Chapter 195: Sick Behind a Fish Rack

I want to tell this part plainly, because Ji Lan has already told it the other way, and hers has a great deal more thunder in it than there was.

There was no thunder. There was a man on a half-mended roof, being pulled up into the sky like a kite, and two women hanging on to him, and the sound of a hammer still rolling around in a gutter somewhere below.

“Pour it out,” said Bai Qing, through her teeth. Her arms were locked round my waist. Her boots were braced against the ridge. “Like last time. Pour it into us.”

“I’m trying.”

I was. The first time the tide came for me, years ago, I had done exactly that. I’d taken all that belief the world was shoving at me and thrown it wide instead of up — into Tao Tao, Bai Qing, Ji Lan, Mu Chen, Nai’s singers, everybody — and my Renown had gone sideways into a hundred small stars instead of one big one. I knew how. I’d done it.

I did it now. I threw it out, all of it, as hard as I could, at the two women holding on to me.

It came straight back.

It hit me like a wave hitting a wall and coming back off it, and my boots came off the slates entirely, and Tao Tao made a sound I’d never heard her make and hung on.

“It will not go,” said the Scroll. It was clinging to my collar now. Its voice was very fast and very thin. “Talent, it will not go to them. Last time it was belief in what you could do, and that can be shared. This is not that. This is missing. The whole world missed you for half a year. You cannot pour missing into somebody else. It has your name on it.”

“Then what do I do?”

“I do not know,” said the Scroll, and it had never once said that to me in that voice before.

— • —

Yun Shu came out of the house.

She came out to see what the shouting was, with her book still in her hand from the argument with Ji Lan, and she stopped dead in the garden and looked up.

I don’t know what she saw. I know what I must have looked like. A short man in a mended coat, two feet off a roof, with a tall woman round his middle and a small one round his ankle, and the sky behind him gone bright and strange at the edges.

She didn’t scream. She didn’t run for the ladder. She stood very still, the way she stands in a soup line, and looked.

“Yun Shu,” I said. “Any time you like.”

“I’m reading it.”

“Could you read it faster?”

“Hush,” said Yun Shu, and kept looking. Not at me. Past me. At the empty place high up in the evening, where a star would be in an hour.

Then she said, quite calmly, the way she’d said a twin in front of Kesa:

“It’s a hole.”

— • —

“It’s not a legend,” she said. She was talking fast now, the way she does when the shape comes clear. “It’s not belief. It’s a gap. You went away, and the whole world made a hole the shape of you, the way Teru made holes. And every night Tao Tao stood on the jetty and read them the record and they said your name into the hole so it wouldn’t close.” She was walking towards the ladder. “And now you’re back, and the hole’s still there, and it’s trying to put you in it. Up there. Where it thinks you go.”

“I don’t go up there.”

“They don’t know that.” She had her hand on the ladder. “They don’t miss you, Lin Bo. Most of them have never met you. They miss a legend. The man who went east. The one who sailed to the end of the half-song and brought back a whole country. That one belongs in the sky.” She looked up at me. “So give them the other one.”

“What other one?”

Yun Shu held up her book.

“The one who was sick behind a fish rack,” she said.

— • —

“Talent,” said the Scroll. “May I?”

“Yes.”

“May I—”

“YES.”

“Talent—”

“I’m two feet off a roof,” I said. “Ask the third time and publish.”

“May I,” said the Scroll, very fast, and didn’t wait for the answer, which I believe is the only time in its whole existence it has ever not waited.

[DING.] A NEW LEGEND HAS BEEN PUBLISHED. On the day the Calamity That Walks landed in Teru, he was sick behind a fish rack. He denies it. Source: the Record, Day 40. Accurate. Was this legend helpful?

It went out down every thread there was, all at once, to eleven hundred million people. And in the lane below the house, where the crowd had started coming back out of their doors to see what the bright sky was about, somebody laughed.

Then somebody else.

And I came down an inch.

— • —

“It’s working,” said Bai Qing.

“It’s not enough,” said Yun Shu, at the top of the ladder now. “One isn’t enough. They’ve had half a year of the big one.” She turned round on the ladder and looked down at the lane. “Tao Tao.”

Tao Tao was still flat on the roof with both hands round my ankle. Her face had gone grey.

“What?”

“They listen to you. Not me. Not him. You. You read to them every night for half a year.” Yun Shu held out the book. “Read them the rest.”

Tao Tao stared at her.

Then she let go of my ankle with one hand — I felt Bai Qing’s grip tighten to make up for it — and took the book, and got up onto her knees on the ridge of the roof, which is a stupid place to kneel, and turned to face the lane.

There were three or four hundred people down there by then. The ones who’d come to watch me fix the roof, and the ones who’d come back when the sky went strange. Fishwives. Children. Lu, at the very back, with his hands out of his sleeves now.

Tao Tao opened the book and shouted, at the top of her lungs, the way she’d shouted across the water that morning:

“DAY SIXTY-ONE.”

The lane went quiet. They knew that voice. They’d been sitting on the sand listening to it every night since spring.

“LIN BO HAS LEARNED TWO HUNDRED AND TWELVE WORDS OF TERU,” Tao Tao read. “OF THESE, ROUGHLY FORTY ARE NAMES, THIRTY ARE FISH, AND THE REST ARE APOLOGIES.”

The lane laughed.

I came down another inch.

— • —

She read them all.

She read them the soup that was described locally as worse than the sea. She read them the children of Asu greeting me across the beach every morning with a word that meant the stuff you scrape off the bottom of a boat. She read them the singing lessons, and Iri glaring at me for going sideways on the bird.

The Scroll published every one as she read it. Small ones. Gold, but small. DING. DING. DING.

Ji Lan came running up the lane halfway through, with her stack of paper under her arm. She stood at the foot of the ladder and looked up at the roof, and I watched her understand, all at once, what she’d done that afternoon on the wall — four thousand people, and the old keeper’s tears, and the grand voice.

She put the stack down.

“He hit his thumb,” she shouted up at the crowd. “This afternoon. With the hammer. Twice.”

“Three times,” said Bai Qing, into my back.

“Three times,” shouted Ji Lan. “And he put a slate in upside down and Bai Qing had to turn it round. And he can’t sing. At all. Ask anybody in Teru. They’ve got a word for it.”

The lane was laughing properly now. Not the polite kind. The kind people do at a man they know.

DING, said the Scroll. DING. DING.

And my boots touched the slates.

— • —

It didn’t stop all at once. It went slowly, the way a tide goes out, a little at a time and then all of a sudden. I felt the pull let go of my shoulders, then my chest, then my knees. Then I was kneeling on a half-mended roof with Bai Qing’s arms still locked round me and Tao Tao kneeling on the ridge with Yun Shu’s book in her hands, still reading, because nobody had told her to stop.

“DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-SIX,” she was shouting. “HIS IS WORSE. SEVERAL PEOPLE HAVE SAID SO.”

“Tao Tao,” I said.

“SEVERAL PEOPLE—”

“Tao Tao. I’m down.”

She stopped. She looked at me. Then she put the book down very carefully on the slates and sat back on her heels, and her hands were shaking so badly she put them under her arms.

Up in the sky over Saltreach, the empty place was still there, faint. But it had stopped pulling. It just hung there in the dusk like a door somebody had left open, and nobody was walking through it.

— • —

Bai Qing didn’t let go.

“You can let go now,” I said.

“No.”

“I’m down. Look. Knees. Slates.”

“In a minute,” said Bai Qing, into my back, and kept her arms exactly where they were. I could feel her breathing. It was not steady, which in all the years I have known Bai Qing I had never once felt. “I’ve held continents,” she said, after a while. “For eleven hours. On my own.” A pause. “That was harder.”

“I weigh less than a continent.”

“You weigh exactly what you weigh,” said Bai Qing, and let go, finally, one arm at a time, the way you take your hands off something you’ve just set down and aren’t sure will stand.

Yun Shu came up the last rungs of the ladder and sat down on the slates beside me, very carefully, because she does not like heights and never has.

“A star doesn’t walk,” she said. “I said that. Years ago.”

“I remember.”

“I’d like it noted that I was right twice.” She leaned her shoulder against mine. Her hand was cold. “And I’d like it noted that I’m never letting you on a roof again.”

“I have to finish it. There’s one slate.”

“Bai Qing will finish it.”

“I won’t,” said Bai Qing, already picking up the hammer from where somebody had thrown it back up onto the roof. “It’s his.” She held it out to me. “Top. Not the middle.”

— • —

“Talent,” said the Scroll, very quietly. “Your tier has not changed. You are still Mythic. Your Renown did not go up. It did not go wide.” It paused. “I do not have a word for what it did. I think it went down. Towards the ground. I have never seen that happen to anybody.”

DING. New title logged: [Sick Behind a Fish Rack]. New title logged: [Worse Than the Sea]. New title logged: [Three Times, Actually]. Talent, these are the stupidest titles I have ever given anybody. I would like you to know they are my favourites.

Then, under the gold, very faint, in a thin careful old hand:

I felt you go up. From down here. I had your other ankle the whole time. I’m good at holding. — S.