The Code

The village knew I was back before I did. The outer gate stood open, which it had not done since the night of the Brindle, and the Shambler was in the yard, and the woman with the muzzle was beside him, and they watched me come up the path the way you watch a weather report.

"You came back from the inner side," the Shambler said. It was not a question.

"The Warden came to get me."

The Shambler looked at the woman, and the woman looked at the ground, and I understood that there was a conversation happening in that silence, and that I was the subject of it.

"He has never come to get anyone," the Shambler said. "He has never once come to the inner gate. He sends the boat to the jetty, and the boat comes back, and that is the whole shape of his coming. But he came to get you." He looked at me for a long time. "Do you know what that means, new man?"

"It means he wants something from me."

"It means," the Shambler said, "that the Warden has an instrument now, and instruments do not go to the inner side. They go to the table." He said it flat, the way a man states a fact of weather, and the woman beside him made a sound, and I saw her hands, and her hands were working against each other the way the cougar's hands had worked against the fence.

I did not go back to the mess hall that night. I stayed in the village, because the village was the only place on the island where the Code was still being kept, and I sat in the yard with the Kindred, and I watched them keep it. It was a hard thing to watch. They kept it the way you hold a cup full to the brim on a moving deck: every moment was a small crisis of balance. One of them would go down on a knuckle, correcting, correcting. Another would forget what its mouth was for and work it, soundlessly, like a fish. A third, the small one, the one the woman had said was made from a deer, stood at the edge of the yard with her head up and her eyes wide, and she was the stillest thing on the island, and she was the one I could not stop watching.

"The Code," the Shambler said, coming up beside me, "is not a law. A law is a thing that can be broken. The Code is a thing that is being kept, every moment, or it is not being kept at all. There is no middle. That is the whole of it. That is why the Warden makes us say it. Because saying is a kind of keeping, and a kept Code is the only thing that stands between us and the inner side."

"She can keep it," I said, meaning the small one.

"She keeps it better than any of us," the Shambler said. "She was made three years ago, and she has not been to the inner side, and she will not go, because her mother keeps it for her on the days she cannot." He looked at me. "That is the other thing the Warden does not make, new man. He makes the bodies, and the bodies make the keeping, and the keeping is the only thing on this island that he did not put there."

I sat in the yard a long time that night. The Kindred chanted the Code at dusk, the way they had the first night, and the chant went through the village like a tide, and I heard it with different ears now. I heard the effort in it. I heard the war. I heard the small one's voice, higher than the others, holding the line, and I understood that the Code was not the Warden's invention. It was the Kindred's answer to the Warden, the one thing they had made out of what he had made them into, and that the Warden, for all his tables and his instruments, could not make a single creature keep it. Only they could do that. Only they, every moment, against everything the old sentence did to take it back.

I understood something else, sitting there, and I have never decided whether I understood it rightly: that the woman with the muzzle had not sent me to the inner side to save me from the Warden, but to save the Warden's world from me; and that I had failed at it; and that I had come back; and that now the world she had spent three years keeping was going to have to keep itself. I have never decided which of the two she meant, and I have finally stopped deciding: a mercy can be both at once.

She came to me at the edge of the yard, after the chant, and she stood with her daughter's hand in hers, and she looked at me, and she said, "The boat comes tomorrow. You will go. And you will not tell them my name, and you will not tell them the small one's name, and you will not tell them any name that lives behind this fence. The Warden is not the only one who makes his world small, new man. You will go back to your world, and you will make yours, and you will do it by forgetting us."

I said nothing. I had nothing to say that would have been true. She took her daughter and went into the dark, and the chant faded, and the island was quiet, and I lay in the yard with my back to a hut and the Code running in my head like a tide, and I did not sleep, and I have not slept well since.