The Workshop on the Hill

The Hill was made of cinders.

Wren had thought, from the ridge, that it was rock. But when she came to the foot of it in the last grey glimmer of the dusk and put her hand on the slope, the ground crunched under her palm like a heap of clinker in a sweep’s yard: little black lumps, rough and light, the kind of thing that is left in a grate when a very great fire has burned out. The whole round black hill was made of it.

And it was warm.

Out on the plain the warm places had been like hearth-bricks at bedtime. This was more like the inside of the oven itself. The warmth came up through the cinders into her hands and knees as she climbed, into all the cold places she had stopped noticing, until she felt like a loaf herself, set to rise.

There were no Knights on the Hill. She had watched from the ridge until dark to be sure: they walked round the foot of it, a long way out, the way they had stepped round the warm places on the plain. And in her pocket, inside its wrapping of scarf, the singing-stone had gone quiet for the first time since noon.

“Well, that’s something,” said Wren to the lamp. “Can’t say much for the scenery. But it’s something.”

She climbed. Twice the cinders slid and she went down on her face; and the sky went black above her, with no stars. She did not take the lamp out. She did not need it. Wren had grown up in chimneys, and a hill is only a very wide chimney, lying down.

At the top the ground went flat, and there was a wall in front of her, and a doorway in the wall, and no door.

She stood in the doorway in the dark, breathing hard, and listened.

Nothing. No wind; no sound of any kind. And yet it was not the silence of an empty place. Wren knew empty places. She had slept in a good many of them, and she knew the flat dead way emptiness hangs about, as if nothing will ever happen there again. This was not like that. This was the quiet of a house in the early morning, when everybody is still asleep upstairs, and the clock is ticking in the kitchen, and the whole house is waiting for the day to begin.

It was a quiet with somebody in it.

“Hello?” said Wren, before she could stop herself.

Nobody answered. Of course nobody answered. She felt her cheeks go hot in the dark, and was glad there was no one to see.

Then she undid the top of her coat, and took out the lamp.

The light came up gold.

It was burning better than she had seen it burn since before the mine — not a blaze, but a good, clear, steady flame, like a candle on a table where there is supper. On her wrist the ribbon came up red, deep red, all the way red, as if somebody had poured it fresh. And all round her, for the first time in days, there was colour: the brown of her own coat under its grey ash, and the warm yellow of the brass in her hand.

She held it up, and looked.

It was a long, low room of rough black stone. At this end, by the doorway, the roof had fallen in, and the rafters lay across one another on the floor, half-buried in drifted ash. But beyond that the roof held, beam after beam, like the ribs of some enormous animal; and as she walked slowly in with the lamp held high, the workshop came out of the shadows to meet her one piece at a time.

There were the forges, at the far end. There were two of them, side by side, under one great hood of black stone that went up into the broken chimney she had seen from the ridge. They were cold. Their hearths were full of old grey ash, the leather of their bellows had gone hard and cracked, and the two anvils in front of them stood like a pair of black dogs that have been told to stay, and will go on staying for as long as it takes.

There were the tools. They hung all along the walls on wooden pegs: hammers and tongs, files and chisels, and a great many small strange things whose names Wren did not know — little bent rods, and tiny shears, and something like a spoon with holes in it. They hung in order, the biggest hammer at one end and the smallest at the other, each one exactly in its place; and round each, painted on the stone behind it in faint white paint, there was its outline, so that if you took a tool down you would always know exactly where it went back.

Wren had swept the chimneys of plenty of workshops, and in every one the tools were in heaps, and the man who owned them was shouting at the boy about where the blasted pincers had got to now. These looked as if they had been hung up by someone who loved them, at the end of a long day, one by one; and as if he had only just stepped out, and would be back in the morning, and would want them.

They should have been rusted to nothing. She knew enough about iron to know that. They should have been red with rust, three hundred years of it, crumbling off their pegs.

They were not.

Wren put out her hand towards the nearest hammer, and then took it back again, and did not touch it.

The bench was in the middle of the room. It was very old, scarred all over with burns and the rings of hot things set down on it; and right in the middle, in the full light of her lamp, there was a lamp.

It was not finished. It was a small brass body, round-bellied, with a little hook on top — and Wren caught her breath, because it was almost exactly the shape of her own. Almost exactly. Only it had no dents in it, and no scratches, and no chimney; and there was no wick in it, and no flame. It sat on the bench with a tiny file lying beside it, and a scrap of soft cloth, as if whoever had been working on it had put down the file in the middle of a stroke, meaning to come back to it in a moment.

“Look at that,” she whispered to the lamp in her hand. “That’s you. That’s you, that is, before you got knocked about.”

The lamp in her hand burned on, small and gold. It did not lean towards the one on the bench. But Wren thought — she could not have said why — that if it had been a dog it would have wagged.

And then she lifted the light higher, and saw the racks.

They ran along both the long walls, under the tools: tall wooden racks, shelf above shelf, like the racks in a baker’s where the loaves are set to cool. And on every shelf, in a row, there were lamps.

Wren walked along them slowly, holding up her own. They were all the same, and all different. Some were tall and some were squat; some had long thin necks and some had none; one was hardly bigger than an egg, and one was as big as a bucket. They were all brass. And not one of them was finished. None had a chimney; none had a wick. They stood on their shelves in the dark with their little round mouths open at the top, empty, like a row of fledglings in a nest, waiting to be fed.

She counted them. She had counted chimney-pots on the roofs of Emberwick since before she could read, and it was a habit. There were ten racks. There were ten lamps on each.

“A hundred,” she said aloud. Her voice sounded very small among the beams. “A hundred lamps, and not one of them done. Somebody had a lot of orders in, and never got paid—“

She stopped. She thought of a story told with shadows on a sheet. He never asked a penny.

“All right,” she said to the lamp. “All right. I know. You needn’t look at me like that.”

The lamp, which had no face, did not look at her like anything. But she felt that it had.

The iron door was at the very back, between the two forges.

She had not seen it at first, because it was set deep into the end wall under the great stone hood, as black as the stone round it. It was not much taller than a man, and narrow, and rounded at the top: one sheet of iron, with great square-headed nails round its edge.

It had no handle. It had no keyhole. There were no hinges, or none that she could see; and when she ran her fingers round the edges, the crack between the iron and the stone was so fine that she could not have slid a hair into it.

In the middle of the door, at about the height of Wren’s chin, there was a round plate of brass.

It was about the size of the palm of her hand, and it was set flush into the iron, and it was engraved all over with fine lines. Wren held the lamp close. The lines made a compass rose, like the ones in the corners of old maps, four long points and four short; only where the north point should have been there was a little curl of flame. And in the very middle of the rose, where all the points met, the brass had been hollowed out into a shallow round dip, perfectly smooth, with a tiny notch cut in its rim at the top, as if something round had been pressed into it once, like a seal into wax, and taken away again.

Wren looked at it for a long time.

It reminded her of something. She did not know what. She was too tired to think, and the thought went up and away like a spark up a flue, and she let it go.

“Right,” she said, and put the lamp down carefully on the edge of the nearer forge, and rolled up her sleeves.

She tried pushing, until her boots slid on the floor. She tried pulling, with her nails in the crack, and broke two of them. Then she stood back and took a run at it, the whole length of the bench, and hit it with her shoulder as hard as she could — the way she had once broken into the coal-shed behind the Tallow Bridge tavern, which had a door that looked much stronger than this one.

The coal-shed door had been wood. This one was not. It did not even shiver. Wren bounced off it and sat down hard on the floor, and her whole left shoulder went first numb and then hot and then blazing, and she said “Blast” so loudly that the word went echoing away among the beams and came back to her from the far end of the room: blast — blast — last.

She sat there holding her shoulder and blinking hard until the stinging went out of her eyes.

“Fine,” she said through her teeth. “Fine. Be like that.”

If a thing will not open for force, a thief tries cunning. Wren had picked a good many locks in her time; mostly cheap ones, it is true, on poor people’s doors, which I am sorry to tell you and which she was not proud of now. But a lock is a lock. She went to the bench and hunted among the scraps on it until she found a long iron nail, square and sharp; and she sat down on the floor in front of the door with the lamp beside her, and set to work.

She picked at the edge of the brass plate, feeling for a catch. She picked at the crack round the door, inch by inch, as high as she could reach. She scraped round the rim of the hollow in the middle of the rose, in case there was a spring hidden there, or a pin. She tapped all over the iron, listening for the place where a bolt might be. And she talked to the lamp while she did it.

“You’d have known,” she told it. “You’d have known how to do it. You’d have come in here and looked at it and said hm, and then you’d have just — done something, and it’d have opened, and you’d have made me feel stupid for not seeing.” Scrape, scrape, went the nail. “And then you’d have made tea. Out of this ash, probably. And it’d have been better than your usual.”

She did not laugh. But she nearly did, and that was something.

She worked at it for an hour, or more. I do not think there was a single inch of that door that Wren did not try. And at the end of it the nail was bent nearly double, and her fingers were sore, and her shoulder throbbed like a second heart; and the iron door stood exactly as it had stood when she came in, black and blank and patient, with its little brass rose shining in the lamplight.

At the very last, she put her hand flat into the round hollow in the middle of the rose. She did not know why. It was too big for one finger and too small for her palm.

It was cold. In all that warm room, it was the only cold thing.

Wren took her hand away and sat back on her heels.

“Right,” she said to the door, quite quietly. “You win. For now.”

She did not mean to sleep there.

She meant to find somewhere to hide in case anybody came. But she was so tired. She had crossed the Burned Country on her belly, and fought a door and lost; and the floor in front of the nearer forge was warm, and the big black hood above her made it feel like being in a room inside a room.

She lay down on the stone beside the cold forge, with her sore shoulder uppermost and the scarf under her cheek. She did not put the lamp away. She curled round it instead, the way Nettle used to curl round a hot brick in winter, and held it against her chest with both arms, and watched its little gold flame through her eyelashes.

“Just for a bit,” she told it. “Just till it’s light.”

She was asleep before she had finished saying it.

And she dreamed.

She dreamed that she was lying exactly where she was, by the forge, with the lamp in her arms. Only the forge was not cold. It was lit. The fire in it was red and gold and roaring softly, the way a forge-fire roars when the bellows are working, and the whole hood above was full of moving light, and the warmth of it lay on her face like a hand.

And there was a man at the anvil.

She could not see his face. That was the strange thing. He was right there, not three steps from her, working at the anvil with his back half turned and his sleeves rolled up; but every time she tried to look at his face, the glow of the forge was in her eyes, golden and dazzling, and she could not see past it. She could see his hands, brown and strong and careful, holding a small hammer and something bright on the anvil, working without hurry, tap and tap and turn, the way a person works who has done a thing a thousand times and still likes doing it.

And he was humming.

He hummed as he worked, low and easy, in time with the hammer; and for a moment she did not know the tune. And then she did. It went into her like warm water into cold hands, and she lay quite still in the dream and listened, and did not dare to breathe.

It was her mother’s song.

It was Morning comes: the song she had carried all her life without the rest of it, like a key without a door. The man at the anvil was humming it, tap and tap, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world — as if he had always known it, as if it were his.

Wren found that her own mouth was humming with him. She did not decide to. Morning comes, morning comes — and the next part, and the next, the part she knew, the part that ended and the dark shall not keep us — and she came to the place where it always stopped.

He did not stop.

He went on. Past the end. Past the place where her mother’s voice had always gone quiet, all her life, like a lamp going out. The tune went on up, and round, and further, into notes she had never heard — and yet the moment she heard each one, she knew it, the way you know a step in your own house in the dark. It was like finding a door in her own garret that she had never seen before, and opening it, and finding a room behind it that had been there all along, with a fire lit, and a chair drawn up, waiting.

She tried to hold on to it, harder than she had tried at the door, to catch those notes and keep them for when she woke. She opened her mouth to ask him — to ask him what, she did not know; his name, or the words, or how he knew—

And she woke up.

It was morning. A thin grey light was coming in through the broken roof at the far end of the workshop. The lamp was in her arms, burning gold.

The forge beside her was cold. Its hearth was full of old grey ash, exactly as it had been. The bellows were cracked. The anvil stood where it had always stood, black and bare, with nothing on it at all. There was no fire, and no hammer, and no man.

Wren lay very still.

She tried to find the tune. She went after it in her head the way you go after a dream, quickly, before it can get away. Morning comes, morning comes — that part was there, as it always was — and the dark shall not keep us —

And then nothing. The door was shut again. She hummed the part she knew, twice, three times, and each time it simply stopped, as it had always stopped, and there was nothing after it but the grey light and the silence.

She sat up, slowly, with the lamp in her lap, and put the back of her wrist hard against her eyes.

“Rot,” she whispered. “Rot, rot, rot.”

But even as she said it, she noticed something, and she took her wrist away from her eyes and looked round.

The forge was cold. Nobody had lit anything in that place for three hundred years. And yet the workshop was warmer than it had been when she lay down — a great deal warmer. The chill had gone out of the stone floor under her, and out of the long dark corners under the racks. It was warm the way a kitchen is warm in the morning, when somebody has been up before you and banked the fire and gone out, and the warmth of them is still in the room.

On the anvil there was nothing. On the bench the little unfinished lamp sat where it had sat, with the file beside it.

But the quiet was still there: the kind of quiet with somebody in it. Only now — and Wren could not have told you how she knew this, any more than she could have told you how she knew the tune — it did not feel like a house where everybody is still asleep upstairs.

It felt like a house where somebody has just woken up.