Sect Year 1 · fourth month · night of day 10 · the seventh life: Ghadir Wells, his sixtieth year. Dawn of day 11
The house by the upper well had grown old along with him. The plaster had cracked along the window frames, and the water tank roof had been patched so many times that its tiles no longer matched. Haddu lay in the bed by the window and listened to the water. It slapped against the stones of the water tank below, the sound the wells made in spring when they were full.
He was sixty. His hands had gone slow, and the cold got into his knuckles every winter now and stayed there. He had stopped going down to the pans two summers before. Then to the carts, and then to the counting-house, and his grandsons had carried the books up the throat stair one by one, with their coins in their fists. The caravans still brought news to the door. They came in the mornings with the dust on their boots and the smell of the coast on their coats, and they stood beside the bed and told him what the salt was fetching.
The brass tray hung on the wall above the chest, where it had hung for forty-seven years. His younger grandson took it down that morning, because Haddu asked him to, and carried it to the bed in both hands.
