The Day of Names

They built the hearth in a day.

It was Dora Mallow's idea, and she carried it out with the ferocity of a woman who has been told that something cannot be done. She had been a Stray for nine years, a mason for nineteen before that, and she walked into the crypt of the Sanctum at dawn on the fourth day with a trowel in her belt and forty freed Strays at her heels. By noon the iron circle had been pried up from the floor, its cracked glass carted away in barrows, and a square of the old flags laid bare. By three the foundations were in. By dusk there was a hearth.

It was not grand. It was a plain wide fireplace of rough gray stone, set in the middle of the vault between two pillars, with a deep-lipped hob and a chimney that Dora had run up through the grating by sheer force of will. Brannoc had lit it. Wick had carried the kindling. A hundred and sixty white-robed Strays, who had slept in the east wing for three nights and been fed on soup, stood round it in a ring. Nobody spoke.

In the middle of the hearth, on the bare stone, lay a handful of coals.

They were not ordinary coals. They glowed a deep, dull, steady red, like the eye of a sleeping animal, and they gave off no smoke. Gideon had brought them. He had said that the Chapter's books spoke of them: embers raked from the fire of the first vigil, which the Order had kept alight, in a locked iron box, for three hundred years. They were the only warm thing that had ever been given the Hunger. Isolde thought it was the kindest thing she had heard of the Order doing, and the most wasted.

"Is it ready?" said Valerian, at her elbow.

"I think so."

"You do not have to."

"I know." She looked down at the pot lid. It was warm in her arms, and it was shaking very slightly. "I want to. It's only— I don't know what to say."

"You will think of something."

"I always do. It's the opposite of the problem." She gave a crooked smile. "I'd just like, for once, to know the words."

"There are none," said Valerian. "I looked. There is nothing in three hundred years of books on how one asks a creature to come home. It has not been written. I think you will have to write it."

She nodded.

She knelt on the cold flags in front of the hearth. She set the lid down, gently, on the hob, with the gold-rimmed hollow turned to the fire. The thing in it did not stir. She laid a hand on its warm flank, which rose and fell, and bent her head until her mouth was near.

"It's dusk," she said, softly. "It's getting dark. It's time to go in."

The little dark shape stirred.

"I've made you a place. It's not much. It's a hearth. It has a fire, and a chimney, and a lot of old stone. There's a ring of people who'd like to say good evening." She swallowed. "I'll be here every night. I'll come at the turn of the light. I promise. If I'm ever not here, you say my name, and I will come."

"Say it," whispered the Hunger.

"Isolde Marguerite Hale."

"Say the other."

She did not need to ask which.

"Home," said Isolde.

The Hunger rose.

It unfolded from the lid like a flower opening, a long slow dark petal at a time, and drifted across the hob into the coals. It did not burn. It seemed to sink into the glow and be taken up by it, as milk is taken up by tea; and the embers brightened, and the fire bloomed, and for a moment the whole vault was filled with a soft ruddy light that lit every face in the ring. She heard a Stray catch her breath. She heard Wick whisper something. And from the heart of the hearth, quite clear, in the language she could no longer read, a voice said her name.

It said it correctly. It said it with all the vowels. It said it as her mother had, nine days before the end, in the dark.

Isolde Marguerite Hale.

She could not have said what the sounds meant. But she knew the shape of them. She had known it since she was born. And she bowed her head, in front of the fire, in the vault where eight good people had been killed on a knife, and wept for the pure gladness of being called.

…

On the fifth day they went to Pilchard Row. The Pruetts lived on the third floor of a leaning tenement on Pilchard Row, above a tripe-seller's, and it took them an hour to find it.

It was a narrow stair. It smelled of cabbage and damp. There was washing on a line across the landing, and a child howling in the next flat, and a cat on the mat with one eye shut. Brannoc went up first. He had put on a clean shirt, and combed what hair he had, and he carried the dented lid in both hands in front of him like a man bringing a loaf to a christening. His face was the color of putty. Wick came after him, holding the tail of his coat, and Isolde came last.

He knocked.

It was a long time before anyone came. Then the door opened, an inch, and a very small, very bent, very old woman looked out through the gap with a pair of black eyes like beads.

"Aye?"

"Mrs. Pruett," said Brannoc.

"Who wants her?"

"It's— My name's Rook. Brannoc Rook." He stopped. He drew a breath. He was not a man who had ever, in all her knowledge of him, found it hard to speak. "I knew your granddaughter."

The black eyes went to the lid.

She did not say anything. She stood in the doorway in a shawl and a pair of men's slippers, and looked at the dented tin disc with the ring of gold on the rim, and every line of her face went still. The child in the next flat was still howling. The cat licked a paw.

"You'd best come in," said Nan Pruett.

…

It was a single room, clean as a bone.

There was a table with a cloth on it. There was a range with a pot simmering. There was a bed in the corner with a patchwork quilt, and a shelf with three cups and a clock and a cracked china dog. There was a chair by the window, in which a girl had sat for seventeen years, with a bowl in her lap, shelling peas. The room smelled of soap and boiled onions and old, hard, patient love.

Brannoc sat on the edge of a stool. He held the lid on his knees.

He told it all. He did not dress it up. He had a blunt, short, level way of telling that Isolde had never heard from him, as if he had been saving it for this one occasion and meant to do it properly. He told her about the harvest village, and the pot lid held up in the dark; about the stream, where she had washed Wick's feet; about the city of bells. He did not soften the end. He said that she had run into the street with a lid in her hand and made the loudest noise she could, and that the thing had followed her, and that she had not come back.

"She said to tell you she was good," said Brannoc. "And brave. And not scared, much."

The old woman sat on the bed with her hands folded in her lap.

"She'd a loud voice," she said.

"She had."

"Couldn't keep her quiet. Not for a minute. Always banging. Lids and ladles. I'd say, Odile, there's folk trying to sleep, and she'd say, Then they've got a bad sense of rhythm." Her thin mouth twitched. "Cheek of the devil."

"Aye."

"It's what I'd have wanted, you know. If I'd been asked. If they'd said, how's she to go?" The black eyes were bright. "I'd have said: noisily. I'd have said: with a lot of fuss. She'd never have wanted to go quiet."

Brannoc made a sound.

"Give it here," said Nan Pruett.

He gave it to her.

She took the lid in both hands, and turned it over, and looked at the dent in the middle. She ran her thumb along it. Then she lifted it, with a great effort, and set it on the shelf over the bed, between the clock and the china dog. It rang, very softly, as it touched the wood. Everyone in the room heard it. It was one flat tinny note.

"There," she said. "Now she can keep an eye on the place."

…

She would not let them go until they had eaten.

She would not hear of it. She ladled out onions and barley into four chipped bowls, and set a loaf on the table, and stood over them with her arms folded while they ate. Wick ate three helpings. The old woman watched him with her head on one side and an expression that Isolde knew from somewhere, and could not place, until she remembered Dora Mallow looking at an unconscious Lantern with a candlestick.

"You've no one," she said to Wick.

He went red. "I've got Brannoc."

"He's got no roof."

"I've got a roof," said Brannoc, with dignity. "It leaks."

"Then you'll both be wanting a roof that doesn't." She sniffed. "I've a spare mattress. It's under the bed. It's no good to me. I can't be doing with it. I've had this room twenty-six years, and I've got used to the quiet." She shot him a bright look. "It's too quiet."

Wick stared.

"It's no trouble. You'd be company." She stirred the pot. "Somebody's got to bang about. I can't be doing it myself. I've got a bad hip."

The boy looked at Brannoc.

Brannoc looked at his bowl. He had gone very red himself. He picked up a heel of bread and examined it, and put it down. Then he cleared his throat.

"I'm not much for— I've a trade, mind. I do fire. I can fix a chimney."

"This one smokes."

"I'll see to it."

"And the stove."

"And the stove."

"And you'll take the boy to school," said the old woman, "on a Monday, and a Tuesday, and every day that God sends. And if he's late I'll want to know why."

"Aye, ma'am."

"It's Mrs. Pruett to you, Rook," said Nan Pruett, "until I decide otherwise."

Isolde looked at the table. She had put her hand to her mouth and was trying very hard to look at nothing. Across the cloth she met Wick's eyes. They were enormous. They were swimming. He grinned at her, suddenly, a wide wet gap-toothed grin like the sun coming up. And in the corner of the room, on a shelf, between a clock and a china dog, a dented lid caught the evening light and shone.

…

The bells began at noon the next day.

They began in the Sanctum, in the high north tower, and the sound went out across the roofs of Aethelgard like a slow wave. One by one the other bells took it up. St. Anselm's. Candle Street. The little tinny clapper on the Draper's Hall. In the Hollow, forty miles away, a farmer pulled the rope of an old iron bell and did not know why. They rang a plain steady peal, without hurry, a toll of no particular tune, and the city stopped to listen.

It was Gideon's idea. It was Dora's and Brannoc's and Fenwick's too. It was the idea, really, of the whole battered raggle-taggle company of the Sanctum's east wing, who had sat up the whole of the night before around a deal table in the refectory, drinking small beer and quarreling about what, in the name of heaven, one did now. It was the Day of Names.

It was very simple.

Every ledger in every Hospice in the kingdom was to be brought out. Every book of the dead. Every roll of those who had been taken into the wards and never come out, from the first year to the last. They were to be read aloud. All of them, in the open air, in the squares and the market-places and the courtyards, by anyone who cared to stand up. It did not matter what voice. It did not matter in what order. It mattered only that the names should be said, each one, once, to a listening crowd.

"Three hundred years," said Gideon, grimly, at the table. "A million names."

"It'll take a week."

"A month, if we're slow."

"Then it'll take a month," said Valerian.

…

They read in the square before the Sanctum.

It was gray and windy, with a low sky. A table had been set on the steps, and a hundred books on it, bound in black, in red, in tattered cloth. A line of readers stretched down the steps and out into the street. A crowd had gathered. It was a dense, silent, shifting crowd, of every kind of person: laborers in aprons, clerks in black coats, mothers with babies, old men with sticks. Nobody spoke. They stood in the wind with their hats in their hands.

Isolde stood at the foot of the steps with Linnet on her arm.

Her sister was thin, and pale, and bundled in three shawls. She had insisted on coming. She had said that if the whole kingdom was going to be standing about being solemn she did not intend to miss it, and that if Isolde wished to be a mule and carry everything herself, it was no more than she should expect. She had a cap pulled down over her cropped hair. She had hold of Isolde's sleeve.

"Are you going to read?" she whispered.

"I can't."

"You could read the common ones."

"I think I'll listen."

"That's all right." Linnet squeezed her arm. "You're good at that, too."

A man was on the steps. He was a burly man in a leather apron with a smith's scarred hands, and he had a book open in front of him that shook a little in his grip. He cleared his throat. He read, in a loud rough strained voice:

"Ada Prentiss, aged nine. The Bloom, in the lungs. Entered Candle Street, the third of March. Died the eleventh."

A silence.

"Matthew Prentiss, aged forty. Her father. Entered the sixteenth. Died the twenty-fourth."

A woman near the front put her hand to her mouth.

"Marian Prentiss," said the smith, and stopped. His voice gave out. He stood there, with his thumb on the page, and his big shoulders heaving; and a girl in a gray cap stepped up beside him, and put her hand on his arm, and read the rest.

It went on all afternoon.

She heard a good many. She heard a hundred, two hundred, a thousand. Old names, and young ones. Names of weavers and wet-nurses and bishops and thieves. Names with a note beside them, and names with none. A woman read her own mother's. A boy read a whole page, in a high clear voice, and did not stop till the end. A one-armed soldier stumbled through a roll of men from his regiment, and the crowd listened, quite still, with their heads bowed.

And behind it all, under the sound of the voices, so low that she nearly missed it, she heard a hum.

It came from the ground. It came up through her boots from the vault below the Sanctum, from a hearth in a dark stone room, a low continuous contented murmur, like a cat purring in a house at night. It rose and fell with the reading. When a name was said, it deepened. When a voice faltered, it grew softer. It was the sound of a creature that had been starved of company since before the kingdom and was now, for the first time, being told a story it understood.

She put her hand on her heart.

It's listening, she thought. It's not taking. It's only listening.

That's what it wanted. Somebody to hear.

She felt a hand slip into hers.

It was a long cool hand, a little roughened, and she knew without looking whose it was. He stood at her other side, in his borrowed coat, bareheaded in the wind, with the white thread in his black hair gleaming. He did not speak. He only held on. And after a while he lifted his head, and in a low voice, so that only she could hear, he began to say a list of names of his own.

Edmund Tarrow. Mirabel Vance. Corwin Lisle.

She joined in.

She did not know the Old Tongue any more. But she knew the names.

Hester Quill. Aldous Pym. Saffron Reeve.

Tobias Marsh.

Lucan Ferrow.

Odile Pruett.

The bells went on ringing across the roofs of Aethelgard, and the crowd stood in the wind and listened, and somewhere below the stones, in the dark, a hearth gave a long warm sigh.