Chapter 184: You Took Your Time

Kesa told her.

“Kesa,” she said. Just that. Her own name, in her terrible old voice.

The young woman laughed. Mouth open, all the way, the laugh Pela had told us about. She said something friendly and quick.

“She says, that’s my sister’s name,” said Nai, very low. “She says, you must be from up the coast. Have you seen her? She’s my height. She looks like me. She’ll be cross. I’ve been out too long.”

Kesa did not say anything.

I watched Sesa look at her. Polite, and in a hurry, and then slower. I saw her eyes go down to the old woman’s feet, to the way she stood with all her weight on one foot. Then to her hands on the stick. Then back up to her face, and stay there.

Sesa stopped laughing.

Kesa said something. Very quietly. Five or six words.

“She says,” said Nai, “you still owe me a comb.”

— • —

Nai told me the rest afterward, because I couldn’t follow it and I wasn’t meant to.

The night before the grey, fifty years ago, Sesa had sat on her sister’s comb and broken it in two, and laughed about it, and promised to buy her a new one at the market in the spring. Nobody else knew. Nobody else had been in the room. Kesa had never told anybody — not Pela, not Hoshi, not anyone — because it was the last thing her sister ever said to her, and it was a silly thing about a comb, and it was hers.

Sesa put both hands over her mouth.

She said something through them.

“She says, how long,” said Nai.

“Fifty years,” said Kesa. I knew those words. I’d heard her say them often enough.

Sesa took her hands away. She looked at her sister’s grey hair, and her stick, and the lines on her face, and her eyes filled.

“She says, you got old without me,” said Nai.

“I’m sorry,” said Kesa. I knew that one too. It was one of the first ten.

Then Sesa asked something sharp, and Kesa answered, and Sesa asked something sharper, and Nai, translating, slowly began to smile.

“Sesa asked did she get married. Kesa said no. Sesa asked did she have children. Kesa said no. Sesa asked, well, what did you DO for fifty years?” Nai wiped her eyes. “Kesa said, I sat on the beach.”

Sesa stared at her.

“She says, FIFTY YEARS on the BEACH?”

“Somebody had to,” said Kesa, with enormous dignity.

And Sesa burst out laughing, mouth wide open, crying at the same time — and then Kesa was laughing too, the same way, wide open, the two of them holding each other on the darkening sand. I could not have told you which laugh was whose.

— • —

Pela said it, later, at the fire.

“You still can’t tell them apart when they laugh,” she said, through Nai. “Fifty years, and you still can’t. They both do it open now.”

Sesa was sitting by our fire in a blanket, eating soup. She had been home for three hours. In that time she had found out about the grey, and the hand, and the song, and the thing under the sea, and the foreign cook, and she had asked a great many questions very fast, the way Kesa asks questions, only louder.

She finished the bowl and held it out to me and said something.

“She says—” Nai began.

“I know what she says.”

“She says it’s ashi-ne.”

“I know.”

“She says it’s the worst soup she’s ever had, and she’s been dead for fifty years.”

“She wasn’t dead,” I said. “She was held.”

Nai told her. Sesa thought about that, and nodded, and held out her bowl for more.

— • —

The beach was loud that night.

I want to put that down, because Asu had never been loud. In all our months there it had been a quiet place. People talked low, children’s games stopped when an old person walked past, and nobody sang, because singing might go west.

Now there were fires all down the sand and you could hear them from one end to the other. Dano was fixing Pela’s gate by lamplight because she’d told him to, and Iri was supervising, and every few minutes she told him he was doing it wrong. Ken and three other boys had got hold of the old net and were dragging it up and down the beach for no reason at all, shrieking. Somebody up at the top of the beach was playing a flute very badly. Haru was laughing again. You could hear him from anywhere.

“It sounds like home,” said Yun Shu, beside me.

“It sounds like Saltreach on a festival night.”

“That’s what I said.”

“It sounds,” said the Scroll, “like a great deal of material, and I have no Teru.” It sighed. “Nai. I need lessons.”

“You need to be quiet for one night,” said Nai.

“I have been quiet for five months.”

“Then you’re in practice,” said Nai, and the Scroll was so offended it did not speak again for nearly an hour.

— • —

Taro came by while it was sulking. He had Ken asleep over one shoulder like a sack of fish, and he stood at the edge of our fire and said something to me, short and rough.

“He says the cook can have his boat,” said Nai. “Any time. For anything. For as long as he’s on this coast.”

“Tell him thank you,” I said. “Tell him I get seasick.”

Nai told him. Taro answered at once.

“He says he knows,” said Nai. “He says everybody on the coast knows. He says you were sick behind a fish rack the day you landed.”

I looked at Yun Shu.

“I didn’t tell anyone,” said Yun Shu. “I wrote it down. That’s different.”

“Who read it?”

“Iri,” said Yun Shu, without shame. “She’s learning her letters.”

Taro said one more thing before he went. He didn’t wait for Nai. He said it slowly, in Teru, so that I would understand it with my four hundred words, and I did.

You took your time.

I didn’t know what he meant, at first. I hadn’t gone anywhere. Then I understood. On that coast, it’s what you say to somebody who’s come home.

— • —

Kesa came to our fire late, when the noise had gone down a little. She had Sesa with her, holding her arm, and she sat down in the best place, and nobody said anything about it.

She looked at me across the fire for a long while.

Then she asked the question I had been waiting for since the day we landed. I had known it was coming. I’d been dreading it for four months.

“She says,” said Nai, and stopped, and started again. “She says, the nineteen. She says, will they come?”

Mu Chen, on the other side of the fire, put his cup down very quietly.

I did not want to answer. I want that on the record too. I am a coward about exactly this, and I always have been. But Kesa had stood on that beach for fifty years telling people the truth when it was the worst thing she could say, and she was owed the same.

“No,” I said.

Nai told her.

“Tell her why,” I said. “Tell her the grey and the sea are two different things. The grey forgets people. The thing under the sea was holding them all this time, and that’s why they could come back. It’s why Sesa came back.” I made myself keep looking at Kesa. “The nineteen didn’t go into the grey. They walked into the water. They drowned. That isn’t forgetting. That’s dying.” I swallowed. “At home we got back everybody who was forgotten. Millions of them. We never once got back anybody who died. Not once. Nobody can. I’m sorry.”

Nai told her, slowly, all of it.

Kesa sat very still. Sesa looked at her sister’s face and put her hand over Kesa’s hand on the stick.

— • —

For a long time Kesa didn’t say anything at all.

Then she began to say names.

She did not say them to me. She said them to the fire, one at a time, slowly, with a breath between each one, the way you set down stones on a grave. Nai did not translate them. Names don’t need it.

Oki. Rena. Tobu. Mise. Kano. Hira. Suma. Teo. Anu. Pori. Sako. Ume. Dai. Nori. Kaya. Gen. Fumi. Riku. Asa.

Nineteen. I counted.

Then a twentieth, last, quieter.

Hoshi.

Nobody moved. On my shoulder, the Scroll had gone so still I could not feel it at all.

“Talent,” it said at last, very softly. “Will you ask her something for me?”

“Ask her yourself. Nai will help.”

So the Scroll asked her, through Nai, whether it might write them down. Not the way the coast had carried them for fifty years, as a warning — this is what happens if you call. As people. With their names.

It asked three times. Kesa said yes three times. The third time she was crying, and she did not wipe it away, and Sesa did not let go of her hand.

[DING.] Filed: nineteen people of the Teru coast, who walked into the sea calling a name, in the years when nobody could answer. Oki. Rena. Tobu. Mise. Kano. Hira. Suma. Teo. Anu. Pori. Sako. Ume. Dai. Nori. Kaya. Gen. Fumi. Riku. Asa. And Hoshi, keeper, who went in after the twentieth and brought her out. Not filed as a warning. Filed as people. At the request of the keeper, who remembered every one. 👍

Mu Chen got up and came round the fire and sat down on Kesa’s other side. He didn’t say anything. He just sat there, the way she had sat next to nine hundred families, until the fire burned down.

— • —

It was nearly dawn when the Scroll went still again, and the grey writing came.

I knew the hand now. Thin and careful and old, as if every letter cost it something.

Lin Bo. Are they all right? Did they catch them?

“Yes,” I said out loud, to my own shoulder, on a beach at the other end of the world. “They caught every one. Nobody went in the water.”

The Scroll sent it. I watched the gold go west along the road. A while later, the grey came back.

Good. Good. There are more. Old ones. From long before anyone on that shore was born — hundreds of years. Nobody there knows their names. I can’t let go of them to nobody. There’d be nothing to catch them. They’d just go out. So I’m still holding those. I don’t mind. I’m good at holding. And Lin Bo — may I come up and see them? The ones who came home. I’d like to say sorry to their faces. Only if the keeper says I may. — S.

I read it out. Nai put it into Teru for Kesa, slowly, every word.

Kesa sat with it a long time. Sesa had fallen asleep against her shoulder. The tide was coming in.

Then she said something short, and Nai laughed out loud in surprise.

“She says she told you she’d like to meet it first,” said Nai. “Before she decided anything.”

“So that’s a yes?”

“She says yes.” Nai was still smiling. “She says tell it to come down the beach by the front, like a person. She says it can stand in the soup line and wait its turn like everybody else.” Nai looked at the old keeper, with her stick, and her sister asleep on her shoulder. “She says she did.”

I looked at my pot. It was nearly empty, and the sun was coming up, and there was going to be a very long line.

“Tell her I’ll need more fish,” I said.