Chapter 176: The End of the Half-Song

The boat sailed in the first week of spring, from the beach below Saltreach, and the whole family came down to see us off, and I want to put down the goodbye that mattered first, because it happened the night before and nobody else was there.

— • —

"I have been thinking," said the Scroll.

It was very late. Yun Shu was asleep. I was sitting up by the embers with it on my shoulder, the way I had sat up every night that winter.

"About what?"

"About who writes it down." Its gold was thin. "When you are over there. For forty days and however long after. Somebody has to keep the record, talent. You know I cannot stand the idea of anything going unrecorded. And you are going somewhere I cannot reach."

"I said I'd write it myself."

"You did. And you would be terrible at it." A pause. "You leave out everything that makes you look good and you exaggerate every time you were frightened. Your records are all modesty and onions. I have read your notes, talent. They are a disgrace."

"Then who?"

The Scroll was quiet a long time.

"Wake her up," it said.

So I woke Yun Shu, and she sat up in her blanket with her hair everywhere, and looked at the Scroll on my shoulder with the face of a woman who has been woken for a reason and would like to know it immediately.

"Accuracy Division," said the Scroll.

"Former."

"You opened two hundred and six cases on him. You lost every one. You filed the reports anyway, and they were the only usable record in your entire province — Ninth Pen said so, in my presence, and I have never forgotten it, and I have resented it for nine years." Its voice changed. "I cannot go. I would like you to be the record while I am gone. Not him. You. Write it down the way you write things down. Exact, and dry, and the truth even when it's embarrassing, and with dates."

Yun Shu looked at it for a very long moment.

"You've never once asked me for anything," she said.

"I have never once needed anything you had." A pause. "I need it now. Please. He's going to be nobody over there, and I cannot bear it if he's also nobody's account."

Yun Shu reached out and, for the first time in all the years I have known either of them, put her hand flat on the Scroll. Just for a second.

"I'll keep it," she said. "Dates and everything. You can correct my style when we get back."

"I shall correct everything," said the Scroll, "and I shall be insufferable," and its voice went in the middle, and nobody said anything else that night.

— • —

In the morning Nai said the thing that made it bearable.

We were on the beach, loading. She was coiling a rope and not looking at anybody.

"The Scroll's a road across the sky," she said. "Star to star. That's why it can't cross water — there's no road there."

"I know."

"A song's a road too. That's the whole of what we do. A road that's sung stays a road." She tied off the rope. "The half-song stops in the middle. It's never been finished. Nobody's ever sung it all the way through, because nobody's ever gone to the end and come back." She looked at me. "If we sing it whole — Maru's half and ours, end to end — it's a road. For the first time. A whole road across the water."

On my shoulder, the Scroll went absolutely still.

"...Are you saying," it said.

"I'm not saying anything," said Nai. "I've never seen it done. I don't know if it'd hold something like you. I'm saying that when we get to the end, I'm going to sing the whole thing, start to finish, because that's my job. And if a road turns up, I'll tell you." She picked up the next rope. "Don't hope. It hurts. But I'd keep an ear out."

The Scroll did not say anything at all. But I felt it on my shoulder, and it had gone from thin gold to something I can only call bright.

— • —

The goodbyes were on the beach. I will not do all of them.

Bai Qing gave me a nod, the one that means a thing is well-built and will hold, and then took my hand and held on a second longer than she has ever done in public, and let go.

Ji Lan said she wasn't going to tell any of it while we were gone, not one word, so that when we came back it would all be ours to tell first. Then she said, "Come back," and walked off very fast up the beach before anybody could see her face.

Xue Ningzhi handed me a list of everything that could go wrong. It was eleven pages long. At the bottom, in a different ink, she had written: Item 412: I will miss you. Not a risk. Just noting it.

Mu Chen's healers lined the beach and did not say anything, because Mu Chen had told them a goodbye is not a speech.

And Tao Tao stood at the waterline and did not cry until the boat was far enough out that she thought we couldn't see her, and we could, and Yun Shu and I watched her the whole way until she was a speck.

The Scroll I left on a post at the end of the jetty, where it said it wanted to be, facing east.

"Talent," it said, as I set it down.

"I know."

"No, you don't. Listen." Its voice was very steady. "You were nobody for twenty-six years and I found you in an alley and made you somebody, and I have never once asked whether you wanted it. Over there, you will be nobody again. I want you to know that you were never nobody to me. Not for one day. Not before the alley either, though I didn't know you then." A pause. "That is the whole of my report. Go and finish the song."

I couldn't say anything. I put my hand on it, and then I got in the boat.

— • —

Forty days.

I will tell the crossing short, because Yun Shu has it all, with dates, in a book that is better than anything I could write.

For the first nine days I was still myself. We were inside our own song, in waters the far islanders sing every night, and the belief of the whole known world was still under me like a floor. I could feel it — eleven hundred million people, the way you feel the warmth of a room behind you.

On the ninth day we reached the place where the half-song stops.

I knew the moment we crossed it. Not because anything happened. Because something stopped happening. The floor went. All at once, like stepping off the last stair in the dark. The warmth behind me was simply not there.

I sat down on the deck very suddenly.

"Lin Bo?" said Yun Shu.

"I'm fine," I said, and was sick over the side, which I had not been in fourteen years because a Mythic does not get seasick, and an ordinary man in his forties with bad knees very much does.

Mu Chen came and sat with me, because that is his craft and it doesn't care who I am.

"How does it feel?" he asked.

"Small," I said. "It feels very small."

"Good or bad?"

I thought about it, lying on a wet deck forty days from anyone who knew my name, ill, with my knees aching and nothing under me at all.

"I don't know yet," I said. "I'll tell you when we land."

— • —

And on the ninth night, at the place where the song breaks, Nai stood up in the stern with Maru beside her and the whole of Maru's crew around them, and sang.

She sang our half. All nine days of it, the swell and the stars and the birds, every line of it the far islanders have carried for a thousand years. When she got to the place where it stops in the middle of a line, she didn't stop. She sang straight on into the gap, and Maru's crew picked it up — their half, the other half, in their own language, the stars of a sky I'd never seen — and the two halves met in the middle of the line.

It fit.

Nobody spoke for a long while after. The sea was very flat and very dark and the boat moved on it like something being carried.

"That's the first time," said Nai, at last. "In a thousand years. That's the first time anybody's sung it whole."

"Is it a road?"

"I don't know," said Nai. "Ask me when it's sung back the other way."

— • —

We sighted Teru on the fortieth morning.

A long grey coast, mountains behind it, a line of villages along the shore with smoke going up straight in the still air. Small boats on the water. People on the beach, who saw the double-hulled boat coming in under the grey bark sail, and stopped what they were doing, and stood.

Maru stood at the bow with Iri in front of her, holding her daughter by both shoulders, so the beach could see.

I stood at the back, a short man in a mended coat with a green elbow, where nobody on that shore had ever heard of me, and nobody had ever sung a single song about me, and nobody would look twice.

"Ready?" said Yun Shu, with her book open on her knee and her pencil out.

"No," I said.

"Good," said Yun Shu, and wrote the date.