1In the north there is a mountain that once burned, and where it burned it left black stone, smooth as water and sharper than any flint. A blade struck from it will shave the hair from an arm. People a moon's walk away used it who had never seen the mountain.
2The people who lived under the mountain were poor in everything but the stone. Their fields were high and cold. So each year, when the passes opened, their carriers went south with packs of it, village to village, and came home with grain and cloth and salt.
3One of these carriers was a man named Taran, and he had a son named Ilu, thirteen years old, who was making the journey for the second time.
4The year before had been a hungry one under the mountain. Frost had come at the wrong moon and killed the barley in the ear. Taran had walked south with a light pack and a heavy heart, and at the last village on his road, far down in the warm plain, he had done a thing that carriers did not do. He had asked for grain he could not pay for.
5The headwoman of that village was named Meshi. She was a broad, quiet woman who counted everything twice. She had looked at Taran, and at the thin boy beside him, for a long while. Then she had given him twenty baskets of barley, and the loan of people to carry it north as far as the ford.
6"Sixty blades," she had said. "Long ones, of the clear stone. Before next harvest. My people cut with flint that is chipped to the back. I will trade the last of our good flint this winter for a breeding bull, because I will have your blades by summer. Do you understand what I am doing?"
7"You are leaning on a thing that is not there yet," said Taran.
8"I am leaning on you," said Meshi. Then she had brought out wet clay and rolled sixty small cones of it between her palms, each no bigger than a finger joint, and baked them by the fire while they ate. She kept them in a bag. "One for each blade. My mouth may forget and yours may forget. These will not."
9That grain had kept forty people alive under the mountain. Ilu had eaten it all winter. He had not thought about where it came from, any more than he thought about where breath came from.
10Now it was spring. Taran had struck the sixty blades himself, from the best stone, and wrapped each one in hide. He carried them in his own pack and would let no one else touch it. His cousin Zakar walked with them, carrying stone of his own to trade.
11On the fourth night out, by the fire, Ilu asked his father why he walked so fast, when the harvest in the plain was still two moons off.
12"Because I am not all here," said Taran. "Part of me is down in that village. I left it there last year, in a bag of little clay cones. I will not be a whole man again until my feet catch up with my word."
13"It is only a promise," said Zakar, poking the fire. "She is a moon away. What can she do if you are late? Shout?"
14"She can never trust a man from the mountain again," said Taran. "Nor can her daughters. That is a long time to be hungry, cousin."
15On the ninth day they came to the ford.
16The river there was wide and, most of the year, no deeper than a man's thigh. But the snow was melting in the hills, and the water had come up brown and fast and loud.
17Taran looked at the water for a long time. Then he took off his pack and tied it high on his shoulders. "It will be like this for half a moon," he said. "I have crossed worse."
18He had. But not this water. He was two-thirds of the way over, with the water at his chest, when a drowned tree came down on the current. He saw it. He could not move fast enough. Ilu, on the bank, saw his father turn and pull the pack off over his head. He threw it with both arms toward the far shore. It landed in the shallows there. Then the tree took him across the body, and he went under, and the brown water closed.
19They found him the next day, a long way down. Ilu and Zakar buried him above the flood line, under stones. Ilu did not weep until the last stone was on. Then he could not stop, and Zakar let him be, which was kind.
20The pack was whole. Sixty blades in sixty hides. His father had thrown his word across the river and had not been able to follow it.
21On the far side of the ford stood a large village, rich from the crossing. A man there dealt in stone. He unwrapped one of Taran's blades and held it to the light, and Ilu saw his face change.
22"I will take all sixty," the man said. "Here, today. Twelve baskets of grain, and a copper awl, and that cloak." It was more than Meshi's grain had been worth, and it was here.
23"They are not for sale," said Ilu. "They are owed."
24Zakar took him aside. He was not a bad man, and he spoke gently. "Ilu. Listen to me. Your father is dead. The woman in the plain made her bargain with him, and it drowned with him. Nobody will blame a boy. I am selling my stone here and turning home; I will not walk the dry country without Taran. Come with me. Your mother has lost a husband. Do not make her lose a son for the sake of a bag of clay beads."
25"I ate the grain," said Ilu.
26"What?"
27"All winter. I ate it. So did you. So did your children. It was not a bargain with my father. It was barley, and it is in my arms and legs now." He was crying again and was angry that he was. "She gave it when it was only words she got back. If the words are nothing, then what did we eat?"
28Zakar looked at him a long moment. Then he shook his head, and gave him a waterskin and half his dried meat. He told him where the wells were. "You are your father," he said. "I do not say it as praise." And he went to sell his stone.
29So Ilu went on alone. He was thirteen, and the pack was heavy, and he had never walked a day without someone ahead of him who knew the way.
30The dry country was ten days across. He walked in the cool of the morning and evening and lay under rocks at noon. He found the first well, and the second. He talked to his father as he went, and after a while he stopped being ashamed of it.
31At the second well, two men were waiting.
32They were not carriers. They had no packs, only clubs, and a lean yellow dog. They looked at him, alone and thin, and they laughed. One held him by the hair while the other emptied his pack on the ground.
33They took the pack. They took his waterskin and his meat. They did not kill him. He was a boy, and it was not worth the trouble, and the dry country would do it for them. They walked off south.
34Ilu sat by the well until his legs would hold him. He had nothing. He could turn north and reach the ford in four days with a belly full of well water, and live, and nobody would blame a boy.
35He got up and followed their tracks.
36He followed all that afternoon, keeping low and far back. At dusk they made a fire in a dry stream bed and ate his meat. He lay on the bank above them with his face in the dust and waited for the stars to turn.
37When the fire was red and both men were breathing slow, he went down on his belly. The pack was by the nearer man's head. They had opened some of the hides to look. Blades lay loose in the sand, and some were snapped, for such men do not know how to handle the stone. He gathered what was whole into the pack by touch, one and one and one. He cut his fingers and did not feel it.
38He had the pack on his shoulder when the dog barked.
39He ran. Behind him there was shouting. He ran down the stream bed in the dark with the pack beating on his back, and fell, and got up. He found a crack in the bank where water had cut under a slab of rock, and crawled into it, and pulled a thorn bush in after him.
40He lay in that crack all night and all the next day. Twice he heard them go by. He had no water. By the afternoon his tongue was like a piece of wood in his mouth, and he saw his father sitting on the far bank of the stream bed, quite plainly, tying a pack. He knew it was only thirst.
41At dark he crawled out and walked south by the stars. On the second morning he came to a marsh with green reeds in it and fell on his face in the water. Three days after that, he walked out of the dry country into the plain.
42The barley there was ripe. That was the first thing he saw. It stood yellow to the edge of the sky, and the people of Meshi's village were in it, cutting. They cut slowly. He saw why. Their sickles were set with old flint, chipped to the back, and each stroke tore more than it cut. Half the field was still standing, and the ears had begun to nod. In a few days the grain would start to fall.
43The cutters straightened and watched him come: a boy burned black by the sun, with rags on his hands, alone. Someone ran for Meshi.
44She came out of the field with a sickle in her fist. She looked past him, up the road, for a tall man. Then she looked at his face, and she did not need to ask.
45"The ford," said Ilu. "In the snow water. He threw the pack across."
46Meshi closed her eyes. When she opened them she said, "Come into the shade, child," and she took him to her house, and gave him water with a little salt in it, and did not ask about blades.
47But he would not rest until it was done. He knelt on her floor and unwrapped the pack. She fetched the bag. She laid out her clay cones in rows on a mat, sixty of them, as carefully as she did everything. Ilu laid a blade beside each cone.
48There were forty-one. Nineteen cones lay on the mat with nothing beside them.
49The house had filled with people. A man near the door said, "I told you. I said it last year. Mountain people. Twenty baskets, and we get two-thirds, and a child sent with them to make us soft."
50Ilu's face burned. He stood up. "My father struck sixty," he said. "I lost nineteen at the second well. I will cut your barley until it is in. I will carry your water. Next spring I will come down with nineteen, and nineteen more for the waiting. If I do not, you know where the mountain is." He looked at the man by the door. "I am what is left of his word. It is not all of it. But it is not nothing."
51Nobody spoke. Meshi was looking at his hands, where the rags had come loose. She looked at the cuts across the fingers, the kind that come from picking up black stone in the dark. She looked at how thin he was. She counted, as she counted everything, and she counted twice.
52Then she picked up the nineteen clay cones, one by one, and put them into his palm and closed his fingers on them.
53"Carry these," she said. "Bring them back when you bring the blades. I do not want the nineteen more. I want the nineteen." She turned to the man by the door. "Last year you said they would not come at all. I said, then we will have lost twenty baskets and learned a thing. Well. He has walked through the dry country with no father to teach us the other thing. Give out the blades. The barley is falling while we talk."
54They set the black blades in the sickles that same hour. Ilu cut beside them until the harvest was in, and it all came in. Then Meshi sent him north with people of her own, by a road that had water on it.
55He came down the next spring, a hand taller, with nineteen blades and nineteen clay cones. Meshi counted them twice.
56Now hear what came of it, for it came to more than barley. The story went up and down the road faster than any carrier. In the villages of the plain it became a saying: sure as the black stone. A carrier from the mountain could get grain on his word in any village after that, in the worst year. None of them knew that their credit had been bought by a boy lying in a crack of rock without water.
57Zakar went home rich that year. But the next hungry winter, when he came down to ask for grain against his promise, they asked him only one thing. They asked whether he was the one who had gone on, or the one who had turned back at the ford.
58And in Meshi's village they kept the custom of the clay. When a thing was owed that could not be paid until later, they made a small shape for it and baked it, and kept it in a bag. It was a way of holding what a mouth had said, so that it was still there after the mouth was shut. They thought it a small thing, a help for counting. They did not know what they had begun.