Sect Year 6 · fourth month · night of day 9 · the sixty-second life: a walled river town across the sea, the boy’s eleventh to thirteenth year
On the ninth night Lin lay down on his cot, calm and willing, and let his breath go long.
“Cross to the far bank before the lamp is lit.”
Iron Constitution.
The town had a wall of pale stone, and nobody in it knew which quarry the stone had come from. The wall ran down from the hill to the river and stopped at the water, as if the masons had run short of stone before they ran short of wall. Below the east wall the river spread itself over a bed of flat grey stones, and across those stones ran the ford to the Reserve gatehouse and its bell on the far bank. Boats were for merchants. The ford was for everyone else.
Upstream, the millers opened their water gate at dusk. The water came down over the stones in the time it took the bell house lamp to catch, and after that the ford was gone until morning. Every child in the town knew it. Most of them had learned it from a parent’s hand on the back of the neck.
