She woke on a stone bench with one thing in her, and it was a bell.
She had lost the sound of it. What she had was the shape the sound had left, the way a hand keeps the shape of a cup after the cup is set down. One note, once. Something had struck, and something had answered, and she had been near enough to feel it pass through the ground. Before the bell there was nothing she could reach, and after it there was this bench.
The eldest lay still and let the bench tell her what it could. It was cut from a pale stone with a grain like old milk, worn hollow along its length by many others who had lain there before her. Above her a vine ran over a frame of grey timber. The light came through it evenly. It came from no direction she could find. It did not warm one side of her more than the other.
She sat up.
She was in a garden. Beyond it were low houses of the same pale stone, with timber lintels gone silver, and paths between them packed hard by feet. Smoke went up straight from a chimney. Somewhere a pot lid rattled.
A woman sat on a step across the path, shelling beans into a bowl in her lap.
"There you are," the woman said, as if the eldest had been expected and was a little late. "You've been on that bench a long while. Are you hungry?"
The eldest did not know. She looked inside herself for hunger and found the bell, and under the bell, cold, a cold that came up through her feet as if she stood on ground that had never once been warmed.
The woman brought the bowl over. It held beans and something green, cooked soft, with oil on it. The eldest took it in both hands because that seemed to be what hands were for. She held it. Steam came off it and touched her face.
"You eat it," the woman said kindly. "With your fingers, or there's a spoon."
The eldest looked at the food for a long time. She had never put anything into herself. She knew this the way she knew the bell, without any memory to stand behind it.
She gave the bowl back.
"What is your name?" she said. Her own voice surprised her. It was low and dry and slow, like something dragged over stone.
The woman laughed. "Nobody has one here," she said. "You'll stop missing yours."
The village had no centre, and the eldest walked through it for what might have been a day. The light did not change to tell her.
It was built of what had been carried there from quarries and forests she did not know, and none of it was new. People sat in threes and fours at tables outside their doors and ate slowly and talked slowly about small things: whether the beans would come on, whether the well rope wanted turning end for end, whose turn it was to fetch from the far garden. They called each other by what they did. The bean woman. The one who mends. The one with the bad knee. When the eldest passed, they nodded to her as people nod to someone they will get to know.
They were jinn. She could feel that much. They were all of one kind, old in a way the eldest could not measure, and all of them unforked, as plain in their shapes as the day they were made. Something about them pulled at her. She had the sense of walking among the children of people she had once known well, and could not say who.
In the afternoon, or what she took for it, she sat at a table with the bean woman and two others. The others were the one who mends, a broad jinn with clever hands who was splicing a rope, and a thin one who said nothing and listened to everything.
Words came out of her while they talked. She did not choose them.
"The long interval," she said.
The one who mends looked up from his rope.
"The contained," she said. "The final expanse." She stopped. She had no idea what any of it meant. The words sat in her mouth like stones that had once been the foundations of something.
"Ah," said the one who mends. "Yes. We all come in with a few like that." He pulled the splice tight. "Mine was 'the pass'. I'd say it in my sleep. 'The pass, the pass.' No idea. They stop meaning anything after a while." He smiled. "Then you stop saying them."
"How long have you been here?"
He thought about it honestly. "Long," he said.
The bean woman had been quiet. Now she leaned across the table and put her thumb and finger into her own hair, near the temple, and drew out a single strand and held it up between them.
It was grey.
"Look at that," she said. "Found it this morning, washing." She turned it in the even light. "I've asked everyone. Nobody here has ever seen one. Not on anybody." She laid it on the table like a coin from a country nobody had heard of. Then she held up her other hand. Across the pad of the thumb was a cut, a small one, from a knife slipping on a bean pod. The edges of it were red. "And this was three days ago, by the bread. It hasn't closed."
The thin one who never spoke looked at the cut, and then at the eldest, and then down at his hands.
The eldest felt the cold come up through her feet.
When the others went in to sleep, she stayed at the table. She did not sleep. She did not know how. She sat with her hands flat on the wood and the grey hair lying between them, and the light did not change, and after a long time the bean woman came out with her bowl and nodded to her as if it were morning.
The road in came down out of a white haze at the edge of the far garden. The eldest found it by walking until the houses stopped. It was a plain road, packed earth, running between two banks of the pale stone. It ran up into the haze and did not come out of it.
A jinn was coming down it.
He came fast and unevenly, half running, the way a man comes down the last of a mountain path when his legs have stopped belonging to him. He was young for this place. He was unforked like the rest, and his edges were frayed and bright from whatever he had come through to get here. His mouth was moving. He was talking to himself, a stream of words the eldest could not catch, and as he came closer she understood that he was saying them so that he would not lose them. She had seen the thin one at the table do the same with his lips when he thought nobody watched.
He reached the bottom of the road and stopped, swaying, and looked at the gardens and the houses and the smoke. His face was full of everything he had walked here with. She could see it going out of him already, at the edges, like water out of sand.
Then he saw her, and all of it came back into his face at once.
He stood very still. He looked at her as no one in the village had looked at her, as if he had walked the whole road toward her and only now understood it.
"You," he said. His voice shook. "I know you."
"I don't know you," the eldest said.
"No." He came a step nearer and stopped at a line only he could see. "Nobody knows anybody. But I know you." He swallowed, and she watched another piece of what he carried slip from him and saw him grab after it. "You are the one who opened the door. They talk of you on the road."