unclaimed-recollection / 20 - The Roster.md# 20. The Roster > **Narrator:** Idrin Orek · **Setting:** Tern Junction platform, the Guild counter, Zdena's kitchen, the yard · **Act 2, Part 10** > Idrin counts heads for a living, and notices more than the roster asks.  I count heads. It is a habit and I have been told it is a flaw. A woman in Lumen once said it made her feel like livestock. Four got down from the evening train from the city. A grain factor with his ledger under his arm. A woman with a covered basket that clucked. Sevran, who got down the way he gets down from everything, one hand on the rail and a half bow to the step. And me. Four off, four counted. I do not know when the habit became the one thing I could be trusted with, and I have stopped asking. It was a Friday and the platform at Tern was doing what it does at that hour, which is to look like a place where something will happen. Lamps lit along the whole length. The dark green evening local standing on the far line with its blue strip lit along its flank and a crowd of people unloading it in the careless way of people who are almost home. Freight bells somewhere. Steam going up straight in the still cold. Zahir was at the end of the platform, under the third lamp, with a tall brass flask slung from one shoulder on a strap and three small cups stacked in his hand. He was not looking at us. * * * I should say what the city had been. It had been three days of Sevran saying *thank you* to corridors. The Collegium wanted him looked at, as it had before, the Guild's paper was on it, and the Collegium had asked for me by name this time, which I took to mean that someone in a back room had decided that a man who keeps a trainee ought to bring him himself. So I put on a clean collar and went down on the ten o'clock with Sevran and a hamper of Zdena's, and I sat for the better part of two days on a wooden bench under a lamp, with my hands between my knees, while a thin dry doctor with a pen behind each ear did whatever it is that he does behind that door. I have sat on that kind of bench before. It is the kind that is built to be sat on by someone who is not the patient. I know the angle of it in my back. I know the sound that doors make. The doctor came out at the end of the second day and wrote a few words on a sheet and said that his patient was sound. He said it twice, as a man does who has expected to say something else. I asked if there was anything I ought to know. He said that he had looked, and that was all there was. Sevran came out behind him, buttoning his jacket, and thanked the doctor, and thanked the corridor, and then, because the bench was there and I was sitting on it, thanked the bench. I did not remark on it. I have learned that it is better not to. Now he stood on the platform at Tern with his hat in his hand, and he looked up the length of it, at Zahir under the third lamp with his flask, and I saw something cross his face, quick and small and gone, as a bird crosses a window. I saw him look the other way. Toward the footbridge, and the stair, and the north side where the Pinecliff local stands with its doors open. Then he looked back at Zahir and smiled with his whole face, which is a thing that he has learned in the last two months, and went down the platform to him. I stayed where I was and watched them. I have said that I count heads. What it does, if you do it long enough, is teach you to count other things. Where eyes go. Which hands are shut. And there were three cups in his hand. Zahir had not been looking at us. He had been looking at the crowd coming off the local. At every man in every coat. At every satchel. His eyes went along each of them as a man goes down a list, and stopped, and went on. He had brought three cups, because he is a boy who brings cups, and when the crowd had thinned and he had looked at the last of them he stood for a moment with his mouth slightly open, and then he put his face back on and turned round. "You're early," he said to Sevran. "The train was punctual," said Sevran. "I believe it was an accident. How is the shed?" "The shed is excellent." He unstoppered the flask and poured, and the steam went up in the lamp light. He gave one cup to Sevran and one to me. He filled the third and set it on the bench, very carefully, where it would not get knocked. And then he said, in a different voice, as one says something that has been sitting a long time: "Odran Maresh came." I did not move. I did not need to. Sevran had become so quiet that the platform seemed to have got louder. "On Wednesday," said Zahir. "He brought my mother's parcel. He came into the shed and said his name, and I thought, *oh.* And he sat on a crate and drank my tea. I told him you were in the city. I hope that was right." "Of course," said Sevran. "He laughed at the shirt." Zahir's face was doing something complicated. "I told him about the shirt, the broker, and he laughed. Out loud. I thought you would like to know." Sevran said nothing. He turned the cup in his hand a quarter turn, then back, and then he did something I will remember, which is that he asked, in an extremely even voice, as a man asks the time: "Was he well?" "He looked tired," said Zahir. "He looked... I don't know. He looked like a man who is thinking." "Yes," said Sevran. "That would be like him." And then he drank his tea, all of it, and thanked the cup, and went with Zahir up the platform toward the kitchen, and I stood by the bench with the third cup going cold at my elbow. It was Zahir who had set it out and Sevran who had seen it, and neither of them said a word about it. I picked it up. It was still warm. I drank it myself, as one does with a thing that has been left for someone who is not coming, and went after them. * * * I have held a relay chain for two weeks past a filed return date. I am not going to tell it. I tell it to nobody. It is in the Guild's books as a line, *base, relay hand, I. Orek, held,* and that is a more accurate account than I could give. What I will say is that it teaches you what waiting is. Not the sad kind that people mean when they say it. The other kind. The practical, dull, daily kind, which is that you light the lamp at dusk and trim it at midnight and put it out at dawn and do it all again, and you do not once let yourself look at the line of trees where they will come out. You count the days instead. You keep the chain up because a chain that is down cannot be answered. And you learn to see it in others. That is the thing I did not expect. When you have waited that way you can see it across a platform, the way a man who has had a broken bone feels the weather. I saw it in Zahir on that platform. He had been waiting for a man he had known for an afternoon, with a third cup. And I saw it in Sevran, who had not been waiting at all, in the way that a man who keeps a lamp lit has not been waiting. I said nothing about it. I want that clear. I am an instructor of record and I have a rule that I do not instruct what I have not been asked to. But I went home that night to the room above Zdena's kitchen and did not sleep, and in the morning I put my two trainees through the chalk field as I always do, and I watched them. They are very good. I do not say that to anyone. I have taught the Guild's field course at Tern for six years and I have had eleven trainees in that time, and of the eleven, three went on to something and eight went home, which is about what you would expect. It takes a hand two seasons to read a leaf without asking what it means. It takes a year to chalk a line so that a stranger can walk it back. It takes most of them until they are well into the second year to understand that the rope is not the point, the knot is not the point, and the point is who is on the other end. Two months, and those two could walk a stranger's chalk line backwards with their eyes shut. Zahir, because he listens through doors and has taught himself to follow a thing by its sound. Sevran, because he keeps what he is given and forgets nothing. They had the shed and the yard and the Guild counter between them, and they had each other, which is the part that cannot be taught, and which I had not planned. I stood at the far fence with my brass rule in my hand and watched them mark the last post, and I folded the rule shut and opened it again. *Adequate,* I thought, in the Guild's sense. It is the highest word we have. It means a thing will do whatever it is asked. I had said it once to Sevran on a Tuesday and Zahir had not forgiven me for a day and a half. I did not say it again. I let them walk home. * * * Perrin Vasko came in on the three-ten northbound the next Tuesday, and she did not look like a woman who had been on a train. She looked like a woman who had been on a surveyor's chain gang for fifteen years and had got bored of it. She was lean and fair and quick, with copper hair pinned up under a field-school cap, a good coat that had been mended in the right places, and a face that had learned to keep its opinions behind its teeth. She walked into the Guild counter in the middle of the afternoon, set a sheet on the glass, and asked for the instructor of record who had trainees. The clerk sent her to me. I was standing at the end of the counter with my rule and a bad cup of tea, because I had been about to go and check on the yard, and I felt the sheet put in front of me as one feels a hand on the shoulder. "Orek," she said. "I need two hands." I will set down what she told me, because I am going to want it later. It was a small job. A very small job, as such things go. Some weeks back there had been a rain slump on the east bank, two kilometres from the last of the known approaches to the Deep Archive at Halloway, and when the water went down there was something in the rock where the bank had been. An iron door. Not the Archive's own door, nor any that Halloway had a name for. A scholar called Lian Sarro, who writes about the field and whom I have known for a good many years, had walked out to look at it and put her hand on the lintel and come back to Halloway with a face like a lit lamp. It was an old service way, she thought. A way in, or a way out, or a way between. The Guild had been asked to open it, and map the first run, and find out where it went. It would stop at the first sealed threshold. They would not go further. They would not enter the Archive. The Archive is a place that Halloway has looked at for two hundred years from outside, and it is not Vasko's to enter, nor the Guild's, nor anyone's. "Ten days," she said. "A little more with the weather. I have a registered door-hand for the hatch. Lian will be the scholar. Veln for the ground." "Ayuk." "He says his rod has its calibration due before first snow, and he will do the sounding either way, and that the rod is old kit and the ground is ground." She gave me the corner of a smile. "I gather that is yours." "It is mine," I said. "I need the specialists on their work. I do not need them carrying lamps. I need two people who do not have to be good at anything, who are simply adequate to follow, hold the end of a rope, mark a line and haul out whatever comes up. A hand who is clever and wants to stay and read what he is carrying is a danger on a job like this. A hand who is steady and does as he is told is worth three." She had put one finger on the sheet. "And it is a good place for a trainee. There is nothing in that rock that has not been in that rock for a very long time. If a lad drops a lamp, it will cost us a lamp." "That is true," I said. "The Guild counter tells me you have two." I thought about it. I thought about it for as long as it takes to fold a rule. "I have two," I said. "They will be adequate." She looked at me. I do not know what she saw. A man with a bad cup of tea and a brass rule, perhaps. She looked at the clerk, and the clerk looked at the ceiling, and she said, in a different voice, "From you that is a reference, is it not? I was told it would be." "It is a word." "Well." She picked up her sheet. "I have been in this trade fifteen years and I have not yet met a man who said it without meaning a great deal. Who do I sign for?" "Hallow, Sevran. Dasan, Zahir." "I should like to meet them." "You will," I said. "At supper. Business is after the meal, at Zdena's. It is a rule of the house." * * * I will say what the table was, because I have thought about it since.  Zdena's long table in the kitchen, with the lamp over it and the stove going. The soup, which on a Tuesday is barley and smoked fish, a thing that I would cross a desert for. Zdena at the head of it with her arms folded, saying that the Guild does not have a notion of the proper hour for a visit. Zahir across from me with his sleeves pushed up, glowing in the way he does when a stranger arrives who might ask him eleven things. Sevran at my right, with his napkin where a napkin ought to be. And at the end, in the guest's chair, with her cap beside her bowl and the mended coat over the back of the chair, Vasko, who ate her soup in a way that told me she had eaten in many kitchens and had learned to do it quickly and honestly. Over the range the fount stood in the window, in its crock with its cloth tied over, with the lamp laid along its shoulder and a bloom of damp on the pane. Vasko looked at it twice. She is not a woman who asks. Zdena saw her do it and said: "Oyari. It is fed at the turn of the day and does not take onion. You may smell it if you must." Vasko leaned toward it, and breathed, and said, "It is alive." "It is a household," said Zdena. "Eat." When the bowls were done and the bread was done, and Zdena had put down the pot with the air of a woman who has won something, Vasko told them. She did it well. She did it in the plain order that I had had it in, with the hatch and the bank and the ten days, and she watched their faces as she spoke. Zahir went the colour of a man who has been handed something that he has been told not to touch. He asked six questions before she had finished the first sentence. Whether they would be inside. How far. Whether the rock was dry. Whether there would be a lamp each. Whether *Archive* meant what he thought it meant. Whether he could carry the rod. "You will not carry the rod," said Vasko. "I will carry whatever is next to the rod." "You will carry what you are given." "That," said Zahir, with deep happiness, "is all I have ever wanted." Sevran had said nothing. He sat with his hands in his lap and his face composed, in the way he has, which gives you nothing and which is nevertheless the most honest face in the room. She had said the word *Archive,* and said it plainly, a place on a map two kilometres away. I watched him. I am afraid that I watch him as I would watch any instrument that I had been trusted with. And I will set down exactly what I saw, which was nothing. His hands did not move. His eyes did not move. He listened to the word as one listens to a place name, and when she had finished he said, "That is very generous. I should like to be of use." I have turned that over a good many times since. A man who was found near that place, whom the Guild's paper calls an explorer in retraining and whom Anka walked down from Halloway, who has been told by every kind person in this house that he will not be asked, sat at a table and heard the name of the place said aloud, and did not so much as shift his weight. I do not choose to know what that means. I have the habit of leaving a door as it is. "And Halloway has the medical post," Vasko went on. "Dorrin's, as always. She will clear the fitness on arrival, I believe she is already booked. A formality." "She will be there," I said. "It is her posting." Zahir looked at his hands. "I have one more thing," said Vasko, "and then I will let Zdena throw me out." She turned her cup a quarter turn on the table, which I noted, because she was a woman who did not do things for no reason. "I asked the Guild for a guide. Someone who knows the Northern Ruins and the north line to Coldharbor. I put in for the one I wanted first, and the Guild has sent the request on. I have not had an answer." "Who did you ask for?" said Zdena, who does not hold with leaving a sentence open. "Maresh. Odran Maresh. He did a day for me at the Charter Hall a few weeks ago, and was the best I have had in a back room in years, and I offered him a berth on my winter survey. He declined. Quite correctly, as it was six weeks in the dead of the year." She paused. "He said it was a bell." There was a very small sound. I do not know who made it. I think it was the spoon. "A bell?" said Zdena. "I assumed it was a figure of speech. He wouldn't say. He said it as though it were the whole answer and then he gave me the name of a permit clerk at Coldharbor and wrote it on my map. I have never been so thoroughly refused by a man being so useful." She smiled. "So I thought: a short one. Ten days, not six weeks. He might say yes to a short one." "He might," I said. I counted. It is a thing that I do. I counted three seconds, and in the third second I looked down the table. Zahir was looking at the ceiling with the deep, innocent concentration of a boy who has just decided not to do something. Zdena was looking at me. And Sevran had put down his spoon, which had been in his hand, and laid it along the edge of the bowl at the exact angle that a spoon should lie, and was looking at it. He did not ask which bell. I knew which bell. I had it in a notebook upstairs, in a hand I had written very small, on the page for Pinecliff. Three bells on a post, rising, with the third one flat. I had written it down the first night he said it, at this table, in his old careful way, as one writes a chime, and had added the line that I had added in the margin because I could not help it: *a word is missing.* "I will see that the request is not lost," I said. "It is a good job. It is a short one. He will be a very good guide." I said it to the table in general. I said it to the soup. "Good," said Vasko. "I have a sheet to sign. Who has a pen?" I had one behind each ear. It is a thing I have caught from the doctor. * * *  I signed the form in the morning, at the counter, with the clerk watching. It is a Guild form, and it has a column for the instructor of record, and I entered what the column asks. *Orek, I., instructor. Trainees: Dasan, Z. Hallow, S.* There is a line for remarks. I looked at it for some time. There was a quantity of things that could go in it. I had in my pocket a long list of them, in order, with the dates. I put one word in the box. *Adequate.* The clerk read it upside down, as clerks do. He looked at me, and at the word, and said: "Is that all?" "It is enough." "It is the only time I have seen it written there," said the clerk. "In eleven years. They put *competent.* They put *sound.* Some of them put a paragraph." He stamped it. "Is it a joke?" "It is the highest word we have." "Then I hope they know that." I do not think they did. I did not tell them. It seemed to me that the proof of a thing is in the thing, and not in what is said about it, and that two trainees who are brought on a Guild survey two months into a course which most hands take two seasons to finish do not need it said aloud. They would work it out. Or they would not, and it would not matter. I touched my cord to the counter leaf to enter the stamp. It is a thin flat display, pale and matte, and it shows a man his own things and no one else's. It showed me my own. The Tern bead, the copper Guild bead, the instructor line. And at the foot of it, small, as one sees a lamp at the end of a long corridor, the new line with the job on it, and a name on the guide's berth, pencilled, pending. *Maresh, O.* I looked at it for as long as I would look at any entry. I did not touch it. I have been asked since whether I did anything. I did not. I put in no word. I did not write to Pinecliff. I did not tell Sevran what was on the leaf or Zahir what was on the sheet. I was not asked to, and it was not mine. If a man's name is put on a roster by a lead who wanted him, and if he says yes or no to it on his own account in his own kitchen, then it is the Guild's paper that has done it, and not a man with a pen behind each ear. I had one thing to do, and that was to see that the paper was not lost. I have kept a good many things from being lost in my time. The paper is not hard. * * *  I keep a notebook. It is in a drawer, and nobody knows of it, except that Zahir does, because Zahir knows everything, and Sevran, because Sevran sees what is in a room. They have both been kind enough not to say. It is a book of platform songs. Every halt on the Northern Corridor has one, a chime or a horn or a bell, and nobody writes them down, because they are a thing that lives in the ear. I have been writing them down for fifteen years. The Tern chime is on the first page, four notes falling. Halloway is a long one, three notes and then a rest, like a man who has said something and is waiting to see if it was heard. I have forty-one halts. I have the Unlisted Stop, which is a blank page with a date. That night I took it out and opened it at Pinecliff and looked at what I had written, and did not add anything. It was already as full as it could be. I had the three bells. I had *rising.* I had the third, flat, and the margin line. I had a man's voice saying it in a dining room, as if it were the plainest thing in the world to carry a station's chime in his head and tell it to a stranger. I had not thought, when I wrote it, that I would one day be at the other end of it. I sat in my room above Zdena's kitchen with the lamp lit and the window dark and the sound of the yard coming up through the floor, and I thought about Maren Hesk. I do that on certain nights. I thought about her crew, eleven years of it, and about base, and the lamp, and the two weeks. About a woman called Maren who used to say that a chain is only as good as the one who holds it. I thought about the line of trees. I am going to Halloway. I have not said that. It has been on the sheet since Tuesday, and I have not said it to myself either. It is a short job, near a place I have not been near in three years, on a bank where an iron door has come out of the earth, and I am going as the relay hand, which is what I am. I will sit on the surface at a post with a chain and a lamp. I will hold the line while the others go in. And at the end of ten days, or a few more, I will count them out. It is not Vael Tessin. I know the difference. It is a short job with a lead who counts and a sounder who says no when the ground says no, and a door that has been shut a very long time and has not, in all that time, opened for anyone to harm. I have looked at it from every side that I know how. It is safe. It is a good place to be wrong. And I will count them. All of them. The lead, and the scholar, and Veln, and the door-hand. The two lads. And a man in a moss-green coat, if he comes, whom I have never met, and whose name I know from a notebook and a spoon laid down at an angle. Nobody comes back alone on my chain. I did not write that. I have a rule against it. But I looked at it for some while, in the lamp. * * *  At midnight I went down to the yard. It is a thing that I do. I walk the chalk. The lads had marked a line that afternoon, from the shed gate to the far fence, a long straight run of marks with a spiral at every tenth post, and in the dry cold the chalk stood up white on the dark boards like a path in a dream. Two lanterns on it, one at each end, left by Zahir, who cannot leave a lamp unlit. *Two lanterns, trust neither.* It is an old saying. It means that if you have two lights in the dark you will tend to steer by the brighter, and you will be wrong half the time, and so you should steer by the chalk. I have said it to three hundred trainees. I said it to Zahir, for three years, through a wall. I stood between the two lanterns with my hands in my sleeves. The footbridge was black against the sky. At its north end the Pinecliff local was standing in the dark with its doors shut, one lamp lit in the brake van, and I looked at that for a time. It would go at first light. There would be a man on it, perhaps, with a satchel and an answer. Or there would not be. A man in a kitchen down the line would decide whether to say yes to a short job on his own account, in his own time, or would not. I was not waiting for him. I would like that to be clear. There is a difference between waiting and keeping a lamp lit, and the difference is that I know how long I am prepared to keep it. Ten days at Halloway. A little more, with the weather. And a muster, at which a number of people would be standing in a row. I thought, *we will see who is in it.* Somewhere in the kitchen a window was lit, and I knew whose. A lamp in a window, over a crock. A man who tells it about his day in a language I do not speak, and is quite sure that nobody can hear. I picked up the nearer lantern, and trimmed it, and set it back on the chalk. Then I went up to bed and, for the first time in three years, slept all the way to the bells.