Sect Year 6 · fourth month · night of day 7 · the sixty-first life: a gatehouse by still water, in a grey country across the sea, the boy’s ninth year
“Keep the gate shut to those not ready.”
Steady Hand.
Idun was nine the first time the old keeper set a hand over his on the bar. The bar was iron, as long as a grown man’s arm, and it lay across two cradles let into the gatehouse timber. Its middle was bound in cloth that had been changed so many times the grip had gone soft and dark with other people’s palms. The bar did not move unless someone meant it to, and the old keeper meant it rarely.
He had come to the gatehouse with a bundle of clothes and a wooden spoon, sent up the raised stone road by an aunt who could not feed him through the winter. The keeper had looked at him through the wicket, at the spoon and at the boots that were too big for him, and had asked only, “Can you count?” Idun said he could. “Then you’ll count the water,” the keeper said, and opened the small door.
He missed his aunt most in the evenings. She had sung while she kneaded, always the same three lines, and he sometimes caught himself humming them over the animal fat. In the day there were the cradles to oil with animal fat. The bar to wipe down, and the bread to…
