unclaimed-recollection / 15 - Three Guides.md# 15. Three Guides > **Narrator:** Odran Maresh · **Setting:** Crownward, Hollin Salt, the Southern Corridor · **Act 2, Part 5** > Odran is hired as support on a survey far bigger than the job.  I have a parcel on my knee. It is flat, about the size of a Guild ledger, wrapped in oilcloth and tied with a cord that I did not tie, and it is addressed in a very upright Tavari hand to a name I did not know at Tern Junction, care of a yard. I have been asked to carry it. That is what a guide is for. You are the one person on a train who is going to the place that everybody else is only sending things to. The train out of Hollin Salt is a long train with a slow engine, and the seat beside me is empty, which on this line is not a sign of anything. I have my satchel on the floor against my boot and the oilcloth on my knee and the salt plain going by in the window as pale as an old plate. I am going to sit here for a day and a half and put the three weeks in order, because it is the sort of thing I do when I have finished a job, and because nobody is going to ask me for it. The Guild does not need a report from the support. It wants the chit signed and the card turned. I will start with the numbers, since they are the part that bothered me. * * * It was a rail-ruin survey. A spur, a few days out from the last working station past Low Kettle, that somebody at Solvara had been looking at on a sheet for two years and had finally decided to see. Track bed, sleepers, a depot shell, a collapsed signal gantry. Nothing that has not been surveyed on forty other spurs. A competent crew of six, with a surveyor and a relay hand and a cook, could have done it in a fortnight and been home for the first frost. There were fourteen of us at the Crownward muster.  I counted them twice. It is a habit. Fourteen, and a freight car of kit, and a field reckoner, which is the smallest of Solvara's reckoners and still about the size of a hockey bag, and which an expedition does not normally bring unless it is large enough to justify a pack mule. A medical officer who was not the cook. A drone pilot and two drones. A Foundries rigging crew, three strong, with a lifting frame. A sounder with a rod nobody was allowed to look at. A Solvara liaison with a very clean coat. A surveyor and her assistant, a quartermaster and a waker and a relay hand, and a lead. And three guides. I was one. The lead was a Foundries woman called Hessa Corrow, sixty or so, with grey hair cut like a hedge and the voice of somebody who has been explaining a plan to men who did not want it for thirty years. She stood on a crate in the Muster Yard with a sheet in her hand and told the lot of us the order of march. I stood at the back with the other two guides and listened to the sheet and thought, quite calmly: *this is too many people.* It makes a kind of sense. Solvara had put up the money, the Foundries had put up the muscle, and each wanted its own hands on whatever was there. A joint expedition is a negotiation that has been given a freight car. Nobody gets what they want, so everybody brings extra. But I have been on forty crews and I have been on four that came back with fewer than they left with, and the thing they had in common was that nobody had known who was standing next to whom. A crew is a set of roles. Every role you add is a person you must keep in your head, and a head has only the one lantern. "Support," Hessa Corrow had said to me in the Charter Hall, when she signed me on. "You will not be leading. I have a lead. I have too many leads. What I want is somebody who knows what is past the fence." "I can do that," I said. I can. That is the first thing I want to set down, here, with the oilcloth on my knee. It was the first thing I noticed at the muster, in the cold, with the satchel across me and the cord twice round my wrist. I did not mind the crowd. I did not mind being at the back. I had stood at the back of forty musters and I knew exactly where to put my feet. For a week and a half I had been a man who put the third chair in the back room and could not say why. Now I was standing in the Muster Yard at Crownward with a sheet of names and I knew what I was. I am a guide. I have always been one. I know what the wider world is like, and where it bites, and who is hungry, and which clerk will take a permit before noon. I am the man who is not in charge and who is listened to. It is a good thing to be. It is, if I am honest, the only thing I have ever been good at, and I had spent a month confusing it with something larger. I noticed that. I did not say anything about it, because there was nobody to say it to, and because there was a drone being unloaded from the freight car and somebody had dropped a case. * * * There were two other guides, and I will do them in the order I came to like them. Naim Sarraf was from Hollin Salt, a wide, slow, humorous Tavari man in his fifties whose job was to know the ground at the far end and the people on it. He was the one who mattered. Guides are hired from the host settlement because the host settlement has to consent, and he walked into the Muster Yard with his own coil of rope and a wife's embroidery on his cuff and a manner of leaning on a thing that made it look as if the thing had been there first. He and I understood each other by the second morning. Halima Rekk was from Low Kettle. She was old, and small, and said eleven words in the first week, nine of them to the cook. She had walked the spur twice, thirty years ago, in a survey that was never published, and she knew where the ground went soft. When she spoke everyone stopped. When she did not speak, nobody noticed, which is the mark of a very good guide. I was the third. The one who had come in from outside, with the corridor lines in my head from Skerrow to Coldharbor, and the settlement manners of four hundred halts, and a way of reading a permit counter that nobody asked me to explain. If something went wrong at a station, I was the one who would know whom to ask. If something went wrong on the spur, it would be Halima, and Naim would say so. It is a good arrangement. I mean that. Three guides, three kinds of knowing, and none of them a lead. I have never been so entirely in my proper place. * * * I should say what I remember of the rest of them, since the Guild will want the names and the card will have them all on it, hung in a row in the north concourse under a date. I remember Teodan Sethra, a Foundries rigger, as the tall one. He is very tall, a hand's breadth taller than I am, and built long rather than wide, with a rigger's back and a drift of old soot ground into his palms that no amount of scrubbing will shift. He ran the lifting frame. I had not understood what that meant until I watched him. It is a great ugly thing of iron and chain, and a man who runs it badly looks like a man fighting a bull, and Teodan did not look like that. He ran it like a dancer taking a stair. The load went up as if it had made up its own mind, and came down where it was meant to, and nobody was ever under it.  I do not think I have seen a man put that much strength into something and take so little visible effort out. I watched him all the first week, in the way you watch a thing you would not like to lose. And I remember Joren Vass as the quiet one. He was Solvara. You could see it in the cord, a pale bead among the dark ones, which is what the saying means by *wearing Solvara*. He was a telemetry analyst, and what that means on an expedition is that he sat by the field reckoner in the evenings with a field leaf on his knee and kept it. The reckoner hummed. He read. He did not talk to the crew, or to Hessa Corrow, or to the very clean liaison. He kept to his leaf, as people do who have had a lifetime of being asked what they are looking at. On the third night, at the fire, he spoke to me. It was almost the only time. "Your man at Pinecliff," said Joren Vass. He did not look up. "The one with the odd registry. Is he well?" I had a bowl of Naim's wife's stew on my knee, and I did not move it. I will tell you what I did. I did not turn my head. I did not say *which man.* I said, "He is training," in the voice I use for a clerk, and I ate some of the stew, and Joren Vass said, "Good," and went back to his leaf. I did not ask him how he knew. I turned it over in the dark afterward, and I have turned it over on this train, and I still do not know. It might have been a Guild file. It might have been a Solvara list. It might have been nothing at all, a man's polite question about somebody he had read about on a sheet. A telemetry analyst sees a great deal go by, and Solvara is a house with a great many windows. I have spent my life learning not to ask a Solvara man what he can see. It is the same rule as the one about old lights.  But I will say this. For three weeks I slept with my boots on, and I never said the name once. * * * Hollin Salt is a town built on a very large dish of salt. You come to it from the north across the pans, white to the horizon, and the rails run out across them on a low causeway like a line drawn on a plate. It is a plain bright place with a plain bright chime, two notes falling and a pause, and I knew it at once, because I have been through Hollin Salt a dozen times and have never heard it without thinking that it sounds like a man putting down a cup. I thought: *he would want that one.* I did not mean to. It came into my head on the platform with the whole crew behind me and the freight car being unloaded, the way a name comes up in a dream. *He would be standing here with his head tilted, doing it back.* I turned my head, and there was a bright sky, and a Tavari porter, and a great many salt-stained boots, and the thought went where I put them. The bazaar is under a long roof of sailcloth. We had two days before the crew went out, to see to the animals and the kit and the permits, and Naim took me through it like a man showing a friend his house. He bought me a cup of tea in a glass with a gilt rim. He introduced me to eleven people. The twelfth was a pair. They were standing at a spice stall as if they had been waiting, which I think they had. A man of sixty with a grey beard and a face the sun had been at for a lifetime, in a long coat the colour of the salt. A woman beside him, small and straight, with her hands in her sleeves and her eyes already on my face. "The Dasans," said Naim, with a kind of deep and happy dread. I did not know the name. I want that clear. I had never heard it. I bowed, which is what you do, and the man said, in the old courteous Tavari, that they had heard there was a guide from the Saddle with the expedition, and that they begged his pardon for the liberty, but that they had a son at Tern. "A son at the Junction," said the woman. She had a very upright voice. "In the yard. He works nights in a charging shed. He sends us a letter every season and a good deal of nonsense in it. He has been telling us for three years that he is going to be taken on by an instructor. He says *not yet.* He writes it like a joke." She took a hand out of her sleeve. "A month ago he wrote *now.*" I said that I was glad. "We are *very* glad," said the man. He said it in the way that a man says a thing that he has been practising, with his eyes on the middle distance. "We should not like to send a thing by post. Hollin Salt is a long way, and the courier goes when the courier goes. You are a man who is going back. If you would be so kind." He took the parcel out from under his arm. It was flat, and wrapped in oilcloth, and tied with a cord, and I saw that the cord had been tied by the woman and untied twice and tied again. "Salt from the north pan," she said. "Dates. A scarf, because he will have no scarf. And a letter. He will not read it in front of you." "It is no trouble." "He makes tea when he is frightened," said the woman Dasan. She said it to my sleeve, flatly, as a thing that had to be told. "He has done it since he was four years old. If he is making a great deal of tea, ask him what is wrong, and then do not listen to what he says." I said I would not listen. "Good," said the man. "You have a face that one can ask a thing of." I have been told that before. By Anka, in a corridor, and by a clerk at Tern, and by a landlady in Lumen, all in the same words, and it has never once been a compliment. It means: *you are the one who will carry it.* I have a satchel for it.  I took the parcel, and I tucked it into the bottom of the satchel under the notebook, and I said I would put it into the hand of the first person I saw at the yard. They thanked me twice, and I said it was nothing, and Naim had to pull me away by the sleeve, because I had stopped, and was standing in the bazaar looking at a stall of dried dates. I did not know why. It was a stall of dates. * * * I will not tell you about the spur. There is nothing to tell. Four days out from Low Kettle on a hired sledge-truck and a great deal of walking, and then a long grey ribbon of track bed running into the scrub, with the sleepers gone to dust and the rails still good. A depot shell with a roof like a broken egg. A signal gantry lying on its side, as if it had grown tired. The ruin was a ruin. The crew went over it like a flock over a field. I walked the rails with Halima Rekk. She said four words, all of them about where to put my feet, and I put them there. I had the rails to look at, and I looked. There is a thing about old rail that anyone who has worked the lines knows. You can hit it with the heel of your hand, and it rings. Every length has its own note, according to its length and its age and how deep the track was laid, and a man with a good ear can tell a spur from a siding by the pitch of it. I struck one near the gantry. It rang flat, a long dull note with a gap in it, like a bell with a word missing. I stood there with my hand on the cold iron. I thought: *he would have crouched down and done every length of it, and written them in the green book in the order he heard them.* I thought it as plainly as I have thought anything, and then I took my hand off the rail and went to see about the sledge. It is the kind of thing a man has no business thinking on a crew. I had eleven people in my head and one lantern, and I had no room. I will say this for the three weeks. They did not leave me alone with it. A great crew is very bad at many things, but it is very good at that. * * * There is one more thing, and I will be brief. On the eleventh night, when the survey was almost done and the fire was big and the crew had run out of anything to say to each other, somebody proposed an entertainment. It was the quartermaster, I believe. It was a great deal of noise. And it was decided, by general vote, in a manner I did not entirely follow, that Teodan Sethra and I should settle something. I am not going to say what. I want that to stand. It was a thing that happened, and I was there, and I am sure that it will be described by somebody else with more detail than it deserves. I would prefer not to think about it. I have a rule about it, which is that I did not do it, and the man who did it was a man at a fire in the dark who has since been told to go away. I will only say that Teodan Sethra is very tall, and very strong, and astonishingly gentle, and that when it was finished he said, quite seriously, *you are not what I expected,* and I said that was the second time that month someone had told me so. And then Halima Rekk, from the dark, said five words, and everyone stopped laughing, and we went to bed. * * * The train is going over the causeway now, slowly. The salt has gone from white to the colour of a bruised plum, and the sky is doing the thing it does out here at the end of the day, and I have not said what I came to say. I am a guide. I have been one for twelve years, and I will be one for forty more, and I came back to it on a crowded muster yard with fourteen strangers and a lead on a crate, and nothing about it was a surprise. I was good at it. I was not unhappy. I am not unhappy now. I have a satchel and a cord and a parcel, and a card on the Late Board with my name in a row of fourteen, and in four days I will stand under it and turn it face down, and buy a drink for whoever is waiting. It will be nobody. That is how the custom works. It is only there for the ones who are. I looked at the oilcloth. There was a smudge on the corner where a thumb had been, and the cord had the knot a woman ties who has been told a thing is going far. I do not know what a person does with that. I put my hand flat on it, as you do on a rail, to feel what it rings. Nothing. It is a parcel. It is going to Tern. I will give it to the first hand in the yard, and I will not look for him, and I will not stay. I have decided that. It is the third time I have decided it this week. The train gives its long note over the pans, one low tone with a space in it, and I listen, with my hand on the oilcloth, until it is gone.