Where the Rock Is

This is told the way things are told below the roof, by the one who was there, and this time the one who was there was in the rock, and the one telling it first is the one who was at the bottom of the rock and could not go in.

A stone moved at the top of the shelving. A good one. Stone-First-Who-Waited knew who it was by the sound, the way you do, and waited to be told, and the small one came up onto the silt and stopped at the edge of it, which is where you stop when the one on the line has not yet answered you.

Stone-First moved a rock. The small one came on.

It was the smaller of the two who had been trying the squeeze since Carried-It-Sleeping was named. The one who had gone up announced, a season ago, and stood beside Stone-First on the line for one asking of the dark, and gone down and told it, and got no name from it because the telling was about somebody else. Not so small now. The warm's count of tellings had put a year on everyone, and on the small ones it shows.

"I want to go up the squeeze," said the small one. "One more time."

"Why?"

"To find out if I still fit."

Stone-First looked at the small one for as long as it takes to say a name. That is a true reason. The small ones are told, from the time they can be told anything, that the squeeze closes on everyone, that the day comes when you go at it the way you always have and the rock does not let you, and that this is how you know you are not a small one any more. Everyone below the roof has had that day. Nobody is there for it but the rock.

"You asked," said Stone-First. "With a stone. That is right. And it is yours to find out and nobody else's, and I cannot find it out for you, because I have not fitted that crack since before your telling begins." Stone-First stepped aside, off the line, which Stone-First does not do. "Go. If it holds you, breathe out. I will be here."

Stone-First heard the small one go in.

The scrape of it, which the Told hear at that distance the way the up-people do not seem to hear anything. The small one went in sideways, the way the youngest had, the way the smallest of the up-people did with a stone; a hand-width, a scrape, a hand-width. Then the scraping got shorter. Then it stopped.

Not the stop of coming out the other side. Stone-First knew that one; it has a sound after it, feet on the upper ground. This was the other stop, the one that has no sound after it at all.

"I'm held," said the small one, from inside the rock. The voice came out of the crack flattened, the way voices do from in there. "It's got me at the narrow. I can't go on."

"Then you have found out," said Stone-First. "Breathe out. All of it. Then come back a hand-width, the way you went."

Nothing came back. Stone-First waited, on the silt at the foot of the crack, with the whole body still, and could not go in, and did not try, because an adult going into the squeeze after a small one makes two held instead of one, and everybody below the roof knows that too.

"There's someone in the crack."

The voice had changed.

"Ahead of me. Where it's narrow. Where it's a hand wide. There's someone in it. Standing. In the rock. The way you'd be in the warm." A breath, flattened. "It's not scraping."

"Do not touch it," said Stone-First. "Breathe out."

"It's going on. Up. Where the rock is. It isn't going through, it's — there isn't a through. It's just where the rock is and then it's further where the rock is." The breath again. "It's not ahead now."

Stone-First stood at the foot of the squeeze and did the thing Stone-First does, and it had never in a whole life been harder, and it was not enough, and Stone-First knew that, standing there, and did it anyway, because the other thing, the going in, would have been worse than not enough.

"Breathe out," said Stone-First. "Come back to me. A hand-width."

The scraping started again. Short. Coming the right way.

Carried-It-Sleeping had felt the piece go, and had let it, because it had asked Stone-First and Stone-First had let it, and that was the shape of things now: a small one going up was a thing you let, if a stone had been moved and the line had answered.

Then the piece had not come back, and had not gone on either.

That is a thing you can feel, lying in the warm. A small one up the shelving takes a piece of the shape with them and the piece moves: up, and then it is on the line and you feel it there, and then it comes down. Or it goes on, past the line, and thins, the way the youngest's did once, and you wait. This one went up and stopped and did not come down and did not thin. It stayed, somewhere past the line, at the same distance, for as long as a short telling, and Carried-It-Sleeping lay in the warm and knew exactly what that was, because everyone below the roof has had that day, and the day has a shape, and the shape is a piece that neither goes nor comes.

The rock had closed on the small one.

Carried-It-Sleeping did not get up. There is nothing to do from the warm about the squeeze, and the one thing you can do, which is to go up and stand at the foot of it and say breathe out, was already being done by the one person below the roof who would do it best. So Carried-It-Sleeping lay still and did the hardest thing, and listened to the smallest, nearby, who had felt it too and was lying very still as well, learning what it is to wait for a piece that is held.

Then the piece moved. The right way. Down.

It came down the shelving slowly, and a stone moved at the bottom, not well, and the small one came into the amber scraped raw down one side and holding the arm, and did not go to Carried-It-Sleeping and did not go to the small ones. They stood in the middle, in the open floor, in the place where the light had stood, and said, to the warm, in a voice that had not come back yet:

"I don't fit."

Several of the old ones made the small sound, because that is a telling everyone below the roof has told once, and it is a good one, and it is always short.

"And there was someone in the rock."

Nobody made any sound at all.

The small one told it standing up, in the open floor, in order, the way Stone-First had taught them all to, with the arm held.

The stone at the top of the shelving. Stone-First stepping off the line, which nobody had ever seen. The squeeze, sideways, a hand-width, and the narrow, and the rock taking them the way it takes everyone. I'm held. Breathing out. And then, ahead, in the narrowest part, where the crack is a hand wide and nothing goes, a shape. The size of a person. Upright. In the rock. Not in a gap in the rock; there was no gap; in the rock, the way you are in the warm, with the rock all round it and through where it was. Not scraping. Going on, up, where the rock was, further where the rock was, and then not ahead.

"Was it warm?" said one of the small ones, and then stopped, because everyone knew the answer to that now: in the squeeze there is no warm to feel, only rock, and the small one had not tried to touch it, because Stone-First had said not to, and because you do not.

"It fitted," said the smallest, from the middle. Not a question.

"It didn't fit," said the small one. "There was nothing to fit. It was where the rock is."

Carried-It-Sleeping lay in the warm and thought about the small ones, who had spent the whole of this season, and the season before it, wanting one thing, which was to fit the squeeze. To be the right size for the one way through. The two who had been trying since the name had taught the next ones, and the next ones had taught the smallest, and it had been the thing a small one was for, below the roof, since the youngest went up the first time. And now the rock had closed on the first of them, which was always going to happen and is how you know you have grown, and in the same breath they had seen a thing for which there was no squeeze, no way, no size, nothing to fit, because it did not need a way.

And the squeeze was still the people's. That was the thing Carried-It-Sleeping got to, lying there, and held on to. It was still the one way to the up-people, and the up-people's one way to the people, and a stone had gone through it each way and a small one with a humming stone, and the smallest of the up-people a hundred times. A way is not less yours because a thing has used it that did not need one.

Carried-It-Sleeping said that, out loud, to the warm, which Carried-It-Sleeping did not often do, and Went-Round, from the far side of the amber, said, "Yes," and nothing else, which Went-Round did even less.

Stone-First went back onto the line, afterwards, because that is where the margin is, and keeping it means being there, and stood in the place, and looked at the squeeze.

Here is what Stone-First had worked out at the foot of it, with a small one held in it and a thing going by where the rock was, and it is kept as Stone-First's.

The rock is where it is. It has not moved. Stone-First has stood on it for a whole life and it has never once been anywhere but where it is, and it was there tonight, and it closed on the small one at the narrow exactly where it closes on everyone, which is a true thing and a kind one, because it is how a small one finds out. The small one is the right size. The squeeze is the right size. Nothing about the rock or the small one has stopped being true.

There was a thing for which neither was there. That is not a thing about the rock. It is not a thing about the small one. It is a thing about the thing, and the Told do not know what it is, and nobody was there for the part that would say, and nobody can be, and Stone-First had said that four times this season and would say it again standing up in the warm, and it was still the whole of it.

Stone-First had stepped off the line tonight. For the first time. To let a small one past, to find out a thing that was theirs. Stone-First had stood at the foot of the one crack in the world Stone-First could not enter and had said breathe out and had not been able to do anything else, and it had been enough, because the small one had come back, and it had not been enough, because Stone-First had been there, which is the whole of what Stone-First does, and being there had not reached into the rock.

That was still the same shape. The margin has an edge. Stone-First had always known the edge was the line. It was also, it turned out, the narrow part of the squeeze, and the warm's edge where the shape runs out, and the place where the amber had gone out of the wall, and the seep; the margin had edges everywhere this season, and Stone-First had kept the one that could be kept, and the others had kept themselves.

Above, through the squeeze, the loud came down, and settled. Then the one light, low. Then the smallest of the up-people, with a stone.

Stone-First answered it. A good one. Once.