Hamo had stopped being useful, in his own assessment, some eighteen months earlier, and had been conducting a quiet and thorough investigation into what a person was for once that was true.
He raised it with Thomas on a cold afternoon in the scriptorium, where he still came most days despite having nothing to do there, sitting in the chair nobody else used.
"I have not corrected a calculation in a year and a half," he said. "I have not taught since the spring before last. My hand is no longer steady enough to copy, my eyes are not good enough to check, and Cecily — who is kind, and who I wish were less kind — continues to bring me documents to review that she has already had reviewed by somebody competent."
"You know that?"
"Of course I know that. I checked." Hamo's mouth moved fractionally. "She brought me the eastern spur costing in March. I found four errors. I reported them to her with some satisfaction. Three weeks later I encountered the same document in the hand of one of her clerks, with the same four errors already corrected in a different ink, dated eleven days before she gave it to me."
Thomas did not know what to say.
"I am not wounded," Hamo said. "I want that understood. It was a kindness, competently executed, and I would very likely do the same. I am simply reporting that I am now a man who is given tasks rather than a man who does work, and that the distinction is not subtle, and that I have been sitting with it."
"What have you concluded?"
"Nothing satisfactory. That is why I am raising it with you." He folded his hands. "I spent thirty years believing a man's worth was his obedience. I spent thirty more believing it was his usefulness, which I thought at the time was an enormous advance and which I now suspect was the same error wearing different clothes. Both of them make a person's value conditional on his output. Both of them end exactly here, in this chair, with a man of eighty wondering what he is."
The fire moved.
"May I tell you what I think?" Thomas said.
"I would not have raised it otherwise."
"I think you're asking the wrong question, and I think you know you are, and I think you've come to me specifically because I spent fourteen years asking the same wrong one." Thomas leaned forward. "I spent my whole life here terrified that when the number ran out there'd be nothing left of me. I built a Codex about it. I wrote a succession document. All of it was the same question: what am I for, and what survives it."
"And?"
"And it turned out that was never the question anyone else was asking about me." He thought about how to put it. "Do you remember Cuthbert? The cooper's boy in the first wave, the one frightened of geese?"
"I remember the page in Victoria's ledger."
"He died holding my hand at four in the morning and I have never once thought, in twenty years since, what was that boy for. It's a grotesque question. It doesn't apply." Thomas spread his hands. "But I apply it to myself constantly, and you apply it to yourself, and we are both apparently willing to extend to a seven-year-old cooper's son a grace we will not extend to ourselves."
Hamo was quiet for a long while.
"That is a considerably better argument than I expected," he said. "I notice it does not actually answer the question."
"No. I don't think the question has an answer. I think it has a retirement." Thomas sat back. "You stop asking it. Not because you've solved it. Because you notice it's been making you miserable for sixty years and has never once produced anything useful."
"That is not a philosophy."
"No. It's a practice. You'd have hated it at thirty."
"I would have burned you for it at thirty," Hamo agreed, "which rather proves your point and which I resent."
He came to the scriptorium less often after that, and seemed — by every account from people who saw him daily — somewhat lighter about it.
What he did instead, for the eleven years remaining to him, was talk to children.
Not teach. He was clear about the distinction and enforced it pedantically. He sat in the schoolhouse yard in decent weather, and children came and asked him things, and he answered them honestly, including the ones he could not answer, which turned out to be the ones they remembered.
"Is there a God," a girl of about seven asked him, in his last year, in front of perhaps nine other children and two extremely alarmed masters.
"I do not know," Hamo said. "I believed absolutely that there was for thirty years. I have not believed it for forty. Neither state made me a better or worse man than the other, which I did not expect and which I have never resolved."
"So what do you do?"
"I find out how water moves, and I am kind to whoever is in front of me, and I have decided that this is sufficient." He adjusted his blanket. "You may find something better. I would be very pleased if you did, and I would ask you to come and tell me, and to hurry, because I am eighty-nine."