Keg Ritual at Seda

Khalid Conway was thirty-six years old, and he had been laying hedge stakes on the helipad for two hours when Oliver Reimer came storming across the roof like a man with a grievance and a schedule.

"Absolutely not," Oliver said.

Khalid kept hammering. The stake went in crooked. He pulled it back out.

"Good morning to you too," he said.

"This helipad is a cargo zone. I've got a drop-off Thursday. A drop-off, Khalid. With cargo. On this pad. Which you are currently decorating."

"It's not decorating. It's ritual." Khalid set another stake. "The keg tapping is Thursday. The grounds crew drew straws. I lost."

"So lose somewhere else. There's a whole courtyard down there."

"The courtyard floods. Father Anselm said the roof."

"Father Anselm doesn't land a helicopter here," Oliver said. "I do. Well. Not me personally. A pilot does. I schedule the pilot. It's a whole thing."

Khalid looked up at him. Oliver Reimer, forty-one, cargo runner for the valley, lean and sunburned and currently vibrating with schedule anxiety. Two years Khalid had been at Seda, and in those two years Oliver had complained to him at least forty times. It was almost impressive. It was almost a relationship.

(That last thought Khalid filed away and did not examine.)

"There's a yellow circle," Oliver said, pointing at the peeling paint. "The circle stays clear. That's what the circle means."

"I know what the circle means. My hedge is around the circle, not on it."

"Your hedge is AT the circle. Hedging the circle. Which is basically the same as on it, from a regulatory standpoint."

"Whose regulations?"

"Aviation regulations."

"This is a monastery, Oliver. In the mountains. The nearest regulator is a yak."

Oliver opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"I hate that you're right about the yak," he said.

Khalid grinned and went back to his stakes. Behind him came footsteps, light and fast, and then his younger colleague Denys appeared at the roof door carrying a crate and a hammer and radiating the energy of a man who had been told to help and was determined to make it everyone's problem.

"Khalid. Khalid. The hammer. The actual hammer. Brother Marek found it."

"The shipwreck one?"

"The shipwreck one. For the first tap. It's tradition." Denys held it out with both hands, like a relic. Which, to be fair, it basically was. Old iron, wrapped in leather cord, pitted from two centuries of ocean and one century of tapping kegs. "You do the tap. You're the senior hedge layer."

"I'm the only hedge layer."

"Senior by default counts." Denys shoved the hammer at him and dropped the crate. "Also here's the ceremonial nails. I'm going back down. The shredder is beeping and nobody knows why."

"The what?"

"The desktop shredder. Father Anselm bought it for the archives. It's stuck. Half a document in, half out. It's been beeping since last Tuesday." Denys waved and was gone, down the stairs, gone.

Khalid looked at the hammer. Then at the crate. Then at Oliver, who had not left, because Oliver never left, Oliver stayed to supervise his circle.

"You're still here," Khalid said.

"I'm guarding the circle."

"With your body?"

"With my presence."

Khalid laughed, picked up the crate of ceremonial nails, and turned to set it by the keg. That was the mistake. The paint markings on this helipad were old, peeling, and in places lifted at the edges like bad wallpaper, and his heel caught one, a loose flake of yellow, and his whole weight went sideways.

The crate hit the deck. Nails scattered. And the crate, being an old crate, split along one seam, spilling out its contents.

Which were not nails.

Well. Some nails. Under the nails: a desktop paper shredder, gray, dented, with a sheet of paper protruding from its slot like a tongue.

"That's the monastery's shredder?" Khalid said, still half on the ground.

"That's the beeping one?"

"That's the beeping one."

The shredder, as if introduced, beeped.

They both knelt. Khalid got a grip on the paper. Oliver braced the machine. Neither of them said anything for a second, which was unusual, because between the two of them there was usually a running commentary.

"Pull," Oliver said.

"I'm pulling. You hold it."

"I am holding it."

"You're holding it like it's a bird. Firmer."

"I don't want to break it. It's a holy artifact now apparently. It came in a crate of ceremonial nails."

"That's not how it works."

The paper came free with a ripping sound. The shredder made a noise of gratitude and stopped beeping. And then their hands were in the same place at the same time, both reaching to clear the jam in the feed slot, and Khalid's fingers ended up flat against Oliver's knuckles, and neither of them moved.

The roof was quiet. Wind, distant bell, yak somewhere far below being a regulator. That was all.

"Sorry," Khalid said, and didn't pull back.

"Don't be," Oliver said, and didn't either.

Khalid looked at Oliver's hand under his. Weathered, like his own. Five years between them, give or take, and the hands looked like they came from the same drawer.

"We should probably," Oliver started.

"Probably," Khalid agreed.

Neither of them named the thing they should probably. The shredder sat there. The nails sat there. The hammer sat there, being ceremonial. It was, Khalid thought later, the most interrupted roof in Sichuan.

Oliver cleared his throat and sat back on his heels. Khalid did the same. The moment folded itself up and went into a pocket, but it did not leave.

"So," Khalid said, mostly to change the subject, mostly to save himself. "Denys is twenty-five. Marek's twenty-eight. The rest of the crew calls me the old man of the hedges."

"You're thirty-six."

"I know how old I am."

"I'm forty-one," Oliver said. "I win."

"You're not in the competition."

"Everyone's in the competition. That's the beauty of a competition." Oliver picked up a nail, turned it over. "Why does it bother you? The age thing."

Khalid took a breath. Out here you learned to say things plainly, because the wind took everything anyway.

"They're quick," he said. "They run up and down the hill with wheelbarrows. I take the switchback sensibly. And when I started here they all called me sir for the first month, and I know it was politeness, but it stuck in me. Feels like I arrived at everything late. The job. The mountains." He paused. "Other things too. Things I didn't try when I had the nerve."

"What kind of things?"

Khalid looked at him. Oliver looked back, and he wasn't being dense, which was worse, or better, depending.

"Things on roofs," Khalid said.

"Oh," Oliver said. Then, quieter, "Oh!"

The bell rang below them, slow and even. Khalid realized he was still holding a ceremonial nail and had no memory of picking it up.

"I didn't move here to be brave," he said. "I moved here to trim hedges and be left alone. And it worked for two years and then you started yelling at me about a circle."

"You started the yelling."

"I absolutely did not."

"You yelled first. First day. About my truck."

"Your truck was ON my hedge bed."

"My truck was parallel to your hedge bed."

"Parallel is a kind of on."

Oliver laughed. It was a good laugh, unguarded, the kind you don't hear from a man who has been guarding a circle all morning. Khalid found