All of Us, Often

They came down the Ladder in the dark, which is not done, and reached the top hut some hours after they should have, and nobody had fallen, which Bel attributed to divine indifference and Ori to the fact that all four of them had been too preoccupied to be clumsy.

At lamp forty-one Sera Ilm was sitting on the rock shelf with her boots over the edge. She stood up when she saw them, and then she came down onto the road, which she had not done in five years, and stood in the light of the cracked pane looking at Merrow. Neither of them said anything for a while.

"You take too much off the near corner," Merrow said eventually. "I have told you for eleven years." "Twelve," said Sera. "You started before I was any good, which was unkind." Then she put her arms round him, and he stood in them like a post for a second and a half before he put his own round her, and Wick turned away and found something extremely interesting about the ladder strapping.

"It let you go," said Ori. "It did not let me go," said Sera. "It never held me. That is the part I could not make anyone understand from up here, and the reason I could not come down and say it — it was never a prison, and I could have walked down this road on any morning of five years, and I did not, because if I had, it would have been alone again." She wiped her face with the heel of her hand, briskly, and looked annoyed about it.

"And now?" said Wick. "Now it is being visited in March," said Sera. "By whoever draws the short straw, and I am told the huts are to have doors that fit." She looked at Merrow. "Is that true, or has she made it up on the way down?" "It is true," said Merrow. "It will take me two years and every favour I have. It is true."

They walked the rest of it in a loose bunch, five of them now, at a pace that made no sense for people who had been awake for twenty hours. At lamp thirty-two Bel started singing the coarse one and Merrow did not rise to it, and Sera did, immediately and with a verse Wick had never heard, and Ori laughed so hard he had to stop and put the ladder down.

They came into Veiro at nine the next morning with the whole town in the street about the salt cart, and nobody paid the slightest attention to five lamplighters walking down the stair from the pass, which was, Wick thought, exactly correct, and exactly what the entire arrangement had always been for.

The guildhouse smelled the way it always smelled. Merrow put the ledger on the desk, opened it near the back, and turned it round so that it faced Wick rather than him — and did not say anything about the gesture, and did not need to.

"I am not writing in that," she said. "You are the only one of the four of you who asked it a question," said Merrow. "That is the whole qualification. It has never been anything else." He sat down heavily in the chair by the stove, and Wick understood that he was going to sit in it for a considerable number of years yet and that this was not the same thing as keeping the book.

She looked at the right-hand column. Forty-odd names, one to a line, and beside each one the small dishonest word. She thought about the eleventh page of the Falls ledger, and the numbers nineteen and twenty-three, and about how easy it would be to cross the word out and how completely that would fail to be the point.

So she did not cross anything out. She ruled a new column instead, down the fresh page, and headed it in the plainest hand she could manage: went up, and why, and whether anyone went after them. Then she wrote Sera Ilm's name in it, and the year, and the word returned, and the date, which was that morning.

"That is a very long heading," said Bel, reading over her shoulder. "It's an honest one." "It is both," said Sera. She had not taken her coat off. Wick suspected it would be some days before she did. "Put Halden Vey in it." "Halden Vey is dead," said Merrow, from the chair. "Halden Vey died in nineteen years ago, up there, of being ninety, and I know because I was told."

The room went quiet. "You were told," said Wick. "By whom?" Merrow looked at the stove for a while. "By something that has never lied to me," he said, "in thirty-eight years of my declining to ask it anything. Put him in the column, Wick. Put all of them in. It knows every name and it will tell you every one, and I have spent most of my life not asking because I did not want to find out what I would owe afterwards."

She put them in. It took the rest of the autumn, on and off, four or five names at a time, and it turned out that Merrow was right about the owing, and that the debt, once you were carrying it in the open, was not as heavy as the arrangement had been.

The doors took eighteen months and not two years, because Bel turned out to have a genuinely unsettling talent for extracting timber from people who had not intended to give any. The eleventh-lamp hut got a door that fitted, a proper stove, and a second window facing the pass, on the grounds that a hut you can see out of is a place and a hut you cannot is a box.

The rotation was harder. A guild that walks a road twice a year needs four people. A guild that keeps a road needs eleven, and Veiro did not have eleven people who wanted the work, and the Falls did not either, and it took two seasons of Merrow being extremely tiresome at town meetings on both sides of the pass before the numbers came out.

They came out in the end because of the salt cart. The Falls physician crossed in February of that first winter, on a road with six lamps lit on the top stage, and a child on the Veiro side who would otherwise have died did not, and after that nobody in either town needed the arithmetic explained to them again.

Wick took the March walk that year, with Ori, because they had drawn it and because neither of them had been willing to admit to wanting it. They went up in weather that made the Ladder into something out of a story, and lit what needed lighting, and spent four days in the top hut with the stove going, and did not see anything at all.

That was the point, though. On the last morning Ori stood at the crown of the pass in his coat with his hands in his pockets and said, conversationally, to the air, "We're going down today. Someone's up in April. It'll be Bel, probably, and she'll talk at you the entire time and you will have to bear it." And the air, Wick was quite certain, was pleased.

The lamps stopped lighting themselves after the second winter. Sera claimed to find this insulting. Merrow, who had begun to walk with a stick and had lost none of his capacity for saying an unbearable thing at the correct moment, observed that a thing which has company does not need to leave the light on.

Wick kept the ledger for forty-one years, which everyone in the guild pretended was a coincidence, and in all that time the right-hand column gained no new entries at all. The left-hand column of dates ran out and had to be continued on a page glued in. The second column, the one with the very long honest heading, went on for four pages, and every name in it came back down.

The apprentice was fourteen and had been given the can on the grounds that everyone was given the can, and had carried it up the Veiro stair that morning without setting it down, which Wick had noticed and had said nothing about.

His name was Toller. He talked the entire first mile, mostly questions, and then stopped talking somewhere on the long climb and did not start again until the second hut, which was the ordinary progression and reassured her more than she would have admitted to anyone. They had eleven on the rota now and four of them were under twenty, and Wick had reached the age where this struck her as both the point of everything and slightly unfair.

At lamp forty-one she made him do it himself. He set the ladder wrong, corrected it without being told, climbed, and opened the glass. "It's cracked," he called down. "The pane. There's a line in it." "There is." "Do we not replace them?" "That one, no." Wick put her hands in her pockets. "Go on. Trim it."

He trimmed it badly, which was correct for fourteen, and she let him get all the way down the ladder before she said anything about the near corner. Then she made him go back up and do it again, and he was sour about it in exactly the way she had been sour about it, which she declined to mention.

"Why not that one?" he said afterwards, on the road, with the lamp burning behind them. "Because a woman I knew sat on that shelf for five years and lit it every autumn so somebody would come and look," said Wick. "And somebody did. And the glass is how you know which lamp it was." She glanced back once. "There's a column in the book about it. You'll read it when you can be trusted with the book."

"When's that?" "When you stop asking." He thought about that for a quarter of a mile, correctly identified it as unfair, and said so, and Wick laughed out loud on the pass for the first time in a while and told him he was probably right.

They made fourteen lamps that day, and slept in a hut with a door that fitted, and in the morning the whole road ahead of them was dark and waiting and entirely ordinary, which was the finest thing about it, and which Toller would not understand for years, and would then understand all at once, on some cold afternoon, at the top of a ladder, with his hands full of somebody else's work.