Chapter 169: The Doorway

"She's been nine times," said Tao Tao.

"Who has?"

"Yun Shu. Greenmarch. The doorway." Tao Tao put a small stack of ferry tickets on the log beside me, very pleased with herself. "Nine. I found them in the tea tin. She keeps her ferry tickets in the tea tin, Lin Bo, like a criminal."

"Why were you in the tea tin?"

"I wanted tea."

"You don't drink tea."

"I wanted to see if she was hiding anything in the tea tin," said Tao Tao, "and she was, so I think we can agree I was correct to look."

I looked at the tickets. Nine of them, over about six years. Greenmarch and back, one person, same ferry every time.

"She said she went to look at the doorway once," I said. "Two coppers. She said it was worth it and she wouldn't tell me why."

"Well, she's been back," said Tao Tao. "Eight more times. That's sixteen coppers, which I would like it noted is not like her. She once made Mu Chen give back a bun because it was a copper over."

"It was a very ordinary bun."

"That's what she said," said Tao Tao darkly. "Are you going to ask her?"

I thought about it.

"No," I said. "I'm going to go and look at the doorway."

— • —

Greenmarch is a market town two days up the river with a very good tannery and a very bad inn, and the doorway is on the street behind the square with a painted sign over it that says:

HERE THE CALAMITY THAT WALKS PASSED THROUGH Doorway Widened To Accommodate — See It Yourself 2 Coppers (Children 1) (Returned Souls Free)

I stood in front of it for a while.

It is a doorway. It is, I want to be exact, about a third wider than a normal doorway and exactly as tall, and somebody has painted a line on the frame about seven feet up with HIS HEIGHT written beside it in red, and under that, in a different hand, CLAIMED, and under that, in a third hand, NO IT ISN'T.

The carpenter came out of the shop to take my coppers and stopped dead in the street.

He is old now — about seventy, small and bald and brown as a nut — and I watched him look at me and then look at the line on the doorframe and then look at me again.

"Well," he said. "That's awkward."

"Is it?"

"You're about a foot and a half short." He squinted. "More. You're a normal height. You're not even tall-normal."

"I've been telling people that for thirteen years."

"And none of them believed you, and they all came here, and I've done very nicely." He held out his hand. "Two coppers."

I paid him. He'd earned it.

— • —

His name is Pang, and he has been a carpenter in Greenmarch for fifty years, and he is without exception the most cheerful liar I have ever met, and the Scroll — which has met Heaven — agrees.

"Talent, I would like to shake his hand," it said, in my ear. "I have no hands. I would like one for this purpose specifically."

"Who drew the line?" I asked. "On the frame."

"Not me." Pang looked genuinely offended. "I want that understood. I have never once said you were seven feet tall. I say widened to accommodate. That's all the sign's ever said. Somebody came through about eleven years ago with a pot of red paint and a very firm opinion, and by the time I got out of the back it was up." He shrugged. "People liked it. I left it."

"And claimed?"

"That was a schoolteacher. Very cross. Came back specially." He smiled. "And no it isn't was her husband, who had been dragged four days to see a door and wanted it on the record that he'd noticed."

"Why are returned souls free?"

He stopped smiling, just slightly.

"Because they come here more than you'd think," said Pang. "They come up, and everybody in their new town talks about you like you're weather, and they don't know what's true. Nine hundred years they've been gone and the first thing anybody tells them is that the whole world was saved by a giant." He wiped his hands on his apron. "So they come to the door. And they stand in it. And they see it's just a door, a bit wide, and they go a bit quiet, and then they usually laugh." He put the rag down. "I'm not charging a man two coppers for that. That's not a show. That's just letting somebody find out the world's a normal size."

I did not have anything to say to that.

"You're here about your wife," he said.

"How do you—"

"Because she's been nine times, and she always comes on the third ferry and sits in the corner for an hour and writes in the book, and she has never once told me who she is, and I have known who she is since the second visit." He waved me towards the corner. "It's over there. Go on. It's not private. It's the least private book in the world. Anybody who comes through writes in it."

There was a table in the corner of the shop with a lamp and a very large, very battered ledger on it, open, with a pen on a string.

On the front, in paint: WHAT DID YOU THINK YOU'D SEE?

— • —

I read it for about two hours. I want to put some of it down, because it is the best thing ever written about me and none of it is by anybody I know.

Expected: a giant. Found: a door. Came four days. Worth it. — a farmer from the coast.

My grandad swore he met him and he was seven foot and had a voice like a bell. I measured the doorway and it's wide but it's not SEVEN FOOT wide. Grandad what have you done. — Mei-lan, aged 11.

I am a returned soul. I came up two years ago. Everyone in my town talks about him like he is a mountain. I came to see the door because I wanted to know if he was real. The door is just a door. This helped. Somehow. — (no name)

Brought my son. He walked through it three times and then asked why a giant would need a door at all, couldn't he just step over the house. I have no answer. He is six. — Bao, carter.

HE IS NOT SEVEN FEET TALL. I HAVE SEEN HIM. HE IS FIVE FOOT SEVEN AND HE HAS A MENDED COAT WITH A GREEN ELBOW. — a person who was at the wedding.

^ you were a mile back. nobody could see him. — someone who was also at the wedding.

^ he walked past our lot on the path. — the first person, again.

I laughed so hard at that one Pang came over to see what I'd found.

"Oh, that's a Reedmoor cooper," he said. "He comes once a year and argues with himself. We love him."

— • —

And then, about halfway through the second year of entries, I found the first one that was hers.

I knew it at once. Not because of any name — there wasn't one — but because of the handwriting, which is small and square and has never once in her life run off the end of a line, and because of the content, which was:

He is not seven feet tall. He is five foot seven. He burns the onion at least twice a week and then says the onion was old. The onion is never old.

I sat there.

I turned the pages.

She had written in it nine times. One entry for every ferry ticket. Never signed. Always small. Always square. Always, every single one, a true thing.

He talks to the Scroll at breakfast like it is a person. It is a person. Most people don't know that.

He cannot sleep when it rains because he was in a lot of fights that happened in rain. He doesn't talk about that. He makes soup instead.

He holds the room. You will have heard he holds the whole world. He does. But when it is just us at night he holds the room exactly the same way, and I have never once been cold in a room he was in.

He is the most famous man in the history of the world and he still does not believe anybody would come four days to see a door because of him. You did. Thank you. I'm his wife. I come here to read what you all think, because it is the only place anyone writes about him honestly, which is to say, disappointed, and fond.

The last one was from about four months ago.

This is my ninth time. I keep coming back because every one of you arrives expecting a giant and leaves having met a door, and none of you are sorry. That is the best thing anyone has ever said about him, and you all say it, and you don't even know you're saying it. — his wife, who is not going to tell him about this book.

I closed the ledger very carefully.

Pang, at the bench, was sanding something and not looking at me in a way that was extremely considerate.

"She comes on the third ferry," he said, without turning round. "Next one's in eleven days, if the pattern holds. I'd not tell her you've read it. But that's your business."