Donncha Ó Laoire

Donncha Ó Laoire keeps a holding on a Celtic Union charter world the record does not name, in a valley below a Survey Corps boundary post that is newer than his byre. The holding was his mother's and is his. He has three goats in the top field, a dog, a brush that stands where he leaves it, a kit of his father's on the right-hand pegs and his own shears, ground for the left hand, on his own peg. The record meets him once, over an afternoon and the morning after it, in the late autumn of 2826 UCSD, when the post's register logged a Sí Gaoithe fluctuation whose strain resolved, after the fact, to his top field, and the post's Senior came down the lane with the Union's form. He answered her four questions and showed her a fifth thing she had not asked about. The record renders him as he.

Known History

• Keeper of the holding below the post in 2826 UCSD, the one season the record holds him at. The holding was his mother's before him; the hinges on his back door were hung, on the inside, by his grandfather; his father's kit hangs as his father kept it. How long any of them kept the place, and when it came to him, the record does not say.
• The post's form has a line for the household's practices, and he had answered it before 2826, with a plain yes and no more, and the Ranger of the day wrote the yes and nothing more. How many times the line was put to him, and after what, the record does not say.
• Late autumn 2826 UCSD, a still afternoon: the three goats went to the far wall together, the way they went for a dog, with the dog at his heel; a skirt of straw the height of a man got up by the gable in air that had not moved all day, went along the yard wall and over it, and lay down where it was carried; and there was nothing in the lane. He went in to see about the milk. Going out with the bowl, he put his hand to the back door and it went away from him, outward, on hinges where they had always been, with no complaint from the wood. He left it as it stood, went round by the gable and set the bowl on the stone from the outside. His shears were on the right-hand peg, in his father's kit, and he put them back. Before the light went, Senior Éilis Ní Mhurchú came down the lane with the case and asked him four things, and he took her round the house to the door. He had looked twice for anything missing and found nothing. He went to bed with the door open the wrong way in the dark, the bowl out and the dog across the front step. See Nothing Taken (S01E00C11).
• The morning after: the bowl full, with a skin on it, and the dog had the milk. He swept, and put the brush back where it stood. At about the hour he tried the back door and it came in to him, and he went through it the way a door is gone through.

The Work

The holding is goats, a top field, a yard wall, a byre and a gate, and the custom is kept the way the gate is kept, without asking whether the gate agrees with him. It has three parts. A bowl on the threshold stone before dark. The brush left standing after dark, wherever it stands. And the words at the door, by your leave, going out and coming in, said to nobody he could point at. He has never claimed the three do anything, and nobody he knows claims it. The Survey Corps' filed position is that no practice of the kind has any measured correlation with incident rate, and his position, as far as the record has it, is that they are manners: you do not go through a door without a word in a house that is not your own. On the evening after a wind like that one, by his own reckoning, it was not entirely settled whose house it was.

The valley calls the post the post, and the people in it by its own name for the Rangers, na Maoir Réalta, when it does not. Since the mast went up on the ridge the valley can read a Ranger's bars, and he read hers: five. He gave the greeting at the gate the valley's answer, and when he spoke of the door he called her by her office.

Character Notes

He answers what he is asked and does what the thing in front of him requires. Asked the time, he gave it as near as he had it; asked the wind, he said there had not been one; asked what was changed, he told the goats, the straw and the shears, and then the door, which he had not been asked about and would not have left out. He took the Ranger round by the gable because he was not going through that door and did not intend to say so, and the record does not have him saying so.

What he did not do is as exact as what he did. He did not force the door back. He did not look about the kit for what might have been put in the shears' place, because nothing had, and he knew the kit. He looked twice for what was missing, the second time not knowing what he was looking for. He did not sweep that night. He noticed that the Ranger stepped over the bowl without looking down, the way you step over a thing you know is there, and that she said the words at the door going out, and that this was not on the form, because he had seen the form. He has said nothing about it to anyone the record knows of.

The record has him in one posture: standing with the bowl in his hands, looking at the hinges.

What the Record Does Not Hold

His age, his birth year and what he looks like. Whether his mother and father are living, since the holding had been his mother's and his father's kit is kept as it had been kept, and the chapter says no more of either. Whether anyone else lives in the house; the chapter names nobody but the dog, and does not say there is nobody. The name of the world, the valley or the holding, which the chapter withholds on purpose. Whether he had seen a wind like that one before, or only heard what his mother would have said of it; the form had been put to him before, which is all the record gives. Whether he and the Senior had spoken before that afternoon, beyond the form. What he made of her words at the door, past noticing them. Any chapter after the morning the door came in.

See also

• Nothing Taken (S01E00C11), the afternoon, the door and the morning after, in his viewpoint and the Senior's
• Senior Éilis Ní Mhurchú, who wrote the door, the shears and the bowl on the step
• Sí Gaoithe: The Discordant Membrane, the register's word for the far side of the zone, and the filed position on the customs he keeps
• Concordant Membranes and Intermembrane Bleed, the Boundary Types the post's column runs through
• The Celtic Union of Planets, the invitation under which the post stands
• Survey Corps Protocol, the half of the form that is the Corps'