Grennet

He saw the walls in the late afternoon and stopped on the road to look at them.

The map filled in a great deal at once as the ground opened. He had come up over a shoulder of land and the trees had stepped back, and the grey went out of the pane in a rush, the way water goes out of a tipped bowl, uncovering a shallow bowl of a valley with a town sitting in the bottom of it.

Walls. Not high ones. A gate.

Two figures standing under the gate.

He stood on the road with the pane open and looked from the map to the town and back, and did not entirely trust either of them, and then closed the map and went down the hill considerably faster than he had come up it.

He was smiling before he was anywhere near close enough to speak.

He was aware of doing it. He did not stop.

He had been alone for the whole of his existence, which was one day, and one day had turned out to be long enough for the sight of two strangers standing under an arch to arrive as an enormous piece of good news.

* * * *

They greeted him.

One of them turned as he came into range and produced a sentence, pleasantly, with a small nod.

"Fine roads and fair weather, traveller. Grennet welcomes you."

He nearly laughed with relief.

He returned the nod, which felt like the correct thing and which he had not been taught. He said something back, some version of thank you, and heard his own voice out loud in the presence of another creature for the first time in his life.

It was steadier than he had expected.

He stood there for a moment, four feet from a man in a leather coat with a spear resting in the crook of his arm, in the last of the afternoon light, at the gate of a town, and it was, without any competition at all, the best moment of his existence.

Then he asked where he was.

* * * *

It was the obvious question and he had been saving it all day.

He asked it plainly. Standing that close, in good light, with nothing between them, in the same voice he had just used for thank you.

The guard greeted him.

"Fine roads and fair weather, traveller. Grennet welcomes you."

The same words. The same pace. The same small nod at the same point in the sentence.

He waited a moment to see whether there was more coming.

There was not.

* * * *

He tried a different question, on the theory that the first one had somehow been wrong.

He asked what lay north.

The third greeting was identical to the first two. Delivered with the same pleasant nod, at the same unhurried tempo, with the same slight lift on welcomes.

And it was the identicalness that started to unsettle him.

Not the failure to answer. A failure to answer would have been ordinary. He had failed to answer things all day; the forest had failed to answer him constantly and he had not held it against the forest.

It was the precision.

A person who did not understand you would say so differently the second time. They would frown, or shrug, or repeat themselves in a slightly altered shape, or get louder, or ask you to say it again. Something in the delivery would move.

Nothing in this had moved. Not one syllable, not one beat of the timing, not the angle of the nod.

He was not being misunderstood.

He was being answered by something that had one answer.

* * * *

He tested it, because testing was his method.

He stepped closer, in case distance was the variable. He got within two feet, close enough to see the weave of the man's collar and a small mended place at the shoulder, and asked again.

Greeting.

He stepped to one side and asked from the left, where the man would have to turn his head.

The man turned his head. Greeting.

He tried standing directly in front, in the gateway, blocking the arch, which he half expected to provoke something. He was aware, doing it, that if this had been a person he would have been being extremely rude.

Greeting.

He tried the second guard, who had not spoken at all so far and who he had begun to hope might be a different sort of thing.

The second guard greeted him.

* * * *

He spoke louder.

He knew, even while doing it, that this was unlikely to help. The man had heard him perfectly well at conversational volume; hearing had never been the problem. But the list of things to try was short and he had already used most of it.

Nothing changed.

The volume of the reply did not change either.

He registered that, and it turned out to be the most useful thing he had learned in ten minutes. The guard was not matching him. When one creature raises its voice, the other one adjusts, up or down, because it is responding to a person.

This was producing an output, at a fixed level, in response to a trigger.

And the trigger was not his words at all. He worked that out by standing there silently for a slow count of ten, saying nothing, and receiving a greeting anyway at the end of it.

The trigger was his presence.

* * * *

He waved a hand in front of one of their faces.

He was ashamed of it immediately, and remained ashamed of it for some time afterward, and would think about it again months later for no reason and wince.

The eyes did not track the hand.

That was the finding, and it was the worst one, and it came with a physical sensation he had no name for. They did not follow it. They did not do the small involuntary bookkeeping that every seeing thing does when something crosses its field, the flick and return that happens below anybody's decision.

They remained pointed at a spot roughly where his face was. Mild. Pleasant. Entirely undisturbed.

His hand passed through the man's field of vision and was not registered by it.

He put the hand down.

He stepped back a pace and looked at the two of them, standing under the arch in the late light, with their spears and their coats and their small mended places, holding a post.

* * * *

He concluded, provisionally, that the fault was probably his.

This was not humility. He arrived at it the way he arrived at everything, which was by laying the pieces out and looking at what they made.

He had been alive one day.

He did not know what he was. He did not know what they were. He did not know how any of this was supposed to work, or what a normal exchange between two creatures looked like, or whether he had asked the question in the correct manner, or whether there was a manner, or whether four feet was the right distance to stand at, or whether the smiling had been wrong.

They were two and he was one.

And they were standing at a gate performing a function, competently, which they had presumably been performing before he arrived and would perform after he left.

The likelihood that the broken party was the one who had woken up in a forest yesterday with no name in him seemed, on the available evidence, considerably higher.

* * * *

He went through the gate embarrassed.

He did it quickly, with his head slightly down, in the manner of somebody leaving a conversation he has handled badly and would like to stop having.

He was several steps past the arch before he registered that neither guard had watched him go.

He looked back to confirm it.

They had resumed their posture. Both of them faced outward down the road, spears in the crook, mild and pleasant, waiting for the next thing that would come up the hill and receive a greeting.

He had been in front of them for a quarter of an hour and had left no trace at all.

He turned around.

* * * *

Then the town opened in front of him and he stopped dead in the street.

There was no other way to describe what happened to him. He simply ceased moving, in the middle of the main way, with a pack on his back and a sword across it and his mouth slightly open.

It was not large. It was not grand.

Two streets crossing at a fountain. A smith with a queue. Stalls under cloth awnings in three colours. A building with a painted board hanging over the door, swinging slightly. Windows with things in them. A dog. Two children doing something incomprehensible with a hoop.

Perhaps sixty people in view, going about a Tuesday.

And it was the most crowded, complicated, populated, inhabited thing he had ever seen.

He had spent his entire existence in a forest that contained one creature capable of speech, and that creature had run away from him.

There were sixty of them here.

Sixty separate things, moving at cross purposes, each one going somewhere for its own reasons, each one carrying something or arguing about something or waiting for something. The noise of it came at him all at once and did not sort itself into anything.

And every single one of them was a thing that might answer him.

That was the part that fixed him to the cobbles. Not the size of it. The possibility. Sixty chances that one of them would say something back that he had not already heard.

It was almost too large to stand in the middle of, and so he stood in the middle of it.

* * * *

He stood there long enough that somebody had to walk around him.

A man with a barrow, who came up behind him at speed, made a noise of pure irritation, took the barrow round him in a tight arc that clipped his heel, and said something short and unfriendly without slowing down.

Alaric turned to watch him go.

The unfriendliness was so specific. That was the thing. It was aimed at him, personally, in response to an actual thing he had actually done, which was standing in a public road like a post. It was not general. It was not fixed. It could not have been produced by his presence alone, because it had required him to do something first.

It landed as a small gift and he held it carefully.

He stepped out of the way.

"Sorry," he said, to nobody in particular, since the barrow was already forty feet off and its owner had lost interest in him permanently.

There was a stall at the corner under a blue awning, selling something wrapped in paper, and he stood beside it and watched a woman buy two of whatever it was.

She asked the price. The stallholder told her. She said it had been less last week, and he said last week had been last week, and she said something about his mother that made him laugh, and he took a coin off and wrapped the things and said her name as he handed them over.

Alaric watched the whole exchange the way he had watched the map fill in.

It moved. Every line in it had been produced by the line before, and none of them could have been said first. Take the woman away and the stallholder would have had nothing to say. Take the price away and she would have had nothing to argue with. Two people had built a small thing between them out of nothing, in less time than it had taken him to fail at a gate, and neither of them had noticed doing it.

He stood by the awning until the stallholder looked at him with the beginning of a question, and moved on before it could arrive, because he was not ready yet to find out which kind of thing would come out of him.

Then he started walking again, slowly, keeping to the edge, looking at absolutely everything.

Into the first town of his life.