Chapter 193: It Means I Missed You

Tao Tao did not wait for the boat to tie up.

We were still ten feet off the jetty, with Maru’s crew shouting and throwing ropes, when she jumped off the post. She landed on our deck so hard the whole boat rocked. Maru said something in Teru that Nai would not translate.

Then Tao Tao punched me in the shoulder, hard, and then she hugged me, harder.

“You’re thin,” she said into my coat. “You’re brown. You smell like fish.”

“I’ve been a cook.”

“You’ve always been a cook. You’ve never smelled like fish.” She let go and held me at arm’s length and looked at me. Her eyes were red and she was furious about it. “Half a year. Half a year, Lin Bo.”

“I know.”

“You said spring. You said back by the autumn.”

“It is autumn.”

“It’s the end of autumn,” said Tao Tao, “and the roof has been leaking since the first week of spring,” and then she hugged Yun Shu, and then she hugged Nai, who stood very still and let it happen, the way you let weather happen.

— • —

“Do you know what it means?” I asked her, while the crew tied up. “What you shouted?”

“What, you took your time?” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “It means you took your time. You did.”

“In Teru it means I missed you. It’s what they say when somebody comes home.”

Tao Tao looked at me.

“Well,” she said, “I didn’t.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t miss you at all.”

“I know.”

“Shut up,” said Tao Tao, and hugged me again.

— • —

Bai Qing was still standing on the jetty beside the post, with one hand on top of it.

I climbed up the ladder. My knees didn’t complain. They hadn’t since the place where the song used to break, because the floor was back under me and a Mythic’s knees do not get to complain about ladders. Six months of bad knees, and then one day at sea they simply stopped. I still wasn’t used to it.

I stood in front of her.

“It held,” I said.

“It held.” She took her hand off the post. “I checked it every morning.”

“Tao Tao told the Scroll. The Scroll told me.”

“Tao Tao talks too much.” She looked at me for a long moment, the way she looks at a wall she built, or a door, or a line of people standing up in the dark. Then she put her hand flat on my chest, just under the collarbone, the same way she’d put it on the post. Quite still. As if she were checking something.

“Holding,” she said.

Then she took her hand away and went down the jetty to help Maru’s crew with the ropes, and did not look back, and I stood there with the place on my chest still warm.

— • —

There were more people on that beach than I had seen in one place since the harvest.

They were on the jetty and the sand and the dunes and the road down from Saltreach, as far as I could see. And every one of them believed in me. I could feel it. After six months of being nobody, it was like walking out of a quiet room into a storm. Eleven hundred million people, all of it pressing against me at once, and all of it saying my name.

The noise was enormous. People were shouting titles. The Calamity That Walks. The Floor of the World. The One Who Went East. That last one was new. I didn’t like it.

A man at the bottom of the jetty dropped to his knees as I came past.

I did what I had done every morning for half a year, before I could stop myself. I bent down and I said, “What’s your name?”

He opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

“Your name,” I said. “It’s all right. What is it?”

He looked up at me with his mouth working, the most famous man in the world asking him a question, and I watched him try to find his own name, and fail.

“He’s forgotten it,” said Yun Shu, beside me. “You frightened it out of him.”

“I only asked.”

“You’re not the cook anymore,” said Yun Shu gently. “Not here.”

The man found it in the end. It was Fu. I said it back to him, the way I’d said every name back on the beach at Asu, and he went away looking as if he’d been struck by lightning, and I felt like a man who’d come home and found someone else living in his house.

— • —

It happened when Yun Shu stepped down off the jetty onto the sand.

She didn’t notice at first. She had her book out, because she always has her book out, and she was writing the date. Then the Scroll on my shoulder made a sound I hadn’t heard it make in a long time, and every person on that beach looked up, because a DING that size you don’t hear, you feel.

DING. TIER ASCENSION LOGGED. Yun Shu — [LEGENDARY → MYTHIC]. New title: [The Reader]. New title: [The Record That Went East]. New title: [Former Accuracy Division, Current Accuracy Division]. Talent. She did not do anything impressive. She stood in a soup line and looked at people and told them the truth. She wrote it down every day, with dates, including the embarrassing parts. Two worlds believe her now. Belief: total. Was this ascension helpful? It was overdue.

Yun Shu looked at the gold hanging over the beach for a very long time.

Then she turned to me.

“How?” she said. “Nobody here knows what I did. Ji Lan promised not to tell.”

There was a short silence.

On the deck behind us, Tao Tao had gone quite red.

— • —

“Every night,” said Tao Tao.

She was sitting on a coil of rope on the deck, not looking at anybody.

“Every night the Scroll sent things home. Down the song. And the post came to me, because I sit by the post. And some of it was letters, and some of it was news.” She picked at the rope. “And some of it was your record. The Scroll was copying it out. Every day’s.”

Yun Shu didn’t say anything.

“And I read it,” said Tao Tao. “Out loud. On the jetty. At night.” She looked up. “It started with about ten people. Fishwives, mostly. By the end of the summer there were four thousand. They’d bring lamps. They’d sit on the sand and wait for me to read the day.” Her chin went. “You wrote it so well. Dry, and exact, and you always put the date. Everybody loved it. They’d shout read it again when it was a good one.”

“Including,” said Yun Shu, in a very level voice, “the fish rack?”

“Especially the fish rack,” said Tao Tao. “They made me read the fish rack four times.”

I turned round. Nobody else on that beach had seen my face just then, which is just as well.

“I would like to say,” said the Scroll, “that I only copied the record because it was accurate, and accuracy deserves to be read, and I am in the Accuracy Division now.” A pause. “And because it was the best thing I have ever been sent, and I wanted somebody at home to have it.”

Yun Shu was quiet for a long moment.

“You could have asked,” she said.

“I did,” said the Scroll. “Three times. You were asleep every time. I took that as consent.”

“That’s not consent.”

“I know,” said the Scroll. “I am very sorry. It was the only crime I committed in half a year. I would commit it again.”

— • —

Ji Lan was at the top of the beach.

I didn’t see her until most of the crowd had gone up into the town. She was sitting on the dune grass by herself, with a stack of paper in her lap so thick she’d tied it with string. When I came up the sand she didn’t stand up. She just looked at me.

“I didn’t tell,” she said. “Not one word. Six months.”

“I know. Tao Tao did.”

“Tao Tao read it off a jetty,” said Ji Lan, with the full fury of a storyteller who has kept a promise while somebody else got the crowd. “To four thousand people. With lamps.” She put her hand flat on the stack of paper. “I wrote down every word the Scroll sent. Every night. I’ve got all of it. And I didn’t tell anybody, because I said I wouldn’t, because I wanted it to be yours to tell first.”

“It still is.”

“It’s not. Everybody knows about the fish rack.”

I sat down next to her on the grass. She didn’t say anything for a while.

“Do you know what the worst part was?” she said at last. Her voice had gone quiet. “Not the not-telling. I thought it would be. I’m good at waiting, it turns out, I didn’t know that.” She turned the string round her finger. “The worst part was every night I’d write down what had happened over there and I’d turn round to tell somebody, and there wasn’t anybody to tell.”

“You had everybody.”

“I had everybody,” said Ji Lan. “I tell everybody things for a living. I’ve told a quarter of the world things.” She looked down at the papers. “It turns out the person I want to tell things to is you. I didn’t know that. I found out in the spring, about three days after the boat went.” She stood up very quickly and picked up the stack. “Anyway. You’re sitting very still for a week while I read you this. Starting tonight.”

And she walked off up the beach very fast, the way she’d walked off when we sailed, before anybody could see her face.

— • —

Yun Shu came and sat down where Ji Lan had been. She’d seen it from the jetty. She sees most things.

“She found out, then,” said Yun Shu.

“Found out what?”

Yun Shu looked at me with enormous patience.

“Lin Bo,” she said, “I’ve been reading shapes for half a year. Don’t make me read yours. I’m tired.” She leaned on me. “Go and sit still for a week. Let her tell you. She’s waited for it.”

“You don’t—”

“I don’t,” said Yun Shu. “I never have. I think it’s lovely. Now hush. I’m Mythic, apparently, and I’d like to sit on a dune.”

— • —

We went up to the house at Saltreach after dark.

It was exactly the same. The fire, the table, the bench by the door, the crack in the shutter Bai Qing keeps saying she’ll fix. Xue Ningzhi had cooked, which she never does, and it was very good, which she would never admit. Su Yue had made bread, which was not. Everyone was there, and everyone was talking at once.

Ji Lan had her stack of paper in her lap, and she didn’t open it. When the noise died down she looked at me and Yun Shu across the fire and said, “Go on, then. You first. That was the promise.”

So we told it. Yun Shu did the dates and I did the soup, and Ji Lan sat with her chin on her knees and listened to the whole thing and did not interrupt once, which in fourteen years I had never seen her do.

Then I went to bed, in my own bed, for the first time in eight months, with Yun Shu already asleep beside me.

And it started to rain.

And something cold landed in the exact middle of my forehead.

I lay there. Another one landed. Then another, in exactly the same place, as if it had been aimed.

From the next room, through the wall, came Tao Tao’s voice. She was not asleep. She had clearly been lying awake waiting for this.

“TOLD YOU,” she said.