The Table With No Price

Legend has it… every dragon hatches whole — and some grow old still giving, long after anyone needs what they give. Below the terraces of Ashfall Flats there is a cistern, and at dusk the hawks and the hares and the field mice all come down to it together. Even in the wet years, when there is water in every ditch, they come. They don't come for the water. They come for the dusk.

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Clay is old now. Her snout has gone gray, her wing-brace is on its third mending, and she keeps her own oil can in her apron pocket and won't let anyone else hold it. Ashfall Flats is green from edge to edge. The terraces hold every rain. On the hill, the old stone wall is taller than she is — every young dragon who ever learned to lay a wall added a stone. Trowel, its gray gone pale, still checks every terrace with its level each morning. By the farmhouse door, on its own small shelf, sits her first slate, with the first price she ever wrote still on it.

3

Nobody has asked for a wall by claw in years. The Engine's machines build every terrace now and pipe clean water to every door; every pantry is filled by delivery cart, all of it paid for by the co-op and free to whoever needs it. Clay sold her share of Clay's Walls to the wallers who built it, a little each year, at a fair price. Her daughter Ochre runs the old co-op with a robot crew and a laugh you can hear across three terraces. And every evening, Clay still cooks by claw: a pot big enough for twenty, at the long table in the yard. Every year, fewer come.

4

Her grandhatchling Fennel sits on the porch step one evening and watches her stir. "Grandma," she says, "what's a wall for, if the machines build them all now?" Clay keeps stirring. "And why do you cook," Fennel says, "if the carts bring supper?" Clay stops stirring. Fennel's little brother Pebble, under the table, is feeding a beetle a crumb. "And what's a fair price," Fennel says, very seriously, "when everything is free?" Clay opens her mouth. Nothing comes out. She has never once, in her whole life, not known what a thing was worth.

5

So Clay does what she has always done. She looks twice. She walks the valley at suppertime and sees what everyone else walks past: every window lit, every plate full, every dragon eating alone. A retired kiln-hand with a perfect supper in front of him, talking to the radio. Three young dragons two doors apart, each eating out of a delivery tray with one claw, alone. At the old co-op gate, the trough where the whole valley used to queue for water sits full and clean, and nobody is standing at it.

6

She tries the old way first. She takes old Flint's hammer down from its shelf and walks it door to door, offering to mend a wall by claw, the way she did when the hills slid. Everyone thanks her. Everyone is well. A young mother holds the hammer a moment, admiring it, and gives it back with both claws, gently, the way you'd return a lovely thing to a museum. "We're fine," she says. "Truly. The machines built us a perfect wall. But thank you." The door closes. Clay stands on the step a while with the hammer.

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Walking home, Clay passes the cistern at dusk and stops. It's a wet year. There's water in every ditch. And the hawks are coming down anyway, and the hares, and the mice, all together, standing in the last light — not drinking much. Just standing there. Clay leans on the terrace wall a long time. Then she laughs out loud, alone in the dark, the way she did once over a footnote. "Oh," she says. "It was never the water."

8

That night she drags the long table into the middle of the yard and lays every leaf in it. Before she sets a single plate, she stands at the head of it with her claw on the wood and asks, out loud, to no one: Is it good for me? Is it good for them? Is it good for the world? Pebble, half asleep on the porch, says yes. Then she paints a sign on an old feed board and nails it to the gate: SUPPER. DUSK. NO PRICE. BRING NOTHING. COME ANYWAY.

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The co-op board is kind about it. "Clay," says the treasurer, "nobody's hungry. The carts deliver to every door. And who pays for twenty suppers a night? What's the ledger on that?" A young engineer laughs: "Why walk to a table when supper flies to you?" Even Ochre, wiping her claws on her apron, says, "Mother, you priced everything your whole life. A free thing gets thrown away — you taught me that. Everyone's fed." Clay pats her daughter's cheek. "Everyone's fed," she agrees. "Nobody's eating."

10

Every evening at dusk she sets the long table, twenty places, and sits down at the head of it, and waits. The first week, three come: Fennel, Pebble, and the kiln-hand who talks to the radio, who stands at the gate a long time before he opens it. He eats, and says nothing, and at the end he holds Clay's claw and doesn't seem to know it. The next week there are seven. Somebody brings a radio, and leaves it off.

11

By the harvest moon the whole valley is coming. Clay cooks for them all by claw, the way she always has — sunup to past dark, every pot in the house going at once. Tables appear in other valleys, made of doors and kiln shelves and borrowed boards, every one with the same feed-board sign at the gate. And the co-op, at last, writes it into the books — a line in the third ledger, under WORTH KEEPING. It votes for a harvest supper, one great table down the middle of Ashfall Flats, everyone at once, the night of the first frost. Clay says she'll cook.

12

She starts at dawn. Forty pots. Two hundred seats. She works through noon and through the afternoon, and the old fierceness comes back up in her — the young dragon who built walls past midnight racing the Company's. At dusk, with the table set and the valley already walking up the road with lanterns, the wing-brace gives out. A small crack. A fading hum. Her crooked wing folds and she goes down on the kitchen floor in the steam, and the biggest pot goes over with her, and supper for two hundred runs across the tiles. Through the window she can see them taking their seats. Two hundred empty plates. And from the corner, the Engine's kitchen robot — the one she has told for twenty years, not in my kitchen — walks quietly out. It does not cook. It picks up the pieces of her brace and sets them in her lap. It slides a folded towel under her wing. It sets her first slate upright on its shelf. Then it goes and stands in the kitchen doorway, facing the table, between her and the window, so nobody outside will see her on the floor until she's ready. Out in the yard, Trowel walks the long table and sets a cup of water at every place, all two hundred, slowly, so everyone has something to hold while they wait.

13

Through the steam and the window, out past the yard, she can see the dry riverbed — a creek now. On its bank, in the lantern-light, stands the old brick kiln she found the day it rained, and the fired-clay tablet on its door: breathe out long so the fire burns blue. Two hundred guests. Forty pots, one spilled. The brace in her lap. Does Clay bank the fire and breathe — and let the machine finish the supper while she sits down — or blaze ahead on a dragging wing and cook it all again, by claw?

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