Chapter 196: The Seat, Not the Throne

Tao Tao didn’t come in for supper.

Xue Ningzhi had made it again, and it was good again, and everybody ate it and talked too loudly about nothing, the way people do after a fright. Ji Lan kept looking at the door. Bai Qing ate in silence and checked the shutter twice. Su Yue had brought more bread, and it was worse than the first lot, and nobody could tell them so.

Tao Tao’s place stayed empty.

I knew where she’d be. I took two bowls and went down to the jetty.

— • —

She was sitting at the very end, by the post, with her knees pulled up and her back against it. It was dark. The sea was quiet. Out on the water, somebody’s boat had a lamp on it.

I sat down next to her and gave her a bowl. She took it and didn’t eat it.

“I did that,” she said.

“You didn’t.”

“I did. Don’t.” She held the bowl in both hands. “Six months. Every night. I stood here and I made four thousand people say your name, so it would still be yours when you came back. That was the whole point. That was my job.” Her voice was very steady, which with Tao Tao is worse than shouting. “And I did it so well I nearly put you in the sky.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You know what I read them?” she said. “Mostly? When they weren’t shouting for the fish rack?” She looked at the water. “I read them the soup line. The man who stayed. The one who wouldn’t go home until the last bowl. I read them the old woman who wouldn’t believe him and the man who waited a hundred days to say his son’s name. I read it well, Lin Bo. I read it so it made them cry.” She swallowed. “I made you so tall.”

“How tall?”

“About forty feet,” said Tao Tao. “In a nice coat.”

And I laughed, and so did she, badly, the way she’d laughed with Old Wen about Ru, and then she put her face down on her knees.

— • —

“Do you know why I did it?” she said, after a while, into her knees.

“To keep my seat. Yun Shu said.”

“That’s the nice reason.” She lifted her head. “Yun Shu always gives the nice reason first.” She turned the bowl round. “It’s because I was scared. Every night. That if they stopped saying it, you wouldn’t come back. Not that you’d drown or anything. Just — that you’d find a place over there where nobody knew who you were, and you’d like it, and you’d stay.” She looked at me. “You did like it. Didn’t you.”

I thought about lying to her. I never have. I didn’t start then.

“Yes,” I said. “I liked being the cook.”

She nodded. She’d known.

“You’re scared of the alley,” said Tao Tao. “Yun Shu told me. Last night, after you’d gone to bed. She said you’re scared that if you leave before the last bowl you’ll be nobody again.” She put the bowl down. “And I’m scared of the opposite thing. That you’ll go somewhere and be nobody’s.” Her chin went. “I was the first, Lin Bo. Before any of them. Before the Scroll had even finished its first legend I was following you down the street. I believed in you when you were a joke. I’ve been the first one to say your name for fourteen years. And then you went somewhere where nobody had ever said it, and I couldn’t stand it. So I stood on a jetty and said it to the sea every night, louder and louder, so it’d reach.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that. I put my arm round her shoulders, and she let me, which she doesn’t often.

“It reached,” I said. “Every night. The Scroll brought it.”

“I know.”

“You kept my seat. You didn’t build a throne. They’re different.”

“Not by much,” said Tao Tao. “Not by very much at all, it turns out. I’ve learned that today.” She leaned on me. “I’ll read them different things now. Small things. True ones.”

“The fish rack.”

“The fish rack,” said Tao Tao, “forever.”

— • —

That was when the Scroll, which had come down to the jetty in my coat and had been very quiet the whole time, made its sound.

It did not ask. It never asks for these.

DING. TIER ASCENSION LOGGED. Tao Tao — [LEGENDARY → MYTHIC]. New title: [The First Believer]. New title: [She Who Kept the Seat]. New title: [Reader of the Fish Rack]. Talent. For half a year she held the whole world’s missing on her own, on a jetty, every night, so that it would not forget a man who was nowhere. And then, in one afternoon, she gave it all back to them as a joke, so that they could keep him without needing to hang him in the sky. I have logged a great many ascensions. I have never logged one that was earned by being brave enough to make somebody smaller. Belief: total. Was this ascension helpful? She saved his life with a fish rack. Yes.

Tao Tao stared at the gold hanging over the dark water for a very long time.

“Oh, no,” she said.

“Congratulations.”

“Don’t.” She put her face in her hands. “Don’t you dare. Now I’ll be in songs. Now there’ll be a verse.” She looked at me through her fingers. “If Ji Lan puts me in a verse about a fish rack I’ll never forgive you.”

“It wasn’t me. It was the Scroll.”

“It was me,” said the Scroll, pleased. “And it will be a very good verse.”

We sat there a while longer. The lamp on the boat out on the water went out.

“Lu was at the bottom of the lane,” said Tao Tao. “When you were up there.”

“I saw.”

“His hands were out of his sleeves.” She picked at a splinter on the jetty. “He’d taken a step towards the ladder. I saw him do it. If you’d gone up any further I think he’d have come up.”

“Would you have let him?”

Tao Tao was quiet for a long moment.

“I’d have let anybody,” she said. “Today. I’d have let anybody up that ladder who could hold on.” She pulled the splinter out and threw it in the sea. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

“No.”

“It doesn’t,” said Tao Tao. “Don’t write it down.”

I didn’t. But the Scroll was in my coat, and I didn’t ask it not to.

— • —

In the morning, Saltreach had gone mad about the fish rack.

I don’t know how else to put it. By breakfast there were children in the lane pretending to be sick behind the drying racks and then standing up and saying I deny it with great dignity. By noon a fishwife on the jetty was selling little carved fish racks for a copper each, and they’d sold out. Somebody had painted WORSE THAN THE SEA on the side of the inn, in very large letters, and the innkeeper had come out to complain and then looked at the crowd outside his door and left it there.

Xue Ningzhi came down to the pot with her board.

“Belief has never been higher,” she said. “I’ve checked it three times.”

“That’s bad.”

“No.” She turned the board round to show me. It was all numbers and arrows, and none of it meant anything to me. “It’s higher than it’s ever been. But for the first time since I started keeping figures, it’s pointing the right way.” She tapped one of the arrows. “Down. Towards the ground. They believe in you more than ever, and they believe you’re a short man who can’t sing.” She put the board under her arm. “I spent twelve years at the Directorate making people believe in things that were bigger than they were. I didn’t know you could do it the other way.”

“Neither did I.”

“Item one of a new list,” said Xue Ningzhi. “Keep embarrassing him.” She went back up the lane. “It’s the safest thing we’ve got.”

— • —

Su Yue found me at the pot in the afternoon. They stood beside it for a while, not saying anything, watching me stir.

“It’ll come back,” they said at last.

I didn’t need to ask what.

“I was Canonical,” said Su Yue. “Before. I know what it feels like when the world decides. It doesn’t stop deciding just because it’s been laughed at once.” They took the spoon out of my hand and tasted the soup and pulled a face. “Every time you go away, and they miss you, it’ll come back. Being missed is the most dangerous thing there is for people like us. I should know. I spent a thousand years up there being missed.”

“Then I won’t go away.”

Su Yue looked at me with great kindness, the way you look at a child who’s said he’ll never be hungry again.

“You will,” they said. “You’re you. You’ll go the moment somebody somewhere needs a pot.” They handed the spoon back. “So go small. When you go. Send things back. Embarrassing things, every day, so they never get the chance to make you tall.”

“Yun Shu keeps the record.”

“Then that’s the answer,” said Su Yue. “It’s a habit now. Tao Tao reads it on the jetty every night. The fish rack. The thumb. The day you said thank you to a fish.” They smiled. “Every family in Teru has a habit, it turns out. Now we’ve got one. Make sure it’s a good one.”

— • —

The post came that night, along the song, the way it does now. Song brings it. It says it likes knowing what people in Teru are having for dinner.

There was a letter from Mu Chen, which said that he and Kesa had sat with eleven families that week, and that Kesa now knew nine words of our language, and that seven of them were rude, and that Sesa had taught her. There was a line from Taro, which was one word, and the word was less.

And there was a page from Iri’s book.

Yun Shu read it by the fire, with her face very close to the paper because Iri’s spelling is not good and her letters are the size of fish. She read it once to herself. Then she went very still.

“What?” I said.

She didn’t answer. She handed it to Nai, who was sitting by the door mending a rope.

Nai read it. Nai’s mouth twitched.

“It says,” said Nai, “RECORD. Day 44. Nanu says the cook and the reader should get married. Everybody at the boat sheds agrees. Kesa says it is not her business. Sesa says hurry up.”

The whole room went quiet.

Ji Lan put down her bowl. Bai Qing stopped checking the shutter. Tao Tao, by the fire, slowly turned round.

I looked at Yun Shu.

Yun Shu looked at me.

Then she took the page back from Nai, folded it very neatly, put it inside her book next to her own, and picked up her pencil — her new one, the one she got after she gave the old one to Iri — and wrote the date.

She didn’t say anything else at all.

Neither did I.

But I noticed she’d written it down.