Chapter 64: The Mediator

Of course, it was not all quite that tidy.

There were arguments every day.

There was a man who tried to corner the nails and was still explaining his position in the plaza when the laughter started.

There was a moon in which the price of a goat changed four times and everybody blamed everybody.

Prices settled themselves eventually, and nobody set them, and Eivind found that more astonishing than anything else that summer and could not get one single person to be astonished with him.

The petty things went to Oddr, in his corner of the plaza, with his pot of bark tea.

He let men shout for as long as they liked, and then asked each of them a question, and then said what he thought, and mostly they took it.

Nobody had appointed him. Nobody would have known how.

But the serious ones went to Hiccup.

Oddr never worked out how that started.

Nobody had decided it. There had been no meeting about it. It had simply begun happening somewhere around midsummer, and by autumn it was so ordinary that a man with something genuinely bad on his hands would walk past the old man's corner without slowing down and go on up the hill.

The ones with a house in them. Or a field. Or a woman. Or a thing said in front of witnesses that could not be unsaid.

The obvious answer, Oddr thought, watching a queue form on a terrace in the third week of the harvest, is that nobody argues with him.

And that was true, and it was not the reason.

Because a man who cannot be argued with is not a judge. He is a wall.

You do not bring a wall the worst thing that has ever happened to you and stand there hoping.

You bring that to somebody you think is going to be fair.

Take that morning.

Two men at the top of the second terrace, and about forty people who had found reasons to be nearby.

It had started a fortnight ago, and it had started in public, which was the worst of it. One of them had stood up at the fire and said out loud, in front of everybody, that the other had gone into the winter stores in the caves and taken food while there were children coughing in the dark.

You cannot take that back. There is no version of that sentence that goes back into a man's mouth.

Hiccup listened to the accuser first. All the way through.

He did not interrupt once, and the man went on a great deal longer than he needed to, the way people do when they have been carrying something.

Then the other one. All the way through, the same.

And it came out about four sentences in, flat and awful, because the man had clearly decided somewhere in the last fortnight that he was going to say it and be done.

He had taken it. Of course he had taken it.

He had taken it in the fourth week of the blizzard and he had taken it for a girl of six who had stopped being able to keep her eyes open, and he had never told a living soul, because he had been ashamed of it every single day since.

The girl was alive. She was down at the wells that minute, carrying water, being six.

Nobody on that terrace said anything at all.

Hiccup did not rule. Not yet.

He turned to the accuser and asked him whether he accepted that the food had gone to the child, and that the child was alive, and that there was no version of this in which the man in front of him had eaten well while anybody starved.

The accuser said yes. It cost him something to say it, and he said it.

Then Hiccup turned to the other one and asked him whether he accepted that the man who had accused him had buried his own boy in the second week of that same blizzard, three rows from where the stores were kept, and had spent every day since looking for somebody to be angry at.

The man had not known. Anybody could see he had not known.

He said yes as well, and he could not get the word all the way out.

Then the boy ruled, and he did it in about two sentences.

The food was taken and it would be paid back. Not to the settlement, and not to the stores, but to the accuser's household, in work, over the winter, at that man's door.

And he gave the reason for it, briefly, which was the part Oddr valued above everything else.

A man will take a judgement that goes against him if he is told why. What no man alive will take is a verdict handed down out of a face.

The accused stood there and turned it over.

A whole winter of another man's work, at another man's door, in front of the whole terrace.

Then he laughed. He put both hands up, and he laughed, and it came out of him ragged, and he said it loud enough for everybody on that hillside to hear.

"Fine! Fine. As his majesty commands."

And the other one laughed too, with his face still wet, which was somehow the thing that made it travel.

Two men who had not said each other's names in a fortnight, both laughing, on the same side of a joke, ten seconds after a judgement went against one of them.

It was down the hill by supper.

For the rest of that autumn you would hear it here and there. Never unkindly, always with a grin, and usually out of somebody who had just been told something he did not want to hear by a boy with horns.

His majesty.

He did not like it.

Oddr was one of the very few who noticed, and he only noticed because he had spent a lifetime watching faces for a living. There was no correction and no complaint. The boy simply did not laugh, and there was a small movement at the corner of his mouth that went as fast as it came.

He did not find out the reason for a long time.

Hiccup went down to the library afterward, the way he did.

Not up to the old halls. He had never taken so much as a room in them, in two years, and he had a story ready about the stairs and the draught that nobody had ever asked him for.

He had the deep halls under the eastern slope, and the shelves down there that went back further than anybody on the surface could read, and a stub of candle, and that was the whole of it.

Toothless was already in there, poured out along the curve of the wall with his chin on his front feet and his tail lying across the doorway, taking up a good deal more of that round room than the round room had to spare.

Hiccup stepped over the tail.

"I do not want to do that," he said, dropping onto the floor on the other side. "That is not a thing I want to do. I flew off the edge of the world, bud. Off the edge of it. And this morning I settled an argument about a fence."

Toothless yawned so widely his whole head folded backward, made a noise like a bag of gravel going down a stair, and went back to sleep.

"You are no help at all."

He sat there a while.

At some point his hand went up and rubbed the left side of his neck, under the jaw, which was a thing his hand had been doing on its own for months and had not needed to do for weeks.

There was nothing there any more. The colour had gone out of it somewhere in the middle of summer and the soreness a good while before that.

All that was left was the habit, and the fact that he still could not think about that morning on the plaza without his fingers going and finding the place.

The truth of it, the part he did not say out loud to a sleeping dragon, was simpler and older than a fence.

The last man he had known who held that kind of authority over people had stood in a cove with an axe in his hand.

He had not swung it.

He had not needed to.

Hiccup sat with that for a bit, the way he did most days, and then put it back where he kept it.

The barley came in at the end of the first week of autumn.

Three strips of it, and three of oats, and one thin patchy one of rye at the western end, exactly where the old farmer had said it would be thin and patchy.

It was not a great harvest. He said so himself, at length, looking at the floor, listing every reason it should have been better and two things he intended to do differently next year.

Nobody was listening to him.

Because it was grain.

It had gone into the ground as seed bought with a dead kingdom's gold, in soil they had cleared with their own hands off a hillside that had been scrub since before anybody could count, watered down a channel they had dug the silt out of on their bellies in the dark.

And in the first week of autumn, on that island, past the edge of every map, a hundred people sat down and ate food that they had grown.

There were men in that field who cried and did not bother hiding it.

Late that night Oddr came out to the eastern spur, the way he did.

The plaza fire was still burning down in the middle. It always was. A few dozen still ate off it, and would, and there was nothing wrong with that.

But the hillside above it was the thing now.

Half a hundred windows with light in them. Half a hundred doors shut against the cold that was coming. Half a hundred little fires, every one of them in a room belonging to somebody, with a family round it eating out of its own pot.

Half a year ago there had been one fire and ninety-six people round it, and every single one of them had known the name of every other one.

The old man stood there a long while with his hands in his sleeves.

It had worked.

That was what he kept arriving at, and it was true, and he did not doubt it for a moment. The goats were fat. The tools were sharp. A man could be paid. People do not thrive in a heap, and a man needs a door.

And it had worked for one reason, and the reason was standing all around him in the dark with lamps in the windows.

Every soul on this hill still knew every other soul on this hill.

That was the whole of the machine.

The prices held because you would meet the man again tomorrow. The judgements held because everybody had watched them handed down. The boy's word held because there was not one person on that island who had not seen with their own eyes what he had done for them.

And what happens, he thought, on the day that stops being true?

Because it was going to stop being true. The boy had said so out loud in a hall in the spring and nobody had asked him what he meant, and the old man had been quietly doing the arithmetic ever since.

Five hundred faces nobody knows. Then a thousand.

Standing in this plaza, on top of a stone that promises a home of their own for every family, being told that a horned boy on a hill is fair, by people who will swear to it, and having no reason on earth to believe a word of it.

Shame does not stretch that far. That was the thing.

He watched the lights a moment longer.

Then he went down the steps to bed, slowly, because his hip was bad, and he did not tell anybody about that either.