Chapter 5: what he survived

The fire had been going a long while and neither of them had said anything in most of that while, which was, by now, an ordinary enough silence between them that Abhorasj had stopped noticing it as silence at all. He was looking, without any particular purpose, at the place on Ghor's foreleg where the bone sat wrong.

"That didn't heal straight," he said.

It was not a question. He rarely asked questions, on the grounds that a question implied you were missing information you actually wanted, and Abhorasj was, as a rule, only interested in information he already intended to use.

Ghor glanced down at the leg as though he needed the reminder. "No," he agreed. "It didn't."

Silence again, for a moment. Abhorasj had said the thing that was true and now considered the subject closed, the way he considered most subjects closed the instant the accurate fact about them had been stated. Ghor did not appear to consider it closed.

"You want to know how," Ghor said.

"I told you how. It didn't set straight."

"That's what happened to the leg. I meant the other part." Ghor stretched the leg out toward the fire, turning it slightly, watching the light move across the old damage as though he were reading something written there that only he could see. "There's a version of that question that's really asking how the leg got hurt, and a version that's asking why I still have opinions about it forty years later. You asked the first one. Most people mean the second one and don't know it."

"I meant the first one."

"I know. I'm answering the second one anyway. It's more interesting."

Abhorasj said nothing, which Ghor had learned, by now, to read as permission rather than dismissal.

"There was a thing," Ghor said, "some considerable while ago, that was under the impression it was the largest problem currently active in its particular stretch of the world. It wasn't wrong, as impressions go. I want to be fair to it. It had done the math correctly."

"What kind of thing."

"The kind of thing where, if I told you what it looked like, you'd form a picture, and the picture would be wrong, because you'd be picturing something you could beat, and I'd be picturing something that very nearly finished me in about the time it takes to say its name twice. Those are different pictures. I'd rather not give you the wrong one just because it's the one that fits in a sentence."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only true one I've got that isn't a shape. Most of what happened to me that day doesn't hold a shape well. It holds a duration a lot better than it holds a shape."

Abhorasj turned his head slightly, the closest thing to an actual question he tended to produce without using the form of one.

"Four seconds," Ghor said, in response to the tilt of the head rather than to anything spoken aloud. "That's the duration, if you want it in a unit that means something. There was a four-second stretch in there where I was not the most interesting thing in the immediate area, and it turns out four seconds is enough. It's more than enough, honestly. Four seconds is a criminally generous amount of time for something to stop being alive in, if you sit down and actually do the arithmetic on it. I've done the arithmetic on it. Repeatedly. It never comes out feeling like enough time, and it also never comes out feeling like it should have taken any longer."

"You didn't win."

"That's the flat way to put it, and it isn't wrong, so I won't argue with it. I didn't win. I want to be careful, though, because 'didn't win' makes it sound like a contest with a scoreboard, two sides both trying, one of them coming up short through some failure of effort or skill. It wasn't that tidy. I was mostly just there. It was mostly just distracted, right at the point where distraction mattered most. I've turned that over a great many times trying to make myself the reason I'm still talking to you right now, and I can't get the numbers to agree with that version. The honest version is closer to: something else, somewhere else, briefly needed its attention more than I did, and by the time it came back for the rest of me the four seconds had already been spent on the wrong target."

"Luck."

"I hate that word for it, and I use it anyway, because I don't have a better one and I've looked. Luck makes it sound weightless, like something that happened to me instead of something I've had to go on carrying. It wasn't weightless. It's the heaviest thing I own, as it happens, and I own a great deal of scar tissue, so that's saying something."

Abhorasj considered this the way he considered most things Ghor said, which was slowly, and without any visible sign that he was considering it at all.

"What happened to it," he said eventually. "The thing."

"Ah." Ghor's mouth did something that on another creature might have been called a smile, though it didn't sit anywhere near amusement. "Now that's the actual second question again, dressed up as a first one. You want to know if it's still out there. Whether the math still needs doing."

"I want to know what happened to it."

"It moved on. Whatever it had been distracted by, it finished with, and I never saw it again, and I've spent a genuinely embarrassing quantity of time since then wondering what the thing was that pulled its attention off me for those four seconds. Not out of gratitude, exactly, though there's some of that mixed in if I'm honest. Mostly out of — " he stopped, turned the leg further into the firelight, seemed to be choosing between several words that had all arrived at once and none of which quite fit. "Curiosity's too light a word. It's more that I couldn't stop building the rest of its day. Where it had been going before it found me. Whether it had somewhere it was still trying to get to when it stopped being interested in whether I lived. Whether the thing that distracted it mattered more to it than I did, or just happened to be closer, or louder, or newer. I never found out. I've built four or five different versions of that day since, none of which I can confirm, all of which I keep somewhere I can get to them."

"That's not useful," Abhorasj said. "Not knowing."

"No," Ghor agreed easily. "It isn't useful at all. I want to be clear that I'm not recommending it as a practice. It hasn't changed one single thing I've done since — I didn't get more careful, I didn't get less careful, I didn't go looking for it to settle the account either way. It just sits there now, this specific unfinished shape, taking up room that used to be empty. Some things you carry because they're useful to carry. This one I just carry."

Abhorasj looked at the fire for a while.

"When you take something," Ghor said, in a different register now, quieter, the deflection mostly dropped, "do you ever wonder the same thing? Not about the thing itself. About where it was going. What it thought its day was going to be, before you arrived in the middle of it."

"No," Abhorasj said. It was the flattest true thing he owned, and he said it the way he said all flat true things, without apology and without elaboration, because elaboration had never previously seemed required.

"I didn't either," Ghor said. "For a long time. Then I got very close to being someone else's unfinished afternoon instead of the one doing the finishing, and it turns out that changes which side of the sentence you start noticing."

Neither of them said anything for a while after that. It was not an uncomfortable silence — Abhorasj noted this distantly, the way he'd begun noting a number of small things lately that did not immediately resolve into anything useful, and let the noting pass without deciding what to do with it.

"Your leg," he said finally, "would sit straighter if it had been reset within the first day."

"Probably," Ghor said. "There wasn't anyone available in the first day who knew how, and I wasn't in a position to insist on the timing." A pause, and then, in something closer to his ordinary register, the dry edge back in his voice: "I've made my peace with the leg. It's the only part of that whole business I actually did settle. Everything else is still open."

"The fire's low," Abhorasj said, which was true, and which was also, in the only language he currently had available for it, the closing of the subject without either of them agreeing that the subject had actually closed.

"It is," Ghor said, and did not push it further, and reached over without being asked to add another piece of wood to it, and the conversation folded itself quietly back down into the ordinary shape of an evening that had, from the outside, nothing remarkable left in it at all.