The Common Right

Chapter One

The Corvée

1430. Perrodus at the barme, twenty-two florins, paid in two parts, the second on the day the water ran.

The list had forty-three names on it and one parcel number.

Aloys read it out at ten past seven in the morning standing on the wall at the intake, holding the paper against his thumb, and he read it the way he read it every April, surname first, then the Christian name, then the section. Halfway down, a dog that belonged to nobody in particular sat on the path and howled at him, and he read straight through it, and two men laughed, and the dog stopped.

When he came to the end he said the number.

"Fourteen forty-seven. Section seven."

"Here," Wren said.

"I know you're here." He folded the list. "Seven's the worst of it this year. There's a slab down."

"I saw it."

"You saw it in March. It's moved since March."

They went up in twos and threes along the path above the channel with the tools on their shoulders, and the sound of it was iron on stone and nobody talking much before eight. It was the eleventh of April, cold in the shade and already too warm in the sun, which is the whole of April on that side of the valley.

The snow was off the south face down to about the height of the mayens and lay in the couloirs in strips the colour of dishwater. Below them the shoulder was brown and grey and the vines further down were still sticks. From the village came the sound of the stables being emptied, one bell at a time, the cows coming out into the yards for the first week of the year, and somebody's radio, and a chainsaw.

Section seven runs along the foot of the Darbon rocks, and the channel there is cut into the slope with the outer bank built up dry, and the dry bank is the part that fails. Wren had worked it for six seasons and knew the two places that always went.

The slab had come off the face in the thaw. It was about the size of a door, and it lay across the bed at an angle with its lower edge in the channel and its upper edge propped on the inner wall, and behind it the winter's gravel had already begun to pile.

Marius arrived four minutes after she did, which was fast for him.

"Ah," he said.

"Yes."

"That's a slab."

"It is."

He put down the bar and looked at it with his hands on his hips.

"We'll not lift it."

"No."

"We'll break it."

They broke it, and it took until half past nine, and it took four of them in the end, because the Duvanel boys came down from section eight when they heard the bar going. The younger one took a swing at it with the sledge, missed, hit the inner wall, and sat down abruptly in the bed of the channel with an expression of great personal injustice. The older one did not say anything at all for about a minute and a half, which was worse than anything he could have said.

The slab came apart along a bedding plane the way Marius said it would, in three pieces, and they rolled the three pieces out of the bed and down the slope and heard the last one hit something a long way below.

"That'll be somebody's wall," said the older Duvanel boy.

"It'll be nobody's wall," Marius said. "There's nothing under there. There's been nothing under there since the war."

Then it was the gravel, which was the actual work.

You go along the bed with the wooden shovel and you take the winter out of it, and what you take out you put on the outer bank and tread it, because the outer bank is what the water stands on, and every year it goes down by the depth of a boot. There is a way of standing to do it that saves your back and a way that does not, and nobody tells you which is which, and you find out in your third season by watching a man of seventy-nine still upright at four in the afternoon.

Marius did his part of the section and Wren did hers and they did not race.

"Your ground's all right?" he said, after a while.

"The wall on the top parcel came down."

"Which one."

"The long one."

He whistled through his teeth. "That's a job."

"It's this year's job."

"Who's helping you?"

"Nobody's helping me."

"That's a lot of wall."

"It came down five metres at a time over four years," she said. "It'll go up the same way."

Marius went back to shovelling. After a while he said, "You want a hand with the corners. The corners are what beats people. Anybody can do the straight."

"Then come and do the corners."

"I might."

They ate at noon on the wall where the channel comes out of the rocks and the ground opens, which is where everybody eats, and where the water stands quietest when there is water in it.

There were bottles standing in the cut and rye bread and the hard cheese, and somebody's daughter had come up with a tart on the back of a quad bike, at speed, to the visible terror of her father and the delight of everybody else.

The bread came round on a board with a knife in it and went round twice.

Wren sat at the end with her back to the stone and her boots in the empty bed and listened, which is what she had done at this lunch for six years and was, as far as she could tell, the reason she was still allowed to come to it. Twice somebody put something into her hand without looking at her — a piece of the tart, and later a cup — and both times she said thank you, and neither time did anybody answer, because saying thank you for food on a wall is a thing outsiders do.

Aloys came down the line with the list.

"Section seven done?"

"Done," said Marius.

"Slab?"

"Gone."

"Good." He made two marks. "Fourteen forty-seven, six hours."

"It'll be nine by tonight," Wren said.

"Then I'll write nine tonight." He was already moving. "It's the parcel that owes the hours, not you. If it's nine, it's nine on the parcel."

"I know."

"Well then."

Marius watched him go along the wall with the paper. "He's not being hard with you."

"I know he's not."

"He can't write what isn't a name."

"I know."

"You could go and see the commune about it. There's a way."

"There's a way," she agreed, and ate her bread.

The talk on the wall that day began, as it did every year, with the meal itself.

The meal is a line in the consortage's accounts. It is the only line anybody has ever queried. It has been queried every year for at least as long as Aloys has been garde, always by a different man, always on the grounds that the consortage is not a restaurant, and it has never once been reduced, and the man who raises it is always given the last of the tart.

Then it moved on to the Sérac, which was the hotel that had gone up on the bench in 1968 and been rebuilt twice, and which had put in a request to the commune in February for a summer supply for its pools and its lawns and what the request called landscape maintenance.

"They can have it in October," said one of the Duvanel boys.

"They don't want it in October."

"Then they can want."

"It's not the commune's to give," Marius said, and there was a silence of a particular kind, and Wren looked up.

"It's not," said Aloys, from the other end of the wall. "That's exactly the difficulty."

"There's no difficulty. The water's the consortage's."

"The water above the intake is the commune's. The water in the channel is ours. What they've asked is whether the water in the channel is ours, or whether we've had the use of it because nobody ever stopped us." Aloys said it flatly, the way he read the list. "That's the question. The commune has to answer it, and the commune has asked its lawyer, and the lawyer says he needs the acts."

"They took the drinking water off us in forty-six," Marius said, "and nobody voted on that either."

"That was a tunnel, and the tunnel was better, and your father said so at the time."

"My father said a lot of things."

"The acts are in Sion," said Aloys, who had heard this exchange, in one form or another, at every corvée of his working life.

"So bring them."

"They're not a book. It's four boxes, and it's in Latin to about 1600, and after that it's in a hand you can't read either. There's a man at the archive who can read it and he's three years of work in front of him, and we are not the first to ask."

"So we pay somebody."

"So we pay somebody. Eleven thousand was the number the lawyer gave for the reading alone, and then there's him on top of it, and there's thirty-one of us with water and a third of those are over seventy." He put the list in his jacket. "The committee meets on the second of May. Anybody who wants to say something can say it there."

Nobody said anything else about it.

Somebody asked about the tart, and the girl's father said she had taken the quad up the church path, and the girl said the church path was quicker, and the older Duvanel boy said it was not, and the girl said she had done it in seven minutes, and there began an argument about the church path that lasted, on and off, for the rest of the day, and eventually for the rest of the year.

The water went in at four.

It always goes in at four on the day of the corvée, because it takes the afternoon to walk the line. Aloys did the walking with the garde's staff, and one of the Duvanel boys went behind him carrying nothing, which was the boy's first year and the whole of the boy's job.

At the intake they pulled the board.

The water came round the shoulder into the dry bed at a walking pace, with a front of brown foam on it, and a smell Wren had never got used to, which is cold rock and old leaves and something underneath that is almost sweet. It went along the bed at the speed of a man not hurrying. People walked with it. Nobody talked much. A dog went into it and came out again, insulted.

It came down section seven and found the fresh bank and stood against it and did not take it.

Forty-three people watched water arrive at a wall they had built that morning. Nobody cheered. Marius took his cap off, put it back on, and said, "Bien."

Then everybody went home, because it was Saturday and a quarter past five and the year had started.

Marius walked down with her as far as the fork, because it was on his way, and then stood there not going the rest of the way, which meant he had something.

"I'll tell you a thing," he said.

"Go on."

"It didn't always run there."

"What didn't."

"That." He pointed his chin back up at the line of the channel, which from the fork you can see for a long way, a dark seam under the rocks with the new water bright in it. "That's not where it was. My grandfather worked the old one. Higher. Right up under the cliff, along the top of the scree."

"Since when?"

"Since always, and then not since the rockfall. There was a rockfall — the big one, it took a hundred metres of it out, my grandfather was a boy. So they built the new line lower where the ground was easier, because it was easier, and it took them two summers and they never went back up." He shrugged. "That's all. It's just a thing I know. There's still the trace."

"Where."

"Above the scree. You can see it when the snow goes and you can't see it after June, the grass takes it." He looked at her. "It's nothing. It's a ditch with nothing in it."

"When was the rockfall?"

"My grandfather was a boy," said Marius, as though she had asked the same question twice, and went down the path towards the Rouvenaz.

She went up at seven.

It was two hundred metres of climbing above the channel and the light was going but not gone, and the trace was where he said it was, and it was not a ditch. It was better than a ditch. It was a shelf, cut level, with the outer bank still standing here and there to the height of her knee, and the stones of the bank were laid the way the stones of section seven were laid, long side in, and grass had closed over the bed so that from twenty metres away it was a green line in brown ground and from on top of it it was a road.

She walked it east until it ended in the scree, where the rockfall had taken it, and the scree was fifty years of rock on top of a hundred and fifty, and there was nothing to see under it.

Then she walked it west.

She counted her paces, because she had nothing to measure with. Ninety paces to the first spur. Two hundred and forty to the gully where the Nétsire comes down, and the trace crossed the gully, or had, because there was a notch cut in the rock on both sides at the same height and nothing at all in between.

At six hundred and something she stopped counting, because she did not need the number any more.

The trace ran along the top of the Comba, above the old terracing, above the collapsed raccard, above the long wall that had come down five metres at a time over four years. Below it the ground fell away in the dark towards the new channel and the vines and the road, and the lights of Ollogne came on one at a time, and somewhere down there a door shut and a dog started and stopped.

She stood in it until she was cold.

Everything she owned was under it.

Chapter Two

The Copies

1432. Of the surplus there is bought the wine for the men, and it was not enough.

On Sunday she said them while she cleaned the intake.

There were nine hundred and forty of them and she did them in order, out loud, at the speed of somebody counting stock. The third of February, one loaf. The fourth, nothing. The fifth, a tin, not taken. She had said them every Sunday since she was six, and there was nobody within a kilometre and a half to hear her, which was one of the four good things about where she lived.

She lifted the grid, took out a winter's worth of leaf and one drowned shrew, and put the grid back.

The last of them was the eleventh of March. She said it and stopped, and there was the noise of the water and nothing else.

Then she said, out loud, in the same voice, "And you are talking to a shrew," and went in for her breakfast.

Her spring comes out of the slope a little above the roof, into a stone box her predecessors built and she has rebuilt, and from there down a black pipe to the turbine. Three hundred watts, day and night, in July and in January, which nobody in the valley believed until she showed them the meter, and several of them did not believe afterwards either.

Breakfast was coffee and the last of the rye bread from the corvée.

The bread comes out of the village oven twice a year and it is meant to. A loaf from the second firing will still be there at Christmas and still be bread, in the way that a stone is still a stone, and you cut it with the flat of the knife and you do not complain about it in front of anybody who made it. Wren had been given half a loaf by a woman whose name she did not know, on the wall, in the ordinary way, and had eaten it for six days, and had about a day of it left, and had begun, in the last fortnight, to understand the point of it.

The building she ate it in was four and a bit metres by seven on the outside, and rather less than that on the inside, because the insulation is not allowed to go on the outer walls and so it goes on the inner ones. She lives in a smaller building than the one she owns. The roof is original and she may not change it. The window is original and she may not enlarge it.

There is a report in a file in Sion which says the structure is materially worthy of protection as an individual object, and that report is the reason she is allowed to sleep there and the reason she can never make it better. She had read it a great many times and could say most of it.

She did not say it on Sundays. Sundays were taken.

The first was a woman in Arcadia with four hundred olive trees on six terraces and a paper from 1955 that nobody in her family could read, because it was typed in a Greek that had been abolished and the office that issued it had been abolished twice.

Wren had the scan. She had the 1955 form and the Ottoman-period title it referred to and the two cadastral surveys either side of it, and she had run all of them together, and what came out was that the woman's grandfather had not bought the water with the land. He had bought a turn in it. Three hours, every eighth day, from a cistern that was still there and still full, fed by two families who had between them forgotten that a third had a right in it.

She wrote four paragraphs. What the document said, what it did not say, what would probably happen if the woman raised it, and what would certainly happen, which was that the neighbours would be angry and would also be correct that nobody had taken those hours since 1971.

She sent it. She invoiced thirty euros.

The second was a man in the Beqaa with a well, a dispute, and nothing written down at all, and there was nothing she could do for him. She said so in three sentences and charged him nothing, and he wrote back within the hour to say that this was the first straight answer he had been given by anybody in two years, and would she like some pistachios.

She said yes.

That was the work. It had no name. It had no website and had never had a card printed, and it existed because six years ago she had needed to know what a piece of Valaisan land was owed, and had discovered that finding out was a skill, and that the skill travelled, and that the world is full of small terraces held by people whose paperwork has outlived the office that made it.

Nobody in Ollogne knew she did it. Two or three of them thought she did something on the computer for money and had decided, kindly, not to ask.

At half past ten she went up.

The trace was easier to find in daylight and harder to believe in. She had thought at dusk that it was a shelf. It was a shelf. It ran level along the top of the scree and the outer bank stood in six or seven places, and where it stood the stones were laid long side in, which is how you build a bank that water leans on.

She walked it west with the phone in her hand and a stick, and she stopped at every point where the bank survived and photographed the stones and the ground and the fall away below, and she wrote down the altitude the phone gave her and knew it was wrong and wrote it down anyway, because a wrong number used the same way every time will still show you a slope.

It fell about a metre in thirty, which is what the new line falls, which meant the same people or the same instinct had built both.

At the gully where the Nétsire comes down there were two notches cut in the rock, one on each side, at the same height. Something had crossed there. Timber, probably, on brackets in those notches, the way they did it on the cliffs, and the timber had gone the way timber goes.

She got down into the gully and up the other side, which took twenty minutes and cost her a piece of the palm of her left hand, and on the far side, on the second stone of the surviving bank, there was a mark.

It was cut, not scratched. Two strokes down and a bar across them near the top, and a hook off the bar to the right. About the size of her thumb. Weathered into the stone to a depth she could get a fingernail into, which meant somebody had cut it deliberately and had meant it to last.

She photographed it from four angles and then sat on the bank with her hand wrapped in her scarf and looked at it.

She had seen that kind of mark before. Not that mark. That kind of mark. Every family in a commune had one, cut on the beams of the barn, burned on the ear tags, notched on the stick that said how many hours of water you took and when. A mark is a signature for people who do not sign. It says this is ours to anybody who can read it, and everybody could read it, and now nobody can.

She went down.

She has two years of the consortage's papers on a disc under the bed, and a copy of the disc at an address in Iceland, and she has them because in her third winter Aloys opened the cupboard at the back of the depot and showed her what was in it, which was the registers of the consortage of Darbon in a cardboard box on a stone floor under a window that leaked.

He had not asked her to do anything about it. He had shown her the way you show somebody a thing that is going to be a problem for somebody else later.

She photographed all of it, over two winters, page by page, on a stand she built out of a chair and a broom handle. Then she typed it — not scanned it, typed it, because the handwriting defeated everything she tried, and in the end the only thing that worked was a person reading a word and putting it down. It took her most of a year. She has never told anybody how long it took, because the number embarrasses her.

Now she asked it about the rockfall.

There was no rockfall. There were four mentions of the Darbon face, all of them about repairs, all of them after 1873, which is where the registers begin, because everything before 1873 was not in the cupboard and never had been. She knew where it was. Everybody knew where it was. It was in Sion, in the four boxes the lawyer wants paying to have read.

She asked it about the mark.

It gave her nine occurrences of marks of that family — two strokes, a bar, a hook — across the registers, all in the margin of the water rolls, all beside the same seven letters, and the seven letters were a name that had not been in Ollogne in living memory.

She asked what the name held.

It said: three hours on the eighth day, from the head of the channel, and after 1904 nothing at all, and no entry recording a sale, a transfer, a forfeiture, or a death.

The stove had gone quiet a long time before.

Aloys lives at the bottom of the village in a house with the wood stacked to the height of the windows.

He was outside doing something to a chainsaw and there was a boy of about nine sitting on the end of the log pile watching him do it, with the particular stillness of a child who has been told twice that he may stay if he does not touch anything.

"Your hand," said Aloys.

"It's nothing."

"It's bled through."

"It's nothing." She put it behind her.

The boy said, "Why is your hand bleeding?"

"Loïc."

"He's all right," said Wren. "I fell in a gully."

Loïc considered this and found it satisfactory in every respect.

"Why?"

"Because I was looking at something."

"What?"

"A stone."

The boy looked at her for a long moment, and then at his grandfather, and decided that the adults were not going to improve on this, and went back to watching the chainsaw.

"The committee's on the second of May," Wren said.

"It is."

"And the question is whether the water in the channel is ours or whether we've had it because nobody stopped us."

"That's the question."

"And to answer it somebody has to read what's in Sion, and the reading's eleven thousand francs, and there are thirty-one of you with water and a third of them over seventy."

"You were listening."

"I always listen." She said it flatly, without any weight on it, and he did not take it the way another man might have. "I'll do the reading."

Aloys wiped his hands on his trousers, slowly, which is what he does instead of thinking out loud.

"You can read that?"

"I can read some of it and I've a way of getting through the rest. It's slow and it's wrong sometimes and I check the places where it matters." She heard herself and stopped. "Yes. I can read it."

"It's four boxes."

"I know how many it is."

"The lawyer said three months."

"Then it'll be three months."

He looked past her at the shoulder, at the line of the channel with the water in it, and at nothing above it, because there is nothing above it that anybody has looked at in a hundred years.

Then he said something to her in patois.

It was six or seven words and she did not get any of them, and he knew she had not, and he waited, because it was not a test and he was not being unkind — he had simply stopped translating for her some time in the second year and had never gone back to it, which was, in its way, the highest compliment anybody in that valley had paid her.

"I didn't get that," she said.

"No." He let it sit for a moment. "It'll come."

"It's been six years."

"It'll come," said Aloys.

"You'd do that for nothing," he said, eventually. It was not quite a question.

"No," said Wren. "I'd do it for the copies."

Behind him, Loïc, who had not been listening and had been listening, said, "What's in the boxes?"

Nobody answered him, and he did not expect anybody to, and he asked her again three years later on a completely different subject and got a much longer answer than he wanted.

Chapter Three

Eleven Thousand

1447. Jaquemetus, having borne the charge, being dead, his part to his sons, to be divided between them and not otherwise.

The archive answered in nine days, which Aloys said was the fastest he had ever known them and which Wren thought was ordinary, because she had written the letter and Aloys had signed it, and archivists are not difficult people. They are people who are almost never asked.

The letter said that the fonds of the consortage of Darbon, deposited 1961, comprised four boxes and one roll; that consultation was free; that the reading room was open Tuesday to Friday; that photography without flash was permitted; and that a request for consultation by a person other than an officer of the consortage required a letter from the consortage.

"So I'll write you a letter," Aloys said.

"The committee hasn't voted."

"The committee votes on the money. Nobody's voting on whether you can go and look at our own boxes."

"They'll think it's the same thing."

Aloys considered this. "Some of them will," he said, and wrote it anyway, and it was a good letter, four lines, and it called her notre consorte, which was true, and which she read twice on the bus and once more in the kitchen.

She spent the last ten days of April on the wall.

Sixty metres of it had come down over four years and she had put back a fifth of that in two seasons, and the arithmetic on that was not encouraging, so she had stopped doing the arithmetic.

You take the fallen stone out and sort it into three piles — big, medium, and packing. Then you build from the bottom with the long side going into the hill, and every fifth or sixth stone is a through-stone that reaches back into the fill and holds the face on. The face does nothing. The face is what people look at. The wall is the fill and the through-stones.

Her hands had gone the way hands go in April and she had stopped noticing.

She was on her knees in the second pile when she heard the car.

It stopped at the fork, because everything stops at the fork, and then there was a pause of about four minutes, and then Célestin Ourdaz came up the last two hundred metres of the track in a pale linen jacket and a pair of shoes that had been made for a man who was never going to walk on anything.

"There you are," he said. "God, it's further than it looks."

"It's two hundred metres."

"It is two hundred vertical metres, my dear, and I am sixty-three." He arrived, breathing, and looked at the wall, and then at the ruined half of the wall, and then out at the valley, which from her second parcel is one of the four or five best views in that commune and which had never once been the reason anybody stopped there. "Ah," he said. "Yes. That's still very good."

"You've never been up here."

"I have been up here exactly once, in 1998, with a man from the bank and a map, and I was wearing better shoes." He sat down on the finished part of her wall without asking whether it would hold, which everybody did, and it held. "You're building it back."

"I'm building it back."

"Is that a good use of you?"

She did not answer that, because there was no answer that was not either rude or a lecture, and she had learned in six years that with Ourdaz you let the question go past and he never noticed and never minded.

He had brought two things.

One was a bottle in a bag, which he put down on the wall and which she would find still standing there on Tuesday, upright, unopened, with a slug on it.

The other was the reason he had come.

"They tell me you have volunteered to go and read four boxes of medieval rubbish in Sion."

"Who tells you."

"Reynaud, at lunch. Everybody at that table has an opinion and none of them has read a document in their lives." He waved it away. "Is it true?"

"Yes."

"Three months?"

"Probably three months."

"Doing what, precisely? Sitting in a room turning pages?"

"Sitting in a room turning pages."

"And the committee is going to spend an evening on the second of May arguing about the money."

"They are."

"Then let me stop it," said Ourdaz. "I'll pay. It's a dinner for eight in Geneva. I'll ring the lawyer tomorrow, he can put his man on it, and the whole thing is finished by June, and nobody has to sit in a room for three months, least of all you."

He said it exactly the way he did everything, which was quickly and warmly and without the smallest expectation that it might be refused, and Wren understood — standing there with her hands full of dust and a through-stone she had not yet placed — that he meant it kindly, that he would enjoy doing it, that he would never mention it again, and that it would cost him nothing whatever.

"No," she said.

"No?"

"No. Thank you."

Ourdaz laughed. It was a genuine laugh and it went on slightly too long.

"You're going to have to explain that," he said, "because from where I'm sitting it looks like pride, and pride is a very expensive thing to keep in a house with no roof."

"The roof is fine."

"The roof is a hundred and forty years old."

"The roof is a hundred and forty years old and it's fine, and that's not what this is." She put the stone down. She was aware of doing it badly. "If you pay, the lawyer's man reads it."

"Yes. That's rather the point of paying."

"And he reads it for the question he's been asked, which is whether the consortage owns the water. He reads it for that and he stops."

"What else is there?"

"I don't know," said Wren. "That's the thing. I don't know what else is in it."

Ourdaz looked at her for a moment with his head slightly on one side, and she watched him decide, quite visibly, that this was charming rather than serious.

"You want to go fishing," he said.

"Yes."

"In four boxes of parish accounts."

"Yes."

"For what?"

"I'll know when I've read it."

He stayed another forty minutes, because he was in no hurry and had nowhere to be, and he talked, which was the price and also, she had long ago worked out, most of the point.

He talked about the hotel and its pools, which he thought vulgar and inevitable.

He talked about his granddaughter, who was four and had recently informed him that the mountains were made of old clouds, and he repeated this twice and was delighted both times.

He talked about the mason he would send her, and she said no, and he said he would send him anyway, and she said no again, and he moved on.

He suggested she get a cow.

"A cow."

"You've all this grass."

"I've no grass, I've stones, and the grass I have is above the channel and I've no water, and a cow needs a barn in winter and a mayen in June and a share of an alp in July, and a man to take it up, and I haven't any of those things and the alp shares don't come up for sale, because nobody has sold one since about 1890." She heard herself getting louder and stopped. "And they're not a lawnmower."

"You know an enormous amount about cows for a woman who hasn't got one."

"I've been here six years."

"Well, quite," said Ourdaz, entirely unbothered, and looked at the view again.

Then, prompted by nothing, he told her about the silk.

"You know what the family was."

"Weavers."

"The family were not weavers, my dear, the family employed weavers, which is an entirely different and much more comfortable profession. Lyon, the whole of the last century and most of the one before. Cards and cords and a great deal of noise. Court of France, the Vatican, half the little German courts, all of them buying the same cloth and all of them convinced they had something the others hadn't." He was enjoying himself. "And before that we did rather better. My great-great-somebody bought church land in this canton in about 1806, when the French were selling it and nobody dared be seen buying it, and he bought a great deal of it very cheaply, and he was a hero to his children and a scandal to everybody else's."

"And the title?"

"Ah." Ourdaz beamed. "The title came from Rome in 1871."

"From the people you bought the land off."

"From the people we bought the land off," he agreed, with enormous satisfaction. "Two generations. That is all it takes. We took the land from the Church under Napoleon and bought absolution from the Church under Pius, and the whole transaction is recorded in an album in Sierre with photographs of everybody looking extremely holy." He stood up and brushed the dust off the back of his trousers. "I have never seen why anyone finds that shocking. It is the only genuinely amusing thing my family has ever done."

Then he nodded at the plateau across the shoulder, where the roofs of the bench sit above the treeline.

"And they are no better, before you say it. A hundred and thirty years ago all of that was mayens. Cows in June and nobody living up there. Then a doctor from Geneva decided the sun on this slope was good for bad lungs, and he was right, and he brought them up by the cartload and built them somewhere to die in comfort." He shook his head, pleased. "And do you know what that slope had meant to everybody underneath it for six hundred years? That it was dry. That you carried every drop of water to it by hand along a ditch cut in a cliff. The sun was the problem. And then one morning the sun was the money, and I am afraid it was not the same people."

At the top of the path he slipped.

It was nothing — a loose stone, one knee down, a hand out — and he was up again before she got to him, and the only thing that was hurt was the trousers and the other thing.

"Don't," he said, pleasantly.

"I wasn't going to."

"You were going to take my arm."

"I was going to hand you your bag."

"Hm," said Ourdaz, and took the bag, and they stood there for a second with something between them that neither of them was going to name.

Then he said the thing she had been waiting twenty minutes for, because he always said the important thing on his way out, and she had never decided whether that was carelessness or tact.

"That ground was Perrenal's, you know. Before me."

"I didn't know."

"Four parcels of it. He sold in ninety-eight along with a good deal else, and he was glad to, because it was worthless and the bank was unpleasant and his brother wanted out. I paid him what it was worth, which was very little, and I paid it promptly, which at the time was worth more than the price." He said it without any weight at all. "And then I sat on it for twenty years because I couldn't think what to do with it, and then I gave it to you, and I haven't thought about it since."

"Which Perrenal."

"The father. He's dead. The son has the ground at the Rouvenaz and the two below the church, and he does very well, and I have not spoken to him in about fifteen years."

He set off down. Two steps, and he turned round.

"Oh — and I'll say a word for you on the second."

"Don't."

Ourdaz stopped.

"Why on earth not?"

"Because then it's you asking."

He looked up at her from six feet below, on a track he had not managed well and would not manage better going down, and for about a second and a half he was not amused at all. She saw it. It was the first time in six years, and it was gone before she could decide what it was.

"My dear girl," he said. "It is always somebody asking."

And he went down.

She went back to the wall.

She placed the through-stone she had been holding and it sat wrong and she took it out and turned it and it sat. Then a dozen more, and the light went orange along the Darbon face the way it does in the last week of April, and she stopped at seven because her hand had opened up again where the gully had cut it.

Perrenal. The son had the Rouvenaz.

The Rouvenaz takes its water from section seven, which is the section she has worked every year for six years, alongside Marius, who is seventy-nine, and who is one of the two people in Ollogne who talked to her in the first winter.

She did not look it up that night. She sat with her hand wrapped and the terminal off and the stove ticking, and she did not look it up, which she would remember afterwards as the last evening on which she had been able to choose not to.

Chapter Four

The Second of May

1461. Aymo, not having borne the charge, is admitted this day, paying his part with the rest.

The committee met in the room above the café, because the depot has no heating and the salle bourgeoisiale has to be asked for a fortnight in advance and nobody had asked.

The room has one table that is too long, a stack of chairs that is never put away, a photograph of the 1961 corvée in which four men are laughing at something nobody now living can identify, and a floor through which you can hear everything that happens in the café underneath. When the committee sits, the café gets quieter, and everybody downstairs has an excellent evening pretending not to listen, and Denise sends up coffee at nine without being asked and puts it on the bill of whoever raises the meal.

Thirty-one consorts. Twenty-two came. Four sent their wives, who are not consorts and have no vote and voted anyway, and nobody has ever raised it.

Wren sat at the end of the second table with her back to the window and a notebook she did not open.

Firmin took the accounts first, because the accounts always come first.

Receipts for the year, being the labour tax on the area watered, at the rate set in 2019. Expenditure: the garde, materials, the insurance, and the meal after the corvée.

"The meal," said a man at the far end, on cue, "is three hundred and forty francs."

"It is."

"We're not a restaurant."

"We're not," Firmin agreed.

"I'm only saying."

"You are, and you have, and it's minuted, and it's the fourth year it's been minuted, and the last of the tart's downstairs if Denise hasn't eaten it." Firmin turned the page without looking up. "Balance carried, six hundred and thirty-one francs."

There was a pause.

"Six hundred and thirty-one," said Firmin. "That's what we have."

Somebody laughed at the back, without much in it.

Then he read the letter from the commune.

It was two paragraphs and perfectly polite and it took him a minute and a half, and Wren watched twenty-two people arrive, at different speeds, at the same place.

The commune had received a request from the Sérac for a summer supply. The commune's own right to dispose of the water above the intake was not in question. Below the intake, the commune's legal advisers wished to establish the basis on which the consortage of Darbon exercised its rights, in order that the commune might respond without prejudice to any party. The commune therefore invited the consortage to produce the title on which its rights rested.

"Produce the title," said Firmin.

"They know we can't."

"They don't know that. They've never asked before."

"Nobody's ever asked before. That's the whole point of it." This was Gilles Perrenal, at the front, and he had come to say something and everybody knew it. "Six hundred years and nobody asked, and the reason nobody asked is that it was never worth anything to anybody. Now there's a hotel that wants water in August and suddenly we need paperwork."

"Then let them take it off the commune like everybody else."

"They can't," said Aloys. "The commune's irrigation network stops below the village and always has. There's no main above the bench and there never was one, because there was nothing up there worth watering but cows, and cows walk to the water." He shrugged. "And they'll not be putting drinking water on a lawn in August. Not after the last two summers. Above the bench there's the Darbon and there's nothing else, and that's why we've had a letter."

"We have paperwork."

"We have registers from 1873 in a wet cupboard. That's not a title. A title is what they're asking for and we haven't got one."

"We might have one," said Aloys.

The room turned. Downstairs, somebody put a glass down and did not pick it up again for some time.

Aloys did not stand up, because he has never stood up in that room.

"There's four boxes in Sion," he said. "Deposited in sixty-one by Ernest's father, who got them out of the old depot before it came down. Nobody's opened them since. The commune's lawyer says he can have them read for eleven thousand francs and three months, and I'll tell you now that that price is the reading and it's not the advice, and the advice will be the same again."

"We haven't got that."

"We've got six hundred and thirty-one."

"Then we raise the tax."

"On whom?" said Firmin. "A third of you are over seventy. Three of you are behind already and I'm not going to name them in this room."

"Then the commune pays. It's their question."

"It's their question and our title," said Aloys. "If the commune pays for the reading, the commune gets the reading, and the commune decides what's in it and tells us afterwards. That's not a saving. That's the whole thing gone for the price of a reading."

Nobody answered that for a while.

Then Aloys said, "There's an offer on the table that costs us nothing."

He put it badly, which she was grateful for afterwards, because if he had put it well it would have sounded arranged.

He said that one of the consorts had volunteered to do the reading. That she had done work of that kind before, elsewhere, for other people. That she would go herself, Tuesday to Friday, for as long as it took, and that everything she photographed would be photographed for the consortage and belong to the consortage.

"Which consort," somebody said, who knew perfectly well.

"Fourteen forty-seven," said Aloys.

There was a noise in the room. It was not hostile. It was the noise of twenty-two people having to think about something they had decided not to think about for six years.

"Stand up, then," said Firmin, not unkindly.

She stood up.

The chair went back and caught on the floorboard and made a sound like a cat, and somebody downstairs laughed at something else entirely, and Wren stood in a room full of people who had watched her shovel gravel for six Aprils and discovered that she had no idea what to do with her hands.

They asked her, in this order:

Whether she could read Latin. Some. Enough for a notarial formula, which is nine-tenths of it, and where it was not enough she would mark the passage and not guess.

Whether she could read the hand. The hands, plural, because there are four hundred years of them, and yes, slowly, and she had a way of working that was faster than reading and she checked it everywhere it mattered.

What the way of working was. She said: a machine reads the page and offers words, and she corrects it, and when it has been corrected enough it stops offering the wrong words. She did not say anything else about it. Two men looked at each other. Nobody asked a second question, which she had not expected and which she understood afterwards was not acceptance but indifference: they did not care what was in her bag, they cared what came out of it.

How long. Three months to read. Longer to be sure.

What it cost. Nothing. The bus, which was hers.

And then Gilles Perrenal said, "What happens if you find something that's yours?"

The room went quiet in the way rooms do when somebody asks the question everybody had and nobody had shaped.

Downstairs, the coffee machine.

"I don't understand the question," Wren said, which was a lie, and she heard it leave her and could not get it back.

"It's not complicated." He was not angry. That was the thing about him and it never changed in the whole of that year. "You'll be alone in a room with four boxes of our papers for three months. You'll read every line before any of us sees a photograph. Suppose there's a right in there that attaches to your ground. Suppose the papers say your parcels are owed water they haven't had since the Empire. What happens then?"

"Then I'd tell you."

"Yes," said Perrenal. "Afterwards."

"Immediately."

"Afterwards," he said again, patiently, "because you'd have read it first. That's not an accusation. That's arithmetic. Somebody has to be first and it's going to be you." He turned half round to the room. "I'm not saying she'd hide it. I'm saying we're about to send one person, on her own, to find out what all of us own, and that person has more to gain from the answer than anybody sitting here, and we're doing it because it's free."

"You'd rather pay money we haven't got."

"I'd rather two people went."

"Then go with her."

And Gilles Perrenal said, "I can't read it," in a perfectly level voice, and sat down, and that was the most honest thing anybody said that evening.

It was Thérèse who broke it, from beside the window, where she had been knitting something grey and entirely without reference to the proceedings since a quarter past eight.

"Then send somebody who can check her," she said.

"Who?"

"Nobody. That's my point. There isn't one." She counted a row. "There isn't a man or a woman in this valley who can read a word of it and every one of you knows it, and if there were, they'd have read it forty years ago and we wouldn't be sitting here at half past nine. So either she goes or the boxes stay shut and the commune answers its own question for us." She reached the end of the row and turned it. "I'd sooner it was somebody who's turned out for the corvée than somebody who's paid by the hour and wants to get home."

Marius spoke last and said the least.

He was two seats from the door with his cap on his knee and he did not get up either.

"Section seven," he said. "Six years. Every April, the slab and the gravel, which is more than her share and everybody here knows it's more than her share, because her ground doesn't take a drop of the water. She pays the tax on a hillside of stones and she turns out for a channel that runs under her land and does nothing for it."

He put his cap on.

"I've buried two men who did less. Vote how you like."

They voted at twenty to ten.

Nineteen for, four against, three abstentions, with the wives counted, which nobody raised.

The conditions were made up in the room, in the way such conditions always are, and Firmin wrote them on the back of the agenda:

That the said consort be authorised to consult the fonds of the consortage at the Archives de l'État in the name of the consortage, on the letter of the garde.

That all photographs be delivered to the consortage, complete, in the order taken, with nothing withheld.

That she report to the committee at each ordinary meeting and not otherwise.

That she remove nothing, lend nothing, and speak to nobody about the contents, including the commune, including the commune's lawyer, and including anybody from the Sérac.

And, added by Perrenal and accepted without a vote, that anything found which touched the rights of any consort, including herself, be reported to the president in writing on the day it was found.

"On the day," said Firmin, writing.

"On the day," said Perrenal.

"Agreed?"

"Agreed," said Wren.

Outside it had gone cold the way it does at the beginning of May when the sky clears, and the men stood about in the road for twenty minutes as they always do, because the meeting is not the meeting. Denise came out and propped the café door open and three of them went back in.

She waited by the wall for Aloys to bring the letter, and Perrenal came out with his jacket over his arm and stopped in front of her, and she made herself stand still.

"I wasn't voting against you," he said.

"I know."

"I don't think you're a thief. I think you're the only person in that room who can do it, which is most of the problem." He looked up the road towards the shoulder, which was black, with one light on it, which was hers. "My father sold that ground in ninety-eight."

"I know. I was told last week."

"Four parcels and the two at the Comba and the strip under the rock. All of it, everything above the channel, because it was worthless and it cost money to hold and my uncle wanted out and the bank was standing on my father's neck." He said it without heat, the way he had said everything. "Do you know what he got for it?"

She did not.

"Eleven thousand francs," said Gilles Perrenal. "For all of it. Nineteen ninety-eight."

He put his jacket on.

"So when Aloys stands up in there and says eleven thousand francs like it's nothing, like it's a number we can't possibly find — that's my father's whole life above the bisse, and it went in one afternoon, and everybody in that room knows it and not one of them heard it." He shrugged. "Nobody did anything wrong. That's what I can't get past. Good night."

He went back in for his coat, which he was already wearing, and came out again a minute later without it, and looked at the jacket over his arm, and swore at himself quietly, and went home.

Chapter Five

The Reading Room

1478. The widow of Martinus keeps his hours and his mark, and the assembly consents.

The bus leaves the village at 06.52 and gets to Sierre at 07.31. The train leaves Sierre at 07.44 and gets to Sion at 07.53. From the station to the Rue de Lausanne is a quarter of an hour at her pace and rather more at anybody else's, and the reading room opens at eight.

Fourteen francs twenty, return. She had worked out on the Sunday what three months of that came to, and had decided to do it anyway, and had then stopped working it out, because there is a kind of arithmetic that is only self-harm with a calculator.

She was outside at four minutes to eight with her bag and her stand in a supermarket carrier, and she waited across the road so as not to be standing at the door.

The form asked for name, address, date of birth, the number of an identity document, the subject of the research, and the institution.

She wrote Ollogne for the address, and the subject took her two lines — fonds of the consortage of Darbon, deposited 1961, all items — and then she looked at the last box for a while.

"You can leave it," said the woman behind the desk. "It's for the statistics."

"What do people put?"

"University of Lausanne. University of Geneva. Sometimes a commune." The woman turned the form round and read it upside down, which was clearly a habit. "You're the consortage."

"I've got a letter."

"I've got the letter. Aloys sent it on Friday and telephoned as well, which he did not need to do." She wrote something and slid a card across. "Madame Vollenweider. I am here Tuesday to Friday and I am not here in August."

She was about fifty and had the manner of somebody who has explained the same nine things for twenty years and has decided, quite deliberately, not to become tired of it.

The nine things were: pencils, no pens, not even capped. No bags at the table. Gloves only for seals, and not otherwise, because gloves make you clumsy and clumsy is worse than clean hands. One box at a time and one item out of the box at a time. Photography permitted, no flash, no tripod on the table, nothing touching the document. Order slips in duplicate. Replace in the order you found, and if the order looks wrong, leave it wrong and tell her, because the wrongness is evidence too.

"And you do not put anything back where you think it ought to go," said Madame Vollenweider. "People do that. They are trying to help. They destroy more than damp."

There is a pencil sharpener screwed to the end of the counter with a small dish under it, and it is the only object in the building that is not catalogued, and in twenty-two years nobody has ever stolen it.

The fonds is four boxes and one roll, and it took twenty minutes to find out what was in them, which was the only fast thing that happened for three months.

Box one. The registers, 1873 to 1961, the same ones she had already photographed in the wet cupboard, deposited by somebody's father who had got the older material out before the old depot came down and had taken the newer material out as well and put it back afterwards. Five hundred hours of her life were already in box one.

Box two. Parchments. Folded, some with the seal gone and the tags still on. Latin. Fifteenth and sixteenth centuries at a glance, and the glance was all she got that morning.

Box three. Paper. The eighteenth century and most of the seventeenth. Accounts, lists of days worked, two bundles tied with tape gone the colour of the paper.

Box four. Everything else, which in every archive in the world is the largest category. A notebook. Correspondence about a lawsuit in 1911. A printed circular from the canton about phylloxera. Four photographs. A tin.

And the roll. Parchment sewn to parchment, wound on a wooden former that was itself old, and heavier than it had any business being.

She ordered box two and started at the beginning, because you do not start where you think the answer is. You start at the beginning, or in a year you will not know what you have.

By noon she had done four items and understood one and a half of them.

The formula is the easy part. In nomine sancte et individue Trinitatis, and the year and the day and the place, and then in presencia mei notarii subscripti et testium, and after that the names, and after the names it becomes a document about something and the hand becomes a hand rather than a shape, and she slowed to about nine words a minute.

She photographed everything before she read a word of it. That was the rule she had made for herself in the wet cupboard: the picture first, because the picture is the thing that survives you.

At twenty to twelve she got to item seven and item seven had two long diagonal strokes through it, corner to corner, in the same ink as the text.

She sat back.

"Excuse me," she said, to nobody in particular.

There were four people in the reading room. One of them was a man of about seventy in a very good jersey who had been at the next table since five past eight with a laptop and a folder of printed family trees, and who had been waiting, as far as she could tell, for exactly this.

"Cancelled," he said, with enormous pleasure. "Struck. They've struck it. It's void, my dear, it's nothing, it's waste."

"It's a whole act. It's got witnesses."

"It's got two strokes through it. Two strokes means the notary cancelled it. Read the archival literature." He was already turning back to his trees. "You'll find a great deal of that. A great deal of it. Most of what people get excited about is cancelled."

Wren looked at the strokes for a while longer. Then she put her hand up, which she had not done since school, and Madame Vollenweider came over from the desk and looked at the item, and at Wren, and then, briefly and without expression, at the man in the jersey.

"What do you think it means?" she said.

"He says it's void."

"What do you think it means."

"I think —" She looked again. The strokes were confident. They had been drawn by somebody with the pen already in his hand, in one movement each, and they did not obscure a single word. "I think if you wanted to destroy it you'd destroy it."

"Go on."

"And I think you'd use a different ink if you came back to it later. This is the same ink and the same nib. It's the same afternoon."

Madame Vollenweider put one finger on the table beside the parchment, not on it.

"A minute is the notary's own note of the act," she said. "The parties get the engrossment, the fair copy, on its own sheet, with the seal. When the notary has drawn the fair copy he strikes the minute in his register so that he cannot issue it twice. So." She straightened up. "Two strokes does not mean cancelled. Two strokes means done. A struck minute is the most complete act you will find in that box, because it is the only one you know was actually delivered."

There was a silence of about four seconds.

"Ah," said the man in the jersey.

"Yes," said Madame Vollenweider, and went back to the desk.

His name was Deletraz and he was not remotely embarrassed, and by half past one he had told her that he had been coming to that room for nine years, that he was at his mother's side now and had done his father's to 1604, that the parish registers of Ollogne were poor after the fire and excellent before it, and that if she ever wanted a family taken back he was, he did not mind saying, extremely good at it.

"I'll remember that," said Wren, who intended nothing of the kind, and who would remember it, in a room, in November, eighteen months later, with a coldness that started at the back of her neck.

She wrote it in the notebook. Two strokes = issued, not void. The struck ones are the real ones.

Then she wrote, underneath: I would have skipped them.

She looked at that for a while, because it was the first genuinely frightening thing she had written down about the machine and about herself, and it was not the machine she was frightened of. She had been going to photograph the struck items last. She had been going to photograph them last because she had made an assumption at twenty to twelve on her first morning, and the assumption was wrong, and nothing in four boxes would have corrected it except a woman at a desk who has been doing this for twenty-two years.

She photographed the struck ones before lunch.

She ate on the cathedral steps because there is nowhere cheaper, with the bread from the corvée, which had reached the stage where it is really a tool.

A man went past selling something out of a case and looked at her and did not bother.

Two schoolgirls sat four steps down and conducted, at volume, a conversation about a third girl which Wren followed with total attention and enjoyed more than anything else that week.

At half past one she was back, and she asked for the roll.

Madame Vollenweider brought it out on a board with two weights and a length of cotton tape, and showed her, without being asked, how to unwind sixty centimetres at a time and let it lie before it is weighted, and to wind it the same way it was wound and not tighter.

"It is a rôle," she said. "Water, probably. They are nearly always water in this canton."

It was water.

It was the roll of the hours: a list of names in a column with figures beside them, sewn on at the foot every time the list was remade, so that the same column runs down four metres and two hundred and forty years, and the hand changes six or seven times, and the names change more slowly than the hands.

She went down it at the speed of somebody going down a wall with her fingers.

There were marks in the margin. Of course there were marks in the margin — she had expected marks, she had seen marks in the registers, the registers are full of them. A household mark beside a name, cut or drawn, so that a man who could not write could be certain, when the roll was read out at the assembly, that the thing being read was his.

Well down it, in a hand of the middle of the eighteenth century, against a name of seven letters, there was a mark.

Two strokes down. A bar across them near the top. A hook off the bar to the right.

She did not move for a while.

Then she took the photograph she was allowed to take, which was the whole opening with the ruler alongside, and then two more, closer, which were also allowed, and then she sat with her hands in her lap.

It was the same mark. It was the mark on the second stone of the surviving bank above the scree, forty minutes' climb above her own top parcel, on a channel nobody had mentioned to her in six years except an old man who thought it was a ditch.

Three hours on the eighth day. From the head of the channel. After 1904, nothing.

At twenty past four she stopped, because the room closes at five and it takes half an hour to put four boxes back properly.

She washed her hands. She signed out. Madame Vollenweider said, "How many?"

"Four hundred and six."

"That is a good day. They get slower." And then, as Wren was at the door: "The struck ones. You would have left them, wouldn't you."

"Yes."

"Everybody does." She was already writing something else. "Tuesday?"

"Tuesday."

On the platform at Sion she took out her phone and opened a blank message to Firmin.

Anything found which touches the rights of any consort, including herself, to be reported to the president in writing on the day it was found.

She had agreed to that in front of twenty-two people, and she had meant it.

She looked at the empty message for four stops.

She had found a mark in a margin. She had found the same mark on a stone, which is not a document, which proves nothing, which was — and this was true, and she knew it was true, and she also knew what it was doing for her — a shape cut in granite that happens to look like a shape drawn in ink two hundred and forty years ago, on a roll that lists an entitlement belonging to a name that is not hers and has never been hers and has not been in the valley since before the war.

It touched nobody's rights. Nobody living held that name. There was nothing to report because there was nothing yet.

At Sierre she put the phone in her jacket and got the 18.10 bus, and a woman she did not know moved a bag off the seat beside her without being asked, and Wren sat down and looked out of the window all the way up.

She would remember the four stops, afterwards, better than she remembered anything else about that spring.

Chapter Six

A Careful Man

1493. A man of this community would not turn out three years together; his water withheld until he works.

By the second week of June the days had a shape.

The 06.52. The quarter of an hour up the Rue de Lausanne. The form, which she no longer filled in, because Madame Vollenweider had put her on the card index in the second week without mentioning it. Box three in the morning, because the paper is worse and the light from the north window is better before noon. The cathedral steps at half past twelve. Box one in the afternoon, which is the easy one, because box one is in her own handwriting by now.

Deletraz had moved to his mother's mother and was having, he said, a difficult time in Nendaz.

At the ordinary meeting on the sixth of June she reported for four minutes. She had photographed the whole of boxes two and three and was two-thirds through box one. She had read the parchments once and understood most of them and would not commit to any of it until she had read them a second time in the light of the rest. There was nothing yet to report which touched the rights of any consort.

Firmin wrote rien à signaler in the minute book and moved to the question of the depot roof, which took fifty minutes.

Gilles Perrenal, who had come, and who had sat through the accounts and the roof and the insurance, said nothing at all, and left when everybody else left.

She had walked down to that meeting past the oven.

They fire the four banal twice a year and the second firing was that week, and the whole of the lower village smelled of it from about four in the afternoon — not bread, at that stage, but hot stone and rye and woodsmoke, which is a smell that gets into a coat and stays there.

The queue is not a queue. It is an order, and the order is the same as it has always been, and it is not written down anywhere, and it is defended with a ferocity that outsiders find completely disproportionate and that the valley finds entirely reasonable, because a family's turn at the oven has a name and the name is ses heures de four — its hours of oven. Hours again. They measure bread the way they measure water.

There were boards of unbaked loaves along the wall under a cloth, and a man she knew by sight was carrying two of them at a time with his forearms, and the loaves each had a mark pressed into the top.

She stopped.

Not because she thought anything. Because they were marks: a cross with two bars, a fish-hook, a thing like a stirrup, pushed into the dough with a bit of carved wood so that four families' bread could go into one oven and come out to the right door.

"Whose is that one?" she said, pointing.

The man looked at where she was pointing the way you look at a road sign in your own village.

"That's Ernest's."

"How do you know?"

"Because it's Ernest's," he said, and carried the boards away, and that was the whole of the conversation.

The thing she was looking for she had already photographed, and she had photographed it in a wet cupboard in her third winter, and she had looked at it perhaps four hundred times.

Volume four of the registers runs from 1889 to 1912.

In it, between the entry for the year 1904 and the entry for the year 1905, the register changes.

She had known that for two years. Everybody who has ever opened volume four knows it, in the way you know that a road has been resurfaced. Up to 1904 the pages are ruled in three columns by hand and written across the opening: name, mark, hours. From 1905 the pages are a printed form, bound in, with eight columns — parcel number, commune section, area, holder, hours, day of turn, observations, signature — and the writing sits in the boxes instead of running across the page.

It was tidier. It was very much easier to read. She had been grateful for it for two years without once asking what it had cost.

The preface is on the recto before the first printed form, and it is nine lines, and she had photographed it in the cupboard along with everything else, and it is image 0331 of her first winter, and she had never read it, because it is a preface, and prefaces are what you skip.

It is signed A. Duvanel, secrétaire, and dated the ninth of March 1905, and it is in a beautiful hand, upright and even, the hand of a man who had practised.

It says, and she typed it out twice because her hands were not steady the first time:

She read the third sentence over and over.

It is not a crime. It is not even a mistake, on its face. In 1905 the water of the bisse of Darbon went where the water of a bisse goes, which is downhill, and a holding above the channel could not be watered from it by any means known to a commune secretary with a printed form and a cadastre, and to write hours against such a holding would be to write a fiction into a register whose entire purpose was to stop people writing fictions into registers.

He had been asked to remedy a confusion. He had remedied it. The assembly had voted for it in February and the assembly was not stupid either.

And in doing it he had changed what the water was attached to.

Before the ninth of March 1905, in Ollogne, water belonged to people, and people held it because of something their people had done, and the roll said so with a mark in the margin for those who could not write their names. After the ninth of March 1905, water belonged to parcels, and a parcel either lay under the channel or it did not.

Nothing was stolen. Nothing was forged. A clerk with a good hand tidied a drawer.

She did the arithmetic that evening at the table, with the stove out because it was June, and it took her most of the night.

The roll of 1904, the last sewn-on list, carries sixty-one names.

The register of 1905, first printed form onward, carries fifty-two holders.

She checked it twice and then a third time, and she wrote the names in two columns and drew lines between them, and nine names on the left had no line.

Nine names. She went back through the roll for each of the nine, and they had all been there a long time, and they had all been there with small entitlements — an hour, two hours, three hours on the eighth day — and none of them had been there with large ones.

Then she found what the nine had in common, which took the longest and was the simplest thing in the world.

Every one of the nine had held ground above the channel.

The Comba. The strip under the rock. The two long parcels on the shoulder that face south and grow nothing. The head of the Rouvenaz, above the line, which is stones. Land the bisse could not water and never had, held by families who nonetheless had hours in the bisse, and who had had those hours for as long as the roll runs.

Which made no sense at all.

Why would a man with land the water could not reach pay a tax in labour every year, and take his hours on the eighth day, and cut his mark in the margin to prove it?

She sat with that until nearly midnight.

Then she got up and went outside, because the answer was outside, forty minutes up, and she had been walking past it since April.

She did not go up. It was dark and her hand had only just healed and she was not stupid.

But she stood in the doorway with the light behind her and looked up at the black under the Darbon face, where there is a shelf cut level along the top of the scree, with the outer bank still standing here and there, falling a metre in thirty, crossing the gully on timber that has gone the way timber goes.

Above the channel.

There had been two channels. And when the upper one came down in the rockfall, and they built the lower one because the ground was easier, the men who had held the upper water did not stop holding it. They went on paying and they went on turning out and they went on taking their hours from the new line, because their right was not a right to a place. It was a right in the water. They had paid for the water, or their fathers had, and the water was theirs wherever it ran.

And it stayed theirs for however long it stayed, and nobody wrote down why, because everybody knew why, and then the last man who knew why died, and in 1905 a careful man with a printed form looked at nine holdings the water could not reach and did the only sensible thing.

The water being of no use to them.

Wren went back in and sat down and did not turn the terminal on for a while.

Because there were two things now and they were not the same size.

The first was that a right had been extinguished by tidying, and that this could probably be shown, and that showing it would answer the commune's question so completely that the Sérac would not get a litre until the lawyers had died of old age. The consortage's rights did not rest on nobody having stopped them. They rested on an act, and the act had been read, and transcribed, and printed, and tidied, and the tidying had not been a grant of anything. It had been a subtraction. Whatever the consortage held, it held from before.

That was the answer. That was the thing they had sent her for, and she had it, and it was good for every single person in that room including the old men.

The second thing was the nine names.

She did not look at the list again that night. She already knew it by heart, the way she knew nine hundred and forty other things, and the fourth name down had seven letters, and beside it in the margin of the 1904 roll there were two strokes, a bar and a hook.

Vuardin.

She knew what came next. It was not complicated and it was not even doubtful. You take the nine holdings and you follow them forward through the cadastre — 1901, then the revision, then the parcel numbers as they stand now — and you find out who holds that ground today, and the water goes where the ground went, if it went anywhere at all.

She could do it in an evening. She had the cadastre. She had the registers. She had a machine that had read every page of both.

She sat at the table for a long time with her hands flat on it.

She knew exactly where four of the nine holdings were, because she owns them, and she had rebuilt part of the wall on one of them with her own hands that spring.

Outside, the smell of the oven had got as far as the shoulder, which happens twice a year and lasts a night, and the whole valley goes to bed in it.

Chapter Seven

On the Day It Was Found

1511. Between the brothers, the meadow to the elder and the hours shared, which was not written until now.

She wrote it at six in the morning and it took her an hour and forty minutes and came to two hundred and ten words.

The printer took three sheets to give her one, which it does when the building has been cold, and she used the last of the paper and did not have any more, and signed it, and walked down before seven.

She did not send it by telephone. A thing like that goes on paper and goes into a hand, because in a year's time the question will not be what she said, it will be when she said it.

Firmin read it standing in his kitchen in his vest with the coffee going cold.

His wife came through, looked at Wren, looked at the paper, put a cup down in front of her without being asked and went out again, and did not come back in for twenty minutes, which is a skill.

He read it twice. The first time he got to the end and said, "Right," and went back to the top. The second time he stopped in the middle and looked up.

"Nine names."

"Nine."

"And four of them are yours."

"Four of the holdings are mine. The names aren't mine. Nobody alive has those names, as far as I can see." She heard herself and stopped, because as far as I can see was doing work she had not authorised it to do. "The names are gone. The ground went on being ground."

Firmin put the letter on the table and smoothed it with the flat of his hand, twice, which she had seen him do to the accounts.

"You could have not written this."

"Yes."

"You could have finished the reading, answered the commune, and written this in October, and nobody in the world would have known."

"Yes."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because I'd have known in October that I knew in June," said Wren.

Firmin looked at the letter for a while.

"Go and get Aloys," he said. "No — sit down. I'll telephone him. Sit down, for God's sake, you've walked down the hill and you've not touched that coffee."

Aloys came in twenty minutes with his boots half laced and read it at the table with his hat still on.

His first reaction was not the nine names. It was the other thing, and he got to it in about forty seconds, which was faster than she had.

"Then we're not holding it because nobody stopped us."

"No."

"We're holding it from before. The register isn't the right. The register's a copy of the right, and a bad copy, and the thing it's a copy of says something else."

"That's what I think. I'd want to read the parchments again before I'd write it down."

"And the commune's question —"

"The commune asked us to produce the title. The register isn't the title. It never was. It's a transcription made in 1905 and it says so on its own first page." She took a breath. "The title's older. I haven't found it yet. But whatever it is, the consortage held the water before Duvanel picked up his pen, and Duvanel didn't give us anything, because Duvanel wasn't in a position to give anybody anything. He was a secretary with a printed form."

Aloys sat back.

"That's the hotel dead."

"That's the hotel not getting anything out of the commune, because it isn't the commune's to give and now we can show it."

"Firmin," said Aloys. "That's the money we haven't spent and a fight we haven't lost."

"I know what it is."

"Then say it out loud, because she's sitting there like a dog that's been sick on the carpet."

"I know what it is," said Firmin again. He had not touched the coffee either. "I'm looking at paragraph five."

They sat with paragraph five for a while.

"Twenty-nine hours," said Aloys eventually.

"Twenty-nine."

"And the total didn't change? Before and after?"

"No. The total's the same in 1904 and 1905. I checked it three times."

There was a silence of a particular kind, and she watched them both do it in their heads, and Firmin got there first, because Firmin has been doing the accounts for nineteen years.

"Then somebody got them."

"Yes."

"Twenty-nine hours had to go somewhere and they went to the people who were left."

"Yes. And it's written down. Duvanel put it in the observations column, in the same hand, on the same day, and he wasn't hiding it. He shared them among the fifty-two in proportion to area, which is exactly what the assembly would have told him to do and probably did."

"So for a hundred and twenty years —"

"For a hundred and twenty years everybody under the channel has been watering, in part, on hours that used to belong to nine holdings above it."

Firmin said nothing for a long moment.

Then: "If those hours come back, they come out of us."

"Yes."

"Out of everybody. Pro rata."

"Out of everybody, pro rata, and nobody has done anything wrong, and nobody can be blamed, and in a dry year it's the difference between three cuts of hay and two on some of those meadows." She kept her hands still. "That's the part I couldn't leave in a drawer until October."

Aloys took his hat off, finally, and put it on the table.

"You've answered the commune," he said, "and cost us water."

"Yes."

"Both on the same page."

"Yes."

Firmin called the committee for the twentieth. He wrote the notice himself and it said only that the consort authorised on the second of May would make a report, and Wren understood that this was a kindness and also a delay, and that he needed eight days, and that she was not going to get to choose what happened in them.

She went up the hill at nine.

At ten she sat down and did the piece of arithmetic she had not done.

It took forty minutes, because it was not difficult, because Duvanel had done all of it for her in the observations column in March 1905 and the only work left was addition.

The two largest shares went to the two largest holdings under the channel, which in 1905 were both at the Rouvenaz.

She looked up who held them then. Then she followed both forward through the cadastre, the revision, the divisions at each inheritance, to the parcel numbers as they stand now.

The lower one had gone through three divisions and come out, in 1998, as part of what a man sold to a man from Sierre because it was worthless and the bank was standing on his neck, and what was left of it is Gilles Perrenal's.

The upper one had not been divided at all.

The upper one is four parcels at the head of the Rouvenaz, held by the same family since before the register, watered from section seven since before the register, and the man who holds them now is seventy-nine years old and carried a bar up to the slab on the eleventh of April and broke it with her, and stood at the fork on a Saturday evening and told her, for nothing, out of pure ordinary kindness, that the bisse had not always run where it runs now.

It's nothing. It's a ditch with nothing in it.

She went down at six in the evening because she could not sit in the building any more.

The bisse was full. It was the second week of June and the whole line was running and the sound of it under the Darbon face was the sound the valley has every summer, and she walked the path above it with her hands in her pockets and her heart going like she had run up something.

Marius was at the head of section seven with his boots in the grass, taking his turn.

He had the water out of the channel and onto the top of the meadow and he was moving it, the way he does it, which is the way his father showed him. He had a board in one hand and a spade in the other, and he had cut two fir branches and laid them in the head of the furrow to break the flow, because water that arrives in a lump takes the soil with it and water that arrives spread takes nothing.

You let it run and you watch where it wants to go and then you argue with it slightly, a spadeful at a time, so that it goes across the ground instead of down it. There is a word for turning it into the next furrow and a word for turning it back, and neither word is French, and she had heard them both a hundred times and had never once been told what they meant.

"There she is," he said. "Your hand all right?"

"It's fine."

"Show me."

She showed him. He looked at it the way men of that age look at a hand, which is briefly and with total attention, and grunted.

"How's Sion?"

"Slow."

"Good." He was watching the water. "Slow's right for that. My father used to say you can do a job fast or you can do it once."

He moved the board twenty centimetres and the sheet of water swung and took a different line down the meadow, and he watched it and was satisfied.

"There. See that? That's an hour and a half, that is, and it'll be green in eight days."

"How many hours have you got?"

"Eleven and a bit." He said it without looking round. "On the eighth day and the sixteenth. Same as my father. Same as his."

"Eleven and a bit."

"Eleven and a quarter, if you want to be a bank about it." He laughed at his own joke, which was not a joke, and moved the board again. "Why?"

"No reason," said Wren.

She stood there another ten minutes and watched an old man water a field with a plank, and then she said goodnight, and he said goodnight, and she went back up the hill.

Chapter Eight

Who Got Them

1547. The channel broken above the Comba by the fall of the rock. All men to turn out. None excused.

Everybody came on the twentieth, which had not happened in nineteen years, and the room above the café was not built for it.

They brought chairs up from downstairs. Two men stood at the back with their shoulders against the photograph of the 1961 corvée. Denise came up at nine with the coffee and stayed at the top of the stairs with the tray on her hip and nobody sent her down, which is a thing that happens once in a decade and is noted by everybody and mentioned by no one.

It was the longest day of the year and still light at half past nine. The window was open. There was a wasp.

Firmin had used his eight days the way presidents use eight days, which is one person at a time, in kitchens, with the radio on. By the time the room sat down there was nothing in it that anybody had not already heard in a version, and the versions did not agree, and that was the problem the meeting had to solve before it could start.

So he read the letter out. The whole thing, slowly, in his accounts voice, and then put it down.

"That's what she wrote to me on the twelfth. That's all she wrote. Anything you've heard beyond that, somebody made up."

Wren had printed two pages and they went round the room and came back an hour later in a different order and with a ring on one of them.

The first page was the preface of 1905 photographed at full width with the nine lines legible, and underneath it, typed, what it said.

The second was two columns of names, and nine lines drawn across the gap to nothing.

She talked for about ten minutes. What the register was and when it was made and who made it and on whose vote. What the preface said, twice, because the room needed it twice. What the roll was and how it was written. The nine names. She did not say the word right once, and she did not say what any of it meant, and when a man at the back asked her what it meant she said:

"That's not mine to say. I've told you what's in the box."

"Well, somebody has to say it."

"Then it should be somebody who isn't in it."

Aloys said, "It means the register isn't the title. It means we hold the water from before, and the 1905 book is a copy of a copy, and a bad one, and the commune can have that in writing the day she's finished reading."

The room liked that. The room liked it a great deal, and for about four minutes it was a good meeting. Somebody said the Sérac could put its pools in the Rhône. Somebody else said there was a perfectly good Rhône. Denise laughed at the top of the stairs and then stopped herself, and Firmin let all of it run, because he knew what was coming and he is not a cruel man.

Then Thérèse, from beside the window, without looking up: "And the nine?"

"The nine are not claiming," said a man immediately. "The nine are dead. There's nobody to claim."

"The nine names are dead," said Wren.

"That's what I said."

"You said the nine are not claiming. The names aren't claiming. The names haven't been in the valley since 1904." She kept her voice level, because she had practised this on the way down and it was the only sentence she had practised. "I don't know yet whether the entitlement went with the name or with the ground. That's what the parchments will say, if anything says it. I'm not going to guess it in this room."

"But if it went with the ground —"

"If it went with the ground, then it's attached to nine holdings above the channel, and four of those are mine, and I said so in the letter on the day I found it."

"And the other five?"

"Two are the commune's. Two are bourgeoisie. One's a family in Crans who've never set foot on it."

Somebody swore, quietly, with feeling.

The wasp went out of the window and came back in again.

It was Gilles Perrenal who did the thing that turned the meeting, and he did it by being honest again, which by then she had stopped finding surprising and started finding exhausting.

"Can I say the awkward bit," he said, "since everybody's thinking it and nobody's going to be first."

"Say it," said Firmin.

"We're about to tell the commune the 1905 register is a bad copy and can't be relied on. That's our whole defence. That's how we keep the water off the hotel." He turned the page over in front of him without looking at it. "And the same sentence says the 1905 register is a bad copy of what's owed to those nine holdings. We can't use it one way. It's one document. If it's wrong about us it's wrong about them."

"Then we don't mention the nine."

"Then we've got a document we've only read half of," said Perrenal, "and the commune has a lawyer, and the lawyer will read the other half in about forty minutes, because she's just put it in a letter with a date on it."

There was a pause.

"That's not a complaint," he added. "She did it right. I want that minuted, actually, Firmin. She did it right and I was the one who put the condition in and she kept it to the letter."

Firmin wrote.

And then a man at the back of the room — one of two who had driven up from Sierre, somebody's son-in-law, no vote, should not have spoken — said the thing that could not be taken back.

"If they didn't go to the nine after nineteen-oh-five, where did they go?"

The room went very quiet. Downstairs somebody dropped a crate of empties, which took a long time.

Firmin looked at Wren, and Wren understood that he had known this was coming from the moment he read the letter in his vest with the coffee going cold, and that he had decided in the eight days that it was better said in a room than in a kitchen, and that he was not going to say it himself, and that this was both cowardice and good practice and she could not tell which was uppermost.

"Duvanel shared them," she said. "Among the fifty-two. In proportion to area. He wrote it in the observations column on the same day in the same hand and he wasn't hiding it, and if he'd been asked he'd have said it was the only fair way to do it, and he'd have been right."

"In proportion to area."

"Yes."

"So the biggest got the most."

"Yes."

"Who got the most?"

Wren did not look at Marius. She had told herself on the path down that she would not look at him, and she did not look at him, and she has thought since that looking at him would have been kinder, because not looking at him told the whole room where to look.

"The two largest holdings under the channel," she said. "Both at the Rouvenaz."

Forty-odd people worked out an inheritance in their heads at the same time, which takes about three seconds in a village and about a year anywhere else.

"That'll be me, then," said Marius.

He was two seats from the door with his cap on his knee, in the same place as on the second of May.

"Some of it," said Wren.

"Eleven and a quarter I've got. Same as my father." He was looking at the table. "And what's mine out of the twenty-nine?"

"Five hours and three-quarters. Approximately. I'd want to check the areas against the old cadastre before I said it to anybody but this room."

"Five and three-quarters," said Marius.

"Approximately."

"Out of eleven and a quarter."

"Yes."

He nodded slowly, twice, and did not say anything else, and the terrible thing — she thought about this for years afterwards — was that nobody in the room said anything either. Not one person said well, it's not decided or nobody's claiming or hold on, now. Forty-odd people sat in a room above a café and did the arithmetic and then sat with the answer, because in that valley you do not comfort a man about water in public. You let him have it.

Somebody at the back shut the window, so as to have something to do.

They did not decide anything, which she had not expected and which Aloys told her afterwards was the only possible outcome and the best available.

Firmin proposed, and the room agreed without a count:

That the reading continue to its end, and that nothing be written to the commune until it is finished.

That all photographs be deposited with the president weekly, and a second copy held by the garde.

That no consort, and no person, advance any claim in respect of the nine holdings before the ordinary assembly of November, and that any consort doing so be understood to have acted against the consortage.

And that the question of the nine be the first item on the agenda of that assembly.

"November," said Firmin. "That's five months. That's the hay in, the second cut, the alpage down and the register closed for the year. Nothing changes before November. Everybody waters as they watered."

"And after November?"

"After November we'll have read the whole of it," said Firmin, "and we'll be a great deal less comfortable and a great deal better informed, and we'll decide then, all of us, in this room, and not one of us on our own in a kitchen."

He looked around.

"That includes me," he said. "And it includes her."

Outside it was the twentieth of June and not properly dark until well after ten, and the men stood in the road, and the two from Sierre got into their car and went, and Denise carried the chairs back down two at a time and would not be helped.

Wren waited by the wall out of habit and because her legs were not entirely reliable.

Marius came out and put his cap on and stopped in front of her.

"Right," he said. "Explain it to me properly. Not the room version. I'm slow but I'm not stupid and I'd like to hear it once from somebody who's actually read the thing."

So she explained it to him in the road, standing up, for about a quarter of an hour. The roll and the register. The printed form. The preface and what it says and what it was trying to do. The nine names and the twenty-nine hours and the observations column. The old line above the scree, and the notches in the gully, and what she thought it meant, and how far that was from what she could prove.

He listened the whole way through and did not interrupt once.

At the end he said, "So the water was theirs because their people paid for it. And then the cliff came down and they built the new one lower, and those lads went on paying and went on turning out, and took their hours off the new line, because it was the same water."

"That's what I think. I can't prove it yet."

"You won't prove it," said Marius. "Not that bit. Nobody wrote that down because everybody knew it." He said it without any resentment at all, as a man stating a fact about his own trade. "You'll prove the rest, though."

"Probably."

"Aye." He looked up the road. "What happens to the meadow?"

And there it was, because that was the only question, and the room had sat for two hours and not one person had asked it.

"I don't know."

"Guess."

"Two cuts instead of three, in a dry year. In a wet year you'd hardly see it."

"Four dry summers in the last six," said Marius.

"Yes."

He worked it in his head, out loud, the way he does everything: three cows now where his father had fourteen, the hay off the top meadow in a good year, what the second cut is worth, what he would have to buy in and what that costs now — and the number he arrived at was not enormous. It was the sort of number that decides whether a man of seventy-nine keeps three cows or keeps one.

"Well," he said, when he had finished.

"Marius —"

"No." He said it quite gently. "You found it in a box. It was in the box before you were born and it'll be in the box after I'm gone. Somebody was always going to open it." He pulled his cap down. "I'd rather it was somebody who told us the same week."

He set off down the road towards the Rouvenaz.

"Goodnight, Wren," he said.

Which was the first time in six years that anybody in Ollogne had called her anything at all.

Chapter Nine

Item Seven

1549. The new line finished, and the water run in it, and the old left dry.

In July the reading room was the coolest building she went into all summer, and she was in it four days a week, and in the first week of the month Madame Vollenweider told her she would be shutting from the first of August for three weeks.

"Three weeks."

"Three weeks. It is the law and it is also my sister." She did not look up. "You have twelve working days. I would spend them on box two."

She had been going to spend them on box three, because box three is the eighteenth century and the eighteenth century is where the hours are. She rearranged her whole summer on one sentence from a woman who had not read a page of it, and she was right to, and that was the second time.

Item seven is a single membrane, folded twice, with two diagonal strokes through the text in the ink of the text.

She had photographed it in May and had not been back to it since, because she reads in order and the order had kept her in the sixteenth century for two months.

She read it on the ninth of July and it took her five days.

Nine words an hour on the first day, because the hand is a fifteenth-century notarial minute hand and the abbreviations are the ones they all used and she had to build the list from nothing. The machine gave her about two-thirds of it, and gave her the two-thirds she could have done herself, and where the hand went difficult it went confident and wrong, and the places where it went confident and wrong were the places that mattered, which she had begun to think was not a coincidence but a property of the thing.

By the middle of the month she had it.

She got that far on the fourth day and thought she had finished.

She sat in a cool room in Sion in July with her hands flat on the table either side of a piece of sheepskin six hundred years old, and thought: it is a building contract. It is magnificent and it proves nothing.

She also thought, because she could not help it, that they had paid the man in bread and wine and money, in that order, and that the bread and the wine had come out of the same ground and the same oven as the bread in her bag.

The last covenant was on the fifth day.

She read it four times.

To those who have borne the charge of it, to each in the measure of what he has paid, and to their heirs holding the same lands.

Not to the lands lying beneath the channel. Not to the ground the water can reach. To the people who paid for it, in the proportion they paid, and to whoever came after them holding the same fields.

A man who put in eight florins in 1430 bought eight florins' worth of water. It was his. It stayed his, and it stayed his sons' while they held his ground, and the channel could run where it liked. The channel was the pipe. The right was the purchase.

Which is why nine holdings above the line had hours. Their people had paid.

Which is why nobody ever wrote the reason down: for four hundred and seventy-five years there was nothing to write. Everybody knew what the water was. It was the thing the village had bought in 1430 for wheat and wine and eight hundred florins and had gone on paying for in labour every April since.

And in 1905 a secretary with a printed form wrote the water being of no use to them, which was true, and had not the faintest idea that he was answering a different question from the one the act had asked.

She got up and went out into the Rue de Lausanne in the heat and stood against the wall of the building for four or five minutes with her arms folded, looking at a bus stop.

When she came back in, Deletraz had come round to her table and was standing over the membrane with his hands behind his back in the manner of a man inspecting somebody else's vegetable marrow.

"Contract," he said.

"It is."

"Fourteen-thirty. Good hand." He leaned in. "Are those his witnesses?"

"Three of them."

"Hm." He straightened up, and she braced for the lecture, and what she got instead was this: "You'll not get them anywhere. Witness names in a water contract, in a village that size — they're the same four men who witness everything for thirty years, and half of them are in the act because they were standing in the room. I've wasted two winters on witnesses." He shook his head at his own younger self with real feeling. "Follow the money and never the witnesses."

Then he went back to his own table, and it was, as it turned out, the most useful sentence anybody said to her that summer, and he did not know he had said it.

She photographed nothing for half an hour. She wrote in the notebook instead, and what she wrote was a list of everything she could not prove.

One. That this act is the act of this channel and not of another. The names are the names — the Nétsire, the Comba, the Fontana Blantse, the rocks of Darbon, the barme of Ollogne — and it is the channel, and she wrote it down as a thing to be proved anyway, because six hundred years is long enough for two waters to have carried the same name.

Two. That the act ever took effect, and that the water actually ran.

Three. That the nine are heirs of contributors. The act names no contributor. It names the community, in the persons of its procurators and syndics, and the community pledged all its goods, present and to come. Who found the eight hundred florins, and in what shares, is not in this document and by the nature of the thing never was.

Four. That the right descended. Four and a half centuries of inheritance, sale, division, marriage and default, and she has registers to 1873 and a roll to — she did not know. She had read the roll from the outside and stopped in the eighteenth century, because that was where the hours were.

And underneath the four, in capitals, the one that frightened her:

THAT ANY OF THIS IS STILL LAW.

Because a right nobody has exercised since 1904, in a country with prescription, in a canton with its own code, against a body that has held and used the water openly and continuously for a hundred and twenty years, is a question for somebody who has passed examinations. She has not passed any examinations. She has read a document.

At four she asked Madame Vollenweider whether a struck minute could be produced in a court.

"Produced, yes. Relied on —" She made a small movement with one hand. "The minute is the notary's own note. The party's document is the grosse. The engrossment. That is the one with the seal, that is the one that was handed over, and that is the one a court is interested in."

"So where's the grosse?"

"Where it was handed to. To the party. In this case to the community, which will have put it in its chest, because that is what a community did with a thing like that. The chest was in the church or in the house of the syndic, it had two locks or three, and the keys were held by different men. That is not romance. It is simply how they did it."

"And where's the chest?"

"That depends entirely on what happened to your commune in the nineteenth century, and in 1961, and on whether anybody's grandfather was tidy." She got up and went to the terminals at the side of the room, and Wren followed and stood at her shoulder and did not touch anything. "Ollogne. Here. Archives communales d'Ollogne, deposited 1961." A pause. "By the same man, I should think. Somebody in your valley had a very good winter in 1961."

"How much of it?"

"Fourteen linear metres."

"Fourteen —"

"It is not a large commune, and fourteen metres is not a large archive, and you have read four boxes in two months, so do not make that face at me."

She was not making a face about fourteen metres.

"Is there an inventory?"

"There is one of 1974 and it is bad." She scrolled. "Section A. Franchises et titres. Twenty-two items, fourteenth to sixteenth century." She stopped. "Item nine. Acte concernant la conduite des eaux, 1430."

Wren became aware of her own pulse.

"That's the grosse," she said. "That's this act with the seal on it, and it's a hundred metres from where I'm standing."

"It is in the depot, which is rather further than a hundred metres. But yes."

"Can I order it?"

Madame Vollenweider took her hand off the mouse.

"You are here on the letter of the garde of the consortage of Darbon. That letter covers the fonds of the consortage of Darbon. This is a different fonds and a different depositor."

"I know. I'm asking what I need."

"A letter from the depositor. Or from the body that succeeded to it."

"Which is."

"The commune of Ollogne," said Madame Vollenweider.

Wren stood there long enough that the archivist turned round properly and looked at her.

"Yes," she said. "I worked it out while I was reading, too. The commune's lawyer has written to your consortage asking it to produce its title."

"And the title is in the commune's own archive."

"The title is in the commune's own archive, in a depot in this building, and has been since 1961, and nobody has looked at it, because nobody has had a reason to look at it since before the war." She sat back down. "This happens more often than you would like. It is not a conspiracy. It is fourteen metres of paper and a bad inventory from 1974 and everybody being busy."

"They'll say no."

"They may say yes. Their lawyer asked a question and here is an answer to it, and lawyers are not all what you think they are." She began typing something else. "But you will have to ask in writing, and you will have to say why you want it, and what you say goes on the file, and the file is theirs."

Wren picked up her bag.

"And they'll know what to look for," she said, "before I've seen it."

"Yes," said Madame Vollenweider. "That is the price of the letter."

Chapter Ten

A Direct Legal Interest

1560. Admitted this year, each paying his part: four.

The resolution of the twentieth of June said that nothing be written to the commune until the reading was finished.

She sat with that for two days before she took it to Firmin, because she wanted to be certain she had not talked herself into a reading of it that suited her, and at the end of the two days she was not certain, and she took it to him anyway and said so.

"I think it means don't tell them what we've found," she said. "I think it doesn't mean don't ask them for a reader's letter. But I've wanted it to mean that since Tuesday, so you'd better decide, not me."

Firmin sent for Aloys, which by now was simply what happened.

They argued it for an hour in the kitchen with the shutters half closed against the heat. Aloys said a request to consult an archive is not a communication about the case. Firmin said the request has to say why, and the why is the case. Aloys said then say the why thinly. Firmin said a thin why on a commune's file is worse than a fat one, because a thin why looks like a man covering something and a fat one only looks like a man who wants something.

"Write it fat," he said at last. "Write it so there's nothing in it we'd be ashamed to hear read out in November. And I'll sign it, not you, and it goes from the consortage, not from a consort."

"They'll know what the act is before I've seen it."

"They'd know in September anyway. They've got a lawyer and the lawyer is not a fool and the inventory is public." He turned the paper over on the table. "I'd rather they heard it from us in July than found it themselves in October. It's the same information and it's a different kind of man who gives it to them."

The request went on the twenty-second of July, over Firmin's signature.

It said that the consortage of Darbon, in the course of responding to the commune's letter, had identified in the inventory of the communal archives an act of 1430 concerning the conduite des eaux. It said the consortage believed that act material to the question the commune had raised. It asked the commune, as depositor, to authorise consultation by the person already authorised by the consortage, and named her. It offered the commune copies of everything photographed, at the consortage's cost, which was nothing, and said so.

Raymond telephoned Firmin the same afternoon, which is what happens in a valley of eleven hundred people, and was friendly, and said he'd put it to the council, and that he personally could not see a difficulty, and that August was August.

"He can't see a difficulty," Firmin reported.

"He's the président de commune," said Aloys. "He's not the difficulty. The difficulty's on a retainer."

The reply came on the fourth of August, on headed paper, signed by the commune secretary for the council, and it was four paragraphs, and it was, from beginning to end, entirely correct.

Paragraph one acknowledged the request and thanked the consortage for its spirit of cooperation.

Paragraph two noted that the council does not meet in August and that the request had been registered for the ordinary session of the eighth of September.

Paragraph three set out the commune's regulations on access to its deposited archives, adopted in 2004. Consultation of items of section A, being original titles, is granted to researchers presenting an academic or scientific purpose, and to persons demonstrating a direct legal interest in the item concerned.

Paragraph four regretted that, the question of the rights in the water of the Darbon being presently under examination by the commune's legal adviser, and the person named being herself a proprietor of parcels whose rights might be affected by the content of the item requested, the council's adviser had recommended that consultation by that person be deferred until the examination is concluded, in order that no party be advantaged and the interests of all be preserved.

Firmin read it out twice in his accounts voice, in the same kitchen, with the same coffee going cold, and at the end of the second reading nobody said anything for a while.

"They haven't said no," said Aloys eventually.

"They've said not until it's over."

"And the thing they're examining is the thing in the box."

"Yes."

"So we can see the document that settles it once it's settled."

"Yes," said Firmin.

Aloys put both hands flat on the table.

"Is that dishonest?"

Firmin thought about it for a long time, longer than she expected, and she understood afterwards that he had been president for nineteen years and had written letters of that shape himself.

"No," he said. "That's the worst of it. There's not a line in it a decent man wouldn't sign. She's got a direct legal interest — that's the only reason she's allowed to see it under the regulation, and it's the reason they've stopped her. It's the same sentence doing both jobs."

"And their lawyer can order it tomorrow."

"Their lawyer has a direct legal interest and no parcels," said Firmin. "Yes. He can."

She walked back up at one in the afternoon in thirty-one degrees.

The reading room had shut on the first. The commune would meet on the eighth of September. The consortage would meet in November. The whole apparatus she was inside had gone on holiday at once, and she had, for the first time since the second of May, nothing whatever she could do, and she found she did not know what to do with an afternoon.

So she carried water.

The spring comes out a little above the roof and in the first week of August it was doing a little under a litre a second, which is its bottom. It always is. Her recharge is up between the mayens and the alp and it feeds her all winter on snow that fell a year before, and by August there is nothing left in the ground to give and the turbine makes what it makes and the terminal eats most of it.

Below her the bisse of Darbon was running at full charge, as it had since April, and would until the end of September.

She filled two cans at the spring box and carried them up to the young trees on the second parcel, one in each hand, and did it a dozen times, and it took her the afternoon, and she did it again on the Thursday.

On the Thursday there were walkers on the bisse path, four of them, in the good clothes, doing the whole line from the intake down, and one of them came up the track towards her because there was a woman on a hillside with two watering cans and that is a photograph.

"Is it drinkable?" he said, pointing at the channel.

"No."

"It looks clean."

"It's irrigation water. It comes off a torrent and it goes past everybody's fields."

"Ah." He looked at the cans. "And that?"

"That's a spring."

"So why aren't you —" he gestured downhill, at the channel, at the obvious, at a great deal of water going past a hundred and sixty metres below her — "using that?"

"Because water doesn't go up," said Wren.

He laughed, and said something to the others in German, and they all laughed, and they were not laughing at her and they were perfectly pleasant and they went on down the path, and she stood there with a can in each hand for about half a minute.

The hay came off the Rouvenaz in the second week.

Marius did it the way he has always done it, which is with the little tractor on the flat part and with a scythe on the steep part, because there is no machine that goes there and there never has been, and the steep part is the part that makes the difference.

She went down on the Tuesday because she had seen him at it on the Monday and had not been able to sit in the building.

He did not look surprised and did not thank her and did not ask why she had come, which was the kindest available arrangement, and they worked six hours and said about forty words.

She turned and he raked. He showed her, once, without comment, how to hold the rake on a slope so that it does the work instead of your back — which is not about the arms at all, it is about where you put your downhill foot — and she had been doing it wrong for six years and was better inside twenty minutes.

At six they sat on the wall and he gave her a beer out of the stream where it had been since morning.

"Hundred and twenty-two," he said.

"Bales?"

"Off the top. In a good year it's more. It's not a good year." He drank. "That's not you. Don't make that face. That's July."

"I wasn't —"

"You were." He looked out at the valley for a while. "I did the sum, you know. After the meeting. If they take it in November I've half the water I had, and the top meadow goes to two cuts, and two cuts on that ground is about ninety bales, and ninety bales is two cows."

"Marius."

"And I'd still rather know." He said it flatly, without looking round. "I've been watering that field for sixty-one years on somebody else's water. Nobody told me. My father didn't know either, and I'll not have a word said against my father, but he didn't know, and if he had known he'd have been at that meeting saying what I'm saying." He finished the beer. "It's not mine. That's all. It was never mine. Somebody made a mistake with a pen before either of us was born and I got the good of it for sixty-one years and now I don't. That's not a crime being done to me. That's the end of a piece of luck."

She did not say anything, because there was nothing to say that would not have been about her.

"Mind," he said, "I'd like to see the paper."

"So would I."

He looked round at that.

"They've not let you?"

"Not yet."

Marius laughed, once, without much in it.

"There you are, then," he said. "Two of us."

She lay awake on the fourteenth of August with the window open and the sound of the spring running thin and the whole of it going round.

Point three was the one that mattered: that the nine were heirs of contributors. The act names nobody. The community pledged its goods and the community paid the master, and who inside the community actually found the eight hundred florins was not in the act and never had been.

It would have been in a list. There is always a list. Somebody sat in a room in 1430 or 1431 and wrote down who put in what, because eight hundred florins does not arrive in a community of that size out of a common purse, and because the covenant she had read on the fifth day made the shares matter for ever. A right measured in the measure of what he has paid is useless unless somebody writes down what each man paid.

Follow the money and never the witnesses.

So where was it?

Not in box two, which is parchments and which she has now read. Not in box three, which starts in the sixteen-hundreds. Not in box one, which starts in 1873. Not in box four, which is a notebook, a lawsuit, a circular and a tin.

And then she sat up in bed in the dark and said something out loud that she was glad nobody heard.

The roll.

Four metres of parchment sewn membrane to membrane, each new list sewn on as the old one filled, wound on a wooden former. She had unwound it from the outside and read down it and stopped in the seventeen-forties, because that was where the hours were, and because the hand got worse going in, and because she had been — she now understood — reading it as a list of who had water.

The outside is the newest.

She had never once asked what was on the last membrane, at the core, on the wooden former, at the end she had not unwound.

The reading room opened on the twenty-fifth.

Chapter Eleven

Those Who Bore the Charge

1583. Of those who take at the head, all have done their labour.

The reading room opened at eight on the twenty-fifth of August and she was across the road at ten to.

Madame Vollenweider was brown and entirely unaltered and said, "Your roll," before Wren had put her bag down, "is on the board. I put it out on Friday. You will want the long table, and two more weights than you think, and you will not have it done today."

"You knew."

"You wrote it on the order slip in July. Roll, all membranes." She was already turning away. "I have been waiting three weeks to see what is on the end of it. Do not enjoy it too much on your own."

Deletraz had been to Alsace and had come back with four generations and a grievance about a priest.

It took four hours to get to the core, and most of that was waiting.

Parchment that has been wound for a long time does not want to be flat, and the way you make it flat is not to make it flat. You unwind sixty centimetres, you weight it at the edges, you leave it, and while it is deciding you do something else. She did the something else with the camera, and she read the membranes as they came, because there was nothing else to do, and she went backwards through the hours of the valley at about thirty years an hour.

The seventeen-forties, which she had. The sixteen-nineties, in a hand that leaned. A gap where a membrane had been cut out and a new one sewn in, the stitching brown and perfectly regular. The sixteen-twenties, in Latin again after two hundred years of French. A membrane that was almost entirely names crossed through, which she worked out was plague and then made herself write down as possibly plague, to check.

Fifteen-eighties. Fifteen-forties.

One of the weights went off the end and hit the floor with a sound that stopped the room, and Deletraz looked up with the expression of a man who has been waiting nine years for somebody else to do that.

And then, near the end of it, the last membrane, on the wooden former.

It was the best-preserved piece of parchment in the entire fonds, because it had been on the inside of a roll since before anybody in that valley could write, and the ink on it was as black as the day it dried.

The heading took her the whole afternoon and she was certain of it by half past four.

These are the names of those who have borne the charge of the water of Darbon, and how much each has paid.

Underneath it, forty-one lines.

A name. Sometimes a mark. A sum in florins.

She did not read the names first. She read the column of sums first, all forty-one of them, because she wanted to know whether this was what she thought it was before she let herself look at anything else.

She had the machine read them as well, from the photograph, because forty-one numbers in a fifteenth-century hand is precisely the kind of work where a person's eye slides.

It gave her a column. She took nine of the forty-one at random and checked them against the parchment with a rule and a pencil, one figure at a time, which took twenty minutes.

Seven were right.

Two were wrong, and they were wrong the same way: a florin sign taken for a numeral in a hand that joins them. She corrected the two and told it what it had done, and it went back through the other thirty-two and changed one more, and after that it did not make that mistake again, in that hand, ever.

That is the whole of it. That is what she had spent most of a year of a wet cupboard teaching it to do, and it is not clever, and she has never once described it to anybody as anything but correcting.

Then she added the column up herself, on paper, twice.

Eight hundred and eleven florins.

And at the foot, in the same hand: and of the surplus, eleven florins, there is bought the wine for the men on the day the water ran.

She put her hands in her lap for a moment.

Eight hundred florins was what the community had covenanted to pay Heinzmann de Loèche on the sixth of June 1430. This is where the eight hundred florins came from. Forty-one men, in a village that probably held four hundred souls, had put in between four florins and ninety-six, and made up the price, and bought themselves and their heirs a water.

And somebody had written down what each of them paid, because the covenant made those proportions matter for ever.

To each in the measure of what he has paid.

They had paid the master in wheat and wine and coin. The wheat came off ground above the village, because the floor of the valley in 1430 was marsh and fever and nobody sowed anything on it; the wine came off the slope below. Even the price was a column. And the florins left over bought drink for the men on the day it ran, which is the only line in the whole document that anybody would recognise as human, and which she read four times.

Nobody in Ollogne had seen this since the seventeenth century at the outside, because it had been at the core of a roll that everybody unwinds from the outside, because the outside is where this year's names are, and this year's names are what a roll is for.

Twenty-nine of the forty-one had a mark beside the name.

She went down them slowly, because by then she knew what she was doing and did not want to be doing it.

A cross with two bars. A fish-hook. A rake of four teeth. A thing like a stirrup. A capital A with the crossbar carried out to the right and down. Marks cut into stone and burned onto beams and notched onto sticks and pressed into loaves, put on parchment in ink by a notary's clerk who drew each man's mark for him and had him touch the pen, which is what they did, and which is why the marks on a document like that are in the same ink and the same hand as the names.

The fourteenth line down had seven letters and ninety-six florins.

Beside it: two strokes, a bar across them near the top, and a hook off the bar to the right.

She wrote the number down and looked at it and did not do the arithmetic, and got up and went and stood at the window at the end of the reading room for four minutes with her arms folded, looking at a wall and a bit of the cathedral.

Then she went back and did it.

Ninety-six florins of the whole is a little under an eighth of the channel, bought outright, in perpetuity, for a man and his heirs holding the same lands.

An eighth of the rota, in 1904, would have been forty-eight hours and a half.

In 1904, against the name of Vuardin, in the margin of the roll, in the last century in which anybody wrote it down, there were three hours on the eighth day.

Three.

She checked it four times over the next two days and it did not move, and then she stopped checking it and started checking the other eight.

It was the same everywhere. The nine holdings Duvanel dropped in 1905 had twenty-nine hours between them in the roll of 1904. Their founders, in 1430, had put in two hundred and eleven florins of the total — a quarter of the channel — which against the same rota is a hundred and seven hours.

Twenty-nine hours was what was left of a hundred and seven.

She sat in a cool room in Sion on the twenty-sixth of August with four and a half centuries of parchment weighted flat in front of her and understood, all at once and with a sort of horror, that 1905 was not the crime. 1905 was the last five per cent of it.

Somewhere between the sixth of June 1430 and the printed form of March 1905, seventy-eight hours had gone out of the water of nine holdings above the channel. Not taken. Not stolen. Eroded — by division on inheritance, by a clerk copying a short list instead of a long one, by a man not turning out for the corvée three years running in a bad decade and his neighbours quietly adjusting what he took, by the thing that happens to any right that is not exercised in a place where everybody can see the ground and nobody can see the document.

The water had drifted downhill. Of course it had. The water could only go downhill, and the people it could reach were down there, and every year for four hundred and seventy-five years the arrangement had bent one notch towards the ground that could actually use it, and every single one of those notches had been sensible.

She found the other thing on the Friday, and it was worse in a way she did not have a name for.

Of the fifty-two holders in the register of 1905, only nineteen could be traced to a name on the membrane of 1430.

The rest had come in later. The act had said they could: any man of the said community who has not borne the charge may be admitted to the said water thereafter, paying his part with the rest, and not otherwise. They had paid their part, in 1560 and 1611 and 1798 and 1863, and been admitted, and their admissions are in the roll where the membranes are sewn on, and every one of them is in perfect order.

Which means that the consortage of Darbon, today, is not a body holding water by custom, or by use, or because nobody stopped them.

It is, and has been without interruption since the sixth of June 1430, a company of people who bought a water and admitted new members on payment.

That is the answer to the commune. That is the complete and final answer to the commune, and it is better than anything Aloys hoped for, and it was in her bag, and it is also the thing that says the nine holdings above the channel had been bleeding hours for four centuries.

The same document. One document, as Gilles Perrenal had said in a room above a café, and if it is right about us it is right about them.

On Friday afternoon Madame Vollenweider came and stood at the end of the long table and looked at the membrane for a while without saying anything.

"Forty-one," she said.

"Forty-one."

"And you have your list of payers."

"I've got the list of payers."

"Then you have the thing that does not exist." She said it quite mildly. "I have worked here for twenty-two years and I have had perhaps six of those. Everybody has the act. Nobody has the money." She bent slightly to look at the fourteenth line. "Ninety-six. That is a very great deal in 1430. That is a man with a mill, or a man with a brother in Sion."

"Or a man who wanted water very badly."

"Or a man who wanted water very badly," she agreed, "and could not write his name."

Deletraz, from the next table, without looking up from Alsace: "Told you. Follow the money."

She took the 18.10 bus on the twenty-eighth of August with six hundred-odd new photographs and a page in her notebook with four lines on it.

Nine holdings. A quarter of the water. A hundred and seven hours. Twenty-nine in 1904.

And under that, because she had made herself write it:

Of which mine: four holdings. Seventy hours.

Seventy hours, on a rota with thirty-one consorts in it, a third of them over seventy, in a valley that has had four dry summers in the last six.

She had gone to Sion in May to find out whether the consortage owned its water, and she had found out, completely, and the answer was yes. She had also found, in the same four boxes, on the same afternoon, in the same hand, that the largest single water right in the commune of Ollogne belongs to four parcels of stones above the channel that a man gave her because he could not think what else to do with them.

The bus went up through the vines with the sun going off them, and then through the chestnuts, and then out onto the open ground where you can see the whole of it at once — the plain at the bottom with the river straightened through it, the terraces, the villages on their dry fans above the old marsh, the mayens, and above everything the rock where nothing grows and where every litre of it comes from.

She looked at the four lines for most of the journey.

At Sierre she took out her phone, and the date on it was the twenty-eighth of August, and under the condition she had agreed to in front of twenty-two people she had until midnight.

Chapter Twelve

Through the Ceiling

1604. A dispute concerning the eighth day, settled by the garde, and both men fined.

She knocked on Firmin's door at twenty past eleven at night with three sheets of paper in her hand.

He came down in a dressing gown and did not say anything at all about the hour. He put the kitchen light on, sat, put his glasses on, and read it where he sat, and she stood by the door, because sitting down would have been a thing she did not have the right to do.

It was longer than the June letter. It had the heading of the membrane in Latin and underneath in French. It had the forty-one names and their sums in a table, and the total, and the surplus and what was done with it. It had the nine holdings and their quarter of the channel. It had the nineteen of the fifty-two who descend from contributors and the thirty-three admitted later on payment, with the dates.

And it had four lines near the bottom which she had rewritten many times on the bus and had ended up writing as plainly as she could manage, because every version that was gentler was also less true.

Firmin read it twice.

Then he took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose for a while.

"Say it to me in words," he said. "Not the paper. Words."

"The bisse was bought in 1430 by forty-one men who put up the money. It belongs to them and their heirs in the share each of them paid. The consortage is the company of those men. Everybody else came in later by paying, and all of that's in order, and it answers the commune completely, and there's no argument against it that I can see."

"Good."

"And the shares have moved. For four hundred years, slowly, always downhill, always for a reason that made sense at the time. The ground above the channel kept paying and kept turning out and kept getting less, and in 1905 it got nothing." She kept her hands at her sides. "And on the numbers in that document, the largest single water right in the commune belongs to four parcels of stones that nobody has watered since before the war."

"Which are yours."

"Which are mine."

Firmin looked at the table for a long moment.

"You've brought me a bill," he said.

He called the committee for Saturday the fifth of September, three days before the commune's council met, and the notice said communication de la consorte autorisée le 2 mai and nothing else. By Wednesday everybody in the valley knew it was seventy hours; by Thursday it was a hundred; by Friday somebody had it that she was claiming the whole channel.

Aloys came up on the Thursday evening, which he had never done.

"I'm not asking you anything," he said, from the bottom of the steps, not coming up them. "I want you to hear it from me before Saturday. They're going to want a lawyer."

"I know."

"Not for the commune. For themselves. Against you."

"I know that too."

"You don't know the next bit," said Aloys. "I'll say it and then I'll go. From Saturday you'd best not tell me anything you find. Not because I don't want to know. Because I'll be asked, under oath if it goes that far, what the garde knew and when, and the only clean answer is nothing." He put his hands in his pockets. "And I'd rather give the clean answer than the true one."

"Aloys —"

"Goodnight," he said, and went down.

On the Saturday Firmin met her at the door of the café at ten to eight and did not let her past it.

"You're not coming up."

"It's my letter."

"It's the consortage's letter and I'll read it to them myself, every word, and then they'll talk about you, and you're not going to be in the room while they do it." He said it the way he read the accounts. "That's not a punishment. Half of them can't say what they think with you sitting there and the other half will say it because you're sitting there. Give me two hours."

"Where am I supposed to go?"

"Denise," said Firmin, "has been told."

She sat in the café for two hours and forty minutes with thirty people arguing about her directly overhead.

You cannot hear words through that floor. You can hear everything else. You can hear a chair go back hard and you can hear the difference between the noise a room makes when it is surprised and the noise it makes when it is angry, and you can hear one voice going on much longer than the others, and you can tell, absolutely and without a syllable, that the long voice is Perrenal, because there is a rhythm to a man reading from a piece of paper he wrote at his own kitchen table.

Denise put a coffee in front of her at eight, and a second one at nine, and at about twenty past nine, without any comment whatever, a plate of bread and cheese and half a dried sausage, and stood at the other end of the bar with a cloth doing nothing at all to a glass.

"He's been talking twelve minutes," said Denise, at one point.

"Which one?"

"Gilles." She held the glass up to the light. "That's not against you. When he's against a thing he's quick."

At ten past ten there was a noise of the particular kind that means a vote, and then the floor started moving as thirty people stood up at once, and Denise said, "Right," and went to put the coffee on.

Thérèse came down first, which Wren understood afterwards had been arranged.

She sat down opposite without being asked, put her bag on the chair beside her, and delivered it in order, the way she delivers everything, which is the reason the valley tells her things.

"They've taken it well and you're not going to like it."

"Go on."

"One. Nobody thinks you've done anything wrong. Two people tried to start something about how long you'd had the roll before you wrote, and Firmin put the dates up on the wall — the twenty-sixth, the twenty-eighth, the letter that same night — and that was the end of that, and they were embarrassed, and one of them will be all winter."

"Two."

"Two. They need a lawyer. Their own, not the commune's, and it's not going to be small, and there's six hundred francs in the account." She turned her hand over. "Three. There's one man in this valley with money."

Wren shut her eyes.

"I wrote to Firmin about that on Wednesday."

"I know. He read it out." Thérèse was watching her carefully. "He read the whole of it. If Célestin Ourdaz pays for the consortage's lawyer, then the man funding the case against my parcels is the man who gave me the parcels, and I don't think that's a reason not to take his money, and I think it's a reason you should all know before you take it." She sat back. "Nobody in that room didn't know. Every one of them has known for six years. They'd just never had to hold it and the water at the same time, and you made them, in writing, before anybody else could."

"And they took it anyway."

"Of course they took it anyway. What else were they going to do?" Thérèse picked up the last of the bread off Wren's plate, which was the most companionable thing anybody had done to her in months. "Perrenal spoke for twelve minutes and all of it was that the consortage had to be seen to fight it properly or nobody would ever believe the result, and that meant the best man they could get, and that meant somebody paying. He never said your name once. That was deliberate."

"And the last one?"

"The last one," said Thérèse, "is that they've finished with you. The reading's done, the discs go to Firmin, and from Monday the lawyer has it and no consort talks to him except through the president." She stood up and put her coat on. "You're not the reader any more. You're the other side of the table, and there was no way round that, and every single person in that room is sorry about it, and not one of them voted against it."

Firmin telephoned Ourdaz on the Sunday and reported it by letter on the Monday, and the letter said that Monsieur Ourdaz had undertaken to meet the costs of legal advice to the consortage in the matter of the rights in the water of Darbon, without limit as to amount and without condition, had declined to be a party to anything, and had asked that his name appear in the accounts.

Aloys told her the rest of it in the road, because Aloys could not help himself, even then.

"Four seconds," he said. "Firmin got about three sentences out and he said yes. Didn't ask what it was about. Didn't ask how much. Said send the bills to the office in Sierre and don't bother me again about it."

"That's him."

"And then he said one more thing, and Firmin's not going to repeat it, so I will." Aloys looked away up the road. "He said: tell her I think it's the funniest thing that has happened to my family in two hundred years."

She did not say anything.

"He doesn't mean it unkindly," said Aloys.

"No," said Wren. "He never does."

She delivered on the Tuesday.

Everything, on two discs, and a third with the transcriptions, and an index she had made herself over two evenings which was nine pages long, which nobody had asked for, and which was — she knew perfectly well — the most useful object of the three.

Firmin signed for it and wrote it in the minute book. Reçu, complet, dans l'ordre.

"That's you done, then," he said, and meant it kindly, and shook her hand, which he had never done.

Nobody asked her whether she had another copy.

She had another copy. She had the working copy, on the machine, on the disc under the bed and at the address in Iceland, because a person who has typed most of a year of a wet cupboard by hand does not delete anything, ever, and because the condition of the second of May said delivered to the consortage and did not say and not otherwise retained, and she had read that sentence more times than was decent.

She walked up the hill on the eighth of September with four and a half centuries in her coat pocket and did not take her hand off it once.

Chapter Thirteen

Maître Delarzes

1611. Admitted, paying his part, the son of the smith, for the ground under the church.

The commune council sat on the eighth of September and dealt with the request of the twenty-second of July as item nine of fourteen, after the school transport and before the cemetery.

It resolved two things. That the commune's legal adviser be authorised to consult item 9 of section A, together with anything else he considered material. And that the request of the consortage of Darbon be deferred, in the terms of the regulation of 2004 and on the advice previously received, until the conclusion of that examination, the council wishing to assure itself that no party be advantaged.

The extract arrived at Firmin's on the fifteenth and he read it out to Aloys and to nobody else, and Aloys said a word Firmin did not put in the minute book, and then said, "Does she know?"

"She'll know by Thursday. Everybody knows by Thursday."

She knew by Wednesday.

Maître Delarzes came up on the twenty-fourth, and he came up the track, and he had the right boots.

That was the first thing she noticed and she had not expected to notice anything about him at all. He was about fifty, small, narrow, entirely grey, in a jacket he had clearly owned for twenty years, and he had parked at the fork like everybody and walked the two hundred metres without any apparent opinion about it.

"You're the reader," he said.

"I was."

"You are. There isn't another one." He put a briefcase on her wall without asking whether it would hold, which everybody does, and it held. "Before anything else, and I am going to say this badly on purpose so there is no doubt about it afterwards: I do not act for you. I act for the consortage of Darbon. Everything you say to me this afternoon may be used against your interest and probably will be. Do you understand that?"

"Yes."

"Say it back to me."

"You don't act for me. Anything I tell you can be used against me."

"Good." He sat down on the wall. "Now. Where's the channel?"

He was not interested in the parchments for the first hour.

He was interested in the ground. He made her take him up to the trace, which he did in his fifties at her pace without comment, and he walked three hundred metres of it, and got down into the gully and looked at both notches, and photographed the mark on the second stone from four angles with a ruler and a small camera that was not a telephone, which she had not told him to do.

"Who else has seen this?"

"Marius. Sixty years ago. He thought it was a ditch."

"Anybody else, since April?"

"No."

"Then nobody walks on it and nobody tidies it, and if anybody from the commune or the hotel asks you where it is, they ask me." He straightened up. "That bank is a structure, and a structure in the ground is evidence in a way a parchment is not, because nobody can say you found it in the wrong order."

They went back down and she made tea on the stove because there was nothing else to offer, and he drank it without looking at the room, which she appreciated more than she would have appreciated tact.

"Right," he said. "Your transcription."

"What about it?"

"I had three passages checked against the originals. Not by you and not by me." He put his cup down. "A woman in Fribourg who does this for the university, four hours, and the consortage paid her out of Ourdaz's money and she has no idea whose case it is."

Wren found she had put her own cup down without deciding to.

"And?"

"Two were right. Word for word, including two abbreviations she says most people expand wrongly." He was watching her, which she understood was the point of the exercise. "The third was wrong. Fourth membrane, sixteen-twenties, a name: you have Chaviez, she has Chavier, and the difference matters because one of them is in the admissions and one is not."

"That's in my favour."

"It is in your favour," said Delarzes. "And in your index, at page seven, against that entry, you have written uncertain, last letter contested, do not rely." He let that sit for a moment. "Which is why I am sitting on your wall drinking your tea instead of writing a letter to your president about the reliability of the material. One error in three passages, marked as an error by the person who made it, before anybody checked."

"I could have —"

"You could have not marked it. Yes." He picked the cup back up. "That is precisely what the four hours were for."

Then he gave her the difficulties, in order.

The good news first, and he gave it first deliberately, because he had learned that from somewhere. The consortage's answer to the commune is complete: a purchase in 1430, a list of contributors with sums, an unbroken series of admissions on payment for four centuries, and a register since 1873. The strongest title he has been handed by a farming body in this canton. The commune will not pursue it and the hotel will not get a litre it is not sold on ordinary terms.

Then the rest, which is the question she wrote in capitals in her own notebook and copied, foolishly, into an index that thirty-one people now have.

"Is any of it still law."

"Is it?"

"I don't know," said Delarzes. "And anybody who tells you they know, this year, on this material, is selling something."

He went through it the way she had gone through the roll, from the outside in. The right, if it exists, is a right in the water attached to the ground, and rights of that kind are supposed to be in the land register, and it is not in the land register, because the land register in this commune was established in the twentieth century on the basis of —

He paused, and looked at her, and she said it for him.

"On the basis of the register of 1905."

"On the basis of the register of 1905. Yes." He was not unkind about it. He was laying cards down. "So the instrument that dropped the nine is the instrument the modern register was built from, and the modern register is what everybody has relied on for a century. There is an argument that a right of this age, preceding the register, arising by act and exercised in fact, survives the register's silence. It is not a mad argument. There is also an argument that a hundred and twenty years of non-exercise, against holders who have watered openly, continuously and in good faith, has done what a hundred and twenty years does. That is not mad either, and it is the one I would make if I were on the other side, which in a sense I am."

"So I lose."

"So you may be right and lose. Or right and win in six years, having spent more than the water is worth, among thirty people you have to live with, a third of whom will be dead." He turned the cup round on the wall. "That is not advice. I am not permitted to advise you. That is the weather."

Then he asked her a question that had nothing to do with any of it, and she did not see where it was going until it had arrived.

"What else have you got?"

"Meaning."

"Land. What do you hold, and where?"

"Four parcels. Section seven, between the vine line and the bench."

"And below that?"

"Nothing."

"Above it?"

"Nothing."

"A mayen?"

"No."

"A share of an alp?"

"No."

Delarzes put the cup down on the wall and looked out at the valley for a moment, at the vines and the villages on their fans and the mayens and the rock above, the whole of it stacked up in bands in the afternoon light.

"Then you are the only person I have acted for in twenty-six years in this canton," he said, "who owns land at one height."

"Is that a legal point?"

"It is the only legal point that matters and it is not in any book." He picked his briefcase up. "Every other person in that room can lose an argument about water at twelve hundred metres and still have a vine at five hundred and a cow on somebody's alp at two thousand. They are not spread because they are clever. They are spread because their great-grandfathers were frightened, and being spread is what a frightened family did instead of insurance." He looked at her. "You are not spread. You are one thing, at one height, and everything you have is inside a single argument. When they vote in November, that is what half of them will be thinking about you, and it will not be unkind and it will not be said out loud."

He said the other thing on the way out, and it was worse than the weather.

"Your strongest opponent isn't me. It's you."

"Meaning."

"On the fifth of September your president read out a letter in which you stated that a florin in 1430 cannot be converted into an hour in 1904, that the hours were never calculated from the florins in any document you had seen, and that the act proves a proportion and not a schedule." He said it evenly, quoting from the minutes, which he had. "Thirty people heard it. It is in Firmin's minute book in Firmin's hand. It will be the second paragraph of everything I write."

She did not say anything.

"That was an honest answer," said Delarzes. "It was also the single most damaging sentence available in this entire matter, and you wrote it voluntarily, in a letter, before anybody had asked you for it, at a moment when nobody in that room would have known the difference if you had left it out." He looked up. "I have been doing this for twenty-six years. I have never seen anybody do that. I would like to know why you did it."

"Because it's true."

"That is not a reason people give."

"It's the one I've got."

He nodded slowly, once, and made a note with a pencil, and she never found out what the note said.

He did the practical part on the path.

The consortage would file nothing before November. He would produce an opinion for the assembly setting out the position of the nine holdings without recommending anything, because recommending anything is the assembly's business.

She should not write to the commune, or the hotel, or the other eight holdings — "particularly not the other eight, and I am going to say that twice, because the first person who telephones the family in Crans converts this from a water dispute into a land value dispute and there will be no recovering it."

She should take her own advice.

"I can't afford my own advice."

"No," said Delarzes. "You can't. You are sitting on the largest water right in this commune and you cannot afford forty minutes of anybody's time, and if you want the sentence that explains this entire canton to you, that is the sentence."

"There's a man paying your bill who'd pay for mine tomorrow."

"Yes. There is." He closed the briefcase. "And if you take it, the consortage's lawyer and your lawyer are being paid by the same man, and the first question anybody asks in November is whether the whole thing was arranged between the three of us in a chalet in Sierre. It would not be true and it would not need to be true."

"So I've got nothing."

"You have the same thing you had in May, which is that you have read the documents and nobody else has." He stood up. "Do not mistake that for a small thing. It is the only asset in this matter that cannot be bought."

At the top of the track he stopped, exactly where Ourdaz had stopped in April, which she noticed and disliked herself for noticing.

"One question," he said. "As a man on a hillside and not as anybody's lawyer, and you don't have to answer it, and I would prefer it if you didn't answer it today."

"Go on."

"Do you want the water?"

She opened her mouth and found nothing in it.

"Because I have read the whole of it," said Delarzes, "and an index made by somebody who was not paid to make it, and two letters written on the day the writer could have waited four months, and I cannot tell. I cannot tell whether I am dealing with a woman who has found a right and wants it, or a woman who would rather it had stayed in the roll, or a woman who wants the thing proved and doesn't care who ends up with it." He put his gloves on, in September, which told her something about his hands. "Those are three different clients and they need three different answers, and you are not my client, so you will have to be your own."

"Does it matter? If the law's the law."

"The law is never the law," said Delarzes. "The law is what somebody asks for. Nothing in that roll comes to you unless you stand up and ask for it, and nothing in it goes away unless you stand up and say you don't want it, and if you do neither, then in November thirty-one people will vote on something you have not told them you want, and they will guess, and they will guess wrong, and they will guess badly of you. That is not law. That is a room."

He went down two steps and turned round.

"That is the only question anybody will ask you in November," he said. "You have until November to find the answer."

Chapter Fourteen

The Column

1628. The roll remade, the old being full, and nothing changed.

Marius came up on the first of October and stood at the bottom of the steps, because that is where he stands now, and said, "Are you doing anything Friday."

"No."

"You are. I need a hand up at the Ruvines. Three cows and a heifer and me, and I'm seventy-nine, and Norbert's got the cheese to get down." He was already turning round. "Half six at my gate. Bring boots that aren't those."

She had never been above her own ground.

In six years she had been up the shoulder to the trace and along it to the scree and no further. She had been to the mayens twice on other people's business. She had never been to the alp, because nobody had ever asked her, and it had not occurred to her that it was a place you went rather than a place you were from.

They went up on the Friday in the dark and it took two hours and forty minutes, and it was the first time in her life she went through the whole of it in one morning.

Through the village at half past six, past the church and the oven, cold, and the last barn.

Onto the old road that stops being a road at about a thousand. Through the vines, which end. Through the chestnuts, which end.

Onto the open ground at fourteen hundred where the light came, and she looked left and saw the Darbon face with the channel under it as a dark seam, and above it, at that hour and that angle, a green line in brown ground that she would now see from anywhere in the commune for the rest of her life.

Then the mayens at sixteen hundred. Nine buildings and seven of them shut. One with a light on and a dog. Two with the new kind of window.

Then the treeline. Then the first snow, thin, granular, in the hollows.

Then nothing that grows.

Then the Ruvines.

The alp is a stone hut with a roof of heavy slabs, a byre built into the slope, and a dairy dug into the north side where the temperature does not move.

Norbert was thirty years younger than Marius and had been up there since June and had the particular quality of a man who has spoken to two people since June. He said good morning, looked at Wren for exactly as long as it took, said, "You're the one that reads," and went back to what he was doing, and that was the whole of the introduction and it was a great deal warmer than it sounds.

Marius let the cows out, counted them, swore at the heifer, and then made coffee on a gas ring and put his feet on the step and did not move for twenty minutes, which she understood was not laziness but the correct procedure for a man of seventy-nine who has walked up eight hundred and sixty metres before breakfast.

The dairy had the cheeses in it on a plank rack, on their sides, turned and rubbed, going back through the summer from the end of September at one end to the first week of July at the other, and the smell in there was the smell of the whole of it, which is milk and stone and ammonia and something underneath that is almost sweet.

"How many?" she said.

"Eighty-four," said Norbert. "It's been a fair year and not a good one."

"And whose are they?"

Norbert looked at her over the rack in a way that suggested she had asked whose the sky was.

"Everybody's," he said. "In the share of what they sent up."

He explained it in about four sentences, standing there, because she asked, and because he had spoken to two people since June.

Each consort sends his cows up. Each man's milk is measured, and the year's cheese is shared out against that figure, and a man who sends up more milk gets more cheese, and a man who sends none gets none and pays his share of the wages anyway.

"And when's it measured?"

"Day in July. It's on the paper."

"One day?"

"One day," said Norbert. "Always been the one day."

"So if a man had his cows —"

"Aye," said Norbert.

"— for a week before —"

"Aye," said Norbert, with enormous dignity, and put another cheese on the rack, and did not say anything else about it, and Marius on the step behind her made a noise into his coffee that she chose not to investigate.

He gave her a bowl of milk at nine because she was there and that is what is done.

It was still warm and it was the best thing she had ever drunk and she said so, and Norbert said nothing, and went to a nail on the door post where a school exercise book hung on a loop of string, and opened it, and wrote something, and hung it back up.

"What's that?"

"Book."

"For what?"

"For the milk," said Norbert.

She went and looked at it. It was ruled in pencil down the middle. Names on the left. Little marks on the right. There were four marks against Marius for the summer and one against a name she did not know and a column, at the back, of what each of them came to.

"You wrote down a bowl of milk."

"It's not my milk," said Norbert. "It's theirs. You drank some of theirs." He took the coffee pot off the ring. "It comes off his account at the end and it's about two francs and he'll not notice and it's not about the two francs."

"What's it about?"

Norbert thought about that for a while, because nobody had ever asked him.

"It's about there being a book," he said.

She found the other book in the tin box on a shelf in the dairy where it is coldest and driest.

It is two books, and the older one has a wooden board cover and a strap.

"You can open it. It's not a church."

"Have you read it?"

"I've had it read at me every spring since I was a boy," said Marius, from the doorway. "Go on. You'll not sleep otherwise."

She opened it on the doorstep and read for an hour and a half while Marius did something to a gutter, and what she found was not a history and not an account.

It is a set of rules, and it is still in force.

How many head each man may put up, in proportion to what he winters below. What happens if he puts up more. What happens if he puts up fewer, which is a longer clause than the first, and nastier. Who goes up first and who stays last. Who repairs the hut, the byre, the dairy, the paths, the springs and the fences, and in what order, and at whose cost. The date the alp opens, which is not a date but a rule about a date. The date it closes, which is the same. What each man owes the herdsmen in food before the cattle go up, and by when. What happens to the milk of a dead man's cows. And what happens to a man who will not take his turn at the water — because there is water up there too, and of course there is, and of course it is regulated.

And at the back, in different hands, an amendment of 1897. Another of 1934. Another of 1971. And the last, in ballpoint, in 2006, concerning motor vehicles on the alp road, which had plainly caused a very great deal of trouble.

"It's the same thing," she said out loud.

"It's the same thing," Marius agreed, from the gutter. "It's all the same thing. Water, grass, wood, the road. A thing that belongs to everybody and nobody, and a book that says how, and a meeting once a year where somebody shouts." He straightened up with a hand on his back. "Why do you think we're all so good at it and so bad at everything else?"

They brought them down on the Sunday with the rest of the valley.

She had watched the desalpe six times from the side of the road and once from her own ground, and she had never been in it.

It is not a parade, whatever it looks like from the road. It is four hundred and some animals coming down a mountain in one morning on a track that is a metre and a half wide in places, in the order the alps have always come down in, which is an order nobody writes down and everybody knows, and if your herd is out of order you will hear about it for a year.

The lead cows had the crowns on. Norbert came down behind the last of them with the cheeses on a pack frame, which is how they have always come down, because a wheel of cheese is a summer's milk in a form that can be carried by a man on a path, and the path has not got wider.

There were people on the corner below the mayens with telephones, and two with proper cameras, and one of them asked Marius to stop so he could photograph the heifer. Marius said something in patois that Wren did not catch and the man did not either, and everybody was perfectly happy.

She walked behind the three cows and the heifer for three hours with a stick she had not asked for and did not need, and her whole job was to be a shape in the road at the corners so the heifer did not try the short way down, and she did it a dozen times and got it wrong twice.

Somewhere below the chestnuts a woman she had never spoken to in six years handed her a piece of bread and a piece of cheese without stopping walking, and said, "You're with Marius," which was not a question and did not need an answer, and went on ahead.

The cheese was from the rack. She could taste the dairy in it.

He asked her on the last stretch, in the road above the village, where you can see the whole of it.

"Do you want the water?"

She had known it was coming since half past six on Friday morning. She had known it was the reason she had been asked up, and she had gone anyway, and she had spent two days waiting for it and had still not decided what she was going to say.

"I don't know."

"That's not good enough."

"I know it isn't."

Marius clicked at the heifer and the heifer came back into the road.

"I'll tell you what I think," he said, "and then I'll not say it again, because I'm not going to be the man who leans on you. I think you've got a right and I think you haven't decided if you want it, and I think the reason you haven't decided is me, and I want that out of it."

"It isn't only —"

"It's mostly me. It's five and three-quarter hours mostly me." He kept walking. "Take me out of it. Pretend I died in August. Would you want it?"

She walked about thirty metres.

"Yes," she said.

"Right."

"Not for the water."

"Then what for?"

"Because it's true," said Wren, "and because if I don't ask for it nobody will ever ask for it, and in thirty years there'll be another register and another tidy man and it'll be gone for good, and the nine holdings will just be stones above a channel like everybody's always said they were. And then it won't have been a mistake. It'll just be the way it is." She was surprised to hear it come out whole, because she had not known it was in her in that shape. "That's not wanting water. I don't know what that is."

"That's wanting it," said Marius.

They came down into the village at half past twelve and the cows went into the barn and he shut the door on them and leaned on it.

"Good," he said. "Now you've said it out loud to somebody, and you'll say it in November, and you'll say it to my face in a room, and everybody will see you say it." He took his cap off and put it back on. "That's the only way it's not a thing that happens to me behind my back."

"Marius, I can —"

"Don't." He said it the way he had said it in the road in June, quite gently. "Don't offer me anything. Don't tell me you'll lend me the hours, or sell them cheap, or come to some arrangement. I know you'd mean it. You'd be doing it out of a bad conscience and I'd be taking it out of need, and that's not a way for two people to live next to each other for the rest of my life." He pushed off the barn door. "Ask for what's yours, in the open, in front of everybody, and let them decide, and then we'll both know where we are and neither of us will owe the other one anything. That's how it's done here. It's not kind and it works."

He went in for his dinner.

She walked up in the afternoon and stopped at the fork, as she always does, and this time went on past her own turning and up to the second parcel and sat on the finished part of the wall.

From there you can see the column.

The plain at four hundred and fifty with the river in it, straight, because they straightened it, and the motorway, and the works at Chippis with the steam going up. The vines from the river to about eight hundred, and the exact line where they stop. The villages between five hundred and a thousand on their dry fans, where they have always been, because everything below them was marsh and fever until somebody's great-grandfather drained it. The mayens at sixteen hundred, shut since June and shut again since October. The alp at two thousand one hundred and forty, closed on Thursday. The rock above it, where nothing lives, and where every litre of the whole argument comes from.

Every one of the thirty-one people who would sit in a room in November holds a piece of that at four or five different heights. Marius has three cows in a barn at eight hundred, a meadow at nine hundred, a mayen he no longer uses at sixteen, and a nineteenth of an alp at twenty-one forty, and the reason he can keep cows at seventy-nine is that he owns a column and not a field. That is what they mean by a holding. That is what the year is for. That is why there is a book in a tin box in the dairy and a book in a wet cupboard in the depot and a roll in a box in Sion, all of them saying the same thing in different centuries about different things.

And she owns two point four hectares of stones at one height, facing south, above the channel, and she has spent six years trying to be accepted by people whose lives run vertically, and not one of them has ever thought to mention it, because you do not explain the shape of the sky.

She sat there until it got cold.

Then she went down and wrote to Maître Delarzes, four lines, no greeting, which by then was how she wrote to him.

Chapter Fifteen

The Dorse

1663. The bed above the scree, being little used, is grassed, and no man repairs it.

The commune folded on the twentieth of October and it did it beautifully.

Its letter ran to a page and a half and it did not use the word title once. The council had received the report of its legal adviser. The council was satisfied that the rights exercised by the consortage of Darbon in the water below the intake rested upon a basis of long standing, and the commune had never sought and did not now seek to call those rights into question. The commune had informed the Société hôtelière du Sérac that any supply would be a matter for negotiation with the consortage, on such terms as the consortage should determine, and the commune would not be a party to it.

And in the last paragraph: the examination being concluded, the council was pleased to inform the consortage that its request of the twenty-second of July, deferred on the eighth of September, was granted, and that the person named might consult item 9 of section A on presentation of the present letter.

No apology. None was owed. Nobody had done anything to apologise for, and the letter was, from end to end, exactly as correct as the refusal had been.

"Two and a half months," said Aloys.

"Three weeks of that was August," said Firmin.

Delarzes wrote to Firmin the same week and his letter was fourteen pages and she was not sent it and did not ask for it.

Thérèse read the whole of it to her over a wall on a Thursday, in a wind, holding it down with both thumbs, because Thérèse had decided in September whose side she was on and had never mentioned it since.

The first nine pages were the title, and they were, Thérèse said, the most enjoyable thing she had read in forty years, because a lawyer letting himself go about a good document is a lawyer having the time of his life. She read four paragraphs of it out in a voice that was not quite Delarzes' and was recognisably somebody's lawyer, and a man going past with a trailer slowed down to listen and then did not stop, which she took as a personal defeat.

The last two pages were the nine holdings, and they said, in effect: there is a question here, it is real, it is not frivolous, the argument can be made either way, no court in this canton has decided anything quite like it in living memory, and it will cost a great deal to find out. He recommended nothing. He set out what the assembly could decide and what it could not.

And he noted, in a footnote that Thérèse read twice because she thought it was rude and Wren thought was the kindest thing in the document, that the consorts should bear in mind that the person who had brought the matter to their attention had done so voluntarily, promptly and against her own interest, on two separate occasions, and that whatever the assembly decided it should not decide it in ignorance of that.

"That's him saying you're honest," said Thérèse.

"That's him saying I'm consistent. It's not the same."

"It is in a footnote," said Thérèse, and put the letter in her bag.

She went to Sion on the third of November with the commune's letter in a plastic wallet, and Madame Vollenweider read it standing up, and said, "Well," and went away and was gone twenty-five minutes.

The grosse came out on a board of its own.

It is not like the minute. The minute is a working note, folded twice, written fast. This was made to be kept: larger, ruled, in a formal book hand with the first line extended and decorated, the letters standing up straight, every abbreviation written out that the minute had contracted. At the foot, three tags, and on the third a fragment of red wax about the size of a thumbnail with nothing readable on it.

She sat and looked at it for a while before she read it, which she had not done with anything else in the fonds.

"Take your time," said Madame Vollenweider, from four metres away, not looking up. "It has been in a box since 1961 and in a chest before that and it is in no hurry at all."

It was the same act.

Word for word, clause for clause, in the same order, with the differences you get between a minute and an engrossment and no others: the formulas written in full, the dates spelled out, the Latin tidier, three witnesses named where the minute had said only that witnesses were called.

Willermus Magnini. Perrodus Chaviez. Jaquemetus Torner.

And the covenant, on the twenty-second line, in the formal hand, unhurried, every letter finished:

And it is further covenanted that the water so brought shall belong in common to those who have borne the charge of it, to each in the measure of what he has paid, and to their heirs holding the same lands.

She read it four times and then put both hands flat on the table on either side of the board and breathed out.

Everything she had said in a letter on the fifth of September was on a piece of sheepskin with a seal tag on it, in a formal hand, held by the commune since 1961 and by a chest with three locks before that.

It was not a note. It was not a copy. It was the document.

She photographed it for an hour and a half. The face, at four widths and three angles, with the ruler and the grey card. Then the tags. Then the wax.

Then she turned it over, because you photograph the dorse, always, because the dorse is where the document's life is written and the face is only where it was born.

The dorse of a document that has been in a chest for six centuries is a palimpsest of everybody who ever had to find it again.

At the top, upside down relative to the text, in a fifteenth-century hand almost certainly the notary's clerk: Instrumentum aque de Darbono. The label, written so it could be read when the thing was folded into three and lying in a chest.

Below it, in a sixteenth-century hand, a summary in four lines, in Latin, for somebody who did not want to unfold it.

Below that, in the seventeenth century, in French, four words and a number: De l'eaue de Darbon. No. 9.

Below that, in brown ink, an eighteenth-century numbering, crossed out.

Then a stamp, purple, oval, half legible: COMMUNE D'OLLOGNE, with a date she could not read.

Then a pencil line, faint, modern in the way that pencil is always modern.

She angled the light and got nothing. She angled it the other way and got the shape of it and not the letters.

So she photographed it flat, twice, and raised it — pulled the tone until the parchment went white and the graphite went black, which is a thing that takes four seconds and which no eye can do at four in the afternoon in November — and the four words came up off the surface like something surfacing in water.

It could not tell her what they meant. It has never been able to tell her what anything meant. It gave her four words she could not see, and then it sat there.

Seen. Does not concern the register.

The ninth of March 1905.

Which is the date on the preface of the register of 1905. The same day. Not the same month, not the same week. The same day.

He had gone to the chest, or the chest had been brought to him, and he had gone through section A before he wrote his preface, because of course he had, because he was a careful man and he was about to remake the basis of the water of the commune and he was not going to do it without looking at what was in the box.

He had unfolded this. He had read it — in Latin, in a formal hand, and there is no reason to think A. Duvanel could not read it, because a commune secretary in 1905 in this canton had an education that would embarrass most people she knows. He had held it on the ninth of March with a pencil, and he had understood what it said.

And then he had written four words on the back of it and put it away, and gone and written his preface, and in his preface he had said that the water was inscribed against persons and not against lands, so that no man could say what was owed to a given parcel, and that he had therefore transcribed the hours pertaining to each parcel lying beneath the channel, and that those holdings which did not lie beneath the channel had been omitted, the water being of no use to them.

Ne concerne pas le registre.

He was not lying. That is what she understood, sitting in the reading room at four in the afternoon on the third of November with her hands not entirely steady. He was not lying and he was not hiding it and he was not stealing anything for anybody. He had been asked by an assembly to make a register of the water as it was used, parcel by parcel, so the thing could be administered. And he had looked at a six-hundred-year-old act about who had paid for a channel, and decided — correctly, by the terms of the job he had been given — that it did not concern the register he had been told to make.

Two different questions. One document each. A hundred and twenty years apart in effect and one afternoon apart in fact.

He filed the answer to the question nobody had asked him, answered the question he had been asked, and went home to his dinner.

She photographed the dorse from every angle she could get a light to.

Then she sat with her hands in her lap for about four minutes, and then she wrote in the notebook, and what she wrote was not about Duvanel.

Nine pages. Index delivered 8 Sept.

She had made that index herself, over two evenings, because seven thousand images are useless without one. She had decided what went in it. She had decided what the headings were and in what order and what got a line and what got three, and she had decided — reasonably, sensibly, in good faith, with a job to do and two evenings to do it in — what was worth a reader's attention and what was not.

Page four had her four unprovable points, which Delarzes had told her never to give to anybody else and which she had already given to thirty-one people.

Page seven had the roll and its membranes by date, and the note against Chaviez that had saved her.

And the core membrane, the forty-one names, the eight hundred and eleven florins, the thing that does not exist, had one line, because on the eighth of September it was five days old and she had still been checking it and had not wanted to overstate it.

One line. Roll, innermost membrane, list of contributors, 1430, 41 names.

Nobody had asked her about it. Delarzes had found it, because Delarzes read the whole of it, and he had told her so, and she had been pleased.

But she had written that index, and it is in the minute book as reçu, complet, dans l'ordre, and she had known when she wrote it that most of them would read the index and none of them would read the discs.

She looked at the pencil note on the dorse for a long time.

Vu. Ne concerne pas le registre.

Four words, in good faith, by a careful person, deciding what did not need to be in front of people.

Chapter Sixteen

One Metre Wide

1688. The mark of two strokes, a bar and a hook, renewed upon the stone.

Thérèse came to the wall on the fifth of November with her coat buttoned to the neck and an expression Wren had not seen on her before.

"You'll want to sit down."

"I'm standing on a slope."

"Then lean on something." She put her hands in her pockets and waited, which was theatre, and Wren let her have it because she had earned it. "Raymond telephoned Firmin last night. Twenty past nine, at home, not at the commune, which tells you what you like." A pause. "The commune's one of the nine."

"Two of the nine."

"You knew?"

"I've known since July. I said it in the room in June. Two of the nine are communal, one's the bourgeoisie's, one's a nurseryman at Chermignon and one's the family in Crans. The other four are mine." Wren wiped her hands on her thighs. "Nobody was listening to that part. Everybody was doing arithmetic about the Rouvenaz."

"Well, Raymond's listening now," said Thérèse, "because his adviser's read the opinion and told him the commune of Ollogne has an interest in two holdings above the channel that have had nothing since 1905, and Raymond has spent three months deferring the only person who could have told him." She looked genuinely delighted for about a second and then put it away. "He'll not forgive that. Not you. Himself."

It went round the valley in two days and it changed the shape of everything, and the reason was not the water, which the commune does not need and cannot use.

It was that the nine had stopped being one woman.

Up to the fifth of November there was a consortage, and there was Wren, and the other eight holdings were an abstraction nobody had met. After the fifth of November there was a consortage and there were the nine, and the nine included the commune, and the bourgeoisie, and a family in Crans with a lawyer of their own, and one of them was her.

"It's worse for you," said Aloys, in the road, having broken his own rule for about ten seconds. "You know that."

"Why?"

"Because up to now they could have done the decent thing. Firmin had a plan and I'll tell you that much and no more. Recognise the right, buy it off you at a price, put it back in the pot, everybody's water goes back where it was, we all sign something and it's over in a year." He shrugged. "You can't buy out a commune. A commune can't sell a right it's just found out it's got without a public procedure and a valuation and three months of notices, and the bourgeoisie's worse, and the family in Crans will want to know what it's worth before they decide whether they're a nuisance."

"So it goes to a court."

"So it goes to a court, and the court takes six years, and the water sits where it is the whole time." He set off. "I've not said any of that."

The first snow came on the eighth, down to the mayens, and went again.

Her spring came up two days later. It always does. The line where the rain turns to snow sits lower than it did when her building was put up, and what would once have been snow on her ground goes into the ground instead of onto it, and by the middle of November she was making what she makes in winter, which is more than twice what she makes in August.

Below her the bisse had been drained on the second of October and was a dry stone gutter under the Darbon face, and would be until April.

That is the arrangement, and nobody in the valley has ever said it out loud to her, and she has never said it to them: their water is a summer thing and hers is a winter one. In July they have everything and she carries cans. In January the channel is a ditch full of ice and she has three hundred watts and a tap.

She sat on the step in the cold with a cup and did the thing she had been avoiding for a week, which was to look at where she actually stood on each of her four points.

One, that the act is the act of this channel. Strong. The names are the names. Delarzes was content.

Three, that the nine are heirs of contributors. Strong for six of them, including all four of hers, on the roll and the cadastre. Thin for two. Unknown for one.

Four, whether it is still law. Not hers. Never would be.

Two, that the act took effect and the water actually ran.

Nothing. Not one line in six hundred years of paper saying the channel was built, or finished, or ran, or was repaired, or failed. The minute is a contract to build. The grosse is the same contract, kept. There is no receipt, no final payment, no quittance to the master, no mention of Heinzmann de Loèche in anything after the sixth of June 1430, and nothing in the fonds between 1430 and 1547 at all, because whatever there was is not there.

And on the other side of the argument, which she had by now learned to construct before anybody constructed it for her: a contract signed and not performed. A channel begun and abandoned. Eight hundred florins subscribed and returned. It happens. It happened all over this canton. Half the bisses in the Valais have a fifteenth-century act and no fifteenth-century water.

If the channel was never built, the forty-one men bought nothing, and the nine inherited nothing, and the whole of it is a piece of paper in a box.

Except that there was a channel.

There is a shelf cut level along the top of the scree for at least six hundred metres, with an outer bank of laid stone standing knee-high here and there, falling a metre in thirty, with two notches cut in the rock either side of the gully at the same height, and a household mark cut into the second stone of the bank that matches a mark drawn in ink beside ninety-six florins on the innermost membrane of a roll.

Everybody who has looked at it agrees it is a channel.

Nobody can prove it ever had water in it.

A dry ditch is a dry ditch. A bank of laid stone is a bank of laid stone. Delarzes had photographed it and called it a structure and said a structure in the ground is evidence in a way a parchment is not, and he was right, and what it is evidence of is that somebody built something.

There is one way to find out whether a channel carried water, and she knew exactly what it was, and she had known since the third of November, and she had spent eight days not thinking about it in the specific way you do not think about something.

She went up on the twelfth at half past six with a spade, a trowel, a folding rule, four sandbags she had made out of feed sacks, a plastic sheet, and the camera Delarzes had told her to buy and which she had bought with money she did not have.

It was dark when she started and the ground was hard on top and soft underneath.

She chose the place carefully and she chose it for the wrong reason, which was that it is the least visible section of the whole trace — inside the curve below the second spur, screened from the village, screened from the fork, invisible from anywhere except the air and the ground above it, which is rock.

She lifted the turf in squares and stacked them on the sheet in order, grass down.

Then she cut a section across the bed. One metre wide. Down through the fill.

It took four hours and it was the coldest she had been since February and she did not notice until she stopped.

Twenty centimetres of turf and root mat. Under that, forty centimetres of hill: angular gravel and dust and small stone, the stuff that comes off a scree slope and fills anything you leave alone for a century — unsorted, unlayered, exactly what a ditch fills with when a ditch is finished with.

And then, at sixty-two centimetres, it changed.

The change was so sharp that she put the trowel down and sat back on her heels.

Below sixty-two centimetres the material was fine, and it was layered — thin bands, two and three millimetres, some paler and some darker, lying flat and horizontal across the whole metre of the cut, dozens of them, one on top of another, like the pages of something.

Silt laid down in still or slow water, one event at a time.

She cleaned the face with the trowel and then a brush and then her thumb, and photographed it with the rule in the frame, and then went down another ten centimetres and found the bottom.

The bottom was clay. Grey-blue, plastic, absolutely unlike anything in that slope, and puddled flat, and under the clay a layer of small flat stones set edge to edge, and they had been carried there, because there is nothing like them within four hundred metres.

They had lined it. They had laid a stone bed and puddled clay over it and run water down it.

And in the side of the cut, against the inner wall, at the level of the clay, there was a piece of wood. About the size of her hand. Squared on two faces. Black and soft on the outside and sound in the middle. She did not take it out. She photographed it in situ with the rule, from three angles, and left it where it was.

That evening she put the photographs of the section face into the machine and had it count.

It counts what an eye cannot count without losing its place: it found the boundaries between the bands, marked them, and gave her a number and a range either side of it, because the top of the sequence is truncated and three of the bands are doubtful and it said so.

Two hundred and ten. Give or take fourteen.

Two hundred and ten years of something settling out of slow water on a stone bed under a bank of laid stone above nine holdings that were charged a quarter of eight hundred florins in 1430.

That is not a dry ditch. That is a channel that carried water for two centuries.

It was the answer to the second point. It was the only one of the four that could ever have been answered by anything other than paper, and she had answered it, and she could not use a single frame of it.

She had backfilled at eleven o'clock in the morning.

She put the gravel back in the order she had taken it out, because she could not help herself, and then the turf squares in their squares, and trod them, and watered them from a sandbag she had filled at the gully, and stood back, and in three weeks there would be nothing to see and in a year nothing at all.

Then she sat down on the bank with her back to the rock and her hands filthy and cold and put her forehead on her knees.

Because to produce it she would have to say where she got it. And what she got it from was a hole one metre wide, cut by her, alone, in the dark, three weeks before the assembly, through the only piece of structural evidence in the case, on ground that is not hers — it is commune land above the bisse, and she had checked that too, of course she had, on the eighteenth of October, which means she checked before she decided and not after.

Delarzes had stood on that bank on the twenty-fourth of September and said: nobody walks on it and nobody tidies it.

She had not walked on it. She had opened it, looked inside, taken what she wanted and closed it again, and done it well enough that nobody will ever know.

She washed the spade and washed herself and sat at the table.

She made a folder and put the photographs in it and the section drawing and the measurements and the count with its range, and she gave the folder a name and the name was a date.

Then she sat with the cursor on it for a while.

She did not delete it. She has never deleted anything.

She did not put it anywhere anybody would find it either.

Vu, she thought. Ne concerne pas le registre.

Chapter Seventeen

Name a Number

1702. Of those who take at the head, three only.

Delarzes telephoned on the seventeenth and was on the line a quarter of an hour and said almost nothing she could use, which she understood afterwards was the point.

The ordinary assembly falls on the last Saturday of November. It is not the committee. Every consort may attend and vote, and the wives will be there and will vote and nobody will raise it. He would present his opinion, answer questions on it, and then leave the room, because an adviser who stays in the room while the body decides becomes the body that decides.

"They'll ask you to speak."

"I know."

"They'll ask you after I've gone out, which means whatever you say, I won't have heard it, and I won't be able to unsay it for you." A pause. "I am not permitted to tell you what to say."

"No."

"I am permitted to tell you what I have seen in twenty-six years, which is that people in that position say too much, and that everything after the fourth sentence is regret."

Ourdaz's message came the same day: Lunch Thursday, the Sérac, 12.30, I have booked it, do not fight me about this, wear whatever you like, C.

She thought about not going for two days.

The Sérac sits just under the bench at fourteen hundred and seventy, where there were cows in June until about 1890, with ten hectares round it of lawn, two pools and a putting green. In the third week of November the pools are drained and under covers, the lawn is going grey, half the shutters on the north side are closed, and there are four cars in a car park built for ninety.

She went up on the bus with two Portuguese women who were talking about a rota of their own, and walked in past a doorman who did not look at her twice, which she noticed, and thought about, and put away.

Inside there were six tables occupied out of forty. Three of the staff were eating their own lunch at the back near the service door and stood up when Ourdaz came through the room, and he told them to sit down, twice, with his hand out, and they sat down, and went on standing up in every way that mattered.

He was at the window with a granddaughter.

"This is Vérène. She's four and she is here under protest because her mother is at the dentist. Vérène, this is Wren, who lives in a hut on the other side of that." He pointed with his fork. "In the winter."

Vérène looked at Wren for a long moment with total scientific attention.

"Why," she said.

"Because I like it."

Vérène thought about this and evidently found it insufficient, and went back to building something out of bread.

They ate. He talked about the road, the commune, a man in Sierre who had sold a vineyard badly, the fact that the chef was Belgian and that this was a scandal, and about Vérène, who was going to the grandmother at Salgesch in the spring and would come back speaking German, which he said with satisfaction and some grievance.

At one point he asked, out of nowhere and with mild curiosity, how the reading actually worked.

"A machine reads the page and offers words," said Wren, "and I correct it, and when it's been corrected enough it stops offering the wrong words."

"Ah," said Ourdaz. "Yes. Extraordinary." And then, without any pause whatsoever: "Now this Belgian. He does a thing to a perch which I can only describe as hostile."

He did not mention water for fifty minutes, which she knew was deliberate and knew he knew she knew.

Then the plates went and he put both hands flat on the cloth.

"Right," he said. "I want to buy it."

"Buy what?"

"All of it. The parcels, the argument, the whole miserable business." He said it briskly and kindly and with the confidence of a man who has already worked out that this is the best available outcome for everyone and has never in his life had that judgement questioned by a result. "I'll take the four parcels off you at a proper price — a proper price, with a valuer, not a favour — and the right goes with the ground, and then it's mine, and then it's my fight and not yours. You'd have the money. No committee, no lawyer, no assembly, nobody in that valley looking at you sideways for six years. You could buy ground anywhere you liked. You could buy ground with water on it, which would be novel."

"And you'd have the largest water right in Ollogne."

"I'd have a lawsuit," said Ourdaz, "which I would pay for out of petty cash and which would take six years and bore me witless, and at the end of it I'd either have some water I don't need or I'd have nothing, and either way I would not have cared very much, which is precisely the qualification for the job." He refilled her glass without asking. "You care far too much to be doing this. I don't care at all. That is the entire argument and it is a good one."

"And Marius?"

"Who?"

"The man who'd lose five and three-quarter hours."

"Ah." He waved it, not dismissively, but as a thing already accounted for. "If it's mine I don't have to take them. I could hold the right and not exercise it, or exercise it in a dry year only, or make him a present of it for his lifetime. I can do all sorts of things you can't, because nobody will accuse me of anything, because everybody already believes the worst about me and is entirely wrong." He smiled. "That is the luxury. You have a reputation to build. I have one that was finished before I was born."

It was, she thought afterwards on the bus, the most generous offer anybody had ever made her, and it took her four seconds to know she would refuse it and most of the journey to be able to say why.

"No," she said.

"Say it after you've thought about it."

"I have thought about it. You made the same offer in April about the reading and I said no then."

"You did, and you were wrong then, and you were right for a bad reason that turned out to be a good one, which is the only kind of luck worth having." He put his chin on his hand. "Tell me why. Properly. Not pride and not gratitude, I'll not sit through either."

She turned the glass round.

"Because if you buy it, it stops being true," she said.

Ourdaz raised his eyebrows.

"Go on."

"Forty-one men put money on a table in 1430 and bought a water, and it was theirs in the share they paid, and it stayed theirs for four and a half centuries while the ground changed hands six hundred times, and the whole point of it — the only reason any of it holds — is that the right went with the ground and not with the money." She found she was talking with her hands and stopped. "If I sell it to you, that's exactly what happens again. The right goes to whoever can pay for it. And that's not what the document says. The document says it belongs to the people who bore the charge. I've borne the charge. Six years of the corvée on ground that doesn't take a drop."

"So have thirty other people."

"So have thirty other people, and that's the case, and the case is the only thing anybody in that valley will ever respect me for." She sat back. "If you buy me out I'm a woman who was given four parcels by a rich man and sold them to the same rich man at a profit when they turned out to be worth something. That's the whole story. That's what I'd be, for ever, in a place where I have to live."

Ourdaz was quiet for a moment.

"You'd be that with a great deal of money," he said.

"Yes."

"Which is not nothing."

"No," said Wren. "It's not nothing. I've had none for twenty-five years and I know exactly what it's not."

He laughed then, properly, and sat back and looked at her with his head on one side.

"Do you know what the irony is," he said. "I have spent my whole life unable to see a use for anything that isn't finished. Furniture, houses, people. I gave you those parcels because I could not think of one single thing to do with them. And you have found the one thing, which was to read about them."

"You'd have found it."

"I would not have found it. I would not have looked. I have never looked at anything in my life." He said it perfectly cheerfully, because he made peace with it about forty years ago. "Very well. Refused. I shall stop offering — no, I shan't, I shall go on offering about once a year, and you will go on refusing, and it will become a thing we do."

"And the lawyer's bills?"

"Will be paid, on the nail, until it's finished, whoever it finishes against." He signalled for the bill with two fingers. "I want that on the record, by the way, and I said the same to Firmin. If the assembly recognises your right and the consortage loses half its water and everybody in that valley wants to throw me in the Rhône, I will still pay, and I will pay for the appeal as well. I am not the sort of man who buys the result. I am the sort of man who buys the process and then finds the result funny."

At the door, with Vérène holding his hand and hanging off it at forty-five degrees the way children do, he said the other thing, and he said it lightly, on his way out, as he always does.

"Somebody asked me about the shoulder, you know."

"Which shoulder?"

"Yours. Above the channel. The strip between the bench and the vines." He nodded up at it, at the brown ground under the Darbon face with the first snow lying in the gullies and a green line in it that he could not see and never would. "A man at a dinner in September. Company out of Zug, something to do with energy, wanted to know who held the ground up there and whether it was all agricultural. Very polite, very well informed, knew the commune boundaries better than I do."

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him it was worthless, which is what I have said about it for twenty-seven years," said Ourdaz, "and I have just realised, standing here, that I no longer know whether that is true."

Vérène pulled his arm.

"Yes," he said. "Yes. We're going."

She got home at four and it was nearly dark.

She sat at the table with the terminal off and wrote out what she was going to say at the assembly, and the first version ran to nine hundred words and was extremely good and explained the erosion of the shares from 1430 to 1905 with three worked examples.

She read it back at six and deleted all of it.

The second version was two hundred and forty words and did not explain anything and was mostly about Marius, and she deleted that too, at about half past seven, because Marius had told her in the road in October not to do exactly that, and because doing it in front of thirty people would have been doing it to him rather than for him.

At nine o'clock she had sixty-one words and she counted them twice.

She did not write them down anywhere except on a card, and she put the card in her jacket pocket, and she did not take it out again until the twenty-eighth of November at ten past nine in the evening, in a room, after the lawyer had left.

Chapter Eighteen

Sixty-One Words

1740. Vuardin — three hours on the eighth day, from the head of the channel.

They had the salle bourgeoisiale, because Firmin had asked for it a fortnight in advance, which he had never done in nineteen years.

It snowed from about four in the afternoon, the wet kind that does not lie below a thousand, and the room filled from half past seven with coats over the backs of chairs and the smell of wet wool and the radiators ticking and somebody's boots making a black lake by the door that nobody moved for two hours.

The caretaker had put out ninety chairs for thirty-one consorts, which is what he does, and nobody has ever told him not to.

Thirty-one on the roll. Twenty-nine in person. Two proxies, both to Firmin, both from men in homes in Sierre who have not been up the valley in four years and whose hours have been watered by their nephews since 2019.

Aloys sat at the side with the register in front of him and did not speak once all evening.

Maître Delarzes talked for fifty minutes and answered questions for fifty more, and he was, Wren thought, extremely good, and what made him good was that he was never once on anybody's side.

He gave them the title first, because he had learned that from somewhere, and the room got ten minutes of pure pleasure: a purchase, a price, a list of payers, an unbroken series of admissions, the strongest instrument he had handled in twenty-six years. Somebody at the back said and the commune had the seal of it in a box the whole time, and got the laugh of the night.

Then he gave them the nine.

The argument for, which took ten minutes: an act, a covenant in terms, a proportion recorded, an inheritance traceable in six cases of nine, a structure in the ground, and no instrument anywhere extinguishing anything.

Then the argument against, which took fourteen: a register of 1905 made openly on a vote of the assembly, a modern land register built on it, a hundred and twenty years of open and peaceful use by the present holders, a right never entered where rights are entered, and a schedule of hours that nobody can derive from a florin without inventing the arithmetic.

"Which side wins?" said Thérèse.

"I don't know."

"You must think something."

"I think it is a real question with two real answers, and that a court would take between four and six years to give you one of them, and that it would cost this consortage more than the water is worth, and that whoever lost would appeal, because whoever loses always does." He put the cap on his pen. "And I think that at the end of it you would all still live here."

He answered four more questions. Then he thanked them, took his coat off the chair, and went out into the snow, and the door shut, and the room was on its own.

It went for an hour and ten minutes before anybody looked at her.

Somebody proposed that nothing be done, on the ground that nobody was claiming, and it was pointed out that the commune is one of the nine and the commune has a legal adviser and the commune has been on the telephone to Firmin twice.

Somebody proposed that they defend, and fight, and take it to the Tribunal cantonal, and let it be settled for a hundred years. This was popular for about six minutes, until Thérèse asked what the consortage would live on while it was being settled, and whether the old men would be alive for the judgment, and the room went quiet in the way it does when somebody says the true thing early.

Somebody proposed writing to the family in Crans. This was shouted down by four people at once, which was the only time all night anybody shouted.

Somebody at the back, who had had a good deal of the evening and not much of the argument, said that the whole thing came of letting a woman with no cows read the papers, and got absolutely nothing from the room — no laugh, no agreement, not even a rebuke, just thirty people waiting for him to finish — which she understood, afterwards, was the moment she stopped being on trial.

And at about twenty to ten Firmin said, "We're going round in a circle and we all know why. There's a person in this room who hasn't said anything, and none of us knows what she wants, and we've been voting on it for an hour."

He turned.

"Say what you want," he said. "In your own words. Nobody's going to interrupt you."

She stood up and took the card out of her jacket and did not look at it, because she had had it by heart since the nineteenth.

"I have four parcels above the channel. The act of 1430 says the water belongs to those who bore the charge, in the measure each paid, and to their heirs holding the same lands. I believe my ground is among them, and I am asking you to recognise it. I am not asking for water this year or next. Thank you."

She sat down.

There was a silence of about six seconds, which in a room of thirty people is a long time.

"Is that it?" said somebody.

"That's it."

"What about the seventy hours?"

"I didn't ask for seventy hours," said Wren.

"You put seventy hours in a letter."

"I put in a letter what the document says the proportion was. That's not the same as asking for it." She stayed sitting down, which she had decided on the walk and was glad of. "I told this valley in September that nobody can turn a florin into an hour, and I meant it, and Maître Delarzes has just told you the same thing for twenty-six years' worth of money. If you ask me what I think is right I'll tell you. But you haven't asked me, and it's yours to decide, not mine."

"Then tell us what you think's right."

"No," said Wren. "You'd be deciding it because I said it, and in ten years that's what everyone would remember."

It was Gilles Perrenal who put it, at four minutes to ten, standing, with a piece of paper he had plainly written at his own kitchen table.

"Right. Here's a motion, and I'd like it minuted that I'm the one making it, because in five years I want it on the record that it wasn't her."

"Go on," said Firmin.

"One. That this assembly recognises that the register of 1905 omitted nine holdings in error, and that the omission did not extinguish anything, because a secretary with a printed form cannot extinguish a right and nobody ever said he could.

"Two. That the nine holdings be reinscribed at the hours recorded against them in the roll of 1904, and at those hours and no others.

"Three. That no claim be made or entertained in respect of the proportions of 1430, the difference between 1430 and 1904 being the work of four centuries and no man's fault, and this assembly treating it as settled by practice.

"Four. That no arrears be claimed by anybody against anybody.

"Five. That this take effect at the opening of the water on the first corvée, and not before.

"Six. That the president seek the agreement of the other eight holdings to the whole of it, and that if any of them will not agree, this assembly meets again."

He put the paper down.

"That's twenty-nine hours coming back," he said, "not a hundred and seven. It's the nineteen-oh-four position and everybody in this room understands the nineteen-oh-four position because our fathers did. It costs the rest of us twenty-nine hours between us, pro rata, the way it came to us. It costs me an hour and three-quarters and I've done the sum."

"And why are you proposing it," said somebody, "since it's costing you?"

Perrenal looked at the table for a second.

"Because I said in May that somebody had to be first and it was going to be her," he said, "and she was first, and she told us the same week, twice, both times against herself. And because I've watched my father's ground sold for what it was worth and I know what it's like when a thing is decided about you by people who have the papers." He sat down. "And because if we fight it we'll lose either the water or the money or both, and I'd rather lose the water and keep the old men out of a courtroom."

They voted at twenty past ten.

Nineteen for. Seven against. Three abstentions. Two proxies both counted for.

Firmin wrote it down and read it back twice, and the second time the room was silent all the way through, and when he got to the end he said, "Carried," and put the pen down, and for about four seconds nobody moved.

Marius was two seats from the door with his cap on his knee.

Nobody looked at him, which is the valley's way of looking at him.

He put his cap on, stood up, said "Right," to nobody in particular, and went out into the snow, and a man near the door got up and went out after him, and came back a few minutes later without saying anything to anybody, and that was the whole of it.

Afterwards, when most of them had gone and the caretaker was stacking ninety chairs at the far end and refusing all help, Aloys opened the register on the table under the good light.

It is the current volume, printed columns, the same eight columns Duvanel had bound in in 1905 and the commune print shop has been reprinting ever since.

"We'll do it properly," said Firmin. "Now, while there's three of us and the minute's fresh. Aloys, you write, you've the hand."

"It's not effective till April."

"The inscription's not the water. Write it."

Aloys turned to the first blank line and filled the columns the way he fills them every year, reading them out as he went, the way he reads the list on the wall at the intake in April.

"Parcel number."

"Fourteen forty-seven," said Wren. "And forty-eight, fifty-one, and fifty-nine."

"Section."

"Seven. All four."

"Area."

She gave him the ares. He wrote them.

"Hours."

"Eleven," said Firmin, from the other side of the table, reading off the minute. "Eleven hours, the roll of 1904, on the eighth day and the sixteenth."

Aloys wrote it.

Then he came to the fourth column, which is headed titulaire, and which in every line above it for a hundred and twenty years carries a family name, and he stopped with the pen down on the paper and did not write anything, and after a moment he looked up.

"How do you spell it?" he said.

And Wren, who had been in that valley six years and been a number on a list for all of them, and who had been called la fille du mazot and fourteen forty-seven and notre consorte and nothing at all, stood in a cold hall at eleven o'clock at night in November while a man held a pen over a book, and found that she had to think about it.

She spelled it for him.

He wrote it in, in a good hand, with the date, and blotted it, and turned the book round so that she could see it.

Outside the snow had stopped and it had gone clear and hard, and she walked up with her hands in her pockets past the oven, cold and shut until spring, and past the barn where Marius keeps his cows, where the light was still on, late, which it is not usually.

She did not stop.

Below her the village. Above her, invisible and perfectly clear in her head, nine hundred metres of a bench cut level along the top of the scree, with water in it two hundred and ten years ago, give or take fourteen.

Chapter Nineteen

The Other Eight

1763. The old bed above the scree, being dry, is let for pasture at a rent of nothing.

It snowed properly on the fourth of December and again on the eleventh, and after the eleventh it lay.

The spring ran the way it runs every winter, which is hard, out of ground that took in November's rain as rain. Four hundred metres below her the bisse was a stone gutter with a lid of ice on the puddles in it.

She had the stove, and the terminal, and not enough for both at once, and on the eighteenth of December she sat in the dark for two hours with the fire going and the terminal off, and then turned the terminal on and let the fire go down, which is what she does every year and which she had stopped pretending was a decision.

The work came in.

Trás-os-Montes. A man with nine terraces and a notarial deed of 1911 that refers to a canal nobody has seen since the sixties, and to a boundary wall that fell down in 1954. Nine weeks. The deed is in a Portuguese that is not difficult so much as administrative — a register that was abolished, a municipality that was merged, and a surveyor's hand that abbreviates everything after the third syllable. The machine read it, offered her the standard expansions, got the boundary description wrong twice in the same way, and stopped getting it wrong once she had shown it what the surveyor did with the word for southeast. Then the cadastral office at Vila Real, which had never had anybody ask them a question in English and turned out to be delighted. He paid her a hundred and forty euros and sent a photograph of water coming out of a pipe onto a terrace, and she printed it, which she has never done with anything.

Arcadia. The two sisters, who were not speaking in October and are speaking now, both of them paying separately and each asking her not to mention the other.

A woman in Aragon with a junta de regantes and a nineteenth-century ordinance in a Spanish she can half read and a marginal hand she cannot.

And a man near Zahlé with a title in Arabic script, of which she can read not one letter, and a French cadastral overlay of 1930 which she can read entirely. That is the whole trick of it and it took her four days: the machine gives her the Arabic in a transliteration she cannot check and a translation she does not trust, and she does not use either. She uses the numbers, because numbers survive scripts, and the parcel numbers in the 1930 overlay are the parcel numbers in the deed, and the shape of his plot is in both, and she can tell him what he holds without ever having read a word of what he sent her.

She wrote that one up at two in the morning with the stove out and her coat on, and when she had sent it she sat for a while, because it was the first time she had understood that what she does is not reading.

Nine of them over the winter, in four countries. Two thousand nine hundred francs between November and March. It was the best winter she had ever had, and she told nobody, and there was nobody to tell.

Firmin wrote to the five on the first of December with the minute of the assembly attached and Delarzes' opinion not attached, which was Delarzes' advice.

The bourgeoisie replied in nine days: yes, subject to its own assembly in February, which means yes.

The commune replied in nineteen days: yes in principle, subject to the procedures applicable to the acquisition and disposal of communal rights, which means yes and the best part of a year.

One of the holdings turned out to belong to a nurseryman at Chermignon whose grandfather had bought it for the stone, and he telephoned Firmin at home on a Sunday and said he did not want the water, had never had the water, would not know what to do with the water, and would sign whatever was put in front of him. Firmin asked him to put it in writing. He put it in writing on the back of a delivery note, and it was, Aloys said, the best letter anybody wrote in the whole business.

That is four of the five, and with her own four it is eight of the nine.

The ninth was the family in Crans.

They replied on the nineteenth of January through a firm in Sion with three names on the letterhead, and the letter was four pages long, and there was not one discourteous word in it.

The family had noted the resolution of the twenty-eighth of November with interest and thanked the consortage for its communication.

The family was not in a position to indicate agreement at this stage, and set out why in nine numbered paragraphs.

Paragraph four asked on what legal basis the assembly had determined that the omission of 1905 did not extinguish the rights of the nine, and requested sight of the opinion on which that rested.

Paragraph five asked on what basis the assembly had fixed the restored entitlements by reference to the roll of 1904 rather than to the proportions recorded in the act of 1430, and observed that the act appeared, on the extracts supplied, to measure the entitlement by the sum contributed and by nothing else.

Paragraph six observed that the difference between the two bases appeared, on the consortage's own figures, to be very large.

Paragraph seven stated that the family had held its parcel since 1974, had never been informed that any water right attached to it, and wished to be advised of the value of the right before considering any arrangement by which it would be limited.

And the ninth regretted that, in the absence of that information, the family must reserve its position entirely.

"They're not being difficult," said Delarzes, on the telephone, to Firmin, with Wren in Firmin's kitchen because Firmin had put it on the loudspeaker and she had not asked him to. "I want that understood before anybody in that valley starts. They are doing exactly what I would do."

"They're asking for hours we've all agreed nobody's having."

"They are asking why you agreed it. Which is a fair question, and the honest answer is that you agreed it because it was bearable, and bearable is not a legal principle." A pause on the line. "Your difficulty is that the compromise of the twenty-eighth of November is not a compromise anybody made with them. It is a compromise the consortage made among itself about nine holdings, eight of which are in the room or want nothing, and one of which is in Crans and has a lawyer."

"And if they won't have it?"

"Then the resolution falls by its own terms, paragraph six, and your assembly meets again, and this time it meets knowing that one of the nine intends to press for the 1430 proportions. And at that point it is not twenty-nine hours on the table. It is a hundred and seven."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"And she'd get seventy," said Firmin.

"She would be entitled to argue for seventy, against thirty people, in a court, with everything that follows." Delarzes' voice did not change at all. "I have no doubt whatever that she does not want that. I have no idea at all how you propose to make it true."

She went to Sion on the twenty-third of January, to his office, and paid for forty minutes herself out of the Trás-os-Montes money, because she had worked out on the bus that if she paid he could tell her things and if she did not he could not.

He took the money. He did not make a performance of taking it.

"I want to write to them," she said.

"No."

"They'd listen to me. I'm one of the nine. I'm the one with the most to lose from the 1904 figure and I agreed to it anyway, and if anybody can tell them why —"

"No," said Delarzes. "And I want you to understand that this is the single most dangerous idea you have had since May, and you have had some." He put his pen down. "You would be a party writing to another party, behind the backs of both the consortage and their lawyer, to persuade them to accept less than they are advised they may be entitled to. It does not matter that you are right. It does not matter that you would be doing it against your own interest — that is what makes it dangerous, because it is the most persuasive thing about you and it is the thing that would look worst read aloud in four years by a man paid to make it look bad."

"So I sit here."

"You sit here."

"And if they press, and it goes to court, and I end up being awarded seventy hours off Marius and Perrenal and Thérèse and the whole of them —"

"Then you will be a woman who was awarded seventy hours by a court," said Delarzes. "And everybody in that valley will know that you did not ask for them, and it will make not the slightest difference to how it feels to live there, and I am sorry, and that is the position."

He walked her to the door, which he had not done the first time.

"There is one thing you can do," he said. "It is the only thing, I am not going to help you with it, and you are going to hate it."

"Go on."

"The family in Crans do not want water. Read the seventh paragraph again. Nobody who has held a parcel since 1974 and never been told it has a water right suddenly develops a passion for irrigation. They want to know what it is worth, because they have just been told they own something and nobody has told them what." He put his hand on the door. "They will settle for a number. They are entitled to a number. And there is no number, because nobody in the history of that commune has ever sold an hour of water, and until somebody does, or until somebody puts a price on one, you have nothing to give them but a story about a clerk in 1905."

"So somebody has to value it."

"Somebody has to value it," said Delarzes. "And the moment anybody in your valley puts a franc figure on an hour of the rota, every man in that room who has watered his meadow for sixty years without thinking about it will know, to the franc, what he is standing on."

He opened the door.

"They will never unknow it," he said. "Not for a hundred years. And you will have done that too."

She walked to the station instead of taking the bus because it was a quarter of an hour and she did not want to sit down.

There was ice in the shadow on the Rue de Lausanne and the light was going at five, and she thought about the register in the hall in November and the column headed titulaire, and about Marius saying ask for what's yours, in the open, in front of everybody, and about how completely and exactly he had been right, and about the one thing he had not foreseen because nobody had, which was that asking for it in the open would put a price on his meadow.

Two days later, coming up from the post office, she stopped on the road below the village and watched three men rebuild a wall.

It was somebody's vine terrace, forty metres of it down at about six hundred, and they had it stripped to the fill and were going up from the bottom with the long sides into the hill, and they were fast. She had not known it could be done at that speed. There was a small man of about fifty running it who never seemed to lift anything and who put his hand on a stone about once a minute and turned it a few degrees before it went in, and every stone he touched went in first time.

She stood there for ten minutes in the cold with her bag on her shoulder.

Two seasons, she had put into sixty metres, and she had most of it still to do.

One of them said something to the small man in a language she did not recognise as anything, and he answered in it, and they laughed, and she went on up the hill.

On the platform at Sion, two days before that, she had started a message to Firmin and stopped.

Then she wrote, instead, to Maître Delarzes, four lines, no greeting, which by then was how she wrote to him.

Chapter Twenty

What an Hour Is Worth

1791. Nothing entered this year.

The valuer came from Fribourg, which was Firmin's doing and was the cleverest thing he did in the whole business, because a man from Fribourg has no cousins in Ollogne.

He was thirty-eight, he had done agricultural valuations for fourteen years, he had never valued a water right in his life, and he said so in the first two minutes, which is the only reason anybody trusted him.

"There's no market," he said. "That's the whole problem and I'll tell you now it doesn't go away. An hour of a rota in a consortage is not traded. It can't be detached from the land in most cases, it isn't offered, and nobody's bought one in this commune in living memory or in any other, as far as I can find out. If you want me to tell you what it would fetch, the honest answer is that nothing has ever fetched anything."

"So what do you do?" said Firmin.

"I find out what it's worth to somebody. That's different from what it'd fetch and it's the best anybody can do." He opened a folder. "And you've handed me the only comparable in the canton, which is that there's a hotel on the bench that wants water in summer and has been told to come and ask you."

The assembly of the previous November had authorised the president to negotiate and to conclude, subject to report, which was the only thing it did that evening that nobody argued about.

The Sérac negotiation took from February to the fourth of April, and Wren had nothing to do with any of it, which she was glad of every single day.

Firmin did it with Delarzes at his shoulder and Thérèse in the room, because Thérèse has a way of asking hotels questions.

What came out of it was not a sale, because Delarzes would not let a right be sold out of the consortage for any money on earth, and said so until people stopped suggesting it.

What came out of it was a lease. Fifteen years. Up to two hundred litres a minute from the middle of June to the middle of September, and not more than sixteen thousand cubic metres in the season, drawn at the intake and metered, suspended entirely in any year the consortage declares a drought, no renewal right, no assignment, review every five years.

For which the Société hôtelière du Sérac would pay the consortage of Darbon twenty-eight thousand francs a year.

Firmin read the figure out to the committee on the seventh of April and Aloys said a word he did not put in the minute book, and somebody at the back had to be given water, and the meeting was adjourned for ten minutes, which had never happened in nineteen years.

Down in the café, Denise asked what the noise had been about, and was told, and said, "They'll all be mad by Christmas," and went back to the glasses.

The valuer's report came on the twenty-fourth of April and the whole valley had read it by the twenty-seventh.

His method was in paragraph six and it was simple enough that everybody understood it, which was the trouble.

The hotel is paying for a summer draw. He worked out how many hours of the rota that draw is worth, divided one by the other, and then knocked the answer down, at some length and with reasons: the hotel is paying a premium for certainty, and for summer, and for being a hotel; the lease is fifteen years and not for ever; and an hour in the hands of a farmer with no buyer is not an hour in the hands of a man with a hotel at the end of the road.

He came out, in paragraph fourteen, with a range, and a middle figure.

Eleven thousand francs an hour.

And in paragraph seventeen he wrote the sentence Thérèse read out over three separate walls in two days: it should be understood that these figures describe what the water is worth to a purchaser and not what it is worth to a holder, and that in a valley where no hour has ever been sold, the first sale will make the second one possible.

Gilles Perrenal read it in the café on the Saturday, standing up, without taking his coat off.

Then he put it down on the bar and laughed — once, with nothing in it at all — and everybody looked at him.

"Eleven thousand francs," he said. "An hour."

"Gilles —"

"My father sold four parcels and the two at the Comba and the strip under the rock for eleven thousand francs. All of it. Everything we had above the bisse." He picked his gloves up off the bar. "One hour. That's the joke. That's the whole joke. He sold everything above the channel for one hour of the water that was on it and none of us knew, including the man who bought it."

He went out.

Denise let the door shut and then said, to nobody, "He'll be all right."

He was, in the end. It took him until June.

The valley took about four days to change, and it did not change the way Wren had braced for.

Nobody shouted at her. Nobody stopped talking to her. The corvée list had already gone up with her on it in the ordinary way and nobody took it down.

What happened was subtler and worse, and she did not have a word for it until Thérèse gave her one over the wall on the first of May.

"They're counting," said Thérèse.

"Counting what?"

"Everything. Sixty years of it." She had her arms folded on the top stones. "Josephine's father let the Bonnards have four hours in 1961 when their spring failed and never took them back. Everybody knew. Nobody minded. It was four hours."

"That's not —"

"It's exactly that. And Ernest's brother took the lower meadow in the settlement and Ernest took the upper and the hours went with the lower, and they shook hands on it in 1988 and they've had Christmas dinner together every year since." Thérèse straightened up off the wall. "I give that till August."

"Nobody's done anything wrong."

"No," Thérèse agreed. "Nobody's done anything wrong since 1430. That's what you keep saying, and you're right, and it hasn't helped anybody yet."

She went down to the Rouvenaz on the fourth of May because she could not not go.

Marius was in the barn doing something to a gate that did not need doing, and there were two cows in it.

She stood in the door for a while.

"Three," she said.

"Two."

"When?"

"March." He did not look up from the gate. "Don't start. It was the old one and she'd have gone this year anyway and I got a decent price, because the price is good this year, because there's people buying beef who've had a good winter." He set the pin. "Don't put her on your list."

"Marius —"

"I said don't."

She stood there.

"I did a sum," she said. "I want to tell you what's in it and then I'll go. Can I?"

He put the hammer down and leaned on the gate and looked at her, and she saw that he had known for about a week that this was coming and had decided to let her have it.

"Go on."

"I asked Delarzes whether I could give the hours back," she said. "Not to you. I know what you said in the road in October and I've not forgotten a word of it. I asked whether I could refuse them — say I don't want the eleven hours, take them off my parcels, put them back."

"And?"

"I can. There's a procedure. I renounce, it's minuted, the hours go back into the rota." She kept her hands in her pockets. "And they go back pro rata, because that's how they came out in 1905 and that's how they'd go back. By area. Same as Duvanel."

Marius worked it for about four seconds, because he has been doing this arithmetic all winter like everybody else in that valley.

"Then I'd get —"

"About twenty-five minutes," said Wren. "Twenty-five minutes back, out of the five and three-quarter hours you're losing. The biggest holdings under the channel would get most of it. Ernest would get the best part of an hour. The hotel's lease wouldn't be affected at all, because the hotel's lease comes off the total and not off anybody's share." She made herself finish it. "I could give up everything I've got tomorrow and it would give you twenty-five minutes on the eighth day."

Marius looked at the gate for a long moment.

Then he laughed — one breath out through the nose, not unkindly — and shook his head.

"That's it, isn't it," he said.

"That's it."

"That's the whole thing." He picked the hammer back up. "You can't fix it by being good. Nobody can. Duvanel couldn't, and you can't, and I can't, and Perrenal stood up in November and gave away an hour and three-quarters he didn't know he had, and it made no difference to me either." He tapped the pin home. "It's not people. It's the way the thing's arranged."

"Yes."

"Well, then," said Marius. "Stop coming down here with your sums. Come down with a shovel in April like you always have and we'll say no more about it."

He put the hammer on the shelf.

"And take a bit of that cheese on the way out. It's off the alp and it's not getting eaten and there's two of us left in this house and one of us is a cat."

She went up the hill in the evening light with a quarter of a wheel of somebody else's summer in her bag.

The corvée had been on the tenth of April and the water had gone in at four as it always does, and this year she had stood at the intake with the rest of them and had eleven hours on the eighth day and the sixteenth, and had not used a single minute of any of them, because her parcels are above the channel and water does not go up.

Eleven hours of water she cannot reach.

A number she cannot spend.

Four parcels of stones and a building she is forbidden to alter, a spring that runs hardest in January, and a right in a register that every man in the valley can now price to the franc.

She stopped at the fork, as she does.

Below her, the channel. Above her, a green line in brown ground.

And from up there, in the clear evening, on the bench, she could see the Sérac with its lawns coming green and the first of the season's cars on the road — and somewhere in an office in Zug, a man who knew the commune boundaries better than Ourdaz did, and who had asked a very polite question in September about who held the ground on the shoulder.

Chapter Twenty-One

From the Head of the Channel

1802. The register kept in French from this day.

The valuation went to Crans on the fourth of May and the answer came on the second of June and it was one page, which after four pages in January was itself a message.

The family accepted the basis of the roll of 1904, without prejudice, on one condition: that they be permitted to realise the value of what was being recognised. They did not want water. They had never wanted water. They had four thousand square metres of steep ground above a channel, held since 1974 and visited twice, which they now understood to carry a few hours of a rota, and they would like, if the consortage had no objection, to sell the whole thing to somebody.

"To somebody," said Aloys.

"To somebody," said Firmin.

"And who in the name of God is somebody?"

Delarzes answered that in nine lines which arrived on the eighth of June and were the most expensive nine lines of the whole business. The right is attached to the land and cannot be detached from it, so a sale of the right is a sale of the parcel; the parcel is in the agricultural zone and may be bought by anybody who satisfies the rural land law; and the consortage cannot prevent it.

It added, in the last line, that the Société hôtelière du Sérac had a lease of fifteen years and would very shortly have an accountant.

The first payment from the hotel landed on the fifteenth of June.

Twenty-eight thousand francs, into an account that had held six hundred and thirty-one francs the previous May and had never held four figures in its life. Firmin printed the statement and put it on the table at the committee and the committee looked at it the way people look at a photograph of somebody they used to know.

They spent an hour and a half on what to do with it, and it went the way those discussions always go. Reduce the labour tax. Don't reduce the labour tax, because a tax you reduce is a tax you can never raise. Repair the depot. Repair the depot properly, with a roof. Put it away. Put every franc of it away, because the hotel might be gone in fifteen years and the channel will not be.

And then Thérèse, who by then was on the committee because people had put her there in March without her asking, said: "Buy the Crans parcel."

It made sense in about four seconds and the room could feel it making sense.

Four thousand square metres of useless ground and a few hours of water, from a family who wanted neither, at a price a valuer from Fribourg had already put in writing, out of money that had arrived from a hotel and would arrive again next June.

"And then it's ours," said Aloys, "and it's back in the pot, and it's one less of the nine."

"It's not back in the pot," said Firmin. "It's in the consortage's hands as a holding. It's the consortage owning land, which we've never done."

"Then we'll learn."

They voted to open negotiations, seven to nothing, at twenty past nine on the sixteenth of June.

And two minutes later Gilles Perrenal, who had said nothing for an hour and a half, said: "And the four above the Comba."

Firmin came up on the twentieth with Aloys and with Thérèse, which was correct and which was also, she understood the moment she saw three people on the path instead of one, a formal act.

She put the kettle on the stove. There are two chairs and a bed and a box, and Thérèse sat on the box without being asked, which made it possible.

Firmin did it properly. He had it written down and he read it.

The consortage of Darbon offered to purchase the four parcels of section seven, with their appurtenant rights, at a price to be fixed by the same valuer on the same basis as the Crans parcel; the consortage to bear all costs; and the sale conditional on nothing.

"We can't do it out of the year's money," he said, putting the paper down. "It's more than the lease brings in and everybody in the room knew that before I'd finished the sentence. We'd borrow against the lease. Fifteen years of it, at a bank in Sierre, and we'd pay it off out of the hotel and we'd still have something over by the fourth year."

There was a small silence while all four of them heard what that sentence was.

"The consortage of Darbon," said Aloys, to nobody, "going to a bank."

"With a hotel's money," said Thérèse, "to buy out one of its own."

"To settle it," said Firmin. "And I'll tell you before you ask that Perrenal proposed it and voted for it and so did I."

"Why?" said Wren.

"Because it closes it. Nine holdings. Six agreed and want nothing, two are public and can't be bought without a year of notices, and one is you. If we buy yours and we buy Crans, then in five years there isn't a question any more. There's a consortage that owns some stones and a rota that works, and nobody's counting." He said the last word without emphasis and she noticed it anyway. "And you'd have more money in one line than anybody in that valley has ever seen, and you'd still be a — no. You wouldn't. You'd have nothing. You'd be a woman living in a hut."

"Yes," said Wren.

"I'm not going to pretend that's not in it."

She let the kettle boil and took it off and did not make anything with it, and then sat down on the second chair and looked at the three of them.

"I'm going to say no," she said, "and I want to say why properly, and I want Thérèse to hear it, because Thérèse tells people things accurately and I'd like this told accurately."

"Go on," said Thérèse.

"If the consortage buys the nine, then in fifty years there'll be a register, and the register will say that the water of Darbon belongs to the parcels lying under the channel, and it'll be true. Legally true. Not because a secretary tidied it in 1905 — because everybody agreed to it, in writing, with a valuer, out of hotel money, in a good year." She had her hands round the cold kettle handle and made herself let go. "It'd be the same result as Duvanel. It would just have been done properly."

Nobody said anything.

"And there'd be nothing wrong with it. Every single person would have been paid a fair price by a fair process, and the argument would be over, and that's worth something, and I know it's worth something." She looked at Firmin. "But what happened in 1905 wasn't that somebody stole hours. It was that a thing stopped being one kind of thing and became another kind of thing, and nobody noticed, because the day it happened it made no difference to anybody. And if I take your money that happens again, in my lifetime, with my signature on it."

"That's a very fine argument," said Aloys, "for a woman with no floor."

"There's a floor."

"There's boards."

"I know exactly what it is," said Wren. "I've known since the twenty-fourth of April. I did the sum once and I've not done it again, and I'm not going to do it in front of you."

Firmin turned his hat over twice on his knee.

"Then I'll tell you what you've just chosen," he said, "because somebody should, and it had better be me and not somebody in a road in August. If you don't sell, you'll be the last of the nine that anybody can point at. The commune and the bourgeoisie can't be pointed at, because you can't be angry at a commune. Crans will be gone by Christmas. The other six never wanted anything. That leaves you, with hours you can't use and money you've turned down, sitting above everybody, for the rest of your life."

"Yes."

"Every November. Every assembly. Every dry year." He put the hat on. "And in a dry year they will look up that hill."

"I know."

"Do you?"

"I've been looked at up that hill for six years," said Wren. "The only thing that's changed is what they'll be looking at."

Thérèse stayed behind after the men went down, which was also formal, in a different way.

"You could have taken it," she said, at the door.

"I know."

"I'd have taken it."

"I know that too."

"No, listen to me, because this is the only time I'm going to say it." Thérèse pulled her coat straight. "I've six hours and I'm fifty-eight and I buried a husband last February, and I have worked out, since April, that I am standing on a great deal of money that I will never see, because if I sell the water the meadow's worth nothing and my son gets a field he can't cut." She looked out at the valley. "That's what we've all found out. We're all rich and none of us can spend it. You're the only one of us who could have and you've just said no, and I don't know yet whether that's the stupidest thing I've ever watched or the only decent thing that's happened here since November. Neither do you."

"No."

"Right." Thérèse went down two steps. "Corvée's the ninth next year. Firmin's putting the list up early."

She sat in the doorway until it got dark, and then she turned the terminal on.

Not to look at the valuation, which she did not look at.

She opened the roll.

She had read it in May of the previous year from the outside in, and she had transcribed the entry against the seven letters in the second week of May, and she had put it in a letter to Firmin on the twelfth of June, and she had read the line, she supposed, two hundred times.

Vuardin — iij heures au huitiesme jour, du chief du bisse.

Three hours on the eighth day, from the head of the channel.

She sat back.

She got up and went outside and stood in the dark and came back in and read it again.

From the head of the channel. Not from his own ground. Not at the parcel. At the chief — at the intake, at the top, where the water comes off the Nétsire above the Comba, which is the only place a man whose ground sits above the line could ever have taken a drop of it.

Then she did the thing that took four minutes and that no person could have done at all.

She asked for the phrase. Every membrane, every hand, both languages, the whole four metres, two hundred and forty years, and then the registers on top of that: du chief, au chief, ad caput aque, and every mangling of them the scribes had managed.

It is not clever. It is the least clever thing in the world. But a person would have had to read the entire roll a second time, knowing what to look for — and a person only ever reads a roll once, because reading it once takes a winter.

It came back against six of the nine holdings, in four hands, across two hundred and forty years.

And against no holding under the channel. Not one. Not in two hundred and forty years. Because for ground under the channel the phrase would have been meaningless: you take your water where your ground is.

She read it again with her hands flat on the table.

It is in the act, too, if you read that as a description of a place and not as a formula: a water from the torrent called la Nétsire, above the place named la Comba.

Above the place named la Comba.

She had read that sentence in July of the previous year in a cool room in Sion and had written down that the names were the names, and had never once thought about what above meant for a woman who owns la Comba.

The intake is at fourteen hundred and ninety-one metres.

Her highest parcel is at thirteen hundred and ten.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Somebody Gets Told First

1834. Of the hours at the head, the greater part is taken below, by consent, none objecting.

She did not sleep on the twentieth and did not do much on the twenty-first except check, and by the evening of the twenty-third she had it in four lines on a page, and she had spent three days trying to find the mistake in it and had not found one.

One. The phrase is not hers alone. It stands against six of the nine holdings, consistently, in four hands, from the sixteen-twenties to 1904, and against no holding under the channel in two hundred and forty years.

Two. The intake is where the act says it is: a water from the torrent, above the place named la Comba. The barrage is a concrete thing of 1954 on a site that has moved perhaps thirty metres in six hundred years, and it stands at fourteen hundred and ninety-one metres.

Three. Her highest parcel is at thirteen hundred and ten. The fall from the intake to the top of her ground is a hundred and eighty metres over about nine hundred of horizontal distance, and water goes downhill without being asked.

Four. There is already a line. Cut level along the top of the scree at about fourteen hundred and forty, falling a metre in thirty, with the bank standing here and there, from the intake round the shoulder and along above the Comba. Not a coincidence. Not a lost curiosity. It is the route, and it is the route because it was built as the route, and the men who paid in 1430 took their water along it to ground the lower channel has never reached and never could.

The old line is not evidence of an old right.

The old line is the means of exercising it.

She sat with that on the evening of the twenty-third and then made herself write the other column.

The right is a right to a quantity of water, not a right to a pipe. Taking at the head means a work at the intake, which is the consortage's, and a conduit, which crosses ground belonging to the commune and to the bourgeoisie and to at least two private holdings, none of which she has any right over whatsoever.

It means a servitude, or half a dozen of them, or a great deal of goodwill.

It means money she has not got, for a pipe she is probably not allowed to lay, on ground outside the building zone, in a canton where laying anything is a year of paper.

And it means the consortage agreeing to let water off the top of its own intake to a woman whose parcels it has just tried to buy.

She wrote at the bottom of the second column: Not a solution. A possibility.

Then, underneath, the thing that had been sitting on her chest since four o'clock in the morning of the twenty-first:

It is not only mine.

Six of the nine.

Two of the six are the commune's. One is the bourgeoisie's. One belongs to the nurseryman at Chermignon who wrote his consent on the back of a delivery note. One is hers.

And one is Crans.

Four thousand square metres of steep ground above the channel, valued in April, which the consortage had resolved in June to buy, and which Firmin was at that moment negotiating for, at a price built on a report which says — she had checked it twice on the twenty-second — that the restored entitlements attaching to holdings above the channel cannot be exercised in situ by reason of elevation, and the writer has valued them on the basis of their transferability rather than their utility, which materially reduces the figure.

Which was true in April.

Which was true because nobody had read a phrase in an eighteenth-century margin that had been photographed by Wren in May of the previous year, transcribed by her in the second week of May, quoted in a letter to Firmin on the twelfth of June, and read by her perhaps two hundred times.

Du chief du bisse.

She had put it in front of all of them. It had been in the consortage's own discs since the eighth of September. It was in Delarzes' opinion, quoted, in the original, in a footnote about the form of entries in the roll.

Nobody had seen what it meant. She had not seen what it meant for fourteen months.

She went down on the morning of the twenty-fourth.

Firmin was in the yard with the tractor and he straightened up when he saw her coming, because by then a woman walking down from the shoulder before eight in the morning meant one thing.

"Now what."

"How far are you with Crans?"

"Delarzes wrote on Monday. They'll take the valuation figure and they want it done by September." He wiped his hands. "Why?"

"Because the valuation figure is wrong, and I know why it's wrong, and if I don't tell you now you'll sign it in September."

Firmin looked at her for a moment.

"Come inside," he said.

It took her nine minutes and she did it in the four lines and did not embellish any of them, and when she had finished Firmin sat with his hands flat on the table for a long time.

"Say the last one again."

"The old line runs from the intake to above the Comba. The Crans parcel is on it. Their water can be taken at the head the same as mine, and so can the commune's, and so can the bourgeoisie's, and so can the nurseryman's. The valuer priced all of it as unusable. It isn't unusable. It's difficult, and it's expensive, and it might not be allowed. It's not unusable."

"And what does that do to the price?"

"I don't know. I'm not a valuer. But he knocked it down because he said it can't be used, and he says so in his own report, and that sentence isn't true any more."

Firmin got up and went to the window and stood there with his back to her.

"Do you know what you've just done," he said.

"Yes."

"Say it."

"I've cost the consortage money. Probably a good deal. If you buy Crans now you'll pay two or three times what you were going to pay, and it's all borrowed, so it's fifteen years of the hotel instead of four. The commune will want its two holdings revalued, and the bourgeoisie will, and the whole thing that was nearly over is open again." She was very steady, because she had said it to herself about forty times on the way down. "And I've made my own hours worth more, which everybody will notice, and some of them will think that's why I came down here this morning."

"Some of them will."

"Yes."

"And you came anyway."

"I'd have known in September that I knew in June," said Wren.

Firmin laughed — one short unamused breath — and put his hand over his eyes.

"You said that to me a year ago," he said, "in this kitchen, about a letter."

"I know."

"You are the most expensive person who has ever set foot in this valley."

He called the committee for the twenty-seventh.

He told them himself, from the four lines, in his accounts voice, and he told them it came from her and that it came before the Crans contract and not after, and he said that twice.

The first reaction was silence and the second was Aloys saying something about the valuer from Fribourg and his fee, and then it broke into six conversations at once for about four minutes, and Firmin let it, and then knocked on the table with his knuckles twice.

"There's a decision," he said, "and it's not about money, and I want it taken tonight, before anybody sleeps on it and gets clever. Do we tell Crans?"

"We're not obliged to," said somebody, immediately. "They've got a lawyer. Their lawyer's had the same report we have. Their lawyer's had the discs since March."

"That's not what I asked."

"We're buying at a valuation neither side disputed. That's a clean transaction in any country in the world. If they've not read their own file that's not on us."

"Still not what I asked."

And Gilles Perrenal, from the end of the table, said: "Yes we do."

He did not stand up and he did not raise his voice and it took about ninety seconds.

"In ninety-eight my father sold four parcels and a strip under the rock and the two at the Comba for eleven thousand francs, to a man who paid promptly and did nothing wrong, because everybody agreed it was worthless and nobody in this room would have paid a franc more for it."

He turned the cap of a pen round on the table.

"There was a right on that ground the whole time. It was in a roll in a box in Sion and it was in a register in a wet cupboard a hundred metres from where my father signed, and not one person in this valley knew, including him, including the buyer, including every man in this room's father. It cost us everything we had above the bisse, and we have had thirty years of being the family that sold cheap, and the thing that makes it unbearable is that nobody was at fault."

He put the pen down.

"Now we know something about somebody else's ground that they don't know, and they're about to sell it to us, and we're sitting here asking whether we're obliged to say so. And the answer is that we're not obliged and we're going to do it anyway, because I have had thirty years of the other thing and I am not putting it on anybody else."

Nobody said anything for a few seconds.

"And I'd like it minuted," said Perrenal, "that she came down and told Firmin on the twenty-fourth, before the contract, when she could have said nothing and had her parcel bought off her neighbours at a quarter of what it's worth and never been found out."

"That's not —" Wren began.

"I know it's not why you did it," said Perrenal. "Minute it anyway. In five years nobody remembers why. They remember the date."

They voted to disclose, unanimously, at twelve minutes past ten.

Delarzes wrote to the firm in Sion on the twenty-ninth of June, three pages, setting the whole of it out and enclosing the transcription, and the reply, when it came in the second week of July, was one line long and said that the family were taking further advice.

Which is how the summer of the second year began. Everything open again. A valuer being asked a question he had not been asked before. A commune preparing to revalue two holdings it had never wanted. A consortage that had been three weeks from finishing, now looking at fifteen years of a hotel's money instead of four.

And a woman on a shoulder at twelve hundred and eighty metres who owned hours of water and now knew, and could prove, that there was a way to get them onto her ground, and no way at all to be allowed to.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The Meter

1863. Admitted, paying his part. The last man so admitted in this book.

Crans took further advice for five weeks and then wrote nine lines.

The family thanked the consortage for its communication of the twenty-ninth of June, which it described as unusual, and said so twice in slightly different ways. It said the family had instructed the same valuer to consider the matter afresh. And it said that, pending that, the family withdrew its parcel from sale and would consider its position at the end of the year.

"They're keeping it," said Aloys.

"They're waiting," said Firmin.

"Same thing with better manners."

The commune resolved in August to obtain its own valuation of its two holdings, by a valuer to be appointed, subject to procedure, and Raymond telephoned Firmin about it at home twice, which by then was simply how Raymond dealt with anything he did not like.

And the whole thing, which in June had been four weeks from being finished for ever, went quiet and settled in for a long stay, in the way that matters of that kind do.

The lease required metering at the intake.

Delarzes had put it in at the second meeting and the hotel's people had agreed at once, because a rate and a cap are only numbers if somebody is counting. The lease gives them up to two hundred litres a minute and not more than a fixed quantity across the season, and it stops altogether in a year the consortage declares a drought, and none of those three clauses is worth anything without an instrument.

The installation was set for the last week of August.

Firmin put a notice on the depot door, which is how anybody finds out anything, and the notice said that between the twenty-fourth and the twenty-eighth there would be men at the intake and the flow would be interrupted for up to four hours on one of those days and the rota would be adjusted and not suspended, and that any consort with a question could ask him.

Wren read it twice on the Thursday, standing in the rain.

Then she went up on the Tuesday.

There were two of them and a van they had got to within four hundred metres and then given up on.

The older one was about fifty-five and was doing the thing with the concrete. The younger one was kneeling on the slab in the weir chamber with his back to her, fitting something into a stainless bracket, with four boxes open around him and everything in them lying in the order it had come out.

She stood at a distance, because it is a work site and because she had learned in six years that the way to be tolerated is not to arrive talking.

After about four minutes the younger one said, without turning round, "You can come closer. You are standing exactly where I will need to walk."

His name was Kirill and he was twenty-eight and he worked for a firm at Visp that installed hydrometric equipment, which he explained by saying, "We measure water. That is the entire company."

He had an accent she could not place at all, and a way of speaking that was very slightly too formal, as though every sentence had been checked before it was let out, which she recognised instantly and did not comment on.

"You are from the village?"

"Up there." She pointed at the shoulder. "The four parcels above the Comba."

"Ah." He looked, for slightly too long, the way somebody looks at ground rather than at scenery. "Steep. What is it, forty per cent?"

"Thirty-five to forty-five. Sixty in places."

"And nothing on it."

"Terracing. Ruined. I'm putting it back."

"By yourself?"

"Yes."

"Then you will be doing it for a long time," said Kirill, and went back to the bracket, and it was not rudeness, it was arithmetic, and she found she did not mind it in the least.

She stayed two hours, which she had not intended, and he explained the whole installation, because she asked, and because — she worked this out later — nobody ever asks, and he is twenty-eight and good at something and lives in a country where people are polite to you and do not ask.

The chamber is the 1954 concrete and it has a sill in it that somebody cast and nobody has measured since.

They were putting in a machined weir plate with a V notch, set dead level, which is what the older man was doing with the concrete and was taking all day, because level is not nearly level.

Above it a stilling well and a pressure sensor, because you do not measure the water — you measure the height of the water behind a known shape, and the shape does the arithmetic for you.

A logger in a steel box with a padlock and a solar panel the size of a book.

"And where does it go?"

"To Visp, four times an hour. To the hotel. And to your president, if he wants it, which he does, because I have already had two telephone calls." Kirill sat back on his heels. "He asked whether it could be made to show the total for the summer on one page. I said yes. He asked whether it could be printed. I said yes. He asked whether it could be printed in a way that a man of eighty can read across a table in a room with bad light, and I said —" he shrugged "— that is the first useful thing anybody has asked me to do this year."

At about four the older man went down to the van for something and did not come back for a while, and Kirill washed his hands in the Nétsire and sat on the wall of the chamber and ate an apple, and Wren sat two metres away, and the water came round the shoulder into the channel below them the way it has every day since April.

"May I ask something," he said.

"Yes."

"Everybody who has come up here this week has told me what the meter is for. Three people. All different." He turned the apple round. "One says it is so the hotel does not steal. One says it is so the consortage cannot cheat the hotel. One says it is because of a court case about a woman with a hut."

"That's all true except the court case."

"There is no court case?"

"Not yet."

"Ah." He nodded slowly. "That is a very Swiss sentence."

She laughed, which surprised her, because she had not done it out loud in front of anybody since the spring.

She told him some of it, because he asked properly and because he did not once look at her while she was talking, which made it possible.

She left herself out as far as she could. The act of 1430 and the forty-one men. The roll and the marks and the innermost membrane. The register of 1905 and the sentence about the water being of no use to them. Nine holdings above the channel. She did not say which of the nine were hers and he did not ask, and she understood by the end that he had worked it out in about ninety seconds and had decided not to say so.

"And you read all of it," he said. "The Latin as well."

"Some of it. The machine reads the page and offers words, and I correct it, and when it's been corrected enough it stops offering the wrong words."

Kirill thought about that for a moment.

"Then how do you know it is right?"

Nobody had asked her that. Delarzes had checked it behind her back, which is a different thing. The committee had not cared. Ourdaz had gone back to the perch.

"I don't," she said. "Not everywhere. I know where I checked."

"Yes," said Kirill.

"That's not an answer people like."

"It is the only answer there is." He put the core down on the wall beside him. "This plate will be level to about a tenth of a millimetre because I will set it and then I will check it, and the checking is nine-tenths of the job and takes four times as long, and in fifteen years nobody will ever look at it again. If somebody asks me whether the meter is accurate, the true answer is that it was accurate on the day I checked it and that it has a drift I can calculate and cannot see." He shrugged. "An unchecked measurement is not a measurement. It is an opinion with a number on it."

They sat with that for a moment.

"Do you say that to hotels?" said Wren.

"I say it to hotels constantly," said Kirill. "They find it upsetting."

He got up on the wall of the chamber at about half past four and looked properly at the shoulder with his hand flat above his eyes, for about half a minute.

"There," he said.

"You can see it?"

"Of course I can see it. It is a bench cut into a scree slope and the grass on it is a different colour because the soil is a different depth. Anybody who measures water can see it." He got down. "How much fall?"

"A metre in thirty."

"On that ground?"

"On that ground."

"Then whoever did that was very good," said Kirill. "That is not a ditch. That is survey. On a slope like that, with no instrument, that is one man walking with a water level and a great deal of patience and probably two summers." He picked up the apple core and put it in his pocket rather than throwing it, which she noticed. "And you said fourteen hundred and forty?"

"Roughly. My phone says forty to forty-two and it's wrong."

"It is wrong by about twelve, on this face, and always in the same direction, which is the only reason it is any use at all." He glanced at the chamber, at the sill, at the new plate. "And here we are at fourteen hundred and ninety-one."

"Yes."

"So the old line begins here."

"Yes."

"And your ground is at thirteen hundred."

"Three ten."

Kirill looked at the intake, and at the line of the old channel round the shoulder, and at the ground above the Comba, and did the thing she had watched Delarzes do and Firmin do and Ourdaz never do, which was to look at all three in turn and then look back at the first one.

"Then why," he said, "are you not taking your water here?"

She did not say anything for a moment.

"Because I'm not allowed to put a pipe across four people's land," she said. "Because the intake belongs to the consortage. Because I'd need a servitude from the commune and one from the bourgeoisie and one from a nurseryman at Chermignon and one from a family in Crans who aren't talking to us. Because the ground's outside the building zone and there's a procedure and the procedure is a year if nobody objects, and nobody ever doesn't object."

"Yes," said Kirill, "but why are you not taking your water here?"

"That's the same question."

"No." He said it quite mildly, without any sense that he was correcting her. "You have answered a question about permission. I asked a question about water. Those are different departments and it is a mistake to let one answer the other, because the first one is somebody's opinion and the second one is only arithmetic."

"All right. Answer it, then."

"It is trivial," said Kirill. "It is not even engineering, it is plumbing. You have a share of the flow and a known point of delivery. You do not need a channel and you do not need a second intake. You need a take-off in that chamber, below the plate, with its own small meter, and a line. If the line is buried it is invisible, and if it is invisible half of your permissions are about something nobody can see. A hundred and eighty metres of fall over nine hundred is nothing — you would be throttling it, not pumping it. The whole thing is three days' work and not a great deal of material, and the hard part is not the water." He put his hands out. "The hard part is the same as everywhere. It is the four people and the year of paper."

"So you agree with me."

"I agree with the answer. I do not agree with the order you put it in." He stood up and brushed off his knees. "You said I am not allowed, and then you explained why. That is how people talk about themselves after a long time of being told no. It is better to say it is nine hundred metres of pipe, and here are the four people. Then it is a list. A list can be worked through. Not allowed cannot be worked through. It can only be believed."

The older man came back up with the thing he had gone for and the conversation ended the way work conversations do, in the middle.

She went down at six.

At the fork she stopped, as she does, and looked up, and it was the twenty-fourth of August and the light was going off the Darbon face, and there was a green line in brown ground running from the intake round the shoulder to above the Comba, and for the first time in fourteen months she looked at it and did not see a document.

She saw nine hundred metres of pipe and four people.

Chapter Twenty-Four

A List Can Be Worked Through

1873. A new register begun, the old being damaged by water in the depot.

She wrote the list on the twenty-sixth of August and it had four lines on it, and she did nothing about it for nine days, and then she did.

The nurseryman at Chermignon. Gaspard, sixty-one, four hectares of container stock and a polytunnel and a sign on the road he painted himself.

She telephoned and he said come Thursday, and on Thursday he walked her round the whole operation for forty minutes before she could get a word in — the Prunus, the beech whips, the rootstock beds, an argument with a supplier in Thurgau that had been running since 2019, and a man who had ordered ninety metres of hedge and then moved house.

Then he sat her down on an upturned crate and said, "Right. It's about the stones."

"It's about the stones."

"You want to put a pipe across them."

"I want to ask whether you'd let me put a pipe across them. It'd be buried. You'd never see it. It'd cross about a hundred and forty metres of your upper parcel and it wouldn't touch the lower one."

Gaspard thought about this for approximately two seconds.

"Aye."

"I'd want to do it properly. There'd be a servitude, registered, and I'd pay for the survey and the notary and —"

"Aye," said Gaspard again. "You do all that. I'm not reading it." He got up. "Do you want a Prunus? I've a dozen of them nobody's taken and they'll not winter in the pots."

She went home on the bus with two bare-rooted cherries on her knees and a written consent on the back of a seed order, because he did not have any other paper, and it was signed and dated and it was the second-best letter anybody wrote in the whole business.

The bourgeoisie. Which is not the commune and never has been, and in that valley owns the woods, four alps, the old mill, a dozen parcels nobody wants, and the ground above the Comba on the east side of the gully.

She went to Henri, who has been president of it for a decade and taught at the school before that, in the evening, at his house, and he listened without saying anything for the whole of it, and then took his glasses off and said:

"And what do we get?"

"Nothing. You'd get a servitude fee if you want one, and I'd pay for everything, and —"

"No," said Henri. "I'm not being sharp with you. I'm asking the actual question. The bourgeoisie has a holding above that channel same as you. Fifteen florins in 1430, Delarzes' paper says, which is what, two hours? And it's on the same shelf as yours and it's the same stones and it's the same problem." He put the glasses on the table. "If you lay a pipe from the intake and it goes past my ground, and I've got two hours I can't use either, and I'm being asked to sign a paper letting you take yours past me to yours —"

"Then you'd want a take-off."

"Then I'd want a take-off," said Henri, "and so would the commune, and I'll tell you what they'll say before you go up there, because I sat on that council for nine years. They'll say: why is the commune granting a servitude across communal ground for a private work, when the commune has two holdings in the same position and no way of exercising them, and who authorised that? And it'll go on the agenda in March, and it'll come off the agenda in March, and it'll go back on in June."

He put the glasses back on, and then took them off again, which meant he had one more thing.

"There's a byre on that ground, east side of the gully. Roof's half off. It's a cheese cellar underneath, cut into the rock — my grandfather's lot used it and nobody's been inside it since about sixty-five." He turned the glasses over. "It's on your line. Near enough on it."

"I wasn't going to touch it."

"I know you weren't," said Henri.

The commune. Raymond saw her on a Tuesday at the commune office, which he made a point of, because he was not going to see her at home.

He was perfectly pleasant for ten minutes. The council had voted to obtain its own valuation. The valuation would be ready when it was ready. He was sure she would understand that the commune could not consider a servitude across communal land while its own position in the same matter was unresolved.

"That's not what I'm asking for."

"That's precisely what you're asking for."

"I'm asking whether the commune would want water on its own two holdings," said Wren, "if it could have it."

Raymond stopped.

"Say that again."

"The commune's got two parcels above the channel with hours on them and no way of getting a drop onto either, and that's why the valuer marked them down. If there were a line from the intake along the old shelf, the commune's parcels are on it, and the commune would have water on ground it currently rates as waste." She kept her hands still. "I'm not asking permission to cross. I'm telling you that what I want to build crosses your ground because your ground is on it — the same as mine, and the same as the bourgeoisie's, and the same as Gaspard's, and the same as Crans."

Raymond looked at her for a long time.

"That's a completely different conversation," he said.

"I know."

"And it's one I can't have with you, because you're one of the nine, and the commune is one of the nine, and the two of us sitting in a room agreeing something is exactly what a person with a lawyer would like to hear about." He took his glasses off, which everybody in that valley does at the same point in a conversation. "Put it in writing to Firmin. Let it come to the commune from the consortage, or from all of you, or from anybody at all except from you to me on a Tuesday."

She walked down the Rue de l'Eglise at half past four with all three conversations in her head, and stopped at the bottom outside the depot, where the notice about the metering was still up and had gone soft in the rain, and stood there for a while with her hands in her pockets.

Four people, she had written.

It is not four people.

It is six holdings, in five hands, on the same shelf with the same problem, which the same line would solve at the same time, which between them have most of the hours — and not one of them can do anything alone.

Gaspard cannot build it. The bourgeoisie cannot build it for a private benefit. The commune cannot build it without a procedure and a reason. Crans will not answer a letter. And she cannot afford four hundred metres of it, let alone nine hundred, and has no standing to cross anybody's ground, and no right to a work at an intake that is not hers.

Six parties, one line, no money, and a very great deal of paper.

She stood outside the depot and started laughing, which frightened a woman coming out of the post office.

She went to Marius before she went to anybody.

He was in the barn on the ninth of September and the two cows were out and he was doing the thing with the gate again, which she had by then worked out is what he does instead of sitting down.

"I want to tell you something before I tell them," she said, "and I want to say first that it doesn't get you anything, and I'm not coming down here with a sum, and if you tell me to go away I'll go away."

"Well, that's a start."

"I think I can get water onto my ground."

Marius put the hammer down.

She told him: the intake, the shelf, the fall, the pipe, the nine hundred metres. The six holdings on the same line. Gaspard's seed order in her pocket. Henri's question. Raymond's Tuesday.

He listened the whole way through without interrupting, the way he had in the road in June of the previous year.

"So you'd take it at the top," he said.

"At the head. Same as the roll says. Du chief du bisse. It's what those six have always had, and nobody's done it since before my great-grandmother was born."

"And it'd come out of the same water."

"It comes out of the same water either way. Whether I take my hours at the intake or at the barme, they're my hours. Nobody loses a minute more than they've already lost." She said it carefully, because it mattered. "You don't lose anything twice. What you lost in November is what you lose. This doesn't add to it."

"I know that," said Marius. "I worked that out while you were talking." He picked up the hammer and turned it over and put it down again. "What I'm doing is something else. I'm sitting here trying to decide whether I'm pleased."

"You don't have to be."

"I know I don't have to be." He leaned on the gate. "It's the water that came off my meadow. And it's going to go along a hill on a pipe and come out on four bits of stone and grow — what?"

"Cherries, apparently."

"Cherries." He shook his head slowly. "Sixty-one years I watered that field and the water's going to go and grow cherries on the Comba." He laughed, one breath. "My father would have gone up there with a shovel."

"And you?"

"I'm seventy-nine," said Marius, "and I've two cows and a book in a tin box and I'll not see the cherries." He straightened up. "Do it properly. That's all. Don't do it as a favour anybody does you and don't do it on a nod, because a nod dies with the man who gave it, and I'd know, I've seen four of them die." He picked the hammer up for the last time. "Write it down. Get it signed. Get it in a book that somebody has to keep."

She walked up the hill on the ninth of September and sat at the table and did not turn the terminal on for half an hour.

Six parties. One work. No money. Nobody able to do it alone, and every one of them better off if it were done.

A thing that belongs to everybody and nobody, and a book that says how, and a meeting once a year where somebody shouts.

She turned the terminal on at eight and opened the transcription of the act of 1430 and read the last covenant again, which she could have said from memory and did say, out loud, while she was reading it, the way she says things on Sundays.

And it is further covenanted that the water so brought shall belong in common to those who have borne the charge of it, to each in the measure of what he has paid, and to their heirs holding the same lands; and that any man of the said community who has not borne the charge may be admitted to the said water thereafter, paying his part with the rest, and not otherwise.

They did not invent it in 1430 either. They used the form that was to hand, because it was the only form that works on a hillside where nobody has enough money and everybody has some ground.

She opened a new document and sat with the cursor for a minute.

Then she wrote the heading, in French, because it will have to be in French. And then the first line underneath it, and the first line was not hers and she did not pretend it was.

She looked at it for a long time.

Then she wrote, underneath, the six holdings, and the five names against them.

Chapter Twenty-Five

In the Measure of What He Has Paid

1889. The bed above the scree is not named in this book.

She sent it to Firmin on the twelfth of September and to nobody else, and Firmin read it twice and then telephoned Delarzes, which is how she knew he had understood it.

"This isn't a request," he said, when she came down on the Monday. "You've sent me a request and it isn't one. It's a constitution."

"It's four pages."

"It's four pages and the first line's from 1430 and there's six holdings on the second page and a column for hours and a column for the charge. I've been president of one of these for nineteen years." He put it on the table. "I know a founding instrument when somebody hands me one on a Saturday."

Delarzes came up on the sixth of October, and this time he brought a second chair in the back of the car and carried it two hundred metres up the track without saying anything about it, and set it down, and sat on it, and Wren understood that this was the closest that man was ever going to come to a compliment.

He had read it four times. As far as she could tell, he had enjoyed it.

"It is the right instrument," he said. "I want to say that first, because I am about to spend forty minutes telling you why it is difficult and I do not want you to think the difficulty is the answer. A consortage is what this canton does with exactly this problem and has done since before the canton existed. Several parties, one work, no single party able to carry it, a benefit divided in proportion. There is nothing else in the law that fits and there never has been."

"So it can be done."

"It can be constituted. Statutes, an assembly, a president, a committee, an approval from the canton, registration, and a register of members with their shares. It is not quick and it is not free and half of it is form." He turned a page. "And you have the harder half already, which is the thing nobody can give you: six holdings in five hands that all benefit from the same work. That is what takes people twenty years. You have it because a man in 1430 chose a route, and the route is the route."

She had not written the statutes out of her head.

She had asked for the shape of them — the statutes and règlements of every consortage she could reach, across four valleys, going back a century and a half, upper and lower valley, water and forest and alp — and what came back was not a document. It was a pattern: which clauses every one of them has, which clauses only the old ones have, where the difficult ones put the quorum, and the three or four places where two valleys have solved the same thing in opposite ways and both solutions have held for eighty years.

Then she chose. That took nine evenings and the choosing was the whole of the work, and the machine did not make one decision in it, and Delarzes — who did not ask where any of it came from — spent most of an hour on the quorum clause, which is the one she had taken from a forest consortage in the Val d'Hérens and did not know why she preferred.

"Where did you get this?" he said, once.

"Somewhere else."

"It's good," he said, and moved on.

Then he gave her the three difficulties, in order.

The first was the Darbon consortage, because the take-off has to be at the intake and the intake is theirs.

"You will have to ask them. All of them, in a room, in November, for the second year running." He said it without particular emphasis. "And I will tell you what you already know: what you are asking for costs them nothing. Not a minute. The hours left their rota on the twenty-eighth of November last year, and every consort has already lost what he is going to lose. Whether you take those hours at the barme or at the head is a matter of plumbing."

"And that's not how anybody will see it."

"That is not how anybody will see it, because what they will see is a pipe built to carry away water that used to be theirs, along a hillside, to ground nobody in the history of the commune has ever watered, at the top of the valley, where they will look at it every day for the rest of their lives." He closed the folder. "You will win that vote or you will not, and it will not be decided on the arithmetic."

The second was the meter. The lease measures at the intake. Any take-off must sit below the plate and carry its own instrument, calibrated and logged, or the hotel's accountant will have a question every August for fifteen years.

"That is not a difficulty, that is an invoice."

"I know the man who put the plate in," said Wren.

"Of course you do."

The third was the money.

The estimate took three weeks and came from a firm at Sierre that Delarzes named and Firmin telephoned, and it landed on the twenty-ninth of October at ninety-six thousand four hundred francs.

Nine hundred and twenty metres of buried line across a slope that runs to forty-five per cent, with three rock sections and a gully crossing. A take-off structure in the chamber. Six delivery points with meters and valves, one at the top corner of each holding. The survey. Five servitudes, drawn and registered. The notary. The cantonal file. A contingency the man at Sierre called optimistic and wrote down anyway.

Divided in the measure of what each takes, her share of it is forty-four thousand one hundred and fifty francs.

She sat with that for four days and told nobody, and then came down and told Firmin and Delarzes together, because Delarzes was in the valley for the commune's own valuation and had an hour.

"I can't pay it."

"No," said Delarzes.

"I've a thousand francs and a winter's work coming in that might be three more. I could pay four hundred a year."

"Yes."

"The bank won't lend against agricultural ground with no income. I asked in Sierre in March, about the terracing, and they were very polite."

"They will have been."

"And I'm not taking it from Ourdaz."

"No," said Delarzes. "You are not, and I am glad, and I am not going to explain why in front of your president." He looked at her over the folder. "So the position is that you have revived a fifteenth-century instrument, correctly, and that the instrument requires each member to bear the charge in the measure of what he takes, and that you take the largest share and are the poorest person in it by a very long way. Do you see the shape of that?"

"I've seen the shape of it since Tuesday."

"Then say what you came to say. You did not walk down here to tell me you have no money."

"The charge doesn't have to be money," said Wren.

Firmin put his cup down.

"Go on," said Delarzes.

"It never has been. Not here." She had it on a page and did not look at the page. "Every consortage in this canton is built on labour. The tax is assessed in ares and it's discharged in days — you turn out for the corvée or you pay somebody to turn out for you, and if you do neither you're in arrears and the garde writes it in the book. That's the whole system. The money in a consortage is what you pay when you can't give the work."

"That is annual maintenance," said Delarzes. "You are talking about capital."

"So was 1430. Forty-one men paid the master in wheat and wine and coin, and it's in the act, and they also gave him timber off their woods and stone off their rocks and passage over their land, and every one of those was a contribution and none of them was a florin." She put her hands flat. "And the book at the Ruvines says what happens when a man can't pay his share of a roof. He does the work. It's in there, from 1897, and it's been amended three times and that clause has never been touched."

Firmin said, slowly, "You want to dig it."

"I want to bear my part in labour, at a rate the other members set, minuted, in advance, with a schedule and a penalty if I fall behind. I don't want a concession and I don't want to be carried. I want it valued as work and set against my share and written in the book, and if I don't do the days I lose the share."

There was a silence in Firmin's kitchen that went on for some time.

"What's the rate?" said Firmin, eventually.

"Forty francs an hour. It's what the consortage pays a man to take somebody's corvée when he can't turn out. It's in the accounts. It hasn't changed since 2019 and nobody's ever objected to it."

"You've looked it up."

"I looked it up on Tuesday."

Delarzes did the arithmetic on the edge of the folder, because lawyers always do it.

"Forty francs an hour, eight hours a day. Your share is eleven hundred francs short of a hundred and ten days." He looked up. "A hundred and thirty-eight days, near enough. Over how long?"

"Three summers. Four if a year goes bad." She shrugged, once. "I've the winters free."

"And the trench is three hundred days of work."

"On my own, by hand, in that ground, at three metres a day. Yes." She had done the number a dozen times and it had not moved. "I'm not offering to dig the whole thing. I couldn't and it would take me six years and everybody would be waiting. The firm at Sierre does the machine sections and the rock. I do the hand work — the bench, the gully approaches, the six take-offs — and that's about my hundred and thirty-eight days, and they can have them wherever they want them."

"There are two problems with it," said Delarzes at last, "and one is fatal and one is only unpleasant, and I will give you the unpleasant one first, because you will not like it."

"Go on."

"To set labour against a share, somebody has to price a day of your work. In a room. In front of thirty people. And you have just spent eighteen months in a valley that has learned, to the franc, what everything is worth — and now they will sit down and decide what an hour of you is worth, and it will be a number, and it will be in a book, and everybody will know it."

Wren did not say anything for a moment.

"Forty francs," she said. "The same as anybody. That's the point."

"Then say exactly that, and say it before anybody else says anything, because the first number anybody says out loud is the number the room argues about."

"And the fatal one?"

"The fatal one," said Delarzes, "is that a consortage under construction has no money, no members and no legal existence, and the contractor requires payment by stages, and no part of this can begin until somebody has put the other members' shares on a table. The commune cannot pay before its procedure, and its procedure is March at the earliest and probably June. The bourgeoisie can find its share and will want to see the commune move first. Crans is silent." He put the pen down. "So the work cannot start in the spring. It can be constituted in the spring, with your labour written in, and it can start when the commune pays, and that is next year at best and the year after at worst."

"And in the meantime I dig."

"In the meantime you dig nothing, because there is nothing to dig until there is an instrument and a servitude, and if you put a spade into the bourgeoisie's ground before either exists you will have destroyed the whole of it and I will not be able to save you." He said it very levelly. "I mention it because I have watched you for eighteen months and I am aware that you are extremely patient about paper and not patient at all about hillsides."

She held his eye about two seconds longer than was comfortable.

"Understood," she said.

She went up at six and it was the first of November and there was snow on the Darbon face above the mayens.

She sat at the table and opened the four pages and added a fifth, and on the fifth page she wrote the schedule: a hundred and thirty-eight days, at forty francs the hour, eight hours the day, to be worked between the first of April and the thirtieth of October in each year, verified by the garde or such person as the committee shall appoint, forfeit of the share on failure.

Then, underneath, because it had to be somewhere and she would rather write it than be asked it:

I am aware that this makes me the only member who cannot be released from the charge by paying it. I am content with that. It is what the act contemplates and it is what my neighbours have done every April for six hundred years.

She read it back and thought about deleting the last nine words for being a speech, and left them, because they were true and because she had earned them with a shovel.

Chapter Twenty-Six

What It May Never Be Asked

1904. Vuardin — three hours on the eighth day, from the head of the channel.

The salle bourgeoisiale again, the last Saturday of November, and this year Firmin had asked for it in September.

Thirty consorts present of thirty-one. The absence was a man in a home in Sierre who has sent his proxy to Firmin for a decade and sent it again.

Three items. The accounts, which now run to two pages and include a line reading Location Sérac and which took forty minutes, because a consortage that has money argues about it for forty minutes and a consortage that has none argues for four. The report on Crans and on the commune, which was that there was nothing to report. And item three, on the notice as Demande de prise d'eau au chief — consortage projeté de la conduite haute, which everybody in the valley had been discussing since the middle of October.

Firmin read the request out. Then Delarzes' note on it, which was one page and said that the request costs the consortage of Darbon no water whatsoever, the hours having been struck from its rota by the assembly's own resolution of the previous year, and that the question before them was solely whether they would permit a take-off from their intake, separately metered, at the applicants' cost.

"That's the lawyer's version," said Firmin, and put it down. "Now say what you actually think."

They did, for fifty minutes, and almost none of it was about water.

It was about the pipe. About a line of disturbed ground along the top of the scree that would be visible from the whole of the lower commune for two years and from parts of it for ever. About the bench being reopened, and whether the old bank would be knocked about, and who would put it back.

About the machine that would have to get up there, and the track it would need, and whether that track would then exist for ever, because tracks do.

Somebody said his father had watched them put the pylons in and had been told the same thing about the access road, and the access road is still there, and you can see it from his kitchen.

And then, at about a quarter to ten, Thérèse said the thing everybody had been walking round.

"The day there's water up there, it stops being stones."

The room went quiet.

"That's what nobody's saying," she said. "It's not the pipe. The pipe's a scar and scars heal. It's that there's four hundred hectares on that shoulder that's been worth nothing since anybody can remember, and the only reason it's worth nothing is that there's no water on it. And we're being asked to put water on it." She looked round. "And there's been a man from Zug asking who owns it. Don't look at me like that, Raymond told his wife and his wife told everybody."

Wren stood up when Firmin asked her to, and she had nothing on a card this time.

"She's right," she said.

That bought her about four seconds of silence, which she had not expected and did not waste.

"Water is what makes ground worth something. That's the whole of this valley, that's the whole of the last two years, that's why forty-one men put money on a table in 1430. If there's water on the shoulder it isn't waste any more, and things that aren't waste get bought." She kept her hands still. "And I can stand here and tell you I'd never sell, and I would mean it, and it would be worth nothing at all, because I'm twenty-six and the pipe will be there in a hundred years and I won't."

"So what do you want us to do about it?" said somebody.

"Bind it," said Wren. "Now. Before it exists."

She had it written out because Delarzes had made her write it out, and she read it, and it was four clauses and took ninety seconds.

That the statutes of the upper consortage shall provide that its water may be used only for agriculture, horticulture, forestry and the domestic needs of a dwelling lawfully occupied, and for no other purpose whatsoever.

That the statutes may not be amended in that respect except with the consent of the consortage of Darbon in general assembly.

That no member may transfer, lease, assign or encumber its share otherwise than with the land to which it attaches, and that any purported transfer of the water away from the land shall be void.

And that if any share is at any time used, or permitted to be used, for the generation of electricity for sale, for industrial cooling, for snow-making, or for the supply of any commercial undertaking, the share shall revert to the consortage of Darbon, without payment.

She put the paper down.

"That last one costs me more than anything anybody's asked me for since May of last year," she said, "and I'd like it in the statutes, and I'd like Darbon to hold the veto, because Darbon's the only body that's going to be here in a hundred years and still care."

Gilles Perrenal said, from the front, without turning round: "Read the fourth one again."

She read it again.

"Snow-making," he said.

"Snow-making."

"You know the hotel's got a lease."

"The hotel's lease is with this consortage, out of this consortage's hours, metered at the intake, and it's got nothing to do with the upper line. The clause is about the upper line. It's about what the six of us can ever do with the hours on a shoulder that faces south and sits four hundred metres below the resort." She said it evenly. "If somebody comes to me in ten years and offers me a great deal of money to put my hours into a pipe going up instead of a field going across, I want this room to be able to stop me, and I want it to be able to stop me without asking me."

"And if you're dead?"

"Then it stops whoever's got it instead. That's the point. It's not a promise. Promises die with the man that gives them." She heard herself and stopped, because she had taken that off a man of seventy-nine in a barn in September and had not asked him. "I'd rather it was in the book."

There was a pause, and then a man near the middle said, to nobody in particular, "That's the first sensible thing anybody's said about that shoulder in forty years," and looked extremely surprised at himself.

Marius voted for it.

He was two seats from the door, and when Firmin called the vote he put his hand up early and left it up, and about six people saw him do it and one of them was Perrenal, and that was probably worth three votes on its own, and Wren has never decided whether he knew that.

Seventeen for. Eleven against. Two abstentions. The proxy for.

It was the narrowest vote of the whole business, and Firmin read it back twice and then said, "Carried," and let the noise run for about a minute before he knocked on the table.

"There's conditions," he said. "Nobody's going anywhere."

The conditions took until twenty past eleven, and Aloys wrote them on the back of the agenda, as he had the year before.

The take-off below the weir plate, separately metered, the instrument approved by the consortage's own engineer and read by the garde.

The works at the chamber at the applicants' sole cost, including reinstatement, and the chamber to remain in the ownership and control of the consortage of Darbon.

The old bank along the bench to be opened only where the line requires it, recorded photographically before opening, and rebuilt to the same section, by hand, in the same stone.

The four clauses, in the statutes, unamendable without Darbon's consent.

Nothing to begin before the upper consortage is constituted and approved and its servitudes registered.

And, added at eleven o'clock by Thérèse and carried without a count: that the president of the consortage of Darbon shall be entitled to attend any assembly of the upper consortage and to speak, and shall not vote.

"That's a good one," said Delarzes afterwards, on the steps, in the snow, and he did not say it to Wren. He said it to Thérèse, who had not known he was still in the building, and who was extremely pleased and pretended not to be.

The last thing was the rate, and she had thought it would be the worst and it took four minutes.

Firmin put it plainly: the applicant proposes to bear her share of the cost in labour, at a rate to be fixed by this assembly, verified by the garde, forfeit on failure. He gave the number of days.

Wren said, before anybody else could say anything, "Forty francs. The same as anybody."

Somebody said thirty anyway.

Somebody else said that was insulting.

And Gilles Perrenal said, "Forty. It's forty in the accounts, it's been forty since 2019, it's what we pay Ernest's nephew to do somebody's corvée and it's what we'd pay anybody in this room. If we put her at thirty we've said out loud that she's worth less than the rest of us, and it'll be in the book for a hundred years, and I'm not signing that. And if we put her at fifty we've given her a present, and she won't take it, and we'll all have to sit here while she says so."

It was carried at forty, by a show of hands, without anybody counting.

A hundred and thirty-eight days.

Aloys wrote it in the book.

She walked home at midnight with the snow coming down wet and heavy at the village and dry and fine by the time she got to the fork, and she was carrying a paper bag with two pieces of tart in it that a woman she had never spoken to had put into her hand at the door.

At the fork she stopped.

Below her the village, mostly dark. Above her the shoulder and, invisible in the snow and perfectly clear in her head, nine hundred and twenty metres of a bench cut level along the top of the scree, running from an intake at fourteen hundred and ninety-one to four parcels of stones above the Comba.

Nothing had been built. Nothing could be built until a commune finished a procedure, and a bourgeoisie held an assembly, and a family in Crans answered a letter, and a canton approved a set of statutes, and six servitudes were drawn and registered, and none of that would happen before the year after next at the earliest.

She had an instrument that did not exist yet, a share she could not use, a debt of a hundred and thirty-eight days, and forty francs an hour.

She stood in the snow at the fork and found that she was extremely happy, and that she had no idea at all what to do with it.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The List

Parcels 1447, 1448, 1451 and 1459, section seven. Eleven hours, on the eighth day and the sixteenth.

The winter was paper and she had never been happier in her life, which she would not have admitted to anybody.

The statutes went through nine versions. Delarzes did four of them and charged for two.

The canton's service returned the first submission in January with nine observations. Seven were formatting — margins, the order of the articles, a heading in the wrong case, a table that would not print — and every one of those was the machine's, because she had let it lay the document out and it had laid it out beautifully and wrongly, in the way of a thing that has seen ten thousand documents and never once been told which ten belong to this office.

One observation was a numbering error, which was hers, and which she had read past four times.

And one was a real question, which nobody could have avoided: whether a member whose share is discharged in labour may vote. That took five weeks and ended in a clause of forty words that Wren thought was the best sentence in the document and that nobody ever mentioned again.

The bourgeoisie held its assembly in February and approved its participation by a large majority, with four against and one speech.

The commune's valuation came in March and said what everybody knew it would say: two holdings on a line capable of being built are worth a good deal more than two holdings on a line that is not. Raymond put the servitude and the participation on the agenda for June, and told Firmin on the telephone that it would come off the agenda in June and go back on in September, and Firmin told Wren, and she wrote September on the wall by the door in pencil and did not rub it out.

Crans answered on the eleventh of March. Nine lines, from the same firm. The family had received its own valuer's supplementary report. The family wished to record its appreciation of the consortage's conduct in disclosing the matter of the point of taking, which it described as not usual. The family would participate in the upper consortage in respect of its hours and would pay its share in cash on constitution.

Aloys read it twice and said, "That's the first bit of luck anybody's had in two years," and Firmin said it was not luck, and did not elaborate, and looked at nobody.

The work came in all winter and she took it all.

Trás-os-Montes got his canal. Two sisters in Arcadia were speaking again and paying separately. The man near Zahlé sent a photograph of a surveyor standing on his boundary with a tape, and a message that said only the number was right, which she kept.

There was a woman in the Beqaa now as well, and a man in Aragon, and a priest in the Peloponnese with the paperwork of a monastery and no idea what any of it said.

She earned more between November and March than she had ever earned in a year, and it was not very much, and it paid the bus and the notary and forty minutes of a lawyer and left something over, and she bought a second-hand grinder for the spade and a pair of boots that fitted.

Kirill wrote to her in January about the take-off meter and the letter was four lines and read like a technical note, and the fourth line said: If you want, I will do the specification for nothing, because your president will otherwise buy the wrong instrument and I will have to look at it for fifteen years.

He came up in the third week of March to measure the chamber, on a Saturday, on his own time, in a jacket that was not a work jacket.

There was still snow on the shoulder and the intake was running grey with melt and the chamber was cold in the way concrete is cold.

He measured for forty minutes and wrote in a notebook with a pencil and then sat on the wall and said, "It is a good chamber. 1954. They built it to last a hundred years and it will do a hundred and forty, because nobody has improved it."

"Is that a joke?"

"It is not a joke at all," said Kirill. "Improvement is the most dangerous thing that happens to infrastructure. Everything that fails, fails after somebody improves it." He put the notebook away. "So. You will take your hours in the summer half of the year, at a rate the statutes will fix, through a line with a valve you can open with one hand in a glove, and you will have a meter that logs and a mechanical counter that does not — because the first one is for the accountant and the second one is for the man of eighty."

"You've thought about it."

"I have thought about it since August," he said, without any weight, and looked at the shoulder.

They walked the line afterwards, the whole nine hundred and twenty metres of it, and it took two hours because of the snow in the gully.

She told him the whole of it that afternoon, all of it, the parts she had left out in August. The nine holdings. The register of 1905 and the pencil on the dorse. The hours that were and the hours that are. Marius and his cows. The offer from Ourdaz and the offer from the consortage and the reasons she had said no to both, which she explained badly and which he did not ask her to explain again.

He listened the way he had in August, which was without looking at her.

At the gully he said, "May I say something that is not my business."

"Yes."

"You have said they let me four times this afternoon and they would not let me twice." He was looking at the notch in the rock. "You have a right that is six hundred years old, a vote of an assembly, and four clauses you wrote yourself that a room of thirty people adopted. That is not being let. That is being one of the people who decides." He stepped across. "I mention it because it took me nine years to hear myself doing it and nobody told me."

"Nine years of what?"

Kirill considered the question for about two seconds, in the way of a man deciding how much of a thing to put down.

"Of being a person whose file is longer than his life," he said. "I have lived here fourteen years. I fill in a form every year. The form is fine. Everybody is polite." He took his glove off to write something. "But you learn to talk about yourself as a thing that is permitted, and then one day somebody asks you what you want and you find you have not got the grammar for it."

She did not say anything.

"Anyway," he said, "the fall here is steeper than the average and you will want an air valve at the top of this crossing or you will be bleeding it every spring for the rest of your life."

She planted the two cherries on the second of April on the lower terrace of the Comba, in the ground she had rebuilt, in the corner where the wall turns and the frost runs off.

Marius came up.

She heard him at about eleven and did not believe it and then did, and she stood at the top of the path and watched a man of eighty come up two hundred vertical metres in his own time, with a stick, stopping four times, and she had the extremely good sense not to go down and help him.

He arrived, and breathed, and looked at the two sticks in the ground, and then at the view, which is the same view Ourdaz had sat down in front of and pronounced very good.

"Right," said Marius. "Show me where the pipe comes."

She showed him. The line from the intake round under the Darbon face, along the bench, the sections where a machine can go, the rest by hand. Where the take-off will sit. Where the outlet will be, at the top corner of the highest parcel, and how the water will run from there, by gravity, across terraces she has not built yet, to two sticks in the ground.

He took a long time over it.

"Nineteen years," he said at last.

"For what?"

"Cherries. On this ground, at this height, from a maiden tree, if you want a crop worth the picking and not four handfuls. Six for the first fruit and nineteen for the tree." He put both hands on the stick. "I'm telling you because nobody else will and you've not asked anybody."

"Nineteen years."

"Nineteen years." He turned round and started the walk down, which took him longer than the walk up. "So you'd best get on."

The corvée was on the ninth of April.

The list went up on the depot door on the second, as it always does, and she read it in the rain, as she always does, and it took her a moment to find herself, because she was looking in the wrong place. She was looking at the bottom, under the numbers.

At ten past seven on the morning of the ninth, Aloys stood on the wall at the intake with the paper against his thumb and read it out, surname first, then the Christian name, then the section, the way he has read it every April for fifteen years, and the way his predecessor read it before him, and the way somebody has read it, off a roll, at the sound of a bell, since before anybody could write.

Forty-four names.

He went down them in order and she stopped listening about halfway, because it was raining and because she was thinking about a hundred and eighty metres of fall and an air valve at the gully crossing.

Then he said her name.

She did not react for about a second and a half, because she had been expecting a number, and the sound of it in that voice in that place at that hour went through her like cold water.

"Section seven," said Aloys.

"Here," said Wren.

"I know you're here." He folded the list. "There's a slab down."

They broke it at half past nine, and it came apart along a bedding plane in three pieces, and the Duvanel boys came down from section eight when they heard the bar going, and the younger one did not miss this year and was visibly disappointed that nobody remarked on it.

Marius was not there. He had sent his nephew, for the first time in sixty-eight years, and everybody made a point of not remarking on that either.

She did her hundred and forty metres of the gravel, and Gaspard's cherries were in the ground four hundred metres above her, and nine hundred and twenty metres of line existed nowhere except on paper in an office in Sion and in a file in a commune that would look at it in June, and take it off the agenda in June, and look at it again in September.

At four in the afternoon they pulled the board and the water came round the shoulder into the dry bed at a walking pace with a front of brown foam on it, and forty-four people watched water arrive at a wall they had built that morning, and nobody cheered.

She stood on the bank with her hands in her pockets and watched it go past her, all of it, every litre, her hours among them and indistinguishable, running downhill to ground that can use it.

Above her, under the rock, in the wet grey light, there was a green line in brown ground.

She went home at six and took the spade off the wall and sharpened it, which was not the same as beginning.