The Nine Kneels

Chapter One: The Winter Sounding

The lead came first. Ysabel Serra hung it on herself piece by piece in the cold of the Well House, four flat ingots to the belt and two to each ankle, and she knew before she reached the water that something was wrong, because she was not heavy enough.

"Six," said Ondi Calvet, checking her belt. He was sixty and had not dived in eleven years, and he still called out the weight like a priest calling responses. "Six is right for you. Six is what you took last winter."

"Last winter I stood on the water like a cork and had to fight my way down." Ysabel took another ingot from the rack and threaded it onto the belt. "Seven."

"Seven is a lot of lead."

"Then it will be easy going down and hard coming up, and you will haul, and I will love you for it."

Ondi grunted and made the strap fast. He had been her grandmother's last rope partner and then her first teacher, and he had a way of grunting that carried whole arguments inside it.

Kneel Four lay three days inland from the coast, in a country of grey scrub and stone, under a hood of masonry that the Concord had raised over the basin nine hundred years ago and repaired eleven times since. From outside, the Well House looked like a cathedral squatting in a gravel plain. Inside there was no altar. There was a floor of black water forty paces across, a windlass the size of a mill wheel, four hundred feet of tarred rope with a knot at every ten feet and a bone bead at every fifty, and a smell that got into your clothes and stayed there: mineral, hot, a little sweet, the smell of brine so heavy that it bent light.

They called it the bite of the water. A sound kneel bit. It cracked the skin of your knuckles, it wept salt out of your eyes, it ate the stitching of your boots. Divers grew a rind on their forearms like the rind on a cheese.

Wellkeeper Simeu Rocas came down the gallery stairs with the log and the lamp and the gauge, and he was shaking, which he did in cold weather and also when he was frightened, so it was no use as information.

"Ninth bead's dry," he said.

Ysabel took the gauge from him. It was a wire loop hung with nine glass beads, numbered, each one blown heavier than the last. In true kneel-brine all nine floated, bobbing at the surface like a string of little moons; that was how you knew the water still had teeth. She lowered the loop into the basin and watched.

Beads one through six rode high. Bead seven sat low, half-drowned. Beads eight and nine sank, and the wire tilted, and the whole gauge hung in the water like a thing hanged.

"Three beads," Ondi said quietly.

"Two and a half," said Ysabel, because she was a diver and divers were exact.

"Last winter?"

"Last winter nine floated. The winter before that, nine floated. Nine has floated at Kneel Four in every sounding written in that book since the book was started." She wound the gauge onto her wrist. "Write it down, Simeu. Write it twice. Write it once in the log and once on a loose sheet, and put the loose sheet in your shirt."

Simeu looked from her to Ondi. "That's not procedure."

"No," she said. "It isn't."

She went into the water. That was procedure.

It closed over her like oil. Even thinned, the brine was thick enough to push back, and for the first thirty feet she had to work, hauling herself down the rope hand over hand with the seven ingots dragging at her hips. The cup-lamp swung from a hook at her chest: a tallow flame inside a bell of glass with its lip downward, a bubble of trapped air that would burn for eleven minutes if she did not tip it, and she never tipped it.

Past the third bone bead, the water changed. She felt it in her ears and in her teeth. In a sound kneel there came a moment near a hundred feet when the brine grew so dense that a diver stopped sinking altogether and lay on the layer as if on a shelf of glass, and had to swim down through it, and it was that shelf that told you the kneel was holding.

There was no shelf. She went down through where the shelf should have been with her lead pulling her along like a dog that smelled home, and she had to catch the rope and brake and count her descent by the beads to keep from falling too fast.

Two hundred feet. Two fifty. Her lamp made a yellow ball around her, ten feet of visibility in the black, and inside the ball the water was full of slow motes drifting up: flakes of pale salt, sheared off the crust below by currents that should not exist in a still basin.

At three hundred and twenty feet, the sleeper.

Ysabel had touched it eleven times in nine years and it never grew smaller. The lamp gave her a piece of flank the size of a barn door, and the flank went on out of the light in both directions, and it curved, and if you followed the curve with your eye you understood that you were looking at one coil of something coiled many times over. The hide was the colour of old candle wax. Plates lay along it in ranks, each one as broad as her chest, each one rimmed with a fine white beard of crystal. Between the plates the flesh was crusted like the wall of a salt pan, and here and there the crust had flaked away, and where it had flaked the flesh beneath was clean and damp and faintly pink.

That was new. That was very new. In every sounding she had ever made, the drake had been sealed in its own rind from crown to tail, a thing pickled, a thing preserved. Now it was shedding.

She set her feet against a plate, unslung the sounding rod, and drove the point into the crust three times at three measured places, and each time the rod went in further than the winter before. She noted the figures on the slate at her wrist with a scriber: forty-one, thirty-eight, forty-four. Then she lifted the gauge from her wrist and let it hang, and by the light of the cup-lamp, three hundred and twenty feet down, in water that should have been dense as syrup, she watched five beads sink.

Five.

There was a protocol for what happened next and the protocol was: do not touch bare hide. Not the shed places, not the clean flesh. A diver measured, a diver noted, a diver came up. The reason given to novices was that the crust protected the sleeper and the sleeper must not be disturbed. The reason understood by every diver over thirty was different and no one said it aloud.

Ysabel Serra put out her hand and laid her palm on the pink flesh where the rind had fallen away.

Something came up out of the dark to meet her.

It was not a voice. It was one sound, one syllable, and it arrived not in her ears but somewhere behind her eyes, and it had shape the way a hand has shape — she felt the edges of it, she felt that it was a piece of something enormous and orderly, a word from a language with grammar and history and jokes in it, and she felt, with absolute certainty, that it was a question.

And she understood it. That was the impossible part, the part she would put in no report. She understood it the way you understand your own name shouted across a market. The syllable meant: *is it time?*

Her nose began to bleed. She felt the warmth go up over her lip and taste of iron and salt, and the brine took the blood and swirled it away in fine brown threads. She snatched her hand back. The flame in the cup-lamp bent as though a wind had got under the glass.

Then the water was only water and she was alone with her lamp and three hundred and twenty feet of rope, and somewhere very far above her, Ondi Calvet was pulling twice on the line, asking whether she was living.

She pulled back three times: *coming up.*

The ascent took eighteen minutes and she wept for most of it, and she did not know why, which frightened her more than the syllable had. Divers were told to expect that. You came up hollow and weeping and it passed.

On the gallery they wrapped her in wool and gave her water that had been carried three days from the nearest sweet spring, and Ondi held the cup because her hands were shaking too badly.

"Figures," said Simeu, pen up.

"Rod bite forty-one, thirty-eight, forty-four," she said. "Gauge at surface, two beads and a half sunk. Gauge at floor, five sunk. No density shelf. Crust shedding — I'd say a fifth of the hide is bare. Motes of pale salt suspended in the column, rising, which means there is a current in this basin and a still basin has no current." She stopped. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and looked at the blood on it. "And contact was made."

Ondi shut his eyes.

"Deliberate?" said Simeu.

"Deliberate."

"Ysabel—"

"Write it." She got her hand around Simeu's wrist. Her rind-cracked knuckles left salt on his cuff. "Write that the diver made deliberate contact with bare hide at three hundred and twenty feet and that the sleeper answered. One syllable. Answered, Simeu."

Simeu wrote. He wrote it slowly, in the good clerkly hand the Order taught, and then he sat back and looked at what he had written as if it might get up and walk.

Ondi carried the lead back to the rack himself, one ingot at a time, as though he needed the walking. When he came back he crouted down beside her.

"Say your rope-count," he said.

"Ten to a knot, fifty to a bead, four hundred to the end, and the end is spliced and not knotted so you know it by feel in the dark."

"Say the nine."

"Sevora, Vorash, Idmath, Kesh, Anrai, Tolun, Marrash, Ebren, Sula." The names came up like water out of a pump; every child in the Concord learned them before they learned their letters.

"Say your mother's name."

"Coretta Serra."

"Good," said Ondi. "And what did she look like?"

Ysabel opened her mouth.

She knew that her mother had been a salt-cutter out of the pans at the north end of the Blanched Sea, that she had hands like split leather, that she sang while she worked and could not carry a tune, that she died of the cough when Ysabel was nineteen and Aneta was sixteen, that she had smelled of brine and tallow and the particular vinegar she used on her chilblains. She knew the sound of her laugh. She knew there had been a mole on her throat, on the left, because Aneta had one in the same place.

She could not see her.

There was a shape where the face went. Not a blank, exactly; a place where her mind said *here is your mother* and gave her nothing to look at, the way a room gives you nothing when the lamp is out. She reached for it and it was gone. It was not a memory being hard to find. It was a memory not being there, a nail-hole in a wall where a picture had hung for twenty-eight years.

"Ah," said Ondi. He said it very gently, an old man's small sound. "Ah, girl."

Ysabel got her writing case out of her kit with hands that had stopped shaking, because she had turned into something colder than a frightened woman. She turned to the back of her diving log — she had kept it since she was fourteen, four hundred pages, sea-swollen, the covers held on with cod-line — where she kept the list she had started at nineteen and never shown to anyone. Under a heading that read MOTHER she wrote, in her exact hand: *Face lost, winter sounding, Kneel Four. Left cheek — was there a scar? Aneta will know. Mole on throat, left side. Grey eyes or brown? ASK ANETA.*

Then she remembered that Aneta had been dead for three years, and she put the log away and sat with the wool around her shoulders while the black water lay flat and thin and patient in the middle of the house.