Sect Year 0 · eleventh month · night of day 11 · the third life: the salt coast, his twentieth year
The sea came through the planks before anything else did. It pushed at the foot of the wall, drew back over shingle with a long dragging hiss, and pushed again. Between one push and the next he could hear his own pulse, slow and heavy, as if it belonged to someone lying in the next room. He lay on a bed of reed matting and waited for the wall to become a wall he knew. It didn’t. The air smelled of wood smoke and of something sharper underneath, stone and scorched, the smell of salt water boiled down in iron until nothing was left in it but salt.
Outside the door a woman was counting. “Thirty-one. Thirty-two.” Her voice caught on every odd number, as though she were stepping over something each time.
He tried to sit up. The pain came back now, not all at once but in slow pulses behind the wrappings, each one arriving a little after the last had finished. He breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth and counted the breaths. Calm first. The anger was already in him, hot and close under the ribs, and it would have to wait its turn. He had learned that long before the gate.
Hands found his shoulders and eased him down before he had finished rising. They were rough and cracked across the knuckles and smelled of animal fat.
“Lie still or you’ll open the cloth,” said the woman. “I’m Ketta. This is my house, and the salt is my house too. You’re in the back room where the sacks are kept. The cart man said you’d want the dark.”
“Where is this?”
“The coast. Past the flats.” She lowered herself onto a stool beside him, and the stool complained. “He said the coast takes the blind and doesn’t ask after them. I don’t ask either. What do they call you?”
He hadn’t said his name since the gate. He found that he didn’t want to say it now, with the sea pushing at the wall. Then he said it anyway, because she was waiting. “Vesh.”
She repeated it once, the way a person tries a coin against the teeth to learn its weight. Then she said, “Well, Vesh. Can you count?”
“Yes.”
“Then count these.” Something cold and heavy was set into his right hand, and his fingers were closed round a curved edge. It was a pan’s rim, thick iron worn smooth by years of scraping. “Tap it.”
He tapped it with one finger. It rang high and clean, and the note went out through the room and came back off the sacks.
“Sound,” said Ketta. “A cracked pan goes dull, like a dropped bowl. A sound pan sings. You count the pans, not the days. The days don’t pay for anything.”
He held the rim against his palm and tapped again. The habit reached for the iron before he had decided anything, as his hand had once reached for every pin on every gate he passed. Tap. Listen. The note came back steady, and for the first time since the gate something in his chest loosened, a little.
“Good,” said Ketta, and left him with the pan.
* * *
Two days later he had eaten nothing. The bowl she left beside the matting went cold and was taken away, and came back full, and went cold again. He lay with his face to the planks and let the chill come up through his back, and he listened to the salt-men at the boiling sheds. They called to one another over the hiss of the fires. They talked about the tide, the price of driftwood, the new tax on the flats. Once a man laughed so hard he had to stop and cough, and the cough went on a long time, and nobody went to him.
On the second night Ketta sat down outside the door. He heard the stool take her weight and heard her hip complain about it. Then she began to count the pans aloud through the wood, the iron pans of the first boiling and the shallow clay of the second, in order, as the salt-men counted them at dusk.
“Thirty. Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Thirty-three in the back row, which has a crack in its lip, which the foreman says he’s mended, which he has not.”
“Stop,” said Vesh.
“Thirty-four.” She didn’t stop. “I’m not dying for you.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“No. Then eat something. The back row wants scraping in the morning, and I can’t reach it with this hip.”
He ate in the dark, sitting up against the sacks. The bread was coarse and salted and grey at the edges, and he hated how good it tasted. Ketta went on counting until he had finished the last crust. Then she stopped, and the silence through the planks was so complete that he could hear the sea drawing back from the stones.
* * *
The foreman of the sheds was a short man with a bald head and tar on his hands, and he wasn’t sorry about the crack. “It’s sound enough,” he said, when Vesh found the lip with his thumb in the morning light. “Sound enough for a pan that’s going to be scraped by a blind man.” He put a scraper into Vesh’s hand, a flat wooden blade with a leather grip worn to the shape of someone else’s fingers. The grip was warm from the last hand that had held it.
The back row was the hottest place in the sheds. The pans sat over a fire-bed of driftwood and dried weed, and the salt water in them rolled and steamed and dropped its salt in a grey crust as the water went out. Scraping was work for the wrist: a short hard stroke, a lift, another stroke, so the crust came away in flakes and not in dust. He learned it by sound first. A pan with salt in its bottom made a dull hush under the blade. A clean pan rang faintly as the wood went over it. By the end of the morning he could tell one from the other without touching the rim, and the foreman had stopped talking about the crack.
The child came in on the fifth night, carried by a girl of twelve who was too frightened to set her down. The shawl was grey with salt. Under it Ilo was five years old and burning, with the dry heat of bread out of an oven. Her mouth hung open, and every spoonful of water Ketta poured between her lips came straight back up.
“Her mother’s out on the flats until the tide turns,” said Ketta. Her voice was flat and steady, the voice of someone who has decided not to be otherwise. “The physic in town wants two silver before he’ll climb the road. I haven’t two silver. I’ve got the pans, and I’ve got you.” She held the child out across the matting. “You’ve got hands. Hold her wrist. Tell me what you feel in it, or tell me it’s nothing, and I’ll go back and sit with her.”
Vesh took the small wrist between his fingers and was still.
Under his touch the flow was there, quick and thin, running up the arm in a steady push like a stream over pebbles in a dry year. Then, low on the left, it slowed. The current bent round something and slid, and bent again, and the bending was too sharp. It was water pushing at a stone it couldn’t move.
The thread came with it. He had dreamed the open hand on a flour sack in a kitchen full of steam, the grey line across the palm, and the dream rose under his fingers now, faint and fine. It stirred, and then it held still. That was all it would do. It didn’t say whose hand it was. It didn’t say whether the hand was giving or taking. It only showed him where the water was caught.
“Low on the left,” he said. “Below the ribs. There’s a stone in the channel. The flow goes round it, but not enough.”
Ketta’s breath caught. “How do you know that?”
“I counted.” He had counted the drag under each beat, one after another, until the pattern showed where it snagged.
“Can you move it?”
“Press her hip. Here.” He found the place with his thumb and then laid his hand over hers, so she could feel the pressure through her own fingers. “Slowly. Not hard. Keep your thumb on the same spot and wait for it to give.”
Ketta pressed. The child cried out, a thin wail, then coughed, then cried again. Ketta did not take her hand away. Vesh kept two fingers on the wrist and held the sense of the flow steady, as he had once held a pin still until the iron decided. He held it a long time. The stone did not move quickly, and he didn’t ask it to.
Somewhere in the long dark the child’s breathing lengthened. The cough came up once and went down. Then the small body went loose against the matting, the wail was gone, and the only sound left was the sea.
By morning Ilo was asleep with her mouth shut. She kept down a spoon of water, and then another. Ketta sat on the step outside with her face in her hands and did not thank him. She said nothing at all. After a while she got up, went into the boiling shed, and came back with a pan. She set its rim against his palm.
“Back row,” she said. “The foreman’s left the lip for you.”
* * *
By the end of that month the salt-men had stopped using his name. They didn’t need it. When a man came to the sheds with a hand gone stiff from the water gate or a back bent by lifting, they sent him to the sacks at the back. “Go and see the hand,” they said. They said it to the children, and then to the wagon drivers on the road, and then to one another, and the word stuck the way salt sticks to a pan.
On the evening the sea went out furthest, Ketta sat on the step with her bad hip stretched out in front of her. Vesh came out to sit beside her and felt along the stones until he found the warm one by the door, and he gave it to her, and she gave it back.
“You’re Salt-hand here,” she said at last. “Nobody’s asked for the other one.”
He turned the stone over in his fingers. The name Vesh was still in his mouth, and the kitchen was in it, and the palace gate, and the smell that had followed him down the road. He let it stay there, silent. He answered to the new name, and nobody on the coast said the first one again.