A Year of Being Very Good at It

The year that followed was the dullest of Teodora Vask's life and she has said since that she would not trade one week of it, which is the sort of thing people say and which in her case appears to be true.

She ruled eleven thousand parallels. She sat and passed the fourth-year examination in October and the fifth-year in March, which is not permitted and which the Chartmistress permitted, and the examiner, who was a councillor named Harrow, asked her the question about the guild's fixed datum for the northern quarter.

She gave the correct answer, which is that there is not one. Harrow wrote it down and moved on and she passed, and she went straight from the hall to the stable and told Piet, and Piet said, "Then he does not know either," and neither of them found that as comforting as they had expected.

She learned the instruments. That was the real work of the winter and it nearly broke her, because the ruling room is a place for a steady hand and the Reach is a place for a steady head, and the theodolite and the chain and the level do not care in the slightest that your parallels are the best in the room.

Piet taught her badly for two months and then admitted it and got Bendt to teach her, and Bendt, who had not been on the Reach in thirty years and had surveyed the ninth district four times before that, taught her in the vault after hours out of a book he had written himself and never shown anybody, in eleven lessons, and she has that book now.

The eleventh lesson was not about instruments. Bendt sat her down at the desk at the foot of the stairs and said: "When you are up there, you will be tempted to check the Stone yourself. Do not. It is the party leader's measurement and it is sealed and there is a reason for both of those, and an apprentice with her own dividers and a theory is exactly how four hundred years of quiet ends."

"Then what am I to do?" "Your job," said Bendt. "Extremely well, in front of everybody, for three months. And keep your eyes open, and your mouth shut, and if you see something, write it down as a measurement and bring it to me." He closed the book. "That is the only advice I have ever given an apprentice in fifty-two years and I am not certain it is good."

The spring party went out on the fourth of April with eleven people, four ponies, and enough paper to make a grown surveyor anxious about the weather, and Teodora Vask was fourteen years and one month old and had never been more than eleven miles from Hallow Ford in her life.

The Reach is not what the sheets suggest. That is the first thing everybody says and it is unhelpful and it is completely true. On paper it is a network of ridges and drainages with names on them. On the ground it is four hundred miles of pale grass and black rock and enormous weather, and the sky is the largest thing that has ever happened to you, and for the first eleven days she was frankly no use at all.

Then she got useful, quite suddenly, in the way apprentices do, and by the end of the first month she was carrying a chain and reading a level and keeping the book for a section leader named Osra who had the patience of a wall and swore in four languages.

The party leader was a woman called Mereth Dane, forty, who had led eleven springs and who was liked in the way that competent people are liked by those who have to walk behind them. She spoke to Teodora four times in nine weeks and every one of them was about work, and Teodora watched her constantly.

What she was watching for she could not have said. What she saw was that Mereth Dane carried her own instrument case, personally, on her own back, up every hill, for nine weeks, when there were four ponies and eleven people and she was the leader and could have handed it to anybody; and that nobody in the party found this remarkable; and that on the two occasions when the case was set down out of Dane's own hand, she was within four feet of it and looking at it.

And Piet, who was a journeyman now and kept the section book for the eastern flank, said one evening by the fire, apropos of nothing, in a voice pitched for one person: "She has done eleven springs. She has walked to that rock eleven times. Do you know what I would give to know what her face did on the eleventh."

They came down into Ilvery Vale on the twenty-second of June, which is the last leg of the northern circuit and is famously the pleasant one, and Teodora saw for the first time with her own eyes the eleven-mile bowl she had measured on forty-one sheets across four hundred years, and it looked like a valley, and she stopped on the shoulder above it and had to be spoken to twice.

They were in the vale for eleven days, which is four days longer than the survey requires, and Teodora worked out on the second day that the extra four days are the point and that nobody had ever told her so.

The party lodges in the vale. It pays well and it pays in coin and it has done for four hundred years, and it buys eleven days of eleven surveyors being polite to eight hundred farmers, and in that time it hears every quarrel about water and every dispute about a wall and every complaint about a road, and it writes none of it down and it settles none of it and it does not have to.

What it does is come back next year. That is the entire mechanism and Teodora watched it work and it took her four days to see it. The guild is the one institution in that valley that has been there longer than any family in it, and it arrives every spring, and it is fair, and it pays, and it leaves, and consequently when the guild's party leader says that the survey needs the eastern shoulder cleared of stock for two days in June, the stock is off the shoulder.

The eastern shoulder is where the Stone is. Teodora worked that out on the ninth day and had to go and sit by the outflow for a while.

She met a girl her own age called Ren who thought Hallow Ford sounded unbearable and the guild worse, and who wanted to know whether it was true that in the districts a river could be in a different place in the morning. Teodora said it was true. Ren said that sounded frightening and Teodora said that it was ordinary, and Ren said, cheerfully, "Not here it isn't. Nothing happens here. My gran says nothing has happened here since the flood and there wasn't a flood."

Teodora Vask, fourteen, stood in a farmyard in Ilvery Vale and looked at a girl who had no idea that she was standing on the only fixed point in four hundred miles of moving country, and that eleven surveyors had walked nine weeks over open moor to come and make sure of it, and that a guild with a vault and a charter and a magistrate's respect existed in order that she should go on not knowing.

She said, "That sounds nice." And Ren said it was boring, and asked whether there were boys in Hallow Ford, and the conversation went where conversations between fourteen-year-olds go, and Teodora walked back to the lodging in the evening light along an outflow with a dog-leg in it that had been in exactly that place since before the guild had a name.

Mereth Dane went up the eastern shoulder alone on the morning of the eleventh day, at first light, with her own case on her own back, and came down at the fourth hour, and gave nothing away at all in her face, which Teodora was watching from four hundred yards with an intensity she is not proud of.

She sealed the four measurements at the trestle in front of the whole party, which is the procedure, and everybody looked politely elsewhere, which is also the procedure. Then the party struck camp and went down the vale road toward the Ford, and it was over, and Teodora had seen precisely nothing.

Except that on the second night of the walk down, Mereth Dane sat next to her at the fire, which she had not done in nine weeks, and said: "Vask. Your section book is the best in the party and I have told the Chartmistress so." "Thank you." "You kept the levels on the eastern flank on the ninth." "Yes." "Read me the closing error."

Teodora did not have to look it up. "Four inches over eleven miles." "That is very good. That is better than very good, that is a journeyman's line and you are fourteen." Dane poked the fire. "Now tell me what you did wrong."

And Teodora, who had been waiting nine weeks for a conversation and had not expected this one, said: "I closed on the mark above the outflow." There was a pause of about four seconds. "Yes," said Mereth Dane. "You did. Which is the correct mark and the one in the book and the one every levelling in that section has closed on for two hundred years." She put the poker down. "And you knew what it was, and you should not have, and I have known since the fourth day that you knew because of how carefully you did not look at it."

Teodora's mouth had gone dry. "Am I in trouble." "No. You are in the party, and next spring you will be in it again, and in about eleven years you will be leading it, and at some point after that a woman will hand you a sealed packet and tell you it is the actual work and the rest is administration." Dane stood up and looked down at her in the firelight. "I am going to say one thing to you and then we are going to talk about the weather for the rest of the walk to the Ford."

"Say it." "There have been eleven springs in my hand," said Mereth Dane. "Ten of them I sealed the packet at the trestle in front of everybody without thinking about it at all. This is the second one where I have thought about it. The other was four years ago." She turned to go. "That is not a confession of anything and I will deny the conversation. But you are going to be Chartmistress one day, Vask, and I would like you to have heard, from somebody, before you get there, that it is not always the same four numbers."