Chapter 189: The Long Way Round

I left the pot with Taro.

I want that on the record, because it was the first time since we landed that I had left it with anybody. Kawa is four days’ walk north of Asu, and Kesa said the cook was coming this time, and I said who would make the soup, and Taro held out his big net-cut hands for the ladle without a word.

“He says it’ll be better,” said Nai.

“It will be better.”

“He says he knows. He says he’s been watching you for five months and he’s worked out what you do wrong.” She listened. “He says it’s everything.”

Ken stood beside his father and nodded very seriously.

— • —

We set out on a grey morning, seven of us. Kesa with her stick, and Sesa holding her arm and talking. Yun Shu with her book. Nai. Mu Chen. Me. And the Scroll on my shoulder, which had complained about the walk before we had gone a hundred steps.

“I do not see why we cannot sail,” it said.

“Kesa wants to walk.”

“Kesa is seventy-two.”

“Kesa walked the whole coast this summer. Twice as far as this. With a stick.”

The Scroll was quiet for a moment.

“I have been out-walked by a seventy-two-year-old,” it said, “and I do not have legs. I would like that kept out of every record there is.”

“Too late,” said Yun Shu, writing.

There were seven of us when we left Asu. By the end of the first day there were forty. People came out of every village we passed and fell in behind, families with blankets and pots, old men on sticks of their own, children running ahead. Nobody asked them to. They had heard where the keeper was going, and why, and they came.

By the third day we were six hundred. By the time we saw the smoke of Kawa there were so many people on the coast path behind us that I couldn’t see the end of them.

— • —

The headman of Kawa was waiting for us. I didn’t see him at first, because he was at the back.

He had come out with his whole village to meet the keeper. Two thousand people crowded on the beach in front of Kawa, and he was standing behind all of them with his carved staff, looking humble, which on a man that size is not easy.

Kesa stopped at the front of the crowd and looked over their heads at him for a long moment.

She said something. It carried. Kesa’s voice is terrible, but it carries.

The headman answered from the back, loudly.

“He says he’s learned,” said Nai. “He says the line starts at the back. He says he’s been standing at the back of everything since Asu. Meetings. Weddings. His own dinner table.” Nai’s mouth twitched. “His wife’s very tired of it.”

Kesa said something else, very dry.

“She says, then learn something else,” said Nai. “She says, come to the front. It’s your village. We need you to show us the road.”

The headman of Kawa came through his own people slowly, as if he expected to be sent back at any moment. When he reached the front he stood in front of Kesa with his staff, and looked down at her, and she looked up at him.

“She says your father was a better headman,” said Nai. “She says, but you’re getting there.”

I have never seen a big man look so pleased about anything.

— • —

The road north out of Kawa runs along the cliffs, above the sea, where the walking is easy.

Then, about an hour out, for no reason at all, it turns inland.

It goes up over a steep hill covered in gorse and down the other side, and it takes nearly two hours, and at the end of it you come back down to the cliffs about a mile further on from where you left them. I noticed it because my knees noticed it. They are forty-odd years old and very honest.

“Why does the road do this?” I said, halfway up the gorse, out of breath.

Nai asked the headman. The headman looked surprised.

“He says it’s always gone this way.”

“But why?”

The headman thought about it. He was a big slow man and he thought about it slowly and properly, all the way up to the top of the hill.

“He says he doesn’t know,” said Nai, at the top. “He says he’s walked it every year of his life. His father walked it. He says he never once asked why it didn’t go straight.”

I looked at Kesa. She was walking steadily up the hill with her stick and her sister, the way she had walked that path all her life.

“Did you ever ask?”

Kesa answered without stopping.

“She says no,” said Nai. “She says she’s walked it two hundred times. She says she knows every stone on it. She says she never once thought it was strange.” Nai was quiet for a moment. “She says she does now.”

— • —

Yun Shu stopped at the top of the hill and looked back the way the road had not gone.

Below us, between the two headlands, there was a cove.

It was beautiful. That’s the first thing, and it took me a while to understand why it was so strange. Every cove on that coast has a village in it. Every one. They are hard coasts and there are not many safe places to pull a boat up, and wherever there is one, there are people. Smoke. Nets drying. Children.

This one had a white beach in a perfect curve, sheltered from the north wind by the headland. A stream of fresh water came down off the hill and ran across the sand into the sea. The grass grew right down to the beach, long and green and untouched.

There was nobody there at all. Not one boat. Not one path. Not one footprint on the sand.

“Five hundred years,” said Yun Shu, very quietly. “At least. Nobody’s set foot down there in five hundred years.”

The crowd had come up the hill behind us and stopped. Thousands of them, along the ridge. Nobody went down. Nobody even moved towards it. They stood on the hilltop and looked at the most perfect cove on the coast as if it were a cliff edge.

— • —

“Well,” said Yun Shu. “I’ll need to go down.”

She went down the slope through the long grass. I went after her. So did Mu Chen, and after a moment Nai.

It was only at the bottom, on the white sand, that I turned round and saw that nobody else had come.

Kesa was standing at the top of the slope with her stick. Sesa beside her. The headman. Six thousand people along the ridge. And not one of them had taken a single step down.

“Why aren’t they coming?” I said.

Nai shouted up. The answer came back from a dozen voices at once.

“They say they can’t,” said Nai. She sounded strange. “Not won’t. Can’t. They say their feet won’t go. They say it’s like stepping off a roof.”

I looked down at my own feet in the sand, and at Yun Shu’s, and Mu Chen’s, and Nai’s.

“Foreigners,” I said.

“We haven’t got the habit,” said Yun Shu. “Five hundred years of walking the long way round. It’s not in us.” She looked up at the ridge. “It’s in every one of them.”

— • —

She found the first stone in the long grass a little way up from the beach. It was flat, and round, and it had been laid there by hands. Then another beside it. Then a whole ring of them, half-hidden — the base of a house, with the grass grown up through the middle.

There were dozens. Once you saw one, you saw all of them, set in rows along the slope above the stream. Fifty or sixty houses. In the middle, a much bigger ring, blackened in the centre, where a great fire had been.

Further up there was a well. Ferns had grown up out of it so thickly you could hardly see the stone.

Yun Shu sat down on the edge of the big fire-ring and put both hands flat on the stone.

“Lin Bo,” she said. “Stay close.”

“I’m here.”

“I mean close.”

I sat down beside her and put my arm round her, and she leaned on me and shut her eyes.

— • —

It took a long time, and it cost her. I could feel it costing her. She started to shake after a while, the way people shake when they’ve been out in the cold too long, and Mu Chen came and sat on her other side and took her hand without being asked.

When she spoke, she spoke slowly, as if she were reading something written very small.

“Three hundred people. About.” Her eyes stayed shut. “They ate together. Every night. Here, round this fire. All of them. Not house by house. One big pot.” She swallowed. “They sang while they mended nets. Loud. You could hear it out at sea.”

“What else?”

“There’s a — ” She stopped. Her face changed.

“Yun Shu?”

“They were getting ready for something,” she said. “The whole village. The night the grey came. There’s — food laid out. More than usual. Flowers. Shells strung up between the houses.” She was crying a little now, with her eyes shut. “There’s a girl. About twenty. She’s sitting in her mother’s house and her mother is doing her hair. And there’s a boy two houses down who can’t sleep. He keeps getting up and going out and looking at the sea and coming back in.”

Mu Chen’s hand tightened on hers.

“It’s a wedding,” said Yun Shu. “They were going to have a wedding in the morning. The whole village. And the grey came in the night.” She opened her eyes. “And in the morning there was nobody. And nobody on this whole coast remembered there’d ever been anybody at all.”

— • —

We came back up the slope as the sun went down. Yun Shu walked on her own, though I kept my hand near her back the whole way.

Kesa was waiting at the top. She had heard it all. Nai had shouted every word up the hill, and the coast had passed it back along the ridge, person to person, the way it passes everything now.

“No names,” said Yun Shu to her, through Nai. “Not one. There’s nobody left to carry a name. Only the shape. Three hundred people and a wedding.”

Kesa said nothing.

“How do you call people you know nothing about?” I asked.

Kesa looked down at the cove for a long moment. At the white sand, and the long grass, and the rings of stone, and the well full of ferns.

Then she said something, and Nai repeated it in our language, slowly.

“She says the same as before. She says, do what we’ve always done.”

“You’ve always walked round it,” I said.

“She says yes,” said Nai. “She says that’s why.”

And Kesa took one step forward, off the path, onto the slope.

I saw what it cost her. Her whole body leaned back against it, the way Taro’s had leaned toward his boy on the flats. Her stick shook. Sesa took her arm without a word. Kesa took another step, and then another, the hardest walking I have ever seen anybody do, seventy-two years old and five hundred years of habit pushing back at every step.

Behind her, on the ridge, the headman of Kawa set down his carved staff in the grass, and followed.

Then somebody else. Then ten. Then a hundred.

And as the sun went down behind the gorse, six thousand people stopped walking the long way round, and came down off the hill into the cove that nobody had set foot in for five hundred years.