Chapter 197 We Forgot to Tell Them

Tao Tao broke first.

She made a small noise, like a kettle, and put both hands over her mouth. Then Ji Lan went, with her face in her bowl. Then Xue Ningzhi, who does not laugh, laughed — one short bark, and then she put her board over her face. Bai Qing turned round and looked very hard at the shutter, and her shoulders shook.

Within about four breaths, the whole room was gone.

“It’s not funny,” I said.

“It’s the funniest thing,” said Tao Tao, through her fingers, “that has ever happened.”

— • —

I should explain, for anybody who wasn’t on the hill.

Yun Shu and I are married. We have been for years. She proposed to me in a drainage ditch, while digging, and told me not to make a thing of it. We were married at our cook-fire in the fen, with six people in the ring and the whole world standing quiet on the hill behind it. Mu Chen said the words. Tao Tao held the cup. Everybody in that room had been in the ring or near it.

And we had just spent half a year on the other side of the world, and in all that time, neither of us had once told a single person in Teru.

“It never came up,” said Yun Shu.

She said it with enormous dignity. She was still holding her new pencil.

“It never came up?” said Ji Lan, emerging from her bowl. “Six months. You lived in a hut together.”

“People in Teru don’t ask about that sort of thing.”

“They do, actually,” said Nai, from the door.

We all looked at her. She was still mending her rope. She didn’t look up.

“Pela asked me in the second month,” said Nai. “She asked whether the cook and the reader were brother and sister.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I said I didn’t know.”

“Nai. You were at the wedding.”

“I was on the hill,” said Nai. “Singing. I didn’t see the middle bit. You could have been doing anything down there.” She pulled a knot tight. “Anyway, she didn’t ask if you were married. She asked if you were kin. And you’re not. Not in Teru. Not to look at.”

“What does that mean?”

Nai finally put the rope down.

“Look at your ears,” she said.

— • —

Maru was wintering at Saltreach. The storms had closed the half-song a week after we landed, the way she’d said they would, and she and her crew had pulled the double-hulled boat up past the tide line and taken over half the far islanders’ longhouse until spring. They came to the house most evenings. They liked Xue Ningzhi’s cooking. They were polite about Su Yue’s bread.

So the next evening Nai asked her, and Maru put down her bowl and touched the top of her own ear, where the blue lines ran.

“She says these are kin-marks,” said Nai. “In Teru, each line is a person. Somebody you’re bound to. When you’re born, your mother gives you hers. That’s the first line. Every one after, you choose.” Nai listened. “She says when two people marry, they each put a line on the other’s ear. That’s the whole wedding. A needle and a bit of dye and a line. Everybody who sees you knows.”

“And people with no lines?”

Maru looked at me for a while before she answered.

“She says a person with no lines is a person with nobody,” said Nai quietly. “She says it’s the saddest thing you can see on a Teru face. Bare ears.”

I put my hand up to my own ear without meaning to.

“She says she noticed it the first day you came to the longhouse,” said Nai. “The man they all said was famous, with nobody’s lines. She thought it was a foreign thing. She didn’t say anything.” Nai stopped, and listened to the rest, and went on in a different voice. “She says Kesa noticed too. On the beach at Asu. The first evening. Kesa asked her why the cook had come alone, and Maru said he came with the reader. And Kesa said—”

She stopped.

“Go on,” I said.

“Kesa said, he has no lines. He came alone.”

— • —

Nobody was laughing now.

I sat there by the fire and thought about it. Six months in Teru. Every morning at the pot. Every name I’d said back to people on the beach. And every single person who’d taken a bowl from me had looked at my bare ears and seen a man that nobody, anywhere, had ever chosen.

Which was the thing I’d been afraid of my whole life. The alley. And I’d been walking around Teru wearing it on both sides of my head, and I hadn’t known.

Yun Shu was very quiet beside me. Then she reached up and touched her own ear — just the top of it — and looked at Maru.

“Ask her,” she said to Nai, “if she can do it here.”

Nai asked.

“She says of course,” said Nai. “She says every sailor carries a needle and the dye. You re-mark at sea when somebody new joins the crew.” She listened. “She says she’s done it on a deck in a storm. She says a kitchen is easy.”

“Then I’d like her to,” said Yun Shu.

She didn’t look at me while she said it. She was looking at the fire, very straight, the way she had looked at the ditch while she dug.

“I’d like his line on my ear,” she said. “And I’d like my line on his. And then I’d like to write to Teru and tell them we forgot, and that we’re very sorry, and that the cook didn’t come alone. He never once came anywhere alone.” She picked up her pencil. “Don’t make a thing of it.”

“I’m not making a thing of it.”

“You’re making a face.”

“It’s my face.”

“It’s a thing face,” said Yun Shu, and wrote the date.

— • —

She didn’t say anything else about it until we were in bed, under the new roof, with the rain not coming through.

“I didn’t forget,” she said, in the dark.

“What?”

“Teru. Telling them.” She was lying on her back looking at the ceiling. “I said it never came up. That’s not true. It came up about once a week. Pela’s sister asked me straight out, in the third month, and I changed the subject to fish.”

“Why?”

She was quiet for a long time.

“Because I liked it,” she said. “Being the reader. Not anybody’s wife. Not the Accuracy Division. Not the woman who married the Calamity That Walks. Just a foreign woman in a soup line who could see things.” She turned her head on the pillow. “You liked being the cook. I watched you like it. And I liked being nobody’s anything, for the first time in my whole life. I didn’t want to give it up by saying whose I was.”

I didn’t say anything. I understood it all the way down.

“And it turns out,” said Yun Shu, and her voice went, “that the whole time, every person on that coast looked at you and thought nobody had ever chosen you.” She found my hand under the blanket and held it so hard it hurt. “I’d never have let that stand, Lin Bo. Not for one morning. If I’d known what bare ears meant, I’d have marked you myself on the beach with a fish bone.”

“I wasn’t alone.”

“I know you weren’t,” said Yun Shu. “Now they will too.”

— • —

In the morning everybody in the house was looking at their own ears.

Tao Tao was at the kitchen basin with a hand mirror, turning her head from side to side. Xue Ningzhi had found a second mirror and was pretending not to use it. Su Yue had come across from the second tent to borrow flour and stayed to ask Nai what colour the dye was, and whether it washed off.

“It doesn’t wash off,” said Nai. “That’s the point.”

“Not ever?”

“Not ever.”

Ji Lan was sitting at the table with her chin in her hand.

“And if you put a line on and it turns out to mean the wrong thing?” she said. “Can you take it off?”

Nai asked Maru. Maru shook her head and said something short.

“She says no,” said Nai. “She says that’s why Teru people take a long time choosing. She says some people wait years for a line. She says the waiting is part of it.”

Ji Lan didn’t say anything. She looked at her own bare ear in Tao Tao’s mirror for a while, and then went out into the garden.

— • —

They did it the next night, in the kitchen, after supper.

It was supposed to be small. It was the two of us, and Maru with her needle and a little pot of blue dye that smelled of seaweed, and Nai to translate. Nobody else.

Everybody else was in the doorway.

“Go away,” I said.

“We’re not here,” said Tao Tao. “We’re in the hall. The hall’s a different room.”

“You’re in the doorway.”

“The doorway’s part of the hall,” said Ji Lan.

Bai Qing didn’t say anything. She just stood behind them, a head taller than everybody, with her arms folded, watching.

Maru did Yun Shu first.

It took about as long as it takes to say it. Maru held Yun Shu’s ear between two fingers and dipped the needle and pricked a short line across the top curve, quick and neat, and wiped it with a cloth. Yun Shu didn’t move. She didn’t even blink. When it was done she touched it, very lightly, and looked at her fingertip, which had a little blue on it.

“That’s yours,” she said to me. “That’s you.”

I couldn’t say anything. I nodded.

Then Maru turned round on her stool and dipped the needle again and took hold of my ear.

— • —

The needle bent.

It didn’t go in. It touched my skin and stopped dead, as if she’d tried to push it into a stone, and then it bent quietly in the middle until it looked like a fish hook.

Maru stared at it.

She looked at my ear. She looked at the needle. She took out a second needle, a thicker one, and dipped it, and tried again, harder.

It bent.

The third one bent so hard it made a small ping and flew across the kitchen, and Bai Qing caught it out of the air in the doorway without looking.

Maru held up the bent needles one after the other and said something in Teru, slowly.

“She says she has marked whalers,” said Nai. “She says she has marked a man who fought a shark with a knife and won. She says she has never, in forty years, met an ear like this.”

“Ah,” said the Scroll, from the shelf, where it had been pretending to be asleep. “Talent. I believe I know what this is.”

“What?”

“You are the Calamity That Walks,” said the Scroll. “You are the Floor of the World. Eleven hundred million people believe that nothing can hurt you. Nothing. Not a sword, not a mountain, not the dark under the world.” It paused. “It has apparently not occurred to a single one of them to make an exception for a sewing needle.”

Tao Tao, in the doorway, made the kettle noise again.