Chapter 181: Shouting at the Sea

I went down to the water that night after everybody was asleep, because I am a stubborn man and I wanted to try the stupid thing first.

The tide was out. The sand was hard and cold, and the grey sat on the far edge of the sea the way it always sits there, like a wall somebody built a long way off and forgot about.

I stood at the edge of the water and cleared my throat.

"Song," I said. "It's me."

The sea did what the sea does. It came in a little and went out a little.

"It's Lin Bo. I'm in Teru. You know where. You sat down in the snow about it." I waited. "They're ready. That's the message. They held. Four hundred people at Asu and a hundred and ninety thousand up the coast. You can let go now."

Nothing.

So I said it louder. Then I said it in my bad Teru, which by then had about four hundred words in it, and not one of them was let go, so what I actually said to the oldest thing in the world was thank you, fish, I'm sorry, very sorry, thank you.

Then I shouted.

— • —

"You're shouting at the ocean," said Yun Shu.

She was standing behind me in her blanket with her hair everywhere. I had not heard her come down the beach.

"I'm talking to it."

"You're shouting. I could hear you from the hut. So could Pela." She came and stood beside me. "Pela thinks it's a foreign prayer. She's sitting up in her doorway with her hands together, being respectful."

"Good for Pela."

"Lin Bo." She put her hand on my arm. "It told you, in the snow. It can't feel this edge. That's the whole problem. You could shout at it till spring and it would never hear a word."

I knew that. I had known it before I came down. I'd come anyway, because the other choice was lying in the hut thinking about Taro's hand going white.

"He didn't let go," I said. "Did you see? It came up and it hung there and it went back down, and not one person let go of him."

"I saw. I wrote it down."

"So they're ready. They did the whole thing. They did it better than we ever did." I looked at the grey. "And the only man on this coast who can tell it so is standing on a beach shouting fish, sorry at the sea."

Yun Shu did not laugh. She is very kind about the moments when I am most ridiculous. She waits until later.

"Come to bed," she said. "Ask Mu Chen in the morning. He's the one who knows about hands."

— • —

Mu Chen knew about hands.

We sat round the fire in the hut in the morning, all of us — Mu Chen and Yun Shu and Nai, Maru, Pela with Iri, and Kesa, who had come without being asked and sat down in the best place as if it had always been hers. Taro had gone out in his boat at dawn, alone, and nobody had stopped him, because sometimes a man has to be on the water by himself, and Kesa said so.

"A numb hand," said Mu Chen. "You've all had one. You sleep on your arm, you wake up, and the hand's there but it isn't yours."

Nai translated. Pela nodded. Iri held up her own hand and looked at it with great interest.

"You can't talk to it," said Mu Chen. "You can't tell it to open. It doesn't hear you, because the part that hears is the part that's asleep." He rubbed his own wrist, slowly. "What you do is work on the arm. Further up, where it can still feel. You rub it and you warm it, and the feeling goes back down a little at a time until it reaches the fingers."

"And then it hurts," said Yun Shu.

"And then it hurts like anything," said Mu Chen. "Pins and needles. That's the feeling coming back. It's supposed to hurt."

Kesa said something.

"She says, so where is the arm?" said Nai.

I looked at the fire.

"Home," I said. "The arm is home. The part of it that can still feel is under our side of the world, where the shore is. Where the Scroll is, and Tao Tao, and eleven hundred million people who talked to it for a whole harvest." I rubbed my face. "Somebody has to tell it from there."

"Forty days there," said Maru, through Nai. "Spring storms on the way. Forty days back."

"I could go," I said.

Kesa said one word. I knew it. It was one of my four hundred.

No.

— • —

"She says you're the cook," said Nai.

"I know I'm the cook—"

"She says if you go home, the cook is gone from Asu for eighty days and Taro stands on the sand next to an empty pot." Nai paused while Kesa went on. "She says she's the one who left for nine weeks to walk the coast, so she knows. She says you don't leave a man the day after his son sinks. Not even to bring the son back."

I had nothing to say to that. Kesa is very often right, and she is never smug about it, which makes it worse.

"So someone else goes," said Yun Shu.

"Nobody goes," said Nai.

We all looked at her.

She had been quiet all morning, which is not unusual for Nai, and staring at the smoke hole, which is.

"That's what a way-song's for," she said. "News. You don't walk news down a shore. You put it on the end of the song and you sing the song, and the news goes where the song goes." She looked at me. "I've sung the half-song west every month since we landed. All the way through, their half and ours. And every time it's held, the whole length, like a rope."

"With weight on the far end," I said.

"With weight on the far end. Pulling." She turned her cup in her hands. "So I'll put the news on the end of it. Teru is ready. I'll sing it west, and it'll go along the road to wherever the road goes, and somebody on the other end will hear it."

"Will it get there?"

"I don't know."

Kesa spoke. It was short and flat, and Nai stopped and looked at her.

"She says no," said Nai slowly. "She says it's not your news."

— • —

I thought Nai would argue. Nai argues with everybody about songs; it is the only thing she argues about. But she sat and listened while Kesa talked, and she translated all of it, and she did not argue once.

"She says the news is that Teru is ready. She says if a foreign woman sings it alone on a beach, then the news is that a foreign woman thinks Teru is ready, and that isn't the same news."

"She's right," said Mu Chen quietly.

"She says this is the first thing Teru has ever said to the sea that wasn't please. She says Teru will say it, in its own mouth." Nai stopped, and when she went on her voice had changed. "She says the old fishermen of this coast had a song too. A going-west song. They'd sing it out past the banks, to see how far they could get before they lost their nerve. It's the Teru half. It always was."

"Had?" said Yun Shu.

Kesa looked at the fire. She said something very quietly.

"She stopped them," said Nai. "Forty years ago. She said a song that goes west goes toward the gap, and she told every village on the coast it mustn't be sung, and they listened, because she'd earned it." Nai swallowed. "She says the last person who sang it in Asu was an old man with a stick called Hoshi. He sang it to her on the sand every night for four months, the winter her sister went. She couldn't bear to hear it after he died."

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then Kesa said something else, and Pela put her hand over her mouth, and Nai laughed — she actually laughed — with her eyes wet.

"She says she has a terrible voice," said Nai. "She says she'll sing it anyway. She says she'd like somebody to stand next to her who has a worse one." Nai looked at me. "She means you."

— • —

It took eleven days to teach it.

The Teru half came back first. It was still there under everything, the way a song you were told not to sing stays in you. Pela knew most of it. The old fishermen knew all of it. On the second evening Taro came in from the boat and stood at the back of the hut listening to Pela get the third verse wrong. Then he opened his mouth and sang it right, and it turned out the biggest man on the coast had the softest voice I've ever heard.

Our half was harder. Nai taught it on the beach every evening, line by line, in the far islanders' tongue, to anybody who came. Children came first. Children always come first. By the fifth evening Iri knew more of it than I did, and corrected me in front of everybody, every time.

"Wrong," she said, through Nai. "It goes up on the bird."

"I went up on the bird."

"You went sideways on the bird."

The children of Asu thought this was the funniest thing that had ever happened. They had a word for my singing by the end of the week. It was ashi-ne. They have one word for everything I do, and it is always the same word.

RECORD. Day 146. Asu learning the half-song, both halves. Attendance at evening lessons: 300+. Kesa attends every night. She stands at the front. Her voice is, as she warned, terrible. Nobody has said so. Lin Bo stands next to her. His is worse. Several people have said so. Words for the end of the song agreed after four nights of arguing. See below. — Y.S.

— • —

The end was the hard part. The news.

They argued about it for four nights. I have seen sect elders argue about the order of a procession for less time and with less shouting. Everybody in Asu had an idea of what you should say to the thing under the sea, and most of the ideas were very long.

"Tell it we forgive it," I said, on the second night, because I thought it would help.

Kesa looked at me. She said one sentence.

"She says no," said Nai. "She says she doesn't forgive it. Not yet. She says she won't tell the sea a lie, and forgiving isn't a thing you can do for somebody else." Nai listened a moment longer. "She says maybe later. She says she'd like to meet it first."

That seemed fair. I said so.

In the end it was four lines, and Kesa made them, and they were not long at all. Yun Shu wrote them down in her book in both languages, and they went like this:

We are on the sand. We are holding hands. Nobody here is alone with a name. Let go. We'll catch them.

There was a fifth line, for one night. A woman from the twenty-ninth village, who had walked down the coast to learn the song, stood up and said it ought to end and Boru's wife says please hurry up.

Kesa let it stand for the whole of that evening. Then she took it out. But I saw her smiling when she did.

— • —

They set the night for the twelfth day, when the moon would be full and the sea still. Kesa sent runners up the coast with the song and the words, village to village, so that the whole shore could sing it at the same hour.

On the eleventh night, Nai went down to the tide line by herself to try the first verse. Just to feel the road.

She sang four lines and stopped.

I was at the pot. I saw her stop. She stood with the water round her ankles and her head on one side, and then she came up the beach very fast, faster than I have ever seen Nai move.

"Lin Bo."

"What?"

"It's pulling," she said. "The weight on the far end. It's never pulled like that." She grabbed my sleeve. "It's got hold of the rope with both hands."