The Work of Hands

Sela was waiting in the workshop with dry stockings, breakfast and an expression that made Iona feel eleven years old.

“You took a boat under the Gate Office.”

“Kes told you?”

“Kes shouted it from the quay to a man she owed money. Apparently it justified not stopping.”

Tarin stood near the door, holding the books.

Sela looked at him. Recognition arrived slowly, then all at once.

“You.”

“Yes,” he said.

Iona began, “He brought—”

“I know what he brought. I can see his hands.” Sela set the stockings on the bench. “I remember the other visit.”

Tarin put down the books.

“I remember it too.”

“Do you? I wonder what it costs you to remember.”

He did not answer immediately.

“Less than it cost you.”

Sela pulled out a stool and sat. There was grey in her dark braid, more than there had been the previous summer. Her fingers were stained blue from the sailcloth she had been mending upstairs. She had never needed a complete store of recollections in order to remain thoroughly herself.

“Why did you do that work?” she asked.

Tarin looked at the window before answering.

“I was good at it. They said so. I liked being useful to people who seemed certain.”

“That’s all?”

“No. I liked the salary. I liked being able to send money to my sister. I told myself the levy was necessary and somebody had to collect it.”

“It was necessary to remove our shutters?”

“No.”

Iona watched her mother’s face. Sela did not look relieved by his honesty. She looked as though she had finally been handed a bill in the correct name.

“Then put the books on the long bench,” she said. “Not the small one. The small one wobbles.”

It was not forgiveness. Tarin appeared to understand that.

They worked until midday. Iona compared the original intervals with the plugged channels in the broken heart. Tarin copied the ward diagrams. Sela leaned over the drawing for Ninth Quay and corrected the path of an old stair.

“You rang there,” Iona said.

“For seventeen years.”

“Can you still?”

Sela gave her an offended look.

“The levy took my memory of the day you first climbed the tower. It didn’t take my hands.”

She took a length of rope from a hook and demonstrated the old sequence: pull, hold, release, wait for the answering bell. The sound of each district carried a little of the load to the next. A late response strained the whole chain. A missing response made the neighbouring bells work harder.

“That was why there were two ringers on every watch,” she said. “One to hear. One to pull. You need people who trust each other enough to be corrected.”

Tarin wrote that down.

“You don’t need to write everything,” Sela told him.

“Yes,” he said, “I think I do.”

By evening, Kes had brought the clappers out on a hired barge, using an order Tarin signed in his own name. She had also brought six dockworkers, a sack of empty assessment vessels and the news that the Gate Office was looking for him.

“They’ll find the signature,” Iona said.

“I meant them to,” he replied.

Kes inspected the broken heart on the bench.

“Can you make it work?”

“I can make it answer the old pattern. Whether the towers can carry the storm is a different question.”

“Lovely. I was worried you might have good news.”

That night, after the others had gone, Iona found Tarin trying to re-sew his torn sleeve with a needle intended for canvas.

“Stop.”

He looked up.

“You’re making additional holes.”

“I thought the first ones looked lonely.”

She took the coat. He surrendered it with a small expression of relief.

Without it he seemed younger, though she knew by then he was thirty-four. There was a line of faded ink on his forearm where he had once used his own skin to remember a measurement. The bandage she had tied at dawn was still clean.

She threaded a finer needle.

“Have you ever paid a tithe?”

His gaze lowered to her hands.

“Before I joined the Office. Twice. Once was a day with my sister when we were children. I know where we went because she tells me. The other was a winter morning. I don’t know much about it now.”

“And since?”

“Wardens are exempt while they serve.”

She pushed the needle through the cloth.

“Of course they are.”

“Yes.”

He could have reminded her of the reports, the stolen glass, the signature that might cost him his position. She was glad he did not.

“Does your sister still speak to you?”

“When she has something she thinks I should hear.”

“Does she live in Glass Hill?”

“Yes.”

“And pay substitutes?”

He nodded.

Iona tied off the thread, then cut it.

“Would she listen if you asked her to ring?”

“She might listen better if you asked.”

“I don’t know her.”

“She considers that an advantage in a person arguing with me.”

Iona handed back his coat. Their fingers touched. Neither moved for a moment.

There were things she wanted to ask that had nothing to do with the gates. Whether he had someone waiting at home. Whether the scar beside his mouth changed how a kiss felt. Whether he was aware that he stood nearer to her now than he had when they began.

Instead she asked whether he was hungry.

“Yes,” he said. “Very.”

They ate cold barley cakes from the same chipped plate. He broke the larger one unevenly and gave her the bigger piece without making a performance of it. She noticed anyway.

Later she went upstairs to her own bed and left him the workroom couch. For a long time she listened to the small sounds of a man making himself comfortable in a room where she knew the proper place of every object.