The Standing Man

Chapter One: The Glass

Marta Sewell woke at four, as she had every morning for nine years, and lay still in the dark to listen to her own breath.

That was the first instrument. Before the barometer, before the mirror, before the salt: her own lungs, the sound they made, whether the air went in clean or came out with a tick in it. She breathed six times, slow, and heard nothing but the dry rasp of a woman in her fifties who had been eating dust for a decade. Good. She sat up, put her feet on the packed clay floor, and got on with the day.

The barometer hung on the north wall where the sun never touched it. Brass case, cracked crystal, a hairline of solder along the bottom where Hoyt had repaired it the summer before the Weeping. In the lamplight the needle sat where it had sat for three months, high and lazy, the little brass arrow pointing at the word FAIR that had been rubbed almost smooth by her thumb.

Except it did not.

Marta bent close. She took the lamp down from its hook and held it at the angle that killed the glare, and she read the needle three times, the way she made herself read every number three times, because a woman who trusted her first look at an instrument was a woman who would eventually kill sixty people.

The needle had come down. Not far. The width of a fingernail. Enough.

She wrote it in the ledger. Date, hour, reading, and the word *falling*, and then she sat with the pen in her hand and looked at that word for longer than she liked.

The ledger went back nine years. It was the only history Yarrow had. Somewhere in the town there were people who could tell you what year the Weeping had come and how the cities went and what the radio had said before there was no more radio, and every one of them told it differently. Marta's ledger did not tell stories. It told the truth in four columns, and the truth was that the Pan had been drying out for nine years, that the last real rain had fallen when Ellen was a girl of thirteen, and that in all that time the needle had never dropped more than a hair without coming back up by noon.

She went out into the yard to read the fog watch.

Yarrow slept around her, sixty souls behind a wall of mud brick and salvaged rail, on the driest bench of the driest flat in the world. The Pan ran a hundred miles south and west of the town gate, alkali white in the daylight, veined with the cracked canals of the old irrigation district, and dotted, out there in the dark, with the dead orchards. Nothing moved in the Pan. Nothing had moved in it for years. That was the whole terrible arrangement they lived inside.

The fog watch was a plank table with three mirrors on it, wiped clean at dusk and dusted with a fine grey ash from the cook fires. If moisture came in the night, the ash caked. If it caked, you rang the bar and the town shut itself and lit the smudges and nobody breathed until the sun came up and burned the world sterile again.

Marta held the lamp low and looked along the surface of each mirror. The ash lay loose and even, like flour. She tipped the first mirror and the ash slid off in a sheet.

"Dry," she said out loud, because saying it made it a fact and not a hope.

Beside the mirrors hung the hygrometer she had made herself: a length of Ellen's hair, cut the day the girl left for the escarpment, strung on a pin with a paper pointer glued to it. Hair shortens when it dries and stretches when it damps. It was a crude thing and it lagged and she loved it more than the barometer, because the barometer had been Hoyt's and the hair was her daughter's, and both of them were gone in different directions.

The pointer sat at eleven. It had sat at eleven since the spring.

She wrote that too.

At five she opened the gate for the well crew and ran the ritual, and the ritual was the reason Yarrow still had sixty people in it when other towns had none.

It went like this. Nobody came in through the gate dressed. You stripped in the outer pen, and you stood in the wind with your arms up while Marta walked around you with a lamp and looked at your skin — armpits, groin, the soft place behind the knee, inside the elbow, the roots of your hair — for the bloom. It was fine and grey and it looked like frost on a window if you caught it early and like mould on bread if you caught it late. Then you opened your mouth and she looked at the back of your throat, and then you took the ash cup and packed your mouth with ash and spat, twice, and only then did you get your clothes back and walk in.

Men who had been kings of something before the Weeping had stood naked in front of Marta Sewell with their arms up and their eyes averted. She had never once made it into a joke. That was also why they let her keep doing it.

"Cough," she said to Hobb, who was fifty and slow and good with the pump.

He coughed. It came from the throat, dry as a dropped plate.

"Again."

He coughed again, and she listened for the wet click underneath, the sound of something in the deep of the lung that had a little water of its own. She had heard that sound four times in nine years. She could hear it in her sleep.

"Go on," she said.

One by one they went in past her, and behind the row of them, on the low ground where the wall's shadow lay all morning, stood the salt hut. Stone walls, a stone floor, a hearth that was never allowed to go out, and shelves of coarse salt in open pans. Anybody who coughed twice inside the wall sat in the salt hut for three days with the fire in front of them and the salt sucking the air dry and somebody they loved sitting outside the door talking to them through the crack. Most of them walked out. Twice, in nine years, they had not, and Marta had walked in with the long-handled hook and the lamp oil and come out again alone, and the town had let her do that too.

That was Yarrow. Sixty people, one well, one wall, one woman who read the air. It was not a life anybody would have chosen. It was a life, and the number in her ledger had not changed in eleven months, and Marta had begun to allow herself, in the privacy of her own skull, the sin of thinking they might go on.

At six, with the sky going the colour of weak tea, she took the lamp and the wire brush and the tally chalk and went out to the pit.

The pit lay ninety paces from the gate, on the bald rise, so the wind off the Pan hit it first and hardest. It was ten feet deep and lined with slaked lime, white as bone, and a ladder of scrap iron went down one side. Around the rim stood a fence of stakes, and on the stakes hung strips of tin that rattled, though nothing down there had rattled them in nine years.

Marta set the lamp on the rim and looked down.

He stood in the middle of the floor, where he had always stood. The chain came out of a plate bolted through a block of concrete and ran up to the iron collar, and the collar had long since sunk into what had been the flesh of his neck. Nine years of sun had done to him what nine years of sun does. He was the colour of driftwood and the texture of driftwood, his skin split along the shins and the forearms in long dry seams, his hair a grey felt cap, his eyes gone to two dull sockets that the dust had filled and levelled. Out of the top of his skull and along both shoulders grew the stalks. Dead, that was the thing you had to understand. Dead and dry and grey, brittle as old straw, curled at the tips like burnt paper. They had fruited once, in the first weeks, and then the Pan had taken the water out of them and they had stopped, and for nine years they had simply stood there, waiting.

He had a name once, and the town did not use it. The town called him the Standing Man, and children were told he was a machine that told the weather, which was, in every way that mattered, true.

Marta went down the ladder.

You could do this if you did it right. She had her mouth packed with ash and her lips shut, and she breathed through her nose in tiny sips, and she moved slow, because he steered by damp and by sound and there was neither. She crossed the white floor and knelt at the plate and put the wire brush to the bolts and cleaned them, one by one, and checked the links closest to the plate with her fingers, feeling for the thin waist that meant rust had eaten a link from inside. She did this on the first of every month. She had done it a hundred and eight times. She had a page in her ledger for it.

Link by link, up the chain, until her hands were a foot from his collar and her face was a foot from his sternum, and she stopped.

His right hand had moved.

For nine years it had hung with the fingers half curled, palm in, the way a man's hand hangs when he is thinking about something else. Now the wrist had turned, and the palm was up, and the index finger stood out from the rest, lifted, as if he were about to make a point in an argument.

Marta did not move for a long time. She heard the tin strips knock on the stakes above her. She heard the small tick of the lime settling. She heard, from ninety paces off, the pump crew starting the day's work with a shout, and she thought about how sound carried on this bench, and how far it carried when the air was heavy.

Then she looked at the hand, at the third finger of it, where a band of gold had been swallowed by the dried flesh until only a curve of it showed, like a wire pressed into a candle.

"Hoyt," she said, through the ash in her teeth, and it came out as almost nothing.

The stalks along his shoulders lifted. Not much. The way the hair on your arm lifts. There was no wind in the bottom of the pit.

Marta went up the ladder without hurrying, because hurrying was how people fell, and she stood on the rim with her hands shaking so hard she had to set the lamp down.

Then she spat out the ash, and wiped her mouth, and went in to read the glass again.

By noon the needle had dropped the width of a thumb.

By dark it was below anything in nine years of columns, and the hair on the pin had stretched from eleven to fourteen, and out on the southern track a trader's dog was barking at something that was not there.

Marta sat with the ledger open and wrote the number, and under it, in her small square hand, she wrote: *He stirred.*