Chapter 161: The Cooper of Reedmoor

'There's a new one,' the Scroll said, with relish.

'Go on.'

'You are seven feet tall.'

'I'm not.'

'You are in Greenstone Village.' It was delighted. 'There is a carpenter there who has been telling people he had to widen a doorway for you, and he is doing extremely well out of it. A man came four days to look at the doorway.'

'Did he charge him?'

'Two coppers,' said the Scroll. 'Lu An, I want to be honest with you; I think the carpenter is the finest liar I have encountered since I was dismissed from Heaven, and I would like to put that in writing.'

This is what my life is now. Every few days the Scroll brings me a new thing I have apparently done, and I read it, and I say let it run, and I go back to whatever I was doing, which lately is mostly meetings about roofs.

I have not filed a denial in nine years. I want you to hold on to that, because it is about to matter.

— • —

The one that went wrong started at my own wedding, which I think is funny now but did not think was funny for about two months.

You'll remember Yun Shu asked not to tell it. She said it on purpose — let somebody get it wrong, she said, let a drunk cooper from Reedmoor be the authority on your wedding; he'll get the soup wrong and everyone will argue about it for forty years.

There was, it turns out, an actual drunk cooper from Reedmoor.

His name is Guo. He was on the hill that night with about a billion other people and he went home and told his local about it, then he told it again, and he has been telling it for nine years; it has grown the way a story grows in a room where everybody's had a drink and nobody was there.

In the first version he stood on the hill.

In the fourth version he was near the front.

By about the seventh he had spoken to me.

And somewhere past that, in a way nobody can trace and nobody meant, Lin Bo said a thing to Guo of Reedmoor on his wedding night turned into Lin Bo chose Guo of Reedmoor, which turned — because a story always finds the shape that travels best — into:

The Calamity That Walks has named a successor, and it is a cooper in the fens.

— • —

I heard it myself about a week in, on the road east of the fen, from a man sharing my fire who did not know me from a post.

That happens more than people think. I am extremely famous and I look like a tired man in a mended coat, and the two facts have never once got in each other's way.

'You've not heard?' he said, delighted to have it first. 'He's picked one. The Calamity. Named a successor.'

'Has he.'

'Cooper. Out in the fens somewhere. Reedmoor.' He got comfortable. 'Wedding night, this was. Whole world on that hill and he comes down off it, walks straight past every lord and every one of that lot he runs with, and picks out one man in the crowd and says something to him.'

'What did he say?'

'Nobody knows. That's the point.' The man tapped the side of his nose, which I have learned means somebody is about to invent something. 'You don't say a thing like that out loud, do you? You say it to the one man and you let him carry it.'

'Maybe he just walked past him.'

'Then why's everybody talking about it?'

I sat with that one for a while. It is, I admit, unanswerable.

'What's he like, this cooper?' I said.

'Quiet, they say. Humble. Doesn't put himself forward.' The man nodded, pleased with the world. 'Which is how you know.'

— • —

I laughed. That's the part I have to put down honestly. When the Scroll brought it to me I laughed for about a minute and a half and said let it run, because it was funny, and because I have a policy.

'You should look at the numbers,' said Yun Shu, eight days later.

'On what?'

'On your cooper.' She put the sheet down in front of me. Xue Ningzhi's people track belief now the way they used to track the flood; it is one of the least glamorous and most useful things in the world. 'That's not a joke going round a tavern. That's a legend forming.'

I looked at it. The reach column was four hundred million and the belief column was sixty-one percent and rising, and I stopped laughing, because I know exactly what those two numbers do to a man when they hold hands.

'He's Renowned,' I said.

'He's past Renowned. He's going to be Storied inside a month at that curve.' Yun Shu took the sheet back. 'Lu An. Four hundred million people believe a cooper in the fens has been handed something by the most powerful being alive. Belief makes things real. That's not a rumour about him anymore. It's a ladder, and he's on it, and nobody asked him.'

— • —

I went to Reedmoor.

I should have gone eight days earlier and I will be hearing about that from Yun Shu for the rest of my life.

There were about two hundred people in the lane outside his cooperage. Some had walked a long way. There was a woman holding up a child who was clearly not well, a man with a bad leg, four people with paper, and somebody selling food to the queue; that is how you know a thing has properly arrived.

Guo's shutters were closed at eleven in the morning.

He let me in the back after I knocked for a while.

He's about fifty, built like a brick house, and his hands are shaking while he tells me, "I never said it."

"I know."

"I never once told anyone you picked me. I said you walked past me. That was it, nine years ago, and even that wasn't true, you walked past plenty of people—" He slumped onto a half-finished cask. "Someone else made up the rest. I don't know who. It's been growing for two years, getting bigger than anything I ever started."

"What's actually happening to you?"

"They want stuff." He pointed at the shutters. "Blessings. Cures. There's a guy out there waiting for me to settle a land dispute because he thinks I know the truth. And the worst part—" He stopped, jaw tight. "The worst part is, last week, I put my hand on a kid's head just because his mom wouldn't stop crying and I panicked, didn't know what else to do, and he actually got better."

"Ah."

"Don't 'ah' me. What was that?"

"That was four hundred million people deciding you have the power," I said. "So, you do."

Guo just stared at me.

"I'm a cooper," he insisted.

"I was a clerk."

"That's not making me feel any better!"

— • —

I did the obvious thing. I want it on record that I did the obvious thing, and that everyone in my family could have told me, and one of them did.

I issued a denial.

Plain, public, blasted across every thread: I haven't named a successor, I don't have a successor, the idea is stupid, Guo of Greenstone Village is a cooper I have never met, so please, leave the man alone.

The Scroll asked me twice if I was sure. I told it I was.

DING. Denial filed. First in nine years. Reach: everyone. Belief in the denial: eleven percent. Belief in the original: seventy-four percent, up thirteen since the denial—talent, I did ask you twice. Current leading interpretation: the Calamity is protecting his successor from attention, which is exactly what a man protecting a successor would say. I have logged three hundred and twelve of your denials over the years. This is the fastest any of them has ever backfired. Congratulations, I suppose.

Streisand's law doesn't stop working just because you saved the world. I knew that. Everyone knew that. I had nine years of staying out of it, and I still blew it because a guy was scared and I wanted to fix it in an afternoon.

The queue outside Guo's shutters was four hundred people deep by the end of the week.