Saga ⁓ the island carved in wood: Teide rising from the sea inside a ring of glyphs

Episode 28

Temporada

The plaza at Los Silos, on the big market day. Late summer, 2042.

Welcome back to Nivaria. Slow news from a quiet island. This is Caitlyn Meeks. Thanks for being here.

The thing about Los Silos, if you have grown up above the fog, is that it is down.

Saga had walked it a hundred times and it still surprised her: an hour and a bit of going down through the laurel and out from under the cloud, and then the light changes and keeps changing, and by the time you come out at the banana sheds it is a different weather system and possibly a different country. The plaza sits low and green with the church at one end and the laurel trees clipped into squares, and the sea is right there behind the town making its enormous ordinary noise.

Nearly everyone came. That was the thing about the northwest leg. When the show is at Vilaflor you send a delegation; when it is at Los Silos you send the entire mountain, because it is practically the same address, and because you can walk home afterward in the dark with a full basket and somebody's uncle singing.

So Querencia emptied out. Linnea came with two crates of preserves and a face like a woman who intended to trade hard. Anna came down off her mountain with the candy laid out in rows so straight they looked typeset. Talvin came, and carried things, and said about eleven words. Stef and Godelieve came in the Santana with Jef and half a cantenna array in the back for a stop on the way home. Sirius came, because Sirius came.

And the Cebolla sisters came, which nobody could remember happening before.

"It is the market," said Remedios, when Saga said so out loud, which she had not entirely meant to. "Onions do not sell themselves."

"They sort of do," said Saga.

"Yes," said Remedios. "That is the tragedy of onions."

They had brought two sacks and sold both by half past ten, and after that they simply stayed, the three of them moving through the plaza in a loose formation that Saga found herself tracking the way you track weather. Angustias walked at the front with her hands behind her back, looking at things at roof height. Remedios stopped constantly, because everybody in the northwest with a goat knew her. Milagros went where she went. Twice Saga looked for her at one end of the plaza and found her at the other, and did not see her cross.

The show was at six. Until then it was a market: fish and papas and gofio and figs, a woman with sixty kinds of seed in sixty twists of paper, Gertie and two of the El Fraile kids repainting the puppet booth in the shade with the doors open so people could watch, Ruymán tuning the timple on the steps of the bandstand, the Chacho brothers stringing wire between the plaza's two strongest laurels and arguing continuously about tension in the voices of men who have had this argument nine hundred times and would be disappointed to stop.

Yara came past with Torbe riding in the backpack, which is where Torbe rode now. He was eighteen. He had a blue lion-mane cut and a ruff and he slept a great deal and Yara lifted him in and out without either of them mentioning it, and when he was awake he watched the plaza go by over her shoulder with the expression of a small emperor being carried to something he had already approved.

Saga was fourteen and had two jobs. One was helping Anna, which mostly meant standing at the stand looking honest. The other was the notebook.

The notebook was for names.

At one o'clock the market went quiet the way markets do, and Stef drove four loads of people down to the charco in the Santana, five minutes each way, standing room in the bed, which is not a thing anybody would have permitted in the before and is the entire transport policy of the northwest now.

Charco los Chochos is a hole in the black rock on the coast below the town where the sea comes in over a lip and then has to stop and think about it. On a flat day it is a swimming pool that the Atlantic tops up twice a day for free. On a bad day it is the Atlantic, and there is a man from Los Silos who will tell you which kind of day it is and what he says is the law.

It was a flat day.

You walk in past the whale.

The whale had been there since before Saga, laid out long and clean beside the path where anybody going down to swim has to go by it: the ribs up on their steel like the frame of a boat somebody abandoned halfway, the long jaw, the knuckled column of the spine running away from you for what seems an unreasonable distance and then continuing. It had come ashore dead a long time ago further up the coast, and the town had cleaned it and set it out, and now it belonged to everybody and to nobody in the way of the camel.

In the before it had stood two meters up on posts, behind a rail, with a sign. You could look at it. Some time in the bad years somebody took it down off the posts and re-set the whole thing low on the rock at about knee height, on the same steel, bolted the same way, square and true and solid as a footbridge ⁓ and there is no record of who decided that, or when, or whether anybody was asked, because by then there was no longer anybody left whose job it was to say you could not.

The bones had gone the color of old soap. Somebody kept the weeds off them.

Saga had been climbing in and out of that whale since she was six years old and had never once thought a single thing about it, and neither had anybody else, and that afternoon nine children went past it at a dead run with their towels over their shoulders and not one of them turned a head.

Then they all got in the water and behaved appallingly for two hours.

Jef could do a thing off the north lip that involved going in feet first and coming out the other side of the charco without appearing to have swum, and he did it eleven times, and would have done it more if Godelieve had not begun counting out loud. Two of Gertie's El Fraile kids, who had come north for the puppet booth and had never in their lives been in cold water, discovered cold water. Sirius went in off the low rock with the total commitment of a dog who has decided that the family is drowning, retrieved nobody, and got out again looking pleased.

Yara sat on the flat rock in the shade with her feet in and Torbe beside her on a folded shirt, and Torbe watched the water the way old dogs watch water, with enormous interest and no intention whatsoever.

Anna swam properly, out and back, twice, in a slow unhurried crawl that surprised the children every time they saw it. Linnea did not swim and instead conducted, from the rocks, a long and increasingly technical negotiation with a woman from Buenavista about vanilla.

The Cebolla sisters came down for it, which was the second unprecedented thing about that day.

Remedios did not go in. She sat on the plinth of the whale with her shoes on and her hands folded and supervised, and told two separate children that the sea does not care about them personally, which is the closest thing to a blessing she gives.

Angustias went in like a woman being paid to. She swam out to the lip and hung there in the swell with her elbows on the rock, looking north at three hundred kilometers of open water, and stayed there long enough that Saga looked over twice.

And Milagros, who was barefoot in all weathers, walked into the sea in her waistcoat.

Not far. Up to about mid-thigh. She stood there for a quarter of an hour with the water going in and out around her and the pockets presumably filling, doing nothing at all, and when she came out she was, as far as anybody could tell, entirely dry above the hem, and none of the three of them mentioned it, and Saga wrote nothing in the notebook because there was nothing you could write.

They walked back up at half past three, because five minutes in a Santana is five minutes and fifteen minutes on foot is fifteen minutes, and the walk is prettier.

On the way up they got in the whale.

Everybody does. You come up off the rocks cold and salted with your towel round your shoulders and the path takes you along its flank, and at some point somebody steps over the spine and in between two ribs and sits down, and then everybody does, and that is simply how the walk goes.

Six of them fitted with room over. Saga sat with her back against the inside curve of a rib, which is warm, because bone in the sun is warm, and looked up.

The light came down through the gaps in stripes and laid itself across all of them in bands, so that Jef had a white stripe across his face and did not know, and the two El Fraile kids kept moving their hands in and out of the light to watch it happen. The sound was different in there. Not quieter. The sea and the wind and the children up at the top of the path all arrived slightly bent, the way sound arrives inside a boat or a church or a big empty water tank, and you could hear the whole coast doing its business somewhere outside the room you were sitting in.

Sirius came in and lay down along the spine with a grunt and put his chin on Saga's foot.

Nobody said very much. Jef, after a while, said, "It's a big one," which was the sum total of that afternoon's scholarship on the subject, and everybody agreed, and they sat inside the ribs of the largest animal any of them would ever be near for another five minutes while the water dried off them.

Then somebody's mother shouted from the top of the path, and they all came out, and went up to the market.

Saga's hair was still wet when she got to the cured-meat stall.

The cured-meat stall was on the church side, between the fish and a man selling rope.

Saga noticed it because of the smell first, which was good ⁓ smoke and salt and pepper, the smell of a thing that has been looked after ⁓ and then because of the way it was laid out, which was better than most stalls. Everything squared up. Everything labelled in careful capitals on scraps of card. CABRA. CONEJO. CONEJO ADOBADO. Goat. Rabbit. Rabbit in marinade.

The man behind it was about seventy and built like a wall that had settled. Big hands. A beard kept short for practical reasons. He wore a shirt buttoned to the throat in the heat and he had a good, easy way with customers, unhurried, letting them take their time, and Saga watched him give a woman four extra strips over the weight and wave off the argument about it, and thought, without any particular feeling, he's nice.

Then she looked at the back of the stall, at the crate he had not put out yet.

There was a leg in it.

Not a joint. Not a piece cut for selling. A whole back leg with the hoof still on the end of it and the hair still on the hide in a band above the hock, coarse and gingery and perfectly ordinary, the way hair is when it is still attached to the animal it grew on. It sat in the crate on a sheet of blue plastic beside a stack of clean cards and a pencil, in the shade, waiting to be dealt with, and it was the most reasonable object in the world and Saga could not stop looking at it.

Nobody else looked at it. Her mother walked past the stall and did not look at it. A man bought a quarter kilo of goat with his back to it.

"¿Mi niña?"

The man was holding out a strip of something dark to her over the counter, between two fingers.

"Prueba. Es conejo." Try it. It's rabbit.

She took it because she was fourteen and it was offered and there was no version of not taking it that she could see from where she was standing. It was good. It was salty and smoky and slightly sweet and it took a long time to chew, and he watched her eat it with an entirely pleasant expression, and she said thank you and he said de nada, mi niña and turned to the next customer.

Sirius, who had been elsewhere, arrived at the front of the stall in the way he arrived everywhere, which was as though he had been sent for.

The man kicked at him.

It was not violent. That was the thing Saga could not get to sit down properly afterward. He did not aim, and he did not connect, and he did not look. He swung his boot out sideways at a dog near his stock the way you would push a chair in with your foot while carrying two plates, and his face did not change at all, and he went on wrapping the goat, and the customer went on paying, and the sea went on making its noise behind the town.

Sirius stepped back and sat down about a meter away and looked up at him with polite interest, because Sirius had never in his life been given a reason to expect anything else.

Saga stood there with her mouth full of rabbit.

She had turned to find her mother, and instead found that the plaza had rearranged itself.

Angustias Cebolla had stopped walking about six meters from the stall. She had stopped mid-stride, in the middle of a market, on a flagstone, and she was standing absolutely still with her hands behind her back, looking at the man in the buttoned shirt.

Remedios was beside her, which was strange, because a second earlier Remedios had been forty feet away at the fish. She had gone still too, but differently ⁓ she had folded her hands at her waist and gone smooth, the way she did when she was about to make a ruling, except she was not making one.

And Milagros had arrived from wherever Milagros arrives from, and was looking not at the man but at his truck, parked up under the laurels behind the stall with the back doors shut.

"Eight," said Milagros.

"Not now," said Angustias.

"Eight since May. I have said eight since May."

"Milagros."

"I have said it four times," said Milagros, mildly, to the truck.

Twenty meters away, on the far side of the plaza, Yara stopped dead in the middle of a sentence, because the dog in her backpack had gone rigid against her spine.

Torbe was not barking. Torbe never barked at anything except on cue and for money. He had gone hard and still and pushed up against the top of the pack with his weight forward and all of it pointed at one man, and Yara ⁓ who had carried that dog on her back through four years of markets, and knew his fourteen ordinary shapes the way you know a bannister in the dark ⁓ turned around slowly to see what he had.

She saw a cured-meat stall and a big old man being pleasant to a customer.

"What," she said. "What."

Torbe did not stop looking at him. His lip was up on one side, which Yara had seen him do exactly once, at a thing in a barranco in 2036 that had turned out to be a barranquero and not worth it.

She put one hand back over him. He was shaking. He was eighteen years old and he was shaking on her back in the middle of a plaza on a hot afternoon.

They did not do anything for about four minutes, and Saga watched all four of them not do it, and that was the part that told her something was badly wrong. Adults do not stand still in markets.

She went and stood next to Angustias, who did not look at her.

"Who is he?"

"Iván," said Angustias.

She said it the way you read a word off a form.

"Iván who?"

"Iván from up the Erques valley." Angustias's eyes had not moved off the stall. "He was a hunter. He is still a hunter, evidently. He ran rabbit with podencos in this end of the island for thirty years, and he ran a lot of dogs, and he was on my ground a great deal of the time without being entitled to be."

"You caught him?"

"Nine times." A pause. "Eleven. Nine that went anywhere."

Saga waited. She had learned that from Anna: if you leave a hole in a conversation, a certain kind of adult will eventually put something in it.

"At the end of a season," said Angustias, "a man with too many dogs has a problem, because a dog eats all year and hunts for four months. Some men solve that problem by keeping fewer dogs." She shifted her weight. "Other men drive up a forestry track in February and open the back of the vehicle and drive home."

Saga did not say anything at all.

"That is where the packs come from," said Angustias. "All of them. Every pack in this end of the island. People talk about them like weather, like they blew in. They did not blow in. They were carried up a hill in a van by somebody who then went home and had his dinner."

"And you couldn't ⁓ "

"No."

"But it's ⁓ "

"There was no offence I could make stick," said Angustias, "because I could never put the man and the dogs and the day in the same place with anything I could write down, and because half the valley did it, and because it was not, in those years, a thing that anybody was going to spend a courtroom on." She finally looked down at Saga. "I wrote it all up anyway. Every time. Nine reports."

"What happened to them?"

"They went to La Laguna," said Angustias, "and were filed."

Behind them the man called Iván laughed at something a customer said, comfortably, like anybody's grandfather.

There was a camel at the far end of the plaza and had been all day.

He belonged to Garachico, in the sense that nobody had ever established that he belonged to anybody else, and he came to markets in this end of the island because the ayuntamiento had a cart and the church had a harness and the argument about which of them owned him had been going on since about 2032 with no side wishing to win it. He had spent the morning bringing crates up from the road and the afternoon tied in the shade under the laurels being fed things he should not have, which was the arrangement. He was twenty-four. He had a face like a closed shop.

Saga had said hello to him at eleven, because you did.

She was not thinking about him at all when Sirius left her side and walked, without hurry and without being called, across the plaza to the back of Iván's panel truck, and sat down against the doors, and would not come when she called him.

That was so unlike him that she went over.

"Sirius. Sirius."

He looked at her. He wagged twice, apologetically, the way he did when he had made up his mind. Then he put his nose to the seam between the doors and breathed in, and made a sound in his chest that Saga had never heard him make in eight years, and looked back at her again.

"Move him."

She turned. The man standing behind her was compact and weathered and could have been forty or sixty, in a shirt gone soft with washing, with a coil of cord over his shoulder and no bag. She knew him the way everybody in the northwest knew him, which was that he turned up, and that animals arranged themselves around him without being asked.

"Ferran ⁓ "

"Not you, mi niña. Him." Ferran was not looking at her either. He was looking at the seam of the doors, and his face had gone somewhere unfriendly. "Move him off the door. Whatever is in there is going to come out fast."

Angustias had crossed the plaza without appearing to hurry. Remedios was three steps behind her. Milagros was already there, standing at the corner of the truck with her hands in her waistcoat, and had said nothing since eight.

"Ferran," said Angustias.

"Guardia."

"Nineteen years ago."

"Yes," said Ferran, "well," and put his hand flat on the door.

Iván came round the side of the stall unhurriedly, wiping his hands on a cloth. He did not look alarmed. He looked like a man interrupted mid-job by something mildly inconvenient, and he took in all five of them and the dog and did not adjust his face by one millimetre.

"Buenas," he said.

"Open the truck," said Angustias.

"It's my truck."

"Open it."

He considered her for a moment. Saga watched him do it, and watched the exact instant he decided that opening the truck was less trouble than not opening it, and she understood, with a cold drop in her stomach, that he had arrived at that decision without ever once passing through the question of whether he had done something wrong.

He opened the truck.

There were fourteen cats.

They were in six wire cages and two crates with mesh nailed over the tops, and the truck had been standing in the sun since ten, and the smell came out of it in one push like something with weight. Some of them were making noise. Most of them were not, which was worse. There was a water bowl in one cage, on its side, dry.

Nobody said anything for a second or two. Then Remedios said, "Ay," once, quietly, and took off her hat, and went in.

She went in the way a person goes into water they already know is cold. She was sixty-five years old and small and round and she got up into that truck without asking anyone for a hand, and she started at the far end, and her voice came back out of the dark going con permiso, señora, con permiso to each cage in turn as she got her hands on it, because that was simply what she did and there was no version of her that did it differently.

Ferran took the cages as she passed them down and set them in the shade under the laurels in a row, and Milagros went along the row unhooking doors and setting bowls, producing bowls from somewhere in the waistcoat in a manner Saga did not examine, and Angustias stood between all of it and Iván without appearing to be standing between anything.

"They're cats," said Iván.

He said it to Angustias, reasonably, in the tone of a man clearing up a misunderstanding.

"There are thousands of them. They're in the barrancos, they're in the plátanos, they take the birds. Everybody knows it. I take them off the walls where people ask me to and I take the rest where I find them." He shrugged, one shoulder. "It's a cat."

"Fourteen," said Angustias.

"Then it's fourteen cats."

And there it was, and Saga saw her mother arrive at her shoulder and did not turn round, because she was busy watching a man be completely honest.

He was not lying. That was the thing. He was not defending himself, or performing regret, or getting angry, because none of those things had occurred to him as being required. He had been asked to account for fourteen cats in the back of a hot truck and he had accounted for them, accurately, and he was now waiting to see what the fuss was, with his cloth still in his hand.

"Is it in the conejo?" said Ferran, from the row of cages, without looking up.

"No."

"Is it in the conejo, Iván."

"No," said Iván, and then, with the first flicker of something that was not quite irritation, "and you can ask her." He nodded at Remedios, who had come back down out of the truck with the last crate. "She's the vet. She's been the vet forty years. Ask her."

They asked her.

Remedios stood there with a crate in her arms and cat hair on her black dress and looked at the meat on the stall for a long moment, at the squared-up rows of it, at the careful capitals on the cards.

"I cannot tell you," she said.

"Remedios ⁓ "

"I cannot tell you." She set the crate down. "Cured, shredded and dried, from across the counter, without a bench and without a microscope? No. Nobody can. Any person who says they can from here is telling you a story." She straightened up, and she was not looking at Iván, she was looking at the fifty or sixty people who had by now stopped what they were doing all across that end of the plaza. "I do not know what is in it. That is the truth and it is all of the truth and I will not improve it for you."

Nobody ever did find out. Not that day, and not afterward. It is still, in that part of the island, a thing people say with a particular face.

Angustias took out the pencil.

Saga was near enough to see it and to not understand it, and it stayed with her afterward more than the truck did, which she felt guilty about for years and eventually stopped feeling guilty about.

It was a flat carpenter's pencil, worn short, sharpened with a knife. Angustias had it behind her ear the way she always did, and she reached up and took it down, and then she put her other hand into the pocket of her apron, which was where a notebook would be if there were a notebook.

There was no notebook. There had not been a notebook in that pocket for twelve years.

She stood in the middle of a market square with a sharpened pencil in her hand and nothing to write on and nowhere to send it.

The time, Saga thought, watching her, without knowing why the words had arrived. She wants to write down the time.

Nineteen years of a machine. A form with boxes on it. An office in La Laguna. A person she would never meet, in eleven weeks, reading her handwriting and deciding whether enough had been done. It had been a slow, dull, quarrelsome, deeply unglamorous machine and it had never once given her what she wanted, and it had been there, and you could put a thing into it and the thing would exist somewhere other than in your own head.

Angustias looked at the pencil for about three seconds.

Then she put it back behind her ear and turned around and said, in a perfectly ordinary voice, to the plaza:

"This is Iván Melián, from up the Erques valley. He hunted this end of the island for thirty years. At the end of every season he drove his dogs up a forestry track and left them there, and that is where every pack in the northwest comes from, and I could never prove it, and I am not proving it now. I am telling you."

She said it once. She did not raise her voice. Los Silos on a market day is not a quiet place and she did not compete with it; she simply said it, and it went across the flagstones the way that kind of sentence goes, and then she stopped talking and there was nothing else.

That was the dogs. The cats went round the plaza on their own, the way that kind of news does, and it was the cats that did it.

The Los Silos people were angry the way anybody is angry about animals in cages in the sun.

The Querencia people were angry about something else, and it took a while for anybody to work out what, because what the Querencia people kept saying, to each other and then to strangers, was that he had taken the Viscount.

Somebody had to explain it, and it did not explain well. Said out loud in a market square, at speed, to people who had never been up that mountain, it sounded exactly as ridiculous as it is: that there is a small black cat above El Tanque who holds a title over a water channel eleven inches wide, granted by a retired vet on the grounds of long service, who draws a salary in sardine heads, who is not picked up and is not called, and who goes through doors first.

The Los Silos people listened to all of that with their arms folded, and then looked at the row of cages under the laurels, and got it in about four seconds, because every town on this island has one. Los Silos has a donkey that is owed money.

To Iván they were fourteen cats. He had said so, and he had meant it, and as an inventory it was correct.

Nobody shouted. Nobody went for him. Saga had braced for it without knowing she had, and it did not come, and what came instead was so much stranger and took so much longer that she did not recognize it as anything at all until it was nearly finished.

A woman at the fish stall turned her back and began doing something to a box.

The rope man folded a tarp over his stock, which he had no reason to do at four in the afternoon.

Two men who had been standing at Iván's counter with their money out put their money away, without hurry, and walked off in different directions, and neither of them said anything to him, and one of them said buenas to Angustias on the way past.

It went on like that for about ten minutes. Nobody made a speech. Nobody was rude. The plaza simply stopped having a place in it where that stall was, the way water stops having a place in it where a stone is, and by twenty past four Iván Melián was standing behind a beautifully laid-out cured-meat stall in the middle of the biggest market day of the year in the northwest of Tenerife, and there was nobody within nine meters of him in any direction.

He stood there for a while. He genuinely did not seem to understand what had happened, and Saga thought later that he probably never did.

Then he began, unhurriedly, to pack.

The truck was parked under the laurels, and so was the camel, and to get the crates from the stall to the truck a man had to pass within about a meter and a half of him.

Iván had made that walk four times already that day without incident, because a camel tied in shade at a market is furniture, and because Manolo had spent the afternoon accepting fig-ends from children with the air of a magistrate accepting a small bribe he intended to keep and ignore.

On the fifth pass, carrying the crate with the leg in it, Iván came alongside and Manolo turned his head and bit him.

There is no dignified way to describe eight hundred kilos of camel making a decision. He did not lunge and he did not rear. He simply reached over, took hold of the man's right hand and most of the wrist in his mouth, and held on, and then let go, all inside about two seconds, and went back to looking at the middle distance with the crate contents scattered across the flagstones between them.

Iván made a sound. The plaza, which had been carefully not looking at him for a quarter of an hour, turned round as one animal.

Ferran got there first.

He was ex-EMT the way Remedios was ex-anything, which is to say not, and he had Iván sat down on the plinth of the laurel with the hand up and a folded shirt under it inside twenty seconds, and he worked on it for the next half hour without one word of comment. He cleaned it out. He got the bleeding stopped and the hand strapped and told him, flatly and clearly and twice, that a camel's mouth is filthy, that this would go bad by Thursday if it was not seen to, and that he should get to Remedios or to the clinic at Icod within two days and not four.

Then he said, "Do you understand what I told you," and waited until he got an answer, which is a thing you learn in an ambulance and never lose.

"Yes," said Iván.

"Good," said Ferran, and stood up, and went back to the cages.

Saga had watched the entire thing from six meters away and could not have said, at the time, why it made her want to sit down on the ground.

Remedios came past her and paused.

"He is a bad man and it is a bad hand," she said. "Those are separate."

The fourth cage, at the back and on the bottom, had held El Vizconde de la Acequia Alta.

He is a small black cat who limps on the left, and his title is the Viscount of the Upper Water Channel, and the channel is a stone gutter eleven inches wide, which is the joke and has been the joke on that mountain for years. He got the title because he has spent his entire life at one bend of it sitting bolt upright with his tail curled over his feet, putting one paw down into the running water to stop it, the way a cat does at a tap. He has never caught it. He has never stopped trying. Remedios decided a devotion on that scale ought to come with land.

Everybody on that mountain knows the protocol, because Remedios wrote it. The Viscount is not picked up. The Viscount is not called. He arrives, and is received, and he goes through doors first. He is paid in sardine heads on a saucer set down with a step backward, Señor Vizconde, because it is a salary and not charity.

And the Viscount does not leave his jurisdiction. He stops, always, at the bend where the channel turns off toward Garachico, and there is not a person alive who has seen him past it.

He was twelve kilometers from his bend and seven hundred meters below it, in a wire cage on the floor of a hot truck, in a town he had never in his life had any business being in.

Saga did not open the cage. She wanted to so badly that her hands hurt, and she did not, because she did not have the standing.

Remedios did.

Remedios came and knelt down on the flagstones in her black dress with the cat hair on it, and undid the cage door, and set it wide, and then sat back on her heels and put her hands in her lap and waited, which took a while.

"Señor Vizconde," she said. "Con permiso."

He came out in his own time. He came out the way he came up a path, without hurry and without acknowledgement, and he stood on the hot stone of a market square with his tail down and made the one flat consonantal syllable he makes, which is not a meow and never has been, and which on that particular afternoon he made four times.

Then he walked six steps and sat down against Saga's shin, facing outward, which is not being picked up and is not being called, and which anybody from that mountain would have recognized as the whole of his position on the matter.

Saga sat down on the flagstones beside him without touching him and cried the way you cry when a thing is finished rather than while it is happening, which is much worse and takes longer.

Eight of the fourteen were from the colony. Milagros went down the row and named them without hesitating, in order, including two that Saga had never once managed to tell apart.

"You said eight," said Angustias.

"I said eight," said Milagros.

"Since May."

"Since May."

Nobody apologized, because that is not how they work. Angustias put her hand briefly on the back of her sister's neck as she went past, which in that family is roughly a parade.

The show went ahead at six.

It went ahead because it always went ahead, and because two hundred people had walked down a mountain, and because Tibor's position on the matter, delivered to the whole company in the shade of the church with his hands out, was that a plaza which has had a bad afternoon needs the show more and not less, and that this was not a philosophical claim but a scheduling one.

So the lights went up in the laurels and along the rail of the bandstand, and Ruymán did the silbo intro with half the plaza whistling back out of the dark, and the Chachos went up on the wire and defended Gran Canaria against all comers, and Mateo's bass came up off the flagstones through everybody's feet. Torbe came out of the backpack for the card act and walked the fan with the gravity of a customs inspection and delivered El Loco to a nine-year-old boy, who had to read it aloud to the entire assembly and did, twice, because the first time nobody could hear him.

The old panel truck had gone by then. Nobody watched it go.

Late on, when the fire was down to the good part and people had started the long walk back up into the fog, Saga found Angustias sitting on the church steps with her boots off.

"What happens to him now?"

"Nothing."

"But ⁓ "

"Nothing happens to him," said Angustias. "Nothing has ever happened to him. He will go home, and his hand will hurt, and in a month he will sell at Buenavista instead and somebody up there will buy from him, because they were not here today." She rubbed the arch of one foot with her thumb. "That is what it is. I have had nineteen years of wanting it to be something else."

Saga thought about that.

"The market did something," she said.

Angustias looked at her.

"Yes," she said. "It did." And then, after a while, in a completely different voice, one Saga had not heard from her before and did not hear again for years: "It did, actually."

Saga took out the notebook.

She turned past the names she had been collecting all summer for the act ⁓ Doña Pino, Auxi, a fisherman called Nazario who had asked for his mother's name to be said out loud, a boy in Icod who had spelled his own name wrong on purpose to test her ⁓ and she found a clean page near the back, and she wrote:

Iván Melián. From up the Erques valley. Podencos, at the end of the season, on the forestry tracks. This is where the packs come from. Los Silos, 2042.

She did it because it seemed like the sort of thing that ought to be written down somewhere, and because the only other person who had ever written it down had written it nine times into a machine that no longer existed, and Saga was fourteen and did not put those two facts next to each other, then or ever.

Angustias watched her do it. She did not say anything about it. She sat on the steps of a church with her boots off and watched a girl write a name in a notebook, and after a moment she reached up and took the flat pencil down from behind her ear and looked at it, and put it back.

Then they walked home up the mountain in the dark, all of them, with the baskets and the cages and somebody's uncle singing.

The Viscount was carried. There was no other way to do it and everybody understood that, and Remedios asked him twice, formally, and then lifted him into a slatted crate and carried the crate herself the whole way up, and did not hand it to anybody, and nobody offered twice. He rode facing forward. He said nothing at all for twelve kilometers.

All fourteen went up that mountain, which was not a decision anybody made out loud. The colony above Querencia is the closest thing the northwest has to a shelter and has been for years, on the grounds that Remedios lives there and there is nowhere else.

Six of them had never been near that mountain in their lives: four from Garachico, two from the lanes behind the Los Silos sheds. They came anyway, because two days shut in a truck in August is not a thing an animal walks off, and because you do not point a dehydrated cat at a town twelve kilometers downhill and wish it luck.

It took most of a fortnight and it was dull, which is what that work is. Shade, and quiet, and water given by syringe a little at a time to the two who would not drink, and small feeds four times a day, and one of the Los Silos pair who went backward on the fourth night and had Remedios sitting up with him until it got light. Angustias built a run out of two pallets and a bed frame in an afternoon. Milagros did the nights, because Milagros was awake anyway.

They all came through. The Garachico four went home in the second week in a crate on the Guagua, in Fran's care, and Fran did not ask what any of it was about and was told anyway, at length, from Ruigómez to the coast, by Milagros.

It was five days before the Viscount resumed his post.

On the sixth morning he was back at the bend in the thin early light, sitting bolt upright with his tail curled over his feet, putting one paw down into the running water to stop it, and not stopping it, and trying again.

Some words from that afternoon, for the curious: