Chapter 174: Five Foot Seven, Over There

The reading tent at Fenmarch runs every morning, and I took them there on the third day, and I want to put down exactly how it went, because I had told Maru she didn't have to believe me and I had meant it.

She stood at the back with her crew around her and her arms folded. Forty readers at eleven tables, lamps, sheets, the open ground behind each table, the bored healers. Ordinary voices reading ordinary names.

A woman at the third table read a name. A man stood up on the open ground behind her, blinking, a thousand years out of his own time.

"You're in a tent," said the healer. "Come and sit down. There's a chair."

Maru's crew made a sound together, a low sound, like wind.

Maru did not make any sound at all. She watched the next one, and the next, and the one after that. She watched for most of an hour. Then she turned to Nai and said something short.

"She says those are your dead," said Nai. "She says she believes it works for you."

"That's fair."

"She says she wants to know if it works for a Teru."

I looked at her. She was holding the little carved bird again, the one on the cord.

"Tell her she can try," I said. "Here. Now. Tell her there's an empty table at the end."

— • —

She sat down at it the way you sit down at something you're afraid will hurt.

I sat beside her. Nai stood behind. Mu Chen came and stood on the open ground behind the table with the healers, because he could see what was about to happen and he did not want it to happen without him there.

Maru put the carved bird down on the wood in front of her.

"Who was it?" I asked. Nai sang it.

Maru answered without looking up.

"Her daughter," said Nai. "Eleven years ago. A grey winter. She was eight. She carved the bird. Her name was Iri."

"Tell her to say it," I said. "Just once. Clearly. Like she's calling her in for dinner."

Nai told her.

And the captain of the first boat in a thousand years to sail the half-song sat at a reading table in a tent in Fenmarch, in a land where she knew nobody and nobody knew her, in a world where eleven hundred million people believe all the way down that the lost come home — and she said her daughter's name.

"Iri."

Nothing happened for about nine seconds.

Maru's shoulders started to go down.

Then there was a girl standing on the open ground behind the table. Eight years old, brown, short-haired, with the top of one ear marked in blue, in a coat much too thin for an inland winter, looking around at a tent full of strangers with enormous, frightened eyes.

She saw her mother.

She said one word, which did not need translating.

Maru made a sound I will not try to write down, and went over the table, and I do not think her feet touched it.

— • —

I left them alone. Everyone did. The readers at the other tables kept reading, quietly, because that is the rule — you do not stop the reading for one homecoming, there are always more — and the healers went and found a blanket and a cup of something hot, and set them down near the two of them, and went away again.

Mu Chen came and stood beside me at the tent flap.

"She's eight," he said.

"I know."

"Her mother's fifty-one now." He watched them. "That's going to be a very strange thing to carry. Eleven years she didn't get. Iri's going to look up one day and work out that her mother got old without her."

"Rin did that. She was all right."

"Rin had Yuhan," said Mu Chen. "And three hundred thousand people back in Teru haven't got anybody, because nobody over there believes it." He looked at me. "You know what she's going to ask."

"I know."

"Are you going to say yes?"

"I don't know yet," I said, which was the truth.

— • —

She asked that evening, at our fire, with Iri asleep in her lap under two blankets and a third one Tao Tao had produced from somewhere.

It was very simple. Iri came back here because here, everybody believes it. In Teru, nobody does. There are three hundred thousand people in Teru and every one of them has a gap they mustn't touch, and the grey still comes some winters, and every name it takes is down there in the dark, and she could stand on the shore at home and say a name every day for the rest of her life and nothing would come up, because a captain and ten sailors believing it is not enough.

"She wants you to come," said Nai. "She says she can take her daughter home and show them, and some of them will believe her, and most of them will say she's mad, or that it's a trick. She says she needs the man the song is about."

"I'm not the man the song is about."

"She says that's what she'd expect him to say."

I laughed, despite everything.

"Here's the problem," I said, "and tell her all of it, because I'm not going to ask her to bring me over there under false pretences." I put my bowl down. "Over here, I'm the most powerful thing that has ever lived, because eleven hundred million people believe I am. Power in this world is belief. That's the whole rule." I looked at Maru. "In Teru, nobody's heard of me. Three hundred thousand people who have never sung a single song about me. Over there I'm not the Calamity That Walks. I'm a five-foot-seven ex-clerk with a mended coat and bad knees. I've been that before. I know exactly what it's like."

Nai sang it. Maru listened all the way through.

Then she said something, and Nai's mouth twitched.

"She says she knows. She says that's why she wants you."

"Why?"

"She says if the most famous man in the world turned up in Teru as the most famous man in the world, nobody would believe a word he said, because why would they." Nai almost smiled again. "She says if a tired little man with a mended coat turns up and tells them their dead can come home, and stays, and is patient, and doesn't do anything impressive at all — then they might."

Nobody said anything for a while.

"That's the doorway," said Yun Shu, very softly, beside me.

— • —

There was one more thing, and it was the worst thing, and I had been not-thinking about it for two days.

"Talent," said the Scroll.

"I know."

"I cannot cross water."

"I know."

"It is not a choice. It is what I am. I am a road across the sky, star to star, and there are no stars in Teru's sky that I have ever written, and between here and there is forty days of sea, and I cannot go." Its gold had gone thin and pale. "I have been on your shoulder since the morning you sneezed in an alley. I have never once not been on it."

"I know."

"If you go, you go without me. No DINGs. No legends. Nobody to publish you. Nobody to tell the world what you did." A long pause. "You would be a man nobody has written down."

I did not answer for a long time.

"I was that for twenty-six years," I said. "It's not the worst thing."

"It is the worst thing," said the Scroll. "It is the only thing I have ever been afraid of for anybody. Being a person nobody writes down."

"Then I'll write it down myself," I said. "Badly. In a book. And when I come back, you can tell me everything I got wrong, and correct it, and publish the proper version, and complain about my handwriting for a year."

The Scroll was quiet.

"...You will not come back," it said, very small. "People go along the half-song and they do not come back. That is what the half means."

"Maru came back."

"Maru came the other way."

"Then somebody's got to go our way, and finish it," I said. "That's all the song's waiting for. Somebody to sing the end of it."

— • —

The warm — late.

I made the soup. Iri woke up and ate some and pulled a face, and Maru said something to her, and Nai translated without being asked.

"She told her it's how they make it here and to be polite."

"Is it bad?"

"Iri says it tastes like a puddle."

"Tell her she's right," said Yun Shu, "and that she's my favourite person in the whole world now."

Iri, when this was translated, looked at Yun Shu with enormous seriousness and then gave her the rest of her bowl, which Yun Shu has since described as the highest honour of her life.

Later, when it was dark, Yun Shu said, "The boat sails in spring."

"If I go."

"When you go," said Yun Shu, "because you've already decided and you're just letting everybody else catch up." She pulled the blanket over both of us. "And I'm coming. Obviously. I'm not having you be five foot seven in a foreign country on your own. You'll get the onion wrong."

"I always get the onion wrong."

"Not over there you won't. Nobody over there knows what you do with an onion." She leaned on me. "You'll be nobody, Lin Bo. A nobody, in a place that doesn't know your name."

"I know."

"You were good at that," said Yun Shu. "I remember. You were very good at being nobody. It was the being somebody you were bad at."

The Scroll did not say anything at all that night. It sat on my shoulder until morning, and I think it was memorising the weight.