Sect Year 8 · third month · night of day 3 · the silent life: the ledge school under the plum tree, his twenty-seventh year
In the fourth year he stopped waiting in bed altogether.
He had got up at first light on most mornings for two years, but this time he went straight out to the hives and did not stop at the door to listen. He noticed it only later, when he was halfway along the ledges with the smoke cool in his hands and the river loud below him. He realized that he hadn’t waited for anything that morning. Nobody had told him the waiting was over. He had simply stopped doing it, as a man stops hearing the river in a house that has stood beside it all his life.
There were nine boxes on the third terrace, as there had been since the swarm went into the empty ones. They hummed together in the warm light like one long note held by a patient throat. Each morning Ossel counted them from the end of the row, nine, and kept an eye on the children as they came up the path. That way, none of them would be lost on the steep part by the wall.
