The Same Hand

The scriptorium faced the sea, which Oriel had not expected, because every other room she had ever been in on Aduine faced away from it.

That was the first thing. Terrace houses turn their backs to the weather; her father's did, and his father's, and the shutters on the windward side of every house in Difenland were nailed and had been for longer than the nails. The Abbey's long room had its shutters open to the tide. The light came in grey and even off the water and lay along the desks, and the air smelled of salt and ink and the dust of something older than either, and at the far end, where the light was best, the shelves began.

She had come up the terrace steps at the first office with her things in a bag that was too big for them, and a sister she did not know had taken the bag and said nothing and pointed, and she had gone where the pointing went, and here was the Abbess.

Oriel had seen her twice before, at a distance, at the storm-blessings. Up close she was smaller and older and did not look up from the book in front of her until she had finished the line she was on, which took as long as it took.

"Fenwick," said the Abbess. "Of Difenland. Your father holds the strip under the second catchment."

"Yes, Abbess."

"He keeps his walls. The Accounting says so; I did not have to ask." She closed the book. It was not the Accounting. Oriel knew that without being told, the way you know a reeve's ledger from a steward's. "You have come to learn the hand."

"Yes, Abbess."

"Not a hand. The hand. Attend to the difference, because it is the whole of what you will do here for longer than you will like." The Abbess stood, and went to the nearest desk, and laid her palm flat on it. "Every line in the Long Accounting is written in one hand. It has never changed. A sister who has kept the book for forty years writes a line, and a sister three hundred years dead wrote the line above it, and the correctors cannot tell them apart, and that is not an accident and it is not a miracle. It is practice. You will copy until you can write a line that nobody in this room can tell from one three hundred years older. When you can, you will be let near the Accounting. Until then you will not touch it."

"How long?" said Oriel, before she could stop it.

The Abbess looked at her the way she had looked at the line she was finishing.

"The Accounting does not say," she said. "Sit down."

Emma la Chapelle had the oldest shelf on the days she had it, which was three in seven, and the first thing she did on each of them was the same thing: she read the last page she had worked, and re-derived what she had written about it, and moved a band down if the morning's reading did not support the evening's. Most mornings it did. Some mornings it did not, and those were the mornings the register was for.

The boat from Kalenjar put her on Aduine's shore before the first office, and she walked up through the terraces with the reeves going the other way, and the ones who knew her said her name and the ones who did not said nothing, which was the Kingdom's manners and not a slight. She had learned that in her first month. She had learned most things in her first month and had spent every month since finding out which of them were wrong.

There was a new novice at the practice desk.

Emma noted it the way she noted anything in the room: without writing it down, because a novice at a desk was not a reading. Sixteen, perhaps. Terrace-born, by the hands, which had held a mattock before they held a pen. Sitting the way the new ones sat, too straight, with the practice sheet squared in front of her and the ink not yet open, waiting to be told that she could begin.

The senior corrector, who had never once in three years told Emma her name and whom Emma had never once asked, set a page of the Accounting on the novice's desk. Not the book; a page, loose, the kind the correctors made for copying from, written out in the hand from the book so that the book itself never left the shelf. Emma had copied from such pages herself, in her first weeks, on the Abbess's instruction, so that she would know what the hand cost before she read what it said.

"Copy it," said the corrector, in the Kingdom's tongue, and Emma heard the word and wrote it down, because the word the corrector had used was not the word for copy. It was the word the Accounting used for keep. The same word a reeve used of a wall.

She had a band for that already. She had had it since the second year, when she had asked what the word meant when it was used of a wall, and of a catchment, and of a season, and had written down each answer as given, and the instruments had gone and looked at the air. She did not move the band. She wrote: corrector to novice, first day: "keep it," of a practice page. And the date in the Archive's reckoning, and no date in the Abbey's, because the Abbey did not give one and she did not ask.

The novice opened the ink.

Emma turned back to her own page, which was a page of the charter era, counting five, and went on with the slowest translation on the posting.

The page was a list.

That was a relief, at first, because a list is easier to copy than a sentence; you do not have to understand it. A heading in the hand, which she could read, because every child on Aduine could read the hand, the Sisterhood saw to that. Then a column of names with marks beside them, which she took for the render, grain and stores, the way her father's ledger did it. Then a second column, ruled, with nothing in it. Then, at the foot, the islands.

She copied the heading. It took her the whole of the first hour and it was wrong, and the corrector came and looked at it and said nothing and went away, which Oriel understood to mean it was wrong, and did it again.

The islands she came to after the midday office, with her hand aching in a place it had never ached from a mattock.

Vellamar. She knew the shape of that one; every child did. Casimor. Aduine, her own, which she copied with more care than the hand allowed and had to do again. Ostrel.

And a fifth.

She read it twice. It was a name. It was written in the hand, in the column with the other four, with a mark beside it like theirs, and it was not Krilzat, which was not an island, and it was not Difenland, which was not either, and it was not any name she had heard in sixteen years of a Kingdom that counted its islands in its own name every time it said it.

She looked up. The Abbess was at her book at the end of the room, and did not look up, and Oriel understood that the Abbess had been waiting for exactly this and was not going to come to her.

She went to the Abbess.

"There are five," she said.

"The Accounting says five."

"Which is the fifth?"

"The Accounting says which. You are copying it."

"But the Crown holds four. Everyone —" She stopped, because the Abbess had raised one hand, not far.

"The Crown holds four. The chronicle counts four. The Accounting says five, and has since that hand, and you are not here to count islands, Fenwick. The court can count islands. You are here to keep a hand. Copy the fifth name as it is written, in the hand, so that nobody can tell yours from the one that first wrote it, and when you have done that you will have kept it, which is more than anyone outside this room has done with it in all the time it has been there." The Abbess looked down at her book. "And the second column. The empty one. Rule it, and leave it empty. Every hand has."

"What is it for?"

"Answered prayers," said the Abbess. "Rule it."

The novice found her on the terrace steps at the end of the day, which Emma had half expected, because the new ones always found the Ranger on the steps eventually and it was usually sooner than this.

The tide was coming in below them, grey, the way it did, over the catchment stones. Emma sat with her reader closed on her knee. The novice stood, because novices stood.

"You read the old pages," the novice said. "The sisters say you've read further back than anyone who isn't a sister."

"Slower than anyone who is. Yes."

"Then you've seen the fifth name."

"Yes."

"What does the delegation think it is?"

Emma had been asked that question, in that form, by a steward, by a court clerk, by Strozzi twice and de Courtney once, and she had given all of them the same answer, and she gave it now, because the novice was sixteen and that was not a reason to give her a worse one.

"I write down what I'm told," she said. "I was told five."

"That isn't an answer."

"No. It's the only one I'm allowed to give you, and it's the only one I'd trust from me." She turned the reader over in her hands, not opening it. "Here is how it works, and I'll tell you because the Abbess would. I don't tell the Abbey what the delegation reads. Not because it's secret. Because the moment I say to a sister we think it means this, I've put it to your record that your record is missing something, and I don't know that, and I'm not going to pretend to, and if I'm wrong it stays in your book forever with my name under it. So I ask what a word means. I write down what you say. And I don't say what I'd have guessed."

The novice thought about that for a while, which was more than the steward had done.

"Do you have a word for it? A name with nothing under it?"

"We have a band," said Emma. "It's the lowest one. It means: this is a reading, and it is not a finding, and anyone who files it higher is guessing in a uniform." She opened the reader then, because the question was worth keeping, and wrote it down as given: novice, first day, on the steps: do you have a word for a name with nothing under it. And her answer, since she had given it.

"You wrote that down."

"I write down what I'm told."

"I didn't tell you anything. I asked."

"That's the part worth keeping," said Emma. "Most people here already know what they think the fifth name is. You're the first one this year who's asked me what a question is for."

At the evening office the novices stood at the back, on the terrace below the scriptorium, facing the water, and Oriel stood with them and did not know the words yet and did not pretend to.

The Abbess spoke them. The tide came in over the catchment stones the way it had been coming in all day and would all night, and nothing anyone said on the terrace made it come faster, and nothing anyone failed to say made it stop, and Oriel had known that since she could walk and had never once stood and looked at it on purpose. She looked at it now. It was the first thing all day that she had been told to do and had not got wrong.

Afterwards, going up, she found the Abbess at the top of the steps, which she had not expected, because she had been told the Abbess went to the book after the office and did not stop for novices.

"You asked how long," the Abbess said. "This morning. I said the Accounting does not say. That was true and it was not the answer. Ask me the other question. The one you have been carrying up the steps."

Oriel had not known she was carrying one until it was asked for.

"When did it begin?" she said. "The Accounting. The first hand. Nobody says. The court doesn't know and the Ranger won't guess and the sisters just say the hand. When did somebody first sit down and write it?"

"Nobody outside the order can say," said the Abbess. "You have heard that. The court has heard it. The delegation has heard it and filed it in whatever they file things in, at whatever height they file them."

"And inside?"

"Inside," said the Abbess, "it began this morning. When you sat down." She let that stand for the length of a wave. "It begins every morning, Fenwick. Every hand that has ever kept it was a novice's once, at a desk, with the ink not open, being told it would take longer than she liked. The first hand was a girl's. She is dead. Her line is on the shelf and yours will be under it, if you keep at it, and nobody will be able to tell them apart, and that is not because the book is old. The book is not old. The book does not get older. We do. That is what the hand is for."

The Abbess went in to the book.

Oriel stood at the top of the steps with the tide below her and the shutters open above her, and thought about a girl at a desk who had ruled a column and left it empty and written five names, and had not been the first either, and had sat where Oriel had sat and had not known how long, and had been told the Accounting did not say.

It did not say. It began every morning. Both were true, and she did not pick one, and went in.