Chapter 191: Everybody Had an Opinion

Maru sailed us back to Asu in a day and a half. Kesa walked. She got there one day after us and said nothing about it, and neither did anybody else, because we wanted to live.

I had nineteen days left to decide, and I couldn't.

So I did what I always do when I can't decide something, which is the worst way there is to decide anything. I asked everybody.

— • —

"She says you can't go," said Nai.

Sesa was standing by my pot with her arms folded. She had said quite a lot more than that.

"She says she hasn't finished being rude about your soup. She says she's only been rude about it for a month, and she was gone for fifty years, and she's got a lot of rudeness saved up."

"Tell her thank you."

"She says it wasn't a compliment."

"Tell her I know."

— • —

The headwoman of Sawa had come down the coast with half her village, to see where the cook lived. She looked at my hut and my pot and my mended coat, and was not impressed by any of them.

"She says go," said Nai, through Hamo, through Kesa. "She says a man who's been away from home that long should go before he forgets where it is." Nai listened to the rest. "She says she should know."

— • —

The headman of Kawa was standing at the back of the crowd when I asked him. He said he didn't think it was his place to have an opinion.

Kesa turned round and looked at him.

He had an opinion very quickly after that.

"He says go home," said Nai. "He says he's very sorry. He says he'd like you to stay. He says both."

— • —

Iri and Ken had the loudest opinions, and the opposite ones.

"She says go," said Nai. "She says Tao Tao's roof is leaking and Tao Tao's been waiting since spring."

"He says stay," said Nai, about Ken. "He says who's going to make the soup."

"She says Taro is."

"He says Taro's soup is too good. He says it isn't ashi-ne. He says he's got used to it."

They argued about it for twenty minutes, in front of my pot, and then went off to the boat sheds together and argued about it there. I don't think either of them was talking about me by the end.

— • —

A runner came from Taro, who was out on the far banks with the boats. Taro had sent one line.

"He says the soup is better without you," said Nai. "He says he means it kindly."

"I know he does."

"He says to tell you that's the kindest thing a Teru man can say to somebody who's leaving. It means we'll manage. Go."

— • —

"Do not ask me," said the Scroll, before I could. "It is not my news."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were. You had the face." It was quiet for a while. Then it said, very small, "I have sand in me, talent. Everywhere. I have had sand in me for half a year."

"That's an opinion."

"It is a fact. I am in the Accuracy Division now. I only deal in facts."

— • —

Kesa I didn't ask. I didn't have to. She'd heard every one of them, standing a little way off with her stick, and she said nothing at all. That worried me more than anything anybody else had said.

— • —

Mu Chen told me on the fourth evening. We were mending a net together outside the hut, very badly, the way two men mend a net when neither of them grew up by the sea.

"I'm staying," he said.

I put the net down.

"The winter," he said. "Maybe longer. Kesa's asked me to teach." He kept his eyes on the knot. "The carrying. She wants every village on the coast to know how to sit toward instead of away. She says she spent fifty years teaching the wrong thing to nine hundred families and she'd like to spend whatever she's got left teaching the right one." He pulled the knot tight. "You can't teach that in nineteen days."

"Your healers—"

"My healers have been running everything without me for half a year. Tao Tao says they're unbearable about it." He finally looked up. "They don't need me, Lin Bo. That's the whole point of teaching anybody anything."

"Nobody here knows you."

"Nobody here knew you," said Mu Chen. "You had a pot."

"And what have you got?"

He held up his hands. Big, steady healer's hands, with a net tangled round the fingers.

"These," he said. "And Kesa. She's the best I've ever seen, and she's only just learned she's allowed to be." He went back to the knot. "I'd like to watch what she does next."

— • —

Yun Shu waited until the seventh night.

We were lying in the hut with the rain on the roof. She had been quiet all evening, which with Yun Shu means she's been reading something and doesn't want to say so yet.

"I'm coming home with you," she said, in the dark.

"You're not. Your list. Four hundred habits."

"I've read thirty-one. If I stay until I've read them all, I'll be here until I'm Kesa's age." She turned over to face me. "Anyway, you haven't decided yet."

"I'm deciding."

"You're not. You've asked everybody on this coast except one person." She was quiet for a moment. "I've been reading you, Lin Bo. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to. It's very hard not to, after a month of doing nothing else."

"What did you read?"

"You've got a habit."

I didn't say anything.

"You always stay till the last bowl," said Yun Shu. "Every job. Every village. Every soup line. I've watched you for fourteen years. You've never once left anywhere while there was still anybody standing in the line." She found my hand. "That's not good manners. It's a habit. It runs deep. And I've never once asked you why."

"Why does it matter?"

"Because that's what we've been doing all month. Finding the thing people do without knowing why, and asking." She held on. "So. Why?"

— • —

I lay there in the dark for a long time with the rain on the roof.

I didn't know. That was the first thing. I thought I knew, and I opened my mouth to say it, and it wasn't there.

"Because when you leave," I said slowly, "people stop needing you."

Yun Shu didn't say anything.

"For twenty-six years nobody needed me for anything," I said. "Not one thing. I filed papers in an office and went home to a room and nobody would have noticed if I'd stopped coming in. Then the Scroll found me in an alley, and suddenly everybody needed me, all the time, for everything." I swallowed. "And I think — I think I've been afraid ever since that if I ever leave before the last bowl, I'll walk back into that alley. And nobody will know I've gone."

The rain went on.

"Lin Bo," said Yun Shu.

"Yes."

"Tao Tao is leaving a roof leaking. On purpose. For half a year. So that there will be a job waiting that only you can do." Her voice was very gentle. "She's keeping your seat."

I started to laugh. I couldn't help it. And then I wasn't laughing, quite, and Yun Shu held on to my hand until I'd stopped, and didn't say anything else at all, which is how I knew she'd decided I'd decided.

— • —

"Before we go," said Yun Shu, in the morning, "I want to teach them the list."

"They can't read shapes."

"They don't need to." She had her book open on her knee by the pot. "That's what I worked out last night. I've been doing the wrong half of the job. The reading's the easy part. Anybody can find the shape if they do the hard part first."

"What's the hard part?"

"Asking why." She looked up at Kesa, who had come down to the pot as she does every morning and was standing beside it. "Nobody on this coast has ever asked why. That's all a gap is, here. A thing you do and never ask about. If they ask — and keep asking, and ask the oldest person in the house, and sit with it — the shape comes. It came for Pela. Her grandmother had already told her. She just hadn't heard it."

Nai translated for Kesa. Kesa listened all the way through.

Then she said something short.

"She says show her," said Nai.

— • —

The third boat shed at Asu belonged to the net-mender's family. Haru's family. It had stood with its roof falling in for longer than anybody could remember, and nobody would touch it, and nobody knew why.

Yun Shu did not go in. She stood outside with her book shut, on purpose. Kesa went in alone with Nai, and sat down with the oldest person in the family — the net-mender's great-aunt, who was nearly ninety and mostly deaf — and asked her.

I stood by the door with Yun Shu and listened to Nai translate.

"Kesa says, why don't you mend the shed?"

The great-aunt said she didn't know. Her mother never did.

"Kesa says, what did your mother say about it?"

The great-aunt thought for a long time.

"She says her mother used to say leave it for when he comes back," said Nai.

"Kesa says, who?"

"She says her mother never said."

Kesa didn't let it go. She sat there, the way she has sat with nine hundred families, and asked again, differently. What else did your mother say. What did she do when she passed the shed. Did she ever go in. Did she ever touch anything.

And slowly — so slowly that Yun Shu beside me stopped breathing — the great-aunt started to remember things she didn't know she had. That her mother always slowed down by the shed. That there was a carved bird over the door, and her mother wouldn't let anybody take it down. That her mother had once, only once, when she was very old, called the shed by a strange name. The boy's shed.

"A boy," said Kesa, through Nai. "Who built boats."

The great-aunt began to cry, without knowing why.

Yun Shu's hand found mine. She hadn't read a thing.

— • —

They called him that evening. The net-mender's family, and Haru, and Kesa, standing in a hand round the falling-down shed. The boy who built the shed. We left it for you. Come back.

The grey came on the Scroll an hour later. I asked him. He says yes.

He walked up from the beach at dusk. About sixteen, thin, with a carving knife still in his belt. He went straight past all of them, into the shed, and stood looking up at the broken roof for a long time.

Then he started to mend it.

RECORD. Day 182. Third boat shed at Asu. Read by: nobody. Asked by: Kesa. Returned: 1. A boy, about sixteen, name not yet known. He will not tell anybody until the roof is done. I did nothing. I want that on the record, underlined. — Y.S.