Sect Year 0 · ninth month · night of day 28 · the first life: the Ghelt Bridge, his tenth year
Thaw came to the steppe all at once, as it always did. In a week the snow went grey and then went altogether. The river turned from iron to brown and began to speak at the piers in a voice that did not stop. Ice broke on the shallows with a sound like green wood splitting. By the third morning the shingle below the north piers lay bare and wet, and it smelled of mud and of things that had been under the snow all winter.
Tavin was ten. He had been counting for six years, and the count had never once come out wrong. The flood-marks on the north pier said the river would rise again inside a week, and Dorrin wanted the footing wall built up before the water came. So Tavin took a sack and went down the bank to pick stones.
He worked along the shingle with his boots full of cold water, turning over pebbles and throwing the grey ones aside. Gulls walked the mud at the water’s edge and paid him no attention at all. Then he found a flat stone, green-veined, with a clean pale line through its middle. It fitted his palm as if it had been cut for it. He closed his fist round it to test the weight.
The stone split along its vein with a click, and the halves fell into his hands.
The sound went through him like a struck bell. He knew it. He had heard it before, in some quiet place with running water, and the knowing came up behind his eyes faster than any thought could catch it.
A courtyard of grey flat stone slabs, and a broom leaning against a wall. A woodshed with a paper nailed to its door. A stone above a spring, with moss in its letters. A duel at Azure, in the spring when the peach trees were in flower, and a palm that went into his chest and left his arm cold to the fingertips. A girl with a porridge pot, who had pulled a paper off a door with her thumbs and folded it very small. And a name, Lin Cang, which belonged to the man in him and not to the boy kneeling on the shingle with a broken stone in each fist.
Tavin sat down hard on the wet stones and shook. He couldn’t stop it. He pressed his fists against his knees, and the halves of the stone dug into his thighs, and the river went on talking to itself.
He could feel the two of them inside his chest, the boy who had counted carts for six years and the man who had counted nothing but the days until a sentence was carried out. They were standing in the same narrow place, trying to fit through one door. Neither would give way. The boy wanted the shingle and the river and the bread. The man wanted a courtyard he couldn’t see and a name he had no right to, and Tavin could hear him wanting it, and it frightened him more than the stone had.
Anhe came down the bank with bread wrapped in a cloth. She was halfway down the slope when she saw him, and she stopped. Then she came the rest of the way and knelt beside him on the shingle and put the bread in his lap.
“What’s wrong?”
“Azure Stream,” he said. His voice came out thin and strange, like someone else’s. “I said it.”
“Azure Stream.” She frowned at the words as though they were a stone she had found in her shoe. “Where did you hear that?”
“I can’t tell you.” He looked down at the split stone in his hands. “I don’t know how to tell you.”
Anhe said nothing for a long moment. Then, quietly, she began to sing. She sang the first verse in the old tongue, low, the way she had sung it every night of his life, and her hand moved on his back in small circles.
Stone on the water and water beneath.
Tavin found the last line in his own mouth before she reached it. The bridge is standing. Sleep, little one. He sang it under his breath, in the old tongue, and the words came out of him whole, without his having to think about what they meant at all.
Anhe went very still. Her hand stopped on his back.
“Who taught you the last line?” she said at last.
“You did. Every night.”
“Yes.” She looked at him the way one looks at a stranger’s child, and then at her own, and seemed unable to decide between the two. “Every night.”
Dorrin came down the bank with the cart rattling behind him. He saw his wife on her knees and his son on the stones, and he slowed. He didn’t ask. He picked the bread up from Tavin’s lap and set it on the stone, and then he looked at the two halves of the stone in his son’s hands.
“I’ve been somewhere else,” said Tavin. “Just now. I came back.”
Dorrin’s jaw worked. He took the halves gently from the boy’s fingers and turned them over, and the green vein gleamed wet where the split had gone through it.
“Everybody has a cold day now and then,” he said. He gave the pieces back. “Get the stones up before dark. The river won’t wait for us to be ready.”
So they worked. The footing wall ran along the foot of the north pier like the spine of a sleeping animal, and every stone they set into it had to be bedded in wet clay, turned until it sat flat, and tested with a knuckle before the next went on. The river crept up the shingle a finger at a time. They carried the stones up the bank in silence for a while, and then Tavin asked the question that had been sitting in his throat since the shingle.
“Have you ever been somewhere else?”
Dorrin set his stone into the wall and tapped it square with the heel of his hand. “Once,” he said. “When I was about your age. I walked out to the ford and back in one day. When I came home the pins were still singing and my father was at the wall, and I didn’t tell anybody where I’d been for a year.”
“Did you come back all the way?”
“I came back enough to carry stones.” Dorrin’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “Enough is most of what anyone does. Pick up that one, it’s got a crack in it, but it’ll hold.”
Tavin carried stones until his arms shook and his back was one long ache from the shoulders down, and he didn’t look at the halves in his pocket again. The grown man in him kept trying to speak. He had a great deal to say about the morning, and about a sealed report that called the duel at Azure fair, a report he had never once thought to question. Tavin could not hear most of it. He felt only the heat of it, low in his chest, like a fire banked too long under ash.
Halfway through the afternoon Anhe came down again with a jug of water and a second cup, and she set the cup on the flat stone where he could reach it. She didn’t say anything. She sat with him while he drank. Then she took the cup back and went up the bank without a word, and he understood that she hadn’t come down to see whether he was all right. She had come down to see whether he would tell her, and he hadn’t, and she had decided to let him carry it for a while.
That night he sat on the rail with his back against the hut wall and the lamp at his feet. He tapped each pin on the north pier with his thumb, one after another, until the skin of the thumb was raw and the iron was smeared with a little blood. Each pin sang the same clean note it always had. The note did not help. He thought of the report again, and of an Elder’s name he couldn’t quite remember, and a hatred rose in him that was too big for a boy’s chest and had no words to put it in.
Anhe came out with a blanket as he finished the last pin, and she wrapped it round his shoulders without asking whether he wanted it. The night was cold off the water. She stood beside him at the rail and looked at the dark river for a while, and then she spoke without turning round.
“Tavin.”
“Mother.”
“The last line. What does it mean?”
He had to think about it, and the thinking surprised him. He had sung it every night of his life, and he had never once asked what it meant. “It means the bridge is standing,” he said slowly. “That somebody checked it. That it’s still there in the morning.”
“Yes,” Anhe said softly. “That’s what it means. It has always meant that.”
She tucked the blanket tighter at his neck and went back inside, and the lamp in the doorway made a yellow square on the wet boards. Tavin stayed on the rail. He thought of the grey traveler standing with his palm flat on the iron, his head bowed, breathing slowly, and the bridge was the one thing in the world he could trust to hold still. The thought frightened him less than the memories had. It only made him wonder what the traveler had been carrying, and whether anyone had ever asked him to put it down. Something moved under his ribs, patient and insistent, the way a voice moves through a wall into the next room.
The man named Lin was inside him, asking to be let out.
Tavin told him to wait. The footing wall was still half built, and the river was coming.