Once upon a time…

We had been hired by courts before, the kind where the windows were stained glass and the floors were polished to a mirror, the kind where people whispered and ate grapes, and men and women wore their pride like iron rings. But the hall that called us this time was a different sort of court. The windows were broken. The wind whistled down from the hills and brought straw and smoke inside. The people who sat on benches had frost on their shoulders. A woman who had lost a child last winter sat carving a spoon, and her hands did not shake. Men in patched coats stood along the wall with spears they had made from broom handles. There were banners on the rafters, but they were turned in, as if ashamed to show their faces. This was the court of South Ditch, which had once had a name, and in older times had sent traders upriver to buy salt and grapes. It did not buy anything now. It held on.

We came in under the beam with the carved fox. That was when we first saw her, sitting at the high chair, which was really only a block of stone. Her eyes were dark as smoke. Her hair was bound back with a strip of leather. A knife lay on the block beside her hand, and a dry leaf had fallen on the blade and stuck there. She was clear-eyed, and her face did not show hunger, though I thought she must feel it often. She stood when we came near, and I guessed at the way the others watched her that they did not know yet what to call her. Not queen, not chieftain, not judge. Just the one who could hold the inside of the hall from turning into fox and dust.

We had heard of her in the lower markets where the river was now a brown string between islands of mud. They called her Mara of the Dark Gable, though I did not see any gable left that was not pale with rain. They said she was looking for a band who would go up the Long Stair and bring back something that was not grain, not wood, not salt, and not iron. Smile at that if you like. People thought it foolish. But people talked more when they thought it foolish. So here we were.

The Long Stair, if you have not seen it, is the name the hill paths have behind the old fort. The steps are uneven and were hewn by men who did not expect people to come down again. They lead into the broken range where the crows sound like old doors and the heather has taken back the road. Once there had been towers and dancers and fat fishermen on those heights, if the old songs can be believed. Now there are reeds in the hearths and foxes in the storehouses.

Mara stood and showed us a cloth with the last dye of the Indigo Gate still sharp on it. The pattern was of a raven hung by its feet and a crescent like a bowl of milk. We did not know the marks. She said, “We used to have a thing, and we lost it. Not in treasure, not in tools. We lost the thing that held our days together. Children wake up asking why. Men stop at the fields and do nothing. Women tie knots in twine and then untie them, and the bread burns, and no one scolds. By night people say the air is full of little needles. They prick the heart. We go about our work like ghosts.”

We had heard such words in other courts too. The old order had fallen off its hooks. Some still tried to hang it back. But the hooks were rusted.

“What do you want us to fetch, lady?” said Har, who always asks first and thinks after.

Mara touched the cloth. “I want you to bring back the bell of Gorse Hill. When it rings, people look up and see each other. It does not force you. It does not make you good. But it makes you remember that you are not alone. We had one, once. We rang it on the first fog night, on the last harvest day, on the morning when the river broke its bank and we brought our boats up the street. It cracked five winters ago. The hill swallowed it, or else thieves did. I do not know. The hill is no simple place now. There is an old custom there. It wakes in hunger years. I think it has woken again.”

We nodded, because we all knew about the customs that sleep like cats under a hearth and rise up when the house is empty. But I had never heard of this one. Mara told it in a quiet way that troubled me more than any loud warning.

In the long past, the people of the hill had a habit after a hard season. They made a ladder of reeds and braided grass. They hung on it all the useless tools of the year: cracked cups, blunt knives, a broken spindle, the old shoes of men who had died. They called it the Ladder of Things Left Behind. They set it up on the peak where the wind snatched at it. They climbed it at night, barefoot, one by one, and spoke aloud a thing they would lay down. A stubborn quarrel. A blight name. A fear. Then they hung a small bell on their wrist and shook it once. The sound was a giving up. They say the hill listened. They say in the morning, the ladder was gone. It was only reeds and grass, but it had gone. The hill took the forgetting.

“But you think the hill took more,” Ana said. She is the quiet one in our band, with a braid like a rope, and the only one with children.

Mara nodded. “Now the hill has bound our tongues. It takes the will out of a body. It takes meaning out of bread. Go up. Bring back the bell. And if you can, wake the hill’s pity. Make it take only what we give, not what it wants.”

We left before dawn, because it is easier to walk when your mind has not yet remembered all the ways to hunger. The path to Gorse Hill follows the canal bed and then climbs through birch forest that has grown crooked. We walked in a line, boots sliding on frost, breath like smoke. Har carried the coil of line and the iron hooks. Ana had her little ax. Tor had the long bow. I had my knife and a sack for the bell, if we found it, and my hand on the charms at my belt. We spoke very little. The morning had a loud silence.

On the second day we met a woman who wore a net of bones. She told stories of how the sheep have learned to speak and they ask now, will you kill us today or tomorrow, and what will you do with our skins, and what is the taste of blood. She laughed, and I was not sure whom she was mocking. She asked us where we were going, and I kept quiet, but Har told her. He always tells.

She looked toward the hill and said, “The Ladder is there. Men hung too much on it. They hang their names now. Be careful of your names.”

We left her sucking her teeth and whispering to the bones, and we walked faster. By afternoon the trees were low, and the ground was rock with a little moss and the low shrubs that cut your ankles. Gorse Hill rose like a knee bone, brown and black, with one old standing stone at its back. The stone had a ring carved round it like the moon. The river below looked like iron that had been hammered flat. It did not move. It lay old.

On that slope we found the first thing the hill had made. People call these things oddity or wonder. We learned to call them by names that we can chew, like bread. This one was the Year-Tree.

At the base of a small yew there hung strings. They ran from every direction, from bushes, from little piles of stones, from roots. The strings were made of strips of cloth, of hair, of pig sinew, of nettle fiber. They were tied to the yew and to small bells that had been made from spoon bowls, thimbles, and the tops of lamp flasks. The strings hummed with the wind, and when they did, the bells gave small answers. The sound was like a house where a child has fallen asleep and the shutters knock a little.

We had seen such things in other places, where people hang wishes. But this one made its own wish. The strings were tangled in a kind of giant knot. Out of that knot there had grown a frost flower of white salt. It had built itself like a crystal wheel, and in it was caught a little run of water, which could not move. The wind made the salt hiss, and the bells shook, and the water fought to drip and could not.

We went near. The strings snagged on our coats and gave us little pulls. The bells talked about small things: a hill of barley, a door latch, a pig that ran away into the rye and was found by a girl with a split ear. And then, as we listened, one voice came out that was not from a bell. It was a woman’s voice, low and level. She said, “Bring it back. Bring it back from the second step. Not the top. The second. People always climb too far.”

Ana put her hand on the salt flower. It was cold as iron. The run of water inside was an eye that stared. “Who are you?” she asked.

The bells shook and gave us the smell of bread. Then the voice, not theirs, said, “I am the one who went up and climbed too far.”

“Do you know where the bell is?” Har asked, because it is his way.

“Not your bell,” said the voice. “Your bell is with the white goat. Mine is on the second step, and I was stubborn and went above it and my name sloughed off like skin. I speak from a knot in a tree.”

We looked at each other in a long quiet. Tor prodded the salt wheel with the tip of his bow. It rang like a glass mouth. “Do you want us to cut you free?” he asked.

“No,” said the voice, and there was a little smile in it. “Leave me tangled. If I am free, I will climb again.”

We left the Year-Tree with our hearts a little heavy and our hands prickled by the nettle strings. We climbed onto the first shelf of the hill, where the wind had sculpted the gorse into low wails. In the gorse a hare ran with no fear of us. Its eye was a bead. It stopped on a stone and looked at us as if at a story it had heard before. Then it ran on and vanished, and the stone was shaped like a kneeling woman.

We found steps cut into the rock and also into the dirt, some old, some new. On each step someone had carved a word, most of them in the old script. Some we could not read. The ones we could read were simple: Bread. Daughter. Warmth. Field. Then as we climbed: Memory. Truth. Trust. And after that, higher: Fear. Forgiveness. Name. And above that, blank. I did not like the blank steps, and I felt my feet grow light in a way that felt not like running but like being taken.

We came to a ledge where a little crowd of stone figures stood always to one side, heads together. They were not carved to look like people. They were river stones set upright, with three little pebbles on the top, so that each looked like a child wearing a hat. On the ledge were ash piles and thin reeds woven like ladders and char charred strings. The wind pulled the ash across the steps. There was a sound there like the sound inside your head when you cannot sleep: old footsteps turned soft.

We rested, and I pulled out a heel of bread. It was not good bread, but it had not gone wholly hard. I broke it and gave it to the others. As we chewed, I felt the edge of the wind tickling the inside of my skull. I thought of the halls we had seen where men grew quiet and did not speak to their sons. I thought of a boy in another village who had taken a hatchet to his mother’s table because he could not stand the sounds it made. I asked myself, what is the thing that can hold a day together? A bell? What is a bell? It is an empty thing that makes noise when struck. Then I chewed and did not think about that anymore because my belly asked for attention.

That night we lay between stones and slept in shifts. The stars were sharp like needles. Once I woke at a noise and saw a white goat standing on a higher ledge. Its beard swung in the wind, and its eyes were yellow as straw. It looked down as if considering a trick. I thought of the voice at the Year-Tree and almost called out, but my mouth was dry, and I slept again. In dreams the steps were ladders and the ladders were strings, and on the strings were hung little tin bells and flakes of bone and braids of hair. The wind played them. The sound said: bring it back from the second step.

In the morning, the light was pale as milk, and the sky was a sack with no seam. We climbed. Our legs shook a little with each step. On the second step there was a carving of a bowl with a line through it, and in the bowl an eye. Someone had drawn that not long ago with a coal. A little wreath of gorse lay beside it. The step had more ash than the others, as if people had sat longer there, looking at the way up and the way down.

“Second step,” Har said. “Do we look for a bell here then?”

“No,” Ana said. “That voice at the tree, she was talking about her own bell. The one she hung up and then climbed past. Ours is with the white goat, she said.”

“And where do goats go?” Tor asked.

“Up,” I said, and we all looked toward the ridge where the path narrowed to a way a goat might take.

We went up after the goat, though Tor muttered, because he had been gored once by a buck with nothing in its head but vinegar. We kept our eyes down because the wind tries to lift you if you look out toward the sky. The path took us through a places where the rock had caved in and left jagged teeth. The teeth had been tied with more strings, these ones spun from the hair of women, thin but strong. On these strings were hung coins with square holes, buttons shaped like stars, and little lead idols with the faces melted by rain. The strings were taut and made a quiet music. They pulled at our sleeves as if pointing to where we should go. Sometimes they led right and sometimes left. We followed the ones that did not make Tor’s bow creak like pain when the wind plucked them. That was how we chose.

At noon we came to a shelf like a tongue, and on it stood the white goat. It chewed on something that might have been paper once, and wore a collar made of red braid with a tin bell on it. The bell swung and made no sound. The goat’s horns were like the two paths we had left behind. It stood on the edge and looked at us with great seriousness.

We stood there with the salt air in our teeth and the goat looking clever. “That bell,” Har said, and took a step. The goat took a step away. Har took another step. The goat tossed its head and went up onto a narrow spine of rock where none of us could go without going on our hands and knees. It stood there as only a goat can, like a dancer in a story about balance and pride. The bell did not ring.

“Hello,” Ana said. “We need that bell. We have a hall where people forget to greet each other. People go around like clay cups that have no liquid in them. If we go back with empty hands, it will be worse.”

The goat looked at her as if she had spoken to it about mathematics. It chewed a little more paper. It turned its head and looked down at the river, where the islands of mud lay like sleeping seals. Then it did a thing I did not expect. It took the collar in its teeth, pulled it off itself with a quick twist, and let it fall. It fell a short way and tangled in a string that ran across a gap. It swung in the wind and made a small sound, and we all stopped breathing.

The sound was like the one you hear when someone you love says your name across a big yard full of strangers. It was small, and it slid through the cracks in the rock, and I felt the hairs on my arms lift. The goat’s eye followed it. The goat snorted and went up in a great bound and vanished into a crease like a pocket.

Tor looked at the bell. “That rope is not strong,” he said. “The string is hair. The knots are old.”

“But not as old as your bow,” Har muttered, and Tor ignored him, which is a sign of peace between friends.

We stretched the line and tied Har around the waist, because he is light and careless and least likely to be hurt by a fall that would break the rest of us. He scowled, but he crawled out on his belly like a snake, hands flat, head turned to the side where the wind would not fill his ear and blind him. He reached out with one hand and plucked at the string that held the bell. It thrummed and tried to cut him. He flinched back. The bell swung. He waited for the wind to turn. Then he took out his knife and cut the string above the bell. The thing fell into his hand, light as a small fruit, and the little sound it made when it touched his palm went down the hill and into our ribs and made it hard to breathe for a moment. He crawled backward, and we pulled him by the line, and he was laughing by the time we had him safe. He held the bell up like a prize.

It was a crude thing made of tin. It had been cut from a flat sheet and folded and soldered. On its side were the old marks, little shapes like teeth. Inside was a clapper that had been a nail once, but now was round and smooth. It had been made by a pair of hands to do a simple job. It had not been thought grand or fine. I felt a sting in my eyes, the way you do when you hold a thing that belonged to a grandfather you did not know.

“Is that all?” Har grinned. “We bring this back, and the hall will be whole? We should tell the white goat thank you.”

Ana took the bell as if it were a baby. She hung it on her belt. She did not ring it then. “We go down now,” she said, and we nodded.

We went down by a different path because the hill is like a maze made for hooves and gulls. The strings led us. For a long time we followed them without thought. The hill had us in it like fish in a net. It was almost a relief not to hold the decisions in our hands. When at last the path widened and we could see the shallow river on both sides and the roofs of the court like bones of a long dead whale, we sat and drank the last of our water.

The wind carried a sound from below, a sound like many bells, but not like ours. It was a thin jangling, and then it was a low drumming, and then it was a sound like a throat that tries to sing and cannot. We stood and looked down and saw that the hall had emptied, and people were in the street, but they were not moving much. They stood and looked up at the hill. Some held hands and looked confused, as if they had found themselves hand in hand with a stranger. The air between us and them had a strange gleam, as if the light had been called by another name.

We went faster. We tripped and slid and took little ankle-biting paths. Har fell once and laughed, and I was glad to hear the laugh because all the laughter in the world seemed likely to be eaten by the hill. We came to the Year-Tree, and the bells there were ringing hard, and the salt wheel had grown nipples like teeth. The knot of strings had tightened. The voice from the tree said, “Do not go to the top. Do not go up where the air is thin. Second step. Second step.”

“We are going down,” Ana said, and the voice made a sound like a sigh, and the bells went soft.

At the bottom of the hill the rush of people gathered was strange, and the glances that crossed faces did not meet like they usually do. There was a gap between eyes. Some looked at us and then past us and then down at their hands as if they were not their own hands. Mara stood behind the stone block in the hall, not on it now. I could see a tremor in one of her fingers that she was hiding. We went to her through the press, and she did not greet us with words.

Ana put the bell in her hand. Mara held it and weighed it. She looked down at it as if it were a bit of bread with a smell she thought she had known once. She lifted it slowly. She rang it once.

In that moment the hall changed, and then it changed back. I do not like telling this part because what happens in moments like that is small and does not show well in words. But I will tell it anyway, because that is my work. For a moment the sound made a thin light between people. It was like the light that shines on dust in a window at noon. It was not bright, not warm. It simply showed the dust and the air. Old men looked up from their hands and met the eyes of little boys who had been kicking stones in the yard. A woman turned her head toward the man beside her, and the line of her mouth softened a finger’s width. Someone in the back cried out as if pricked by a needle, and then he laughed because he had not meant to make a sound that belonged to a child. The hall did not become a temple, and the benches did not turn into a feast. Grain did not appear from nowhere. But the air became less like a sack over the head. That is all. That is much.

Mara looked at Ana. “Thank you,” she said. It was the first time I heard a thank you like a priest’s blessing, and not as a habit.

Har said, “What is this trouble here? We heard a hundred bells.”

Mara nodded. “The hill is hungry. The Ladder wakes and takes. People who go to the hill tie their breath and thought onto strings. The strings pull back. It is stronger this year than I have seen. I sent two messengers. They went to the second step and laid down their fear, and came back thin as reeds. They look at me and do not see me. They only see the wind. That is why I needed you to bring the bell. We must try to ring against it. We must try to tell the hill, take only what we give you. Take the broken spindles and the stubborn quarrels. Leave our names. Leave our days.”

She rang the bell again. The sound went into the corners where cobwebs were. Some of the men on the benches breathed out all at once, like a wave. Outside there was a little change in the wind. The smell of the river came in, and with it the smell of nettles. I had not noticed but the hall had smelled for days like damp cloth and old ash. Now it let itself smell like a hall again.

We ate that night in the court of South Ditch. The food was thin stew with beans that had been planted in poor earth. The bread was burned around the edges. But people talked, not much, but with the right shape in the mouth. Tor told a story about a girl who snatched her own goat out of a wolf’s jaw. Har laughed at something that was not at anyone’s expense. Ana went to the corner where the wise women sat with their herbs, and they gave her a small round cheese and a look that said, we see you. I drank water and felt it go down like a small good thing. I wondered if we had done half the work, or only one small piece, and I wondered what the hill would ask for now.

In the morning Mara took us up the path again, this time only to the first shelf. Many people followed, some to watch, some to try, and some to stop others from climbing too far. They had made a new Ladder of Things Left Behind from reeds cut at the ditch mouth. It was bright and green, not yet dry. On it hung small bits of old life: a child’s shoe whose heel had split, a cloth with a stain of wine not drunk, a quill that would not write because the woman who held it had trembled too much, the rope from a boat that would never be beached again. We built a simple frame between two stones and set the ladder there. We tied strings of hair and wool and nettle fiber. In the middle of them we hung the tin bell.

There was another thing we did, on Ana’s word. She stepped out and spoke in a way that did not sound like a person who wanted the hill to step on someone else. “We have an old custom here,” she said, though it was new. “The bell will ring for what we give, not for what it takes. When you hang something, speak it plain. Do not speak your name. Do not speak anyone else’s. Do not try to make a show of sorrow. Say the small thing that eats your bread. Then ring once. Then go to the second step and stop. Eat a bit of bread. Share it. Then come down. Do not climb past the second step. We bind this in the strings, we bind this in the reeds, we bind this in our hands.”

She held the bell in her palm, and I saw that her fingers were shaking now. But she said it all without blinking. Mara took the bell from her and hung it on a string in the middle of the ladder. People came then. They came like a slow river. They came with their small losses in their palms or tied in cloths. A man brought the broken stem of his flute. He hung it and said, “I lay down the long mornings in which I do not play.” He rang the bell, and the sound made him smile, and there were tears in his beard. A girl brought a clay mouse that had lost its tail. She hung it and said, “I lay down being angry at my mother when she tells me to fetch water.” She rang the bell, and her mother laughed and smacked her shoulder gently. An old woman brought a spoon carved by a man now in the ground. She hung it and said, “I lay down the thought that I am the last.” She rang the bell, and three women stood up and brought their stools close to her and asked her about the winter when the river froze, and for half an hour they did not feel hungry.

We stayed there all day. We listened. We did not look up the hill. Sometimes one or the other of us went to the second step and sat and ate a crust. I cannot tell you too much about this day without making it sound like a sermon. But understand this: the tin bell did not make them brave or good. It did not heal the soil. It did not stop the wind. It made a sound that went between people. It marked a decision made aloud, so that it did not slip away like a silent thought. It was a small thing. But small things are a great army.

Evening came. The ladder hung heavy with small junk. The strings were all tied. The bell was warm to the touch. Mara stood and looked at the hill in the falling light. “We have given the hill its due,” she said. “We have not climbed past the second step.” There was a quiet that felt like the breath just before sleep when you know if you keep your eyes closed you might have a dream.

Then a boy ran crying from the path. He shouted words that broke apart in the air like dry sticks. We made him say them twice before we understood. “They went up,” he cried. “The twins. They are light as smoke. They laughed and went up. They said they would go to the top and see if the moon is a door.”

Mara closed her eyes. She held the bell hard. “Their mother,” she said. “She died in the winter. They make a game of grief.”

Ana did not wait for anyone. She was already on the path. Har went after her. Tor and I followed with the coil of line. The others shouted. Mara told the crowd to stay. We went up into the purple light.

On the first shelf we did not see the twins. On the second we saw their footprints, small and bare. On the third step I smelled the smell of bread. On the fourth I smelled the smell of snow. The gorse was black silhouettes, and the strings sang. We called but did not shout. On a narrow ledge we saw them. They were crouched like frog-eaters on a rock that looked like a knee. They were laughing, and the laugh was the laugh of two children who have found a house with no windows.

“Come down,” Ana said. “Come down and I will show you how to make a kite that will fly from the hall to the river. We will draw a face on it that will look at the moon like a friend.”

They looked at her and were silent as fish. One said, “We want to see the top, where the bells are nailed to the sky. We want to see the door in the moon.” The other said, “Mother is there. She climbed past the second step a long time ago.”

“No,” Ana said. “Your mother is in the ground. She turned to sweet black and feeds the roots of the yew. She is not hungry or cold. She does not wait for you on a ladder.”

They laughed again. It was not the laugh of mockery now. It was the laugh that children make to keep from crying. Ana went down to her knees. She made her voice as plain as water. “Listen to me,” she said. “Do you know what is at the top? Nothing. Wind. Thinner wind. And then a step beyond that, if there is one, there is a place where your names will slip. You will come down and not know who is your brother. You will speak and not know who listens.”

They looked at each other, and a little line came in one boy’s forehead. Then I saw the hill’s trick. It was a good trick. On the ledge where the boys crouched, someone had cut two holes in the rock. A rope had been threaded through them and led upward. The rope had bells on it, dozens, made from thimbles and little brass cups and shells. The wind took the rope and made the bells ring like voices in the dark. They called. One called out, “Thal!” which was one twin’s name. Another called, “Kesh!” which was the other. They were the same names the boys had for each other when they were small and used them to call each other to supper. The bells knew.

Ana heard it too. Her mouth went hard. She took out her knife and tied a thin cord to it and threw the knife above the boys where it stuck in a crack. She pulled the cord and tested it. Then she tied it to her waist. She lay down and slid toward them. The rock was white and not warm. I put my hand on her ankle to steady her, and Tor lay on his belly and reached with his bow and hooked it round a root to brace us all. Har whispered something that sounded like a prayer but had too many bad words in it to be one.

Ana reached the boys. They watched her as if watching a play. She took hold of Kesh by his thin arm. He did not pull. She took Thal by his sleeve, which tore. He did not move. The bells said their names in their small brass voices. The boys’ eyes went to the sound. Ana leaned close and put her mouth to Thal’s ear. She said something. We could not hear it. Later she told me. She said, “I carried my daughter to the second step, and I wanted to keep going because she was light that day like a sparrow. But I did not. I sat and ate bread with her and sang her the song about the hedgehog. Then I came down, and she got a fever that night, and in the morning she did not know me. But the day before, she did. I have that day. If I had gone up more steps, I would have lost the day. I keep it. If you go up, you will lose this day between you. Keep it.”

It is a little thing, a day, to put against a bell rope that calls your name. But that is the kind of battle we fight now, and you know it. The boys looked at each other, and Thal put his hand on Kesh’s fingers. He nodded. Ana pulled them both in, one against her chest, the other under her arm, and we pulled her back. The bells called their names in the wind like lovers calling across a field. We put our bodies between the boys and the sound. We went down step by step. At the second step we sat. We cut bread and shared it. The boys ate and were quiet for the first time since their mother died. We did not hurry. When we got up, their faces were the faces of children again and not of boys walking towards a big empty.

At the Year-Tree the voice in the knot said, “They will come again when their feet itch. It is good that they come again. Only not past the second step.” Ana touched the salt flower with her fingernail and took away one tiny flake and put it on her tongue. She said it tasted like weeping.

Back in the hall, Mara rang the bell and then stood still and did not wipe her eyes. The twins’ aunt took them home, and there were ashes on her hands, and she was not ashamed to show them. People moved about and carried baskets. A man went to mend a fence not because someone told him but because he could see there was a gap and a goat would find it. We sat and watched a little girl teaching a younger boy to braid nettles for rope. We did not feel like heroes. We felt like people who had held a string and not let it snap.

We stayed a week in South Ditch. We helped set up more ladders at the hill’s foot, not only on the first shelf but near the old standing stone at the back and near a ditch where the frogs sang at night. We made a mark on each: a pair of eyes, one large, one small, and a second step drawn between them. It was our new sign. We taught people to make small bells from tin and to use the bits of round things they had in the drawers that no one had opened since the last good year. We showed them how to twist hair into cord. Men came with bundles of old shirts and women with spools of old thread. Someone brought a section of hull from a broken boat. Our hands smelled of iron, nettle, and skin.

All that time, the hill whispered. Some nights we heard a sort of sigh. The wind carried voices that were sad and tempting. They said, “Come take the easy ladder. Give up something bigger. Give up the hard thing, and I will give you quiet.” We did not go up. We stayed in the hall and pinned the strings to the rafters, and the bell hung there and made a sound at dawn and at dusk.

They told us a story on the third day, and Mara told it as if it had happened to a neighbor and not to a saints’ daughter. In the old time there had been a woman named Risa who had begged the hill to take away the whole winter. She laid a white blanket on the stone at the top and put a loaf and a knife on it and said, “Take the season when we starve. Take it away.” The hill listened. The next year, the winter did not come. The river did not ice. The goats gave milk even in the shortest days. Children grew. Men sang. It might have gone on, but the second year without winter the ground would not take seed. Worms bred in the goat’s milk. The bread grew mold in the ovens. Risa climbed the hill and tied her name to the top of the Ladder. She hung a bell on her throat and rang it. She went to sleep and did not wake. That is what happens if you ask the hill to change the world. That is what Mara told us. And she looked out the broken window as she said it, at the hills where a storm gathered with no rain in it.

On the sixth day the woman with the net of bones came to the hall. She had wind in her hair and hanging from her belt a string of little bells made from thimbles. She looked at the bell on the beam and laughed. “Yours is small,” she said.

Mara smiled. “Today small is large. Today a small bell will do.”

The bone woman spat into the fire and said, “Do not grow proud. You will need many small things. You will need a pot for boiling nettles, a child who can mend shoes, a man who can tell the story of the year when the river ran backward. There will be days when the bell’s sound tastes like iron or like blood. Do not turn away. Ring it then.”

“We will,” Mara said. “Will you come again?”

“I am always there, at the corner where the dogs shit. I am the one your children throw stones at. I am the thing you want to forget. I will come.”

That night Ana sat with me under the beam. We watched the flame and the way the smoke hit the hole and went out. I asked her what she had said to the twins on the ledge. She told me about the day she kept. She told me the song about the hedgehog, which is a poor song but it gets under the skin. She said, “This is all it is now, and all it ever was, I think. Keeping a day.”

“You saved their lives,” I said.

She shrugged. “If they had gone up farther, they would have come down again, maybe. Or they would have lived up there. They would have done what people do. They would have turned into people who sweep and haul and do not have names in their own mouths. We brought them down. Now we will see if they keep their day.”

I looked at the bell. It had a nick in it from where it had hit a rock or a tooth of the ladder. It had scratches on it from the goat’s teeth. It had been made by a simple hand a long time ago. The man who made it was gone. But his hand was still in the bell in a certain way. When Mara rang it next morning he rang a little with it, across a gap of years, a small good thing.

We were ready to leave. We had our pay. It was not much. A leather satchel, a knife, some dried apples, a pair of boots that fit Tor, a needle made of bone for Ana, a handful of fishhooks for Har. We had a song too, because in these halls a song is a coin. It was a short song, a new one. It went: Ring and keep. Ring and keep. We go to the second step and eat. That was all. It was enough.

The morning we left, the river glowed like a dull blade, and the hill was a long cat stretched against the sky. Before we went, Mara asked to walk with us as far as the Year-Tree. She carried the tin bell in her hand. She had tied it to a loop of twine. The wind was low and warm, a little. At the tree she stopped. The knot of strings had grown and changed. It was tighter and it had a pattern now. Someone had braided three of the lines together and then braided them back into the knot. It looked like a thing a mother does with a daughter’s hair. The salt wheel had melted in the warm spell and reformed into a shape like a cupped hand. Water ran through it and did not freeze. The voice spoke, low and steady.

“Thank you,” it said.

Ana went to the knot and put her hands on it as if on a friend’s shoulder. “Will you come down?” she asked.

“No,” said the voice, with a little laughter. “If I come down, I will go up. I know my mouth. Leave me my knot. It is a better house than most.”

Mara lifted the bell and rang it once. The sound went up the strings and into the knot and into the tree and out of the tree’s leaves and into the air and into our ears. It made me feel ordinary. It made me feel done with pretending. It made me see that a bell is a simple thing and that a court is a simple thing and that a hill is only a hill, even if it has a long hunger and a trick with strings.

We said goodbye to Mara, and she did not say goodbye back in a grand way. She said, “When the flood comes and the river picks up its bed and carries it, bring us rope.” She said, “When the high spring comes, and the goat has two kids, send us a story from the north.” She said, “We will put a mark on the fifth day of every month. We will ring the bell at dusk. If you are far off and you can, ring whatever you have. A spoon. A cup. A bell. Let the hill hear that we keep our days.”

We went on and left the hill behind us. We walked through places where fences had fallen, where carts lay in ditches, where the old wayposts had been split for firewood. We passed men who were taking stones from a church to build a wall to keep out the wolves. We passed women carrying water in buckets that used to hold paint. We saw a man selling a single good rope for two chickens. There were small markets. There were songs for bread. There were children with straw in their hair learning to read a little from scraps stuck on doors. There was work. There was the blank step too, waiting.

We did not go back to South Ditch for three years. When we did, the hall had a new gable, dark as its name, made from tarred planks. The windows had glass in them again, not all the panes but enough to keep the wind from drinking at the soup. The floor was smooth because it had been walked on by people who do not sit in their own heads all day. On the beam, the tin bell hung. It had been polished until the marks on its side gleamed. There were more bells too, along the wall and in the yard and on the ladders at the hill. The ladders had become a custom. People came from other places to see them. They did not climb past the second step. They might have wanted to, but when they did, someone took their hand and gave them a crust and a drink and said, “Sit.” If the hill whispered and asked for more, the people whispered back: Not today. We keep this day.

We asked after the twins. They were grown a little and had become the boys who run errands that need running fast but careful. They did not go up the ladder past the second step, though sometimes at night I saw them looking at the hill and in their faces the old ache that is in all of us when the wind calls our name. Their aunt had a second child now. You could tell who had been to the hill and come down right because of the way they touched their children’s sleeves when they spoke to them, not hard, but so that the children felt the skin on their shoulder.

Mara had a line of white in her hair like a frost path. She had added to the bell’s string a second loop for a child to pull. She had built a board near the door. On it were marks, not numbers, but notches and circles and scratches that meant the days since the last flood, the days since the last measles, the days since a good catch, which was one day, and then five days, and then ten. The board was ugly. It was needed. People touched it when they came in and when they went out.

We rang the bell with them and ate soup. When we left, Mara said, “Tell this thing where you go. Tell it in words so small that even a goat could understand. Tell them: we kept today.”

So this is what we tell in the courts that were once rich, and in the yards of men who still feel their hands turn to wood when they try to lift a shovel, and under the beams of old churches where there is now a tinker’s shop, and in the corners where the dogs sleep: there is a hill that wakes when hunger wakes. On that hill the people built a ladder out of reeds and tied to it all the things that used to be heavy but are really light. They climbed it barefoot in the night and gave up a quarrel and a knife that they had sharpened too often and a spoon that reminded them of the taste of a year that is over. They learned to stop at the second step. That is the custom now. They learned that when they tied their breath to the strings, they had to keep the strings in their own hands and not let the wind bear them up. They learned to ring a bell made by a simple hand a long time ago.

People ask if the bell is magical. We say yes, if you mean by that, it opens a door inside your ribs and lets a little light through, the kind that shows dust. People ask if the hill is a god. We say no, it is a hunger. And you cannot feed a hunger by throwing yourself into it. You feed it by giving it the peel and keeping the fruit. People ask if we slew a dragon or outwitted a king. We say no. We did not fight a dragon. We fought the big blank that eats names. We won for a day.

There is one more thing. In South Ditch they now keep a second bell in a box in the hall. It is a little thing made from a carved nut shell and a pin. It makes a sound like a cough. They take it out when a person comes in and cannot stop crying because they have lost all their markers. They put it in the person’s hand. They teach them to ring it and speak one small true thing: I mended a shoe. I watered a bean. I held my sister’s baby. When the person rings and speaks, the bell answers, and that sound is like a hand on the back. That is part of the custom too. It is the piece that was not there in the old days. It is the piece that Ana added. She says it is easier to fight a hill if you have a bell in your pocket.

If you go there in spring, you will see the ladders green with new reed, moving in the wind, with little bells clicking like teeth, and children tying bright strings and men tying dull ones and women kissing their hands and touching the ladders like touching a gate and then turning toward the second step with bread in their pockets. You might hear the hill call. It has a voice like the inside of a shell. You will also hear the bell. It is small. It says your name in a way that does not ask you to let it go. It says: Keep this day.

We left the bell in the hall, and we took one small bell for ourselves. We tied it to our pack. On nights when the wind says, as it does, come up, my dears, and step on the blank where you will not feel a thing, we reach back and ring our bell and say aloud a thing that is true. We have made that our custom. In a world like ours, that is a rope you can count on. It is not grand. It does not turn hawks into doves or feed you when there is no grain. But it is the kind of rope you can tie to a friend and pull them back over a bad edge. It is a rope you can offer to a boy with eyes like wind. It is enough to get you down from the hill and into a hall with soup. That is the kind of story we can tell and stand by. That is the kind we tell now. And if the old halls hear it and the new halls hear it and the hills hear it, good. We will keep telling it until the bell cracks and the hill sleeps and even after that, when people ask for a tale to hold their heads together for a little while in the long wind.