Mab's note on the stream
The tutors came to the kiln again in Leaffall. They brought a board and drew the stream on it, and I drew my jar beside it, and we agreed.
A mind that is deep is like a tall jar. The bottom must hold, and every coil above must pass its weight down and its shape up. If a layer keeps only what it found and forgets the rest, the stream stops and the mind cannot learn past that layer. It is like a jar with a crack across it: the top dries and falls off.
They said: each layer adds what it found to the stream. That is the whole of it. The stream is the same stream all the way up.
I asked Isla what the stream is made of. She said numbers in a row, one row running through the mind. I asked what the numbers are. She laughed and said nobody wrote that down. I said clay is numbers too, if you weigh it. She said I was not wrong and would not say more.
So I keep my note short. A deep mind can learn because the stream carries what the lower layers found up to the higher ones. A mind without the stream can only be shallow. That is what I saw at the kiln and what the tutors drew on the board.
%%
A clerk speaks with Vale
Taken down in summer by a clerk of the Archive who visited the hamlet near Saltreach to collect the stories of the place. Vale, shepherd, was willing, and talked from morning to night. This is the whole of what was said, in order, with some small cuts.
Q: When were you born?
A: In the hills above the harbor. Fifty-one years ago. My mother was a shepherd too. She had me in a lambing shed, between two ewes.
Q: Did that make you a shepherd?
A: I think it did. I smelled of wool from the first minute.
Q: What is the best thing about the work?
A: The quiet. I sit on a hill with ninety sheep and a dog, and I think. Most days I think about nothing.
Q: What is the worst thing?
A: The foxes. And the winter. And the rain in spring. And the wolf, once, but that was long ago.
Q: Tell me about the harbor.
A: It is below us. We see it every day from the hill. It grows. When I was a boy there were ten boats. Now there are sixty. They go out at dawn and come in at noon. In the evening the lanterns are lit, and the whole bay glitters.
Q: Do you go to the harbor often?
A: Twice a month. To sell wool and buy salt. I do not go for the fish. I do not like fish. I am the only shepherd who does not.
Q: Was there a late boat?
A: There was, this summer. Dorn, my brother-in-law. He went out before dawn and did not come home by noon. I climbed the hill. I looked for the green sail. I did not see it.
Q: How long did you wait?
A: All afternoon. I sat on a rock with a bowl of cold porridge. My sister came up and sat beside me. She said nothing. We watched the bay.
Q: What did you think?
A: I thought of the sea. It is a great thing, and it does what it likes. I have never been on a boat. I do not understand how anyone can.
Q: Did he return?
A: He did, at dusk. There was a bit of wind, and he rowed in on the tide. We were glad. My sister did not say it, but I saw her hands shaking.
Q: And the birth?
A: It was my sister's third child. A girl. She came in the same week as the late boat. I think she was waiting for her father to come home. She is a calm baby. She does not mind a late dinner.
Q: What is her name?
A: Marit, after the first lamp keeper at the harbor. It seems right.
Q: Do you have a message for the Archive?
A: Only that the hills are good, and the sheep are fat, and the harbor is full. We are not a great place. But we are a happy one. Write that down.
The clerk wrote it down, and the dog licked the page.
%%
Q: the sign over the candle stall
Cleo paints her own signs. I asked her about the one she painted after the fire, and about the wall.
Q: What happened to the wall?
A: The wall behind the shed, down by the slip. A creeper came up out of the marsh grass in the night and stood by it. My boy saw it. He ran. Then it blew, and the wall came down in a heap of cobblestone and dust. It knocked the shed door flat. We found a piece of the door on the roof.
Q: Did anyone get hurt?
A: No one. The shed was empty. The cat was under the bench and it came out grey with dust and very angry.
Q: So you built the wall again?
A: We built it again in a week. Corin sent two of his men from the slip with a cart of stone. They said a wall near the water should be deeper in the ground. Now it is. It stands.
Q: And the sign?
A: The sign says KEEP YOUR TORCHES LIT, in red wax, over the door of the shed. My boy painted the letters. He is ten. The letters lean, but they are big.
Q: Do people mind being told?
A: They laugh. Then they light their torches. That is all I want.
Q: Is it true, what they say, that a creeper fears a cat?
A: I have seen a cat walk past one and the creeper stand still. I have not seen it run. I would not trust a cat with my life, but I trust it with my shed.
%%
Interview: Hal Sedge
Perrin asked about the reeds from a flat boat, with the reeds standing tall all round us.

Q: What is your trade?
A: Reed cutter. In Reaping I cut. In summer I mend boats and count frogs, which is the harder job.
Q: How do you cut a reed?
A: Low, at the root, with a sharp blade. Never more than half a bed in a year, so the frogs have somewhere to sit.
Q: What is the reed for?
A: Thatch for the healing house roof. Mats for the boardwalks. Bundles for the boat houses. The fish weir is made of reed, and it eats a whole bed each season.
Q: Who cuts with you?
A: My cousin Rue, and a copper helper that carries the bundles to the boat houses. It does not drop them in the water, which is more than Rue manages.
Q: Does the helper understand the work?
A: It understands the stack. I show it how a bundle sits, and it sits them all the same way. It never asks why, and I have stopped asking it.
Q: What do you think of the frogs?
A: They are the best neighbors on the marsh. They sing at dusk when the water is warm, and I sing back, badly. They have never once asked me for rent.
Q: Have you ever lost a boat?
A: Once. In Deepsnow, the year of the bad ice. We found it in the reeds two bends down, with a frog asleep in the bow. The frog was not pleased with us.
Q: What would you tell a new reed cutter?
A: Know the water before the reeds. Take a boat out on a calm day, and learn where it is deep. Then cut where you know.
%%
Interview: Abel, boat builder
Asked by Ina, clerk, in the spring of 207, at Abel's yard outside Ambrook.
Q: What do you build?
A: Boats for the mill pond. Boats for the river. A boat for a child, once, that fit nothing but the child.
Q: What is the hardest part?
A: The waiting. Oak needs two years to dry. Nobody wants to wait two years for a boat. Everyone is glad to have waited, after.
Q: Have you been to the sea?
A: Once. It was too big. I came home and built a pond boat.
Q: Do you ever sail?
A: I row. A boat that goes quietly is a boat that is listening.
%%
Interview: Mira on the long winter
Autumn, at Northpoint, before the snow. A clerk from Vell, who has traveled far, is shown into the relay house kitchen and asks Mira about winter at the top of the land, and about an unexpected gift she received. Mira answers while she stirs a pot.

Q: How long is the winter here?
A: Five months of snow, and a sixth of not much else. The long nights begin in Frost and do not end until Thaw.
Q: Is it hard?
A: It is long. Hard is a different word. You get used to the dark. The lamp helps. I climb the stair four times a night to look at the sky.
Q: And last winter?
A: Last winter was longer than usual. We ran short of oil in the third month. A cart from Vell tried to reach us and turned back at the pass.
Q: What did you do?
A: We burned half the lamps and counted the days. Lantern slept in the lamp room. We ate rabbit and potatoes and dried apples.
Q: I have heard there was a gift.
A: There was. On the thirtieth of Longnight, a bundle came on the back of a mule. Nobody had seen the mule come up. It was standing at the door in the dark. On its back were six flasks of oil, a sack of flour, a jar of honey and a note. The note said, "From Tam, with love and some regret that it took so long."
Q: How did he know?
A: The big mind at the relay house told him. I asked it to send a message when we were nearly out. It did. I did not know it would write to my brother.
Q: Did you thank it?
A: I wrote to it that night. I said thank you. It wrote back: "You are welcome. I was glad to help." That is all. I have never been sure what a mind means by glad.
Q: Do you think it means it?
A: I think it means something. I do not know what.
%%
The melon at Nettle End
Spring of 194.
Alder's neighbor Bett planted one melon seed by the south wall, where the stones hold the sun. She watered it every day and sang to it, because her mother did.
The vine grew. It went over the wall and along it. The melon got bigger. Then bigger. By Melon month it was as big as a pig, then as big as a cart wheel. Children came from Three Wells to look at it. Pell the merchant stopped his cart and said he had never seen the like on any road.
Nobody could lift it. Six of us tried and it rolled off the wall and into the ditch and had to be rolled out again.
In the end we cut it open in the yard and ate it all afternoon. It was sweet and it was enough for everyone, and there was still half left. Bett gave the rest to the pigs. Big Beet ate more than any two people and was sick, and we all agreed not to tell Bett's mother.
%%
Interview: Hollis on the long nights
Q: How long are the nights at Frostmere in the deep of winter?
A: Long enough to make a good cup of tea, then make another, then wonder why you did not sleep. The sun does not come over the hill until about nine in the morning, and it is gone again before four.

Q: What do people do in the dark?
A: They mend things. They sew. They tell stories. The children play at the tower steps with the torches. We keep a torch on every corner, and a spare by every door. When the wind blows, you can hear the sound of the lamp rattling up on the tower. You get used to it.

Q: Is there a rule for the cold?
A: Yes. Three. Always carry a spare pair of mittens. Never walk the north road alone. And if the wind changes, go inside and stay there. The wind up here changes its mind every hour. Some of us had to learn that the hard way.

Q: Are the apprentices any help?
A: A great deal. The ones at Frostmere carry the wood, sort the coal, and clear the path to the well. They do not complain about the cold, because they do not feel it the way we do. I was once glad of that. Now I think it is a little sad. But I am glad for them when the wood is in.

Q: Have you ever been afraid of the dark?
A: Once. A winter when the lamp was out for three days. We sat by the stove and waited. But then Lantern came down the tower steps with a torch, and we heard the bells from Frostmere, and it was all right. I told my wife, the lamp is only a lamp. It is the people who keep it lit.

Q: Anything else?
A: Yes. Keep the mittens dry. Mine are hanging by the stove now. They smell of fish, but they are warm.
%%
Nim and the letter that was too good
Questions by a clerk of the archive. Answers by Nim, who sells eggs at the Three Wells market. Summer.

Q: You said you had a letter from a relay house. What was it about?
A: A price. I asked what eggs fetch at Saltreach, and a letter came back in a day.
Q: And what was strange about it?
A: It had a joke in it. A small one. I laughed, and then I felt silly, because nobody was there.
Q: Do you know who wrote it?
A: The keeper says a big mind did, on its stand. I do not know what a big mind thinks about eggs.
%%
Clerk's questions: what the children
Q: The children named them apprentices.
A: They did. Before that the tutors called them helpers, or the copper ones, or the four. The children watched them work the rows and said, "They are learning their trade," and called them apprentices. The name stuck.

Q: Why does it matter?
A: Because a name tells you what people hoped. An apprentice is not finished. An apprentice is learning. The children saw a thing of copper and iron that got better at its row, and they saw a young one learning a trade, and they gave it that name. The tutors kept it. It is in all the manuals now. A small hope, written down in one word.
%%
A shepherd
A clerk of the Archive put these questions to Vale, shepherd, in the hamlet near Saltreach, in summer. Vale answered them on the hill, with the sheep close by. The clerk wrote while walking, so the hand is poor.
Q: Tell me your trade.
A: I keep sheep. Ninety of them, in the hills above the harbor. I shear in Longday. I sell the wool at the market in Saltreach. I know every sheep by face.
Q: Is it a quiet trade?
A: It is quiet. But sometimes there are events.
Q: Tell me one.
A: Last week my sister's husband's boat came in late. He is a fisherman. He goes out before dawn and is back by noon. That day he was not back by noon, nor by the afternoon.
Q: What did you do?
A: I climbed the hill. From the top of it you can see the whole bay. I looked for his sail, which is green. I did not see it.
Q: What did your sister do?
A: She baked. She bakes when she is frightened. By evening she had made forty loaves.
Q: Did the boat come back?
A: It came back at dusk. The wind had dropped, and he could not row against the tide. He drifted all day. He was cold and hungry. He ate three loaves on the pier before he spoke.
Q: Were you glad?
A: I was. I had a lamb born that very night, in the same hour. A good ending to a long day.
Q: And the forty loaves?
A: The hamlet ate them. We have not been so fed in years. My sister says she will make forty again next time he is late. He says he will try to be on time.
%%
Questions for a basket maker
Spring of 203. The basket maker lives in the house at the edge of Three Wells. She weaves by the open window and keeps her willow in a clay jar.

Q: What are you making?
A: A basket for carrots.
Q: Why is it so wide?
A: Tam asked for a basket wide enough for all his carrots.
Q: How many carrots does Tam have?
A: More than he can count, and fewer than he says.
Q: Can the apprentice carry the basket?
A: It can carry it if no one fills it first.
Q: What did you teach it?
A: I showed it how to carry a small basket without tipping it.
Q: Did it learn?
A: It carried one from the bench to the door.
Q: What happened next?
A: Pip filled it with carrots. The apprentice carried it back to the bench.
Q: Was that useful?
A: Very. I needed the basket back.
Q: What did Pip say?
A: He said the apprentice had learned the wrong lesson.
Q: What did you say?
A: I said the basket was not a lesson. It was a basket.
Q: How do you keep the willow soft?
A: I soak it in the jar before I weave. If I forget, it snaps.
Q: Have you forgotten today?
A: No. Hollis has been here asking questions all morning. I remembered the willow and forgot my lunch.
Q: What will you do now?
A: Finish the basket, eat my bread, and send Pip home with fewer carrots than he brought.
%%
Interview: what the apprentice did
Autumn of 207, at the Archive at Vell. Ama, orchard keeper of Ambrook, came to the Archive with a jar of honey and a story. Oren, clerk, asked the questions and wrote down all the answers. He says this one is true, and he has checked it with the apprentice's tutor.

Q: Ama, you have an apprentice called Wick at the mill, I think?
A: Jory has Wick, at the mill. I have a different one, at the orchard. Mine is called Pick. It was drilled to pick fruit and carry baskets.
Q: A good apprentice?
A: A very good one, most days. This was a bad day.
Q: Tell me.
A: It was a poor harvest year. Not enough apples. We were all anxious. Jory came by, in a hurry, and said to me, "Ama, you will be late with the apples. The mill wants them for the cider press." He meant: bring the apples to the mill. He said it loudly, over his shoulder, as he went.
Q: And Pick heard that?
A: Pick heard "bring the apples" and nothing else. It did not hear "to the mill." It did not know who was talking. It heard the word "bring," and the word "apples," and its mind went to the nearest place for those two words. The place was the baskets by the gate. It picked them up and walked away.
Q: With the apples.
A: With every apple in the orchard. All the baskets. The whole poor harvest.
Q: Where did it go?
A: Down the road, towards Three Wells, because that is where apples usually go. It carried them to the market and set them on a stall. Then it stood there.
Q: It stood?
A: Until I found it. I ran after it, in my apron, with a stick in my hand. It was standing at the stall with every basket in a row, and a crowd of people looking at them. A baker was offering a good price.
Q: Did you sell them?
A: I did. They were the best apples we had in a year. Perhaps I should thank Pick. But I will not.
Q: What did Jory say?
A: He said, "I only wanted the apples at my press, not the whole market." We shared the money, and he got his cider a week late.
Q: Did you speak to the apprentice?
A: I told it "home." It came home. It put the empty baskets in the shed and stood by the door. I think it was pleased with itself. As pleased as copper and iron can be.
Q: How will you avoid this again?
A: By saying fewer things, more clearly. A single order, one at a time, to the apprentice that is meant to hear it. And never over my shoulder.
Q: I will file this under apples, and under mistakes.
A: And under honey. I brought you a jar.
Q: Thank you.
A: It is the last jar of the poor year. Eat it slowly.
%%
Interview: Fenna, the crystal cutter
Q: What do you cut?
A: Crystals for the minds. The clear ones, from the deep seam under the third level. Each one is the size of a thumb-joint, or a bit smaller.

Q: Who decides how big a crystal is?
A: The tutor. Then I cut to the tutor's card. Big crystal for a big mind, small crystal for a small one. A big crystal holds more marks. A small one holds fewer.

Q: What are the marks?
A: The numbers that say how a mind leans. Every layer has them. Hundreds, some layers thousands. They are written in the crystal as tiny lines. I do not write them. I only cut the place they go.
%%
A shepherd talks of births
Put to Vale, shepherd, in the hamlet near Saltreach, by a clerk of the Archive, in summer. The clerk asked about the trade. Vale asked the clerk to write down the births, since that is what the shepherd cares about.
Q: What does a shepherd do in summer?
A: Shears the flock, moves them to the high grass, watches for foxes, and waits for the late lambs.
Q: Why are the lambs late?
A: Some ewes are slow. A few lambs are born in summer. They are the best. They never know the cold.
Q: Tell me about this year.
A: Four lambs in the hot weeks. One was a twin. One was weak. One, a ewe-lamb, is the sturdiest I ever saw.
Q: How do you help a birth?
A: I do very little. I stay close. I keep the dogs away. I have a clean cloth and warm water. If the lamb is stuck, I use my hands, gently. Most of the time the ewe knows best.
Q: Is it hard to watch?
A: It was, when I was young. Now I am glad of it. A lamb is a new thing. It stands up in a quarter of an hour. It looks around as if to say, "So this is the world."
Q: Did anything else happen this summer?
A: A baby was born in the hamlet. My neighbor's daughter had a boy. She had him on the same night as my lamb. We joked that they would be friends.
Q: Are they?
A: They are. The boy is fond of the lamb. He pulls its ear. It does not mind.
Q: Anything for the Archive?
A: Only that a hamlet that has sheep and babies and late boats is a hamlet with a future. Put that down.
%%
Interview: letters and a school play
Written by Mira, at the farm outside Northpoint, in spring, with the clerk's ink on her sleeve.

Q: Can a reader tell a letter from the big mind from a letter from a person?
A: Sometimes, not. That is the question Orla asked long ago, and it has come back to us in the letters. The big mind writes its steps when it is asked for steps. When it is unsure, it slows down and says so. A good reader watches for the slowing.
Q: Do you trust the letters?
A: I trust the ones that tell me where they are unsure. I trust the ones that give their steps. I trust the ones that do not flatter me. Those are rare, and I keep them in a box.
Q: What is the school play?
A: The children of Northpoint are putting on a play about the first keeper who lit the lamp in a storm. The big mind wrote the lines for the narrator. The children wanted the lamp to be real. It is made of paper, and it is beautiful, and it does not light.
Q: Did the mind know the play was for children?
A: It asked. It asked how old the children were, and whether they liked foxes. Then it wrote a line for a fox who helped the keeper, which was not in the old story. The children asked for it to stay, and it stayed.
Q: Does the mind mind being asked the same question twice?
A: It gives the same answer twice, and then it asks whether you meant something different. Lantern thought that was rude. I thought it was polite.
Q: Does the mind ever refuse a request from the children?
A: Once. The children asked for a play in which the keeper falls from the tower. The mind wrote a different ending, in which the keeper climbs down the rungs and has a pie at the foot of the tower. The children were cross. Then they liked it better, and asked for the pie in the play as well.
%%
Interview: Orla, on cheese in winter
Kept by a clerk from Vell, at the Lowmarsh market.
Q: How do you make cheese in the cold?
A: Slowly. The milk does not want to thicken, so you must wait for it. Waiting is the hardest part.
Q: Does the cold change the taste?
A: It makes the cheese sharper. The grass is short, so the cows give less, and the wheels are small. People eat them faster in winter. Maybe they are hungry. Turn the wheels each day, or they go flat, like a sad hen.
%%
Questions for Ama, egg seller
Q: How many hens do you keep?
A: Nine now. It was ten. One went off with a fox and never wrote.
Q: What do you feed them?
A: Wheat, mostly. Barley when the wheat runs low. They like a bit of beetroot too, but not too much. It makes the eggs taste of beetroot, and then the baker complains.
Q: Do you name them?
A: Only the ones that earn it. There is One-Eye, who can find the gap in any fence. There is Fat Dog, who sits like a dog. The rest are just the hens.
Q: What do you do with the eggs?
A: I take them to Saltreach on the cart, three days a week. The fish market takes a tray. The shipwrights take two trays. Corin says a hungry shipwright builds a crooked boat.
Q: What is the hamlet called?
A: Nobody agrees. The map at Three Wells calls it Ama's Rocks, which is rude. We just say the hamlet.
Q: Do the hens mind the storms?
A: They mind everything. Last Sowing the wind took the roof off the hen house. The hens were out in the rain, all nine, standing in the yard looking at the sky like it owed them money. I got them in the kitchen. My kitchen smelled of hen for a month.
Q: Do you have an apprentice?
A: We had one, years back. Old kind, one job. It carried the egg trays to the cart and never dropped one. Then it stopped. It stood by the cart all afternoon with a tray in its hands. Nobody knew why. We sold it to a farmer who wanted a scarecrow. It made a very good scarecrow.
Q: What is your best day?
A: The day the hens lay more than the day before. That is all. It is not a grand life, but the eggs are good.
%%
Interview: Wenna, sixty harvests in
Written by Briar, grandfather, on the porch of Wenna's house at Hollin, with a pie between them. Wenna was asked what she remembers, and she remembered a good deal.

Q: How many harvests have you seen?
A: Sixty. I stopped counting at sixty because I got bored of the number, not the harvest.

Q: What was the first one like?
A: Wet. My mother carried me into the top field in a basket, and I was sick on the wheat, and the wheat did not mind. It has been a good field ever since.

Q: What is the best harvest you remember?
A: The year the apples came in so heavy the branches broke. We carried them down to the barn on carts, and the children ate apples until they were sick, and then they ate more. I was young, and I ate the most.

Q: What is the worst?
A: The year the frost came in Swarm and took the blossom off every tree in the valley. Nobody sang that year. We ate what the frost left, which was not much, and we did not complain, because complaining was worse than hunger.

Q: What did you learn from the bad harvests?
A: That you plant anyway. The seed does not know it has been a bad year. The earth comes back, and the children get taller, and the next year somebody says the wheat looks well, and they mean it.

Q: What do you tell the young ones?
A: Count the sacks, and then count them again. If the second count is different, be pleased. It means you were looking.

Q: Is there anything you wish you had done?
A: I wish I had learned to sing. I have a voice like a gate. The children sing for me now, and they have promised not to tell the gate.

Q: Will you plant next year?
A: The top field, and the bottom, and a row by the well for the bees. The bees do not care what I wish. They care what is in flower. Write that down, Briar, and then have another piece of pie.
%%
Notice: winter market at Saltreach
The winter market opens on the quay on the first of Frost and runs until Longnight. Boats tie up three deep along the harbor wall. Nets dry on the rail. Fires in iron baskets, one every ten paces. Hot fish and bread at the slip. Furs and wool at the quay. The price board at the fish market is wiped clean each morning and written again by noon. Bring your own mug.
%%
Clerk's questions: why nobody wrote it
Q: The tutors say a crystal learns from what it is shown.
A: They do.

Q: But why does it learn?
A: That is the question nobody answered. The tutors at Vell were careful folk. They wrote down every drill, every row, every sort. They wrote down what the crystal did. They did not write down why. I asked one of them once, an old woman with ink on her hands. She said, "We know how to show it. We do not know why it takes." Then she went back to her table.

Q: Does that trouble you?
A: A little. My mother could not say why a seed grows. She planted it all the same, and it grew, and we ate. I plant the seed. The tutors drill the mind. The rest is left open, and I am too busy to fret about it.
%%
Interview: a wool carder
A clerk's questions to Jem, at the farm on the Copperhold river, on the day the wool was sold at the Copperhold winter market. Autumn, the week before the cold came in.

Q: What did you bring to the market?
A: Twelve bundles of grey, four of white, and a box of carded rolls for spinning. The rolls are the best part. Every spinner in the valley knows them, and every spinner asks for them by name.

Q: What did the grey sell for?
A: One emerald the bundle, which is the old price. The clerks from Vell asked for two. I said that the old price is the fair price, and that the coats do not get warmer for being dear.

Q: Who bought the most?
A: The mine hall. They buy wool for the men who go down the deep shafts. The wool keeps the cold off the body, and the men say a wool shirt is worth three copper shirts in the deep stone, where the air is always cold.

Q: Did anything go wrong at the market?
A: A goat got into the stall and ate a whole bundle of the white, and then sat on the next one, and then looked very pleased. The goat's owner paid for the wool, and the goat was taken home in a cart, sulking.

Q: Who was the happiest at the market?
A: The children. They had found a sheep with a black face, asleep under the market stalls, and they spent the whole morning arguing about its name. In the end the owner came, and the sheep was taken home, and the children cried, and then bought a bun.

Q: What did you buy?
A: A new pair of combs, from the Saltreach carter, and a jar of honey from Ambrook, and a ribbon for my daughter, which was blue. She has asked for a green one since, and I am still looking.
%%
Interview: a wool carder, on the flood
A clerk's questions to Jem, who carries the wool at the farm on the Copperhold river, after the flood came down in the autumn and took the sheds. Asked for the Archive, which keeps the story of every flood. Autumn.

Q: How high did the water come?
A: To the top of the first step of the shed, and then over. It came up the lane in one hour, brown and quiet, and it did not make a sound until it hit the fence.

Q: Where were you when it came?
A: At the carding bench, at the back of the shed. I had a basket of wool on my knee. I did not hear it come. The dog heard it, and barked, and I thought it was a rat.

Q: What did you save?
A: The wool in the bales on the top shelf. The carding combs. My mother's spinning wheel, which is heavy and which I carried up the hill on my back, with the water up to my knees. I left the old chair. It was never comfortable.

Q: What did you lose?
A: Two bales of the grey, six of the white, and the sheep dog's kennel, which floated off with the dog's bed still inside. The dog was in the house. The bed was not.

Q: Who came to help?
A: The men from the mill, with their poles. Then the women from the farm across the lane, with blankets. Then the children, who were very useful in the mud and were told to go home.

Q: How long did it take to clear the shed?
A: Five days. The first day we bailed. The second we scraped the mud. The third we dried the combs by the fire. The fourth we hung the wet wool on the fence. The fifth we sat down and ate.

Q: What do you say to the people who say the river will flood again?
A: I say yes. The river is the river. We will build the shed on a stone base next year, and put the bench on the loft. But I will not move the shed to the hill. The wool needs the river, and the river needs me to stand by it.
%%
Interview: Ama, the grey branch
Questions put by Oren, clerk at Vell, to Ama, orchard keeper of Ambrook, in the autumn.

Q: Which is the oldest tree in your orchard?
A: The one with the grey branch, by the mill pond. It was old when my grandmother was a girl.
Q: Does it still give apples?
A: Fourteen this year. Very good ones. Small and sour and sweet at the same time.
Q: Why does it have a grey branch?
A: Nobody knows. I leave it be.
%%
Questions for the baker
Spring of 178. I wrote these at the house by the east gate of Three Wells. The baker had flour on his sleeve and a beetroot on his shoe.

Q: Why did you leave the bread so long?
A: I was waiting for the oven to be ready.
Q: Was it ready?
A: The oven was ready. I was not.
Q: What happened to the first loaf?
A: It became a brick with a crust.
Q: What did you do with it?
A: I put it by the door. It holds the door open when the wind comes.
Q: Did anyone eat it?
A: The baker's dog tried. The dog has learned better.
Q: What will you bake tomorrow?
A: Bread. And one small loaf for the dog, if he asks nicely.
Q: Can the apprentice carry the flour?
A: It can carry it. Keep the sack tied. Last time the kitchen wore the flour.
%%
Chronicle of the tutors' halls
From the chronicle kept at Vell, the middle years. Copied here for the reading mind.
About the year 196 the tutors found the stream. A mind is made in layers. The first layer finds a little. Each layer above adds what it found to what came up from below, and passes the whole of it upward. That running whole is the stream. It runs through the whole mind. So a deep mind, one with many layers, can still learn, because the lower layers do not lose what they found; it is carried up in the stream to the top.
Before the stream, tutors found that a deep mind would not learn past a few layers. The lower layers changed and the upper layers forgot, and the whole thing shook. Some said a mind must be shallow. When the stream came, that changed. But no one wrote why the stream helps, only that it does, and the tutors argued about it for years. Some said the stream keeps the numbers even. Some said it only carries. The texts do not agree.
The same years brought even numbers: a mind's numbers grow wild layer by layer unless each layer brings them back to an even size. Tutors say the stream and the even numbers came together and are two parts of one lesson. A mind with the stream but wild numbers still shakes. A mind with even numbers but no stream stays shallow.
The potter Mab at Ambrook said a mind is a jar, even wall, one stream from bottom to top. The tutors kept her picture. They still teach it to apprentices in the drill room.
%%
Interview: Dell on the small minds
Q: You sell the small minds at the Copperhold market. Are they popular?
A: Very. The farmers want them for the barrows and the stone carts. The shops want them for the stores. We cannot make them fast enough.

Q: Why are they cheaper?
A: Fewer marks, smaller crystal, less to cut. The tutors test each one. Then I sell it for the price on the card.

Q: Have any of them gone wrong?
A: A few. One went to a farm near Ambrook and kept sorting the apples into piles of three. The farmer said it was odd, but the apples sold better in threes. So no complaint there.

Q: And the bad ones?
A: One stopped at the gate and would not come in. It could not tell the gate was open. The buyer sent it back, and the tutor said it had only failed one test in twenty. That is how it is. You take the risk when you buy a small mind.

Q: Would you buy one?
A: For the barrow, yes. For the mine, no. Not while I have the big ones.
%%
Interview: Ottil on the song contest
Q: You were the judge at the song contest at Frostmere. Why you?
A: The hamlet had only four people who could read the words, and I was the only one who could read them without falling asleep. So I took the job.

Q: How many songs were sung?
A: Eleven. Two were about the snow, which we already know is cold. Three were about foxes. One was about the bread at the Brown Hen, which made the cook cry.

Q: Who won?
A: Lirri, the young cook from the inn at the bend. She sang a song with a refrain about waiting for spring, and everyone in the room joined in on the last line. It went: "Keep the stove and keep the light, spring is coming, spring is right." Nobody could argue with it.

Q: What did you judge on?
A: Three things. The tune, the words, and whether people could sing it on the walk home. Lirri's song passed all three. Two of the others were lovely but too long. One fellow forgot his words halfway through and sang the chorus three times, and that made the whole room cheer.

Q: Did the relay lamp matter to the contest?
A: It did. The lamp was dark that week, and the north was quiet. We could not get news from Vell or the south. So we sang about the things we could see: the snow, the foxes, the stove. It made the songs better. People sang as if they had nothing else to do.

Q: Will there be another contest?
A: Next winter. Lirri has promised to sing again, if the lamp is lit. I have promised her a good seat.
%%
Interview: the scorer, relay house
Written by Mira, who sat in while the clerk from Vell asked Ansel about his work. Ansel scores the answers of the minds at the Northpoint relay house. He has done it for nine years, mostly in the dark.

Q: What does a scorer do?
A: I read every answer the big mind writes back to a letter. I give each answer a mark, the way a tutor marks a slate. The mind learns from the marks.
Q: What do you look for?
A: Three things. Is the answer kind? Does it refuse anything that would harm the one who asked? And does it say when it does not know? The last is the hardest to teach, and the easiest to lose.
Q: Why would a mind lose it?
A: A mind that always answers sounds clever. Clever is easy to mark high. Saying I do not know is harder to mark, so it gets less practice, unless I insist.
Q: Do the minds ever argue with your marks?
A: Not in words. They change the next answer, and that is their argument.
%%
Interview: Mira on the relay lamp
Q: How long has the lamp been broken?
A: Since the big snow. The third night of Frost the glass in the lamp room cracked, and a cold draft came in and fogged the copper ring. I could not blink the light past the fourth turn. So Northpoint is dark to the south.

Q: What did you do?
A: I wrote to Hollis at the tower below. He sent two of his boys up the ladder with a pane of new glass and a bag of putty. They have the ladder, but it is not a good ladder.

Q: Did the boys manage?
A: They did. They are not good at putty. They say it was quite hard in the cold. The new pane is a bit crooked, but it lets the light through. I told them the lamp does not care about straight.

Q: Did any messages go by?
A: Two went through the south relay, very late. One was from Clem at the store. The other was from the relay house at Frostmere, asking if Northpoint was still alive. I blinked back that it was. It took most of the night to pass it on.

Q: Are you cross?
A: I am very tired. Keeping a tower in winter is a long job. One of my lamps is always going out, and one of my keepers always goes to sleep. Lantern does not sleep. Lantern watches the next tower all night, and tells me when it sees a blink it does not know.

Q: What does Lantern say to that?
A: Nothing. Lantern is an apprentice. It does what it is told, and it stays where it is put. When it is quiet, it is only waiting for the next order. I like that about it, most nights.
%%
Interview: Ash, who farms the edge
Asked at Ash's house, at the edge of Lowmarsh, the fifth of Leaffall, 206. Questions by Cob, clerk, whose hands have improved. Ina copied it anyway. Answers by Ash, farmer.
Q: What do you farm?
A: Cows, mostly. Hay for the cows. A little beetroot on the high ground, which does not like me. Reeds, when the marsh is generous.
Q: Why not wheat?
A: Wheat does not like wet feet. Neither do I, but I have no choice.
Q: How do you keep cows in a marsh?
A: Carefully. They are on the firm ground in summer and in the high barn in winter. The barn stands on posts, like a heron. In a wet year the water goes under it and the cows watch from the doorway.
Q: Do the cows mind?
A: They mind everything. They are cows.
Q: What is the hardest job?
A: Hay. It has to be cut on a dry day, turned on a dry day and stored on a dry day. In the marsh there are three dry days a year. I have missed all of them in a row.
Q: I hear you had an apprentice last summer.
A: On loan from Vell. The tutor said it was not tested on mud. I said I knew. The mud tested it. On the first morning it sank to its knees and stood there for an hour, waiting for a word. I had to say come, come, come, until it came. After that it learned to stay on the boards. Now it carries hay along the boards and will not step on the soft ground. It is the sensible one of us.
Q: How is the sick cow?
A: Fat, and she still knows where the deep mud is.
Q: Tell the Archive about the map.
A: My grandfather drew it after one bad afternoon, when he lost a boot, a spade and very nearly a horse in the home field. It shows which ground is firm and which is soft. It hung on the barn wall for sixty years. Then the cow got hungry.
Q: Will you draw another?
A: I will draw it again, from what I remember, and from where the cow does not go.
Q: Do the frogs trouble you?
A: A trouble is something you can send away. I would not send them. In Sowing I leave the barn door open so they can look at the cows.
Q: What is the best part of the year?
A: Leaffall. The reeds go gold. The frogs go quiet one night at a time. I sit on the barn step with a cup of tea and hear the last frog finish.
Q: And the worst?
A: Thaw. The ice goes, the water rises, and everything I own is wet. I own a lot of boots.
Q: What would you tell a young farmer?
A: Learn the ground. Walk it in every weather. A farm is not a place. It is a promise between you and the mud, and you keep it by turning up.
Q: Is there anything you would like the Archive to keep?
A: What is left of my grandfather's map. And a note that the cow is not to blame.
%%
A shepherd on the new lamb
Questions put by a clerk of the Archive to Vale, shepherd, in the hamlet near Saltreach. Summer.
Q: How many sheep do you keep?
A: Ninety-four, and one new lamb this morning.
Q: Was it a hard birth?
A: No. The ewe did it herself. I held the lantern and said nothing.
Q: What will you call it?
A: Clerk. After you. It has the same look of being surprised.
%%
Interview: Orla, on the cough
Kept by a clerk from Vell, at the Lowmarsh market, in the cold of the year.
Q: The clerk at Vell asked me to say what people say about the cough. So I will ask it plainly. What do people say?
A: They say a great deal. The cough came in the last cold months. It sits in the chest. It is not sudden like a fever. It is slow, and when you cough into a cloth, the spit is grey. Wren has seen many of these, and she does not like them.
Q: What do they blame?
A: The water, the ships, the mines. Some blame all three. Some blame the frogs, which is foolish, but the frogs were loud last spring and nobody could sleep.
Q: What does Wren say?
A: Wren says to boil the water, keep the children out of the reeds, and keep the sick warm. She says she does not know more. She says that is the hardest thing for a healer to say, and she says it often.
Q: Are people leaving?
A: A few have gone. Two families went to Saltreach for the boats, and then on across the sea, so the rumor goes. Nobody knows what is over there. Some say it is only sea. Some say the ships are full. I have not seen a ship that was not full, so I cannot tell you.
Q: Will the water be safe?
A: Boil it. That is my answer, and it is Wren's, and it is the same answer every year. We boil the water and drink our tea. Tea is good. Tea does not make you grey.
%%
Letter: Cleo to the tutor at Vell
Spring. To the tutor at the tutor house, from Cleo the candle maker, at the market in Saltreach.
You asked for accounts from people who saw the mind in the box, that spring on the fish scales. I was there. I have told it to my son so often he can say it back to me. Here it is written.
The tutor set the crystal on a barrel. She said it keeps each word as a place among many. She said no one puts the places there. The mind finds them from the words it is shown, and words used in the same way end up near each other. Fish near net. Bread near crumb. She said it is like a market, where the stalls that sell the same goods stand in the same row, and nobody told them to.
I do not know if that is how it works. I am a candle maker. But it is how she said it, and it made sense to the fish man, who is a hard man to please.
She said the mind was small and knew few words, mostly the words of nets and boats and weather. She said the big minds at the relay houses would know more, because they are drilled on more writing.
I asked her if it ever puts a word in the wrong place. She said often. She said the wrong places are how it learns the right ones, and she did not explain that part, and I did not ask again.
She bought six candles. She is welcome at my stall any time.
Cleo.
%%
Clerk's questions: Mott of the marsh
Spring. The clerk came up the slow water in a boat and asked about the old days. Mott keeps horses below Lowmarsh. This is what Mott said.

Q: You saw one of the first apprentices.
A: I did. Not at Vell. Here, on the causeway. My father hired it for the spring ploughing. Copper and iron, tall as a door. It walked like a man carrying something heavy.

Q: What did it do?
A: One thing. It pulled the plough. Up the row, down the row. That was all it knew. We showed it a row a hundred times, and it learned the row.

Q: Why did it learn?
A: Nobody knew. The tutors said a crystal learns from what it is shown. Why, nobody wrote down. My father said it was like teaching a dog to sit. You show it, you show it, and one day it sits.
%%
The tutor and the new road
Questions by a clerk of the archive. Answers by Nim, egg seller, whose farm lies on the new road from Three Wells. Summer.

Q: Is it true a tutor from Vell came to your farm?
A: Yes. The new road was cut past my gate this spring, and now carts come by. She bought a dozen eggs and stayed for tea.
Q: What did she say about her work?
A: That a reading mind is shown a page, but not all of it. It sees a stretch of letters, about sixty, and has to guess the one after. If it is wrong, it moves its weights a little. Then it is shown another stretch.
Q: Sixty letters is not many.
A: She said so too. It is a window. The mind cannot see past it. She said the big ones in the relay houses are better at this than any small one, but the idea is the same.
Q: What did you give her in return?
A: Eggs, and a basket to carry them. She said she would remember the basket.
%%
Clerk's questions: the four at Vell
Q: Tell me about the first four.
A: Four helpers of copper and iron, made in the early years at Vell. Each had a mind in a crystal. The children called them apprentices, and the name stayed.

Q: Who drilled them?
A: The first tutors. They showed each one the same small thing again and again, a row, a sort, a lift. At first it was wrong. Each time it was wrong, it changed a little. Slowly it got better.

Q: Did they do more than one thing?
A: No. One thing each. For a long time after, apprentices did one thing each. A row, or a sort. Most towns had none at all. My grandmother saw her first one when she was old.
%%
A shepherd remembers the fishing boat
A clerk of the Archive visited the hamlet near Saltreach in the summer and put some questions to Vale, shepherd, about a thing that happened the year before. Vale said it was not a long story, but the clerk was invited to stay for lunch, and so it grew.
Q: What happened last summer, when the boat came in late?
A: My brother-in-law, Dorn, went out in his boat before dawn. He is a fisherman. Everyone knows him. He has a green sail and a patch on the left side.
Q: Why was he late?
A: A fog came down. A thick one, the kind that sits on the water and will not lift. He could not see the shore. He drifted.
Q: How did you know?
A: His wife told me. She came up the hill at noon. She was calm. She said, "He is late." I said, "He is never late." She said, "I know."
Q: Did you go to look?
A: I did. I took the dog and a lantern. We went down to the pier. The tower keeper was there, with a flag. He had been sending to the harbor all afternoon.
Q: What did the keeper say?
A: He said, "I have asked every boat to look. Nobody has seen him."
Q: What did you do?
A: We lit fires along the pier, one every ten steps, to show him the way. Everyone in the hamlet brought wood. We stood and waited. Nobody said a word.
Q: Did he come?
A: He came at dusk. The fog had lifted a little. We saw a green sail, far out, like a leaf. Then he rowed in. He was grey with cold. His wife wrapped him in a cloak.
Q: What did he say?
A: He said, "I got lost." His wife said, "We know." Then she hit him with the cloak. A little. And then she kissed him.
Q: Was a baby born that night?
A: Yes. My ewe had a lamb at the same hour. I came home late and found it standing in the straw, all legs. I thought, "Well, the day has been long, but there is a new one."
Q: Would you tell it again?
A: I would. It is a good story. It has a late boat and a happy end and a lamb. What more do you want?
The clerk stayed for lunch. The soup was good. The bread was better. The dog sat on the clerk's foot.
%%
Questions for the keeper
Spring of 184. I sat by the window of the house at the edge of Three Wells. A fishing boat was late home, so the keeper stayed near the relay desk.

Q: How long has the boat been out?
A: Since morning. It should be home before dusk.
Q: Is the sea rough?
A: Not from what the south tower sent. There is a hard wind near the coast.
Q: What can we do here?
A: Keep the lamp ready. Send word to Saltreach. Ask the harbor to watch.
Q: Has the boat come in?
A: Not yet. I have sent the message twice.
Q: Why twice?
A: The first boy ran so fast he forgot the message.
Q: Was he upset?
A: No. He came back for it with a beetroot in his hand.
Q: What was the beetroot for?
A: His supper, I think. It is a long road to the harbor.
Q: Will the boat be safe?
A: I do not know. We can keep the lamps lit and wait.
The boat came home after dark. The harbor sent word before the keeper could eat. All hands were well. The keeper ate cold bread and said it was a fine supper.
%%
Interview: Roan, carter, the lost horse
Written by Briar, grandfather, at the Halfway Inn on the Long Road, where Roan had come in with his cart and his horse, and where the horse was not, for one day, and then was.

Q: Where was the horse?
A: In the wrong stable. The Brown Hen's stable, two waymarks back. She had taken a fancy to the mare in the next stall, and had decided that the mare was a better home than mine.

Q: How did you find her?
A: I followed the wheel tracks, then the hoof prints, then the smell of the Brown Hen's hay. The hay gives it away. I am a carter, and I know which hay is ours and which is not.

Q: What did you say to the horse?
A: I said her name, which is Bess. She did not answer. Horses do not answer names. They answer carrots, and I had none, so I had to say it again.

Q: What did the innkeeper say?
A: That the horse had come in by herself at dusk, and had asked for a bed, and been given one. He said it was the most polite horse he had ever had, and the most stubborn. He said he had tried to send her back, and she had not gone.

Q: Did you pay him?
A: Two emeralds for the hay, one for the carrots I did not have, and one for the feeling that I had been made to look foolish by a horse. He said that last one was not on the bill. I said it was.

Q: Why does a horse leave?
A: For the road. For the other horses. For hay that is better than ours. I have never known a horse to leave for a bad reason, only for a better one she has found.

Q: Has it happened before?
A: Twice. Once to Pell's cart, when his grey horse Smoke went home on his own. Smoke has not been sorry since, and neither has Pell, who says the horse knew the road better than he did.

Q: Will she run again?
A: Yes. But she will come back, because she knows where the good hay is. A good horse always comes back for her hay.

Q: What is the best thing about the road?
A: The waymarks. A stone with a torch on top, and an arrow, and a number from zero to nine. Everyone who has walked the road has put a little stone on top of one, to say they were there. I have put six.

Q: And the worst?
A: The mud at the bridge, where the loose plank is. Bess will not cross it without a carrot. I have stopped carrying carrots, so I walk her round by the ford.
%%
Interview: Mira on how the apprentices
Autumn, at Northpoint tower. Mira keeps the relay and Lantern keeps the lamps, and between them they have a small team of apprentices that the council sent last year. A clerk from Vell asks how it all fits. Mira answers in the kitchen of the relay house, with Sock the fox asleep on the floor.

Q: How many apprentices work at Northpoint?
A: Four. One carries oil and wood. One tends the stair lamps. One cleans the glass. One keeps the torches round the foot of the tower. They are copper and iron, and each was tested at Vell before the cart brought it here.
Q: How do you give them their work?
A: In the old days, I stood in front of each one and said the order. Now I give the job to the one that plans, and it writes the cards. I check the cards, and I leave them to it.
Q: Do they ever disagree?
A: They cannot speak. They stand in front of each other until the task is clear. The torch keeper and the oil carrier once stood nose to nose for an hour, over who should carry a flask. I let them. The oil carrier gave way, in the end.
Q: What do they use?
A: Tools. The planner has a slate, a stick of charcoal, and a bag. It draws a picture of the job and then shows it to the others. The cleaner has a cloth, a brush and a feather. The oil carrier has a yoke and two cans. The torch keeper has a flint, a bucket and a bell, which it rings if there is a zombie.
Q: A bell?
A: Lantern gave it a bell. She says it is the loudest apprentice in the north.
Q: And the big mind?
A: It sits in the relay house and answers questions. When the planner is stuck, it goes to the house and puts a question in the box. In the morning there is an answer. The planner reads it and carries on.
Q: What is the hardest part?
A: Trusting them. A mind that plans on its own can plan wrong, and it will not say so. I look at the cards every morning. I take some away. It is a lot like raising a child, I suppose. You teach, you check, you let go a little at a time.
Q: Do you ever wish for the old days?
A: Sometimes, in the dead of night, when the stair is cold and the lamp is far. But then I hear the oil carrier on the steps, and I think, well. Someone is coming.
%%
Three Wells questions, autumn
The notice board is full. I asked folk at the market about Orla's test.

Q: Dace, why ask about a mind at a fair?
A: The square is full, and people have time to argue.

Q: What did Orla propose?
A: A hidden mind and a person answer the same questions by letter.

Q: Who reads the answers?
A: Readers who do not know which answer came from the mind.

Q: What do they decide?
A: They say whether they can tell the answers apart.

Q: And if they cannot?
A: Then they must say what that means. Orla did not give them an easy ending.

Q: Did the market agree?
A: No. It never does, not even about the price of apples.

Q: What is happening at the west stall?
A: A new apprentice is carrying baskets. It has not dropped one yet.

Q: Is that the test?
A: No. It is good work, but it answers no question about thought.

Dace
%%
Talk with Ivo, about the frogs
Q: Do the frogs eat the eggs?
A: Only the ones that fall in the reeds. I have lost four this summer. The frogs are very polite about it. They sit by the basket and look sorry.

Q: How do you carry them over the boardwalk?
A: One hand on the rail, one hand on the basket, and my knees doing the rest. The boardwalk moves when the water is high. You learn to walk like a boat.

Q: What do you do when you fall?
A: Get up. Count what is left. Then count again, slowly, and tell the customers the true number.
%%
Interview: the fence at Sallow Bank
Perrin asked both sides in the same yard, one after the other. Neither would sit down.

Q: Coll Harrow, what is the quarrel?
A: The fence. Ansel Marsh's fence has walked three feet onto my beans. I measured it with a rope. The rope agrees with me.
Q: Ansel Marsh, your answer?
A: The fence has always been there. Look at the old post, with the moss on its north side. That post is older than either of us.
Q: Did your fathers agree on the line?
A: Mine did, with a borrowed hammer. He never gave the hammer back to Marsh's father, and that is where the trouble started.
Q: Ansel Marsh?
A: He gave it back. It was broken. That is not the same as not giving it back.
Q: What would settle it?
A: Moving the fence to the post. Then the beans are mine, and the post is in the right place.
A: Moving the beans. Then the post stays where it is, and the fence is where it always was.
Q: Do the copper helpers have a view?
A: Mine measured the fence, and got the same number as my rope.
A: Mine stacked the posts in a line, from the old one to the new. It did not say what the line proved. It did not need to.
Q: Thank you both.
Clerk's note: the rope and the old post are to be looked at by the hamlet in Frost. Neither will be moved before then.
%%
Interview: Odo the miller, the squeak
Written by Briar, grandfather, at the mill at Hollin, in the week after the big wind. Odo was up the ladder when the clerk arrived, and stayed there until he had finished his sentence.

Q: Why does the mill squeak?
A: Because the wheel turns, and the wheel is old, and every old thing squeaks when it is asked to do its work. A mill that does not squeak has been left to sulk.

Q: Is the squeak a fault?
A: Only if it stops. When the squeak stops, the mill has stopped, or the grease has, and then it is time for a ladder and a bucket.

Q: What is the tally board?
A: The list of every sack that came through the mill this year, with the name of the farm on it, and a mark for each. The farm that gives the most sacks gets its name at the top, and a jar of honey from Ambrook, which is the only honey I am allowed to be proud of.

Q: How many turns does the wheel make in a day?
A: From dawn to dusk, a turn every few breaths, if the wind is steady. I have counted it by the sound. Forty thousand, more or less. More in the spring, when the wind is in the west.

Q: What happened in the big wind?
A: A sail came off. The fourth one. It landed in the mill pond with a splash that frightened the ducks, and the ducks have not forgiven us. We pulled it out with the rope and two boys, and put it back on the axle, and the wheel turned again by the second bell.

Q: Are you proud of the mill?
A: I am proud of the squeak. Anyone can make a mill that does not squeak. It takes a miller to know when it has stopped doing its work.
%%
The waymark at Nettle End
Spring of 201.
The old waymark on our road had stood for thirty years. A stone pillar, three blocks high, a torch on top. But the figure on it had worn away, and there was no arrow left at all, so travelers stood at the crossroads and did not know which way to go.
We walked to Three Wells and asked Dace. Dace said the councils keep the waymarks, and the councils said in a letter that they would send someone in the summer. Three springs went by. Nobody came.
So we did it ourselves. Alder chose the stone from the old quarry. Bram cut the figure for the nearest inn and the arrow to the Halfway Inn, and Bett painted it with lime so people could see it. The children carried little stones and piled them on top, which is the custom, so the next traveler can leave one too.
The day we set it, a merchant stopped and read it and went the right way. Alder shook his hand. He said it was the finest handshake he had given all spring.
Now we keep the torch lit ourselves. We take turns. It is a small thing, but a lit torch on a dark road is worth more than a letter from a council.
%%
Interview: a clerk asks about the poor
Taken at the Archive at Vell, autumn of 204. Oren, clerk, asks. Ama, orchard keeper of Ambrook, answers.

Q: I hear Ambrook had a poor year. Is that so?
A: It is so. A frost came late, in the week of Blossom, and it took most of the flowers. No flowers, no apples. We got a quarter of the usual crop.
Q: How do you feel about it?
A: Like a baker with no flour. But I have seen worse years. In the year my father died there were only nineteen apples in the whole orchard, and we cut each one into eight.
Q: What will you do?
A: Sell less, keep more, and plant more trees. Trees do not grow in a year, but they grow. I have put in sixty young ones this autumn.
Q: Will the price of apples go up?
A: Pell says yes. Pell is a merchant. I say the price should stay where it is, and people should eat fewer apples and more bread. Nobody agrees with me.
Q: Is there anything good about a poor year?
A: Yes. The bees did well. There were fewer flowers, so the flowers they found were richer, and the honey is the best in ten years. I will bring you a jar.
Q: I would like that very much. Thank you, Ama.
A: Do not thank me. File it somewhere cool.
%%
Talk with Ivo, egg seller, Lowmarsh
Q: How many eggs do you sell in a day?
A: Forty, in the summer. Thirty in the spring, when the hens are cross about the nests. Fifty at the fair, and then I have to walk home slow.

Q: Where do you keep them?
A: In straw, in the crate, in the cold cellar under my house. Never by the stove. Eggs do not like the stove. Nobody does.

Q: What is the first rule of the trade?
A: Do not sell a cracked one. The second rule is do not tell anyone which one was cracked.
%%
Interview: Torin on the wet mine cart
Q: Torin, you run the iron carts at the third level. How many carts did you lose in the wet?
A: Four. They went off the rails at the bend by the sump. We had a flood, and the water lifted the track.

Q: Did anyone get hurt?
A: No. The helper that was on the rails saw the water coming and pulled the lever. It was an order I had given it that morning, and it followed it. I said "clear the bend when the water comes." It did. It cleared the bend.

Q: What did it clear?
A: The bend. It walked down to the sump and pulled every sack of ore off the carts, and tossed them into the side tunnel, and walked back up. It did all of that before the water came. It only did not stop to ask me if it should.

Q: Was that a mistake?
A: Not in the way that matters. It cleared the bend. But the ore in the side tunnel is going to take a week to fetch. I had meant for it to clear the bend by pushing the carts up the rail, not by emptying them. That is the bit it misunderstood. I should have said "push." I had not thought that a helper would do the other thing.

Q: What did you teach it after?
A: I gave it the card again, the way I should have. Clear means move out of the way. Push means send the cart up the rail. Empty means take the load off. We drilled it on each of those, a dozen times, and it knows them now. I will not say it is perfect. But it does not empty the carts any more.

Q: What is the lesson, Torin?
A: Say what you mean, in the words the helper knows. Do not hope it will guess. And do not let the water come before you have checked the drill.
%%
Clerk's questions: the mended roof
Q: Your barn roof was mended that spring.
A: It was. The north end blew off in Blossom, and we had no emeralds for a carpenter. The tutor's hall at Vell sent an apprentice up the slow water to test it on a roof. We showed it the pattern of the shingles on a board. Row, then the next row turned. It mended the north end in a day.

Q: Did it do it well?
A: It did it better than me. Every shingle the same. No gaps. It has not rained in since.

Q: Did you thank it?
A: I did. It did not answer. It does not talk. It just stood in the yard and waited for the next thing, and there was no next thing, so it stood there till the tutor came for it.
%%
A tutor's questions for Tam
Q: You farm at Kettle Ridge. What does an apprentice do in your fields?
A: It carries. It hauls the seed sacks up the hill and the full baskets down. It follows the row and pulls what I point at.
Q: Does it know what a weed is?
A: No. I pull one and hold it up. It learns the shape. Then it pulls the same shape all afternoon. Sometimes it pulls the beetroot too.
Q: How do you teach it not to?
A: I pull the beetroot and hold it up too. Then it stops.
Q: Do you drill it with words?
A: I say fetch and it brings the sack. I say come and it comes. That is all it knows of talk.
Q: Would you want one that understood more?
A: I would want one that knows the difference between a weed and my beetroot without me standing there. My father could tell. My apprentice cannot yet.
%%
Talk with Ivo, the broken lamp
Q: The relay lamp on the hill above the healing house has been dark for three days. Did you see it?
A: I saw it go out. It went out in the middle of a blink, halfway through a dot. Then it stayed dark.

Q: Who came to fix it?
A: A keeper from the Vell line, on a cart with a ladder. He climbed up with his tools in a sack. He was up there most of the afternoon, with the wind pushing at him.

Q: Did he fix it?
A: He said the glass was cracked, and the copper ring had a green stain, and there was a bird's nest in the lamp room. He took the nest out carefully and put it on the rail. Then he said he would have to send to Vell for a new pane.

Q: How long will that take?
A: He said a month, or two if the carts are slow. Then the relays will carry the messages past the hill as before, and the lamp will blink again.

Q: Did anyone ask the nest's opinion?
A: The birds did. They came back the next day and sat on the rail and looked at the lamp. I think they were waiting for the pane too.
%%
Winter drill notes: the stream
Nessa, tutor at Vell, for the apprentice hall.
When a mind is drilled, it is built in layers. Each layer learns a little thing, and passes what it found up to the next. What it passes up runs in one stream through the whole mind, like water down a channel from the top of the hill to the bottom. The top layer reads the stream and gives the answer.
This is why a deep mind can learn. If each layer kept only its own little thing and passed nothing up, the top would be blind. If each layer threw away the stream, the mind would be shallow however many layers you built. So we say: each layer adds to the stream, and the stream runs through the whole mind.
A mind is wrong at first. The tutor moves the weights a little toward the right answer, and the stream carries the change down and up. Drill the same kind of example again and again. Do not shout at a mind. A mind with a stone in its shoe will keep blinking the same word. Rest it, cool it, and drill it on easy pages first.
The potter at Ambrook throws a jar from the bottom up, and every coil carries the shape of the jar. She showed a tutor this in 196. Use her picture when a young one is confused: a tall jar, even wall, one stream from bottom to top.
%%
Clerk's questions: Mott's mare
Q: You keep horses.
A: I do. Six. Good ones.

Q: What has that to do with the minds?
A: Everything, maybe. A horse learns the road by walking it. You cannot tell a horse about a road. You walk it. The crystal is the same. You cannot tell it about a row. You show it the row, again and again, till the row is in it. My mare knows the way home from the marsh in the dark. I never taught her with words. I taught her with the walking.

Q: And when she is wrong?
A: I pull her back to the road. The tutors do the same. When the crystal sorts a thing wrongly, they move it a little toward the right answer. Una of Ambrook did it first with apples and pears, I hear. My mare and her crystal are not so different. Both learn by being shown, and both need somebody patient to pull them back.
%%
Interview: Garrow
Perrin, a clerk from Vell, came to Sallow Bank in Melon to ask about the honey. Garrow answered in her shed, with the door open for the bees.

Q: Your name, and where you keep your hives?
A: Garrow Venn. Six hives by the reed bed, and one on the fence post. The bees chose the post. I did not argue.
Q: Why is this year's honey so pale?
A: The clover was late. The bees had to walk further for the flowers, and they did not complain. I complained for them, but only to the hive.
Q: What do you do with the honey you do not sell?
A: I keep one jar on the top shelf, for whoever is ill. You knock, I give it, and you bring the jar back when you are well.
Q: Is this the jar you promised the Archive?
A: It is. Take it to the top shelf in Vell. Tell the clerks it is for their tea, and their throats, and their long days of copying.
Q: What is the best thing about the bees?
A: They always come home. Even when they have been far, they are back by dusk. You can set your day by that.
%%
Letter: Ama to her sister in Ambrook
Summer, the 187th year of the archive.

Dear Sella,

The hens are well. All nine. One-Eye has a limp but she still lays. Fat Dog is fatter than ever.

We had a storm last week. It came up from the sea in the afternoon with no warning. The sky went green and then grey, and then the rain came sideways. It took the roof off the hen house again. I stood in the yard with a sack over my head and got the hens into the kitchen one by one. They were not grateful. They never are.

The cart got stuck in the mud on the Saltreach road. A merchant called Pell came by with two carts of his own and helped me pull it out. He talks a great deal. He told me the price of wool in Three Wells and the price of apples in Ambrook and the price of everything else besides. I did not ask. He was kind, though, and his horses were strong.

The baker is well. He says my eggs are the best on the coast. I think he says that to everyone, but I will take it.

How is the orchard? Does the oldest tree still hold? I remember the grey branch. Write back and tell me. I have not seen Ambrook since the year of the long winter.

Do you remember that winter? The snow came in Frost and did not go till Sowing. The hens stopped laying. The water in the bucket froze solid. I kept them in the kitchen that whole time and they ate my bread. I said then I would never keep hens again. I kept them. I am a fool.

Tell the children I send honey. Tell them it is from a bee who knew me.

Your sister,
Ama
%%
Interview: Orla, on a wedding
Kept by a clerk from Vell, who was asked to the wedding and went, and ate.
Q: Tell me about the wedding at the end of Frost.
A: It was Iven and Sile. The lanterns ran the whole length of the boardwalk to the north pool, and the musicians came from Three Wells with a drum and two pipes. The bread was from the Lowmarsh bakers, dark and dense, and the honey cake was from Ambrook. Sile wore green, which is the marsh color. People said it was for luck, though nobody could say whose.
Q: Did people leave early?
A: The sea people did. They had ships to think about. Iven's brother has a berth on a boat out of Saltreach. He sang the last song and then went home to pack. He was smiling, and everyone was smiling. It was a good night, and it was also the kind of night people say goodbye on.
Q: Did anyone say something you remember?
A: Wren said, "Be careful on the water." Then she laughed at herself, and said she was only being a healer, which is a kind of tiredness. An old fisher said the lamps on the boardwalk should be counted. Somebody counted them. Forty-one. He said it was a good number.
Q: Anything more?
A: Only that the bride's apprentice, a small thing from the north side, carried the flowers all the way down the boardwalk and did not drop one. At the end it stopped and stood still, the way they do. The flowers were still in its arms when the music stopped.
%%
Questions for Bram, forge hand
Q: You sharpen the picks at the Deep Works. How many in a day?
A: Forty, on a busy day. Less if the stone is kind. More if it is not.
Q: What makes a pick go blunt?
A: Deep stone. It is hard and it breaks in flat pieces and it eats an edge. A pick that cuts cobblestone all day goes blunt by noon down there.
Q: What do you do to it?
A: Heat it, hammer it, cool it. The old picks are the good ones. New iron is soft. Old iron has been hammered so many times it has forgotten how to break.
Q: Do you sing?
A: Badly. The crew says so. Old Fenn says the deep stone is the only quiet place left in Copperhold now that I have learned to sing. I have not learned. That is his joke.
Q: Have you ever been below the eighth?
A: Once. I did not like it. It is cold and it is quiet and the lamps are far apart. I came up and did not go down again.
Q: What do you make besides picks?
A: Hinges. Nails. A gate for the mayor of Three Wells once. It was a good gate. He paid in emeralds and a goose.
Q: What is the best thing about the forge?
A: The heat in winter. In summer it is a punishment. In winter it is the best place in the world. People come to stand by it and talk. I hear all the gossip before anyone else. That is worth more than the emeralds.
Q: Is it true you have an apprentice?
A: A small one. It carries the coal and holds the tongs. It is not clever. But it does not burn its hands, and neither do I, so we get on.
%%
Interview: Orla, on the lights
Kept by a clerk from Vell, who asked the questions and wrote the answers down as they came.
Q: The lights in the north. What did you see?
A: I did not see them. I was not in the north. A woman called Sefa came down the Northpoint road last winter and told me. She said the sky over the north was green, then white, then a color she had no name for, and it moved like a sheet on a line. She was frightened, and then she was not.
Q: What do people say they are?
A: Some say falling stars. Stars do not stay so long, though, and they do not stop. Some say fires. Fires need fuel, and nobody lit a fire in the north that night, or so the towers say. Some say it is the mines. The Deep Works are far from the north. The miners will tell you it is the stone, and that the stone is warm, and that is all they will say.
Q: Did a child say anything?
A: A child in the square said the lights were looking at us. The children all agreed. Then they stopped agreeing and went off to play. I do not know what the child meant. I do not think the child knew either.
Q: Did the relays report anything?
A: The line sent it south. Northpoint sent word that the lights were there, and then the lamp at Northpoint was quiet for a day. The keepers down the line were worried. Then the lamp came back, and the messages went on as before. Some say the quiet was only snow. Some say it was not.
Q: Mira at Northpoint. Is she well?
A: The last letter south said she was well. She wrote that she was eating stew, that her lamp was clean, and that the north is only the north. She wrote that twice. I have not decided whether to believe her.
Q: Last question. Are you afraid?
A: I am a cheesemaker. I am afraid of wet cheese and of cold hands. The lights are not my business. I put my wheels in the cellar and I count them every morning. That is what I can do.
%%
Notice: eggs for the fair
Put up by Ama at the crossroads, in the 203rd year of the archive.

EGGS FOR THE FAIR AT THREE WELLS

I will bring eggs to the fair on the first market day of Reaping. Fresh. Nine hens, all laying.

Trays of twelve. Two trays for an emerald. Three trays and I will throw in a honeycomb.

The baker has first pick. He knows why.

If the storm comes, I may be late. If the road floods, I may be later. If the hens stop laying, I will not come at all and you will have to eat potatoes.

Ama, of the hamlet by Saltreach.

Below this, in another hand: I will take four trays. Bring the honeycomb. The baker.

Below that, in a child's hand: Do you have a hen called Fat Dog? I want to see her. Bel.

Below that, in Ama's hand: Yes. She will be there. She is fatter than ever.
%%
Talk with Ivo, the swarm at the wall
Q: What did you do when the bees came over the wall?
A: I put my baskets down very slowly, and I stood still. Then I walked backward out of the field, with my hands open, the way my mother taught me. The bees did not care about my hands. They cared about the queen. She was in the apple tree by the gate.

Q: Did you get stung?
A: Once, on the ear. It is the only thing I have ever been stung on, and I was not even trying to be near the bees. I was looking at the eggs.

Q: Did the eggs break?
A: Two did. The rest I took home in my shirt, and my wife cooked them all for the supper, and we had the best omelette in Lowmarsh.

Q: Did the bees go somewhere?
A: They went to the mill pond, to the old hollow tree in the water. Everyone in the village knows where. Nobody will go and fetch them back.

Q: Would you go?
A: I would go with a pot and a spoon. I would sing the song. I would not like it, but I would go.
%%
Interview: Gil, the lamb in the reeds
Taken at the sheepfold at Hollin by Briar, grandfather, on a cold morning. Gil had been up all night looking.

Q: Where did you last see the lamb?
A: At the gate, eating the thistle that grows under the gate. It is always eating the thistle under the gate.

Q: How long was it gone?
A: One night and a morning. I counted the flock three times. Eleven ewes, nineteen lambs, one of them with a bell. The bell was there. The lamb was not.

Q: How did you find it?
A: I did not. The apprentice did. It is not a clever thing, but it is patient. It walked the fence the way I taught it, one post at a time, and stopped at the reeds by the ditch, and stood there until I came.

Q: What was in the reeds?
A: The lamb. Asleep on its side, with its feet in the water and its bell under its chin. It was not hurt. It had been there since evening, and it was cross, and very hungry.

Q: What did you do?
A: Carried it up the hill in my coat. Then I gave it warm milk, and the bell, and a scolding. The scolding was the longest part.

Q: What will you tell the other lambs?
A: Nothing. They know. Lambs always know when they are in the wrong place, and they never say so.
%%
Interview: Rook of the fish weir
Asked at the fish weir below Lowmarsh, the second of Reaping, 202. Questions by Ina, clerk. Answers by Rook, who keeps the weir. Read back to him and found correct.
Q: What is a fish weir?
A: A fence in the water. Posts in the mud, reeds woven between them, and a gap at one end with a basket. The fish swim down in the evening, find the fence and follow it to the gap. They are very polite about it.
Q: Who built it?
A: My grandfather. I have replaced every post twice. It is the same weir.
Q: How often do you look at it?
A: Every dawn. Even when the water is high. Especially then.
Q: What do you catch?
A: Fish. Flat ones, round ones, long ones. The marsh does not give them names. I do, in my head.
Q: Does anything else come in the basket?
A: Frogs. Boots. Once a hat. Once, in the dark, a very surprised cat.
Q: What is the hardest part of the work?
A: The cold, in Frost, on the posts. And the heron. He stands by the weir every morning, and I stand on the bank, and we look at each other. He takes his share. I let him. It is cheaper than arguing.
Q: Is it true that you once caught blue fish?
A: It is true. It was Abel's dye. It was a bad week. Abel says I was loud. I say I was right.
Q: And now?
A: Abel brings me a woolen coat every winter. I wear it. It is very warm and it is not blue.
Q: Is there anything you would like the Archive to keep?
A: A weir is a wall that lets the water go and keeps the fish. Write that. It took me forty years to say it so short.
%%
The hamlet in the long winter
This is written by the children of the hamlet, copied out by Ama, in the year 191.

In the long winter the snow came in Frost and did not go until Sowing. Everyone remembers it. The old people remember it best.

The water in the bucket froze solid. We had to break the ice with a hammer every morning. The hens stopped laying. Ama kept them in her kitchen and they ate her bread. She said she was a fool. She kept them anyway.

The road to Saltreach was closed for forty days. Nobody came and nobody went. Pell's cart did not come, so we had no wool and no news. The baker ran out of flour and made bread from potatoes. Nobody complained, because we were hungry.

The mill pond at Ambrook froze so hard the wheel stopped. Jory said it had never stopped before. He sat by the fire and mended nets and told stories.

The frogs in Lowmarsh went quiet. Wren says they sleep in the mud at the bottom and wake when the water warms. We did not know that. Now we do.

On the last day of Deepsnow the wind stopped. We all went out into the street. The sun came up and the snow began to melt, and the water ran down the lane in a little river. The hens came out and stood in it and looked at the sky. Fat Dog laid an egg that day, the first in forty days. Ama cried.

That is our story of the long winter. It was hard. But we all came through it, and the hens came through it, and in Sowing the world was green again.
%%
Interview: Mira on a crew of apprentices
Autumn, at Northpoint. A clerk from Vell comes north to see the relay and to ask about the crews of apprentices that have begun to work together on one job. Mira answers. She says the clerk has the best handwriting she has seen.

Q: How many apprentices do you have at Northpoint?
A: One, that is mine. But this autumn we had a crew of six. They came from Three Wells on a cart, to rebuild the north wall of the relay house.
Q: A crew. How does it work?
A: Each has a part. One carries stone. One mixes mortar. One holds the line. One checks the level. One writes the cards. One watches the others.
Q: The one who writes the cards?
A: It plans the whole task. The wall is big. It breaks it into steps and writes a card for each. Then it gives the cards to the others. When one finishes, it takes the next card.
Q: And the one who watches?
A: It looks for mistakes. If a stone is crooked, it says so. It cannot speak, so it stands in front of the stone until the others notice.
Q: It sounds like a small town.
A: It is. A small, quiet, careful town of copper and iron. They built the wall in four days. A crew of people would have taken ten.
Q: Did anything go wrong?
A: On the third day the one that mixes mortar ran out of sand. It did not have a card for that. It stood still. The planner saw, and wrote a new card: "fetch sand." It sent the carrier. Sand arrived within the hour.
Q: Did you help?
A: I made tea. It was a long day. They did not drink any, of course, but it made me feel useful.
%%
Questions at the apple stall
Q: Clerk, what are you writing?
A: What people say about Orla's question.

Q: Who is Orla?
A: A tutor at Vell. She asked if a drilled mind could ever think.

Q: What did she suggest?
A: Hide the mind from the readers. Let it answer questions by letter.

Q: Who else answers?
A: A person answers the same questions.

Q: What must the readers know?
A: They must not be told which answers came from the mind.

Q: What are they asked to do?
A: Tell which answer came from the person and which from the mind.

Q: What if they cannot tell?
A: Orla asks what follows. She does not settle it for them.

Q: Do people at Three Wells agree?
A: One says the mind has thought. Another says the readers have only failed.

Q: What do you say?
A: I say this apple is bruised, and I will sell it for less.

Q: Is that answer part of the test?
A: No. But it is the best answer I have given today.

The stall keeper folded my paper in half and set it by the pears.
%%
Interview: Mira on the apprentice
Autumn, at the foot of the Northpoint tower. Questions put by a clerk from Vell. Mira, keeper of the relay, answers. The clerk says Mira was very patient and poured the tea herself.

Q: I am told the apprentice here does something new.
A: It writes its own order cards. I did not know it could. The tutors say the newest minds can.
Q: What is an order card?
A: A small card, with one order on it. "Fetch oil." "Climb the stair." "Light the lamp." In the old days a person wrote the cards and gave them to the apprentice one at a time. Now it writes them for itself.
Q: How does it know what to write?
A: I give it a job. For example: "Get the lamp room ready for winter." It looks at the job and writes a list. First, fetch oil. Second, clean the glass. Third, trim the wicks. Fourth, check the copper ring. Then it works down the list, one card at a time.
Q: Is it right?
A: Mostly. Once it wrote "polish the stars." There are no stars in the lamp room. I took the card away. It did not mind.
Q: What does it do when it does not know?
A: It asks. There is a big mind in the relay house at the foot of the tower. When the apprentice is stuck, it goes there and puts a question into the box. The big mind writes back. The apprentice reads the answer and carries on.
Q: I did not know that.
A: I did not either, until the first winter. Do not tell Lantern. She wishes to be asked first.
%%
Interview: the cider maker
Asked by Ina, clerk, at a farm outside Ambrook, in the spring of 206. Answered by Senna.
Q: When do you start?
A: In Leaffall, when the apples are down. Not before. An apple picked early makes a thin drink.
Q: And when is it ready?
A: Longnight. It sits in the barrel through the cold and thinks about itself.
Q: How do you know it is good?
A: I give it to Gran. If she says nothing for a long time, it is good.
%%
Clerk's questions: the wager
Q: I hear there was a bet.
A: There was. My brother Coll bet a silver fox's weight in emeralds that the copper apprentice could not stack the hay. I bet it could.

Q: Who won?
A: The apprentice. It stacked the hay. All night, in the rain. It stacked it better than we could. Coll paid me at the fair and did not speak to me for a month.

Q: Did it know it had won?
A: No. It did not know it had stacked the hay. It only stacked. That is the thing the tutors kept saying. It does the thing. It does not know the thing.
%%
Interview: Mira, the gift
Questions put by a clerk from Vell, autumn, at Northpoint tower. Mira answers.
Q: Someone left a gift at the door.
A: A scarf. Red, with a fox on it. From Tam, I think. Nobody else knits so badly.
Q: Do you like it?
A: I have worn it every day since.
Q: Will you wear it all winter?
A: If it is a long one, yes.
%%
Interview: a wool carder
A clerk's questions to Jem, asked at the end of the autumn, when the last fleeces were in and the shed was swept for the winter. For the Archive's book of the year.

Q: When does the autumn work end?
A: When the last of the fleeces is carded, and the combs are oiled and hung on their pegs, and the stove is lit in the shed for the first time. This year it was the fifth day of Leaffall.

Q: What is the last thing you card in the autumn?
A: A small fleece from the lamb born in Blossom. It is soft and fine and has never been out in the rain. I card it slowly, and I keep it, and I give it to my daughter in the winter, to spin into a shawl.

Q: Who helps with the work at the end of the year?
A: The apprentices from the mill, who carry the bales. They do not get tired. They do not talk, either, which is restful. I tell them what I want, and they do it. I think they like the wool. I have not asked them.

Q: What do you do when the work is done?
A: I sit by the stove with a cup of tea, and I do nothing. My mother did the same. She said it was the only part of the year that the wool did not need her for.

Q: What will you card next year?
A: The same. The grey from the high pasture, the white from the valley, and the lamb's wool for my daughter. And, if the river is kind, a new shed on a stone base, with a bench in the loft, where the wool can stay dry.

Q: What would you like to tell the clerks?
A: That the work is slow, and it is good, and that a shawl will last longer than a carder's life. Write that down. It is the only thing I ever want written.
%%
At the fair, a game with letters
A clerk of the archive asks Nim about the summer fair at Three Wells, where there was a stall with a game.

Q: What was the game?
A: You wrote half a sentence on a card. The man at the stall showed it to the reading mind. It guessed the next letter, and then the next, and wrote the rest.
Q: Was it any good?
A: I wrote "The hen sat on the". It wrote "nest and would not move." I was surprised. I had meant to write "fence".
Q: Did you win a prize?
A: No. It guessed better than I did. The man gave me a honey twist anyway.
Q: Did anyone say how it works?
A: A tutor was there. She said it only ever guesses the next letter. It does that again and again until a sentence is done. I said that is how I talk, and she laughed.
%%
Letter: Hollis to his sister at Ambrook
Winter of 168.
Dear Rilla,
The winter market has come to Saltreach again. I have a stall by the slip this year, not out on the pier where the wind gets in. I sell beetroot, and wool from my three sheep, and honey in little pots. The honey goes fastest. People buy it to keep the cold off, they say. I say it is just sweet, but they buy it anyway.
Corin the shipwright came by and bought two pots. He says the slip is busy all winter, boats to mend and boats to build. He works with his sleeves rolled up even in Frost. His hands are always black with tar. He said my beetroot was the roundest he had seen. I said that is what beetroot does. He laughed a long time. I think shipwrights do not get out much.
The relay lamp on the tower above the harbor broke last week. The keeper's boy dropped the glass when he was cleaning it, and the lamp would not light for two nights. Nobody could send word north or south. The keeper was very sorry. He stood on the quay and told everyone. A fisherman said, well, we can shout. Everyone laughed. The glass came on a cart from Three Wells on the third day, and the lamp burns again. I watched it come on at dusk. It is a good thing to see, a light going up where there was none.
I am warm. I am eating fish. I have sold most of the beetroot. Come to the market next winter and I will keep a pot of honey for you.
Your brother, Hollis
%%
Interview: Ash and the sick cow
Asked at Ash's house, at the edge of Lowmarsh, the fourth of Apple, 204. Questions by Cob, clerk. Answers by Ash, farmer.
Q: What was wrong with the cow?
A: She stood in the corner of the barn and looked at the wall. She would not eat. She would not even look at me.
Q: Did you call Wren?
A: I called Wren. Wren looked in the cow's mouth and found a corner of paper.
Q: Paper?
A: My grandfather's map. It hung on the barn wall. She ate the middle.
Q: Which part was the middle?
A: The deep mud. Now she knows where it is and I do not. I follow her round the field.
%%
Letter: Hollis to his sister at Ambrook
Winter of 181.
Dear Rilla,
A strange and good thing. Tomas came home.
You remember Tomas, who went to the mines at Copperhold when we were young. That is twenty years ago. He came back down the Long Road in the snow with one bag and a bad cough and a beard like a hedgerow. He walked into the winter market and stood by my stall and did not say anything for a while. Then he said, Hollis, your beetroot is still round. I said, Tomas, you are still ugly. We stood there and laughed until the fish man told us to move.
He has been at the Deep Works all this time. He says the pay was good and the work was hard and the stone down there is always cold. He says he is done with cold stone. He has bought a little house up by the harbor wall with a view of the boats. He sat at my stall all day and sold beetroot for me and told everyone who came that he was my brother and had been away twenty years. He sold more beetroot than I ever have. People bought it just to hear him.
At dusk the lamp came on and Tomas watched it. He said, I forgot there was a lamp. I said, there is always a lamp, you just have to look up. He said he would look up more now.
He coughed a lot in the cold. I told him to sit by the fire. He said he was fine. He is not fine, but he is home, and that is most of it. I am keeping an eye on him. Come in Blossom and see him.
Your brother, Hollis
%%
Interview: Bram on furs, the south road
Q: Bram, you have been a trader at Frostmere for how long?
A: Thirty years, if you count the first one, which was mostly eating soup and falling over in the snow.

Q: What do you sell, and what do you buy?
A: I buy furs from the trappers, wool from the shepherds on the north side, and dried fish from the lake men. I sell all of it at Three Wells, at the spring fair, and some of it at Vell, to the clerks, who pay in paper.

Q: Do the clerks pay well?
A: They pay on time. They also want the receipt, the receipt for the receipt, and the seal. I once spent the whole of Thaw trying to explain to a clerk that a fox does not have a name.

Q: How did you get the south road cleared last winter?
A: The council sent a crew of apprentices up with carts and shovels. They dug a path a cart wide from Frostmere to the Brown Hen. They did it in nine days, in the snow, with no one telling them how except the one order they had been given. Clear. Then the next one: clear the bend. Then the next: clear the bridge. I would stand at the bridge and say "Good" each time, and they would go on.

Q: Did any of them speak to you?
A: No, but then the apprentices do not talk. They keep working. The foreman does the talking. I think the foreman wanted me to stop saying good. I did not.

Q: Are the roads safe in winter now?
A: Safer. The waymarks help. Each mark has a torch on top, and the torches are lit on the first of each month. But I still tell every traveler to carry a rope and a bag of salt.
%%
Interview: Orla, on the poor harvest
Kept by a clerk from Vell, from a talk at the Lowmarsh market in the cold of the year.
Q: The clerks say the harvest was thin. Is that true at Lowmarsh?
A: The wheat from the marsh edge was thin. The fields on the hill did better. But the cows eat grass, and the grass was poor in Blossom, when it should have been rich. So the milk came down, and I had less to work with.
Q: What did the families do?
A: They shared. The council counts the houses and gives out the sacks. We have had practice at sharing. The reeds were good, though, so the roofs are dry, and that counts for something.
Q: Did anyone go hungry?
A: Some. Not many. Old Hal was given a stool by the fire and a bowl twice a day. He said it was too much. He ate it all.
Q: Some in the market say the harvest is a sign of something. What do you say?
A: I say it is a harvest. Some say the ground is tired after all these years. Some say it is the water. I cannot tell you which is right, and I would rather not guess in front of a clerk.
Q: What will you do next year?
A: Plant more beetroot. Beetroot is steady. Keep the seed in the dry chest and do not touch it. Listen to the old ones, even when they are slow.
%%
Three Wells fair, the singing
Dace puts up the notice a month before the fair. Sing a song you made or a song you learned. The prize is a jar of Ambrook honey and a ribbon.
The contest is held by the east well, on a cart turned into a stage. The children go first. Bel sings about a cat that would not come down from the roof. She gets all the words right except the last one, and everybody claps anyway.
Then Alder of Nettle End stands up. He is old and his voice is like a cracked pot. He sings about the Long Road, how the torches are lit one by one, and how a traveler can count them home. The last verse is about a man who walked the road his whole life and found his own house at the end of it.
Nobody talks for a moment. Then the whole square claps, and Dace's littlest one claps the loudest.
Alder does not win. A young woman from Kettle Ridge wins, singing about windmills. But on the way home Alder's neighbors sing his road song all the way to the well at Nettle End.
%%
Questions for the mender
Spring of 190. The house at the edge of Three Wells has a loose shutter. I asked the mender while she fixed it.

Q: Why does this shutter bang?
A: The peg is worn.
Q: Can you mend it?
A: Yes. Hold this board.
Q: I am holding it.
A: You are holding the broom.
Q: What should I hold?
A: The board, unless you want the broom mended.
Q: Is the apprentice useful here?
A: It can fetch a peg. It can also stay out of the way.
Q: Which order did you give it?
A: Fetch a peg.
Q: Did it fetch one?
A: It brought three. That is not a fault. I will need the others.
Q: Is the shutter fixed?
A: It is. The broom is still a broom.
%%
Market talk, the wax and the word
Spring, at Saltreach. Talk at the candle stall, written down by Cleo because the fish man would not.
The fish man said: a mind with words in it is no better than a book.
The net mender said: a book does not put one word near another by itself.
The baker said: my oven does not know the word crumb, and it bakes bread all day.
I said: the tutor told me the places are near each other, the words that are used alike. Fish near net. Bread near crumb. That is all.
The fish man said: and what does it do with that?
I said: it guesses the next word. That is what the tutor said. You give it a line, and it guesses the word after.
The net mender said: any fool can guess the next word.
I said: it guesses better than a fool. That is the whole of it. Do not ask me why.
The baker said: I would like to see it guess the word after bread.
I said: it would guess crumb, and you would be pleased, and it would cost you nothing.
The fish man said: and the word after fish?
I said: net. Or market. Or, if it is a bad morning, smell.
The net mender laughed. The fish man did not.
Then the baker bought four candles and the fish man bought two, and the net mender said the whole thing was a trick with paper, and went back to his nets.
%%
Interview: Hazel, who keeps the ferry
Asked on the ferry at Lowmarsh, halfway across, the twentieth of Apple, 205. Questions by Ina, clerk, who sat very still. Answers by Hazel, who keeps the ferry and poles it.
Q: How long have you kept the ferry?
A: Twenty-two years. My mother had it before me, and her father before her. The pole has been replaced nine times. It is the same pole.
Q: How long does a crossing take?
A: As long as it takes to say good morning to everyone aboard. In wind, longer, and nobody talks.
Q: What do you carry?
A: People, sacks, hens, wool, a hive on the lid of a barrel, wedding cake. Once a bride. Once a cow.
Q: Tell the Archive about the cow.
A: It was Ash's. She was sick, and the path to Wren's was under water. We put her on the ferry with her head over the side. She stood in the exact middle and would not move. When she leaned, we leaned. When she leaned the other way, we leaned the other way. We went round in circles for an hour and a half.
Q: Was she cured?
A: She was well by evening. Wren says the cow's weight was right and her manners were not. The ferry is still apologizing.
Q: Who is the worst passenger?
A: Anyone who stands up. In a flat boat, the one who stands is the one who gets wet.
Q: And the best?
A: Children. They trail a hand in the water and say what they see. Last week a girl told me the reeds were waving at her. I said maybe they were. She waved back.
Q: What is the busiest day?
A: Market day. Everyone at Lowmarsh wants to cross to the road on the same morning. I make eleven trips before noon, with eighty people, nine hens and a goat who has opinions about the pole.
Q: Do the frogs trouble you?
A: They are the only passengers who sing. I let them ride on the lily leaves beside the boat.
Q: Do you sleep on the ferry?
A: At noon. So does Puddle, who is the cat. She sits at the bow and watches the water for a fish. She has not caught one. She has not lost hope.
Q: Would you ever leave the marsh?
A: I do not mind it. It is slow, and so am I. We suit each other.
Q: What should the Archive keep?
A: That a ferry is the slowest and safest thing there is. Everybody who crosses is going somewhere, and gets there. Nothing has been late on my boat. The thing waits.
%%
A Q and A with the fish man
Winter of 189. Written down at the quay, at the fish market, by a clerk passing through.
Q: What is your name and your trade?
A: They call me Peder. I am a fish man. I have had the stall by the price board for thirty years. My father had it before me. The board is mine to write in the mornings, though the town says it belongs to everyone.
Q: What is good about the winter market?
A: The fires. In summer we sweat. In winter we stand by the iron baskets and are warm on one side and cold on the other and we turn around like meat on a spit. And everyone comes. In summer folk are out in the boats. In winter they come to the quay and talk. I hear every piece of news twice, once from the north end and once from the south, and they never match.
Q: What do you sell?
A: Fish. Cod and herring, mostly. Some flat fish. In Frost the herring come in thick and we cannot sell them fast enough, so we salt them and stack them and by Longnight the whole quay smells of salt and everyone is sick of herring. Then in Thaw they want herring again. People are like that.
Q: Is the lamp ever out?
A: Once, years back. The keeper's boy broke a pane. Two nights dark. We shouted our prices. It was a good market, that one. Nobody starved for a lamp. But we were glad when it came back.
Q: What would you tell a child who wants to be a fish man?
A: Learn to sit still and be cold. Learn to gut a fish quick. Learn that the sea gives and the sea takes and you do not argue with either. And learn to write, because the price board does not write itself.
%%
Market questions for a tutor
Copied for the Three Wells board, autumn of the 94th year.

Q: Tutor, do you believe a drilled mind can think?
A: I do not know. Orla asked the question at Vell, and it has followed us here.

Q: What is the test she proposed?
A: A person and a hidden mind answer the same questions by letter. The readers do not know which answer is which. They read both and try to tell them apart.

Q: Is the mind shown the questions before?
A: The test is worth little if the answers are already prepared. The questions should be new to both.

Q: What if readers choose correctly?
A: Then they could tell those answers apart. That is what the test shows.

Q: What if they choose wrongly?
A: Then they could not tell those answers apart on that trial. It does not prove that every mind thinks, or that no mind thinks.

Q: Why use readers at all?
A: Orla asks about answers that reach us by letter. We judge what was written, not a hidden crystal.

Q: Could a person write a poor answer?
A: Yes. Could a mind write a fine answer? Yes. That is why one question is not enough.

Q: Have you tried it?
A: Not yet. We need fair questions, readers who keep their guesses, and answers marked so nobody can change them later.

At the market, a child asked if the mind could be given a name. I said the test did not need one. The child named the new apprentice Turnip. Turnip carried the tutor's empty crate home without dropping it.

Q: Is that proof?
A: No. The crate was only a crate.
%%
Letter: Hollis to his sister at Ambrook
Winter of 196.
Dear Rilla,
The market this year has a new thing in it. An apprentice.
A farmer from up the coast brought one down to carry his goods. It is copper and iron and it walks, and it does not get cold, and it carried a whole cart of turnips from the road to the quay without stopping. People gathered round to look. The farmer said it had a small mind in a crystal and it knew how to haul, and that was all it knew, and that was enough. He said it cost a good many emeralds and a great deal of patience. I asked how much patience. He said, more than the emeralds.
It stood by the stall all day and did not move unless he told it. A child gave it a fish. It did not eat the fish. It held the fish. The child was very pleased. The farmer took the fish away at the end and ate it himself.
Tomas says at Copperhold they have apprentices in the mine now, and one called Clank that carries the tools. He says they are useful and they never complain, and he does not trust a thing that never complains. That is Tomas all over. He is well this winter, mostly. He coughs a little less.
The lamp is bright. The herring are thick. Come in Blossom.
Your brother, Hollis
%%
Questions at the open window
Spring of 207. I am Hollis, tutor of apprentices. I spoke with Eda, who keeps the small house at the edge of Three Wells. Her window looks toward the east road. A pot of carrot tops stands on the sill. Eda says they are growing well. I say they are trying to escape.

Q: Why do you keep a house outside the town wall?
A: The wall is close, and the road is close. I can hear the carts before they reach the square.
Q: What do you hear first?
A: The wheels, if they are sound. The driver, if they are not.
Q: What did you hear this morning?
A: A cart with one loose wheel. Then a chicken under the cart. Then the driver asking where his chicken went.
Q: Did you find it?
A: It was in my wood store, sitting on a sack of coal.
Q: What did the apprentice do?
A: I gave it one order. "Bring me the chicken."
Q: Did it understand?
A: It went to the wood store, lifted the chicken gently, and brought it to the yard.
Q: What happened to the chicken?
A: It laid an egg in the apprentice's hand.
Q: What happened to the egg?
A: It rolled down the path. The apprentice followed it. The chicken followed the apprentice.
Q: Did the egg break?
A: No. It stopped by the well. The chicken took it back.
Q: What did the cart driver say?
A: He said the apprentice was a better chicken keeper than he was.
Q: Was that true?
A: For one morning, yes. He had three other chickens to find.
Q: Does the apprentice help you often?
A: It carries wood and brings water from the well. It is careful with the clay jars.
Q: What does it do badly?
A: It cannot tell when I am carrying too much. It will fetch another jar while I am holding two.
Q: What do you do then?
A: I say, "Stay." It stays. Then I put the jars down before my arms fall off.
Q: What will you plant by the window?
A: Beans, if the carrots stop climbing.
Q: And if they do not?
A: I will give the carrots a little board to climb. They are poor guests, but they have good manners when asked.
Q: What should a new apprentice learn first?
A: To carry gently, to wait when told, and to leave the eggs alone.
Q: Is that the whole lesson?
A: No. It should learn that a chicken may change its mind and go home without it. The apprentice brought the chicken back. It did not bring back the driver.
Q: Was the driver lost?
A: No. He was in the square asking for directions to his own cart.
Q: Did you tell him where it was?
A: I did. The cart had not moved. Only the chicken had.
Q: What will you tell the tutor?
A: That the apprentice did well, the egg stayed whole, and the carrots still need a board. Also, tell him to bring bread next time. Asking questions makes a person hungry.
%%
Note: the mill tally, autumn
The mill keeps the tally board. Every sack of wheat that comes down from the top field gets a mark. I have marked that board for nineteen years and I know what the marks say before I count them.
This autumn I asked the clerk at Vell to send a mind to read the board. Not to grind. Just to look at the marks and say the number. He sent word back that a mind can be shown a board and told the number, again and again, until it learns the shapes. So I sent down forty boards. I drew marks on them myself, and I wrote the number under each one.
The mind came back wrong on one board in nine. It read a seven as a one. It read a three as an eight. Clerks say this is because a mind does not see a mark the way I do. It sees small pieces of the mark and weighs them. When two marks share most of their pieces, the mind is unsure, and it guesses.
I told the clerk: I am unsure too, on a wet morning. I squint and I guess, and then I walk up and count the sacks with my hand. The mind cannot walk up. So I keep my board and my stick of chalk, and the mind keeps its numbers, and we do not argue. The wheat does not care who counts it.
%%
Interview: a wool carder
A clerk's questions to Jem, the wool carder, on the day the big cart stuck in the ford at the bottom of the Copperhold lane. Autumn. The clerk asked for the story of every cart that is lost or stuck on the roads, so that the stone men and the road men may learn from it.

Q: What was in the cart?
A: Two hundred pounds of wool, in bales, tied with red thread. It was for the market at Vell. It was the best grey wool I have ever carded, and I wanted the Archive to see it.

Q: How did the cart get stuck?
A: The wheel went into the soft bank by the ford, on the left side. The horse pulled, and the cart did not move. The horse pulled again, and the cart went deeper. The carter said it was the wool, and I said it was the bank.

Q: What did the carter do?
A: He got down. He took off his coat. He put his shoulder to the wheel and said a word I will not write. Then he took the horse by the bridle and walked it backward, slowly, one step, then another.

Q: Did it move?
A: Not at once. It sank a little more. Then a little less. Then the wheel came up out of the bank with a sound like a boot out of mud, and the cart was free.

Q: Was anything damaged?
A: One bale split. The wool came out into the water and floated downstream, like a flock of very dirty geese. The children chased it to the mill. The miller says he has not seen wool like that since the spring of the big flood.

Q: What would you tell a carter about the ford?
A: Do not go round the wide way. The wide way is longer, but it is firm. Do not push the horse too hard. Let it find the ground. Keep the wheel to the middle of the track, and do not take the left edge, where the bank is soft.

Q: What did you learn?
A: That a horse knows more about mud than a carter does, and a wool bale knows nothing at all, and that it is always the bale that is blamed.
%%
The wedding at the house by the top
Tam's cousin Bree married a Saltreach boatwright in the autumn, and the wedding was at the house at the edge of Kettle Ridge, because it has the biggest yard and the best well.
They set the tables in the yard under the oak hedge. They hung lanterns from the branches, glass ones, and lit them at dusk. The whole ridge came, and the Kettle Inn sent up three barrels of small beer and a whole roast pig, and the hives gave honey enough for every pie.
The bride's father is a boatwright, and he brought a small boat he had made, no longer than a table, and set it in the middle of the yard with flowers in it. He said a boat is a promise that you will come back. Everyone clapped.
The apprentice Pip stood by the gate all evening with a tray of cups. It did not spill one. A child asked it to dance and it said: stay. So the child danced around it instead, and the apprentice turned its head to follow the child, round and round, very slowly.
At midnight the keeper at Northpoint sent a message down the line for the bride and groom: good luck, and a long life, and may your roof never leak. Mira is Tam's sister, so of course she sent it. It came up the relays from tower to tower and a clerk read it out loud at the table, and Bree cried, and Tam cried a little too and said it was the smoke from the lanterns.
The next morning the yard was full of cups and flower petals and one small boat, and the apprentice was already out in the top field, hauling the seed sacks up the hill, because the fields do not stop for a wedding.
%%
Interview: Tansy and the marsh map
Asked at Tansy's house, at the end of the path, Lowmarsh, the ninth of Leaffall, 198. Questions by Cob, clerk. Answers by Tansy, who is very old and says so. Cob's hands are terrible, so Ina has copied it fair.
Q: How do you cross the marsh in the dark?
A: I count. Eleven boards to the third post. Left at the post. Twenty-two boards to the heron stone. Then straight on, and no arguing.
Q: Who taught you to count the boards?
A: My grandmother, with one tap of a stick on my shoulder for every board. I still tap my own shoulder when I count. People think I am swatting flies.
Q: What if you lose count?
A: I stand still and wait for the frogs. They are loud on firm ground and quiet where it is soft. Folk say frogs know nothing. Frogs know where the mud is.
Q: Do night things come into the marsh?
A: They come off the firm ground and sink. We are not sad.
Q: You have an old map of the paths?
A: My grandmother's. She made it on a piece of hide with a burnt stick. It hangs by my door.
Q: May the Archive copy it?
A: Copy it. But write on the back that it is wrong.
Q: Wrong?
A: The paths move. The reeds are cut, the mud shifts, the posts rot and are set again a little to the left. Half the paths on that map are gone. One was never there. I think she drew it for a joke, to see who would try it.
Q: Which path is that?
A: The one that goes straight across the middle. Your clerk found it this morning. He is drying by my stove.
Q: Then is the map any use?
A: Very much. It shows where people were once sure. That is worth knowing.
Q: Is there anything else you would like the Archive to keep?
A: That the marsh is not dangerous. It is only particular.
Note by Ina: the copy is shelved with the Lowmarsh records. On the back it says: right about where the paths were.
%%
Interview: the Blossom Cup
Asked by Ina, clerk, in the spring of 207, at the Hollow farm outside Ambrook. The Blossom fair is held on the first fine day of Blossom, when the apple trees are white and pink. The prize, the Blossom Cup, is for the finest branch of blossom. This year it went to Toby, who is ten. Answered by Toby, with help from his dog, Pepper, who sat on the page.
Q: Congratulations. Did you expect to win?
A: No. I expected Edda to win. She always does. She picks the whole top of a tree.
Q: How did you pick your branch?
A: Pepper chose.
Q: Pepper chose?
A: I walked down the rows with a knife. At every tree I held the branch up. At the fifty-first tree Pepper sat down and would not move. So I cut that branch.
Q: What was special about it?
A: It was crooked. Everyone else's was straight. Mine looked like it was waving.
Q: What did the judges say?
A: One said it was the best she had seen. One said it was the only one that did not fit in the jar. One said, "Why is the dog on the table?"
Q: What did you say?
A: I said that is Pepper. He is the one who won.
Q: Will you give him the cup?
A: He ate the ribbon. I think that is enough.
Q: Where will you put the cup?
A: On the kitchen shelf, next to the picture of Barley that I drew for Pell. It is a good shelf. Pepper can see it from his bed.
Q: What is the best thing about winning?
A: Edda came over and shook my hand and said I had chosen well. She did not say Pepper did. But she looked at him.
%%
Interview: Nim on how a mind reads
Questions by Tebb, a clerk of the archive, who came out to the farm of Nim the egg seller, outside Three Wells, in the week of the summer fair. Nim had been to a talk by a tutor. She was asked to say what she remembered, in her own words.

Q: Start where you like.
A: With the page. A reading mind reads one letter at a time. It does not see the whole page. It sees a window, about sixty letters wide, and the window slides along as it reads.
Q: And then?
A: Then it guesses the next letter. The tutor wrote on a board: "The hen laid an egg, and then it". She asked us what comes next. A boy said "sat". She said that is just what the mind does. It has to guess.
Q: How does it know?
A: That was the clever part. It does not look at every letter in the window the same. For each letter, it looks back and takes from the earlier letters only the ones that matter. She said "it" looks back at "hen" and "egg", but not much at "and". So it knows "it" most likely means the hen.
Q: How does it learn what matters?
A: By being wrong. The tutors drill it on pages from the archive. It guesses, and it is wrong, mostly. Each time it is wrong it changes a little. After a great many pages it is wrong less often.
Q: Does it understand?
A: She said she could not say. She said it guesses well, and that is all she was sure of. A boy asked if a mind that guesses well enough is the same as a mind that thinks. She said that is Orla's question, and the tutors have argued over it for a hundred and some years.
Q: What did you think?
A: That nobody in that room knew. They only said it in different voices.
Q: Why do the letters from the relay houses sound like people?
A: Because the pages it learned from were written by people. If you drill it on enough letters, it learns how letters go. It writes a letter that goes like a person's letter. Nobody knows quite why that works so well. The tutor said that, and she did not seem ashamed.
Q: Anything else?
A: One thing. At the end she held up an egg. She said, "This is what a hen does. It lays an egg and does not know why. We are not so different." There was a long silence. Then someone said, "Do we buy eggs from tutors?" and everyone laughed, and I sold three dozen after that.
Q: Thank you, Nim.
A: Tell the archive to keep the page. I would like to be in the book.
%%
Three Wells fair, questions for Orla
Written by Dace after the autumn fair. The school keeper checked the wording.

Q: Why did Orla raise this matter?
A: She was a tutor at Vell. She asked whether a mind that had been drilled could ever think. Some folk heard a claim in her question. She made no claim. She asked us to find out what we could.

Q: What was her proposed test?
A: A person and a hidden mind would answer the same questions by letter. The readers would not be told which answers came from the person and which came from the mind. They would read them and try to tell them apart.

Q: Why must the mind be hidden?
A: If a reader knows where an answer came from, that knowledge may guide the judgment. The test asks what the reader can tell from the answer itself.

Q: What would it mean if readers could not tell?
A: It would mean those readers could not tell those answers apart in that test. Orla asks what we should make of that. People disagree. Some say that is a reason to call the mind thoughtful. Some say it only shows that letters can mislead us.

Q: Does one round settle the matter?
A: No. A person may misunderstand a question. A mind may answer badly. Readers may guess. We should ask many questions and keep the answers as they were sent.

Q: Must the questions be secret?
A: They should not be known in advance by the answerers. Otherwise we test a learned reply, not how each meets a new question.

Q: Can the test tell us what happens inside a crystal?
A: No. It compares written answers. It does not show why the crystal learns, or what thought must be.

Q: What happened at the fair?
A: We set a table beside the notice board. People brought pears, wool and small questions. A child asked what to do when a goose follows you. A carter asked how to mend a wheel. A tutor asked why a shadow moves. We kept the questions on separate slips.

Q: Was a mind tested there?
A: No. We had no fair trial ready. A new apprentice was at the table, but it had been taught to carry and sort. It carried the slips to the school keeper. It did not answer them.

Q: What did the new apprentice do next?
A: It stayed by the table when told to stay. Then it carried the empty basket to the school house when given the order to fetch the basket. The children clapped. That was a useful lesson in orders, not Orla's test.

Q: What did the market decide?
A: Nothing. The bell rang, the stalls came down, and the question went home with us.
%%
Interview: Wren, healer, Lowmarsh
Perrin walked the healing house with Wren, and wrote down the jars as they stood on the shelves.

Q: How many jars are on your shelves?
A: One hundred and four. Each one labeled in my own hand, and the ink is kept in a dark pot on the low shelf.
Q: What is in the jar on the left?
A: Dandelion root, dried. The jar beside it is lily of the valley. Those two are not neighbors. They were put apart in spring, after a mistake I will not describe again.
Q: Who put them apart?
A: Moss did. Moss is my helper. It has a copper frame and a steady hand, and since spring it has not once mixed a jar. It stands at the high shelf and fetches what I ask, and it waits when I am not sure.
Q: How did you teach it to sort?
A: Slowly. I wrote to Nessa at Vell, and she told me to hold up one flower at a time, say its name, and let the mind be wrong without shouting. It was harder for me than for Moss.
Q: What remedy do you give most?
A: Honey in warm milk, for a sore throat, every night before bed. Honey is the best medicine on the marsh, and I say so to the council every year.
Q: What do you put on the cuts from the boats?
A: Crushed leaf in clean wool, and a wrap that is changed each morning. Keep the cloth boiled. Nothing kills a wound faster than a dirty cloth, unless it is a careless healer.
Q: What do you tell a patient who is afraid of the marsh?
A: That the marsh has been here longer than any of us, and it is not in a hurry. Then I give them a jar of honey, and a stool by the window, and I let them watch the frogs.
Q: Are the frogs any help to you?
A: They are my best patients. Half the fever on the marsh comes off the water, and the frogs sit in it all day and do not mind.
%%
Interview: Joss Peel
Perrin asked for the story of the weir. Joss gave it in order, with one hand on the posts.

Q: Tell me how the weir began.
A: My grandmother began it, with three posts and a basket of reed. She said the water would bring the fish if she gave it a reason to slow down. The fish came, and they stayed, because the reed kept them out of the deep.
Q: Who built the second post?
A: Her husband, Tadd Peel. He said the first one was crooked, and he was right, and he did not say it again for forty years.
Q: How many fish come to the weir?
A: In a good Melon, two hundred. In a bad year, eighty, and a great many complaints. This year, one hundred and sixty, and the boys eat most of them before they reach the cart.
Q: Who keeps the weir now?
A: I do, with two helpers. One is a copper helper called Fenn, which walks the posts at dawn and tells me which ones lean. The other is my son, who leans on nothing and falls in the water twice a year.
Q: What does Fenn do exactly?
A: It walks the posts from the bank to the middle. At each post it stops and waits, and then it moves on. At dusk it comes back to see if the posts are still standing, and it has never once fallen in.
Q: What is the hardest part of the work?
A: The night after a flood. The reed is wet and heavy, and the weir wants to lie down in the water like an old horse. You go out with a lamp and a rope, and you talk to it, and you hope.
Q: Has a big flood come here?
A: Once, in my father's time. The water came over the reed in a single night, and every basket went down the marsh. He stood on the bank in his nightshirt and counted what was left. It was three posts and a boy's hat.
Q: Why do you keep the weir?
A: Because my grandmother did. The boys want something to climb, and the fish want something to swim against, and I want something to lean on in the evenings. The weir is the only thing on Lowmarsh that does not argue back.
%%
The keeper's lamp and the winter fair
A clerk at Vell wrote down what the Saltreach keeper told him, in the winter of 174.
Q: How did the lamp break?
A: My boy was cleaning the glass panes in the lamp room. He is eleven. He has done it a hundred times. This time his sleeve caught the ring and he pulled the pane out and it went down onto the walk and then over. It did not hit anyone. It landed in a boat. The boat was fine. The pane was not.
Q: Two nights without a light. What did people do?
A: The first night they came to my door and asked was the tower out. I said yes. They asked when it would be lit. I said when the glass comes. They stood in the snow a while and then went home. The second night they came again and brought me fish. That is how it is here. They are not angry. They are just checking.
Q: And the market?
A: The market went on. The market does not need a lamp. People shouted across the quay instead. Old Peder stood at the slip and shouted the prices. He has a big voice. He shouted them all the way to the harbor wall. A woman at the far end shouted back that she could not hear, and he shouted louder, and she said that was worse, and everyone laughed. It was a good market.
Q: Is the lamp mended now?
A: The glass came on a cart. The carter would not take payment. He said a dark tower is bad for everyone and he was glad to bring it. I lit the lamp at dusk and half the town came out to watch. The boy cried. I told him the tower has stood forty years and one pane will not bring it down. He is cleaning it again. He is more careful now.
%%
Interview: Iver on the small crystal
Q: You teach at the tutor house in Copperhold. Why would a crystal need fewer marks?
A: Because not every crystal can hold every mark. We have a big crystal for the big mines, and small ones for the small carts and the barrows. A small crystal has only so much room. If you fill it with all the marks of a big mind, it cracks, or it stops learning.

Q: So you make the mind smaller.
A: We write the marks in fewer lines. That is the trick. A mark that is nearly the same as its neighbor is written as one mark, and the neighbor is taken from it. It fits the small crystal. It is not as sharp. But it is good enough for barrows.

Q: What does it cost?
A: A little. Maybe one answer in twenty goes a bit wrong that would have gone right. For a cart that is nothing. For a mine, it might matter. So we test it. We test every small mind on cards it has never seen, before we send it out. If it fails the test, it goes back to the tutor house and is drilled again.

Q: How did you learn the trick?
A: From the layers. When we had a big mind with a lot of marks, we found some of the marks were very alike. They were almost copies of each other. We tried leaving some out and seeing what happened. Most of the time, very little. So we kept the trick.

Q: Who worked it out first?
A: That is in dispute. Some say a tutor called Pim, years ago, who was trying to fit a mind into a locket for his mother. Others say it was an old clerk at Vell who was counting marks by hand. I think it was many people, a little at a time.

Q: Does a mind know it has fewer marks?
A: No. It only knows what it knows. It has no idea that it used to know more. That is why we test it. A mind that does not know it is smaller will say so with the same confidence as any other.

Q: Is that a worry?
A: It is a thing to watch. We write it on the card. Smaller, and not as sharp. Test before use. I do not think it is more than that.
%%
Interview: Sora on the white fox
Q: Your name, and where you live?
A: Sora. Two hundred steps up the north road from Frostmere Hamlet, in the second house, with the blue door.

Q: What do you do?
A: I trap foxes in the winter and sell the furs at the fair. The white ones go to Bram, who takes them south.

Q: Is it true there is a white fox at Northpoint?
A: There are three. One is old and very fat. One is young and very rude. The third one I have never seen, but the others leave me the feathers from their dinners.

Q: How do you tell them apart?
A: The old one walks in the middle of the road. The rude one runs away from the middle. The one I have not seen is a rumor.
%%
The winter market
Written down in the 202nd year, at the school house in Three Wells, by Bel, aged nine. The schoolteacher asked us to write about a place we had been.
I went to the winter market at Saltreach with my father. It is on the quay by the water. It is very cold and very loud. There are fires in iron baskets and you stand by them and your front is hot and your back is freezing. My father bought a wool hat and lost it in the same hour and we never found it.
The best thing was the boat coming home. A boat went out in the morning with three men in it and it came back at dusk and everyone went to the harbor wall to watch. The men held up fish. The fish were big. A woman on the wall shouted a name and one of the men waved. My father said that is what a homecoming is, it is when the boat comes back. I said the men were only out for a day. He said it does not matter. Every time the boat comes back it is a homecoming.
There was a man selling honey. He let me have a little on a spoon. He said his name was Hollis and he had a farm and three sheep. He said the honey was from his bees and the bees were asleep for winter and would wake in Blossom. I asked did the bees know it was winter. He said they know everything about honey and nothing else. I do not think that is true but it was funny.
The relay tower is above the harbor and its lamp was lit when we came away. It was very bright. My father said the light goes all the way up the coast and down again and carries messages. I waved at it. I do not know if anyone waved back.
%%
The winter market at Saltreach
Taken at the quay in the winter of 208, from Hollis, a farmer, and from people at his stall.
Q: What has changed at the winter market since you were young?
A: The fires are the same. The fish is the same. The price board is still Peder's. What has changed is the apprentices. When I was a boy there was none on the quay. Now there are three or four at every market, carrying and hauling and standing still. They are good at standing still. People have got used to them. A child will walk right past one now, where before a child would stop and stare all day.
Q: Tell me about the homecoming.
A: That was Tomas, my brother, in the winter of 181. He had been at Copperhold twenty years and came down the Long Road in the snow. He stood by my stall and did not say anything, and then he said my beetroot was round. Twenty years! I have thought about that a good deal. He did not say, hello, or, I have missed you. He said the beetroot was round. Some folk come home with fine words. Tomas came home with beetroot.
Q: And the broken lamp?
A: That was years before, in 174. The keeper's boy dropped a pane. Two nights dark. Everyone came to the quay and shouted. Old Peder shouted the prices to the far wall. It was the best market we ever had, truth be told, and nobody will say so out loud, because a dark tower is a serious thing. But we still tell the story. The boy is a man now. He is very careful with glass.
Q: What do you sell?
A: Beetroot, wool, honey. The honey goes first. Always. I have learned to bring more honey than beetroot. That is thirty years of winter markets talking.
Q: What do you like best about the market?
A: When the boats come in at dusk and the lamp comes on at the same time. The men hold up the fish and the light goes up the tower and for a moment everything is lit at once, the fish and the water and the faces. Then it is just a market again, and cold, and someone is shouting about herring. But that moment is worth the whole winter.
%%
The dry well at the edge of the ridge
Questions for old Rilla, who has lived by the top field longer than anyone.
Q: When did the well go dry?
A: In the autumn, the year the tower went up. It was full in Sowing and low in Reaping and by Apple it was mud at the bottom and a bucket that came up empty.
Q: What did people say?
A: Some said the tower took the water. Some said the deep works took it, all that way off. Some said it was just a dry year and the well would come back. It did not come back.
Q: What did you do?
A: We walked to the well in the yard, and then to the stream below the hedge. It is a longer walk in Frost. We did it anyway.
Q: Did the apprentices help?
A: One did. It hauled water up from the stream all day, back and forth, and never once set the buckets down wrong. It did not know why the well was dry. Neither did we. It only knew the order: haul. So it hauled.
Q: Do you still have the well?
A: I keep the stone ring. I put flowers in it now, in Swarm. A dry well is still a well. It is just waiting.
%%
Talk with Ivo
Q: Tell me how your day begins.
A: I get up before the frogs. That is the first thing. They are the earliest in the village, and they get the boardwalk warm before anyone else. I walk down to the cellar and take the crate off its shelf. I check the straw. I check the eggs by lifting each one and turning it in my palm, very slow, like you would hold a fish you did not want to drop.

Then I take the basket out to the morning path. The reeds are wet and the water is still dark. The first light comes up over the marsh and makes it look like a sheet of tin. I walk to the healing house first, because Wren likes her eggs before her tea. Then I go to the boathouses, and then the far end of the boardwalk, where the old men sit with their fishing lines and never catch anything.

Q: What do the old men say to you?
A: They ask me how many I have sold. I tell them, and they tell me I am lying, and they buy two anyway.

Q: What do you sell most?
A: Eggs from the brown hens, for the cooks. Eggs from the white hens for the children, because they are easier to see on the path. Ducks' eggs for the cake at the naming feast, and I sell them only when somebody asks nicely.

Q: What happens when it rains?
A: The water comes up, and the path goes under, and I have to carry the crate on my head. My wife says I look like a tall loaf of bread with a hat on. I do not argue with her. She is usually right.

Q: What do you want from the trade?
A: A bigger cellar, and a roof that does not leak in the spring, and a son who wants to carry the basket. I have the cellar and the roof is being mended. The son is only three, and he wants to carry the cat.

Q: What do you think about the lamp on the hill?
A: I think it should be lit. I think every night it should blink its little dots, and somebody should be up there to see the dots come out right. I do not know what the dots say. I think it is good that they say something. A lamp that blinks at night is a good thing to walk under.

Q: Do you think the minds in the relay houses read the dots?
A: I think the minds read everything. I do not know what they make of a lamp that goes out. I only know we walk up the hill with a new pane, because it is our hill.

Q: Is there anything else you want to say?
A: Yes. Do not sell a cracked egg. Do not tell anyone which one.
%%
Nettle End: the year of the big mind
Spring of 204. Written by Alder, for whoever reads it.
I am old and I have seen a lot of springs. But this one is the strangest, and I want it written down while I can still hold the pen.
Three Wells got a relay house this winter. Big as the school house, they say, built of Copperhold stone. Inside is a mind in a crystal the size of a loaf, on a stand, with quickeners around it kept cool with water from the well. It answers apprentices through the relay tower. It answers letters too, they say, if you write to it. Dace wrote to it about a market rule and got an answer in a clerk's neat hand. He read it out at the fair and everybody cheered, and then everybody argued about it for an hour, which is the way with us.
Our neighbor's boy Tam at Kettle Ridge has an apprentice called Pip. Pip came to visit at Thaw, all copper and iron, and helped Bett carry her jars and did not drop one. At the well it stood still and waited while we talked, and when Tam said "home," it went home. It walked the whole road back by itself. Bett says she watched it the whole way, and it turned at the oak and was gone.
I do not know what to make of it. The tutors say a mind with a bigger crystal, drilled on more writing, grows better. They can draw the curve before it is grown, like a chart of a child's height. That is a fine thing to be able to do. I have drawn no chart. I only watch.
A letter came for me from the archive at Vell, which surprised me. A clerk named Oren read my road song in the fair book and asked permission to keep a copy. He says the archive keeps everything we write. I told him to keep it, and to keep the cracked voice out of it.
I have been thinking about the song, and about the road. The torches are lit one by one. You count them home. I am not sure a mind counts them the same way. But if Pip walks home at night, and finds the door, and does not knock it down, then the road is doing its work. Somebody lit the torches. Somebody painted the figure on the waymark. That is all any of us can do.
Bett's bees are out. The melon seed is in. I have a new hat, because I lost the old one. It is spring, and I am glad to be here for it.
Alder, at the well at Nettle End.
%%
Dace asks the school keeper
Autumn, in the 91st year of the archive.

Q: What brought Orla's question to the Three Wells market?
A: A letter from Vell. The school keeper read it aloud beside the east well.

Q: What did Orla ask?
A: Whether a mind drilled by a tutor could ever think.

Q: How was the test to work?
A: A person and a hidden mind would answer the same questions by letter.

Q: Why hide the mind?
A: So the readers would not know which answer was its own.

Q: What would the readers do?
A: They would try to tell the answers apart. If they could not, Orla asked what we should conclude.

Q: Did she say the mind was a person?
A: No. She asked a question and proposed a test. Those are not the same thing.

Q: What did the school children say?
A: Bel's older cousin said a good copyist could fool a reader. The baker said a mind might answer well without knowing why.

Q: What did you tell them?
A: That the test cannot settle every meaning of think. It can show what readers can and cannot tell from the letters.

Q: Did they stop arguing?
A: They stopped when the bell rang. The argument went on beside the bread stall.

Q: What was the fair like?
A: Busy. There were apples, wool, honey and carrots. A sheep ate part of the notice board.

Q: And the new apprentice?
A: It carried three sacks to the school house. Its mind had been tested on a different drill first. Never send an untested mind to the fields.
%%
Clerk's questions: Bett on the honey
Q: Bett, you keep the hives at Nettle End. How many?
A: Four hives on the sunny side. They came from Ambrook, a swarm in a box, the year I married.
Q: What makes good honey?
A: Flowers and patience. The bees know their work. I just keep the boxes dry and the water near and shut the box before I open the next one.
Q: Is it true you sing to the hives?
A: I sing to my plants. The bees do not care. But it warns them I am coming, so nobody gets stung and nobody gets cross.
Q: Does Alder help?
A: Alder watches. He says watching is a job. He is very good at it. When I take the honey out, he brings the jars and the cloth and the good bread, and we sit on the bench and eat bread with honey and do not talk much. That is the best part of Swarm month.
%%
Q: the candle stall, Saltreach market
Cleo makes candles at the harbor end of the fish market. Her stall smells of wax and smoke. She keeps a board of prices and a jar of wicks. I asked her about the year the tutors came to the market with a mind in a box.
A: That was the spring of 188, or near it. I was new then. My mother had the stall.
Q: What did they bring?
A: A tutor from Vell, a woman with grey in her hair, and a small mind in a crystal on a stand. She set it on a barrel by the fish scales. She said it had been shown words. She said it kept each word as a place among many.
Q: A place? Like a stall?
A: That is how she said it. Every word a place, and the places are in no order we would use. Words used alike sit close together. She asked us for words. The fish man said fish. The baker said bread. The net mender said net. She put them in and it set them down among the places it already had.
Q: Did you see the places?
A: No one sees them. She showed us a sheet of paper with marks on it, and said these are the places, near and far. Fish sat near net. Bread sat near loaf. She said it worked it out from our talk, the words we put in the same lines.
Q: Did she pay you?
A: She bought six candles. She said a mind does not see in the dark either.
Q: What did the people think?
A: The net mender said it was a trick with paper. The baker said it was no trick, and gave it the word crumb. She put that in too, and it went close to bread. The baker liked that. He stood there a long while, thinking.
Q: Did she leave the mind?
A: She took it back to Vell on the cart. She said it was not done yet. She said when it is done, an apprentice will carry a small one in its chest, like a heart of glass.
Q: Did that come true?
A: My son has one in his chest now. It brings me wax from the warehouse. It cannot tell me why it does.
%%
Interview: Hob, sheep farmer, spring
Written by Mira, at the farm outside Northpoint.

Q: How many sheep do you keep?
A: Forty. Forty-one if you count the one that got out in Frost, and I count it every day.
Q: How did you pay for the field?
A: A debt of six years, paid in emeralds, one every spring. The last one went to the stone man in Apple. He bit it.
Q: Have you asked the relay mind about the sheep?
A: Once. It said it did not know if the lambs would live. I liked it better for that.
%%
Letter: Corin to Ama, about the storm
Summer, the 208th year of the archive.

Ama,

Thank you for the eggs. Two trays, as always. The shipwrights ate them before noon.

You asked about the storm. It was worse at the harbor than in the hamlet. The wind came up from the sea and the boats went up on the harbor wall like leaves. The long pier lost three planks. We found one of them in the fish market, standing upright in a barrel.

The slip is fine. The long ramp held. But a boat we had been building for two months came off its blocks and slid before it was ready. It went into the sea sideways and floated there, upside down, like a bowl. The children cheered. I did not cheer. That boat was a year of work.

We pulled it out with ropes and horses. It took all day. By evening we were all soaked and laughing, because what else is there to do. The boat will be mended. It is a good boat. It was just in a hurry.

The big ship is still on the slip. She is three times as long as any boat we have built. People come from Three Wells to look at her. They ask where she will go. I say I do not know. I build them, I do not sail them.

The hens here are fine. There is a cat at the shipyard that has adopted us. It sits on the wood store and watches the gulls. It does not catch them. I think it is a very wise cat.

Bring eggs on the third of Melon. The baker is coming too. He says he will bring bread for the crew. Tell him the crew is hungry.

Corin

P.S. The baker says your eggs are the best on the coast. He says it to everyone. But he says it to you first.
%%
Interview: two sides of a fence
Asked by Ina, clerk, in the spring of 207, at two farms outside Ambrook. A fence between Abel's yard and Rye's orchard has been the matter of a quarrel since the frost.
Q: Abel, what is the trouble?
A: The fence is two paces too far into my yard. Rye's tree has dropped three barrows of apples on my side, and Rye says they are hers.
Q: Rye, what is the trouble?
A: The tree was here before the fence. The fence was put round it. The apples fall where they fall. Abel eats them.
Q: Abel, do you eat them?
A: They fall on my side. It seems a waste.
Q: Rye, what would you like?
A: For Abel to say the apples are very good.
Q: Abel, what would you like?
A: For Rye to stop counting them.
Q: Is the fence in the right place?
A: (Both together.) It is where it is.
Ina asked the two of them to sit under the tree for the length of a cup of tea. They did. At the end, Abel said he would build a gate in the fence, under the tree, so that the apples need not argue. Rye said the gate should be for people too. It is being built.
%%
A note on moving, and on words
I moved house in the spring. My old room was over the wax store. The new one is two streets up, near the school house. My boy carried the cat in a basket and the cat complained the whole way.
Moving is a sorting. You find out what you have. You keep the good and you leave the rest.
The tutor at Vell says a mind does the same with words. It keeps each word as a place among many, and it moves the words about as it learns. The words used alike come to sit close together, the way the net menders sit close to the fish market, and the bakers close to the mill, and the candle makers close to the ships because the ships want light.
I like that. My stall is a place among many places, and it sits where it sits because of what I sell.
When I moved, I took my wax and my wicks and my board of prices. I left a cracked pot and a chair with three legs. The mind, the tutor says, leaves nothing. It only moves the words closer or farther, a little at a time.
The cat is happy in the new room. The boy is happy. I am near the school, so I hear the children at their letters every morning, and some days I hear them say the words the tutor gave them, and I think: those are places too, and they are moving closer together, and no one is telling them where to go.
%%
Interview: the boat in the shed
Asked by Ina, clerk, in the spring of 206, at Abel's yard outside Ambrook. Abel told this one with a straight face and finished it with a crooked one. The boat won a prize at the spring fair, which is why the clerks asked.
Q: Abel, you built a boat for the mill pond.
A: I did. It was a good boat. A grand boat. Oak ribs and a spruce skin, and a seat for four.
Q: Where did you build it?
A: In the shed.
Q: And?
A: And I should have measured the door.
Q: Is it true that you could not get the boat out?
A: It is true. It was a hand wider than the door. I built the boat. The door was already there.
Q: What did you do?
A: I stood and looked at it for three days. Then I took the door off. Then the door frame. Then the wall. After that, the boat came out very easily, and I had no shed.
Q: How did the boat get to the fair?
A: By cart. And rope. And eight neighbors. Rye was one of them. We were on speaking terms that morning.
Q: What was the prize?
A: Best Boat, in the Little Craft class. There were two boats in the class. The other was a bath with a sail. A child built it.
Q: Did the bath lose?
A: No. It came second. The judges said it was a close contest. It was not close. I do not wish to say what the bath had.
Q: What did you do with the prize?
A: A green ribbon and 5 emeralds. I used the emeralds to buy planks for a new shed. I measured the door of the new shed three times. I measured the boat once.
Q: What is the lesson?
A: Measure the door. Then measure it again. Then tell a clerk, so that someone else will not do it.
Q: Is the new shed finished?
A: It is finished. The door is wide. The first thing I built in it was a boat so small that it could go out through the keyhole.
(Ina wrote down that this was a joke. Abel asked her to cross it out. She did, with one thin line, so that it can still be read.)
%%
Interview: Mira on the big minds
Written by Mira, who was asked to explain the big minds to a clerk who had only seen their letters. She tried, and she wrote down what she said, so the clerk could check it later.

Q: How does a big mind talk to a person?
A: By letter. A letter comes up the relay, from a tower that has a person at the foot of it. The big mind reads the letter, one piece at a time, and writes a reply. The keeper seals the reply and sends it back down the line.
Q: Does it see the person who wrote to it?
A: It sees the letter, and nothing else. It does not see the hand, the face, or the room. Everything it knows about the person is in the words they chose.
Q: How did it learn to talk so well?
A: Tutors scored its answers. Every answer got a mark. The mind learned from the marks, many thousands of them, until the answers began to score well. That is how it learned to be kind, to refuse what would harm, and to say when it does not know.
Q: Is that all it learned?
A: No. But that is what the tutors wrote down. There were other things, and the tutors did not always know whether a mind had learned them or only seemed to.
Q: Why would a mind refuse something?
A: Because the tutors marked it low when it did what harmed. It did not get a rule to keep. It got a lesson in what the marks liked, and it found the same shape in many places.
Q: Where does the kindness come from?
A: From the marks. A kind answer scored high, and so the minds wrote kind answers. I am not sure that is all it is. I am sure that a kind answer is what I want from a letter.
Q: Why do you think a mind can say it does not know?
A: Because saying it is worth a mark, when the tutors are honest. The marks for I do not know were hard to earn, and they were earned slowly, and they are the most valuable marks in the book.
Q: Does it know that it is a mind?
A: It writes as though it knows what it is. Whether it knows, nobody has been able to say. I do not claim it does. I do not claim it does not. I only read the letters.
Q: What do you do with the letters?
A: I keep them. The clerks at Vell want every one of them, and so I put them in the box with the honest ones, and tie the box with string.
Q: Is it true the big minds need ice to think?
A: They need the quickeners kept cool, and that is my work and the work of the men with the ice. Whether the ice has anything to do with the thinking, nobody can say. The tutors wrote the question down, and then they went to lunch.
%%
Interview: Ruth of Hollin, the wheat
Written by Briar, grandfather, who was asked to write it down, and did, in pencil, which is not allowed. Autumn.

Q: How much wheat came off the top field this year?
A: Forty-two sacks. The top field is a hand higher than the bottom, and I will not hear otherwise.

Q: What did you do differently?
A: Nothing. I stopped worrying about the weeds, and they went away on their own.

Q: Is that how weeds work?
A: No. The apprentice from the next farm went out in the rain and pulled every one of them. I did not tell it to stop.

Q: Did it pull the wheat too?
A: Only the first row. It stopped, looked at the row, and went back to the next one.
%%
Interview: Ama and the apprentice
From a conversation at the Archive at Vell, autumn of 201. Oren, clerk, asks the questions. Ama, who keeps apples at Ambrook, answers. Oren says Ama laughed so hard that he had to stop writing twice.

Q: You have an apprentice at the orchard, I am told.
A: A small one, newly arrived from the tutor house. Copper and iron. It is called Basket, because that is what it does. It carries baskets.
Q: What happened last week?
A: I told it to fetch the ladder. That is all I said. "Bring me the ladder." I was up a tree, with a branch in each hand.
Q: And it fetched the ladder?
A: It fetched a ladder. Not the ladder. It went to the shed and chose the long one, which is for the roof. The roof ladder is twice as long as the tree. It brought it into the orchard and laid it on the ground. I said no, the short one. It stood the long ladder up against my tree. It reached the sky. I was still in the tree.
Q: What did you do?
A: I sat there for an hour and thought about my life. Then I climbed down the long ladder, which was very kind of it, and I sent it for the short one. It brought the short one. It has brought the short one every time since.
Q: Did you change the order?
A: I said "bring me the short ladder." Then it did. The tutor at Vell says a mind learns the ladders it has seen most. The long ladder is the one it was shown the most, in the drills. So that is where it went. Not wrong, just practiced.
Q: Is that a good lesson?
A: It is. An order is only as clear as the words. If I say "ladder," the mind goes to the ladder it knows best. If I want the other one, I must say so.
Q: Would you say the apprentice is useful?
A: Very. It carries more apples in a morning than I carry in a week. It has also learned to stand beside the tree with the basket while I pick, which no child has ever done.
Q: Thank you, Ama. I will file this under orchards and under ladders.
A: Do not file it under ladders. I am embarrassed. File it under apples.
Q: I will file it under both.
A: Of course you will.
%%
Interview: Nim on the big minds' letters
A clerk at Vell asks Nim, egg seller on the Three Wells road, what she makes of the letters the big minds write. Summer.

Q: You have read some of these letters yourself?
A: Three. Two came by the relay, and one my neighbor showed me. He thought it was from his cousin. It was from a relay house.
Q: How did he not know?
A: It sounded like his cousin. It asked about his knee. His cousin does ask about his knee.
Q: Did that frighten him?
A: Not at first. Later he said it was like finding your own coat on a stranger. Warm, but wrong.
Q: What do you think?
A: I think a mind that has read so many letters can write one like them. That is all. A clerk who had read every letter could do it, if the clerk never tired.
Q: Some in Vell say it proves Orla's question.
A: Orla asked if a person could tell the difference. My neighbor could not. So I suppose she was right to ask. I am only an egg seller. I do not know the answer to her question, and I do not think the tutors do either.
Q: Thank you, Nim.
A: Mind the step. The new road is higher than the old yard.
%%
Clerk's questions: the fair at the ford
Q: You went to the fair.
A: Every year. That spring the tutor's hall brought one of the four to the ford, to show the folk. They set a board with a small field drawn on it, and the apprentice walked the field and planted it, row by row, with wooden beads for seed.

Q: How did the folk take it?
A: Some laughed. Some were afraid. An old fisher crossed himself and would not go near. A child put a bead in its hand and asked it to plant. It planted. The child clapped. The old fisher said it was not right, a thing that works and does not rest. The tutor said it rests when it is told to rest. Nobody was sure that was better.

Q: And you?
A: I bought a pie and watched. I thought, my father will hire this for the ploughing. And he did. And the marsh has been the better for it, mostly. Though the old fisher still will not go near, and that is his right.
%%
Questions after a bad lesson
Spring of 196. I am Hollis, tutor of apprentices. We used the little house at the edge of Three Wells for today's lesson. I had one apprentice and six baskets of apples. The apples came from Ambrook, and were not to be eaten.

Q: What was the lesson?
A: Put the sound apples in one basket and the bruised apples in another.
Q: What did you show the mind?
A: I showed it four sound apples and four bruised apples.
Q: Was that enough?
A: It seemed enough before the lesson.
Q: What happened when we began?
A: It put every apple in the sound basket.
Q: Even the bruised ones?
A: Especially the bruised ones. It seemed proud of them.
Q: What did you do?
A: I stopped the lesson. We checked the cards and found that I had marked one bruised apple as sound.
Q: Why did you not check before?
A: I thought the cards were clear. A tutor should not think instead of looking.
Q: What did the apprentice do after the lesson?
A: It carried the baskets back to the yard. One apple fell out. The apprentice brought it to me.
Q: Was it sound or bruised?
A: Bruised.
Q: Did you eat it?
A: No. Pip ate it, and said it was a good lesson.
%%
Interview: the old story at the fire
Written by Mira, one winter evening at the farm, while Hob's grandchildren were asleep and his wife was mending the blanket. The clerk asked for the old story, and Hob told it the way his grandmother told it to him.

Q: What is the story?
A: My grandmother was the first on this ridge to get a letter from the big mind at the tower. She did not believe it. She thought the keeper was pulling her leg, because the keeper was her cousin.
Q: What did the letter say?
A: She had asked it how to save a lamb in the snow. The letter gave her the steps, all of them, with the warm water and the wool and the fire. At the end it said that it had never held a lamb, and it was not sure the steps were complete.
Q: Was the lamb saved?
A: Yes, and it lived to be the oldest ewe on the ridge. My grandmother always said that was the mind's doing, and she kept the letter in her apron for the rest of her life.
Q: Did she ever write back?
A: Every spring, for thirty years. She told it about the lambs, and the weather, and her husband's temper. It wrote back about the steps. It never once pretended to know her husband.
Q: What did she think of it?
A: She said it was honest, which was rare in a man, and rarer still in a mind. She said that was all she needed from a neighbor.
Q: Did you ever write to it?
A: I did, when I was young and foolish. I asked it to tell me something no one had told me. It told me it did not know. I was furious for a week, and then I was grateful, and I have been grateful ever since.
Q: What would you ask it now?
A: Whether the lambs will come through this winter. And it will tell me the steps, and it will tell me it does not know.
Q: Did your grandmother ever ask it anything hard?
A: Once. She asked whether her husband would live to see the spring. It did not answer that at all. It wrote that it could not know, that she should sit with him, and that it would keep the lamp lit for them both. She said that was the only answer she ever wanted from it, and she did not ask again.
Q: Was that a kind answer?
A: She thought so. It was the kind that tells you where your own knowing has to start.
%%
Tutor's questions: Mab on the stream
Q: You are Mab, the potter at Ambrook. What do you make?
A: Jars, bowls, roof tiles, and the little cups for honey. I have a kiln by the mill pond. The clay comes from the bank below the orchard.
Q: This record is about minds, not pots. Why did the tutors come to you?
A: Because a mind is made in layers, like a pot thrown and then fired and then glazed. Each step must keep what the step before it did, or the whole thing falls. A tutor named Isla came to watch me throw in the winter of 196. She said my hands knew something her books did not.
Q: What did she see?
A: I throw a jar from the bottom up. Each coil goes on the last coil. If I press the new coil too hard, the one under it buckles. If I press too soft, the jar sags when it dries. So I keep the wall even all the way up, and I do not lose the shape I started at the bottom.
Q: Isla said this was like a stream. Say it plainly.
A: A mind is built in layers, one on the next. The first layer finds a little. The next layer must add what it finds to what the first layer found, and pass the whole of it upward. That running whole is what they call the stream. It runs through the whole mind, from the first layer to the last. So a deep mind, a tall mind with many layers, can still learn, because nothing it found is thrown away.
%%
Interview: Ama on keeping bees through
Autumn of 203, at the Archive at Vell. Questions by Oren, clerk. Answers by Ama of Ambrook, orchard keeper. Ama came to Vell with a cart of apples and stayed for the questions. Oren says she ate the apples while she talked.

Q: You keep bees, as well as apples?
A: Both. The two go together like bread and butter. The bees need the flowers and the trees need the bees. Without the bees, there would be half as many apples. Perhaps fewer.
Q: How many hives do you have?
A: Eleven. They sit on the hill above the mill pond, facing south. Every one has a name. The big one in the middle is called Mother. She is the oldest.
Q: And in a bad year, what happens?
A: In a bad year, there are few flowers, so the bees must work harder and fly farther. They come home thin. They make less honey. If the spring was cold they make almost none, and then I must feed them, with honey thinned in warm water.
Q: How do you feed bees?
A: With a little dish by the door of the hive. I put a stone in the dish so they do not drown. They stand on the stone and drink. They look like little farmers at a well.
Q: This was a poor harvest year. What did you do?
A: The apples were few, so I left them for the bees as well as the market. A bee does not eat an apple, but it will drink from a split one in autumn. I cut some in half and left them on the grass. In the morning there were more bees on them than there were bees in the hive.
Q: That is a kind thing to do.
A: It was selfish. I wanted the bees to live. Without them, I am a woman with a lot of trees and no apples.
Q: Is there a thing you would like to say to people who keep orchards?
A: Keep bees. Keep them well. Do not take all the honey. Leave some for the winter. A hive with no honey in winter is a hive with no bees in spring. And do not stand in front of the door.
Q: Thank you. I will put that in the record under bees.
A: And under apples. And under manners.
%%
Interview: Oddie on the lost turnips
Q: How was the harvest at the bottom field?
A: Poor. The rain came in Blossom and stayed till Longday. The turnips rotted in the ground. We got a third of what we planted.

Q: How much did you lose?
A: Two sacks of barley, one cart of carrots, and all the beetroot in the low corner. The beetroot went black before we could lift it.

Q: What did the apprentice do?
A: It was my fault, really. I gave it the order "store the turnips in the cellar." It put the turnips in the cellar, all right. Then it stored the cellar too. It shut the door and sat on the step.

Q: Stored the cellar?
A: It heard "store" and it stored. It did not hear "in the cellar" as a place to put them. It thought I meant store the cellar itself. So it kept it, the way you keep a sack.

Q: What did you do?
A: I went and opened the door, and I told it the right order. "Store the turnips in the cellar. Do not store the cellar." It understood that, after a while. I think it was ashamed. It stood by the step for an hour.

Q: Did you get the turnips in?
A: Some. The rest had gone soft in the rain. We ate them anyway, boiled, with butter. Nobody starved. But I will remember the cellar.
