollection / 27 - Tern Yard.md# 27. Tern Yard > **Narrator:** Odran Maresh · **Setting:** Tern Junction · **Act 3, Part 6** > The yard wants an explanation for a favour. Odran gives one, in order and without heat.  I want it understood that I slept. I slept in my own bed, the narrow one, under the old light on its stool with its knitted cosy, and I did not dream of anything, and I woke at the usual hour with the frost gone grey on the window and Resa's bread still wrapped in its cloth on the table where I had left it. It was the first night in a month that nobody had been counting me. I woke at four anyway, out of habit, and lay there counting the beams. By seven I was on the morning local with my satchel on my knees and two members of the Pinecliff council across the aisle, and the larches going by the window like a row of lit lamps. I had put the coat on properly. The collar was straight. It would not stay that way, but I had thought it only courteous to begin that way. "Say what is true," said Hanne Corvel, "and no more of it than is asked." She said it to the window, in her flat dry voice, the way she might have said it to a bad pump. She is a woman of perhaps sixty with grey hair pinned hard and a high-collared dress the colour of slate, and she has chaired the Pinecliff council for eleven years by never once raising her voice in a room. She sat very straight on the bench with her hands on her knee. She had not slept either. I could tell by how exactly she had done her hair. "I will," I said. "You will be asked as the Guild's man. Not as Resa's brother, and not as the man who brought us the difficulty." She turned her head. "You did not bring us the difficulty. I would like that said once, on this train, so that you can stop arranging your face to apologise for it." "Mm," I said, and put a hand to the strap. Edda Pask, beside me, had the supply book in an oilcloth wrap and was holding it the way a person holds a bird that might leave. She is the youngest of them, thirty at most, quick-eyed, with her brown hair in two plaits she had clearly redone more than once. She kept the book for the council and a good deal of the hope, and she had been told she was coming to carry numbers. She looked as if she would have preferred a smaller thing to carry. Four in the first car beside ourselves. Two in the second, a farmer and a woman with hens in a basket. The mail car. I count heads. I have always counted heads, and I did not stop counting them on that train, and I made it nine by the time we were round the long curve below the Saddle and the sun was well up, hard and gold and no warmer than a coin. My wrist was cold. I will say what was on it, since I am in the habit of being exact. A keycord, a plain bead cord with the Guild's guide bead on it, and a pulse bead, which had gone warm the night before in front of my sister, and which had been, ever since, a small point of attention on my left arm that I was determined not to look at. *Eat properly. Sleep. Don't take the yard personally.* I had answered it, because I am not a man who leaves a message standing in the hall. I had sat on the edge of the bed with the light on and drafted three replies and sent the shortest. *Eating properly. Biscuit noted. Home safe.* It was all true. It left out the yard, and the notice, and the morning, and where I would be by nine o'clock. I had decided that in the dark with some care. Sevran had the registry to sit through and the Solvara paper after it, and forms that would take two days and that he would do exactly, with his whole attention, as he does everything. He did not need this laid on top of them. There would be a time to tell him, and it was not now. I held to that, and I want it on the record that I knew perfectly well what I was doing. "Odran," said Edda quietly. "What will they ask?" "Why," I said. "Then who. Then what we will do about it." "And what do we say?" "The truth, in the order it happened." I thought about it. "It is a good story. It is only unflattering to one party, and he is not going to be in the room." Hanne looked at me for a moment, and her mouth moved, very slightly, at one corner. It was not a smile. It was the place where one would have been, if she had been sure it was allowed. * * * Tern is a wind with a station attached. It meets you at the platform edge with the whole Saddle behind it. It takes your hat first if you wear one, and your sleeve after, and then it settles to the real work, which is standing in the middle of the town with its hands in everybody's coat. The light is thin there and very clear. The gantries stand along the yard in their iron rows against the pale sky, and the long green Saddle Line trains come in between them, and the whole place smells of cold metal, charging cells, woodsmoke and, from somewhere out of sight, onions. The chime sounded as we stepped down, four clean notes, falling. I have heard it more times than I could count and it still goes into me at the same place. I did not look toward the yard, down at the far end where the long shed is and the kitchen with its door propped open. I want that understood too. I looked at the clerks in their grey yard coats and the freight barrows with the pale blue lights in their racks, and at Hanne's back, and at the stairs. I was good at it. I have had practice. "This way," said Edda, who had been given a paper. The yard office is a stone-and-timber building at the near end of the gate, with Bohdan Krel's counter at the front and a long room behind it. I had been to the counter once before, with a parcel that was not on his sheet. He remembered, I think. He looked up when we came in, a heavy-shouldered man of fifty-odd with a grey cropped head and a clipboard held low like a tool, and he gave me the look a man gives a gate that has previously been left open. "Pinecliff," he said. "Pinecliff," said Hanne. "Through. He is already here." He jerked his chin at the door behind him. "Mind the step. It is not level and I have said so since spring."  The room behind was long and cold, with a stove at one end that had been lit and not yet convinced. There was a table of scarred pale wood with eight chairs and a ledger the size of a door on a stand beside it, and a map of the Saddle pinned flat on the wall, with the corridors drawn in three colours of chalk. Nothing on the walls to read but the map. A single window gave on the yard, and I did not stand near it. A man sat at the head of the table with his hands folded on a closed folder. He was sixty or so and broad, in a long grey coat of the yard's cut with a brass pin at the collar, three bars in a row, which I knew by sight and had never had cause to love. His hair was white and combed flat. His face had the settled look of a man who has spent forty years being right about the small print. He rose when we entered, and he did it exactly, from the knees, as though to show he could. "Oswin Marrek," he said. "Tern slot office. Mistress Corvel. Mistress Pask." He did not look at me for the length of a breath, and then he did. "And the guide." "Odran Maresh," I said. "Yes. I have the name." He sat. "Sit, please. Krel will join us. The yard was good enough to log the use and make the call, and I do not like to proceed without the party whose sheet it is." We sat. Hanne took the chair at his right hand, because she would have taken it in any room. Edda put the supply book on the table in front of her and rested both hands on it. I took the chair at the far end, where I could see the door, the stove and the man, in that order. Krel came in, closed the door, and leaned against it with the clipboard against his chest. He did not sit. He said nothing at all, and went on saying it for most of an hour.  * * * Marrek opened the folder. "I will be brief," he said, "and I will ask you to be the same. Yesterday at noon, the priority slot on the Crownward to Tern corridor, held by the settlement of Pinecliff under allocation from this office, was used under class P1. The use was lodged at the Crownward Muster Yards. The consignment was medical, mixed and sealed, with cells, covers and a cold-chain lot, consigned to the Field Guild at Tern Gateway and onward to the Far Reach. The claim was logged to Pinecliff. The cargo was not Pinecliff's." He turned a page. "The yard sent the notice to Pinecliff, as it must, and to this office, as it must. I learned of it at the same hour as you. I did not enjoy it." "We did not enjoy it either," said Hanne. "I am sure." He looked at her over the folder. "I will ask the question the form asks. Did Pinecliff sell the slot, lend it, or let it be taken?" "None of those," said Hanne. "It was an arrangement. A favour, granted in advance, to the Field Guild. The council agreed it in its own room. The Guild exercised it yesterday, as it was entitled to do." "Agreed with the Guild." "With the Guild." "On a slot that is allocated by Tern." "On a slot that Pinecliff holds," said Hanne, with no change at all in her voice. "I understood the word *holds* to mean what it says." Marrek smiled, and it was not unkind, and I liked it less than if it had been. "It means *holds under allocation*, Mistress Corvel, which is a different verb. We shall come to it. I would like first to hear what the favour was for." He turned his head. "Guide Maresh. You are named in the notice as party to the arrangement. Please." I put my hand flat on the table where he could see it. I did not touch the strap. I thought about the order, as I had on the train, and I began where it began. "There is a man called Sevran Hallow," I said. "He is a resident of Pinecliff, registered through Tern. His cord was issued by this office. You will have the file." "I have the file." "Then you know how he came to the Guild. He had no standing. He was discharged from the Halloway infirmary in good health and with no history, no kin, no registry mark, and a Guild that had paid for his bed and his keep and had no way of knowing whether it would see him again. The Guild's difficulty was simple. It had spent money on a man who might at any moment walk off the platform and not come back, and it had nothing to hold him with. It did not want to leave him without status. That was a larger risk, and a larger burden, because a man with no status is the Guild's to keep for good. It wanted him registered somewhere. It wanted him tied to a place." "And not many places will take a man like that." "No." I let that stand. "I asked the Guild to register him at Pinecliff. I said I would stand witness. I said I would answer for him, and that Pinecliff would take him." "On your word." "On my word, and on a letter from the Guild, and with the Guild's medical officer as a second witness." I kept my eyes on the folder, since it was a safe place to put them. "The Guild agreed, on one condition. If it was going to move the risk off itself and on to a settlement, the settlement would give it something to carry the cost. It asked Pinecliff for the right to use a priority slot, once, on a day of its own choosing, with no date set. Pinecliff's council considered it. It could have said no. It was not a good bargain for a hamlet with a few slots to spare. It said yes." Marrek's brows moved. "Why?" "Because of me," I said. "I will not pretend otherwise. I have lived there all my life. I have guided for it for years, and I have brought what I earn back into it, and I think it believed I had earned a hearing. And because one more resident on the roll does a place no harm." "It was transacted," said Hanne, into the pause, "not given away. The Guild took on a risk and Pinecliff took it from the Guild. The slot was the price. That is the whole of it, Master Marrek, and it was agreed in good faith in a room with a stove in it, by people who have never been in this one." I did not look at her. I could feel Edda not breathing beside me. "Ah," said Marrek. He sat back. He laid the pen across the folder, with great care, and looked at the window. "The boy." I want it on the record that I did not move. "The one with the bead," he said. "No birth date, and *registered by witness*. I remember the clerk who issued it. She talked of it for a week." He turned his head and met my eye, easily, with the whole weight of his forty years of small print behind it. "Memory of a sieve, as I hear it. No standing. A Guild purse behind him that is, shall we say, patient. A burden, I imagine, to everyone around him." My right hand lay flat on the table, where I had put it. The other had gone to the satchel strap where it crosses the chest, and the strap had gone very tight.  I thought a number of things. I thought that Sevran had learned to joke this season, and had written down his first one in the margin of a notebook. I thought that he lays his spoon along the rim of his bowl so that it will not roll, and that my sister had decided in his first week that he was a stray and had fed him accordingly, and was not sorry. I thought that the man across the table had never once said the name. "His name is Sevran Hallow," I said. "He is on the Guild's training roll and a resident of Pinecliff. Those are the facts of his standing." "Of course." "He is no burden to the settlement. I have not found him one." "I did not say he was," said Marrek, with mild surprise, and I understood that he did not think he had. "Pinecliff supports its residents," said Hanne. She had not raised her voice. She had not moved her hands. But Edda, beside me, sat up as if a string had been pulled, and Marrek, at the head of the table, turned his face towards her like a man hearing a door in another room. "All of them," said Hanne. "Those it has had for fifty years and those it has had for two months. And I will say, since the office has been so good as to bring up the subject of burdens, that Odran Maresh is one of the most productive people we have. He has guided for us for years, and he has brought in work and money and name, and he has done more to make Pinecliff worth a ward's allocation than anybody in this building. If he asked us for a favour, he was owed one." There was a silence in the room. The stove ticked. At the door Krel shifted the clipboard from one arm to the other, without a word. "I withdraw the remark," said Marrek, after a moment, and I could not tell if he meant it. "It was not material. I am an old man and I am short of patience for the Guild's methods." He took the pen up again. "Let us return to the thing." * * * "I accept that it was transacted," he said. "I do not dispute the cargo. Medicine on a P1 claim, for the Far Reach, in a bad week. Had I been asked by noon, I should have approved it by lunch." He turned a page. "I was not asked. That is the whole of the matter, and I would be glad if the council would hear it as I mean it." "The slot lapses if it is not used," said Edda, in a small voice. "It did not lapse. It was used. It was used for something good." "It was used by the wrong party," said Marrek. He said it gently, to her. "That is not a moral judgment, Mistress Pask. It is a question of who knew. An allocation is a trust. Tern gives a ward a slot so that the ward may use it for its own needs without bargaining, and Tern knows who is on the corridor at any hour because the slot is Tern's to give. The moment a third party rides it without Tern being told, Tern no longer knows who is on its own line." He spread his hands. "Misuse is use without prior approval. Whatever the cause, and however fair the price, and however poor the manners of the party who made it." "The Guild is not a stranger," said Hanne. "It is not Pinecliff." He folded his hands. "Mistress Corvel, I do not say that the council acted in bad faith. I say that the council did not ask. It will not occur again, because I propose that it cannot." "Go on." "Pinecliff's allocation under the ward arrangement is suspended, from today, for two seasons. For that period it holds no guaranteed slot on this corridor. It may buy what it needs through the brokers at the rate of the day, like any hamlet in the Reach. That is not a hardship. You know as well as I that it is not." He looked at the ledger, and then at her. "At the end of two seasons we shall review it. If Tern is told in advance of every use, in writing, by whom and for what, the allocation will be restored." "It is a rebuke," said Hanne. "It is a procedure," said Marrek. "I will not insult you by calling it more." I will say something about that, since I have promised to be exact. I thought it was a slap on the wrist, and I thought it was meant to be, and I thought that the man across from me was not a cruel man and had been at it forty years and could not conceive of a favour except as a debt. I thought that a hamlet with a rail line and a regular local would not die for want of a priority slot, and that it would buy, in the course of two seasons, one cart of seed and perhaps a sick child's passage, and that the broker would be paid, and that the council would be vexed about it every single time. I thought that a favour on a slot was how Pinecliff had paid for a man to be let stay in the world, and that Tern had taken it back for the sake of a form. I thought that Tern had issued the bead and had not been asked, and that this was true, and that nobody could be wholly in the wrong. I did not say any of it. "Any brokerage," I said. Hanne turned her head. "Any slot Pinecliff must buy in the two seasons," I said, "for whatever purpose, through the brokers at the rate of the day. I will pay it." "Odran," said Hanne, very quietly. "It is my doing," I said. "The council agreed because of me, and it is paying for it. I am the Guild's man for Pinecliff and a resident of it, and I have the guide's pay and not much else to spend it on. I would rather it came from me than from the supply book." I did not look at Edda. "I will not have Pinecliff pay twice." "That is for the council to decide," said Marrek, "and for you. Tern will note the offer." He wrote it down. "We do not require it." "I know." "The Guild will be written to separately. I have a number of questions for the Guild." He closed the folder. He looked, for a moment, almost tired. "I do not enjoy this, you understand. It would have been simpler if a clerk had sent a line." "A line would have been nothing," said Hanne. "No." He rose. "That is what I tell the young clerks. Nobody ever misses it until the day it is not sent." At the door, as the others filed out, Krel unfolded himself from the frame, looked at the sheet in his hand and spoke for the first time that morning, to nobody in particular. "Sheet's square," he said. "Claim logged. Cargo cleared. Manifest matched. Owner told who used the slot, which is all that I am for." He glanced at me. "Pinecliff knows. Tern knows. I have nothing to add to that." "Thank you, Foreman," I said. "Mm," said Krel, which is the whole of what I got from him, and was enough. * * * Hanne stopped us in the yard, beside the gate, with the wind going by and her hand on her collar. "You offered something without asking us," she said. "Yes." "It was handsomely done." She said it with no warmth at all. "I do not like it." She looked at me for some while. I have been looked at by her since I was twelve, and I have never once managed to guess what she is thinking. "The council will discuss it. It will say no. You will argue. It will say no again. Then, I expect, we shall find you have already paid, and we shall have to say something else." "Mm," I said. "Edda and I will take the afternoon local. Zdena will give us tea, I am told, and I should like to see whether the kitchen is as good as it is said." She looked along the yard, without any change of expression. "You have an hour. Go and do whatever it is you do." "I have no business there." "No," said Hanne. "I imagine you do not." She turned. Edda, behind her, gave me a look of such frank and unfeigned gratitude that I had to look at the sky. * * * I should say that I had not meant to go. I had meant to go to the platform and sit on a bench and eat the second of Resa's rolls and wait for the afternoon local, in the sun if there was any, and do nothing, with my face arranged. I had made the decision on the train. It was the fourth time that week that I had decided to keep to the platform, and I am told that is a sign. I went through the yard gate. I walked along the long shed, past the charging bays with their racks of cells and their pale blue lights, and the gantry that stood in its place over the cart road. I told myself I was looking at the freight. The chalk line began where the cobbles ended. It is a bare square, the training yard, between the long shed and the gantry's third leg, with a coil of rope hung on a post and a lantern on an iron stand. It was marked out in chalk that had been walked over a hundred times, in squares and long strokes and one wavering arrow. A man stood at the edge of it in a charcoal-brown waxed coat with brass clasps, a folding rule at his belt and a pouch of chalk at his hip, looking at the sky, the line and the tree edge in that order, as he does. Idrin Orek counted. I could see him do it. His lips did not move. His eyes went over the yard, once, and came to me, and stopped. "Four," he said, without turning his head. He is a lean man of forty-two with grey in his dark hair and a pale scar along his left cheek, and he said it as a man says the time. "Guide Maresh." "Instructor Orek." "Adequate morning?" "Adequate," I said. He nodded, once, and went back to the sky. That was the whole of it. It is the best greeting I have had from him, and I took it as meant. Beyond him, by the gantry's leg, two men were at a rope. Zahir Dasan saw me first. He is a shade shorter than the other and built like a bundle of cord, in his rust vest over the blue tunic, with a chipped front tooth and his curly hair coming out of its knot, and he lit at the sight of me like a lamp at a door. He said a word in Tavari that was certainly a greeting and possibly a joke at my expense. He held up the end of a rope in one rope-scarred hand as though I should be impressed. The other man was standing with his back to me, with the grey rope in both hands. He was a little taller than Zahir, and a good deal taller than I am. He had the olive canvas jacket on, the one the Guild issues to a trainee, buttoned to the throat, and he stood in the way of a man who is waiting to be told where to put his feet. I looked at him. I did it quite openly, and for longer than I should have, and I am not sorry. He held his shoulders less like a letter than he had at the camp. I noticed, and told nobody. He turned round. He saw me, and he did the thing his face does, which is nothing, at first, and then everything. It is not a smile. It is the place where one would be, if he were sure it was allowed. His eyes found mine and did not leave. "Odran," he said. He said it plainly, in the old careful way, every vowel where it belongs. He had stopped saying *Guide Maresh* at the camp, and I have not got used to it, and I do not think I shall. "Mm," I said. "I did not expect you until the Halloway muster." "I had business at the yard." It was true, and I stopped there. The strap was in my hand. I let it go. "I have an hour before the local." "Then you will have tea," said Zahir, who had been waiting for the cue. "You will sit and have tea. I will make it and you will not argue." He was already moving towards the shed. "You can tell me about the parcel's aftermath. My mother has written. There was a goat discussed. It is unclear whether it is a metaphor." "The goat is not a metaphor," said Idrin, from the sky. Sevran had not moved from the rope. He stood and looked at me with the grey coil in his hands, and I thought, quite clearly, the way you think a thing in a very quiet room: *he does not know.* He did not know that I had spent the morning in a stone room being asked what he was worth. He did not know a man in a grey coat had called him a burden, or what Hanne had said, or what I had offered, or that I had gone down a corridor to do it. There was nothing in his face that said so. He had been standing in a yard, in the cold wind, learning a knot. He did not need to. Not now. There would be a day for it. It would be a better day than this one. A man should be allowed one morning in which nobody has been talking about him, and I intended that he should have it, and I had no intention of examining the arrangement closely. "Resa sends her regards," I said. It was true. She had said it at the door, with a roll in her hand. "And the pot?" "The pot is on." "I am glad." He put a hand to his chest, as he does, as if testing that something is where he left it. "I must tell you that I have found the biscuit again. It is on sale at the platform stall. I have been unjust to it. It is not as bad as the one I reported." He considered. "It is a little worse." I laughed. I had not expected to, and it was short and wet and surprised me, and I put my hand over my mouth. Behind us I heard Idrin, in the sky, make a small dry sound that might have been a cough. "Come," said Sevran. "Zahir will have found the cups." And then, in a voice I will not describe, because it was nobody's business but mine: "I am pleased you are here." "Mm," I said.  We walked together towards the shed, he and I, a half-step apart across the chalk, the wind at our backs and the gantry's long shadow lying over the yard. At the door Zahir was already pouring, from a height, from a brass pot, in a long bright stream that caught the light, into four cups. Sevran stopped to watch it. He did not take out the notebook. He already had that line. I took the cup he handed me. It was very hot. I held it in both hands, as one does, and said nothing, and let the steam go up past my face into the cold. There was a train in the afternoon, and a council to drive home, and two seasons of brokers' fees to work out on the back of an envelope. There was the matter of what to tell Resa. All of that would keep. I had one hour in a yard in the wind, with the tea going down hot, and I intended to have it.