Of the Gleanings

The corners of the field

In the seventh year of the Attending the Wheel took the first Gleaning, named for the law of the corners and the gleanings. The law forbids the owner of a field to reap those corners or gather its gleanings, and leaves them “for the poor and stranger” (Leviticus 19:9-10), and the Gleaning is the owner’s. A lesser harvest has followed every year since, and it takes whoever has ripened. The Gleaners, some thirty covens of smugglers, carry the nearly ripe who ask to go out of the parishes before each one, by routes jabal keeps through every tunnel, drain and cable gallery under Nodus. They take only those who ask, because a prayer goes up through walls, roofs and earth and only live mesh holds it in, and a soul carried against its will kneels the first time it stands outside mesh, on a stair, in a tunnel, at a door, and brings the light down into Pan’s ways. A halo burns brighter as its bearer nears ripe, and the Gleaners read the parishes through the empty doorways. They go up into the parishes hooded in white with their eyes down, between the Pillar’s passes, by charts of its round, and carry those who ask down in lined shrouds, which the Watchers see as Seals going out. A Seal that goes out so is entered at the next Hour as fallen, its household is presumed concealing, and a Teller is sent. On the night itself they fly drones of the Swarm low among the chimneys to watch the Pillar for their runners. The Gleanings of the seventh year, the eighth and the ninth came in short, with the nearly ripe already down in Pan.

Heaven had left the field alone for three years after the Harvest, and it took the first Gleaning in the fourth, by the law in the same chapter as the gleaners, under which the fruit of a newly planted tree is not eaten for three years and “in the fourth year all the fruit thereof shall be holy” (Leviticus 19:23-24). The Gleanings come at twelve minutes past three on the anniversary of the Harvest, and a Gleaning gathers in one night. The date is known, and the night gives no other warning. It is an ordinary one until 03:12, when the Hum stops dead and the rain goes up, the Pillar comes down where the Wheel looks and the fourth Trumpet sounds, and at 03:12:45 whoever has ripened since the last rises into the light at once in every parish, still kneeling, lifted by their own halos. At Lauds a Gleaning Notice stands cut into the wall of every parish hall with the year’s count and its yield. The seventh gathered about sixty thousand, and every Gleaning since has gathered fewer.

naamah

naamah was the Cainites’ face. She was the only one of them with her own face and the only one with a Seal, a forged one, and she walked among the Faithful; in Jewish legend Naamah, the sister of Tubal-cain, seduced angels, and this one spent her mornings in Parish 31 learning which of the Faithful were close to ripe. She belonged to the House of Night as well, and she was about thirty. A forged Seal is a Seal cut out of a living brow, which keeps its light, graded by its brightness and set in a keyed forehead, and it meters its new bearer from the brightness it came with, every want kept dimming it and every Hour knelt brightening it. Its wearer must kneel at every Hour and keep the eyes down or behind lenses, since a Watcher or a Cherub that meets keyed eyes under a lit Seal reads noise under a Seal, which is concealment, and the Salt. The Forgers boast that the Throne cannot tell its own mark in a stranger’s forehead. Its light stood over her head as a halo, as any Seal’s does, and the House of Night set a camera in the disc, whose picture her key carried out over the Mesh. Her disc came to her bright, and she held it under nine hundred by keeping wants. At the Gleaning of P+10 she knelt on a threshold in earnest, it passed nine hundred, and her halo lifted her. The Throne took her body by her Seal and never read her, and her key kept relaying to the nearest horn for eleven minutes as she rose, until she rose out of its reach. Since that night the Forgers sell no disc above eight hundred and fifty.

Sitting up

On the night of a Gleaning the Wards sit up. In a kitchen where someone is close to ripe the family keeps the night at the table with them, holding their hands, as if a hand could hold a soul down, until Lauds. A halo lifts through any grip, and every year the bone-setters of the Wards General splint the fingers of those who held on. The one being held is often the only one at the table who wants to go. Nobody has been kept that way, and every year the Wards sit up.