The academy

I am eleven and I have just ended an argument with my forehead.

It works. The other boy is on the floor holding his nose and I have the bunk by the window. That's the academy. Hard isn't the word. The word is hungry. Not for food. For power. Everyone in this building wants more than they have, and the wanting has no end and no top and no floor. You feel it in the corridors like a draught.

And then there's the blind boy.

Same year as me, from a teashop in the town, with a snake under his collar. He's blind and eleven and can see through the snake, which makes him the most wanted thing in the building and the least able to want anything back, and everyone knows it in a week.

"What can it see?" they ask him. Every day.

I don't ask. I decided about him the first morning, when he turned his face to me before I'd spoken and said, "You're the one with the forehead."

"Who told you?"

"Nobody. It's in the rafters."

That was enough. I decide early. I don't revise.

···

I am fourteen and everyone else revises constantly.

That's this building: people revising their loyalties every morning, and he sees all of it, because the snake is in the rafters and it doesn't blink. He learns things about the people teaching us that no boy should have to carry.

"You could tell someone," I say.

"Who?"

Fair.

One evening he puts them down. We're walking back, the gate's ahead, and he doesn't go through it. Nothing dramatic; he says he can't see where the drama is. He keeps walking, snake round his neck, up, away from the city, and I stand in the gate like an idiot until the hill has him.

Nobody exiles him. He finds a place a long way up where nobody wants anything from him, and stays.

···

I am forty and I walk out of the same gate for the same reason.

It takes me longer. A forehead only ends the small arguments. But the building teaches everything by halves, because a whole answer makes a student dangerous, and one day I've had enough halves, and I go up the hill.

He's there, on a rock, the snake looking at me so he can too.

"You took your time," he says.

"I had a forehead to look after."

He's learned everything up here. All the studies. All the experiments. The ones the academy taught by halves he's done whole, with a snake for eyes and nobody to impress. And he's found out he's the last of a kind. The last one, in all that brutality, doing it to stop it rather than to win.

"That's not useful," I tell him.

"Not yet," he says.

···

There are five of us now.

The five elders, people will call us. Now we're five old teachers who've each, separately, walked out of the same building for the same reason and found each other on the same hillside, which tells you something about hillsides.

We tinker for a long time. We argue for longer. I end one argument the old way. And when we're done we've made a pact, and founded the Alliance.

People assume the pact is grand. It's one sentence. We stand on the hill and say it, and the snake watches.

We will not want more than we have.

Five people from a building where that sentence was unthinkable agree to think it, and to hold each other to it. That's the Alliance. That's what it's for.

···

I am old, and it's golden.

I don't get to say that often. A thousand years of quiet, doing its work on everything under it, and me on a hillside with four people I'd walk out of a gate for and a snake.

When the quiet has done its work, we expand. Into places nobody's touched. We mix among the people. We take on crews of our own kind, the strong ones, naturally only the best; I test them, you can guess how. The world gets, for a while, the shape we'd hoped for.

Then the quiet ends.

I know because the snake goes still. Not the way it goes still for a good mind. Still like it's never seen this before. I follow its head, out past the edge of the thousand years, and there's a girl standing there.