Sect Year 3 · ninth month · night of day 2 · the thirty-first life, the third summer: an orchard valley beyond the Wide Sea, his fourteenth year
The old tree died in the middle of the third summer. Mattin knew it before he reached the wall. There were no leaves on its branches, not even the small curled ones that the lower trees still held out like hands. The bark on the north side had split from the root to the first fork. When he laid his palm against the trunk it was dry and light and cold, though the sun had been on it since dawn.
He stood there with the buckets at his feet and the dust settling into the water. Then he sat down in the tree’s shade, which was thin, and he stayed.
He didn’t carry the yoke down the steps. He didn’t go to the lower rows. The buckets stood on the terrace where he had set them, and a skin of grey dust gathered on their surfaces and then sank, and he didn’t lift them. The sun crossed the top of the ridge and began its slow way down the far side, and the shadow of the wall crept across the terrace by stone, and still he sat.
