Chapter 166: Old Wen

She went to Reedmoor. I went because she asked me to and because I have not been in a long while.

Old Wen is very old now. She was not young when we found her in that hut at the water's edge, and that was a long time ago, and she sits in the sun outside her door most of the day with a boat-hook she does not use leaning against the wall beside her. Her order still calls her a doorkeeper. Bai Qing signs her name on the roll every year and will not hear a word about it.

She knew Tao Tao at fifty paces and shouted at her to come and sit down and stop hovering.

"You've come about the stone," she said.

"How do you—"

"Because Sedgewater wrote to me in the winter," said Old Wen, "and I wrote back in the winter, and here you are in the spring, which means somebody spent three months chewing it." She patted the bench. "Sit. You've gone a funny colour."

Tao Tao sat.

"What did you tell them?"

"I told them yes."

— • —

I want to put down exactly how she said it, because Tao Tao had walked four days and had not once considered that answer.

"Yes?"

"He can cut the names," said Old Wen. "He's a stonecutter and we need a stonecutter and the ones in the county want eleven silver and a month, and he wrote and said he'd do it for nothing and stay out of the way." She shrugged with one shoulder. "It's a lot of names, girl. Have you seen how many? Nineteen from the west side and the four from the lanes and Toma and Sile off Marrow Ford because their people asked to be on ours. That's a winter's work for one man with good hands."

"He built the thing that killed them."

"Yes," said Old Wen.

"And you don't—"

"I don't think about him," said Old Wen.

Tao Tao stared at her.

"At all?"

"Not for years." The old woman looked out at the water, unbothered. "I did. Three or four years, I thought about him a great deal, and it was all teeth, and I'd wake up with it. And then one morning I noticed I'd gone about a month without, and I sat with that, and I decided I wasn't going to chase it back." She scratched her chin. "He's a man at a table somewhere. Ru's dead. Those are two separate facts and I stopped holding them in the same hand, because holding them together was doing nothing to him and it was taking my mornings."

"That's—" Tao Tao's voice went. "That's forgiving him."

"It is not," said Old Wen, with sudden heat, and thumped the bench. "Don't you put that on me. I've not forgiven him and I never will and if he came up this path I'd not have him in the house. I just stopped doing it as a chore." She settled back. "There's a difference, and nobody ever tells you, and it took me four years to find it. Hating a man is a thing you can feel. Being on duty about it is a thing you do with a calendar. One of those is yours and one of them owns you."

Nobody said anything for a while. A heron went over.

"You've been on duty," said Old Wen.

"...Twelve years."

"Aye. I could see it from here." She reached over and took Tao Tao's hand, which she has done perhaps twice in the years I've known her. "Listen to me, because I'm old and I get to say it plain. You have carried that old man beautifully. You carried him when the whole world had gone mad with joy about the ones that came back, and you would not let him be a small thing in the middle of it, and I have been grateful for it every year and never said so, and that's my fault."

Tao Tao made a sound.

"But he isn't kept by you being angry," said Old Wen. "He's kept by being said. That's the whole of what we do. You want to keep Ru? Say Ru. Say him out loud in a town, once a year, in front of people who never met him." She let go of the hand. "You've been guarding a door that hasn't had anything behind it for about eight years, girl, and you're tired, and it's making you hard, and old Ru would think you were being daft."

"He'd have said something rude about it."

"He'd have said something filthy about it," said Old Wen. "He was a net-mender. They're all like that."

And Tao Tao laughed — badly, wetly, with her whole face wrecked — and it was the first time in twelve years I had heard her laugh about old Ru instead of around him.

— • —

Sedgewater voted on it anyway, because Old Wen is one voice and the town is a town, and that took two more weeks and was not unanimous.

Eleven households said no. Two of them said no in a way that has not softened since and will not. Shan stood up and said that she did not care what he could cut, that she did not want that man's hands on her father's name, and that if the stone went up with him having touched it she would not look at it.

They kept her out of it. The town moved Dou's name onto a separate small stone at the other end of the row, cut by a mason from the county, paid for by the town, and nobody argued and nobody made a speech about it. She goes to that one. That's the arrangement, and I think it is the best thing Sedgewater has ever done.

Lu came in the autumn and worked all winter in a lean-to by the mill with a canvas over it.

He did not stay in the town. He did not eat in the town. He arrived, and cut, and went back to the lean-to, and when people came to watch — and they did, at first, quite a lot of them — he answered any question he was asked, briefly, and did not talk otherwise.

Somebody asked him halfway through whether he was doing it to feel better.

"No," said Lu. "It doesn't."

"Then why?"

"It's a winter's work and I can do it and they need it done," he said, and went back to the chisel, and after that people mostly left him alone, which I think is what he wanted and also what he deserved and those are not the same thing.

— • —

They set the stone up in the spring, a year after the letter.

The whole family went. Half the fen went. It is not a big stone — Sedgewater is not a big town and there are twenty-five names on it, which is more than it sounds when you see them all cut at the same depth in the same hand.

Old Wen read them. All twenty-five, sitting down, with a boy holding the paper she did not look at.

She read Ru fourth, because it is alphabetical by the town's own way of doing it and not by importance, and she read it exactly the same as the other twenty-four, and I watched Tao Tao's shoulders come down about an inch when she did.

At the far end of the row, Shan stood at her own small stone with her back to all of us, which was her right, and a handful of the town went and stood with her, which was theirs.

Lu stood at the very back, outside the low wall, with his hands in his sleeves. He did not speak and was not asked to.

Afterwards Tao Tao walked over to him, and the whole town watched her do it, and I could not hear what she said because I was too far and I would not have listened anyway.

She told me that evening, unprompted, in about nine words.

"I told him the fourth one's cut well," she said. "That's it. That's all I've got and it's not going to get better and he said thank you and I left."

"That's not nothing."

"It's not forgiveness."

"No," I said. "Nobody said it was."

"Good." She poked the fire. "Because it isn't. He's still the man who built it. I'm just not clocking on anymore." She looked at the flames a while. "Old Wen's right. It was taking my mornings."

— • —

The warm — late.

I made the soup. It was a bad one even by my standards; I had been away four days and the onion had opinions.

"There's a thing I want to do," Tao Tao said, halfway through.

"Go on."

"Once a year. In Sedgewater. Somebody says the twenty-five out loud in the square, in front of the kids who weren't born." She was not looking at anybody. "Half that town's under twenty now. They think the burning is a story. It should be a story — that's the whole point, they're supposed to get a world where it's a story — but they ought to know the names are real people and not a poem."

"Who reads them?"

"Anybody," said Tao Tao. "That's the point. Anybody who'll turn up. Old Wen said he's kept by being said, not by me being angry, and I've had a month to find a hole in that and there isn't one." She shrugged. "So we say them. That's the whole plan. It's not very impressive."

"It is the same plan as the entire rest of my existence," said the Scroll, "and I would like it on the record that I think it is the best one there is."

"Nobody asked you."

"I am a publisher, Founder of the Homecoming. Nobody has ever asked me."

Yun Shu leaned over and looked into my pot and made a face.

"What did you do to this?"

"The onion was old."

"The onion was from last year," said Yun Shu. "That's not an onion, that's a relic. Min's going to hear about this."

"Don't tell Min."

"I'm absolutely telling Min," she said, and did, and I have not heard the end of it since.