Sect Year 3 · third month · night of day 17 · the twenty-seventh life: Thrice-Bend Ford, his nineteenth year
The ferry-woman hauled him up the bank by the back of his shirt and shoved him through the door of her shed so hard that he went down on his knees on the planks. The shed was low and close, and it stank of tar and fish. Nets hung from the rafters in heavy brown folds, drying. She dragged a double armful of them off their pegs and threw them over him where he crouched.
“Lie flat,” she said. “Under. Don’t come out till I say.”
He lay flat. The nets settled over his back and his legs. They were wet at the hem and smelled of the river, and the cut across his left calf from the reeds began to burn where the mesh pressed into it.
The ferry-woman stood over him with the lantern he had dropped in the reeds. It she had fished out and set on its hook, cold and dented. She was a broad, grey-haired woman with a stiff hip, and her hands did not shake. Her face was as flat and calm as the water at the lower bend.
