Sect Year 8 · third month · night of day 3 · the silent life: the third terrace, his twenty-fourth year
For three years after the first comb, Ossel woke before light and mostly lay still.
He didn’t decide to do it. He simply opened his eyes in the dark, and the clay walls of the house were there, and the smell of cold ash from the hearth, and under everything the sound of the river far down the terraces. Then he lay with his hands flat on the blanket and listened for something he couldn’t name. His body was ready, and nothing had told it what for.
On market days a bell hung from the post at the valley road rang at first light. Just then, the market-warden judged that the carts could come down. Ossel could hear it from the bed, thin and far off, a sound that carried up the terraces as if the valley had been waiting to hand it to him. On the other days the house stayed quiet. He lay in that quiet and waited for something to be given to him.
He waited as a man might wait for a bell he had heard all his life.
