Sect Year 1 · eleventh month · night of day 4 · the seventeenth life: the river market at Pellan, his thirty-first year
Peaches at first light. Yeot was twenty, and he counted them the way he had every morning since he was ten: once, all the way down the row.
Thirty-six. The bruised ones sat in the second basket, where they always sat, brown at the shoulder and soft under the skin. He didn’t need to touch each one. He let his eye run along the baskets, and the number was simply there, waiting in the place where a number belongs. He had never once needed to count a row twice. The fishwife across the aisle said it was a trick of the cart. His aunt, before she went into the ground under the sycamore by the bridge, had called it a gift and told him not to brag about it, which he had never done.
Ten years of carts lay between the boy with the thumb and this man with the awning rope in his fist. The cart had come to him the winter his aunt died, with its torn cloth and its iron-rimmed wheels, and with a debt to the ferryman that he had paid off in the second spring. The other years were not on the cart. They had gone the way sold peaches go, into somebody’s mouth, and he didn’t miss them. A year of carts was a year of carts.
