Chapter 192: The End's for Going

The last twelve days went the way last days always go, which is all at once.

Taro came back from the banks and gave me the recipe for his soup. He said it in Teru, slowly, so I’d understand it without Nai, and it was one word.

Less.

“Less what?” I said.

He thought about it, and said it again, and walked off. Nai said that was the whole recipe. Less salt, less fish, less stirring, less everything. She said Taro had worked it out by watching me for five months and doing the opposite.

— • —

Ken gave me a fishhook he’d carved himself, out of bone, very badly. I have it still.

Iri didn’t give me anything. She gave Yun Shu something.

It was a little book, sewn together out of scraps, with a cover made from sailcloth. Iri had been learning her letters out of Yun Shu’s record all summer, which is how the whole coast knew I’d been sick behind a fish rack. On the first page, in large wobbly letters, she had written: RECORD. Day 1.

Yun Shu looked at it for a long time.

Then she took the pencil out from behind her ear — the one she’s had since the Accuracy Division, the one she wrote every case on — and gave it to Iri.

“Dates,” she said, through Nai. “Always dates. And write down the embarrassing things. They’re usually the true ones.”

Iri nodded very seriously and wrote something down straight away. Yun Shu wouldn’t tell me what. I think it was about me.

— • —

The grey writing came the night before we sailed.

Lin Bo. When you sail, I’ll be under you. The whole way. I’m good at holding. Tell the twelve I said goodnight. No — they can hear me. I’ll tell them myself. They’re arguing about the net again.

“Tell it thank you,” I said to the Scroll.

“It knows,” said the Scroll. “I will tell it anyway. Some things you say even when they know.”

— • —

The whole coast came to Asu to see us off. I don’t know how many. Yun Shu stopped counting at nine thousand, which is the only time I have ever seen her stop counting anything.

They stood along the beach in hands, the way Kesa taught them, all the way along the tide line and up into the dunes. The headman of Kawa was at the back. Kesa sent somebody to fetch him to the front, and he came, and stood beside Taro, very pleased.

Maru’s boat was in the shallows with its grey bark sail up. Nai was already aboard, coiling rope, not looking at anybody, which is how Nai says goodbye.

I went round them all. I won’t do every one.

Pela and Dano were holding hands like people half their age. Pela said something, and Nai shouted it from the boat.

“She says Dano’s going to keep the gate fixed till you come back. She says if it squeaks, it means you’re late.”

Hamo shook my hand so hard I felt it in my shoulder, and said something in old Teru. I looked at Kesa. Kesa shook her head.

“She won’t tell you,” Nai called. “She says it’s not polite in modern Teru. She says it was very polite three hundred years ago.”

The headwoman of Sawa told me, through four people, that she would keep a bowl for me at Sawa if I ever came back.

“But she says she won’t eat out of it,” said Nai.

“Tell her that’s fair.”

“She says she knows it’s fair. She says she’s the headwoman.”

Nanu and Kai didn’t say anything at all. They were still holding hands. I don’t think they’d let go since the beach.

Sesa hugged me so hard she lifted me clean off the sand, and said one last thing about my soup, in my ear, in Teru. I understood every word of it. It is the rudest thing anybody has ever said to me, and I have been called the Calamity That Walks.

Mu Chen I left till last but one.

“Don’t let them make you famous,” I said.

“Too late,” said Mu Chen. “They’ve started calling me the one who sits.” He shrugged. “There are worse names.”

“Ashi-ne,” I said.

“There’s that,” said Mu Chen, and hugged me, and let go.

— • —

Kesa was standing at the water’s edge, at the end of the line, with her stick.

I stopped in front of her. Nai was on the boat, too far to translate. It was just the two of us, an old woman with blue-marked ears and a short foreign cook in a mended coat, and about four hundred words of Teru between us, and none of them big enough.

So I said the only one I had.

“Thank you,” I said.

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she said something I’d never heard her say. She said it slowly, carefully, in my own language, in her terrible voice, the way I’d said what’s your name to the children of Asu on the first morning. She must have learned it from Mu Chen. She must have been practising.

“Come back.”

I couldn’t say anything at all.

She nodded once, as if that settled it. Then she turned and walked back up the beach to her sister, the way she had walked up the beach the night she told me to go and tell the sea, and she didn’t look round.

— • —

They sang us out.

The whole coast. Nine thousand people standing in hands on the tide line, singing the half-song west — the Teru half first, the going-west song that the old fishermen used to sing to see how far they could go before they lost their nerve. Kesa’s voice was in it, terrible, every word. So was Taro’s, very soft, and Hamo’s, in words three hundred years old, and Sesa’s, laughing in the middle of a line.

They sang until we were too far out to hear them. Then I saw them still standing there, a long dark line on the sand, until we were too far out to see them either.

Yun Shu stood at the stern with Iri’s little book in her hand and didn’t say anything for an hour.

Then she opened it, and read the first page, and made a sound that was half a laugh.

“What?” I said.

She held it out so I could see. Under RECORD. Day 1, in big wobbly letters, Iri had written one line.

“Nai,” said Yun Shu. “Read it to him. My Teru’s not good enough for her spelling.”

Nai came and looked over her shoulder.

“It says, The cook says he is not sad. He is lying. — I.”

I looked at the sea.

“She’s going to be very good at this,” I said.

“She’s going to be better than me,” said Yun Shu.

“She’s eight,” said Nai.

“So was I, once,” said Yun Shu, and closed the book very carefully, and put it inside her coat next to her own.

— • —

We were thirty days out when the storm came.

It came down the half-song from the north the way Maru had said it would, black and fast, and Maru stood at the steering oar and shouted at her crew in Teru, and they took the sail down, and lashed everything, and lashed us too. I had not been on a sea like that in my life. The waves were taller than the mast. The sky went the colour of a bruise.

And around the boat, about a hundred feet out on every side, the sea went flat.

I want to be exact, because Yun Shu was and I’ve got her book. It did not go calm. It went flat, in a circle, the way Asu bay had gone flat on the night of the song. The storm went on all round us — I could see the waves standing up like walls at the edge of the circle, and the rain coming down sideways — and inside it, the water lay as still as a pond. The boat sat in the middle like a cup on a table.

Maru let go of the steering oar. She stood there in the pouring rain, staring.

She said something, and Nai translated it with her mouth hanging open.

“She says she’s been sailing forty years and the sea has never once done that.”

“It’s holding us,” said Nai, to me, very quietly.

“It is good at holding,” said the Scroll, from inside my coat. “I have told everybody that for years. Nobody listens.”

The storm blew itself out by morning. The circle held the whole night. When it finally let go, at dawn, I swear the water under the boat went up a little, very gently, like somebody setting something down.

— • —

On the thirty-first day we came to the place where the half-song used to break.

It doesn’t break anymore. Nai has sung it whole too many times. But it’s still the place where Maru’s half meets ours, and I knew the moment we crossed it, because the floor came back.

All at once. Like a stair coming up under your foot in the dark.

Eleven hundred million people. The whole known world, believing in me all the way down. Six months of nothing and then all of it at once, the way you feel the warmth of a room after a long time out in the cold. Except it was not a room. It was a world. I had forgotten how big it was.

I sat down on the deck very suddenly.

“Lin Bo?” said Yun Shu.

“I’m fine,” I said. And I was. I wasn’t sick at all. I sat on the deck with my bad knees and my mended coat and the whole world under me again, and I put my face in my hands for a while.

On my shoulder, the Scroll went from thin gold to something I can only call blazing.

“Talent,” it said. Its voice shook. “May I?”

“Yes.”

“May I?”

“Yes.”

“Talent. May I. I have been very good. I have not published one word about you at home for half a year.”

“Yes. Go on.”

[DING.] A NEW LEGEND HAS BEEN PUBLISHED. The cook of Asu is coming home. He is late. He is very sorry. The roof is still leaking. Reach: everyone. Belief: total. Was this legend helpful? 👍

— • —

We sighted the jetty below Saltreach on the fortieth morning.

There was a crowd on it. There was a crowd on the beach, and on the dunes, and on the road down from the town. I couldn’t see the end of it.

But at the very end of the jetty, by the post where I’d left the Scroll in spring, there were only two people.

One of them was standing beside the post, very straight, with her hand flat on top of it, the way you’d check something you’d built was still holding.

The other one was standing on the post. Which the first one clearly did not approve of. And she had both hands cupped round her mouth, and she was shouting across the water at the top of her lungs, and I could hear every word of it long before we were close enough to see her face.

“YOU TOOK YOUR TIME!”

Tao Tao has never been to Teru. I don’t think anybody ever told her what it means there.

She didn’t need anybody to.