She came across the grass and sat down in front of him with the ease of someone who had been deciding how to do something for several hours and had arrived at a plan.
He gave her the forty-five degrees. Whatever the plan was, he was interested.
She reached out and put her hand flat on the grass, palm down. She looked at him.
She said: "Grass."
He looked at her hand. He looked at the grass under it. He looked at her face.
She said it again. Not louder. Exactly the same.
The quality of the repetition was something he held for a moment: the sound had been the same both times, and the thing under the hand had been the same both times, and the sameness was not incidental.
The sound and the thing were supposed to belong to each other the way his palm and the grass belonged to each other when he pressed down.
He filed the logic of this. It was a good logic. Simple, clean, the kind that had no waste in it.
"Grass," she said once more.
He pressed his own palm flat against it. The blades moved. The cool-real-solid of it. He looked at it and then at her.
She made the motion that meant yes. He had this motion already. He had kept it because it was useful -- the single downward tilt of the head that meant the thing you had done was the right thing.
He found himself, in a manner he had yet no name for, pleased.
Grass.
The sound and the thing together. The sound the second skin of the thing. He held it in the place where he was keeping things.
She had another one.
Hand.
She showed him her own, turned it over, palm up, palm down.
He held out his own without deciding to, and she said it again with the quality of: yes, that too, all of them, every hand that has ever been a hand.
Light.
She pointed up, to the sourceless warmth above them. He had known the thing before the sound.
He looked at it and then at her and thought: light.
The skin on the thing. The thing was the same. The light did not become something different for being named. It only became more itself.
Tree.
She went to the amber one and put her hand on the bark and said it. He stood and went to stand beside her and put his hand on the bark too.
The amber warmth of it, deep in the grain, the quality of something alive that had been alive for a long time and was very good at it.
She said the word again. He looked at the other five trees in their circle. All of them. Every one. The same skin.
He kept the word.
· · ·
The woman with the notebook had been asleep against the ember-copper tree and was now awake, writing without looking at the page.
She could look at things and write about looking at the same time, which meant the writing was something her hands did separately from the rest of her.
He had noted this. He kept it again, because keeping it felt right.
The man who looked at the ground was awake. He was watching the grass between them and the grass between them was a shade greener than the grass at the edge of camp.
The man was looking at this with the expression he always wore when the ground was telling him something he had suspected it would tell him.
He said nothing. He pressed his lips flat in the way that meant: confirmed.
· · ·
She gave him: stone.
She found one at the edge of camp, round and grey and ordinary, and she put it in his palm and said it. The stone was cool and heavy and real, and now he had a skin for it.
He sat with the stone for a moment.
He looked at the grass.
He pressed his other palm flat against it.
He looked at her.
"Grass," he said.
It came out wrong. Too large in his mouth, the shape of it rounded where it shouldn't be, the second sound arriving a moment after the first like something that had not yet learned the timing.
He heard the difference between his version and hers.
He said it again.
The woman with the notebook made a sound. A short, upward sound that she stopped immediately with both hands pressed against her mouth.
He looked at her. She was looking at him over her hands with an expression he had not seen on her before.
He looked at Amara.
Her face was the kind that landed in you instead of on you. He had catalogued this: it was not a face that performed its expressions in the outward way of faces that were aware of being watched.
It was a face that received things and responded from the inside, so that what you saw was not the expression it had decided to show you but the expression that had arrived before the deciding.
What had arrived was not a small thing.
"Grass," he said. Better.
"Yes," she said.
He looked at the stone in his palm.
He looked at her.
The quality of her waiting meant: you know this one.
"Stone," he said.
The shape of it arrived on time.
· · ·
The man against the far tree had opened his eyes at some point and was watching with the stillness of someone who has made a decision about how still to be and is committed to it.
He had the quality of a person for whom this was not the strangest thing that had happened in forty-eight hours -- not because it was not strange.
But because the strangeness had filled to its limit and the mechanism responsible for the filling had quietly closed.
He was watching and he was not filing anything for the record and for him this was, He understood, a significant departure from his ordinary way of operating in the world.
He had that about all of them now.
The shapes they usually made in the world. The shapes they were making instead. It was more interesting than the shapes they usually made.
· · ·
Water.
She brought it in a container from camp, poured a small amount into her palm and said the word. The water moved when she tilted it. He held the container. He tilted it. He felt the weight shift.
"Water," he said.
She nodded. He held the container a moment longer than he needed to, because the weight of it moving was interesting in a way he did not have a word for yet.
He gave it back.
Fire.
The small metal device that produced it. A brief orange thing, held and then gone.
He had known fire before the word -- as a quality of the world, a thing that came to him when he called. He remembered using it Back Then.
Rope. She coiled it on the grass and said it twice and waited.
"Rope," he said.
She nodded.
He set it down.
And looked north.
He had been looking north in increments since the first word. Not continuously -- he had been fully with each word when each word arrived, he was not a person whose attention split itself -- but in the spaces between.
The Wall was there.
He knew the Wall was there. He had been in the same room as the Wall since he woke and the Wall had not changed its quality of waiting: patient, absolute.
The way of something that had been waiting longer than anything else in this room and had become expert at it.
The seventh tree above the Wall. Its bare branches spreading over the northern end of the garden like a second ceiling that had decided on its shape.
It was Present.
The quality it had carried since he first stood in the garden was still there, unchanged, with the persistence of something that was simply what it was.
He knew that quality. He had been in the place below, in the recess, in the dark, for a span of time that had no number.
That quality had been there the whole time -- pressed through stone and depth and all the weight of centuries.
Not asking anything. Not saying anything. Just: there. The way the warmth was there when the warmth was there.
Amara gestured at him.
He looked at her.
She had the fruit. The round gold one with the small white blossom still attached, which she had been sitting near since last night and had not eaten, and which he had put in her hands because it was hers and she had not yet understood that.
She was holding it now and she held it up toward the sourceless light. The edges of it went translucent, gold deepening toward amber, the five petals casting the faintest imaginable shadow.
"Gold," she said.
He looked at the colour of it. The warm particular yellow, the quality of the fourth tree's light. He looked at the fourth tree. He looked back at the fruit.
"Gold," he said.
She turned it so the light came through at a different angle.
"Gold," she said again, with the quality that meant: the same word, look at it from here too.
She put it down between them, carefully, the blossom up.
The pull to the north was patient and keeping its place in the line of things that had not been reached yet, the garden was here, Amara was here, and the words were arriving one at a time, each one a new skin for something that had always been there without one.
He turned his attention back to the lesson.