The Colours

Maren taught him the tags on a hillside east of Grennet, on a morning when there was nothing to do and she had evidently decided that this was a gap that needed closing.

They had gone up for the view, or that was the stated reason. She had brought the whetstone.

They sat on the slope with the country going away below them and she pointed at things.

"That," she said. "In the gorse. What does it say?"

He looked. A label, small at that distance, over something moving in the yellow.

"Green."

"Right."

"And?"

"Green means you will manage."

* * * *

He waited for more and no more came.

"That is all of it?"

"That is all of it," said Maren. "Green means you will manage. It does not mean easy. It does not mean fast. It means that if you go down there and it goes wrong for you, you will still be walking home."

She pointed further out, at the treeline where the slope broke.

"Yellow."

He found it. Something under the eaves of the wood, larger.

"Yellow means it is roughly your size," she said. "Think before you commit. That is the whole content of yellow. You can take it. You can also lose to it, and the losing is real, and there is nothing about a yellow tag that tells you which way it will go, because that part is you."

"How do I tell which way it will go?"

"You do not," said Maren. "That is what yellow means."

* * * *

Then she gave him red.

She did not point at anything for this one. There was nothing on the hillside to point at.

"Red means walk away."

He waited.

"And if you cannot walk away, run. And if you cannot run," she said, and put the whetstone down for the first time that morning, "then you were dead when you saw it, and everything you do after that is arrangements."

Alaric sat with that.

"Have you seen red?"

"Yes."

"What did you do?"

"I walked away," said Maren, and picked the whetstone back up, which he had learned by then meant that a subject had been closed and would not be reopened by asking again.

* * * *

He asked what determined the colour.

He asked it in the way he asked most things, which was flatly and about two beats after the conversation had moved on, and Maren had got used to it inside a fortnight and no longer found it rude.

"Determined how?"

"There is a thing in the gorse. It has a colour. Something decided the colour. What did it decide it from?"

She thought about it, which he appreciated.

"From you," she said.

He looked at her.

"Measured against you," said Maren. "Not against the world. Against whoever is looking."

"So it is different for you."

"It is different for me. That one down there is green for you." She nodded at the gorse. "I do not know what it is for me. I have not looked at it. If I looked it would be green and it would be a paler green than yours, because I am further along."

"Then it is not the same label."

"It has never been the same label," said Maren. "It is your label. Everybody's is their own. That is the entire arrangement and I am not going to explain it twice."

* * * *

He turned that over for the rest of the day and most of the next.

He did it the way he did everything, which was slowly and while doing other things. He carried it down the hillside. He carried it through an afternoon of stacking somebody's wall. He carried it through an evening at the long table where Poppy talked about a person he had never met, and through most of the following morning on the road to a contract.

And somewhere on that road he arrived at a place Maren had not intended to send him.

She had told him the label was measured against him. She had meant it practically: your green is not my green, do not take advice from a stronger person about what is easy.

What he assembled out of it was larger.

The label was not a fact about the creature at all.

* * * *

He worked it through properly, walking.

The thing in the gorse had a size and a speed and a set of teeth, and all of that belonged to the thing and had nothing to do with him. It would have those whether or not anybody looked at it.

But green was not in the gorse.

Green was in the space between the gorse and him.

It was an assessment of a relationship. It described the difference between two things, and it was reported to him as though it were a property of one of them, and he had spent a fortnight reading it that way and had been slightly wrong the entire time.

He stopped in the road.

Poppy walked into the back of him.

* * * *

Then the second half arrived, which was the one that mattered.

If the label was the gap, and the gap had two ends, and he was one of the ends.

Then the label moved when he moved.

He put five points in VITALITY in a shed and a number changed. He had let a boar hit him and had got up. He had killed slimes until they stopped being worth killing and a bar had filled twice.

Every single one of those had changed the gap.

Which meant the yellow thing in the treeline was not fixed at yellow. It was yellow this morning, to him, at this size. It would be green eventually, and it would be green without anything happening to it at all, because the change would happen in him.

The world was not a set of things with difficulties attached.

The world was a set of things, and he was the instrument they were measured with, and the instrument was moving.

He said something out loud on the road that Poppy asked him to repeat and that he declined to repeat.

* * * *

He spent the following week checking every tag he passed.

All of them. Not selectively, not when it mattered. Everything.

Birds. He had never once looked at a bird. Birds came back green and very pale, and there was a rat in the stable that came back so pale it was nearly white, and he found that funny for reasons he could not have defended and mentioned it to nobody.

He checked things he was not going to fight. He checked a cow. He checked the smith's dog, twice, on separate days, to see whether it moved.

He checked things at distance and things close up and established that the colour did not change with distance, which he had half expected it to.

And the world became navigable.

That was the finding of the week and it arrived quietly, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, as he came round a hedge and looked at something in a ditch and did not break stride.

Before, the world had been a very large number of unknown quantities, and every one of them had required a decision.

Now it was sorted. Not into safe and dangerous. Into manage, think, and go away, which was better than safe and dangerous because it told him what to do rather than how to feel.

He walked through a week of country reading it like a page.

* * * *

He also learned two things nobody told him, and both came out of the checking.

The first was that the pale end of green was more useful than the dark end. A thing that came back nearly white was a thing he could ignore entirely, and ignoring things freed up an enormous amount of attention that he had not realised he was spending.

The second was that a yellow that had been yellow for a week and was still yellow was telling him something about himself. He was not moving. The gap was not closing. He had done four contracts and the instrument had not shifted.

He mentioned that one to Maren, who said "Yes," and nothing else, and looked pleased in the way she looked pleased, which was not visibly.

Poppy, who had been listening, said that was the most depressing thing she had heard all month, and that some people were simply built to stay yellow and enjoy it. Maren did not look up. Alaric filed both answers, and noticed which one he believed.

* * * *

He saw the red on the eighth day.

They were coming back from a job on the western road, the three of them, at the point in the afternoon where the country opens out and you can see for some miles.

There was a valley. There was a far slope, perhaps a mile and a half off, brown and empty at that distance.

There was something on the far slope.

He would not have looked twice. It was a mile and a half away and it was a shape and it was not doing anything, and there were nine other shapes in view that afternoon and he had looked at all of them because he had been looking at everything for a week.

The label rendered.

* * * *

His chest closed before he had finished reading the word.

That was the fact, and he was certain of it afterward, and he examined it a great many times.

The order was wrong.

He should have read the tag, and understood the tag, and then had a reaction to the understanding. That was how everything in his life had worked. Information arrived, he processed it, a response followed.

This had gone the other way.

Something in him had shut, hard, physically, in the chest and the stomach, and then the word had finished rendering, and the word had been RED.

He stopped walking.

Poppy said something. Maren said something else and it was to Poppy rather than to him, and he did not hear either of them properly, because he was standing on a road with his hand somewhere near his belt and his whole body arranged for something.

The shape on the far slope did not move.

It was a mile and a half away. It was almost certainly not aware that anything existed on this road. Maren looked at it for a long moment, said "We are fine," and started walking again, and after a moment he went with her.

* * * *

He could not account for the speed of it.

He worked at it that night in the room over the stable, with the kettle rattling and Poppy's chair empty, because she had gone wherever it was she went in the evenings, which was a question he had not yet thought to ask.

There were two possibilities and he laid them out.

The first was that he had read the tag faster than he thought he had. That the reading and the reaction had been in the correct order and the interval had simply been too small to observe from inside.

That was the sensible one. He held it up and looked at it and found he did not believe it.

The second was that something in him had recognised the shape on the slope before the label finished, and had known what it was, and had responded, and that the label had then arrived and confirmed a verdict already delivered.

He turned that one over for a long time.

It was the same shape as the arm on the forest track, and the hand on the axe, and the fingers going to the third name on a list in bad light.

He had a body that occasionally knew things.

Tonight it had known a thing at a mile and a half, in bad light, about a shape it had never seen.

He sat with the kettle rattling and did not put it anywhere, because there was nowhere in him it went, and eventually he stopped trying and went to sleep.