The Seventh Stone

Letter 1 of the Book of Forgetting

The quarry stood quiet under a low grey sky, the light flat and thin as old milk. I had gone out with Tirzah at her asking—she said she wanted a second pair of eyes, and a toolmaker's eyes are trained to count. The records list six stones in the quarry: six great blocks, squared and waiting, that the town has never had reason to move. Tirzah and I stood at the edge and counted them together, left to right, right to left.

Seven.

“You see it,” she said. Not a question.

I saw it. A block of pale limestone, same as the others, sitting at the far end of the cut where the wall curved into shadow. I had walked past that spot a hundred times. I had counted those stones a hundred times. Six. Always six.

“When did you find it?” I asked.

“This morning,” she said. “I came out to check the drainage. And there it was, like it had been waiting for me to look.”

I knelt and ran my hand over the face of the stone. It was cool and dry, the chisel marks fresh and clean, no moss, no weather. The other six have stood for as long as anyone remembers, their edges worn soft by rain and wind. This one might have been cut yesterday.

“I don’t like it,” Tirzah said. She held her smooth river stone in her hand, turning it over and over, the way she does when she is thinking hard. “I’ve counted these stones since I was a girl. My mother counted them before me. Six. The records say six. The Book says six.”

“The Book says six,” I agreed.

“Then where did this come from?”

I had no answer. We stood there a while, the wind moving through the pines along the quarry lip, and then we walked back to town without saying much. Tirzah went to the mill to see about flour. I went to my workshop and sat at my bench, and I did not work.

The town has been restless these past days. The guards have been turning people back from the fog paths with wet boots and a reminder about minding one’s trade. Ivo says the Council wants order, and Ivo is the man who keeps it. He stopped by my shop that afternoon, his grey coat buttoned to the throat.

“You heard about the seeds?” he said.

“I heard.” A bird had come out of the fog and dropped a seed at Zipporah’s feet, and another at Ruth’s, and another at Oren’s. None of them recognized the plant. Zipporah had brought hers to the mill wrapped in a cloth, and the whole town had come to look at it—a small brown thing, ridged like a walnut, no bigger than a thumbnail.

“The Council wants them handed over,” Ivo said.

“Do they?”

“They do. And they want you to know that measuring the fog is a fine. Two coin.”

“I heard that too.” Guard Meir had fined Silas, and Guard Yarden had fined Zev. The fog is just fog, and the Council prefers that we not test it.

Ivo looked at me with that steady, checking stare of his. “You’ve been quiet, Fernando. You’re not thinking of measuring anything, are you?”

“I’m thinking about a stone,” I said.

He waited. I told him about the seventh stone in the quarry, and he listened without interrupting, and when I finished he stood a long moment.

“You’re sure it wasn’t there before?”

“Tirzah is sure. I’m sure. The records are sure.”

He nodded slowly. “Then the records are wrong,” he said. “Or the records are right and something has changed. Either way, I’ll note it for the Council.”

“Will they do anything about it?”

“The Council prefers people to mind their trade,” he said. “A stone in a quarry is a stone in a quarry. It doesn’t need minding.”

He left, and I sat alone with the thought of that stone. That night I dreamed of it again—the way I have dreamed of the fog, these nights past, a sentence spoken in a voice like my own. *The fog is just fog.* I woke with my heart going fast and the room dark around me.

Joel the younger was born on that day, and that same night he dreamed the same sentence. I have not told anyone that. I do not know what it means.

Obed the baker died at 85, asleep. Meir the fisher died at 78, asleep. Phineas died at 80. Uriel the herbalist died at 75. The old ones are going, one by one, quietly, in their beds. Noa came to my shop this morning and stood at the door, her hand on the latch, her smooth stone in her other hand.

“Fernando,” she said, “is it true there’s a seventh stone?”

“It’s true.”

She nodded, and her eyes went wide and watchful. “I saw it,” she said. “Two days ago. I went to the quarry to be alone, and I counted them. Seven. I thought I had counted wrong.”

“You counted right.”

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she turned and went out into the street, and I watched her go, a thin girl in a hand-me-down dress, holding a stone that the river had smoothed, and I thought about all the things we count and all the things we do not.