Chapter 188: Three Hundred Years Late for Dinner

He ate the whole bowl.

We stood round the table and watched him do it. Nobody said anything. I don’t think anybody could. He ate like a man who has been out on a cold sea a long time, fast and without looking up, and when he’d finished he wiped his mouth on the back of his big hand and put the bowl down.

Then he looked up and saw us.

He looked at Pela, and Dano, and Maru, and Iri, and the cousins, and the aunt, all of them standing round his table holding hands. He looked at Kesa. He looked at me for quite a long time, because I was the strangest thing in the room.

Then he said something.

Pela frowned. Iri giggled. Nai’s mouth fell open.

“I don’t know that,” said Nai. “I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s Teru,” I said.

“It’s old Teru.” Nai shook her head. “It’s like — it’s like when you hear your great-grandmother’s songs and half the words are wrong. I got house and I got who and I think I got strangers.”

Kesa said something to him. Slowly, carefully, in words I’d never heard her use.

The man stared at her. Then he answered, and Kesa nodded, and turned to Nai, and Nai turned to me.

It went through two women and three hundred years before it got to me.

“He wants to know who all these people are,” said Nai, “and why there are strangers in his house.” She listened to Kesa. “And why the gate doesn’t squeak.”

Dano said something, rather proudly.

“Dano says, I fixed it,” said Nai.

— • —

His name was Hamo.

Kesa got that out of him first, because Kesa knew the old words. Fifty years of sitting with grieving families had taught her every old lullaby and every old lament on the coast, and the old words live in the old songs. Hamo spoke like a song nobody had sung for a very long time.

“Tell him,” said Pela, through Kesa, through Nai, “we’re his family.”

Kesa told him. Hamo shook his head and said something short.

“He says no,” said Nai. “He says his family is his wife, Aya, and his two boys. He says where are they.”

Kesa looked at Pela. Pela looked at the floor.

So Kesa told him. I watched her do it. She did it the way she must have done it nine hundred times — plainly, and kindly, and without making it smaller than it was. That he had gone out to the boats one grey night. That the grey had taken him. That nobody had remembered him the next morning, not even Aya. That it had been three hundred years.

Hamo sat very still at the end of the bench.

He looked at the people standing round him. I saw him look at Dano’s hands, which were big. I saw him look at Iri’s chin, which was square, and stubborn, and very like his own.

Then he got up, and ducked through the door, and went out into the yard, and stood looking at the sea.

— • —

Mu Chen came. Somebody had run for him. He went out and stood next to Hamo in the yard and didn’t say anything, because Hamo wouldn’t have understood him anyway, and it didn’t matter.

The rest of us stayed inside. Pela sat down at the table with her face in her hands. Iri didn’t understand, and kept asking, and Maru kept telling her quietly to hush.

“We should have asked,” I said.

Yun Shu looked at me.

“Him. We should have asked him first.” I was looking out of the door at the two men in the yard. “Ken came home to his father. Sesa came home to her sister. Everybody we’ve brought back, at home or here, somebody was standing there who knew them. He’s come home to a bench.” I rubbed my face. “Everybody he ever knew is dead, Yun Shu. Not forgotten. Dead. Old age. Hundreds of years ago. We can’t give him that back. Nobody can.”

“No,” said Yun Shu.

“Su Yue said it at the top of the sky. You finally asked. That’s the whole thing we learned. You ask. You don’t decide for people.” I felt sick. “And we stood round a table and called him home without asking, because we were so pleased with ourselves for finding the bench.”

Kesa had followed most of that from my face. She said something to Nai.

“She says then go and ask him now,” said Nai.

— • —

So I went out into the yard, with Kesa, and Nai behind us, and stood next to Hamo and Mu Chen, and looked at the sea with them for a while.

“Tell him I’m sorry,” I said. “Tell him we should have asked before we called. Tell him nobody asked him.”

It went through Nai, and through Kesa, and three hundred years. Hamo listened. Then he laughed — once, short, not happy — and answered.

“He says nobody asked him when the grey took him either,” said Nai.

“Fair.”

“He says he went out because it was weather and he always went. He says he didn’t get to ask the weather anything.” Nai listened. “He wants to know if you’re the one in charge.”

“Tell him I’m the cook.”

Nai told him. Hamo looked at me sideways for a long moment, and then he said something that made Kesa make a small dry sound.

“He says that would explain the soup,” said Nai.

— • —

Then Iri came out.

Nobody had sent her. She came across the yard on her own and stood in front of the huge stranger with her square stubborn chin, and looked up at him, and said something in modern Teru, very fast.

Kesa put it into old Teru for him. Nai put it into ours for me.

“She says, we kept your seat. She says, nobody knew why. My granny didn’t know and her granny didn’t. We just did. Nobody’s ever sat in it. Not once.” Nai’s voice went. “She says, not even at the new-year dinner, when there’s not enough room and the cousins have to stand. We still didn’t sit in it.”

Hamo looked down at her for a long time.

Then he turned and looked through the door at the bench. At the left end of it, where the wood was not worn like the rest, because nobody had sat there for three hundred years.

He said something quietly. Kesa didn’t translate it straight away. She just stood there for a moment, holding her stick.

“He says,” said Nai, when Kesa finally told her, “three hundred years they kept a seat for a man they didn’t know.” Nai wiped her eyes. “He says, I’d like to sit in it.”

— • —

The grey writing came that night, at the fire, under the last of the gold on the Scroll.

I let him go when they called. I didn’t ask him first. I’m sorry. I was so pleased they’d found him. The ones I’m still holding are very old, Lin Bo. Everyone they knew is gone. I should ask each one before I let go. Whether they want to come home to a bench.

“Can they answer?” I said. “Down there? While you’re holding them?”

The grey came back after a while.

Su Yue did.

I read it out. Nai put it into Teru for Kesa.

Kesa sat with it, and nodded slowly, and said something.

“She says good,” said Nai. “She says from now on, the family calls, and the one under the sea asks, and the one who’s held answers. She says nobody on this coast does anything to anybody without asking anymore.” Nai smiled a little. “She says that’s new. She says she likes it. She says she spent fifty years telling people what to do with their gap and she’s glad she doesn’t have to anymore.”

— • —

“I have post,” said the Scroll, later. Every night now it sent word home along the song, and every night, somehow, the answers came back. Song carried them. It said it didn’t mind. It said it liked knowing what people at home were having for dinner. “Tao Tao says the whole of Saltreach heard about Teru. She says people cried in the street. She says the fishwives sang the homecoming on the jetty all night. She says the roof is still leaking and she is still not fixing it.”

“Of course she isn’t.”

“Ji Lan says she has written the whole of it down, every word I have sent, and she is not telling anybody, and she is going to burst, and when you come back you will have to sit very still for a week while she reads it to you.”

“That sounds right.”

“And Bai Qing,” said the Scroll, and paused.

“What did Bai Qing say?”

“Bai Qing did not say anything. Bai Qing never says anything. But Tao Tao says she goes down to the end of the jetty every morning and checks the post I was sitting on. Every morning. She puts her hand on it and checks it is holding.” A pause. “It is a post, talent. It is holding. It has always been holding. She checks it anyway.”

I looked at the fire for a while.

“Tell her it’s holding here too,” I said.

— • —

Hamo had his first bowl of my soup the next morning. He came down to the beach with Pela’s family and stood in the line, because Kesa told him that’s what you do now, and when he got to the front he took the bowl in his big hands and tasted it.

He said one word in old Teru.

Kesa laughed. Mouth open. She had been doing that since Sesa came home.

“What?” I said. “What did he say?”

“She says it’s the old word for ashi-ne,” said Nai.

“Is it different?”

Kesa answered, still laughing.

“She says no,” said Nai. “She says it’s exactly the same. She says three hundred years, and every other word on this coast has changed, and that one hasn’t moved at all.”

“Some truths,” said the Scroll, “are eternal.”

— • —

That night Yun Shu sat up late with her book. I could see she’d gone back to the first page, and that there was one entry there she hadn’t underlined or crossed out. She’d been leaving it alone.

“What’s that one?” I said.

“The cove north of Kawa.” She showed me. It was only a line. “Nobody builds there. Nobody fishes there. It’s a good cove, sheltered, fresh water coming down off the hill. Kesa says it’s bad luck. It always has been.”

Kesa, across the fire, nodded.

“It’s not a family,” said Yun Shu. “That’s why I haven’t touched it. A family carries a gap — in a bench, or a stone on a step, or a song that stops. But nobody carries this one.” She tapped the page. “Because there’s nobody left to. It’s a whole village, Lin Bo. Everybody in it. All at once, one winter. And all that’s left of them is a good cove on a hard coast that nobody will go near.”

Nobody said anything for a long while.

Then Kesa said something, very quietly.

“She says she always walks the long way round that cove,” said Nai. “When she goes north. She says everybody does. She says she never once thought about why.”

Yun Shu looked at the old keeper for a long moment.

“That’s the habit,” she said. “The whole coast walks round it.”

She wrote the date.