Then, back to Suur Tulia to file a report.

Seventeen years ago, Tulia had been found at the Day Gate, wrapped in newspapers and nestled in a beer cooler with the lid ripped off. The stump of her umbilical cord had already fallen off, which meant that she was too old and too touched by the Sæcular world to be accepted by the Thousanders. Anyway she had been sickly at first and so she had been kept in the Unarian math, which was more convenient to Physicians’ Commons. There she had been raised (as I pictured it) by the doting burgers’ wives and daughters who populated that math until she’d graduated through the labyrinth at the age of six. She had emerged, all alone, from our side of the maze and gravely introduced herself to the first suur she saw. Anyway, she had no family on the outside. Watching the rest of us cope with our families during Apert had led her to understand how very fortunate she might be. She was too deft to say anything, but it was clear she’d spent the whole time being bemused at the rest of us. She had seen me strolling around chatting with my sib and concluded that everything was fine and simple for me. I sensed it would boot me nothing to try to explain to her what I had discussed with Orolo.

So, instead, I talked to groups of total strangers from extramuros who showed up to take tours of the Unarian math.

My math was small, simple, and quiet. The Unarian math, by contrast, had been built to overawe people who came in from outside: ten days out of each year, groups of extramuros tourists, and the rest of the time, those who’d made a vow to spend at least one year in it. Few of these graduated to the Decenarian math. “Burgers’ wives trying to feel something,” was an especially cruel description I had once heard from an old fraa. As often, they were younger, unmarried, and looking for the final coat of polish and prestige needed to go out into adult society and seek a mate. Some studied under Halikaarnians and became praxics or artisans. Others studied under Procians; these tended to go into law, communications, or politics. Jesry’s mother had done two years here just after she’d turned twenty. Not long after coming out, she’d married Jesry’s father, a somewhat older man who had put in three years and used what he’d learned to start a career doing whatever it was he did.

Around dawn of the tenth day of Apert, Suur Randa, who was one of the beekeepers, discovered that during the night some ruffians had found their way into the apiary shed, smashed some crockery, and made off with a couple of cases of mead. Nothing so exciting had happened in eons. When I came into the Refectory to break my fast, everyone was talking about it. They were still talking about it when I left, which was at about seven. I was due at the Year Gate at nine. The easy way to get there would have been to go extramuros through the Decade Gate, walk north through the burgers’ town, and approach it from the outside. But thinking about Tulia yesterday had given me the idea of getting there through our lower labyrinth—retracing the steps she’d taken at the age of six. Supposedly she had made it through in about half a day. I hoped that at my age I could get through it in an hour, but I allowed two hours just to be on the safe side. It ended up taking me an hour and a half.

As the clock struck nine, I stood, formally wrapped and hooded, at the foot of the bridge that led to the Year Gate, which rose up before me in its crenellated bastion. Bridge and gate were of similar design to those in the Decenarian math, but twice as big and much more richly decorated. On the first day of Apert, four hundred had thronged the plaza that I could now see through the Year Gate, and cheered as their friends and family had poured out at sunrise to end their year of seclusion.

This morning’s tour group numbered about two dozen. A third of them were uniformed ten-year-olds from a Bazian Orthodox suvin, or so I guessed from the fact that their teacher was in a nun’s habit. The others seemed a typical mix of burgers, artisans, and slines. The latter were recognizable from a distance. They were huge. Some artisans and burgers were huge too, but they wore clothes intended to hide it. The current sline fashion was to wear a garment evolved from an athletic jersey (bright, with numerals on the back) but oversized, so that shoulder seams hung around the elbows, and extremely long—descending all the way to the knee. The trousers were too long to be shorts and too short to be pants—they hung a hand’s-breadth below the jersey but still exposed a few inches of chunky calf, plunging into enormous, thickly padded shoes. Headgear was a burnoose blazoned with beverage logos whose loose ends trailed down the back, and dark goggles strapped over that and never removed, even indoors.

But it was not only clothing that set the slines apart. They had also adopted fashions in how they walked (a rolling, sauntering gait) and how they stood (a pose of exaggerated cool that somehow looked hostile to me). So I could see even from a distance that I had four slines in my tour group this morning. This troubled me not at all, because during the previous nine days there had been no serious trouble on the tours. Fraa Delrakhones had concluded that the slines of this era subscribed to a harmless iconography. They were not half as menacing as their postures.

I backed up onto the crest of the bridge to get a little altitude. Once the group had formed up below me I greeted them and introduced myself. The suvin kids stood in a neat row in the front. The slines stood together in the back, maintaining some distance to emphasize their exceptional cool, and thumbed their jeejahs or suckled from bucket-sized containers of sugar water. Two latecomers were hustling across the plaza and so I went a little slowly at first so as not to strand them.

I had learned not to expect much in the way of attention span and so after pointing out the orchard of page trees and the tangles on this side of the river, I led them over the bridge into the heart of the Unarian math. We skirted a wedge-shaped slab of red stone, carved all over with the names of the fraas and suurs whose remains lay underneath it. It was our policy not to talk about this unless someone asked. Today, no one did, and so a lot of awkwardness was avoided.

The Third Sack had opened with a week-long siege of the concent. The walls were far too long to be defended by so few, and so on the third day the Tenners and Hundreders had broken the Discipline and withdrawn to the Unarian math, which was somewhat easier to defend because it had a smaller perimeter that included some water barriers. The Thousanders of course were safe up on their crag.

By the time the siege was two weeks old, it had become obvious that the Sæcular Power had no intention of coming to their aid. Before dawn one day, most of the avout gathered behind the Year Gate, threw it open, and stormed out across the plaza in a flying wedge, driving through the surprised besiegers and into the town. For one hour they sacked the town and the besiegers’ supply dumps, gathering medicines, vitamins, ammunition, and all that they could find of certain chemicals and minerals that could not be obtained within the concent. Then they did something even more astonishing to the attackers, which was that instead of running away they formed up into another wedge—much smaller, by this point—and fought their way back across the plaza and went back in the gate. They didn’t stop until they’d crossed the bridge, which was immediately dropped by explosives. There they threw down the stuff they had scavenged and collapsed. Five hundred had stormed out. Three hundred had come back. Of those, two hundred died on the spot from wounds suffered during the operation. This wedge of granite was their tumulus. The stuff that they had gathered was sent up to the Thousanders. The rest of the concent fell the next day. The Thousanders lived alone and untouched on their crag for the next seventy years. Besides ours, only two other Millenarian maths in the world had made it through the Third Sack unviolated and unsacked. Though in many cases there had been enough warning that avout had been able to run away, carrying what they could in the way of books, and live in remote places for the next decades.