Sect Year 4 · second month · day 7 · the new ford below the broken Span, the lower bank
The water ran full in the gorge. For weeks the river had been feeling its way back to its old bed through the rock, and now it had cut a channel as wide as a road between the walls. The children of the valley had come down to it in a crowd, daring one another to put a hand in. Lin sat on the stone bench by the rail on the lower bank and watched them.
The bench was older than the Span. Someone had cut it from one block of grey stone and set it into the bank facing the water, with an iron rail behind it that the flood had bent and somebody had since straightened. The seat was worn into a shallow dip at one end, as though a great many people had sat there over a great many years and left a little of themselves in the stone.
Lin rested his hand in the dip without meaning to, and it fit. Below the bench a stone trough caught the spring that came out of the rock under the old toll-house. The children filled their cups there, one after another, and drank standing up with the water running down their chins.
