They buried Pel, son of Corv, at the third hour after midday beside the south stone wing-wall of the canal weir. There, the lowland water-willows trailed their pale green spring catkins in the moving current and every grain barge passing down from Oran had to sound its horn for the lock-keeper.
No sect elder read a scroll over the grave. Old Corren and Jarn lowered the seasoned oak coffin with their own trace-ropes. Young Tomas laid Pel’s braided leather driving whip—its handle still bound with the split-reed splint Seyun had tied on the first afternoon of the march—across the lid before the first spadeful of heavy black canal clay fell. And thirty village farmers stood bareheaded in the damp wind until the mound was turfed with green sedge.
Half an hour after the last spade was rinsed in the canal, Seyun took off his mud-stained coat, tied a coarse hemp apron around his waist over his linen shirt. Then he climbed the sixteen-rung ashwood ladder leaning against the northern roof edges of Marta’s cottage.
For the next two days—across the second and third dawns of the seven-dawn echo countdown ticking behind his breastbone—Seyun’s world narrowed to the smell of wet lime plaster, chopped goat-hair mortar, and heavy grey river-slate.
