He bought a new slate on the two hundred and tenth day.
The old one had been full since the morning he wrote and erased Tuesday, and he had been writing on cloth strips and the backs of his hands in the meanwhile, which was not a system but had been sufficient. The market stall that sold chalk also sold slates. He had not thought to ask on the previous visit, which told him something about the limits of his inventory-taking — that he could miss the obvious when the obvious was adjacent to something he was already attending to.
The new slate was larger. He did not ask for larger. The stall operator looked at him for a moment, with the expression of someone making an assessment he would not have expected from a chalk vendor, and then produced the larger one from beneath the counter without explanation. He looked at it. He looked at the operator. The operator said nothing.
He bought it.
He walked home with it under his arm and the three dead at the usual interval and thought about the transaction. He had said thank you. They had said welcome. He had returned four days later needing a slate and received one that was larger than what he had asked for, from someone who had apparently decided something about him in the interval.
He thought: I did not ask for this.
He thought: most of the things I have here I did not ask for. The room. The coldlight bowl. Seren coming on the third day. Casvar teaching him when there was something Casvar needed from the teaching.
He thought: asking and receiving are not the same operation. I have spent two hundred and ten days learning that.
He set the slate on the ledge next to the old one and looked at the two of them. The old one, nearly full, every word in columns by function. The new one, blank, the surface the deep gray of undisturbed ash in the outer fields.
He picked up the chalk.
He thought about what to write first.
He wrote: what I do not know yet.
It was not a word. It was a category heading. A placeholder for the function the new slate would serve — not the vocabulary of arrival, not the accumulation of terms needed to navigate a world he had not expected, but something else. The vocabulary of the thing that came after arrival. The vocabulary, he thought, of staying.
He sat on the floor with the new slate on his knees and the old one on the ledge and thought about the difference between a man cataloguing what he needed to survive and a man cataloguing what he wanted to understand.
The distinction had been unclear to him for a long time.
It was beginning to clarify.