Sect Year 3 · ninth month · night of day 2 · the thirty-first life: an orchard valley beyond the Wide Sea, his fourteenth year
“Keep the orchard alive through the third drought.”
“Second Breath (unused).”
The yoke sat on his shoulders the way it had sat on them since he was small enough to duck beneath it. It was a length of ash worn pale in the middle by other shoulders before his, and a bucket hung from each end on a loop of cord. Mattin walked the terrace steps with the buckets knocking against his knees. At each turn water slopped over the lip and ran dark down the stone, and the stone drank it, and by the top step it was dry again.
Dawn lay grey over the valley. The pear rows ran down the hillside in nineteen terraces. Each wall was dry stone as high as a man’s chest, and on each terrace stood a row of trees planted by people who now lay in the ground under them. The pears were small and hard and yellow-green. They had been small for two summers. The first summer had been dry, and the second had been drier, and the leaves on the lower rows had curled at their edges like paper held too near a lamp.
