Sect Year 3 · eighth month · night of day 24 · the thirtieth life: a river county beyond the Wide Sea, his sixty-first year
At sixty-one Imrin walked up the flood bank with a lamp in a tin shade, the way he had walked up it at eleven with a slate under his arm. The lamp hung from two fingers. His other hand held a stick cut from an ash sapling, which he had needed since the spring his knees began to fail. The grass on the slope was wet with the evening, so he took the climb slowly and watched where he put his feet.
The river lay low on the far side. Years of rain had carried the silt back toward the middle of the channel. It had left a grey shelf along both banks, drying into plates that curled at the edges and cracked under a boot. Reeds stood up through the plates in thick stands. When the wind came off the water they hissed together, and the sound climbed the bank to him like a crowd murmuring over a list it hadn’t expected to hear.
The granary stood where it had always stood, at the foot of the bank on the landward side. Its roof had come down in the second winter after he left the county’s books, and nobody had put it back. The walls were river stone set in clay that had softened and hardened so often it had the colour of bone.
