The Mined World

She went back on the Thursday, because she had spent the Wednesday night, after closing the notebook slightly before she wanted to, lying in the dark counting the stones of the Small Bridge in her head and arriving each time at nineteen, and because nineteen, repeated enough times against a ceiling, had eventually become a question rather than an answer. Nineteen of what. Nineteen still. Nineteen as of when.

She crossed at the front, through the front door of the city, the way she had crossed the first time, because she had decided — she was making, she noticed, a great many small decisions in this manner now, the way one makes small decisions in a house one suspects of a leak — that today she would walk Lentar the way a person walks a town she has heard a rumour about, rather than the way an Author walks a thing she has made. She would look at it. She would not, at first, name anything new. She would see what was, before she let herself think about what she had thought there was.

The fountain square was where the fountain square had always been. The light was the dust-gold light. The woman in the tea-coloured scarf was at her stall, and Iyla, on the way past, made herself look at the woman properly and not write her down, because writing her down today, for comfort, would have been a use, and she had decided, last night, against uses. The woman nodded at her. Iyla nodded back. So far the city was the city.

She turned, at the corner of the square, into the street that ran east toward the dyers' quarter. She had written the dyers' quarter on her second visit, in some detail, because she had liked the idea of a part of a city in which the gutters ran, on different days, different colours, and in which the children could tell you what day of the week it was by looking down. She had named three of the dyers. She had given one of them a daughter who sang while she stirred. She remembered this, walking, because she was making a small private effort to remember everything she had given the city before she arrived at the places where it had been kept.

The dyers' quarter was not there.

This is not, she understood, standing at the mouth of the street, quite the right sentence. The street was there. The buildings, in the sense of walls and roofs and doors and the small architectural facts of buildings, were there. What was not there was the quarter. The gutters ran clear. The vats, which she had written as squat and copper and steaming faintly even in the mornings, were cold; one of them had been turned on its side, as a thing is turned on its side that is no longer expected to hold anything. The doors, which she had written with the small painted symbols by which a customer knew which dyer worked in which colours, had been wiped. Not painted over. Wiped, in the way a slate is wiped: as if the symbols had been treated as provisional information, of use to no one once the underlying facts had been collected.

There were no people. This was the part that took her, for a moment, by the throat, because there ought to have been people; she had written people; she had named, she was certain, three of them, and named a fourth by giving her a song. There was, in the middle of the street, a single boy of perhaps nine, sitting on a step, doing nothing. She walked up to him. She crouched, in the small careful way she had seen Tev crouch at the jambs, so as not to be above him.

"Where is everyone," she said.

The boy looked at her. He was a child she had not, she was sure, written; he had the slight definite look of a person Lentar had filled in around the edges of her authorship, in the way the city had filled in Aren the Second on the coins. He thought about her question with the seriousness of a child who has been asked a question he has been asked before.

"They went," he said.

"Where."

"I don't know where. They went on a Tuesday." He considered. "Or it was the colour of a Tuesday. I am not sure it was actually a Tuesday."

"Who took them."

"Nobody took them." He frowned. "They were here and then they were less here. My aunt was here. Then my aunt was — she was thinner. Then she was the idea of my aunt. Then she was gone." He said this without crying. He said this in the tone of a child reporting weather. "I remember her name was Saba. I remember she had a song. I do not remember the song."

"What is your name."

The boy looked at her with a small flicker of interest, as if she had asked a useful question for the first time. "I don't know," he said. "Nobody has called me anything for three days."

Iyla wrote his name down. She wrote it down in the only notebook she had with her, on the Lentar side, in the smallest careful letters she could manage, because she did not, at that moment, trust her hand to be steady at a normal size. She wrote: The boy on the step at the mouth of the dyers' street. Black hair. Step is the third from the left. Aunt was Saba. He does not yet have a name; ask, next time, what he would like. She showed it to him. He read it slowly. He said, "That's me," with the small grave satisfaction of a person being shown a door he had not known was there, and the air around him, very slightly, thickened, the way the air had thickened around the lamp on her first naming experiment, and he became, in a way she could not have described to anyone who had not stood in such a street, more present.

She stood up. She walked the rest of the dyers' quarter. She made herself walk all of it, because she had decided, somewhere between the second vat and the third, that what she had to do today was inventory, and that inventory was a discipline, and that disciplines were performed in full or not at all.

The daughter who had sung while she stirred was not there. The vat she had stirred was there. The stool she had stood on, because Iyla had written her as small for her age, was there, kicked slightly to one side. There was, on the rim of the vat, a smear of indigo, dry now, which a person looking quickly would have taken for a stain, and which Iyla, looking slowly, recognised as the print of a thumb that had been there long enough to leave a print and was no longer there to leave any more. She wrote this down too. She wrote: indigo thumbprint, west vat, daughter of the third dyer, she sang, I did not write down what. She wrote it down because writing it down was, at this point, the only thing she had that was the opposite of what had been done.

She left the dyers' quarter and walked north, because she had to know, now, and walking south first would have been a kindness to herself she had not earned.

The scrivener's was untouched. This, she understood immediately, was worse than damage; this was care. They had taken the books, she could see through the open door, down from the shelves, and put them back. The books were in the right order. They were almost in the right order. There were, on the third shelf from the bottom, two volumes whose spines faced inward, which the scrivener — a thin man called Iden, whom she had written on her fourth visit and who was not, today, behind his desk — would never, in his life, have shelved that way. They had read the books. They had read the books and put them back, and the only sign that they had been read at all was the small carelessness of two spines turned the wrong way by a hand that had been, after several hours, tired.

She did not, this time, write down what was missing, because what was missing from the scriveners was a thing that could not be itemised on the spot; it was the privacy of an entire people's record of itself, which had been read, by strangers, without being asked, and which would now have to be lived inside knowing it had been read. She wrote, instead, on the Lentar side: Iden not at desk. Two spines reversed, third shelf, bottom. They have been here for hours. Not once. Hours.

In the bakers' alley, Halun was at his oven. She had braced, on the walk over, for Halun also to be gone, and the bracing had been, in its way, more frightening than anything she had yet seen, because she had realised, bracing, how much of her sense of Lentar was hung on the small fact of Halun being where Halun was. He was where Halun was. He looked up. He smiled at her, the way he had smiled the first time, with the corner of his mouth that did most of the work.

"You have not been in," he said, "for a week."

"Two days," she said.

He thought about this. He thought about it for slightly too long. "Two days," he agreed, eventually, with the small puzzled courtesy of a man agreeing to a fact he is not, on his own evidence, sure of. "Yes. I think two days is right. Tuesday you were here. With the tall man." He paused. "Was there a tall man."

"There was," she said, "a tall man. His name was Kettle."

"Kettle," Halun said. He turned the word over, in the way a person turns over a coin to check the face. "Yes. Kettle. I remember Kettle. I think I remember Kettle." He looked at her, and his face did the small careful thing faces do when they are deciding whether to admit a worry to someone who might be able to do something about it. "Iyla," he said. "I cannot, this morning, remember the name of the dog that comes to the back door at midday for the heel of the second loaf. I have been giving it the heel for — for a long time. I do not, today, know its name. I knew its name yesterday. I am sure I knew its name yesterday."

"Bell," said Iyla, who had written the dog on her third visit, because she had wanted Halun to have a small daily kindness that was not transactional, and had given the dog a bell on its collar and called it, with the small flat pleasure of the obvious, Bell.

"Bell," said Halun, and the word landed in him the way a found coin lands in a pocket, and his face eased, and he said, "Yes. Bell. Thank you. Bell." And then, after a moment, with the small honest unease of a man too courteous to ask the question he was asking, "Iyla. Should I be worried that I forgot Bell."

"Yes," said Iyla, who had decided, at some point in the last hour, that she was finished, in Lentar, with the comfortable lie. "Yes, Halun. You should. But not by yourself. With me. We will both be worried about it. I will come back tomorrow and we will be worried together, and we will, between us, work out what is to be done."

Halun nodded. He gave her a roll, on the strength of her face, the way he had the first time. She took it. She did not, today, eat it. She put it carefully in her coat pocket, because she had decided that this particular roll was going to go home with her, and was going to sit, uneaten, on her kitchen table, as evidence, in the small precise way evidence sits, of a man who was still there and who knew, this morning, that something in him had been, very lightly, taken.

She walked, then, the parts of the city she had been putting off. The weavers' lane, which was empty, although the looms still stood; the small chapel at the end of the bridge, in which she had written, on a whim, a single old woman who came every afternoon to light a candle, and which today contained the candle, lit, and not the woman. The school yard, which was full of children, because children, she understood now with a cold clarity she would think about properly later, were apparently expensive to remove and easy to leave in place as set dressing; the children were playing a game with stones, and the game had no rules she could discern, and when she asked one of them, a girl with a scab on her elbow, what the game was called, the girl said, "It used to have a name," and went on playing.

By the time Iyla reached the foot of the Small Bridge again, she had stopped, for some streets, being able to feel her face. This was, she recognised, a thing that happened to her under certain kinds of pressure; her face went, and her hands stayed, and the hands took over the running of her, in the meantime, with the small competent indifference of a deputy. Her hands walked her up the bridge. Her hands counted the stones. There were nineteen. Her hands wrote this down, on the Lentar side, under the four lines from the night before, because the hands had decided, apparently, that the inventory was not closed.

Nineteen stones. Dyers' quarter: hollowed. One boy left, unnamed until today; aunt Saba gone, song gone with her. Daughter of the third dyer: gone, indigo thumbprint on the west vat. Scrivener's: read through. Iden missing from desk. Two spines reversed, third shelf, bottom. Weavers' lane: empty, looms standing. Chapel candle: lit, woman gone. School yard: children kept, names of games taken. Halun: present. Bell: forgotten and restored.

She stopped, here. She put the pen down. She put both hands on the parapet of the bridge, which was warm, because the dust-gold light had been on it all afternoon, and she let her face come back, because her face had to come back before she could go home; one did not, she had been taught somewhere, by someone, possibly her mother and possibly herself, walk back into one's own kitchen with a face that had gone.

What she felt, when the face came back, was not the anger she had carefully banked the night before. The anger was still there, underneath, like a coal she had buried for the morning; it would be there when she wanted it. What she felt, on top, was something she had not, in her life, had quite this specific occasion for, and so had not, in her life, quite had the word for. It was the grief of a person who has been away from a house for two days and come back to find that a great many small things — not the house, the house was still there; not the furniture, the furniture was still there — have been very gently taken. A button from a jar. A photograph from a drawer. The name of the dog. The name of the woman at the candle. A song. A song. A song.

They had not, she understood, standing on the bridge with her face slowly returning, sacked the city. Sacking was loud, and they were not loud; they had been here on a schedule, between fourteen and sixteen, when the Small Bridge was to be avoided. They had not burned anything. Burning left ash, and ash, as Mr. Behr had once told her in another context, was evidence. They had done the quieter and more thorough thing, which was to take, from the city, the kind of small unrepeatable particulars that the city itself, deprived of them, would forget it had ever had. They had taken the things that travelled cleanly. Penn's column had said as much: viable for transport, stable, transports cleanly, weight retained. They had taken, in other words, exactly what an Author makes — not the architecture, which any draughtsman can put up, but the named-ness of things, the specific weight of an aunt called Saba, of a dog called Bell, of a daughter who sang. They had been mining the city for the only ore the city had.

And the city — this was the part she had to make herself sit with, before she went home — would, in time, stop noticing. Halun had not, this morning, noticed Bell until she had said the word. The girl in the schoolyard had not noticed that her game had been a named game until Iyla had asked. The boy at the mouth of the dyers' street had not noticed that he had been, for three days, no one in particular, until she had crouched on his step. The taking did not, on its own, hurt. The taking, on its own, simply removed the part of the city that would have known it had been hurt. This was, Iyla saw, with the small dry clarity that was beginning to feel like the only honest emotion left to her today, the most considerate possible form of theft. It was theft designed to leave no one behind capable of pressing charges.

She would press them anyway. She would press them, she understood, on behalf of the boy without a name and the aunt called Saba and the daughter with the indigo thumb and the dog called Bell and the woman at the candle and the game without a name and Iden, wherever Iden was, and Halun, who was still there and was the reason any of this could still be done. She would press them in the only court she had, which was her notebook, and the only language she had, which was the careful naming of what had been there; and she would press them, she suspected, against Saroya, in a conversation she could feel arriving, the way one feels weather arriving, from somewhere east.

She walked home across her own kitchen floor with the uneaten roll in her pocket, and she put the roll on the table, and she sat down with her coat still on, because taking the coat off would have been an admission that the day was over, and she was not, yet, ready to admit that the day was over. She opened the notebook. She turned, deliberately, past the Lentar side, and past the model side, to a fresh page in the back which she had not, until this moment, designated for anything.

At the top of the page she wrote, in capitals, because capitals were what her hand wanted: NAMES TO BE RESTORED. Underneath, in her ordinary writing, she began the list. She wrote Saba first. She wrote Bell second. She wrote the daughter of the third dyer, with a small bracket reminding her to find out, on the next visit, what the daughter had been called, because she had failed, the first time, to ask. She wrote Iden. She wrote the woman at the candle, with another bracket. She wrote the game in the schoolyard, with a third. She wrote, last, and underlined it, the boy on the step, with a note that he had agreed, this afternoon, to be written down, and that the writing-down had taken; that he was, as of today, more present than he had been at noon, and that this was the only good news the page contained, and that she intended, by the end of whatever was coming, to have more of it.

She closed the notebook. She did not, tonight, close it slightly before she wanted to. She closed it exactly when she wanted to, which was the moment she had finished, because there were nights, she was learning, for thrift, and there were nights for spending everything one had; and tonight, with the roll on the table and her face still cold at the edges and a city quietly forgetting itself two days' walk and one green door away, was the second kind.