Chapter 173: The Half-Song

"There's a boat," said Nai.

She had come four days from the coast to say it, which Nai does not do. Nai sends a boy. Nai sends a way-song down the shore and lets it arrive in its own time. In fourteen years I had never once seen her walk inland.

"What kind of boat?"

"Not ours." She sat down by the pot without being asked and held her hands out to it. "Not anybody's. It came in off the east six days ago with eleven people on it and a sail made of something I don't know, and they were nearly dead, and they're not anymore." She looked at me. "They came along the half-song."

Tao Tao, across the fire, put her bowl down very slowly.

"The half-song?"

"The half-song," said Nai.

— • —

I should explain, because I had heard of it maybe twice and never paid attention.

The way-singers of the far islands carry every crossing they have ever made in songs, and no song stands alone — every one has verses of the songs on either side, so a cut song can always be mended from its neighbours. That is the whole craft and it has held for a thousand years.

Except one.

There is a song, very old, that goes east from the last island and does not come back. It has the swell and the stars and the birds for about nine days of sailing, and then it stops in the middle of a line. No far end. No family at the landing. Nobody alive knows who made it or whether anybody ever reached the end of it.

They call it the half-song. Children sing it as a dare.

"And somebody's come in along the other half," I said.

"Somebody came in singing the other half," said Nai. "Our half, backwards, with their own end on it. It fits. I sat with their navigator for two days and it fits, line for line, at the place where ours breaks off." She was very still. "There is a land at the end of the half-song, Lin Bo. There always was. Nobody's been there in a thousand years and they've never been here."

"Why now?"

"That's what you need to come and hear," said Nai. "They've asked for you."

"They know who I am?"

"No," said Nai, and for the first time since I've known her, she very nearly smiled. "That's the other thing you need to come and hear."

— • —

They were at Saltreach, in the longhouse the far islanders keep there, and there were eleven of them, and they were the strangest people I had seen in my life, and I want to be fair to them: I was almost certainly the strangest person they had seen in theirs.

They were tall, all of them, brown and weathered and broad through the shoulders, with their hair cut very short and the tops of their ears tattooed in blue lines that I found out later were their kin-marks. Their boat was beached outside the longhouse, a long double-hulled thing with a sail of woven grey bark, and I have never seen anything that looked further away from home.

Their captain stood up when I came in. She was about forty and had a scar from her eyebrow into her hair, and she looked at me the way you look at a man somebody has warned you about and who has turned out to be shorter than advertised.

She said something. Nai answered in a sort of half-singing that I gathered was the only bridge they had — old crossing-words, bird names, the counting for stars.

"She says her name is Maru," said Nai. "She says she was told on the coast that you're the one to ask about the dead."

"I'm one of them. Tell her my name's Lin Bo."

Nai sang it.

Maru repeated it carefully. "Lin Bo." Then she said something else, and her crew looked at each other, and one of them laughed and covered it.

"She says she's never heard of you," said Nai. "She'd like to know if that's a problem."

I sat down on the bench, because my legs had gone.

"Tell her," I said, "that it is the best thing that has happened to me in fourteen years."

Nai told her. Maru looked at me for a long moment, plainly trying to work out whether I was simple.

Behind me, Tao Tao said, "She's never — she doesn't — how?"

"Because nobody from here has been there in a thousand years," I said. "And the Scroll's never been there, because it can't cross water. And nobody's ever sung about me east of the last island." I put my hands over my face. "I'm a stranger, Tao Tao. I'm just a man in a coat."

"You're the Calamity That Walks."

"Not to her," I said, and I was grinning so hard my face hurt.

"Talent," said the Scroll, on my shoulder, sounding distinctly put out. "I would like it noted that this is not a joke to me."

— • —

It took two days to get their story through Nai's half-singing, and I am going to put it down plainly, because they told it plainly.

Their land is called Teru, and it is long and narrow and runs north to south down a coast with mountains behind it, and there are perhaps three hundred thousand of them, in villages along the shore.

And they have a grey.

That is their word, near enough — Nai sang it as the fog that eats. It comes in off their sea some winters, and it does not kill. It goes through a village in the night, and in the morning there is somebody who is not there, and the people who loved them have a hole in them where a name should be.

"Erasure," said Yun Shu, very quietly. "It's erasure. It's the same thing."

"Since when?" I asked.

Maru answered, and Nai took a long time with it.

"Always," said Nai. "As long as there's been a Teru. They thought it was weather. They have a word for the hole it leaves, and the word means something like the gap you mustn't touch, and they have taught their children for a thousand years not to touch it, and not to go looking, because looking hurts and nothing comes back."

The fire was very quiet.

"Then what changed?" I said.

Maru reached inside her coat and took out a thing on a cord, a little carved bird, and held it up, and said one word.

"The song," said Nai. "Four years ago their fishermen started hearing a song on the water. Out on the far banks, on still nights. They'd hear it a long way off. Hundreds of voices, all at once." Nai stopped. "Lin Bo — it's ours. It's the homecoming. It's the lullaby the far shore sang to the dark. It went out across the water every night for fourteen years and some of it carried."

"How far?"

"Far enough," said Nai, "for a fishing boat on the other side of the world to hear eleven hundred million people singing to the thing under the sea, and ask what it was for."

— • —

Later that night I went outside to get away from the longhouse fire for a bit, and found the youngest of their sailors standing on the beach with his head back, staring straight up.

He was about nineteen. He had not said a word in two days. He was looking at the sky.

Our sky is very full now. It wasn't, when I was young — there were whole stretches of dark between the stars, and old people used to point at the dark and say that's where the forgotten are. But eight million came home, and every one of them is a star again, and the sky over the known world is so crowded now on a clear night that you can read by it.

The boy pointed up and said something to me. I didn't understand a word. I didn't need to.

"People," I said, and pointed up too, and then at myself, and at the longhouse, and at him. "People. Every one."

He looked at me, and then back up, and I watched him work it out.

Then he pointed east, out to sea, the way his boat had come — and held his hand up flat against the sky, and made a slow wiping motion across it.

Empty. That's what it meant. I understood it without a single word of his language. Ours is empty.

I did not have anything to say to that. I stood next to him on the beach for a long while, both of us with our heads back, until his captain called him in.

— • —

Maru said one more thing that night, and Nai did not translate it for a while.

"Go on," I said.

"She says they worked out the words. Some of them. Enough to know it was a song about the dead coming home." Nai's voice was not steady. "She says that in Teru, when they told people about it, nobody believed it. Of course nobody did. A thousand years of don't touch the gap. She says a few of them tried anyway. Stood on the shore and said the names of people the grey took, out loud, the way the song seemed to say."

"And?"

"And nothing," said Nai. "Nothing came back. So most of Teru decided it was a story. A cruelty, even — something the sea does to make you hope." She looked at Maru. "And eleven of them decided that it wasn't, and built a boat, and sailed it along the half-song for forty days, which nobody has done in a thousand years, to come and see for themselves whether it was true."

Maru was watching my face while Nai said it.

Then she said, in very careful, very bad half-song, the first thing she'd ever said to me directly:

"Is it true?"

"Yes," I said.

She did not move.

"Tell her I'll show her," I said to Nai. "Tomorrow. Tell her there's a tent two days inland where they read names every morning, and she can stand at the back and watch, and she doesn't have to believe a single thing I say."

Nai told her.

Maru looked at me a long time. Then she nodded once and sat down, and put the little carved bird back inside her coat, and did not say anything else at all.