The complaining began at forty minutes, which Arthur privately considered generous, and did not stop for the following two hours and twenty.
YSE: How much further?
ART: Same as the last time you asked.
YSE: It cannot be the same as the last time I asked. Time has passed. We have moved through space. If it is the same as the last time I asked then something has gone extremely wrong with the world and I want to know about it.
ELS: He doesn't know.
ART: I know exactly.
ELS: He's never known. He's been walking this since he was six and if you ask him how far he says not far now in the same tone at every single point on the route.
ART: That's because it isn't far now.
ELS: It's an hour and a half.
ART: That's not far.
The path left the last of the fields at about the first hour and went up into the trees on the mountain's western shoulder, and the trees were the part that made it hard, because it stopped being a walk and became a climb conducted at a walk's pace: switchbacks, roots, two places where the path was theoretical and you simply went up the rocks and hoped, and Arthur doing all of it one-handed, which slowed everything and which he refused with total consistency to acknowledge.
MRA: Give me the bag.
ART: I've got the bag.
MRA: You have the bag on the shoulder that is not in a sling, which means the entire weight of it is on the one functioning half of you, and I have been watching you compensate for ninety minutes and it is making my own back hurt.
ART: I'm fine.
MRA: Arthur, I have catalogued eleven separate adjustments in your gait since we entered the trees.
ART: You've been counting my walking?
MRA: I count everything. It's not personal.
He gave her the bag. At two hours and ten minutes Yseult sat down on a rock without warning and announced that she was conducting an inquiry, and at two hours and forty she began, with increasing conviction, to advance a theory.
YSE: I want to say something and I want it received in the spirit in which it's intended.
ART: Go on.
YSE: You have not been up here since you were thirteen.
ART: No.
YSE: Three years.
ART: About that.
YSE: In three years a great deal can happen to a place. Trees come down. Ground moves. People find things and put fences round them, or graze things on them, or build on them, and the thing about a spot, Arthur, the thing about a spot, is that it is by definition a small and specific location, and small specific locations are precisely the sort of thing that stop existing without anybody bothering to inform the last person who liked it.
ELS: She's got a point.
ART: You're not helping.
YSE: I'm not accusing you of anything. I'm raising the possibility, at hour three, on a mountain, with a bag I am no longer carrying, that we are walking toward a memory. And if we are, I want to say now that I will be extremely gracious about it, and I want that on the record, because I will also be bringing it up for the rest of my natural life and I would like both of those things understood in advance-
She stopped talking. Arthur, three steps ahead of her, had gone through the last of the trees. The path came out of the wood without any warning at all. That was the thing about it, and it was the reason he had never once been able to explain the place to anybody and had stopped trying at about eight years old: there was no approach, there was no clearing that got gradually brighter, there was simply the wood and then, in the space of one step, there was not the wood. There was a field. It sat in a fold of the mountain's shoulder, ringed on three sides by the trees they had just come out of and open on the fourth, and it was perhaps two hundred yards across and it was full, edge to edge and end to end, of golden flowers. Not scattered. Not in patches. The whole of it, a single unbroken sheet of them standing about knee-high and moving all together in a wind that did not reach down into the wood, and the late sun coming in flat and low from the open side so that the entire field was lit from underneath as much as from above. The open side was a drop. Not sheer, not quite a cliff, but steep enough that standing at the edge of the flowers you could see over the whole of everything: the trees going down, the fields after them, the river, the road running west, Hollowell sitting small and orange in the last of the light with its ninety-one people in it, and beyond that the country going on and on into a haze that Arthur had been told as a child was the sea and had never entirely believed. Nobody said anything for a considerable time.
YSE: Oh... wow.
ART: Yes.
YSE: I'd like to withdraw the inquiry.
ART: Noted.
YSE: I'd like it struck from the record entirely.
ELS: Absolutely not.
They went out into it. There was no path through, because there had never been enough feet up here to make one, and Arthur walked out into knee-high flowers for the first time in three years and found that the sound was the thing he had forgotten: not silence, but a very large quantity of very small movement, the whole field going at once, which was closer to water than to anything else he had a word for. Mira stopped about twenty feet in and crouched down and looked at one of them at close range for a long time.
MRA: I don't know what these are.
ELS: Nor does anybody. Hobbes doesn't know. My mother doesn't know and she knows every plant between here and Weald Cross.
MRA: They're not in anything. I've read a considerable amount of provincial botany, because it was in the library and I had a bad month, and there is nothing in any of it that is a knee-high golden composite growing in a single unbroken stand at this altitude on a western aspect.
ELS: Is that unusual?
MRA: Elsie, it's a field of something nobody has written down. On a mountain. Four miles from a village of ninety-one people who apparently all know about it and have collectively decided it isn't worth mentioning.
ELS: It's just the flower field.
MRA: THAT is what I mean.
They lay down in it, in the end, which was what everybody did up here and which Arthur had never once had to suggest to anybody. The flowers came up over them on all sides so that lying flat you could see nothing at all except gold and the sky going orange above it, and the wind kept moving through and the whole field kept making its sound, and the four of them lay in a rough line about six feet apart and stopped talking for a genuinely long time.
YSE: Arthur.
ART: Mm.
YSE: I've been trying to think of something to say for about four minutes.
ART: You don't have to.
YSE: I know. I want to. That's the difficulty. I've got a considerable vocabulary and I've been through most of it and everything I've assembled sounds like something off a jar.
MRA: I have the same problem.
ELS: Everyone has the same problem. Nobody's ever said anything good up here. He brought me up when I was six and I said it's very yellow.
ART: You said it twice.
ELS: I said it twice, yes, thank you, Arthur.
Arthur sat up after a while. He did it slowly and badly with the one arm and did not ask for help and did not get offered any, which he appreciated, and sat in the flowers with his legs out in front of him and the light going long across the whole field, and looked down at the ninety-one people going about the end of their day four miles below and a very great distance under. Then he reached over and picked three of them.
ART: Sit up.
ELS: Why?
ART: Because I'm about to do something and you'll want to be sitting up for it.
They sat up. He turned to Elsie first, which was the correct order and which everybody in the field understood was the correct order, and reached over and put the stem of one of them behind her ear so that the flower sat against her hair, and she let him, and did not make a joke about it, which for Elsie Tanner was a considerable statement. He did Mira second. She went completely still for it, in the manner of a person who does not have a procedure for being touched gently and is not going to make it anybody else's problem, and afterward put one hand up and felt the flower there and left it. He did Yseult last.
ART: I read something once.
YSE: Where?
ART: A book in the library. Second year of the boring section. I was looking for something else entirely and I didn't find it, and about four pages from the end of a book about provincial customs there was a line about these.
MRA: About these specifically?
ART: About golden flowers. Not these ones, nobody's written these ones down, you've established that. But golden flowers generally.
ELS: What did it say?
Arthur looked out over the drop, where the last of the sun was going into the haze that might have been the sea.
ART: It said they're the symbol of hope. That's all. One line, no explanation, in the middle of a chapter about wedding customs in Corvane. It said golden flowers stand for hope, and that giving one is a blessing on somebody's future.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
YSE: You've been carrying that around for a year.
ART: I've been carrying it round since I was twelve, actually. Hobbes had the book. I read it in his front room and I thought about this field the whole time I was reading it and I've never once said it out loud to anybody until about eleven seconds ago.
He lay back down in the flowers.
ART: There. That's the spot. That's the whole of it. There's nothing else, it doesn't do anything, and I've never been able to explain why it's the spot to a single person in my life.
The wind came through again and the field made its sound, and the three of them lay back down as well, and the sun went into the haze, and the light on the field went from gold to a deeper orange and then to something that was not quite either, and nobody attempted to say anything good about it, and all four of them lay in a field of flowers that nobody had ever written down with one behind each of three ears, being blessed, at some length, entirely without knowing it.