The Second Basket

Sandy came across the green on Saturday with the second basket, and this time there was somebody waiting.

He came the way he had come before, in a straight line, thin beard, anxious, the basket held out in front of him as if it might go off, and he was looking at his boots for most of the way, like someone sent on an errand he understands towards a person he does not. Nettie was at the edge of the patch. She had been there since first light, with her arms folded, and beside her, on the flat stone where she leaves things out for gods, was a basket.

It was the hollow's basket, and Nettie had filled it, and what she had filled it with was beans. Not many; there are never many. But beans off the plants, which under the Treaty of the Fallen Bean are the hollow's, picked by Nettie and counted and the count recorded, and it was, Grizel established that morning after going back through the whole of the book, the first gift ever sent from the hollow to Gnomesby in fourteen winters. There was no protocol for it, because there was no precedent, because it had never happened, and Grizel said this with the air of a woman who has looked for the bottom of a thing and found there was not one.

"How does a grumlin give?" said Kit, because somebody had to.

Nobody knew. Grumlins do not, much. Mungo had given the beetle an acorn cap, once, without appearing to move, which was not a method anyone else could copy. Pettigrew, asked, said that the Court gave by decree and the recipient was informed by letter, and looked at the basket of beans with the expression of a person watching somebody else's ceremony from a pew. Grizel said the ledger would record whatever happened and was not going to say what should.

So Nettie did it the way a grumlin does anything. When Sandy reached the patch, and stopped, and held out the Provost's basket, she took it from him with one hand and set it down, and picked up her own with the other and set it down in front of his boots, and turned round, and walked away into the patch, and did not look back, and her beard did not click once the whole way, and that was the giving. Sandy stood and looked at the beans. He looked at them for a Mungo, at least. Then he picked them up, in both hands, out in front of him, and the ledger records that he did not carry them as if they might go off. He carried them as if they might spill.

Kit walked him to the gate. They stood there a moment, the two of them, with the green in front of them, flat and shorn and enormous in the cold light, and Gnomesby small at the far end of it, and the Stair going up behind them like a cliff.

"It's smaller than it looks from the other side," said Sandy.

"Everything is," said Kit.

He nodded, as if this had been on his mind. Then, looking at the beans and not at her, he said that the Provost had been reading a lot. He did not say what. Kit did not ask. Mungo said "Nobody comes in," and Kit said "He's with me," and it came easier the second time, the way a borrowed coat does, and Sandy went out across the sea with the beans, in a line that bent, once, near the patch, and did not straighten until the poles.