The Fixed Star

The dogs came twice that night, and twice they went away again.

They were not like the dogs of the Sump. Those were small, mangy, cringing things that lived on scraps and ran from boots. These were big... lean and long-legged and grey as the dust, with eyes that caught the firelight and glowed green in the dark. There were eleven of them. Teo counted. They circled the little fire that Mira had built in the lee of the fallen slab, just beyond the reach of the light, and watched, and waited.

Bram sat with his back against the slab and his barge pole across his knees, his torn leg bound tightly in strips of Mira's cloak, and did not take his eyes off them. Teo stood beside him with the long steel bar, which he could barely lift. Mira fed the fire.

Twice, the biggest of the dogs came in close, low to the ground, its lips peeled back from its teeth. And twice, Bram swung the pole... not hard, not wildly, just once, a single heavy sweep that cracked against the sand in front of the creature's nose. And twice, it backed away.

Toward dawn, when the sky in the east turned grey, the dogs slipped away into the ruins and did not come back.

'...Huh,' Teo thought, slumping down against the slab with his arms trembling. 'They're like the Ashwardens. They only want the ones who run.'

The sunrise brought one small mercy. Turnip the mule came back.

It wandered out of a side street as the first light touched the tops of the towers, its broken rope trailing behind it, looking entirely unrepentant. It walked up to the wreck of the cart, which had been standing by the temple door and was now mostly kindling, and began calmly eating one of the spilled sacks of beans.

Mira laughed until she cried. Teo did not blame her.

They salvaged what they could. Two sacks of grain. Most of the beans. The crock of honey, which had somehow survived without a crack. Ama Tull's waterskins. A blanket, and the steel bar, and Bram's pole. They tied it all onto Turnip's back, and then, after a long and undignified argument which Bram lost, they tied Bram onto Turnip's back as well.

Then they walked out of the city of Glass Bones, east, into the morning, and did not look back.

Two days later, the dust came.

It began as a dark smudge on the southern horizon, low and brown, and Teo did not pay it much attention. By noon, the smudge had become a wall. By the middle of the afternoon, it was on top of them... a howling, choking, roaring wind full of fine grey dust, so thick that Teo could not see his own hand at the end of his arm. They wrapped their faces in cloth and huddled behind Turnip, who stood with his back to the wind and his eyes closed, enduring it with the vast patience of a creature that had seen worse.

It blew all night, and all the next day, and into the second night.

When it finally died, a little before midnight, the world was different. The dust had drifted over everything. The low hills had changed shape. And the Maker road, which they had followed from the Fens for six weeks... the straight, grey, endless road, their only guide across the emptiness...

The road was gone.

Teo walked back and forth across the plain in the starlight for an hour, kicking at the dust, digging with his hands. He found a few cracked slabs of grey stone here and there. But they did not lead anywhere. They were broken pieces, scattered by some ancient upheaval, and the dust had buried the rest.

He came back to the little camp and sat down by the fire without a word.

Mira looked at him.

"We're lost," she said. It was not a question.

"No," said Teo. "Not yet."

He tilted his head back and looked up.

The storm had scoured the sky clean. The stars were out in their thousands, blazing, crowding the darkness from horizon to horizon. And low in the north, not high and not low, there was one of them that Teo had been watching every night since the Fens.

It was not the brightest. There were a dozen brighter. It was not a remarkable colour. It was a plain, steady, yellowish-white point of light, of middling brightness, sitting a little above the northern horizon. But it was different from all the others in one way, and Teo had noticed it on the second night out of the Fens, because he could not help noticing things.

It did not move.

Every other star in the sky moved. That was the strangest thing he had learned in six weeks of sleeping under them. Over the course of a night, the whole sky turned — slowly, steadily, like a great wheel — the stars rising in the east and wheeling up and across and setting in the west, the way the sun did. But not all of them rose and set. The ones in the north turned in smaller and smaller circles, never dipping below the horizon at all, and at the very centre of all those circles, the hub of the great wheel, there was one star that barely moved at all.

Hesk had told him about it, years ago, in the cellar. One of the first Leaves Teo had ever read aloud. The Pole Star. The Makers had called it Polaris.

"The sky doesn't turn," he said slowly, staring up at it. "We do. The whole world spins, like a top. Once every day. That's why the sun rises and sets, and why the stars wheel across the sky. And a top spins around a line — an axle — running right through the middle of it, from top to bottom." He pointed. "And the top of that axle points almost exactly at that star. So while everything else seems to go around, it stays put. It's the hub of the wheel."

"I know which way is north," said Mira, a little impatiently. "Everyone in Calder Reach knows the Still Star. The fishermen use it. But north isn't enough. We need to know where the Observatory is."

"I know," said Teo. "That's the second thing it does."

He pulled out Hesk's map, the last Leaf, and unfolded it carefully in the firelight. At the bottom of the faded text, there was a line he had read a hundred times without understanding it.

Latitude 41° 12′ N.

"I didn't know what it meant," he said. "Not until a few nights ago. Then I remembered another Leaf. A page about sailors. The Makers' sailors, crossing the great seas, before they had any of their clever machines to tell them where they were." He tapped the line. "Latitude. It means how far north you are, from the middle of the world. And the old sailors found it with the Pole Star."

Mira frowned.

"How?"

"Because the star sits above the top of the world's axle. If you stood at the very top of the world — the North Pole, the Makers called it — the star would be straight overhead. Right above your head. And if you stood in the middle of the world, on the line halfway between the top and the bottom, the star would be right down on the horizon. Just touching the edge of the earth." Teo held up his hand, flat, and tilted it slowly. "So the further north you go, the higher the star climbs. And the sailors found that the angle of the star above the horizon... how high it is, measured in the Makers' degrees... is the same as your latitude. Almost exactly."

He looked at the line on the map.

"Forty-one degrees and a little. If we can find the place where the Pole Star stands forty-one degrees above the horizon... we'll be on the same line as the Observatory. North and south, we'll be right. And then we just keep walking east, along that line, keeping the star at the same height, every night." He paused. "The Leaf said the old sailors did exactly that. Sailed north or south until the star was at the right height, then turned and sailed straight along the line. They called it running down the latitude."

Mira stared at him.

"And how are you going to measure forty-one degrees," she said, "in the middle of the Ashlands, in the dark, with a mule?"

Teo grinned at her.

"With a board," he said. "And a string. And a stone."

It took him the rest of the night.

A degree, the Makers said, was one part in three hundred and sixty of a whole circle. Teo did not know why they had chosen three hundred and sixty... Hesk had once told him that the Makers had borrowed it from people even older than Eratosthenes, who had liked numbers that could be split many ways... but he did not need to know why. He only needed to make one.

He took a flat, smooth board from the wreck of the cart, which Bram had insisted on bringing for firewood. He cut one corner square, as square as he could make it, checking it against the corner of the steel bar. That was a quarter of a circle. Ninety degrees. Then he scratched a curved line across the corner with a string and a nail, and began to divide it.

Half of ninety was forty-five. He found it by folding a square of cloth corner to corner and laying it along the board. Half of that was twenty-two and a half. A third of ninety was thirty... he found that one by trial and error, stepping a piece of string around the curve until three equal steps fit exactly. And so on, halving and thirding and checking, scratching tiny marks into the wood by firelight, until he had a curve marked with every five degrees from nought to ninety, and a single, carefully placed scratch between forty and forty-five that he hoped was forty-one.

Then he tied a pebble to a length of thread and fixed it to the corner of the board with a nail, so that it hung straight down. A plumb line. Like the one he had used to stand the stick upright on the longest day of the year.

"Now," he said, lifting the board. "You look along the top edge of the board, like aiming a crossbow, until the star is sitting right on the end of it. And the thread hangs straight down by itself, because of the weight. And where the thread crosses the marks..."

"...is how high the star is," Mira finished slowly.

Teo raised the board to his eye, and sighted along the edge at the Pole Star, and held his breath until the thread stopped swinging.

Then he looked down.

Thirty-nine degrees. A little more.

He did it again, and again, five times, and wrote each one down on a strip of bark. Thirty-nine. Thirty-nine and a little. Forty, perhaps, once, when his hand shook. He took the middle of them. Thirty-nine and a third.

"We're too far south," he said. "Two degrees, near enough. Maybe a little less."

"How far is a degree?"

Teo had worked that out too, in the long nights since the longest day. If the whole world was three hundred and sixty degrees around, and Eratosthenes had found the whole world was two hundred and fifty thousand of his units... and the Makers had said it was about forty thousand of their own kilometres, which Teo still did not really understand...

"A long way," he said. "A degree is about four days' walking. Maybe five."

Mira looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at the board in his hands, with its careful, crooked little scratches. Then up at the steady yellowish star in the north.

"So we go north," she said. "For eight or ten days. Until the star is forty-one degrees high. And then east."

"Yes."

"Using a plank of firewood."

"Yes."

Mira was silent for a while. Then she laughed... a short, helpless, astonished laugh... and shook her head.

"Hesk would be so proud of you," she said, "he'd be unbearable."

From the other side of the fire, Bram stirred under his blanket and muttered something. Teo glanced at him, and frowned.

The big man was shivering. In the warm night, with the fire beside him and a blanket over him, he was shivering, and his face, in the firelight, was shining with sweat.

Mira saw it at the same moment. She was beside him in an instant, her hand on his forehead, then on the bandages around his leg. She peeled them back, very gently, and Teo smelled it before he saw it.

The long gash below Bram's knee was swollen and angry and red, the skin around it hot and shining and tight. And from the deepest part of it, where the stone had cut down to the bone, a thin, yellowish fluid was seeping into the cloth.