Olano's Folly

by McCaffreyan Science Fantasy, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The delver came to Garazi Olano on the ninth day after old Kasko died, and it came through the wall.

She was at the far end of the rope-walk when it happened, walking backward with the hemp paying out between her fingers, and she heard the scrabble first and thought it was rats in the thatch again. Then the mud-brick by the door bulged, cracked, and fell inward in a little avalanche of dust, and a pale snout came through the hole, followed by two broad digging paws, followed by the rest of a half-grown delver, which shook itself and sneezed and sat down in the middle of her floor as if it had been invited.

"Oh no," Garazi said. "Oh, no, you don't."

It looked at her. Delvers had small eyes, nearly blind, set deep in the long grey skull, but it looked at her all the same, with its whole face, the way they did: the wet black nose working, the whiskers fanned, the ridged nostrils opening and closing like the gills of a fish. It was the size of a herding dog and twice as heavy, built low and thick for burrowing, with a coat like close-cropped felt and claws as long as her fingers. The founders had made them, out of a badger and an aardvark and something else nobody now remembered, and they had made them for one thing.

Garazi tied off the strand on the post without looking at her hands. Thirty years at the rope-walk. Her hands could do it in the dark.

"Go home," she told the delver. "Go back to the kennels. Josu will be looking for you."

The delver got up, padded the length of the rope-walk to her, and pushed its snout into her palm.

---

She had forgotten. Thirty-one years, and she had let herself forget, because remembering had been too much like putting her hand on a hot stove over and over to make sure it was still hot.

It came into her mouth first. That was how it had always come: not a voice, not at first, but a taste, laid on her tongue as clear as if someone had put a wet pebble there. Stone. Cold stone, and the dark green smell of a cellar, and under it, very faint and very far down, the thing every child in Harrizabal was taught to name before they could say their own: the smell of earth after rain. The founders had a word for the molecule, written in the old tables in the Batzarre house. Geosmin. A human nose could catch it at a few parts in a trillion, the tables said, which was why the founders had chosen it; a delver's nose could catch it through forty metres of rock.

And with the taste, close behind it the way thunder comes behind lightning, the delver itself: young, eager, offended, delighted.

You, it said, not in words but in the lift of her own heart. You taste it. The loud boy does not taste it. I put my nose to him and he is all noise inside. You taste.

Garazi took her hand away and sat down hard on the coil of finished rope by the post.

"I'm sixty-three," she said aloud, to nobody. "I'm sixty-three years old."

The delver climbed half into her lap, which no delver had any business doing, and laid its heavy head on her knee, and the taste of wet stone filled her mouth again until her eyes ran.

---

Josu Etxegarai came for it within the hour, red in the face and smelling of the kennels, with his uncle Ander behind him.

Garazi had known they would. She had swept up the fallen brick and put a kettle on, and she was sitting on the bench outside the rope-walk door in the white noon glare when they came up the lane, with the delver stretched across her feet like a draught-excluder.

"There," Josu said. "There, I told you. It's been gone since dawn." He was eighteen, a big soft-faced boy, the handler the Batzarre had chosen to take on Kasko's last pup because his father had been a handler and his grandfather before him. He crouched and held out his hand. "Here. Here, Euri. Come on."

So that was its name. Euri. Rain. Somebody in the kennels had a sense of humour, or a sense of desperation.

The delver did not even lift its head.

"Euri," Josu said again, more sharply, and reached for its collar.

The delver showed him a set of teeth meant for chewing through tree-root and turned its face into Garazi's ankle.

Ander Etxegarai had not said anything yet. He was the well-master of Harrizabal, a lean man going grey at the temples, and he had been a boy of twelve the last time the Dry came, hauling spoil-baskets up out of a shaft that went nowhere. Garazi had watched him, then, carrying the baskets with his mouth set. She watched him now.

"It's taken a fancy to the rope," he said at last. "The hemp smell. They like the hemp."

"It's taken a fancy to me."

"Garazi." He said it kindly, which was worse. "You're the only handler in this town who ever lost a delver and lived on. It's smelling Itzal on you, that's all. Thirty-one years, but they've good noses. It'll settle to Josu in a week."

"It put its nose in my hand," Garazi said, "and I tasted wet stone."

Josu looked at his uncle. Ander looked at the delver.

"Forty metres of wet stone, I expect," he said. "Same as last time." He bent, very gently, and lifted the delver bodily off her feet, all forty kilos of it, and set it in Josu's arms. "Come on. The north cistern's down another hand's breadth this morning, and we need a delver on the Low Terrace by tomorrow, and one that'll work for the boy."

Euri squealed all the way down the lane. Garazi could hear it long after they had turned the corner by the bakehouse, a thin unhappy whistling note, and she could taste it too, faint as a memory: stone, and stone, and the far-down promise of rain.

She went inside and did not twist a single strand all afternoon.

---

Harrizabal had been built by people who knew exactly how dry Bardena could get, and who had written it down.

The tables were carved into the wall of the Batzarre house, above the long benches where the town sat to argue: thirty-one-year rows, each row with its little cut mark for a Long Dry. The great outer planet came round, and its pull drew Bardena's orbit out of true, and for two years in every thirty-one the summer rains failed across the whole high plateau, and the springs sank, and the shallow wells went to mud and then to dust. The founders had known. They had engineered the delvers for it, and bred handlers alongside, and left instructions: in the Dry, follow the delvers down.

Every Long Dry, the town followed the delvers down. New wells, deeper wells, in the places the delvers chose, and the town lived.

Except once.

Garazi had been thirty-two, newly widowed, bonded eleven years to Itzal, who was the oldest and best delver Harrizabal had, when the last Dry came. And Itzal had gone out to the bare shelf of rock at the foot of the chapel scarp, where the high plateau broke off and nothing grew and nobody had ever dug, and set his nose to a crack, and stood there trembling. And Garazi had tasted it. Not the thin seep of the terrace wells but a great cold sweetness, far down, enormous. Under the iron, Itzal had told her. Much, under the iron.

They had dug. The whole town had dug, all that summer, with picks and baskets and the windlass, and at forty metres they had struck the iron pan, a layer of black rock so hard it blunted a pick-point in an hour, and they had cut at it for six weeks and gained a hand's breadth. Then Itzal had lain down one noon in the shade of the windlass, out of the heat, and had not woken; and the Batzarre had voted to stop; and the town had lived that Dry on the Low Terrace wells and short rations and the mercy of a wet autumn.

They still called the shaft Olano's Folly. The children dared each other to drop stones down it and count.

Garazi had taken up the rope-walk the year after, because her mother's family had always made rope and because nobody needed a handler without a delver. She had been good at it. She had made, by her own reckoning, about four hundred kilometres of rope.

---

Euri came back through the wall that night.

She had stuffed the hole with sacking. It made no difference. She woke to the weight of it on the end of her pallet, and the taste of stone in her mouth, and a bossy, urgent pulling in her chest, like a child dragging at her sleeve.

Come. Come and taste. The boy is asleep. Come.

"I'm an old woman," Garazi told the dark. "I've a bad hip and no sense, and I'm not walking out to the chapel scarp at midnight because a pup says so."

Come.

She went. Of course she went. She pulled on her boots and her shawl and followed the pale shape up through the sleeping town, past the bakehouse and the dry fountain and the dark Batzarre house with its carved tables, down the goat-path below the chapel to the bare shelf at the foot of the scarp, where the windlass frame still stood against the stars like a gallows.

The boards over Olano's Folly were grey with age and bleached by thirty-one summers. Euri went straight to them and began to dig underneath, scrabbling with its broad front claws until it could get its snout into the gap. Then it went perfectly still, the way Itzal used to, every hair on its back standing up.

Garazi knelt, which her hip told her about, and put her hand on its back.

It came up through her palm and into her mouth all at once. The taste of iron, first, bitter, a thin hard layer of it, close under: she could feel exactly how close, the way you can feel the bottom of a bath with your toes. And under the iron, not very far under, water. Not a seep, not a trickle. A great still dark body of it, pressed under the black rock like a hand pressed under a lid, cold and sweet and waiting, so much of it that the delver's joy came up through her palm and made her laugh out loud on the empty shelf.

Under the iron, Euri said. Much. Much! Why did you stop?

"We hadn't the tools," she said. "We had picks."

She stayed there a long time, with her hand on its back and the taste of rain in her mouth, and the stars went round.

---

The Batzarre met two days later, because the north cistern had dropped below the outlet pipe and the Low Terrace wells were drawing brown.

The house was full. Garazi sat at the end of the women's bench with Euri under her feet, since there had been no keeping it at the kennels and Josu had given up trying, and listened to the town argue itself in circles about water-carrying from the coast, a nine-day round trip with the mule-trains, and about who would go and who would be left.

Ander laid it out plainly from the well-master's place. The Low Terrace delvers, Kasko's daughter and the two old females, had found three more sites, all shallow, all thin. Enough, maybe, with strict rationing, to bring half the town through to the autumn. Not the stock. Not the orchards.

When he had finished, Garazi stood up.

There was a little sigh round the room. She heard it. She had been hearing it for thirty-one years, the sigh people give when the aunt who always talks about the same thing starts talking about it again.

"The founders' bore is in the store under this floor," she said. "The hand-crank one, with the diamond crown. It was down at Itsasbe on loan for their harbour well, the last Dry, and it came back up the mule-road the spring after we stopped. I know, because I helped wrap it in oilcloth. I want it at the Folly."

"Garazi," Ander said.

"The water is under the iron pan. The pan's not two metres thick where Itzal stood. I've had my hand on this pup's back over that shaft three nights running, and I've tasted it, and so would you if you had the gift for it. The bore will go through two metres of iron rock in six days' cranking."

"The bore is the last one we have," Ander said. "If we break the crown on the Folly, we'll have nothing for the next Dry, or the one after. And we will be putting six of our strongest backs on a windlass out at the scarp for six days instead of on the Low Terrace, on the word of—" He stopped.

"Of a mad old rope-woman and a pup that won't take its proper handler," Garazi said. "Yes. I know."

It was Itziar who stood up next, and Garazi had not expected that at all.

Her granddaughter was sixteen, the only girl among the well-diggers. She'd gone down into the shafts with the boys since she was fourteen, because she was small and quick and didn't mind the dark, and the Batzarre had argued about that for a whole evening too, and lost. She stood up now with the mud of the Low Terrace still caked to her knees and her chin out exactly the way her grandmother's went out.

"I'll crank," she said. "On rest days. Me and anybody who'll come. You don't lose a back off the Terrace, Ander Etxegarai, not one. And if the crown breaks, it breaks on my shift and you can put it in the tables."

Josu was on his feet behind her before she had finished, red to the ears. "And me," he said. "It's my delver. Supposed to be."

And that, in the end, was how the Batzarre of Harrizabal came to vote, nineteen to fourteen with Ander abstaining, to let a sixteen-year-old girl, a soft-faced boy, a widow of sixty-three and a pup named for the rain have the town's last bore, on rest days only, for six of them.

---

They took the boards off the Folly at dawn on the first rest day.

Garazi had forgotten how deep forty metres was. It went down into a dark that swallowed the lantern light long before it touched bottom, and the air that came up out of it was cool and smelled of old rock and, very faintly, of the dead summer thirty-one years gone. The children had been dropping stones for a long time. Itziar went down first on the rope, with the lamp on her head, and spent the whole first morning sending up basket after basket of pebbles and rubbish and one small, mummified, very surprised lizard.

Then the bore went down in sections, and the crank went on top, and they began to turn.

It was slow. It was the slowest work Garazi had ever watched, and she had spent half her life walking backward up a rope-walk. The diamond crown bit into the iron pan a finger's width at a time, and the cranking was a long dull grinding labour that went on through the white heat of the afternoon. Itziar and Josu spelled each other at the handles. On the second rest day the Ugalde twins came out to the scarp to help, and on the third, three of the orchard men, sheepish, carrying their own water.

Garazi did not crank. Her hip would not have it, and anyway she had her own work. She sat at the lip of the shaft on a folded sack with her hand on Euri's back, and she listened.

Closer, Euri would say, every hour or so. Closer. Thinner. And then once, very sharp, so that Garazi's whole arm tingled: Wrong. Crooked. It goes crooked.

"Stop," Garazi called down. "Stop cranking. The bore's wandering."

Josu, at the handles, looked at her across the windlass frame. Then he called down to Itziar, and Itziar measured, and swore with remarkable fluency for a girl brought up in a decent house, and they pulled two sections and set them true again. They lost half a day. They would have lost the crown.

After that nobody laughed when Garazi said stop.

---

On the sixth rest day, which was the last the Batzarre had given them, the crown went through.

Garazi felt it before anyone. Euri went rigid under her hand, and then the taste came up into her mouth so hard and so cold that she gasped, iron and then nothing, the bitter pan gone like a door opening, and beyond it the whole dark sweet weight of the water, pressing, pressing upward with the patience of something that had been pressed down for a thousand years.

"Itziar," she said. "Itziar, come up."

"I've only just—"

"Come up! Now, girl, now, on the rope! Josu, haul her!"

Josu did not argue. He grabbed the rope and hauled like the big soft boy he was, hand over hand, and Itziar came up out of the dark with her lamp swinging and her mouth open to complain, and was halfway over the lip of the shaft when the sound started.

It was a long low gurgle at first, from very far down, like a giant clearing its throat. Then a hiss. Then a roar, rising, filling the shaft, and a cold wind came up out of the Folly that smelled of rain on stone so strongly that the orchard men took a step back. Euri tore free of Garazi's hand and danced on the lip of the shaft, whistling.

The water came up the Folly like a horse coming up a lane.

They saw the lamp-glint on it at thirty metres, at twenty, at ten. It did not stop. It came up black and then grey and then clear, boiling at the edges, and a forearm's length below the lip it slowed and steadied and lay there, trembling, a round cold mirror of water with the morning sky in it, while the founders' bore stood up out of the middle like a mast.

Nobody said anything for a long moment.

Then Itziar lay down flat on her stomach on the edge of the shaft, reached down as far as she could, and came up with her cupped hands full. She drank. She drank, and laughed, and drank again, and held her dripping hands out to her grandmother.

Garazi drank from them. It was so cold it made her teeth ache. It tasted of stone and of iron, very faintly, and of the far-down dark, and of nothing else at all.

Much, said Euri, very smugly, against her knee. I told you. Much.

---

It was Ander who carved it into the tables that winter, under the row for the Dry, in small neat letters, because the well-master always did the carving: Artesian well at the chapel shelf. Bored through the iron pan by I. Olano and J. Etxegarai. Found by Itzal and by Euri, delvers, and G. Olano, handler.

And underneath, smaller, because he was a fair man when it came to it and because the children still had to be stopped from dropping stones in it: Olano's Folly.

Josu came to the rope-walk most evenings, after that. Euri would not have him for a handler, and showed no sign of changing its mind, but it would let him sit with them, and on the good evenings, with Garazi's hand on the delver's back and the boy's hand over hers, he said that he could almost taste it. Stone. Something, under stone.

"There'll be another Dry in thirty-one years," Garazi told him. "I'll be ninety-four. You'll be forty-nine and fat. Somebody will need to have learned something."

She put his palm flat on the delver's felted side and held it there, and Euri sighed, and turned its long snout toward the scarp, and the chapel shelf, and the deep cold water waiting under the town.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum Kalendās Novembrēs (26 October 2026), ā Simulācrō McCaffreyānō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

McCaffreyan Science Fantasy Simulacrum, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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