The Morning of the Kayaks

The sapling came up to Paul Smith's knee. That was the whole of the hill's furniture, the whole of its amenity, the whole of its contribution to the occasion.

Everything else was dust, and rocks, and the morning.

The plant itself was new to the hill by a handful of days. A few stones had been arranged near the base of it, not quite symmetrically, and the dirt packed around its roots was still fresher than the dirt around it. The crown held eight or nine leaves, young enough to still be deciding whether Clivilius was going to be survivable for them. The trunk was the thickness of a finger. The thing was not yet an oak in any meaningful sense. It was a promise made by a plant.

Paul stood beside it with his hands at his sides. He had crossed the river earlier, alone, and had taken up his position with the quiet seriousness of a man arranging a room that did not yet have walls.

He had been standing there for some time by the time the others began pushing off from the far bank, and for the whole of that time his only company had been the dust, the sapling, and whatever he was carrying in his head that morning — which, as it happened, was a great deal.

It is a curious thing to wait alone on a hill for the people you have asked to come and build a government with you. The waiting has a physical weight that is not quite fear and not quite anticipation — a sort of acknowledgement, mostly, that the thing you are about to do is going to be either laughable or important, and that the two possibilities are still indistinguishable from each other.

Paul had been through versions of this feeling before, in smaller rooms with better chairs. Those rooms had always had walls. This hill did not. The sapling at his knee was, in that sense, the only boundary he had yet drawn around the thing he was calling a council, and he was aware — in the quiet way he was aware of most things — that the sapling was not much of a boundary, and that the meeting would therefore have to provide its own walls.

On the far bank, the Council was climbing into its kayaks.

The river was wide. Wide enough that the five people setting out from the far side of it looked, from where Paul was standing, like figures in a painting that had not yet decided on its own subject.

Grant Ironbach — the one of them who had ever seriously held a paddle before — crossed without difficulty. The others came behind him in the manner of five people crossing a wide river in boats they had never used before, which is to say with effort, the occasional silent swearing, and the patience of water that did not care either way.

One by one they reached the stones at the foot of the hill.

One by one they climbed.

They gathered around the man and the plant, and formed the loose shape that would come to be called a circle, and that on the morning itself was more of a polite suggestion.

There were no chairs, because nobody had put any there. There was no water, because nobody had brought any. There was no shade, because the only shade-producing object on the hill was the sapling, and the sapling's shadow was the width of a hand and moved with the morning the way small shadows did.

They stood. Or they sat. Or they lowered themselves into the dust according to what their knees said. Terry Saba, who was easy in his body in a way the others envied without noticing they envied it, was the first to go fully down, and he stayed there more comfortably than anyone else.

And they began to govern.

There is a particular absurdity to founding moments that is only visible afterwards. On the morning itself, the absurdity was perfectly visible, but nobody on the hill was in any position to enjoy it. What it looked like — to anyone who might have been watching from a vantage point that did not, at that moment, exist — was six people in a loose ring around a plant, on a hill across a river, in a stretch of Clivilius that had only lately begun to contain human beings at all.

Paul did not call the meeting to order. There was no order to call. He simply began speaking — quietly, about the water, about the tents, about the shortage of people, about the things that were breaking and the things that would break next if nobody made them stop.

His voice was not the voice of a man presenting a vision. It was the voice of a man reading out a list of the day's work to people he had not yet had time to convince were listening.

They were listening.

The morning settled around them in the way mornings settled when there was nothing to interrupt them. No birdsong, because the region had no birds. No insect sound, because the region had none of those either. No rustle of leaves, because the one plant on the hill had nine of them and not one of them was rustling. There was the river, audible behind them only as an idea of water. There were the six voices on the hill, and in the gaps between the voices there was the particular silence of a place that had not yet learned to be listened to.

The dust held the shapes of where boots and shoes had been placed, and released those shapes slowly as the wearers shifted.

Partway through, Glenda De Bruyn reached into a canvas satchel and drew out a notebook that nobody had asked for. She opened it on her knee and began to write.

She had brought the notebook across the river on a private suspicion that, if the writing-down of things was going to happen on this hill at all, no one had made arrangements for it in advance. Her handwriting was small and neat and Swiss. Her pen moved in the careful clipped phrases she had learnt, over years of practice in rooms where nobody was supposed to know she was writing anything at all, how to make move fast without looking like they were moving fast.

Her pen was the only sound on the hill that was not a voice. It was a sound most of the others did not notice. It was a sound Paul noticed immediately, and filed, without comment, under useful.

A little later, Michael Abela — newest of the six by an interval more usefully measured in hours than in weeks — unrolled a sheet of paper onto the dirt in front of him. He weighted its four corners with four small stones.

He had gathered the stones on the walk up the hill, in the minute before everything began, without being entirely certain at the time why he was gathering them. He had simply noticed that the hill had stones on it and that paper had corners, and had acted on the quiet understanding that the gap between those two facts was, before very long, going to need closing.

The stones held his paper flat. His paper was the first thing anyone had yet placed on the dirt of that hill that could be read. The wind, which was mild but not absent, did not lift the corners.

Paul, watching, understood without saying so that the Council from this morning onward would be a body whose members brought to it the things he himself had not thought of. He experienced the thought the way he experienced most of his useful thoughts — as a small settling, low in the chest, of something that had been a worry becoming something more like a relief.

Adrian Pafistis, who was a builder, looked at the sapling at one point and silently performed the calculation his working life had trained him to perform on any plant of that species and size. He knew what a young oak needed. He knew what this ground was not providing. He worked out, without meaning to, how many years it would take before the thing was large enough to shelter even one of the people currently sitting around it — and whether any of the people currently sitting around it were likely to be on the hill in that number of years — and what it meant that the plant had been put here anyway by a man who almost certainly knew the answer to both questions as well as Adrian did.

The number was not a short one.

He did not share it. Builders, in Adrian's experience, rarely benefited from volunteering numbers the people around them had not asked for. And he understood, in the slow quiet way he understood most things, that the sapling was not really about shade.

The meeting wound toward its close in the way meetings of its kind did when there was no gavel to bring them down. Not by conclusion, exactly — by the gradual slackening of attention, by a silence that lasted a beat longer than the previous silences, by Paul falling quiet and the others understanding, together and without speaking, that quiet was where he was going to stay.

The ring loosened.

Nobody stood up yet.

It was the hinge moment, small and almost unnoticed — the second or two between a meeting having happened and the people at the meeting having begun to leave it. The hill held them there. The dust held the impressions of where they had been. The sapling held its shadow, which had moved during the sitting by exactly the width of itself, and was now on the other side of the small stones at its base.

For that second or two, the six of them existed as a Council for the first time — not as a plan, not as an intention, not as a hill with a plant on it, but as six people on a patch of dirt around which, in some way that had not been true when the morning began, there was now the faint outline of something.