The Shortening

The Occupant was woken by the sound of the sky being torn in half, which is how the Above mows the green.

The Shortening comes, Grizel said afterwards, when it comes, and there is no warning except a smell of oil and a change in the birds, and then the whole world above the hedge fills with a roar like a wasp the size of a county, and the grass, which yesterday was a jungle you could lose a fox in, is gone, and where it was there is a great flat green plain that runs, terrifyingly, all the way to the poles and past them, and at the far end of it, small and distinct and waving, is Gnomesby.

The hollowfolk regard the green the way sailors regard the sea: as a thing to be crossed only when necessary, spoken of in a lowered voice, and never turned your back on. To have it suddenly become a plain, with a neighbour visible across it, was the equivalent of the fog lifting from a harbour to reveal that the enemy had been anchored in it all along. Nettie came out of the mushroom patch, saw Gnomesby, and for the first time in fourteen winters was speechless, because for the first time in fourteen winters the thing she had been blaming was present, and could see her. Then she raised one arm and waved back, in a manner, and the ledger records the manner, and the record runs to most of a page.

The theology of the Above is one of those things every hollow has and no hollow agrees on, and the Shortening brought it all out. Grizel's position, long held, is that the Above does it out of spite, on the same principle as the bins, which it puts out every seventh day in a row along the wall as if for inspection and then, before anyone can inspect them, takes away. Nettie's, newly formed, was that the Above did it so the hollow could see Gnomesby coming. Pettigrew, who had by now been at the gate for four days and was becoming, without anyone remarking on it, a fixture, ruled that it was an act of deference by the Above towards the Court, on the grounds that it made her wings more visible from a distance. Mungo's position, asked for, was that he had not been consulted, which was also his position on the weather, the treaty, and the Occupant. Pettigrew's reply was a silence the ledger records as "point four of a Mungo, but louder."¹

Gnomesby did not send a letter that day. Gnomesby shouted. The Provost of Gnomesby, a grumlin in a hat that had never once been folded and a beard that reached his belt and had, the Occupant would have sworn, been ironed, stood at the edge of his own hedge with a clipboard and delivered, across the great flat green sea, in a voice trained for it, notice that a delegation would attend at the frost to take possession under Clause Seven, and beside him, holding up a sign that said STILL NOT TIPPED, stood the beetle, whose hat was now, at this distance, the tallest thing on the horizon.

This was the day the ledger seal became clear, and it became clear because Nettie tried to buy the Occupant's way out. Her counteroffer, made across the green at the top of her voice, was the mushroom patch, which was not hers to offer, in exchange for Clause Seven, which was not theirs to waive, and when it was declined, with courtesy, she turned to Grizel and demanded to know what the treaty actually said about disputes, and Grizel, who had been waiting for someone to ask her that for fourteen winters, read Clause Eleven.

Clause Eleven says that where the parties disagree they shall consult the ledger, and the ledger shall be decisive.

There was a silence in which everyone in the hollow turned and looked at Grizel, who was tall and stooped and holding a book the size of a paving slab, and who had been, it turned out, the court of appeal of the entire Anunder all along, and had never once been asked.

"I write down what happened," she said, into the silence, to the Occupant. "For you to be keeper in this book, being keeper would have to have happened. Has it?"

It had not. But there were two nights to the frost, and that evening, for the first time in the memory of anyone living, Grizel left the ledger open on the table with the pen beside it, and went up to bed, and said nothing about it whatsoever, and everyone in the hollow walked past that table very carefully all night, the way you walk past a fox that has noticed you.

Sorrel, that afternoon, looked up the Table of Precedence in the ledger, because Sorrel does things, and came back from it and said nothing, but was seen to be biting her wing. Grizel, summarising the day, wrote that Gnomesby wished to relocate the hollow, and then looked at the word for some time. Wick's stool was nearly ready.