The eldest came back to the arch after midnight, when the town had gone dark again and the road was empty.
The men had come at dusk. She had watched them from the dust beside the old stone, where she had stood since she stepped off the road. They came up from the column on foot, a few of them, with a blanket, and stood a long while at the gate before they bent. They carried something away in the blanket between four of them. It was not heavy. She had not watched where they took it.
After that the town had stayed empty. A dog had come out and sniffed at the paving under the arch and gone away again with its tail down. The radio in the shop had run out of whatever kept it going. Nobody had come back to pick up the plastic chair.
She went and stood under the arch.
The paving was dark there in one place, the size of a man's two hands, and dry. She looked at it and did not bend to it. Then she put her sense down into the stone beneath, the way she had put it into the cinder of the final expanse every day of the long interval, and felt for the mark.
It was gone.
When she came up into this town in the afternoon the substrate under the gate had been folded, waiting, the decree's grain set deep in it long before any town. She had stood on that fold. She had stepped off it. Now she felt for it and found ordinary stone under ordinary stone, the same all the way down, a road through an old gate in a wall that was not there. It had let go of the record, as the ground at the Prison had let go when the one inside walked out. She had seen it happen once before and had not expected to see it twice.
She stood in the arch a long while. Nothing in the ground asked her to stand there.
Two ways opened under her.
She felt them the way she had always felt roads, as a lean in the substrate, a slope that her nature wanted to run down. The first was the oldest. It went down and down, below the deep layers, below the halls the old tribes kept, to the stratum her kind had held before the bell was hung. She had turned toward it once, at the Prison, when the work was done and the six went their separate ways. She had got as far as its first turning. There was a hall there with nothing in it she needed, and long spans with nothing to attend to, and quiet that did not end. It had been made for her. It would take her back without a word.
The second way went across, and up a little, toward a stratum above the Between where the light did not change with the hour.
She had woken there in the long day, among people who had no names. She remembered that now, though she had forgotten it for a while. She had come to herself on a bench by a low stone wall, with someone's garden behind her and someone's cooking on the air, remembering a bell and nothing else. They had been kind to her without asking who she was. Nobody there asked who anybody was. They kept small gardens. They ate in threes and fours at plain tables and talked slowly about the weather that did not come. One of them, an old Jann with flour on his hands, had told her that she was the one who had opened the door, that they talked of her on the road, and then had offered her bread.
She had left them. She had gone out to find the one she freed, and found him, and been passed like a post.
She stood in the arch at Lud and looked down the first way, and across the second.
The six had gone. The sixth on the first night outside Damascus, the first on the third. She had felt them come apart one by one and had held her place until there was no place left to hold. They had been gathered for one purpose, at the making, and the purpose was done, and they were done with it. She did not know where a thing of her kind went when it came apart. Nobody had made a rule for that.
She found she did not want to go down.
The hall at the bottom of the world would hold her the way the cinder had held her around the bell: patiently, without asking anything, for as long as she liked. She had been held like that for twenty thousand years. She had been a station in a ring and a key in a lock, and at the last she had stood on a mark that did not want her. She did not want to be held like that again.
The people in the village were jinn. So was she. She had not let herself put it so plainly in all the long interval. Her line had made itself a separate thing, refused, apart, waiting outside the world's arrangement for the world to come round. The world had not come round. It had gone on, and on the road today it had shown her how small the one she waited for was beside the one who came down the road after him.
There was a bench by a low wall, with a garden behind it. The village was ageing now, the returners said. Slowly. They had begun to notice grey at their temples and to be pleased by it.
She turned her back on the way down.
The road into the village was not a road anyone in the upper world could have walked. It went through the ground of the world at a slant, through layers she knew and one she had only crossed once, half asleep, in the long day. Only the awakening walked it in. Nobody walked it out. She had walked it out, and now she walked it in again, and she did not know if that had ever been done.
She went at an ordinary pace. There was no hour she had to be anywhere by.
The light changed as she went. It thinned from the dark of the substrate to something grey, and then to the even, pale light of the stratum where the village lay, which did not move with any sun. Far ahead she could see the first of its roofs, low and stone, and a thread of smoke going straight up from a chimney. Someone was cooking. She could smell bread.
She thought of the old Jann with the flour on his hands. She would sit at his table, if he would have her, and eat what he put in front of her, and listen to him talk about his beans. She would learn the names of his neighbours. Most of them would not remember their own, and she would learn whatever they called each other instead.
Every arrival on this road forgot. That was the village's one rule. You came in along this slant and your line fell away from you, and the prophecy, and the road behind you, until there was only a faint sense of having come from somewhere and a person sitting on a bench. She had come in once and lost everything but a bell.
She waited for it to happen again. She was ready to let it.
It did not happen. The roofs came nearer. The smell of the bread came stronger. Somewhere a child laughed, though there were no children in the village, and then she understood that the village was ageing and perhaps there were.
Halfway down the last slope, with the first garden wall in sight, she remembered her name.
It came up in her the way water comes up in a dry well when the rains have been heavy somewhere far off, slowly, from a long way down. It was not a station or a number. It was not "the eldest", which had never been more than a word for where she sat. It was a short name in a language that had dissolved before men were made, and nobody alive had spoken it to her since the bell was hung.
She said it once, aloud, to the empty road, to hear how it sounded. Then she went on down toward the smoke and the bread and the garden wall, carrying it.