The Six on the Top Stage

The Falls end of the road was easy and always had been. Six lamps on the top stage, then a long descent through pine into a town that had decided some generations back to be pleased to see lamplighters, and had never revised the decision. They were fed. Ori was flirted with by a woman who mended nets and did not stop grinning about it for two days. Bel sold, for an unreasonable price, a small quantity of gossip.

Nobody talked about the top. That was the eight days: a held breath dressed up as a working week. Wick found herself watching Merrow the way you watch a stove you have been told not to touch, and found Merrow watching Ori, and found Bel watching all three of them and saying nothing, which was so unlike Bel that it functioned as a shout.

On the fourth evening Wick sat on the sea wall at Sunder Falls with the Falls-side ledger — every town kept one, a thin thing, mostly weather — and worked backwards through the autumns. Ninety years of crossings. The salt cart. The timber. The two winters the road had gone untended, both before her grandmother, both remembered in the town by name.

She found what she was looking for on the eleventh page. The untended winters had a column of their own, and the column was headed lost on the pass, and the numbers in it were nineteen and twenty-three. Not lamplighters. Traders, a midwife, a family of four coming over in March because a child was ill on the Veiro side and the Falls had the only physician.

She sat with that for a long time while the harbour did its evening business below her. Two hundred years, one lamplighter at a time, quietly. Or two winters, and forty-two people, loudly. It was not a comfortable sum and it did not resolve into a comfortable answer, and she understood at last what Merrow had meant about there being no word in the book for what they were.

"You've gone the colour of the wall," said Bel, sitting down beside her with two cups of something hot. "I found the years the road went dark," said Wick, and handed her the ledger, and watched her read it. Bel gave it back without a word and drank her cup and looked at the water. "Well," she said eventually. "That is the meanest arithmetic I have ever seen."

"It's why nobody ever said no." "It is why nobody ever asked," said Bel. "Those are different sentences. You told me that." She stood, and dusted the wall off her coat, and passed the second cup down. "Drink that. We go up on Thursday, and I would like you sharp, because I have a suspicion about Thursday that I am not enjoying."

Thursday was clear and hard and blue, the kind of weather that makes a mountain look like an illustration of itself. They came up the Ladder in four hours, which was fast, and lit the six lamps of the top stage in the order the guild had always lit them, which was not the order of the numbers and never had been, for reasons the ledger did not record.

The last one stood at the crown of the pass on a stone plinth that was older than the lamp by a great deal. Wick had lit it three times before and had never once looked at the plinth. Now she looked. There were marks cut into it, weathered nearly out, and they were not letters, and there were a great many of them, and they went all the way round.

"Don't count them," said Merrow. "I have counted them. It does not help." He set his pack down against the plinth and straightened up, and Wick saw him decide something in his shoulders before he said any of it. "Right. Here is how this goes. The three of you walk on down the Veiro side to the top hut. I will follow before dark."

"No," said Bel. "We discussed—" "You announced," said Bel. "Nobody discussed anything. You said the word alone in a firm voice and Ori and I let you, because you are sixty-one and frightening, and I have spent eight days deciding not to let you again." She sat down on the plinth. She looked, Wick thought, exactly like a woman who intended to be difficult to move.

What happened next did not announce itself. There was no light, no voice, no wind dropping out of the sky. Wick simply became aware, in the manner of noticing that a room has another person in it, that the four of them were five, and that the fifth had been there for some while and had been waiting politely for a gap in the conversation.

It was not visible. That was the difficulty she had, afterwards, telling it to anybody: there was nothing to look at, and yet she could have said precisely where it was, and so could Ori, because he had turned to face the same patch of empty air she had. Bel had gone very white and had not moved off the plinth.

And it was old. That came through before anything else — not menace, not size, but a fatigue so complete that standing near it made Wick's own bones feel borrowed. Something had been holding a door open for two hundred years and had been doing it, latterly, with one hand.

It did not speak in words, but Wick understood it in words afterwards, and never entirely trusted the translation. What arrived was a question. The question was very simple, and it had the worn quality of a sentence said so many times that the saying of it has become a kind of habit rather than a hope. And it was not addressed to Merrow.

It was addressed to Ori. Wick knew that the way you know which way a room is facing, without evidence and without any doubt at all. Ori made a small sound and put the ladder down carefully against the plinth, as though the ladder mattered, as though a man being asked the oldest question on the pass should first take care not to drop anything belonging to the guild.

"Say nothing," said Merrow, low and fast. "Ori. Say nothing at all." "It isn't like that," Ori said. His voice was strange — not frightened, which would have been bearable, but moved. "It's not — it isn't grabbing at me. It's asking. It's so tired, Merrow. Do you have any idea how tired it—" He stopped, and his face did something complicated, and Wick realised with a lurch that he was about to say yes and that he would mean it kindly.

She got there first. Not by moving; there was nowhere to move to. She simply turned to the patch of air where the question was coming from and said, out loud, in the flat voice she used for reading a lamp number, "What happens if we all say no?"

The question stopped. That was the only way she could ever describe it: the pressure of being asked went out of the air like a held note released, all at once and completely, and for a moment there was nothing on the crown of the pass but four cold people, six lit lamps, and a very old plinth with a great many marks cut round it.

Then something came back, and it was not an answer. It was, unmistakably, surprise — and under the surprise, running through it the way a crack runs through glass, something so much like relief that Wick sat down on the road for the second time in a fortnight.

"Nobody has ever asked it," she said, to nobody. "In two hundred years." Beside her Merrow had put a hand out to the plinth to steady himself. "It's been waiting to be asked. It's been asking us because that is the only question it knows how to put, and we keep saying yes, and every single time it has cost it another one of us and it has never once got what it actually wanted."

They stayed on the crown until the light started going, which was longer than was sensible and a good deal shorter than any of them wanted. Wick did most of the talking. What she was doing, she understood only dimly at the time, was not negotiating and was not bargaining; it was closer to explaining a misunderstanding, very slowly, to someone who had been unfailingly polite about it for two hundred years.

The thing at the top of the pass wanted company. It had said so, in the only way it could, forty-odd times. And forty-odd lamplighters had heard the request and had answered it with the biggest thing they had, because that is what people of that sort do: they had given up their entire lives, one at a time, permanently, in a place where the giver could never be visited, thanked, relieved, or replaced.

"It's the wrong shape," said Ori. He had sat down too. "It asked for company and we kept giving it a hostage." "We gave it the best thing we had," said Merrow. "Yes," said Ori. "And it has been alone the whole time anyway, because one person on a mountain for forty years is not company. It's just a different arrangement of alone."

Bel had not moved off the plinth, and showed no sign of intending to. "So what is the right shape?" she said. "Because I would like to be very clear that I am not volunteering to move up here and become a story people tell in the Falls. And I would like to be equally clear that I am not walking down off this mountain until somebody says a sentence that ends the thing properly."

Wick looked down the Ladder. Forty-one lamps between here and Veiro, six on the top stage, a hut at the eleventh and another at the twenty-eighth, and a guild that walked the whole thing twice a year and treated the road as a thing you crossed rather than a place anyone was.

"We come up," she said slowly. "That's all. Not one of us for ever. All of us, often. The guild walks the road twice a year and calls it finished — what if it isn't a walk? What if somebody's up here every month, and the huts are places people live in rather than survive in, and the top stage gets tended in winter instead of being abandoned to it?"

"That is not a small change," said Merrow. "That is the guild being a different guild." "Yes," said Wick. And then, because the air had gone strange again and because she had been raised to say things plainly to people who were listening: "Would that do? Not one of us for ever. All of us, often." And the crown of the pass, very carefully, the way you agree to something you have stopped expecting, said yes.