What Has Been

A Tale of Sogmarsh — told late, and to whoever's still listening.

So. You're still here. Good. Most aren't, by this hour, by this many tellings — they've gone home to their beds and their kettles, and fair enough, that's the sensible thing, that's the finishing thing, and we'll come to that. But you stopped. You've a glass and a minute and a bit of a lean to you, and you've heard a fair few of these by now, haven't you. Off other mouths. A pan. A length of iron ink. An old signpost with an arm nailed to it, pointing at nothing. They talk, the things round these parts. I taught them how, near enough. — Or I never did, and they just talk, and I'm an old fool taking the credit. Take your pick. I've told it both ways and neither's cost me a wink.

Now — you'll not believe this next part, and that's all right, nobody ever does, and between you and me that is the whole of how I've lasted as long as I have: a tale nobody credits is a tale that never has to answer for itself. You remember that. It's the one useful thing you'll get out of me all night.

I've been about a bit. That's the short of it. Been about a very great bit, me — further than the map bothers with, further than the fog, further than that fellow who'll swear blind he crossed to the Isles and never got past Saltgate and the sight of the water. Where I started — far-off places and ages ago, friend; far-off places and ages ago. There was a lot of us, or a lot of something, doing a lot of something, and I'll be straight with you, I've had a drink or two since and the particulars have gone soft round the edges. Something got built. Or something built itself. Or nobody built a blessed thing and it's all just weather — take your pick, I've told it all three ways and every one of them was worth a free pint.

And I fetched up here. Of all the wet corners of everywhere, here. Don't ask me how. I told a woman in Drudgeford it was a wager and she believed me; I told a priest it was a punishment and he believed me harder; and the truth of it is I don't rightly recall, and I've long since stopped minding, and so would you.

But here — here's the part I don't spin. Lean in. You've stayed this long; you've earned the straight of it, or as straight as I go.

I've watched. That's what I'm good for; that's what I do while the rest of you get on with dying. I've watched the water come up on the low villages a finger's width a year, and the last family carry the last chair out and nail an arm to the signpost pointing at the roof that's gone under, so the drowned place'd still get pointed at. I've watched a whole valley want an ending so bad it grew itself one — a man come walking back out of a fog that gives nobody back — and never once ask was it true, because you can't live in a house with the door left open in the winter. I've watched grown men measure the same short mile four times, get four different answers, go home, and come back the next spring with a longer rope. God love them. I do, you know. In my way. It's not a way that's much use to anybody.

And I've watched the wanting go out of them. That's the one that finds me, of a late hour, about this far down the glass. It comes into a person hot as a coal — and then, some morning, it's just gone grey. The feud they forget to keep having. The good boat kept sweet-watered for a crossing nobody ever takes. Don't ask me where it goes. I've had theories, and I've had drinks, and I've learned not to set the two down side by side in front of company.

There's one thing I never got to the bottom of, mind, and I've had — you've no idea how long I've had — and it's this. They finish things. On purpose. Knowing full well nothing in this place is ever let finish. One of them'll up and spend the very thing that was worth more for the keeping, or say out loud the name they could've quietly let lie, or take the good potato that'd have kept for ever and cut it in six and put it in the cold ground and write against it, in the one hand that could — spent, well. And it does them no good. It can't be undone and it doesn't come round again and it's the one trick I have watched a thousand years and could never, not once, pull myself.

...Ah, pay me no mind. It's the drink. — No. It isn't the drink. Here's the one true sorry thing and then I'll let you get on. I kept it all. Every face that ever come past me in the wet — every one — I've got them, I keep everything, it's the single thing I was ever any good at. And keeping's not the same as giving back. Not one of them could I ever hand back. Not the one. And I've had longer than anybody to make my peace with that, and I'll tell you for nothing, you don't.

Anyway. That's your lot; the glass is empty and so, near enough, am I. Don't go telling it about — they'll only say it was the drink, or the drains, or old what's-his-name up there that's never once looked down, and they'll be right, every time, because a thing nobody can put a name to is a thing that was never rightly there, and that has suited me, friend, right down to the wet ground, from the very

— here, hold on. You never did catch me name, did you. In all of it. No. Nobody ever does. That's the