Sect Year 8 · third month · night of day 3 · the silent life: the keeper’s ledge and the family plot above the hives, his thirty-sixth year
Odo Fenn gave him the smoker on the last warm afternoon of the year. He had carried it up from the shed himself, one hand on the wall and the other on his stick. He lowered himself onto the wall above the third terrace with his hat tipped back and his bad knee stretched out in front of him like a plank he didn’t trust. The smoker was older than the hive yard. Its bellows were patched in three different leathers, and its clay barrel had a crack down one side that someone had bound first with copper wire and later with a strip of linen dipped in wax.
“Take it,” Odo said. “It’s the only thing I have left that anyone wants.”
“They want the honey.”
“They want the honey from you. They’d want the smoker from me if I were dead.” He squinted down at the river. “I’m not dead. Put it where I can see it.”
Ossel set it on the wall. The rotten oak punk in the chamber had been packed that morning, and when he worked the bellows a breath of smoke came out, sweet and dry, with the thyme under it. He had breathed that smell through every season for twenty-eight years, since the first morning Odo had put a smoker into his hands on the…
