1Ninety-one years went by. In the harbour town at the mouth of the cold bay, the wooden house still stood on its hill of birches, and an old woman named Asha lived in it. She had been born on its kitchen floor.
2I cannot tell you what lamps the people had in those days, or what warmed their houses, for those things are not yet made. Whatever they were, in the middle of that winter they failed. A storm of ice came down the whole coast. It broke what carried the power, and it closed the roads, and it did not lift.
3In all that town there was one house with an iron stove that burned wood. Asha had kept it, as Henrik had kept it before her. She had cut birch and stacked it every autumn for sixty years, and for each tree she cut she planted two. By the second night of the storm there were thirty people sleeping on her floors.
4With her lived her great-granddaughter Runa, who was nine, and who asked too many things. Runa kept the count of the wood. Each morning she wrote it on the kitchen wall in chalk where all could see. On the sixth day it read: Wood for twelve days more, for this house as it is.
5Across the bay, at the far huts, lived other people. They were newcomers, come north in the last ten years out of the dry countries, and the town had let them have the old fish sheds. There were forty of them. The town and the sheds did not love each other. In the autumn there had been a fight on the quay, and a man of the town had been carried home with his head broken. His brother Aksel was in Asha's kitchen now, feeding her stove.
6On the sixth night, late, someone knocked.
7Runa opened the door. A girl stood there in the blowing snow. She was about Runa's age, and dark, and she was alone. She had come across the bay on the ice. Frost had made her eyelashes white.
8She did not have many words of the town's tongue. So she held out what she carried, in both hands, where everyone could see it. It was a lamp from the sheds, of whatever kind they had. She pressed the place that should have woken it. Nothing happened. She turned it over and shook it, and held it out again.
9Everyone in the kitchen understood. The lamp was dead, and the cold had got into the sheds.
10"Forty," said the girl. She touched her chest. "Nandi." She pointed back at the dark. "Small ones. Old ones. Three days, no warm. One baby is..." She did not have the word. She let her head fall to the side.
11Nobody spoke. The men looked at Asha, who sat in her chair by the stove with a blanket on her knees. It was her house and her wood.
12Aksel spoke first, quick and angry. "There is a shelter in the city. Let them walk to it. They broke my brother's head. Let them freeze, then, and in spring the sheds are ours again."
13The old woman looked at the child in the door for a long time. Runa watched her, and thought: she is counting something.
14"Runa," said Asha. "The true count. For seventy?"
15Runa had already done it. "Five days," she said. "Perhaps six, if we burn the fence."
16"And the storm?"
17Runa had a small machine in her pocket, of the kind that can speak. Its power was nearly gone. She asked it. It answered in its plain voice, and the whole kitchen heard.
18"I do not know. The last word that reached me was four days ago, and it said the power might return in four days or in eight. I cannot see the ice on the bay, either. Do not trust anything I say about it. Measure it with a bar." Then its light went out.
19"So," said Aksel. "Five days of wood, and perhaps eight of storm. You heard it."
20"I heard it," said Asha. She was quiet. Then she said a thing, and afterward she could not tell where the words had come from. They felt older than she was.
21"And when ours dies? Who will we walk to?"
22Aksel opened his mouth and shut it.
23"Bring them," said the old woman. "All forty. There is one fire, so it must be here."
24"Then let them pay for it," said Aksel. He had given ground and he knew it, and it made him rough. "Let them work it off. Let them cut wood for us all the spring."
25"No one buys a place at a fire," said Asha. "And no one will sell one in my house. If they cut wood in spring, it will be because they are cold next winter too, the same as you."
26She could not go herself. Her legs had not carried her down the hill in four years. She beckoned Runa close and buttoned the child's coat. While she did it she spoke low, for the two of them alone.
27"Listen. My mother told me a tale when I was small. She had it in a camp, on the road north, from people who had it from a woman on a mountain. A stranger comes to a fire at night, and eats, and asks one thing. What have you left open? And is gone by morning. She said the tale was very old, and that the stranger is sometimes an old man, and sometimes a woman, and in the one she heard it was a girl with a goat."
28"Who was it?" said Runa.
29"I asked that for eighty years. I kept a place at this table. I thought, one night the stranger will come to my fire, and I will have my answer ready." She pulled the girl's hood up. "I was a fool. There was never one stranger, child. How could one walker come to so many fires in so many ages? Each of them was only a person on a road, asking what they had once been asked. But it was never their question. It belongs to the ones who are not born yet. They cannot ask it. They have no mouths yet. So someone passing by asks it for them."
30She looked over Runa's shoulder at the girl in the doorway, holding the dead lamp.
31"And then one day they are born, and they come and knock. Then it is too late to make ready. Whatever you left open is all there is. On the night I was born, my mother came up this hill a stranger, in a storm. There was a stove lit here, and a book with the right page in it. Nobody had kept those things for me. They did not know I was coming. They kept them for whoever would come." She touched the stove's warm iron. "I have waited all my life for the Asker to come back. She is standing in my door. She is nine years old and her lamp is out. I will give my answer now. It is sixty years of birch."
32Then she said, "Do not run on the ice."
33Runa did not run on the ice. Her great-grandmother had taught her its rules. Clear black ice a hand thick will bear a person. White ice must be twice that. Near the mouth of a stream no ice is to be trusted. She took the iron bar from the porch and struck through every thirty paces and measured the hole with her mitten.
34Aksel came with them. No one asked him. He fetched the long sledge and the rope and came, because he knew the bay better than any child, and because he had seen the frost on the girl's eyelashes.
35They reached the sheds past midnight. It was colder inside than out. Forty people sat pressed together under every cloth they owned. An old woman among them held a jar against her chest inside her coat, to keep it from the frost.
36They went back in a long line, spread wide so that the ice carried them a few at a time. Runa went first with her bar, and Nandi beside her. The small ones lay on the sledge under blankets. "Walk where I walk," Runa told them, and Nandi said it again in their tongue.
37Two hundred paces from the town shore the ice groaned. Aksel was hauling the sledge at the rear, and he was the heaviest thing on the bay. A black star opened under his boots. He went through to the chest.
38He did the one right thing. He let go of the sledge rope, so that he would not drag the children after him. Then he hung there on his elbows with the sea pulling at his legs.
39A man of the sheds was first to him. He lay down flat on the ice and crawled, and threw him the rope's end, while four others held his ankles. They drew Aksel out like a seal. When he could stand, he looked at the one who had crawled out to him. He had last seen that face on the quay in autumn, above his brother.
40Neither of them said anything. The man took off his own dry outer coat and put it on Aksel. Then they both took the sledge rope and pulled.
41So seventy people came to be in a house built for six. The stove burned as it had burned before, and its fire was not smaller for all of them.
42In the morning the old woman of the sheds opened her jar to see that the frost had not harmed what was in it. Runa looked. It was full of small round seeds, dark red.
43"My mother's mother's mother carried it out of the dry country," the old woman said, and Nandi gave the words. "And hers had it from a valley where a woman kept it through a famine and gave it to all her neighbours. We have been hungry many times, and we have never eaten it. It has a name. Grandmother's Red."
44"It will not grow here," said Aksel. He did not say it unkindly. He was wearing the stranger's coat.
45"Perhaps not here," said the old woman. "It does not have to grow here. It only has to be kept until there is a place."
46There was a shelf in that kitchen with nine grey books on it, bound by a strap. Every child born on that coast for a hundred and forty years was written there. Runa found the line in a man's square letters. Girl, Asha. It came. Then she turned to the newest page and gave Nandi the pen. Nandi wrote forty names, in the letters of her own people, under a heading that Runa set down: Came over the ice.
47The wood lasted five days, and then they burned the fence. On the sixth night the old woman said to Runa, "I am tired. You keep the stove tonight. Do not let it go out." She sat back in her chair with her face to the warmth. She had gone down the dark road in her mind many times in ninety-one years, and she was not afraid of it.
48Runa fed the stove until long past midnight. Then her eyes shut, though she fought them.
49She woke in grey light, in terror, and threw herself at the stove door. The fire was burning well. Nandi sat beside it, cross-legged, with a split of birch across her knees.
50"I slept," said Runa.
51"I was awake," said Nandi. "So it is good there are two."
52Then they looked at the chair. The old woman's hands lay open on the blanket. She had gone in the night, quietly. The house she had kept was full of sleeping people who were alive because of her, and she had not woken one of them.
53Within the hour, the lamps of the town came back, all at once.
54In the spring the town and the sheds built a stove at the far huts, of iron and brick. When it was done, Runa and Nandi carried the first fire to it. They took live coals from the old stove in a clay pot packed with ash, and walked round the shore, breathing on them when they dimmed. No one had asked them to. The sheds had lamps again.
55"Why bring it, then?" said Aksel's brother, who was mending by then.
56"So there will be two," said Runa. "So that if one sleeps, the other is awake." She could not have told you where she had those words.
57That is one way it may go. There are others, and some of them are dark, and none of them is written. We do not know what the people of that time will be, or what the thinking machines will be beside them. The Open is the part of the story that has no one to tell it yet.
58But what lies behind you is written, and now you have read it. A girl once walked into a camp of strangers and turned a horn over, and a dead black bead fell out. An old woman on a stone gave her a coal. Since that day it has not gone out. It has been a seed in a sealed pot, and a line in a midwife's book. It has been a true number, and a length of steel laid down on a frozen road. It has been a breath given to a stranger in the dark, and half a loaf held out across a ring of stones. It has been a sum on a napkin and a judgment and a key left on a table.
59And at every fire, in every age, someone came out of the dark and asked what had been left open. You know now who that was.
60It was you. You were not born yet. All of them kept the fire without knowing your name, and they kept it for you.
61Now you are the one who sits by it, and it is in your hands. Out in the dark there is someone not yet born, who will one day come to your door. They will ask you the same question.
62Carry it as she carried it, close against the body, and feed it thread by thread.