SEBASTIAN PRIEST

The Year of Our Lord, 100,393 AD.

The cups came up together.

Lapin's hand was quicker. He had been waiting all night to lift. When Fedya called four fives he lifted before the sand was half down, so hard that his cup skidded off the pit onto the rug. His daughter caught it against the side of her shoe.

Four dice under Lapin's cup. Four under Fedya's. The girl leaned in from her chair to count. Counting was her job tonight. She had the sand-timer in her lap and her father's breather hanging from her wrist by its strap.

'Two fives,' she said. 'One five.' She pointed at Fedya's dice one at a time without touching them, as children on the Brim were taught to. 'That's three.'

'Three,' said Lapin.

'Three,' said Fedya. He had called four. He had known when he called it that there were three.

Lapin was paying him not to know. Twelve heat-hours, agreed at the door, with Lapin's hand already on his purse and the girl's chair already set by the pit. Just the once, Lapin had said. She's never seen me win anything. She goes to the other square at the Deal. So she has it.

He pushed a die across the pit with two fingers. It was a stranger, one of the six he had bought from the carver at the Knuckle and never asked about. It slid over the scratched line into Lapin's half and stopped against the fringe of the rug. Lapin put it with the other two he had won, in a row, square to the line. He nudged the end one straight with his fingernail.

The rug was the warmest thing Fedya had sat on in a round. It had been red once, with a border of little knotted dice running round its edge, and it was worn through at the middle where Lapin's family had sat for three rounds. One corner was folded back so that the dice-pit could be used without anyone kneeling on stone. The pit was the same as every pit on the Brim, a square scratched into the chequered floor with a line across it. Lapin's was scratched deeper than most. Somebody in this family had liked to play.

The cell had six walls, as all the cells in Doubles did, and Lapin had made something of every one. The family's tally ran up the door frame, a notch for every Lapin since the Wooden Age, the oldest worn so smooth they might have been made by water. Two cradles hung one above the other on iron hooks. Lapin's cap lay in the lower with its visor up, the brass of the brow gone brown with handling. The girl's lay in the upper, polished. Behind the girl's chair the vent-pipe came down out of the rock and turned into the floor. Above the turn the air moved all the time, so that the wall behind it seemed to breathe. The rest of the rock was painted in small squares of two colours, gone dark with soot. The squares went on up over the ceiling, which had been painted as the back of a card: a lattice, meeting in the middle round a die showing six.

In Doubles, the second ring was warm enough for a rug.

'Your throw,' said the girl.

It was kosti, the game every child on the Brim learned on the stair. Each man threw his dice under his cup and peeked at his own. Then they called in turn: how many of one face lay under both cups together. Each call had to be higher than the last, until one man would not believe the other and said lift. Then the cups came up and the counter counted. If the call was there, the man who lifted paid a die across the line. If it was not, the man who called paid. Ones counted for nothing. The last man with a die under his cup had won.

They threw. Fedya shook his cup twice, as he always did, and brought it down mouth first onto the pit. Lapin shook his for a long time, like a man who liked what he heard.

Fedya tipped the rim of his cup towards himself and looked. A three, a three, a one.

Lapin peeked twice. He was a man who peeked twice when he liked what he had. He had been doing it since the first throw of the night.

'Your call,' the girl said to Fedya. She turned the timer. The sand began, coarse sand in a glass the length of a finger. It ran faster than it looked.

'Two threes.'

Lapin raised it without thinking. 'Three sixes.'

The sand ran. Fedya looked at his own cup. A worn-down man did that. Then he looked at Lapin's hands. They were a foreman's hands from the pigment floor, stained yellow in the creases of the knuckles and red under the nails. He wore a ring with a stone in it. He turned the ring with his thumb when he raised.

'Four sixes,' said Fedya.

'Lift,' said Lapin, and lifted.

Two sixes under Lapin's cup. None under Fedya's. The girl counted them aloud. Her voice went up at the end. Her father said, 'Two,' with his whole chest.

Fedya pushed another stranger across. Two left.

He had come at the dusk bell and had been losing since. It had gone slowly at first, then faster, as a tired man loses. Lapin was not a good player. He called what he hoped for. He raised whatever came before him. Twice that night Fedya had taken a throw off him and let him see he was pleased with it. The two dice he had won sat beside his own cup on the rug. They were Lapin's, smaller and whiter than the strangers, carved in a better round.

The girl had brought them each a cup of hot mead at the start. Fedya's was still on the floor by his knee, full. The steam had gone off it an hour ago.

'You're tired,' Lapin said to him, kindly. 'You can say.'

'I'm all right.'

'He's tired,' Lapin told his daughter. 'Look at him.'

She looked at him. She was eighteen or near it, with her father's broad face and somebody else's eyes, grey and careful. She was to be married at the Deal.

Through the rock overhead somebody laughed in a cap, a long laugh with nobody to answer it. The girl looked up at the painted die in the ceiling. Then she looked back at the pit.

They threw.

Fedya had a two and a one. He looked at the two for a long time. He looked at the one for longer.

Lapin peeked once. He had nothing he liked.

'Your call,' said the girl.

Fedya had to call first. He could call low and lose on Lapin's raise. He could call high and be lifted. A tired man called high. He said, 'Three fours.'

Lapin's thumb went to the ring. The sum in his face was so slow that the sand was nearly down before he said, 'Lift.'

There was one four on the pit. It was Lapin's.

He stared at it. Then he laughed and slapped the rug. Dust came up out of it and hung over the vent, turning. The girl laughed with him. Fedya pushed his second-last die across. He kept his hand on it a little too long and let them see that. Then he took his hand away.

One die left. It sat under his cup on the pit. Lapin had four of his own. Beside him, in a row, he had five of Fedya's. The row was getting long.

'Last one,' said Lapin.

'Last one.'

'Play it properly,' the girl told her father. It was the first thing she had said all night that was not a number. Her father looked at her. Fedya watched him decide to remember it.

They threw. Fedya did not peek. A man who did not look at his last die was either very brave or very finished. Nobody in Doubles would think he was brave.

Lapin peeked twice.

'Your call,' said the girl.

'One two,' said Fedya. It was the smallest call there was.

'Two threes,' said Lapin.

The sand was a quarter down. The vent-pipe ticked behind the girl. On the ring above them a cradle creaked as somebody shifted in a cap.

'Three threes,' said Fedya.

'Lift.'

The girl lifted Fedya's cup herself. She did it slowly. Under it was one bone die, a little yellowed at the edges, with a single pip on its upper face.

'It's only a one,' she said.

'That's why he lost,' said her father.

Lapin had two threes. The girl's eyes went from them to the one. Then she put both hands over her mouth.

Fedya pushed his last die across. It went over the line and lay on the rug with its one pip up. Lapin looked at it. He looked at his daughter. His face did several things in a row that Fedya had been paid to see. When it was done he picked the die up, kissed it and set it down at the end of the row.

'Did you see that?' he said to her. 'Did you see your father?'

She had seen. She was still holding her mouth. Fedya met her eyes once. Then he turned to the vent-pipe behind her, where the air moved.

'He's good,' Fedya said, to her and not to Lapin. 'Your father.'

'He let me,' said the girl. She said it to the pipe as well.

Lapin did not hear. He was counting heat-hours out of his belt-purse into his palm. They were wooden tokens, stamped on one side with a small furnace and worn smooth on the other by a great many palms. He counted them out loud into Fedya's hand. Twelve. It was what they had agreed. Then he added a thirteenth. He closed Fedya's fingers over the lot with his own stained ones.

'For the last one,' he said. 'That was a proper last one.'

'Thank you.'

'Wait till I tell Ryabov.' Lapin stood up, ducking his head under the slope of the ceiling, and stretched. 'Wait till he hears I took a whole cup off a man who plays the Knuckle. He'll want you for the Deal pit. I'll tell him. I'll say, that one from Ones, he's got hands.'

Fedya put the tokens inside his sash. 'I'd rather you didn't.'

'Too late. I'll tell everyone.' Lapin laughed. 'I'll tell the whole of Doubles.'

The girl had stood up too. She had put the timer on her chair and was holding her father's breather in both hands. She was looking at Fedya's sash. Under the painted ceiling, with two colours all round her, it was the only yellow in the room.

'We play for the last,' Lapin said. He pushed five of the strangers back across the pit. They came over the scratched line in a ragged row and stopped against Fedya's knee. 'That's how we do it in Doubles. A man doesn't take another man's whole cup in his own house.'

'That's how we do it in Ones.' Fedya pushed Lapin's two the other way.

'Is it? Good. Good.' Lapin gathered his two in without looking at them. 'Then you'll know I'm keeping this one.'

The one sat by itself on the rug in front of him. Fedya gathered the five strangers into his cup. They clicked against the horn. He put the lid on and tied the cord. He stood, bending under the ceiling, and pulled his breather up over his mouth.

'Still playing?' said Lapin at the door.

'Still playing.'

He went out onto the ring. Behind him the girl said something to her father. Her father said, 'What?' The door closed. The ring was colder than the cell. It got colder with every step towards the stair.

The die was still on the rug. He had left it where it lay, one pip up.

* * *

The heat came up to meet him on the stair of Ones.

It always started at the same step. It was the fourth below the top ring, where the snakes and ladders painted on the wall had been rubbed away to grey at the height of a hand. Above that step the air tasted of breath and stone. Below it, it tasted of the furnace. Fedya pulled his breather down round his neck at the fourth step. He had done it every night since he was tall enough to reach.

Ones was dug into the lip of the crater in three rings round one stair. The stair went down through all of them to the furnace room at the bottom. The whole honeycomb leaned towards the crater, as everything on the Brim leaned, so the stair turned in a spiral where one wall was always nearer than the other. Fedya kept his left hand on the near wall. The stone was warm by the second ring.

The snakes and ladders went right down to the bottom. Some Deuce in the Wooden Age had painted the board up the stairwell in one long spiral, a hundred squares from the door at the top to the furnace at the bottom. The ladders were painted rung by rung. The snakes had faces. The longest of them started on the top ring by the Pervovs' door. It came down the wall through two whole turns of the stair, grey scales on a grey belly, to rest its head on the last square by the furnace-room door with its mouth open. Every child in Ones had put a hand in that mouth. Nobody had painted the board again since the Deuce who made it. The colours had gone with the hands that touched them. What was left was the shapes, raised a little where the paint had been thickest.

The doors of the second ring went past on his right. Each had its tallies cut into the frame. Over each one somebody had scratched a little board to play on while you waited to be let in: a square of nine, a ring of pips, a row of holes for pegs worn into a groove. One door stood open. Inside, a woman lay in her cradle with her visor down and her hand moving on her chest, dealing cards that were not there. Her man sat on the floor beside her, mending a boot. He nodded to Fedya. Fedya nodded back.

He did not stop at his own door. He went on down.

The furnace room was round and low. The furnace stood at the back of it, an iron stove the height of a man, with its door shut and a red line showing at the hinge. Whoever cast it had cast the four suits into the iron round the door, hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades, in a border, and sleeves had polished them until they stood out bright from the black. Pipes went up from its back into the rock, through the floor of every cell in Ones. They spread as they went, so that the ceiling over the furnace was a knot of iron, branching. The chequered floor in here was worn so smooth that its black squares and white had both gone grey. They only showed their colours in the furnace light. By the door stood a small table with nothing on it.

The Istopnik was on his stool by the furnace door.

He had heard Fedya on the stair. The mask was already turned towards the doorway when Fedya came through it. It was a brass face cast as a sleeping infant's. It had closed eyes and a small closed mouth with a slit between the lips. It had been polished so often it had gone cloudy, and the furnace light did not shine on it so much as sit in it. The Istopnik wore beige and blue, faded until they were nearly one colour. His leather gloves came to the elbow. His stool was a little chequered board on three legs. He sat on it with his knees apart and his gloved hands on them. He had sat like that, on that stool, for eight rounds.

'Ulybin,' said the Istopnik. The brass made it sound as though he were speaking from the next room.

'Four-oh-six.'

'You lost.'

'I was paid to.'

'Good,' said 406. 'Warm in Doubles?'

'There was a rug.'

The mask stayed on him for a moment. Then it turned back to the furnace door. Fedya sat down on the floor between the stool and the furnace, on the square he always sat on, with his back to the warm iron of a pipe.

He took a stranger out of his cup and walked it across his knuckles while the pipe warmed his back. Over the first knuckle, the second, under, and up between the third and the fourth. It was the one with a ridge along an edge where the lathe had caught it. The ridge clicked on each knuckle as it went over. When he was warm through he put it away and took the deck out of the niche in the wall.

It was an old deck, thirty-six cards, six to the ace, with soft corners and backs painted in a lattice gone brown. The faces had been painted by hand. The kings had long faces and the queens had small ones. The jack of clubs had lost his eyes to somebody's thumb. Fedya shuffled it on his knee, the cards going into each other without a sound, and began to lay it out.

He laid seven columns. He turned the top card of each face up and left the rest face down beneath it. The old Deuce had taught the children of Ones to lay it like that, when Fedya was smaller than Senka. Above him, through the stone, he could hear pebbles.

They clicked on the stair. Two clicks, then a pause, then one. Somebody was playing Snow on the stair above. He was playing both sides of the board alone, counting under his breath between moves.

'Four,' said the voice. 'Three. Three.' Then, 'Two,' with satisfaction.

It was Senka's voice. He counted like Fedya. He had been doing it since the last Deal, and his mother had stopped telling him not to.

Fedya turned a card. A six of clubs. He put it on a seven of hearts and turned the card it had been sitting on.

The Istopnik did not watch the cards. He never did. He sat with the mask towards the furnace door. Every so often he leaned forward and put two fingers against the iron by the hinge. Another man might have touched a child's forehead like that.

The furnace breathed. Fedya could hear it through the door, a long slow draw, a longer letting go. In the pause between them the iron ticked. The red line at the hinge brightened on the draw. On the letting go it dimmed, and the shadow of the stool's three legs swung a little across the floor and came back. He had grown up in this room. He had learned to count here, to that breath, before he could count anything else.

On the stair the pebbles stopped. Varya said something. Senka said, 'I'm winning.' Varya said, 'Against who?' Then her feet were on the stair, coming down.

She came through the doorway sideways with a cradle-hook still in her hand. She wore a grey shawl and had her hair tied up off her neck. There was wood-dust on her sleeves from the cradle she had left. She sat on the bottom step without being asked, forward, elbows on her knees, and put the hook down beside her. The snake's painted mouth was open on the wall just over her head.

'Lapin,' she said.

He took the tokens out of his sash and counted thirteen into his palm. Her tenth was a little over one. There was no such thing in wooden tokens. He gave her two. She gave him one back and put hers in her apron without looking at it.

'He paid thirteen?'

'For the last one.'

'You made him cry.'

'His girl cried.'

'Same thing.' She watched him put a red eight on a black nine. 'She's to be married at the Deal. To a two-colour boy in Fives with a lemon tree. Lapin's asked the Pervovs to the feast.'

'Why?'

'Because he's that pleased.' She picked up the hook and turned it over in her fingers. 'He says it's your doing. He says he'll tell the whole lip.'

'He said that to me too.'

'You told him not to.'

'I did.'

'He'll tell them anyway.'

'He will.'

She sat there. Fedya laid another card. The furnace door ticked as it settled. Varya opened her mouth. Then her eyes went to the Istopnik, and she closed it again.

Fedya knew what she had not asked. Everybody on the Brim knew what happened to a square like Ones whose Istopnik guttered before the Deal. It went on the list. Nobody in Ones had said the word yet.

She pulled the shawl closer, though it was warm in the furnace room, and looked up at the pipes knotted in the ceiling.

406 leaned forward. He put his fingers to the iron by the hinge. Then he reached for the long rod beside his stool and opened the vent at the base of the furnace a notch. The furnace's breath changed. The red line at the hinge brightened and stayed bright.

Varya watched him do it. Fedya watched her watch.

'Senka's had his paste?' said 406, to the furnace.

'Twice,' said Varya. 'He's growing.'

'Good.'

She got up. She stood on the bottom step with the hook in her hand and looked down at the cards.

'Black six on the red seven,' she said.

'I know.'

'You'd have seen it.'

'I would have.'

She went up. He heard her feet on the stair. Then Senka asked who was winning. Varya said, 'You are.' The pebbles began again.

Fedya moved the black six onto the red seven. Under it was a king. He moved the king into the empty column. He turned the next card, and the next.

The furnace was loud now. He could feel it through the pipe at his back. Somewhere above him a cradle creaked, then another, as the heat came up into the cells and people shifted in their caps.

There were nine cards still face down when it stopped coming out. He went through the stock twice. There was nowhere to put a red jack. There was nowhere to put anything.

'No?' said 406, without turning round.

'No.'

Fedya gathered the columns one by one and squared them on his knee. He knocked the edges of the deck against the floor until they were even. Then he put it back in the niche.