Sect Year 6 · fourth month · night of day 7 · the sixty-first life: the gatehouse, his forty-fourth year, and then his seventy-first
The old keeper died on a rainless night, twenty-four years after he had handed over the bar. He died as he had sat for most of those years, on the stone step inside the gatehouse, with his knees drawn up and his lantern set beside him. Idun found him in the grey before the watch changed. The mist had come up off the still water, the old man’s face was turned toward the boards, and his feet were perfectly still.
Idun knelt on the stone and did not get up for some time. He hadn’t thought the keeper would die. He had thought, as a man thinks about the weather, that the old man would go on sitting there until the step wore through beneath him. The lantern had gone out in the night. Idun took it up and held it in both hands without lighting it, as though it were the one thing he had been left to keep.
He had never once said thank you. It came to him now, kneeling there, the way a missing notch shows on a wall. The bread heel in the cold evenings, the animal fat shown him between the palms, the sentence about the feet that the keeper had given him once and never repeated. He had meant to say it on some ordinary morning, when there was…
