Chapter 151: Forty Days

"They can’t all just stand in their doorways," Xue Ningzhi said.

"Why not?" Tao Tao asked, sounding confused. "Everyone has a doorway."

"Four hundred thousand people live on boats."

Tao Tao thought about it for a second. "Then they stand on the boats."

"On the water, during the biggest event in the history of the world?" Xue Ningzhi put her pen down. "When the weight hits, people drop to their knees. I’ve watched it happen in a flat, dry field — so what do you think happens in a fishing fleet?"

Nobody had an answer, so Tao Tao wrote BOATS on the board and underlined it twice, which is how we spent about a third of the forty days.

I want to make this clear: the forty days were mostly just paperwork. The songs aren’t going to mention it. There’s not a single verse about the week we lost just arguing about boats.

— • —

The boat problem got solved on the eleventh day by a woman from the far islands who wasn’t even at the meeting.

Nai walked in, reading off a scrap of paper in her hand. "She says stand in the shallows. Waist-deep, off the beach, arms linked. Not on the boats, and not on the land."

"In the water?" Xue Ningzhi asked.

"Waist-deep water holds you up, but a deck doesn’t." Nai shrugged. "She says she’s been fishing for fifty years; if a guy goes down in waist-deep water with his arms hooked through his neighbors’, he doesn’t sink. He just gets wet, and then he stands back up."

Xue Ningzhi stared at the note for a long time. "...That’s better than anything I had."

"She also says your chart is wrong about the tide."

"My chart is not wrong."

"She says it’s wrong about the tide on the fortieth day specifically," Nai said, "and she’s really sorry, and she wrote out the correct one, and she hopes you won’t be offended."

Xue Ningzhi took the second scrap. She read it twice.

"She’s right," she admitted. "I used the wrong table." She sat down slowly. "Four hundred thousand people, and the answer was a fisherwoman nobody even put on a list."

"Yeah," Nai said. "That happens a lot. You all keep acting surprised by it."

— • —

Mu Chen ran the rotations until people started to hate him.

"Again," he’d say.

"We’ve done it four times already."

"Do it again. Slower." He paced the line of them, counting. "You’re three short on the east side. Where are your three?"

"They’re sick," someone muttered.

"Then you’re carrying their share, but you didn’t slow down for it, so you’ve been faking it the whole time." He stopped right in front of the guy. "On the day, don’t fake it. Drop your hand, say the word, and someone else will take it. Nobody will remember that you did. But everyone will remember if you faked it and it fell."

"It’s just a drill."

"It’s the drill until it isn’t," Mu Chen said, and made them start over.

He did that in ninety different towns. By the third week he’d lost his voice, so he just kept going with a slate and some chalk, writing AGAIN and holding it up, which Tao Tao found so funny she actually cried.

— • —

I went down to the dark every single day of the forty.

"What do I do with my hands?" it asked on the ninth day.

"What?"

"Afterward." The cold shifted. "I have held this since before there were stars. I don’t know what a thing like me does when it isn’t holding."

"I don’t know," I told it. "Sit down, probably. That’s what I did."

"You sat down for three days, then got up and started holding a floor again."

"Well. Yeah."

"That is not very encouraging."

"It’s honest, though." I leaned back against the cold. "Nobody’s going to ask you to do anything. You can sit at the bottom of the world for a hundred years and do nothing at all, and we’ll come down and tell you how the harvest went."

It was quiet for a while.

"I would like that," it said. "The harvest."

On the nineteenth it asked if it would hurt. I told it I didn’t know. On the twenty-fourth it asked if anyone would be angry with it later, when they saw how many it had taken, and I said some of them would and that it would have to carry that weight, and it said it had expected as much and thanked me for not lying.

On the thirty-first it said: "I have been saying goodbye to the water."

"To the ocean?"

"To the holding. It has been the only thing I am for ten thousand ages and I find I am fond of it, which is a stupid thing to be fond of." A pause. "Do not put that in the letter. The Lantern will worry."

"I won’t."

I put it in this account instead, which I think is different, and I hope it forgives me.

— • —

Lu and Tao Tao finished Ping’s manifest on the twenty-second day.

I walked past their fire near midnight and they were on the last sheet, Lu reading names off and Tao Tao writing them down, and neither of them talking about anything else.

"Two hundred and forty left," Lu said.

"Mm."

"You could get some sleep. I can finish this."

"I’m not leaving you to do the last two hundred by yourself at night," Tao Tao said. "You’d make it mean something."

Lu’s pen stopped for a second. "...Yeah," he said. "I probably would."

"So keep reading."

He kept reading. Near the end he said, without looking up, "His name is on it."

"I know. I put it there myself."

"You could leave it off. Nobody would check but me."

Tao Tao set the pen down. "Don’t ever say that to me again," she said. "Not as a test, not as a kindness, not ever. He gets offered. Everybody gets offered. That’s the rule, and the rule is the only reason I can stand to sit at a fire with you."

"I know," said Lu.

"Then don’t test it." She picked the pen back up. "Read."

— • —

Bai Qing walked the floor for thirty of the forty days. All of it, league by league, on foot.

I caught up with her on the thirty-third, somewhere east of the terraces, and she did not stop walking, so I walked with her.

"You could ride it," I said.

"I could."

"Mu Chen says you’ve done nine hundred leagues."

"Eleven hundred." She stepped over a ditch. "You can’t feel a weak place from a horse."

"Have you found weak places?"

"Six." She said it without any particular weight, the way she says everything. "Two were tired towns and Tao Tao has sent people. Three were my own order not standing where I told them to, which is my fault and is fixed. One was a stretch of fen with nobody living in it for eleven miles, so there’s nothing to stand on it, so I’ve bent the weave around it."

"You bent the weave."

"It’s a weave. You can bend it." She glanced at me. "You’re about to ask if it’ll hold."

"I was."

"It’ll hold," Bai Qing said. "I’ve checked it with my feet."

We walked a while after that without talking. About a mile on she said, "My teacher never got a morning like this one."

"No."

"If she had, somebody would have had to hold the floor under her." She kept walking. "I’d have liked that job."

"You’ve got it," I said. "You’ve got it for eleven hundred million of them."

"Yes," she said. "I know. That’s why I’m walking."

— • —

On the twenty-eighth night, the Lantern wrote back.

Nobody expected it. The Scroll had been sending up a letter every night for two years and had never once got so much as a flicker in reply — it had said, more than once, that it did not need one, in the voice of something that badly wanted one.

Then it went rigid on my shoulder at about the second hour and made a noise I had never heard out of it.

"Talent."

"What."

"Talent. Wake up. Wake up."

DING. Incoming. I repeat — INCOMING. Reach: one. Belief: unnecessary. From the Lantern of the Nine Skies, to a whole world, twelve days out: I can see the shore from up here. It is much bigger than I thought it would be. I did not know you had got the far islands into it. Tell the old people on the mountain I heard what they said about carrying more than you think, and I have been laughing about it for four days. I am going to cry when I land. I want that known in advance so nobody panics and thinks something has gone wrong. Twelve days. Keep writing. I read all of them. I have read every single one.

The Scroll did not speak for about a quarter of an hour. Then it said, very small, "They read all of them," and went quiet again for the rest of the night.

I sat up with it. It seemed like the thing to do.

— • —

The warm — the thirty-ninth night.

Nobody ate. I made the soup anyway, because if I had stopped making it on that particular night I think the entire family would have come apart.

"It’s terrible," Yun Shu said.

"I know. My hands are shaking."

"Mine too. Give me the other one." She took the pot off me and stirred it badly. "There. Now it’s terrible in two directions."

Across the fire Ji Lan was writing, and had been all day, and kept crossing things out. Bai Qing was sharpening a sword she has not used in four years, not because she needed it but because her hands needed a job. Tao Tao was asleep sitting up against Mu Chen’s shoulder with her mouth open. Mu Chen, who could not speak at all by then, was holding his slate with SHE IS FINE, SHE IS JUST TIRED written on it for the benefit of anyone who looked worried.

"Show me the sewing," I said.

"No."

"It’s the night before. You said the fortieth day."

"It is the fortieth day tomorrow, which is when I said, and it is tonight now, which is not tomorrow." She ate some of the bad soup. "Also you’d cry, and then I’d cry, and we have eleven hundred million people to hold up in six hours."

"So it’s that kind of sewing."

"It’s exactly that kind of sewing." She leaned into me. "Eat your soup, Lin Bo."

I ate my soup.