Chapter 194: The Roof

There was a bucket under the leak in the morning. I hadn’t seen it in the dark.

It was an ordinary wooden bucket, half full of rainwater, sitting on the floor at the foot of our bed. And on the wall beside it, at about the height of a person sitting on the floor, there were scratches.

Short straight lines, scratched into the plaster with something sharp. In rows. In bundles of five. I started to count them and then stopped, because I didn’t need to.

“Two hundred and thirty-one,” said Tao Tao, from the doorway.

She had a cup of tea in each hand and she was not looking at me.

“Every morning,” she said. “I’d come in and empty the bucket and do a line. For the record.” She put one of the cups down on the floor beside me, very carefully. “Yun Shu wasn’t here to do it. Somebody had to keep the dates.”

I looked at the wall for a long time.

“You could have fixed the roof,” I said.

“I could have,” said Tao Tao. “In about an hour. Bai Qing offered on the second day. I told her if she touched it I’d put sand in her boots.” She sat down on the end of the bed. “It was yours. It was a job only you could do. If I fixed it, then there wasn’t one.” She drank her tea. “Don’t say anything nice.”

“I won’t.”

“Good,” said Tao Tao, and didn’t say anything else, and neither did I, and we sat there and drank our tea and looked at two hundred and thirty-one lines on a wall.

— • —

I fixed the roof that afternoon.

By hand. I want that on the record. I am the most powerful being that has ever lived, I am told, and I could have lifted the whole roof off with one thought and set it back down with every slate in place. I didn’t. I went up a ladder with a hammer and a bag of nails and a bundle of slates, like an ordinary man in his forties, and I did it very badly.

The whole of Saltreach came to watch.

“Talent,” said the Scroll, from the ridge of the roof, where it had arranged itself for a better view. “Please.”

“No.”

“Just a small one. THE CALAMITY THAT WALKS REPAIRS A ROOF. People would love it. Look at them. They are already loving it.”

“No.”

“It would be true. I am in the Accuracy Division. I only publish things that are true.”

“It’s a roof,” I said. “It doesn’t need a legend. It needs a slate.” I hit my thumb with the hammer. “And not that one.”

“THE CALAMITY THAT WALKS HITS HIS THUMB,” said the Scroll wistfully, and the crowd below laughed, and I didn’t stop it, because it was true.

— • —

Xue Ningzhi stood at the bottom of the ladder with a board and a pencil.

“I’ve made a list,” she said.

“Of course you have.”

“Risks of the roof.” She read it out. “Item one: falling off. Item two: falling off while being watched by four thousand people, which is worse. Item three: Bai Qing.”

“What about Bai Qing?”

“Item three,” said Xue Ningzhi, “is that Bai Qing is going to come up there and do it properly, and you’re going to let her, and it is going to be very difficult for you.”

“She won’t.”

Xue Ningzhi looked at me over the board.

“She’s been holding the ladder for the last twenty minutes,” she said. “You haven’t noticed.”

I looked down. Bai Qing was standing at the foot of the ladder with both hands on it, looking up at me, with the expression of a woman watching a man put a slate in upside down.

— • —

She came up five minutes later.

She didn’t say anything. She just climbed onto the roof, and crouched down beside me, and took the slate out of my hand, and turned it round the right way, and put it back in my hand.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Nail it at the top. Not the middle.”

“I know.”

“You were doing the middle.”

So we did it together. She handed me slates. I nailed them, at the top, mostly. When I got one wrong she took it out without a word and gave it back to me to do again, and she never once did it herself. I noticed that after a while. She could have finished the whole roof in the time it took me to do one row. She didn’t touch a nail.

“You could do this faster,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you?”

Bai Qing turned a slate over in her hands, checking the edge.

“Because Tao Tao kept it for you,” she said. “For half a year. I’m not going to take it off you now.” She handed me the slate. “I’m just going to make sure it holds.”

— • —

Su Yue came up the lane at about four with a basket of bread. They stood at the bottom of the ladder and called up.

“Did it like the soup line?”

They didn’t mean the bread. I knew exactly who they meant.

“It waited four hours,” I said. “Behind a woman talking about her knees. Nobody noticed it until it got to the front.”

Su Yue laughed — a real laugh, startled out of them.

“Of course it did,” they said. “Neither of us has ever known how to ask for anything. We just stand at the back and wait to be noticed.” They shaded their eyes. “And the twelve? The ones who stayed?”

“They’re still there. Arguing about a net.”

Su Yue didn’t say anything for a while. They stood at the bottom of the ladder with the basket on their arm, looking at nothing.

“It’s got company,” they said at last. Very quietly. “Down there. After all that time.”

“It has.”

“Good,” said Su Yue. They put the basket down by the ladder. “This is for after. It’s not very good.”

“It never is.”

“No,” said Su Yue, pleased. “It never is.”

— • —

Ji Lan arrived in the late afternoon with her stack of paper, sat down on the garden wall, untied the string, and began to read.

Not to me. To the crowd.

“You said it was mine to tell,” she called up at the roof, before I could say anything. “You told it last night. That’s first. Now it’s mine.”

And she read them Teru.

I had heard Ji Lan tell stories for fourteen years and I had never once heard her tell one about something I’d been there for. It was very strange. She read them the soup line, and the old keeper with the stick, and the boy on the flats dragging his net. She did all the voices. She did Kesa’s terrible voice so well that Nai, who was sitting on the grass with her eyes shut, opened them and stared.

When she got to the end — to the old woman on the beach saying come back in a language she’d learned in secret — the whole lane went quiet. Four thousand people, and not a sound but the sea.

“That’s not accurate,” said Yun Shu, from the doorway.

Ji Lan didn’t look up from the page.

“Which part?”

“Kesa didn’t cry. You said she cried. She didn’t.”

“She did on the inside,” said Ji Lan. “It’s true. It’s just not accurate.” She turned the page. “You do accurate. I do true. That’s the arrangement.”

Yun Shu opened her mouth, and closed it again, and went back inside. I think it was the first argument about a record she had ever lost.

On the ridge of the roof, very quietly, the Scroll made a small unhappy sound. I didn’t know what it meant then. I thought it was jealousy.

It wasn’t. It was counting.

— • —

There was one other person watching. I didn’t see him until the light started to go.

Lu was standing at the very back of the crowd, at the end of the lane, with his hands in his sleeves. He wasn’t watching me. He was watching Bai Qing set slates, and every time she set one, his hands moved a little inside his sleeves, the way a craftsman’s hands move when he’s watching somebody else do the work.

Tao Tao saw him too. She was sitting on the wall with her tea.

“He cuts stone,” she said, to nobody. “Not slate.”

“Ask him anyway,” I said, from the roof.

She looked at Lu for a long time. Then she looked away.

“Not yet,” said Tao Tao.

I didn’t push. It isn’t mine to push. But I noticed she’d said not yet, and not no, and I think she noticed too.

— • —

I had one slate left at sunset. The last one, right over the place where the bucket was.

I was kneeling on the roof with it in my hand, and Bai Qing was beside me with the nails, and the crowd had mostly gone home for supper, and Tao Tao was still on the wall. The sky was going orange over the sea. I set the slate in place, at the top, the right way round.

And the Scroll, which had been chattering all afternoon, went completely silent.

I knew that silence. I hadn’t heard it in a long time.

“Talent,” it said. Its voice had changed. All the fun had gone out of it. “Do not move. Listen to me. The tide is back.”

I didn’t need to ask which tide. I could feel it.

It came up under me like the sea coming in. All the belief that had been pressing on me since I stepped off the boat — eleven hundred million people, and then on top of them a whole coast at the other end of the world who called me the cook — and something else now, pulling. Not pressing. Pulling. Upwards.

“You went away,” said the Scroll, very fast. “For half a year. And the whole world missed you, talent. Missing is the strongest belief there is. And Tao Tao kept them saying your name every single night so it would still be yours when you came back, and it worked, it worked too well, and now you have come back—”

I felt my knees lift off the slates.

Just a little. Just an inch. The hammer slid out of my hand and went down the roof and over the gutter, and somewhere below somebody shouted.

“It is not asking,” said the Scroll. “It never asks. The world is deciding. Talent — it is the step above Mythic. It is Canonical. And it is pulling harder than it did the first time, because this time two worlds are doing it.”

I grabbed the rafter with both hands. My whole body was going light, the way a body goes in deep water, and the sky over Saltreach had gone strange and bright at the edges, and I could see, high up in the orange, a place where the stars would be in an hour — an empty place, waiting, exactly the size of a man.

A star doesn’t walk. Yun Shu had said that, years ago, looking at me very levelly across a fire.

Bai Qing already had both arms round my waist.

And then there was a hand round my ankle, small and hard, and I looked down past my own boots and saw Tao Tao. She’d come off the wall and up the ladder and across the roof faster than I’ve ever seen anybody move. She was lying flat on the new slates with her heels hooked over the ridge, holding my ankle with both hands, and she was white to the lips.

“Don’t you DARE,” she said.