Chapter 183: The Boy on the Flats

Nobody went home.

I don’t think anybody decided it. Kesa said wait, and the word went down the beach the way the names had, hand to hand, and three hundred people sat down on the sand where they stood. By the small hours most of them were asleep in heaps, still holding on to each other, like puppies somebody had left out in the cold.

I did the only thing I know how to do at four in the morning on a beach. I made soup.

— • —

“You are putting in too much salt,” said the Scroll.

“You’ve been here eight hours.”

“I have been watching you cook since the alley, talent. Eight hours is not required. It is too much salt.” It shifted on my shoulder. “Also there is sand in me. Everywhere. I have sand in places I did not know I had.”

Yun Shu came and sat by the pot with her book on her knee. She hadn’t slept either. She had the look she gets when she’s been counting all night and the numbers kept being good.

“Morning,” she said.

“Accuracy Division,” said the Scroll. “I wish to discuss the record.”

“No.”

“I have not said anything yet.”

“You’re going to say you’ll take it back now you’re here.” She didn’t look up from the page. “No. You do the legends. I do the record. That was the arrangement.”

“The arrangement was temporary.”

“The arrangement,” said Yun Shu, “has dates in it, which yours never did.”

The Scroll was quiet for a long moment.

“…I will be correcting your commas,” it said at last, with enormous dignity.

“I look forward to it.”

I put my head down and stirred the soup, because if either of them saw my face they’d have stopped, and I didn’t want them to stop.

— • —

The tide went out at dawn.

I mean it went out. Further than I had seen it go in all our time at Asu — further than Pela had ever seen it, she told me later, and she was born there. The sea pulled back and back across the flats until the wet sand shone all the way to the thinning grey, like a floor somebody had just washed and left for us to walk on.

Kesa was standing. I don’t know when she’d got up. She stood at the very edge of where the water had been, with her stick, looking out.

Taro was beside her. He had not slept at all. I don’t think he’d sat down.

Then Iri, who was awake because Iri is always awake when something is about to happen, pointed.

“There,” she said, in Teru, and I knew that one.

Far out on the shining sand, small, somebody was walking.

— • —

He was dragging something. It took me a long while to see what. A net — a small one, the kind they give boys to learn on — trailing behind him across the flats and catching on the ripples in the sand. He was walking slowly and looking around him the way you look around a room you’ve woken up in and don’t recognise.

All down the beach, people woke and stood and went quiet.

Somebody near me lifted a hand to his forehead to make the sign. It was an old man. I don’t think he meant it. I think his hand did it by itself, after a thousand years of being taught to.

Kesa turned her head and said one word to him, sharp.

He put his hand down.

Taro didn’t move. I saw why. His whole body was leaning toward the boy and his feet would not go, like a man at the edge of a roof. For four winters he’d been told that if he ran to the water he would never come back.

Kesa took her hand off her stick and put it flat in the middle of his back.

“Go,” she said. I knew that one too.

And Taro went.

— • —

I’ve seen a lot of people run toward somebody they lost. I have never seen a man that big run that fast. He went across the flats like the sand was on fire, and the boy stopped dead and dropped the net, and then Taro had him off the ground and was holding him so hard I was afraid for the boy’s ribs.

They were too far off to hear. We all stood and watched. Nobody went after them, which I think was right.

After a while they came in together, slowly, Taro with one arm round the boy and the net over his other shoulder, and the boy talking the whole way. Nai went down to meet them and walked back up beside them, translating under her breath, so I got most of it.

“He says he’s sorry he lost the net,” said Nai. “He says he was out on the far bank and the grey came, and he lost the net, and he’s sorry.”

“He didn’t lose it,” I said. “He’s carrying it.”

“He says it’s the wrong net. He says it’s his net, but it’s gone all old.” Nai listened. “He wants to know why everybody’s on the beach. He says is it a festival. He says why is everybody holding hands like at a wedding.”

The boy looked up at his father.

“He says, your beard’s gone grey,” said Nai. “He says, you never cry. Why are you crying?”

Taro said something, thickly.

“He says I do now,” said Nai, and had to stop.

— • —

After Ken, they kept coming.

Not all at once. One, then another, then three together, walking in across the flats out of the thin grey, looking around them, puzzled. A woman with a fish basket. An old man with a pipe in his mouth that had gone out. Two girls who had gone out together to dig clams one winter, and came back still holding hands.

You heard Haru before you saw him.

He laughed. Somewhere out on the sand, a long way off, somebody very tall saw the whole of Asu standing on the beach at dawn and laughed out loud with his whole chest, so you could have heard it from a boat. And the net-mender, who had not said his name in eight years until a foreign woman read his shape in a soup line, dropped everything she was holding and ran.

RECORD. Day 154. Morning. Returned at Asu by midday: 61. First: Ken, son of Taro, aged about twelve. Apologised for the net. The net is fine. Second: Haru, brother of the net-mender. Heard before seen. Into the sea: 0. Signs made against the forehead: 1, withdrawn. — Y.S.

— • —

Dano came up the beach at about noon.

He was about forty, broad, with a bald patch and a good face, and he walked straight up through the crowd like a man coming home from an ordinary day’s fishing and wondering why nobody had started dinner. He stopped in front of Pela.

Pela was sixty-nine years old. She stood there with her hands at her sides.

He looked at her for a long time. Then he said something.

“He says, Pela?” said Nai.

Pela said something back. It was short, and the whole crowd round her laughed, the way people laugh when they badly need to.

“She says, you took your time,” said Nai.

Dano looked past her at Maru. Maru was fifty-one. She had her father’s nose and her father’s shoulders and about eleven more years than her father.

“He says, who’s this?” said Nai.

“Tell him,” said Pela, through Nai, “she’s your daughter.”

Dano stared at Maru. Maru stared at him.

“He says, she’s older than me,” said Nai.

“Maru says, I’ve been busy,” said Nai.

Then Iri pushed out between them and looked up at Dano with her hands on her hips, and said something that made Pela put her face in her hands and Dano sit straight down on the sand.

“What did she say?” I whispered.

“She said, are you my grandfather? You’re very young for one,” said Nai.

— • —

The runners started coming down the coast in the afternoon. Village after village. Yun Shu sat by the pot and wrote down every number they brought, and her hand never shook once, and I watched her do it.

From the twenty-ninth village came a message especially for the keeper. It was from a woman who had once stood at the tide line and said, loudly and rudely, that her husband was called Boru and she would like him back when it was convenient.

“She says he came back,” said the runner, through Nai. “She says to tell the keeper. She says she told him he took his time.”

“Everybody’s saying that,” I said.

“It’s a Teru thing,” said Nai. “You don’t say I missed you. You say you took your time. It means the same.”

— • —

Ken found the pot in the middle of the afternoon.

He came and stood beside it the way every child in Asu does, looking at it with deep suspicion, and then at me.

“He wants to know who you are,” said Nai.

“Tell him I’m the cook.”

Nai told him. Ken said something and pointed at the Scroll on my shoulder.

“He says cooks don’t have gold things.”

“Tell him this one does.”

“Tell him,” said the Scroll, “that I am the most important document in the known world, and that I have spent three months falling in the sea on this man’s account.”

Nai told him a shorter version. Ken looked at the Scroll for a long time. Then he took a bowl, tasted the soup, and made a face exactly like his father’s.

“Ashi-ne,” he said.

Yun Shu wrote it down.

“He’s been back seven hours,” she said. “Who taught him that?”

“Nobody had to,” I said. “It’s in the water.”

“It’s the only true thing anybody on this coast knows about you,” said Yun Shu. “Of course it spreads.”

“I published it,” said the Scroll smugly. “Last night. Reach: one village. It is now two.”

— • —

Kesa did not sit down all day.

She stood at the tide line with her stick and watched them come in across the flats, one by one, and she knew every face. Every one. She had sat with all their families. When the woman with the fish basket came in, Kesa said her name before her own son could. When the old man with the pipe came in, Kesa told him where his wife was buried, so nobody else would have to.

But none of them was Sesa.

I took her soup at noon, and again in the late afternoon. She drank it standing up.

“She says it’s fair,” said Nai, when I asked. “She says they seem to come in the order they were called. Loudest first. Most often first.” Nai looked at the old woman. “She says she called her sister every night for four months, and then not once in fifty years. She says she’s at the back of the line and she put herself there.”

“Tell her I’ll wait with her.”

“She says the cook has soup to make.”

“Tell her the soup’s made.”

Kesa looked at me sideways. Something happened at the corner of her mouth, and she let me stand there.

— • —

The sun went down. The tide turned and started coming back in over the flats, slowly, filling up the ripples in the sand one at a time.

Nobody had come in for an hour. Most of Asu had gone up the beach to their fires, with their lost ones beside them, talking and talking. It was just Kesa and me and Nai at the tide line, and Yun Shu a little way behind with her book shut.

Then, out on the last of the wet sand, in the last of the light, somebody stood up.

She didn’t walk in. She just sat up and then stood, as if she’d been lying there a long while, and looked around. A young woman. Short hair. She stood with all her weight on one foot.

She cupped her hands round her mouth and called a name across the flats, laughing, as if it were a game.

“Kesa!”

Kesa did not move.

The young woman came in across the sand quickly, looking up and down the beach, calling. She was looking for somebody. She looked straight at the old woman at the tide line, and then past her, up the beach, searching every face for a girl of twenty-two who looked exactly like her.

She came all the way up to us and stopped. She looked at Kesa — an old woman with a stick, and grey hair, and her own face — and frowned, puzzled and polite, the way you are with a stranger.

She said something.

Nai didn’t translate it. She didn’t have to. I knew those words. They were the first ones I ever learned in Teru.

What’s your name?