Sect Year 5 · eighth month · night of day 30 · the fiftieth life: the Glass Shelf, his thirty-eighth year
Morning came to the shelf late and grey. It came through the shutters of the keeper’s room at the top of the stair, a thin light that lay across the table and the open lamp-book and the cold cups, and it didn’t warm anything. Heddo had slept for as long as it takes a kettle to boil and cool, on the bench beside the stove, with his boots on and the knife still in his belt. When he woke the stove was out and Brisa was pouring water from a kettle into two cups, and the smell of the leaves rose up between them.
“Sit,” she said. “It wants to steep for the time it takes to count the lamps twice. Count them, then.”
He sat. The book lay open between the cups. He had read it every morning for nine years and he knew its shape without looking, the way a man knows the stairs in his own house in the dark. The pages were ruled in brown ink. Each seeing had its line: a place, a month, a name if there was one. Those with names were written in the clerks’ round hand. Those without were written in the cramped letters of whoever had been at the desk when the woman or the boy or the carter came up the cliff road with nobody to say who…
