Chapter 190: The Wedding Was in the Morning

They lit fires on the stones.

Nobody told them to. The first family to reach the bottom of the slope found a ring of stones in the grass, and looked at it, and set down their blankets and their pot inside it as if it had been their house all along. The next family did the same. By full dark there was a fire burning in the middle of every ring along the slope, fifty or sixty of them, and the great ring in the middle was lit as well, with the headman of Kawa feeding it driftwood and looking very serious about it.

“From the top of the hill,” I said to Mu Chen, “it must look like a village.”

Mu Chen was crouched by our fire, feeding it sticks. He looked up the slope at the rings of light, one after another, all the way to the well.

“It is a village,” he said.

Kesa stood by the big fire with her stick. When everyone had come down, and the fires were all going, she lifted her terrible voice and said it.

Nai said it after her, for me.

“The village in the cove. We don’t know your names. We’re sorry. We walked round you for five hundred years and we didn’t know why.” Nai’s voice shook. “Your place is kept. Your fires are lit. Come home.”

And six thousand people standing in the dark in rings of stone said come home after her, in Teru, all together.

Then we waited.

— • —

The grey writing came within the hour. I read it by firelight.

I’m asking them.

Then nothing, for a long time. Long enough for Yun Shu to fall asleep against me, and wake up, and ask what was happening.

“It’s asking them,” I said.

“How long does that take?”

“For Hamo it was quick.”

“Hamo’s one man,” said Yun Shu, and closed her eyes again.

Then the grey came back.

They’re arguing.

I read it out. Nai put it into Teru. Somebody at the next fire laughed, and then the next fire, and it went along the whole slope.

“Talent,” said the Scroll. “Ask it what about.”

I asked. The Scroll sent it. Song sent back, slowly, the way it does, as if it were writing with its tongue between its teeth.

Everything. An old man says it’s a trick. A woman says the old man always says that. Somebody wants to know if the nets are still there. Somebody else wants to know who’s going to pay for the wedding now, after five hundred years, and whether the food will have gone off. I think it’s a village meeting. I’ve never been in one. It’s very loud.

“It’s a village meeting,” I said, and I could not stop laughing, and neither could Mu Chen, and Kesa, when Nai told her, put her hand over her face and her shoulders shook.

“Five hundred years under the sea,” said Mu Chen, wiping his eyes, “and the first thing they do is have a meeting.”

“That’s not strange,” said Yun Shu, without opening her eyes. “That’s a village.”

— • —

It went on half the night. Song sent us pieces of it, and I read them out, and the slope listened.

“The old man still thinks it’s a trick,” I said.

“What does the woman think?” said Yun Shu.

“She thinks he always says that.” I read the next piece. “Now they’re arguing about whose turn it was to mend the big net.”

“Before the grey came?”

“Song says it was going on before the grey came. Song says it still isn’t settled.”

“Five hundred years,” said Mu Chen.

“That’s not long,” said Yun Shu, “for an argument about a net.”

Then, just before dawn, the grey came again. It was longer this time.

Two hundred and eighty-four want to come home. Twelve don’t. The twelve are the oldest. They say they had their lives, right to the end, and they’re tired, and everyone they’d want to see again is coming up with the others anyway. They say they’d like to stay where they are. With me. They say somebody should keep me company.

I read it twice before I read it out.

Then I asked the Scroll to send one question back, and it did.

Is that all right with you?

The answer took a long time to come.

Nobody’s ever offered to stay with me before. I didn’t ask them to. I want you to know that. They offered. They’ve told me their names. All twelve. I’m going to look after them very carefully.

There were twelve names under that, in the thin grey hand. The Scroll read them. Then it asked me, three times, whether it might file them, and I said yes three times, and Kesa said yes when Nai asked her, and so the coast had twelve names out of the cove before it had anybody.

[DING.] Filed: twelve elders of the village in the cove, who chose to stay below, with Song, so that it would not be alone. Aba. Tenno. Riho. Kamu. Sae. Oro. Puri. Wena. Toku. Hane. Ishi. Mo. They are not lost. They are kept. Talent — I have filed a great many things that went into the dark. This is the first time anything went in on purpose, to keep the dark company. 👍

Yun Shu was awake now. She read the names over my shoulder.

“It’s going to have company,” she said.

“It’s going to have twelve old people arguing about a net,” I said.

“Good,” said Yun Shu. “It’s been quiet down there long enough.”

— • —

They came up out of the sea at sunrise.

Not one at a time, the way they had at Asu. All together. The tide was out and the whole bay was a sheet of wet sand, pink with the dawn, and out at the edge of the water a great many people stood up at once, as if they had been sitting down waiting, and started to walk in.

They were dressed up.

That’s what I’ll remember. Every one of them. Clean clothes, and flowers in their hair, and shells on strings round their necks. Old men with their beards combed. Children with their faces scrubbed. A whole village dressed for a wedding, walking up a beach five hundred years late.

“They’re dressed for it,” Yun Shu whispered. “Lin Bo. They went to sleep dressed for it.”

“They’re five hundred years late.”

“They’re not late.” She was holding my arm very tightly. “Look at the sky. It’s the morning. The wedding was in the morning.”

Six thousand people stood on the slope in the rings of stone and watched them come, and nobody made a sound.

At the front there was a young man who kept looking back over his shoulder. And behind him, between two women, there was a girl of about twenty with her hair done up very carefully, holding her skirts out of the wet.

— • —

The first thing anybody said was to the headman of Kawa, because he was the biggest man standing nearest the water.

An old woman at the front of the village stopped in front of him, looked up at him, and said something sharp. It was a Teru so old that even Kesa stopped and frowned.

But Hamo was there. He had walked up from Asu with Pela’s family, four days, because he said a man who’d come home to a bench ought to see a man come home to a cove. He stepped forward and listened, and answered the old woman, slowly, in words of his own that were nearly hers.

Then he turned to Kesa. Kesa turned to Nai. Nai turned to me.

It went through Hamo, and Kesa, and Nai, and five hundred years.

“She says,” said Nai, “who are all these people, and what are they doing in our houses, and why has nobody swept.”

— • —

The village was called Sawa.

They told us that first, before anything else, as if it were the most important thing, and I suppose it was. The coast had walked round it for five hundred years without a name to call it by. Now it had one, and people said it to each other up and down the slope, trying it out. Sawa. Sawa. Like a word you’ve been trying to remember all day.

Then the old woman from the front — she was the headwoman, it turned out, and there was no doubt about it — wanted to know who was in charge.

Everybody on the slope pointed at Kesa.

Kesa pointed at me.

I pointed at Kesa.

The headwoman of Sawa looked from one of us to the other for a long time. Then she said something to Hamo, and Hamo laughed, and passed it down the line.

“She says she’s seen this before,” said Nai. “She says it’s what happens when nobody wants to be blamed for the food.”

— • —

The wedding was that afternoon.

“She says it was supposed to be in the morning,” said Nai, when the bride had finished saying it to Hamo, and Hamo to Kesa. “She says it is the morning. She says she’s waited five hundred years and she is not waiting until tomorrow.”

“What does her mother say?”

“Her mother says quite right.”

“And the groom?”

Nai looked at the young man. He was standing beside the bride holding her hand, and he had not let go of it since the beach, and I don’t think he had heard a single word anybody had said all morning.

“I don’t think the groom’s been consulted,” said Nai.

So it was that afternoon, in the great ring of stones in the middle of Sawa, with six thousand guests.

Her name was Nanu. His was Kai. I learned that much Teru that day, and I won’t forget it.

I made the soup. Of course I did. The headwoman of Sawa looked at my pot and asked who the cook was, and everybody on the slope pointed at me, and this time nobody pointed anywhere else. Mu Chen helped. The headman of Kawa carried water from the stream. Sesa made a second pot, and the headwoman tasted it, and said something to Hamo, and Hamo would not translate it, and Sesa laughed so hard she had to sit down.

Kesa stood with the bride.

I don’t know how that happened. Nobody arranged it. In Teru, at a wedding, an old woman stands beside the bride and holds her hand while the vows are said — a grandmother, or an aunt. Nanu’s grandmother was one of the twelve who had stayed below. So when the time came, Nanu looked round the ring of six thousand strangers, and her eyes went to the old keeper with the stick, and she held out her hand.

Kesa took it.

She stood beside the bride with her sister behind her, and held a stranger’s hand through the whole of a wedding that was five hundred years late.

“Look at her face,” said Sesa, beside me, through Nai.

“I’m looking.”

“Fifty years she’s sat next to people on the worst night of their lives,” said Sesa. “Nobody ever asked her to stand next to them on the best one.” She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “Don’t tell her I said that. She’ll fold my blanket in two.”

— • —

They tasted my soup at the feast. Nanu’s mother, first. Then Nanu. Then the headwoman, slowly, with great dignity.

She said one word.

Hamo didn’t even need to translate it. The whole slope was already laughing.

“Five hundred years,” said the Scroll, on my shoulder. “And it is still the same word.”

“It’s not a word anymore,” said Yun Shu. “It’s a review.”

— • —

Maru found me that night, by the big fire. She had sailed up from Asu with Iri and half her crew, because Maru does not walk if she can sail.

She sat down beside me and didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said it in her own careful, bad half-song, the way she’d spoken to me the very first time, on the other side of the world.

“The season is turning.”

“I know.”

“The winter storms come down the half-song in a month. Maybe less.” She looked at the sea, west, where the road was. “If you want to be home before winter, we sail in twenty days. If not, it is spring.”

I didn’t answer straight away.

I looked at Yun Shu, asleep against Mu Chen’s shoulder with her book open in her lap and four hundred habits in it, most of them not yet read. At Kesa, sitting on the stones with her sister, both of them laughing with their mouths open at something the headwoman of Sawa had said. At Nanu and Kai, dancing very badly by the fire, while six thousand people who had never heard of Sawa until yesterday clapped for them.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Maru nodded, as if she’d expected that, and got up and went back to her crew.

On my shoulder, the Scroll was quiet for a long time.

“Talent,” it said at last, very gently. “I have post. From Tao Tao.”

“What does she say?”

“She says the roof is still leaking.”

I looked west for a long while, past the fires, out over the dark water, to where the road went home.

Then I went and stirred the soup, because it was going to be needed in the morning, whatever I decided.