The Carpet People

looking at me. None of them noticed!
    ‘Hmm?’ he said. He tried to recall what Bane had been saying. ‘Oh ... so tonight’s Feast means we’re in the Chay of Bronze, yes?’
    ‘It means it’s starting,’ said Pismire. ‘It’s a time of war and destruction.’
    Glurk coughed. ‘How long does this last, then?’
    ‘It’ll last as long as the wights think it will. Don’t ask me how they know. But tonight wights all over the Carpet will celebrate the Feast of Bronze. It’s something to do with their memories.’
    ‘Sounds a bit unbelievable to me,’ said Glurk.
    ‘Oh, yes. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.’
    ‘You certainly know a lot about them,’ said Snibril.
    ‘I don’t,’ said Pismire, simply. ‘You never know anything where wights are concerned. Youremember tales, see things, pick up little bits of knowledge here and there, but you never know anything for certain.’
    ‘All right,’ said Glurk. He stood up on the driving-board of the cart. ‘We’ll go. Don’t see we can do nothing else, anyway. Bertha’ll come, and Gurth, and, let’s see . . . yes, Damion Oddfoot. It strikes me that when a wight asks you to dinner you go, and that’s it. In sevens.’
    They entered the wights’ little camp sheepishly, keeping together.
    Wights always travelled in numbers of seven, twenty-one or forty-nine. No one knew what happened to any wights left over. Perhaps the other ones killed and ate them, suggested Glurk, who had taken a sort of ancestral dislike to axe-stealing wights. Pismire told him to shut up.
    The oldest wight in the group was the Master. There were twenty-one in this group and Pismire, looking at their cart, pointed out the big varnish-boiler on top of it. Wights specialized in smelting the varnish that was mined at the Varnisholme, the giant pillar of red wood in the north known as achairleg in Dumii. Then they went from village to village, selling it. Varnish could be cast into a spear head, or a knife; or just about anything.
    Snibril wondered how long it would be beforeanyone noticed he had shoved the belt back in his pack? But he wasn’t going to give it up, he told himself. They’d be bound to want it back if they saw it.
    There were seven fires, close together, and three wights around each. They looked identical. How do they tell one another apart, Snibril wondered?
    ‘Oh, there’s something else I forgot to tell you,’ said Pismire, as the wights busied themselves over their cooking pots. ‘They have perfect memories. Um. They remember everything. That’s why they find it so hard to talk to ordinary people.’
    ‘I don’t understand,’ said Snibril
    ‘Don’t be surprised if they give you answers before you’ve asked the question. Sometimes even they get confused,’ Pismire went on.
    ‘Never mind about them. I’m confused.’
    ‘They remember everything, I said. Everything. Everything that’s ever going to happen to them. Their minds . . . work differently. The past and the future are all the same to them. Please try to understand what I’m saying. They remember things that haven’t happened yet.’
    Snibril’s jaw dropped.
    ‘Then we could ask them—’ he began.
    ‘No! We mustn’t! Why, thank you,’ Pismire continued, in a more normal voice, taking a plate from a wight, ‘that looks . . . um . . . delicious.’
    They ate in silence. Snibril thought: do they say nothing because they already know what it was they said? No, that can’t be right – they’d have to speak now to remember having said it . . . or . . .
    ‘I am Noral the kilnmaster,’ said the wight on his left.
    ‘My name—’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘We—’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘There was—’
    ‘I know. ‘
    ‘How? ’
    ‘You’re going to tell me after dinner.’
    ‘Oh.’ Snibril tried to think. Pismire was right. It was almost impossible to hold a conversation with someone who’d already heard it once. ‘You really know everything that’s going to happen?’ was all he could think of.
    There was the trace of a smile in the depths of the hood.
    ‘Not everything. How can anyone know everything? But a number of things I do know, yes.’
    Snibril looked around desperately. Bane and Pismire were deep in conversation with wights, and were not paying him any attention.
    ‘But . . . but . . . supposing you knew when youwere going to die? Supposing a wild animal was going to attack you?’
    ‘Yes?’ said Noral politely.
    ‘You could just make sure you weren’t