unclaimed-recollection / 22 - Key Without Teeth.md# 22. Key Without Teeth > **Narrator:** Zahir Dasan · **Setting:** The east bank at Halloway, the iron door, the field camp · **Act 3, Part 1** > On the second day at the door, Zahir is told to count everything he is not allowed to touch.  A ledger is only honest if you write the line before you know how the day ends. That is the first rule I made for mine, in the shed at Tern, three winters ago, and I have broken it exactly once, which was the night I wrote *Idrin: not yet* in ink and not in pencil. So I will set this down the way the ledger would, in the order it happened, and I will not tidy it afterwards. *Halloway. East bank. Second day.* I woke with a blanket on me that I did not remember having. It was grey wool, a good heavy one, tucked under my shoulder on the side that faces the fire, and the corner of it had been folded over my hand. I lay a while under the larches and looked at the underside of a branch with a single gold needle still hanging off it, and I thought: somebody did that, and neither of them will say so. I should say that I was asleep for most of the first night. I have been told this several times. I am told that I said the word *goat* at some hour, and that nobody answered it, and I accept all of that. I am a man who is easily taken by sleep when he has carried four lamps and a flask for two kilometres, and I am not ashamed of it. But I will say that a person who wakes by a fire and finds two bowls rinsed and set upside down on a crate, side by side, with their spoons laid along the rims at exactly the same angle, has been given a piece of information, whether or not anyone intended it. I did not write it down. I looked at it for the length of a held breath, and then I got up and made tea. I make tea in the morning the way my mother makes it, which is to say in the Tavari way, with the pot held high and the glass low, three pours, the third from the full height of my arm, so that the tea is wakened and aired and the glass is filled with a little cap of foam that nobody in the Reach has ever once complimented. The foam is the point. A host who does not pour from a height is only a man giving you a drink. I had eight glasses on the tray, one for every soul in camp, mine last, and a field stove that spat at me twice before it took. The camp came up out of the dark by degrees. There was frost on every tent, so thick that each canvas had a little white fur on its ridge. The larches stood over us the colour of old brass, and a thread of mist was lifting off the river and snagging in them, and far off, on the far side of the water, the tops of the stones had a faint pink on them where the sun was starting. It was a hard cold morning. It was the sort of morning that makes a man glad of a thing in his hands. Ayuk was up before me, which I should have known. He had pitched his small tent off by itself, as he does, and he was sitting in front of it on an upturned bucket with the rod case across his knees, going over the clasps one by one with his thumb. He raised the thumb to me. I carried a glass across to him with both hands, as one does for a man older than oneself, and he took it with the hand with the stiff last two fingers, and drank half before he spoke. "Foam," he said. "It is the point of it." "Mm." He looked at the glass. "My aunt would have said it was a waste of good water." "And what would you say?" "That I have had worse." He drank the rest. "The sheet doesn't want me on the walk today. Vasko says the plate is a door-hand's work and a scholar's, and the ground's no different from yesterday. I'll go along the bank later and do the clay on the west side, where it's soft. Over the chamber, if there is a chamber." He closed one clasp with a small click. "I am to stay out of everybody's way. It's a good day for that." He said it in the voice of a man who had been told a kindness and had decided to accept it as an instruction. I took his glass back, and he said "Thank you for the ground," and I did not understand it until I was halfway across the camp, and then I did. That was what I had shouted from the window of the southbound, after the sounding day, and he had kept it. Ayuk keeps things. Idrin came up from the mouth at about the time the light came into the clearing, with his coat buttoned to the throat and frost in the grey threads of his hair, and the chain coiled and hung on his left shoulder like a sleeping animal. He had been up all night. He does not say so. He sat down on a crate, and I put a glass in his hand, and he drank it like medicine, looked at the foam, looked at me, and said nothing at all. That is how I know it is good. "Is it a good day?" I asked. "It is the second day," said Idrin. "The second day is the one that tells you what the job is." "What is the job?" "Ask me tonight." I should add that the next glass I poured after Idrin's I had meant for Vasko, who was still in her tent. I had not decided to hold it out toward the crate where Odran Maresh sat. My hand did it. I was holding the glass, and then I was holding it out, and he had come across the moss with his satchel over his shoulder and his green coat done up to the neck and a look on his face like a man who has slept, and he took it from me. "Odran will do," he said. "I have been called worse than Odran. Not much worse." He glanced at the foam. "That is very good." "It is the point of it," I said, for the third time that morning, and he smiled, the quick crooked one, and said "Mm," and sat down on the crate with the glass in both hands. * * * I will tell you what I saw, since I am the person in the camp who is paid, in a manner of speaking, to look. Sevran came out of the tent he had shared with me and Idrin in a state of perfect order. His jacket, the olive waxed one that is the colour of a wet field, was buttoned to the collar. His hair was flat on one side, where he had slept on it, and he had made no attempt to correct this. He took the glass I gave him with a small bow. He thanked the glass, and then me, and then, when he saw that I was about to point out the rule, he said, "That is once. I shall thank you again this evening," and I had no answer, because I had made that rule up myself and lent it to a doctor. Then he did something that I want set down plainly, because I have thought about it all day. He walked to the stove, where the lamps were lined up in their row to be trimmed for the walk, and began to trim them. He did not look round for Vasko. He did not stop to ask which was his, or where he should stand, or whether he might. He took up the first and turned the wick and lit it from the stove, and set it down at the end of the row, and took up the next. Three years of watching men at the yard gate has taught me what it looks like when somebody is waiting to be told where to put his hands. He was not doing it. He was a man at a stove with a job. And Odran, on the crate, with a glass of foam in his hands, looked up, and watched him do it, and did not say anything, and did not count anything, and did not touch the strap of his satchel. He sat with his shoulders down. I had met that man twice, once at the shed with the dates and once at the muster, and both times he had held himself like a man holding a door shut against weather. I had made a joke of it in the ledger. *Odran: pockets.* This morning he was sitting like a man who had put down something heavy and was seeing how long he could go without picking it up. "Zahir," said Sevran, without turning round. "Is there a spare wick?" "In my left pocket." "Thank you," said Sevran, and then, with exquisite care, "That is not a second thank you. It is a continuation of the first." Odran made a sound into his glass. It might have been a cough. Then he laughed, properly, with his head back, so that a rime of frost fell off the larch above him in a small glittering shower, and I understood that I was in the presence of two men who had arrived, in the course of one night, at a thing I had spent a month asking them about, and that neither of them was going to tell me what it was. I have been told by two different people not to ask where a man is from. I decided, there at the stove, with my own glass cooling, that the rule extends to what a man is to another man. It is a good rule. It saves a great deal of tea. I did feel something, and I will be honest about it, since the ledger is. It was not jealousy. I looked for jealousy and could not find any, and I went through my pockets for it twice. What it was, was this. I stood three years on the platform at Tern with a tray in my hand and watched the trains go out, and I know exactly what it looks like when somebody finally gets on. It looks like nothing. It looks like a man stepping up onto a step. It does not look like a great deal at the time. And not long ago I had said to a tired man in a shed, over a plate of dates, *don't think, just do*, and he had gone away and, as far as I could tell, done, and here was the result, at a stove, in the frost, with a blanket on me that I had not asked for. It is a strange thing to be proud of something that was never yours. I had a small sharp feeling in my chest like a splinter, and I let it stay there, because it was a clean one. * * * It is two kilometres from the camp to the door, as you will know, and it is the same two kilometres as yesterday, but a walk is never the same walk twice. Yesterday I had gone with my mouth open. Today I went with my eyes open, which is much more tiring. We went in a line, in the order that Vasko had put on her leaf. Vasko first, in her field-school cap, with the copper hair she keeps jammed under it, striding as though she were late for something she had invented. Lian Sarro behind her with her sketching board under her arm and ink to the elbow, already muttering a measurement to herself. Marit Sove with her canvas apron and her bag of tools, quiet and square and unhurried. Then me, with a lamp and nothing else, which is the post of honour for a man who has been told to keep out of the way. Then Sevran with the chalk bag and the second lamp. Then Odran, at the rear, counting. "Seven," he said, at the first turn, counting Idrin ahead of us on the path. "Six on the line. Mm." "You said that yesterday," said Lian over her shoulder. "It was true yesterday." The path ran along the edge of the bank, through larch and low scrub, with the river below in its mist. Sevran walked as he had walked when he first came to Zdena's yard, with his hands visible and his eyes up, but there was a difference in it that took me a quarter of an hour to name. He was not walking to be looked at. He was walking to look. He stopped, once, at a bird that I had not seen, a small brown thing on a larch bough that was not afraid of us, and said "A wren," in a voice so full of simple delight that Lian turned right round and looked at it too, and Vasko, who does not stop for wrens, slowed down for the length of a stride. At the cut Idrin was already at the mouth of the bank. He had walked ahead, as he does, and had tied off the chain at the old iron ring, and was standing with his rule in his hand and the frost on his shoulders, like a man holding a door with his whole body. He looked at us all as we came up, one at a time, and I saw his lips move, and I knew what he was doing, and I thought: that is how he knows we are all here. He counts us, the way I count cells. It is a thing a man learns after he has once failed to. "Six," said Odran, from the rear. "Six," said Idrin, a breath behind him. "And the chain holds." "Mm." Odran put his hand on the strap of his satchel, then took it off again, and looked at it, and put it in his pocket. I wrote that down. The iron door stood open in the bank as we had left it, a plain dark slab with its hinges in the clay and a black mouth behind. It looked smaller than it had yesterday. Doors do, when you know them. The passage went down in front of us, grey and straight, with the pipe along one wall and the groove along the other, and at its far end, a hundred and forty paces away by Marit's count, the plate. We went in by twos, with the chalk, as before. Vasko and Lian. Marit and I, because Marit had said that she wanted a lamp that did not shake, and I had held mine very still, in what I hope was a manly manner. Sevran and Odran last, the one with the chalk and the other with the count. * * * The plate was as I remembered it. A flush of dark iron, floor to roof, with no bar and no socket and no seam. Cold came off it like breath off a river. Marit put down her bag and laid out her tools on a square of canvas, one by one, as a surgeon does, and I held the lamp and was glad of the quiet. I will say what I know about her tool, which is little. It is brass, about the length of a forearm. It is flat, and it has a head on it like a key's, a plain loop, and a shaft with two shallow grooves along it, and no teeth. Not one. I had seen it yesterday from across the passage and thought it a handle for something else. Today I was at her shoulder, and I looked properly, and it was exactly what Lian had called it at supper the night before, with her mouth full of bread: a key without teeth. "What is it called?" I said. Marit did not look up. "It's what I use." "Does it have a name?" "The Registry has a number for it," said Lian, from behind us, with a small unscholarly snort. "I have seen it in a list." "The Registry can have it when I'm done with it," said Marit. She turned the tool in her fingers, and laid the loop against the plate, at about the height of her own heart, and shut her eyes. "Lamp low, Zahir. Lower. I want to hear it, not see it." I lowered the lamp. I held my breath, because it seemed the thing to do, and so did everyone else, and the passage was as quiet as the inside of a bell. I had been told it would take an hour. Yesterday the iron door had taken an hour, and Marit had warned us at breakfast that a plate was likely worse. I had counted on an hour. I had arranged my face for an hour. It took three breaths. On the first breath nothing happened. On the second, the iron under Marit's tool went a shade less dark, as a window does when somebody lights a lamp in the room behind it. On the third, a line drew itself down the plate from top to bottom, exactly in the middle, as a thread draws through cloth, a thin pale line with no mark of a cut, though I have looked at it since with my nose very close. The two halves of the plate moved apart. They did it without any sound. They slid back into the walls on either side, a hand's breadth, then an arm's length, then the whole of the width, and there was a breath of cold air that smelled of stone, and of something very dry and very old, like the inside of a drawer that has been shut for a long time on one person's things. Marit opened her eyes. She looked at the tool in her hand. She looked at the open plate. And then, with great steadiness, she said, in the voice of a woman reading a bill: "That is not how it goes." "It was warm," said Lian. She had come forward, with her board clutched to her chest and her face quite white. "Marit, the plate was warm." "It's a door," said Marit. "Iron's cold, brass is cold. They agree with each other." She wiped the tool on her apron. "Doors are doors." Nobody said anything, because nobody was going to be the first to say that it had not sounded like a thing that thought so. I did what a Tavari does at a threshold that has opened to him. I bowed, from the waist, not far, and said "Thank you," quietly, to the doorway. It is not in any book I have read. It is what my grandmother did at the well in Hollin Salt when the bucket came up full. It costs nothing, and it is a thing that I would rather have done and been laughed at for than not done. "Thank you," said Sevran, behind me, in the same tone, with the same bow, a half-second later. He did it so exactly, and so seriously, that I did not know whether to laugh. Lian did, silently, with her whole shoulders. "Seven," said Odran, to nobody. "Six in the passage. Mm. Thank you as well."  * * * The chamber was short, and it was dark, and it was cold, and it was the most extraordinary room that I have ever stood at the door of. I want to be precise. I am the one who has been given the job of being precise, and I will come to that. But first I want to say what it was like, which is that it did not look like anything that a person had made for the purpose of being looked at. At the threshold the walls were plain grey stone, rough-faced, like the passage. A pace in they went a shade darker, like wet slate, and smoother. At two paces they were black. They were a black I knew. We have it in Hollin Salt: it is the stone of the Salt Guild's counting house, hauled from the south quarry, a common stone, as common as rain, that a good mason can polish until it will show you your own face. The Guild had it laid on the front of their house to say, *we are ordinary, we are only a stone, we are worth ten times what you think.* It is a common stone made valuable by what stands behind it. It is a stone for banks and registries. It is the stone one puts around a thing one wants thought of as common and costly at the same time. And this was that stone, but more so. It was smoother, and deeper, and as the room went back it got darker still, until at the rear wall it was as black and as still as the inside of a bowl of ink, with our lamps in it twice. Everything we held up, the room held up again. We stood in the doorway, five people and five lamps, and below and before us, in the black floor and the black walls, there were five more of us, and a hundred small gold lights that went down and away into a second chamber that was not there. "Don't step on your reflection," said Lian, in a very small voice. "Nobody is stepping on anything," said Vasko. She had said it at once and without turning. I looked at her. She was standing at the very edge of the threshold with her lamp in one hand and the other up, palm out, not touching the air, just there, the way you hold a hand over a pot to feel if the water is hot. She had stopped, with one boot raised, a half-pace short of the line where the grey stone met the black, and I saw her lower it, slowly, to the floor behind the mark. "Hold," said Vasko. "All of you. Hold where you are." I had, I realised, one foot over the line. I had not noticed. I took it back. There were chests along both walls. Squat grey things, the colour of old river stone, as wide as a man's two arms and as high as his knee, with no hinges that I could see and no marks upon them, two rows of them, six on one side and five on the other, each set exactly a pace from the next. I knew what they were, or I thought I did. I had grown up on caravan stories, and no caravan driver has ever told a tale without a keeping chest in it somewhere, with a loaf in it that was still warm after forty years. A keeping chest, my father says, is a thing that remembers the hour it was shut. And the rule of a keeping chest is the oldest rule of the road: *leave it shut.* Open one, for even an instant, and the keeping breaks for a day. Nobody knows why a day. That would be Vasko's thought, I decided. She had stopped because of the lids. Every one of those eleven chests was a day of somebody's good fortune, and a clumsy boot could spill it. It was the back wall that I could not stop looking at. It was black as the rest, but along it, at the height of a man's shoulder, there ran a row of small pegs, a little thicker than a finger, set a hand's breadth apart. And on the pegs hung things. Pale things, thin and round, each about the width of a head. They were the colour of bone, or old milk, and they shone a little in the lamps with a soft dull gleam, and there was a reflection of each of them in the black wall behind it, so that every one was two. I decided what they were, and I was quite sure. They were a market display. It was a stall. Somebody, a very long time ago, had hung their bangles on pegs, to be looked at, in a row, with a keeping chest behind for the stock, and a black stone counter to show them well. It was the most natural thing in the world. Any bazaar in the Saltmere has the same, and the stallholder sits on a stool with a glass of tea and says that for you, honoured sir, the price is nothing. I could very nearly hear her. There is one other thing a person might hang on a row of pegs, in a very old room, in a very dark stone. I knew it. Everybody knows it. It is the first thing that every explorer is taught not to do anything about. And I did not say it, or think it all the way to the end, because in Tavari there is a custom that you do not say the name of a thing at a threshold if you are afraid that it will turn out to be true. A name is a guest. If you call it, it comes. "I did not see a thing," I said, to nobody, very quietly. "It is a stall." "Mm," said a voice behind me. Odran. He had come up close, at my shoulder, and was looking over the top of my head at the back wall, with one hand in his coat pocket and the other, I saw, around nothing. His face was perfectly still. "Zahir." "Yes?" "How many chests?" "Eleven." "Mm." He did not say what that meant. "And on the wall?" I looked, and I counted, and I was precise. I counted the pegs first, then the pale things on them, and I lost it halfway, because the black stone doubled every one, and I began again. "Seventeen," I said. "Or eighteen. The wall makes one of them two." "Write it as seventeen or eighteen," said Odran. "It's honest." "Hold," said Vasko again, although none of us had moved. Her voice had changed. It was a very level voice. "We are not going further than this line until I say, and not one thing is touched. Lian, I want the threshold drawn, wall to wall, and the first pace of floor. Marit, hold the plate where it is. If it moves, you tell me before you tell yourself. Sove?" "It is holding," said Marit. "Good." And then, still without turning round, and in a tone that I had not heard her use, a tone with a long hard day folded up in it: "Dasan." "Yes, Lead Vasko." "You keep a ledger." "I do." "Then I want everything we can see from this line. Every chest, every peg, every mark on the wall, and the count of the lamps, and what the floor does at the third pace, because it does something and I do not like it. By lamp-count, from here, without crossing. Do it exactly. You are going to be the first record this room has had in a very long time, and I would rather it were a good one." I do not know what my face did. I am told that it did something. "Yes," I said. "Yes, Lead Vasko. I can do that."  * * * I counted for six hours. I will not set down all of it, since the figures are in the ledger and will be copied into whatever the Registry makes of them, but I will tell you what it is like, which is that it is not like counting a yard of cells at all. A cell sits on a rack and is a number. The room in front of me was a number and also not one, because the black stone changed everything it held. I counted the chests on the left wall and then on the right. I counted the pegs, and the pale things on the pegs, and then, on Lian's advice, I counted the pegs that held none, of which there were four, set in the middle of the row with a little more space between them than the rest. I do not know why they stood empty. I wrote that down with a small mark beside it, which in the ledger means *a thing I do not understand.* It is the longest column I have. I did not cross the line. Odran stood at my shoulder for most of it, with his satchel, in the way a man stands by when he has nothing to do that he is permitted to do, and every so often he said "Mm," which I came to understand was a noise for *go on*. Sevran drew the chalk arrows back along the passage for Lian's sheet, and returned each time, and held my second lamp where I told him, at the angle I wished. Once, as I was shifting my weight, he said very quietly, "May I give you the count of the lamps?" and I said yes, and he gave it, in a clear low voice, as though he were reading it off a page: five lamps, forty-one reflections, three flames that leaned, all the same way, toward the back wall. I had not noticed the lean. I wrote it down, and beside it, *a draught,* because Marit says that cold rooms breathe. I looked at his face while I did, and saw that he was not frightened by it, only very attentive, as a man is who has been shown a handwriting he thinks he almost knows. Then Lian called him to the board, and he went, and I was alone with the room. I should like to try to say what I thought, in that hour, because I have been asked to be opinionated and because it is, in the end, what the ledger is for. I have wanted to be an explorer for as long as I can remember wanting anything. I was a boy of nine when my father first took me out with the caravans, on a spring run from the north pan to the coast, and the thing I remember is not the heat or the salt or the thirst, though there was a great deal of all three. It was the first night. We stopped in a dry riverbed under a sky with no moon, and the drivers lit the fire, and an old man called Bashir who had been over the Saltmere twenty times began to tell the story of the Cloudwell. I lay with my head on a water-skin and heard how, far in the middle of the desert, there is a place where a cloud sits on the ground and will not go away, and under it there is a forest, and in the forest it rains, every hour, on nobody. I asked how he knew. He said that he did not. A man he knew had a brother who had gone. The brother had not come back, and nobody could tell if that meant what you thought it meant. I have never forgotten that. I have never been to the Cloudwell, and I have a wish unpaid there. But the thing I took from that night was not the story. It was the old man's face while he told it. He was looking at the fire as though it were a door that had been left a little ajar. He did not want to go through it, exactly. He wanted it to be there. He wanted there to be, somewhere in the world, a place that had not yet made up its mind about him. That is the whole of my ambition. I have tried to say it to Idrin, and to Zdena, and to my own mother, and I have never got it out right, and I think it comes out better in a dark chamber with a ledger on my arm. I do not want to be a hero. I do not want to find a treasure, though I would not turn one down. I want to stand on the right side of a door that nobody has opened in a very long time and be the person to whom it says, in whatever way a door says it, *you may.* I have been told that a door is a thing in a wall. I do not believe it. I have been a host all my life, and I know a host when I see one. A sealed door is a host who has not decided. It sits there in the dark with a house full of food, and it looks at you, and it waits to see what kind of guest you are. If you come in a hurry, it keeps the food. If you come with your boots wet and your voice loud, it keeps the food. If you come slowly, and bow, and say thank you, and wait on the step to be asked in, it may let you across. It may not. But you will have been a good guest, and that is not nothing. I think the old people knew it. I think it is why we thank the doors. And I will tell you what I felt, in that dark, with the ledger in my hand. I felt that I was in exactly the right place. Not because the room was beautiful, though it was, or because it was strange, though it was that too, but because I was the man who was counting it. A hundred men on the platform at Tern could have counted it faster. They would not have written *a thing I do not understand* beside four empty pegs. I did. That was the thing I could do, and I was doing it, at a threshold, in the right company, and nobody had told me *not yet*. It is a poor reason to be happy. I will take it. * * * Vasko called the day at four, when the light in the passage was long past anything we could use. She had Lian's drawing, and my ledger, and Marit's note of the plate, and she sat on the floor of the passage with her cap pushed back and read all three twice, with her lips moving. Then she stood up and brushed the stone dust off her knees. "Here is what we have," she said. "A sealed chamber behind a plate that should have taken Marit a day to open and took three breaths. Eleven chests, shut. A wall of pegs, some of them occupied. A floor I don't like. And a registrar at Halloway Station who is going to be extremely unhappy to hear from me, because the sheet does not provide for any of this, and I am going to send the word anyway." She looked at each of us in turn. "We do not touch anything tonight. In the morning we go in. All six, by the sheet, with the count, and the door-hand holding the plate. The registrar is sent for. She will be at the mouth by the time we bring anything out, to witness, and not an hour before, because that is how the form works and I mean to follow the form to the letter. This school has done every find by the book for forty years. We are not going to be the first to fudge one." "Yes, Lead," said Lian, and Marit, and I, and Sevran in his clear voice, and Odran, a half-beat late, in his. "Mm," said Vasko. It was a remarkably good imitation. Then she saw what she had done and went pink to the ears, and Odran put his hand over his mouth, and I thought: it is going to be a good job. On the way out I looked back once, at the dark, over my shoulder. The plate stood open. The lamps were out in the chamber, and in the black stone at the far end there was a faint, pale shine that I took to be the last of the day coming down the passage behind us. I decided it was that. I am not a man to argue with a thing that is kind enough to explain itself. Ayuk was at the camp, on his bucket, with the rod case and his notebook and a glass of tea gone cold. He had done the clay on the west side in the afternoon, he said, and the ground over the chamber was good ground. A bit of water at the sill. "It is always a bit of water at the sill," he said. "I have said it so often that I think the sill has begun to expect it." He looked at me over the rim of the glass. "You look like a man who has seen a very large thing." "I have seen a ledger," I said. "Mm," said Ayuk, and I could not tell if it was a joke. * * * I took tea to the mouth after supper, because it was my turn and because nobody had asked me to. It was a clear night, with a hard frost coming down and the stones very sharp on the horizon, and the air so cold that the cup steamed like a kettle. Idrin was sitting on his crate at the iron door with the chain in his lap and a lantern at his feet, as he had sat the night before and, I think, as he would sit on every night of the job. He did not look round. He heard me on the gravel and shifted along the crate, which is a thing he does for about three people in the world. I gave him the glass and sat down. For a time we said nothing. The lantern made a small yellow room in the dark, and the dark came right up to its edge and looked at us. "Seventeen," I said at last. "Or eighteen." "Count again in the morning." "I intend to." I turned my own glass. "Idrin. Is it still adequate?" I had not meant to ask. It came out as a man says a thing in the dark that he would never say in the day. Idrin did not answer for so long that I thought he had decided not to. His rule was in his left hand, folded, and he unfolded it, slowly, joint by joint, to its full length, and looked at the brass in the lamp, and folded it again. "Yes," he said. "Still." "It is adequate, Zahir. It was adequate yesterday. It will be adequate tomorrow, and the day after, I should think, and and I will not say the other word before its time." He did not look at me. "I will reconsider it when the training is completed. Not before. If I said the other word now, you would stop being a man who can still be taught. And you are very much a man who can still be taught." "That is an unkind sort of kind thing to say." "Yes," said Idrin. "I have been told that." And then, almost too quietly to hear: "Keep the ledger." "I keep it every night." "Keep it. Somebody should write down what that room looked like before we put our hands in it." He turned his glass, and the foam on the top had gone flat, and he looked at it with something that was, I think, as near to tenderness as he allows. "Nobody ever does. They write down what they took. You wrote down the four pegs with nothing on them. I read it over your shoulder. That was the best line in the book." I could not speak. I drank my tea. It was a fine cold night, and I was very glad of the foam.  * * * When I got back to camp the fire was low and there were two people on the crate. I stood at the edge of the light for a moment, as a man does who has found a good thing and does not wish to put his boot through it. Sevran was sitting very straight, as he does, with a bowl in his hands, and Odran was beside him, at a distance that I could not have measured and could have drawn blind. They were not touching. They were talking about a pot. It was a very ordinary conversation. Sevran said that the fount was thriving, and that Zdena had moved it to the window above the range, and that he now told it everything. Odran said, "Mm. Everything?" and Sevran said, "Nearly. I have found that one does not have to explain a thing to a plant, only to arrive at it. It is a restful form of company," and Odran said, "Resa says that about the goat." They both laughed, quietly, and I thought, with a distinct pang, that I had never heard a man say a plain thing to Sevran and have it come back to him so lightly. I sat down on the other side of the fire, with my back against a larch, and took the ledger on my knee. Sevran looked up, and said, "Zahir. Good evening. You are home." "I am home," I said, and it was true, which surprised me. "I should like to thank you," said Sevran gravely, "for the lamp-count. It is a very good habit. It is the first time I have seen a number made kind." "That is your second thank-you today." "It is the evening one. I told you so." "I am keeping a record," I said. I had the pencil in my hand. I was writing the ledger lines for the night, as I do, under the column that I keep for every crew: *wished they had packed.* I had written Vasko's already. *A second registrar.* Lian's: *a larger board.* Marit's: *nothing, and she meant it.* Ayuk's: *a second rod, though he would not say so.* Idrin's: *nothing he would admit to.* I had written them without thinking about it, as I always do. Now I came to the names across the fire. I looked at Odran. I wrote: *nothing yet.* It was the truth, and it sat very well on the line. I looked at Sevran. He had set down his bowl, and was watching the embers with his hands on his knees. I held the pencil above the page for a long time. I had written, in the shed, in the dark, on a night when he came down because the wind was loud: *One basket. One crock (alive). One hat.* I had left the last column blank. It was blank now. I considered it, and I decided, as a man decides to leave a chair empty at his own table, that it should stay so on purpose. I drew a small line through the empty space, and under it wrote the words *not forgotten,* which in the ledger means that nobody has left it blank by accident. And then, because it was the end of a long day, and because I am the host of this ledger and no one else has a say in what goes into it, I wrote my own. I will not tell you what it says. It is not for the page. It is the sort of line that a man writes for himself in the night and shows to nobody, with a goat in it, and a salt wind, and a mother coming north in the first snow. I will tell you that it is short. "What are you writing?" said Odran, from across the fire. "A record." "Of what?" "Of the two of you sitting on a crate," I said, "being very boring." There was a short silence. Then Sevran said, with great seriousness, "I should be very sorry to be anything else," and Odran put his head down and began to shake, and the fire popped, and a long way off in the fog a bird that did not know us said one note and thought better of it.  I closed the ledger. I lay back against the larch with my hands on my chest and looked at the stars through the needles. They were very sharp. I could hear, on the other side of the fire, two bowls being set down together, along a rim, at the same small angle, and neither of them said a word about it, and neither did I. * * * *Halloway. East bank. Third morning.* I woke before light with a blanket on me. It was a different one. It was a green wool one, patched at the edge, and it smelled faintly of coal smoke and of bread. I lay and held it and did not ask whose it was. The frost was down again. It lay on the tents and on the moss and on the larch needles like a pale fur, and the sky over the river was the colour of the inside of a shell. I got up. I lit the stove. I put on the pot, and I held it high, and I poured, one, two, and the third from the full height of my arm, and the foam stood up in the glass like a small proud cap, in the cold. Eight glasses on the tray. Six of them would go through the plate in the morning, one would sit at the mouth with the chain, and one would keep the ground. I counted them, and I thought of the room at the end of the passage with its black walls and its eleven chests and its four empty pegs, and of the plate standing open in the dark, which had taken three breaths to be asked in, and had waited, I believed, a very long time. Vasko came out of her tent with her cap in her hand and her hair on end. "Dasan," she said. "Is that tea?" "It is the point of it," I said. "Good," said Vasko. "The hold stands. We go in at first light." I carried the tray round the camp. I gave the first glass to Ayuk, who said "Foam," and the second to Idrin, who looked at it and said nothing, which was good, and the third, with both hands, to the man in the olive jacket who was already trimming the lamps, and the fourth to the man in the green coat, who took it and said "Mm," and the fifth, sixth and seventh to Vasko, Lian and Marit, who had come out of their tents in a row like ducks, and the last, as always, to myself. And I stood in the cold with the empty tray, in the larches, with the stones standing up out of the mist beyond the river, and I felt as one feels who has stood a long time at a platform and, quite without noticing, has found himself on the train.