Where Arthur Lyerm is born and raised. Ninety-one people, one mill, and a barn everybody also calls a mill.
Named in ch. 335, after ninety-eight chapters of not being. Ch. 238 to ch. 242 call it "the village" and nothing else, and this entry carried a working title for as long as they did. The name arrives in the least ceremonial way available: Arthur gives it to a bursar's clerk as a forwarding address and watches a man write Hollowell, Astoria in a book.
"It was, he thought, the first time anyone had written it anywhere official on his account. It looked strange in another man's handwriting."
That also settles the region, which this entry recorded as unstated for ninety- eight chapters. Hollowell is in Astoria, the westernmost province, four days' walk west of Solmere.
What it is
Chosen for being unimportant, and the chapter says so:
A small one, tucked into the kind of unremarkable countryside that most histories never bothered recording, where the seasons turned the way seasons always turned and the harvest came in roughly on schedule and nothing of particular historical weight had ever happened within its borders, nor seemed likely to. (ch. 238)
That is the deliberate opposite of every previous setting in the saga. Act 1 opens at Point Null. Act 6 opens at the Hall of Heroes.
The shape of it
- A market square at the centre, with a well.
- The schoolhouse, "close enough to the market square that the smell of fresh bread drifted through the open windows on baking days and close enough to the well that the younger children were sent to fetch water as a kind of unofficial extension of their lessons" (ch. 241).
- An old oak in the schoolyard, with a good spot under it that has to be claimed early (ch. 242).
- Fields, which Calder works.
- The Lyerm house: small, warm, a hearth, a creaking third stair, and a bedroom door left open a crack at night.
The children
The village is where the saga establishes what a normal soul ability looks like by ch. 242, at five and six years old.
| Who | What |
|---|---|
| Elsie | wind, small things, arrived at four |
| Elsie's brother | unnamed, and his arrived "by the time he could walk, practically" |
| Tomas | makes thrown stones skip further than physics allows |
| Pria | her own shadow moves independently for a second or two |
| Felix | visible lightning from his fingertips |
| Denner | a quiet boy; makes small plants grow slightly faster, "a gift he mostly used to win minor bets involving turnip seeds" (ch. 244) |
| Arthur | nothing |
The chapter is careful that this is not yet a problem:
It simply was, the way some children were taller and some were shorter, the way some could whistle and some couldn't, one fact among many small facts that made up the texture of being five years old. (ch. 242)
By ch. 244 it is. Two years later "nearly everyone had at least a flicker of something", Pria's shadow detaches for whole seconds, Tomas skips a stone six times, and Arthur is
not excluded exactly [...] but quietly other, the way a single mismatched stone stood out in an otherwise even wall.
Ch. 335 to ch. 341: Arthur comes home
Ten months after he left, with Elsie and with two students who cannot get to their own provinces. See The closure of the northern crossings.
The village is exactly the size it always was, and the entry's opening claim about being chosen for its unimportance holds:
It was not smaller. It was exactly the size it had always been, ninety-one people and one mill and a barn everybody called a mill [...] and the thing that undid him was not scale at all. It was that he could see his own house from here and had been able to see it from here his entire life and had not, in ten months, once thought about the fact that the view existed.
Who lives here
The archive had five children and the Lyerms. Ch. 337 and ch. 340 give the adults.
| Who | What |
|---|---|
| Mabel Ruck | sixty-one, a gate facing the western approach, and by common agreement across three generations has never once missed anything |
| Gregor | sixty-eight, a bad hip, runs the bakehouse, and gives bread away by insulting the batch so it cannot be refused |
| Ned Halloway | leans out of a window to ask after people, and asks the frightening question in a form he can carry home |
| Old Bess Tanner | no relation to Elsie's people, "despite forty years of the village finding this hilarious"; dispenses jars |
| Master Hobbes | eighty-one, still in the same garden with the same disgraceful hedge |
What the village does to a stranger
Mira arrives braced for eleven years' worth of accurate experience and finds the model does not fit.
People stared. That part was correct. [...] But the staring did not do the thing it had always previously done. It arrived and it went straight past her and it came out the other side as an entirely unrelated activity, which was that these people wanted to give her things.
GRE: I've given you half of Tuesday's, which was a bad batch, so don't go telling anyone I've given you a good one. MRA: I don't have any- GRE: If you finish that sentence I'll be offended and I'm sixty-eight and I've a bad hip and you'll feel terrible about it.
Arthur's own forecast, given honestly in a barn the night before rather than reassuringly, turns out to be right:
ART: The first four days will be bad. After that you'll be the girl staying at the Lyerms', because a village of ninety cannot sustain novelty for eight weeks, it hasn't got the resources.
Nobody in Hollowell has met a hybrid. There is monsterkind in Astoria, and a family two villages over runs the smithy, but they are not hybrids. Calder has met two, both down the southern reach, because he was an adventurer and has been all over the world.
The flower field
Four miles up the mountain's western shoulder, three hours' walk, and the reason this entry can no longer call the village unremarkable without qualification.
The path gives no warning: "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."
a field [...] 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.
The open fourth side drops away far enough to see the trees, the fields, the river, the road west, Hollowell "sitting small and orange in the last of the light", and beyond that a haze Arthur was told as a child was the sea and never entirely believed.
Nobody knows what the flowers are, and Mira is the first person in the saga to find that strange:
MRA: They're not in anything. I've read a considerable amount of provincial botany [...] 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.
Arthur had not been up since he was thirteen. He puts a flower behind three ears, and gives the only meaning anybody has ever attached to them, out loud for the first time in his life:
ART: It said golden flowers stand for hope, and that giving one is a blessing on somebody's future.
One line, from a book of Hobbes's about provincial customs, four pages from the end of a chapter on weddings in Corvane. He read it at twelve and has said nothing about it for three years.
The entry keeps this section deliberately. A village chosen by the author for having nothing of historical weight in it turns out to hold a plant that is in no provincial botany, four miles up, that the whole village knows about and has decided is not worth mentioning. The archive is not drawing a conclusion from that. It is writing it down.