Sect Year 1 · ninth month · night of day 9 · the fourteenth life: Brack Quay, his twenty-second year
They were married on the quay steps at low tide, because that was when the steps were dry enough to stand on and the whole quay could come down to see it.
Neighbours brought bread wrapped in cloth. That crock of cider had been cooling in the well since morning. A tar lamp on a long pole that somebody’s brother held up above the crowd. The lamp smoked. It smelled of pitch and of the sea, and the gulls circled over it as though they had been invited too. Ardon stood on the bottom step in his good coat, the one Ebbe had let out at the shoulders the winter before. Then he found that his hands would not stay still no matter where he put them.
“Stop that,” said Imre, from the top of the steps. “You’re fidgeting at me.”
“I’m standing still.”
“You’re standing still with your whole body, which is worse.” She came down two steps, careful of the wet weed, and the whole quay made a noise like a crowd at a race. She wore a blue shawl she had woven herself. Its border ran a thread wider on the left than on the right, because her hands had been cold that winter and the beat had slipped. She had told him so the night she finished it. Then she had said that nobody would ever…
