The Ninth of Every Month

A memory bottle is not one piece of glass. That was the first thing Oisín learned, and it undid most of what he had assumed about the four a year, and about a good deal else besides. It is a body, a throat, a stopper, and a seal. Each of them is made separately, on a different day, from a different draw, and the body alone takes eleven attempts before Cadhla will keep one — and she counts the attempts out loud, which he came to understand was for her benefit rather than his.

She kept the fourth. She broke the other ten herself, at the bench, without ceremony, and swept them into the crate. "That is not waste," she said, when Oisín failed to hide his face about it. "That is the tenth one telling the eleventh what shape to be. A maker who keeps a piece she has doubts about has decided the doubt is somebody else's problem, and it usually turns out to be the buyer's."

Through December and January he did nothing but heat management. Nine hours a day at the glory hole with a piece that was not his, learning the exact colour that the body of Rosaleen Fell's bottle needed to be at each stage, and being told, roughly, when it was not. He got very good very quickly, which he noticed, and Cadhla did not mention, which meant she had noticed too.

Rosaleen came on the ninth. Cadhla took her into the back room where the annealers were, and shut the door, and the two of them were in there for two hours, and Oisín — working the furnace six feet away — could hear talking and sometimes laughing and once, in January, a long stretch of nothing at all.

Fell waited outside in every weather. In February it sleeted and Oisín took him out a cup of something hot and Fell took it without a word and then, twenty minutes later, said, "Thank you," to the empty causeway, at a distance and a delay that made it clear he had been working up to it.

"She's better than she was in autumn," Oisín said, because it was true and because he had nothing else. "She is not," said Fell. "She is louder. Those are different." He drank the rest of it. "I am aware of what I am doing here, if you were wondering. I am spending eleven hundred and a year of my daughter's ninths on a bottle, when I could be spending them on her." He handed back the cup. "I have done the sum. It comes out the same either way, which is the only reason I can bear it."

Oisín thought about that for the rest of the winter and never did find the end of it.

In March the guild sent its levy inspection, which happens every eleven years and which nobody in Ard Rhun had bothered to explain to Oisín, and Cadhla was gone for six days, and Oisín was left with the furnace, the rota, and a set of instructions that filled two pages.

The instructions did not mention the vault. He found it by dropping a punty. It went under the racks, and he went after it on his stomach, and the floor beneath the third annealer was not floor: it was a hatch, iron-bound, older than the annealer standing on it, with a hasp that had been oiled recently enough to be shining.

He should not have opened it. He was extremely clear with himself about this afterwards, in the specific way of a person who is going to do a thing anyway and would like the record to show that he knew. He shifted the annealer eight inches — it was on rollers, which told him something, and the rollers were greased, which told him more — and lifted the hatch. Eleven steps down there was a room the size of a boat shed, cut into the rock under the workshop, cold as the flat at low tide.

There were shelves. There were a great many shelves, and they were full, and every single thing on them was a memory bottle. Not four. Not four a year. Hundreds. They went back into the dark further than his lamp reached, rank on rank, each one stoppered and sealed and holding, if the guild's entire body of work was to be believed, one whole human hour.

He walked the first aisle with the lamp up. The bottles were not identical — different bodies, different throats, sixty years of different hands — but they had one thing in common that he did not understand until he had gone twenty feet, and when he did understand it he stopped walking and stood quite still in the cold.

They were all the same colour. Every one. That green with grey underneath it, the exact shade a gather takes when a maker gives it something true, and it does not repeat — it cannot repeat, it is the print of one specific thing given up by one specific person, and Cadhla had told him so in his first month and had been unable to keep the impatience out of her voice at having to say it.

Hundreds of bottles. Sixty years. One colour.

He spent four of the six days down there and slept badly on the other two. He counted eight hundred and sixty-one bottles and stopped counting because the aisle went on and because the counting had begun to feel like an activity he was doing to avoid the thinking.

He found the ledgers on the third day, in a chest at the far end, and they were guild ledgers in guild hands and they were completely ordinary, which was the worst thing about them. Commission. Buyer. Price. Date of delivery. Date of return. He read the fourth column eleven times before he accepted what it was.

Every memory bottle Ard Rhun had ever sold had come back. Some in a year, some in thirty, one in fifty-two — but every single line had a return date, and beside each return date a note in the plain guild shorthand: recovered, resealed, held. The bottles went out. The buyers used them. And then the bottles came home and went onto a shelf in the dark under the workshop.

Which left the question of what had gone out. Oisín sat on the bottom step with the lamp beside him and worked at it the way you work at a piece that will not centre, and got there in the end, and did not enjoy it. If eight hundred bottles were all one colour, then eight hundred bottles held one memory. And Ard Rhun had been selling one memory, over and over, for sixty years, to people who came to it in the worst month of their lives.

He thought about Fell in the sleet. I have done the sum. He thought about a man at seventy uncorking a bottle expecting one hour of his daughter and getting an hour of somebody else's entirely, and having no way at all to tell the difference, because whatever else was true, a real memory in a real bottle would feel real.

He came up on the fourth day, put the annealer back on its rollers, dropped the hatch, and went out to the flat and sat on the black beach until his hands stopped. The tide came in over the channel he had drawn from in the autumn. He was nineteen, and he had been in the guild two years and eleven months, and he had precisely one person he could take this to, and she was the person he would be taking it about.

Cadhla came back on the sixth day, off the Tullow road, tired and disagreeable. She stopped in the workshop doorway and looked at him for about two seconds. "Ah," she said. "You moved the annealer back an inch and a half short. Sit down, Oisín. You will want to be sitting."

"I am not going to lie to you," Cadhla said, "and I am not going to soften it, and you are going to want me to do both within about a minute, so take a moment now and decide whether you would rather I sent you home instead."

"I'd rather know." "Everyone says that." She put the kettle on the furnace shelf. "Very well. Yes, there are eight hundred and some bottles under this floor. Yes, they are one colour. No, we have not been selling one memory for sixty years." She sat down. "We have been selling one memory for four hundred and eleven."

Oisín found that he had nothing at all to say. "It is called the First Hour in the ledgers, which is a piece of guild grandeur I have always disliked," Cadhla went on. "It was given by the woman who founded this workshop. Her name was Sile Rhun and she had a daughter who went into the water off the causeway at the age of six, and she made the first vessel that would hold a whole hour, and what she put in it was the hour before."

"The hour before—" "Before the daughter drowned. Yes. An ordinary hour. Breakfast. An argument about a shoe. Nothing in it at all." Cadhla's voice had not changed. "And it turns out — and I would give a great deal to know how she found this out, because the ledgers do not say — that one true whole hour of an ordinary morning with a child you love is not specific. It is the most general thing there is. Anyone who has ever lost anyone opens that bottle and finds their own."

"That's a lie." "It is a copy," said Cadhla. "The two are related and they are not the same, and I have had forty years to decide which this is, and I have not decided, and I have kept making them." She took the kettle off. "Because the alternative is what I told Fell in the autumn, which was also true. A vessel that holds one whole hour costs the maker something that does not come back. Sile Rhun paid it once. Every bottle since is a casting from that."

"And if a maker paid it fresh?" Oisín said. "Then you would get a true one," said Cadhla. "One. And the maker would be missing the hour they gave, entirely and permanently, not the way you are missing your brother's knuckles. Gone as if it had not happened. Three makers in four hundred years have done it and all three of them are in the right-hand ledger and none of them made anything afterwards." She poured. "Now. Rosaleen Fell comes on the ninth. Drink that, and then tell me which bottle you intend to make her, because I have made my choice a hundred times and I would like, once, to hear somebody make it out loud."