Sect Year 8 · first month · night of day 7 · the sixty-seventh life: the top stair, his sixty-first year
The last flight had no landings at all. It ran up the face of the mountain in one stretch of worn stone, and Aldo climbed it with his stick planted a step above him and his good knee doing most of the work. The other knee had gone on the wet stone between the fourth landing and the fifth. He had come down hard. His hands had found the rail. Then he closed on it, and for a long moment he had hung there with his breath knocked out of him and his heart beating against his ribs like a fist on a door. Nothing had broken. The sickness that moved through the lower villages in the wet season could not come near him, and that was the gift the stair had given him. A fall could still reach him. He had found that out between the fourth landing and the fifth, and then he had got up and gone on.
He was sixty-one. He had thought about the number at the first landing. Meanwhile, the monk with the basket held out a grey stone with a red thread round it and said it would carry the weight of the climb for him. Aldo had refused it. He hadn’t needed a thing to carry him. He had needed to climb, and the climbing was work his own legs would…
