better than that. The seats went higher and higher around the sides, almost up to the ceiling, but the middle dropped away so it was below where you come into the room. That kind of made it be the natural place where you looked, no matter where you was sit. Your eye was drawed to it. There was a platform there that we called the middle round. It was another place where only Ramparts got to stand, at least on meet-days. In a testing it was different, because it was where the testing got to happen.
On meet-days there wasn’t no furniture in the middle round. On testing days there was three tables stood there, kind of like three sides of a square, only the sides wasn’t flat but opened out a little ways. The middle table had the tech that was already woke up and working: the firethrower, the bolt gun, the cutter and the database. The other two tables had all the things, more than you could count, that was old tech but didn’t never do nothing no matter who touched it.
I seen this lots of times when other people was testing. In fact I seen it fourteen times exactly, once for every Summer up to this one, only the earliest times I was too young to remember it. So I knowed what was going to happen, right down to the last, least thing. Shirew Makewell had coached us in what to say, but we had all the words solid in our heads before we ever started so she didn’t waste too much time on that. Mostly she told us how to look and how to be once we was in the Count and Seal.
“There’ll be more than two hundred people there, all looking at you,” she says to the three of us, “but don’t you be minding that. Don’t you look at them at all, or think about them. They’re there for you, not the other way round. When Rampart Fire speaks to you, you say your part the way you learned it and you come forward when she bids you. After that, it’s all just doing what you’re told to and keeping a hold on yourself after.”
It was good advice, and kindly meant, but on the day of my testing it went out of my head as soon as I stepped in the room. Actually it didn’t stay even that long. When we was walking along the corridor toward the big doors (there was two doors to the Count and Seal) and hearing all the people inside, my whole head emptied out like a downturned bucket. I stumbled along behind Haijon, through the doors and into the room, and I bumped into his back when he stopped.
It’s the testing, I thought. This is the time. This is the test. And my legs sort of losed their strength so I all but fell down.
Haijon stepped to the side so we was all in a line like we was supposed to be. The Ramparts was in the middle round, all in a line too except that Catrin was out in front a little way. On testing day, Rampart Fire spoke for the village.
“Who is it comes into this chamber?” she asks us.
I risked a look up at the faces all around. That was just what Shirew told us not to do, and she was right. So many people! Everyone I knowed. Everyone as had ever been in my life from before I even knowed my own name right down to the here and now. I seen my mother there, and Athen and Mull to either side of her. It was like my eyes knowed how to find them, even in all that great, breathing, shifting press of life. And I got some strength from seeing them, though also a kind of dizzy strangeness as though I was there with them looking down on my own self as well as being where I was.
It was only then I realised how come I could hear everyone breathing. It was because there was stone silence in the room. I don’t think I was the only one thinking Haijon would answer first, but he never done it. I looked at Spinner and Spinner looked at me. Haijon didn’t look at either of us. He was standing with his head down and his hands all clenched in fists. If I had to say what he looked like, he looked like he was afraid, only