Sect Year 3 · third month · night of day 17 · the twenty-seventh life: Thrice-Bend Ford, his nineteenth year
Dawn came up grey over the reeds, and then the sun cleared the raised stone road and turned the water to copper. The last raft grounded on the near bank with its barrels sun-warm and its lashings slack. Men waded out to take its bow rope and stood to their knees in the shallows, and none of them cheered. Bai Shun was still on the rope.
He hadn’t let go of it in the night, and his hands had locked into its shape, so that he had to open them one finger at a time. The boy lay across his knees with his head against the old man’s boot, and his face was turned up to the sky, as it had turned up to the lantern.
“Count them,” the salt-carter said from the gravel. His leg lay out straight, the bandage black to the hip. “You’ve got the count. I’ve got nothing but the leg.”
Bai Shun counted aloud, because the boy had always called them aloud, and it seemed wrong to stop. “Nineteen before the riders came. And the last one.” He looked toward the near bank. There, the last raft ran up on the shingle with men around it in the water. “Twenty across.”
