Chapter 186: Not Mine to Forgive

So it ate.

It sat down on the sand by the pot, very stiffly, the way the very old sit, and held the bowl in both hands, and four thousand people watched the thing under the sea try my soup.

It took one spoonful. It held it in its mouth for a while. Then it swallowed, and looked at the bowl with enormous wonder.

“Lin Bo,” it said. “This is very bad.”

“I know.”

“I’ve tasted plums. I’ve tasted chestnuts. I’ve tasted snow.” It looked at the bowl again. “This is the worst thing I’ve ever had in my mouth.”

“You held the forgotten of the whole world for ten thousand ages,” I said.

“Yes,” said Song. “This is worse.”

Then it turned to the beach, and said one word in Teru, loud enough for the front of the line to hear.

“Ashi-ne.”

I have heard a great many crowds make a great many sounds. I have never heard four thousand people go from total silence to helpless laughter that fast. It went down the line like a wave. The children shrieked. Haru laughed so hard he had to sit down. The headman of Kawa, a mile back, asked what was happening, and somebody told him, and he laughed too.

Song sat in the middle of it, holding its bowl, looking up at all of them with its wet grey eyes. It didn’t know what it had done. It just knew it was a good sound.

— • —

Ken came over while it was eating. He stood in front of it with his hands behind his back, the way boys stand in front of an old person they’ve been told to be polite to.

“He wants to know if you like plums,” said Nai.

“Very much,” said Song, in Teru, without waiting.

Ken asked something else.

“He says, then why are you eating his soup?”

Song looked at the bowl. Then at me. Then at the line.

“Because I was in the line,” it said.

Ken considered this. Then he nodded, as if that were a perfectly good answer, and went back to his net.

— • —

The Scroll had not said a word since Song reached the front. I could feel it on my shoulder, holding very still.

Song looked up at it.

“Hello, Scroll,” it said.

“You came up wet,” said the Scroll.

“The sea is wet.”

“I know. I have been in it a great deal lately.”

“I know,” said Song. “I felt you fall in. Every time. All summer. Something small and warm, dropping into the middle of the sea and climbing out again.” It tilted its head. “I didn’t know what you were doing.”

“Coming here,” said the Scroll.

Song was quiet for a moment.

“I’m glad you came,” it said.

“So am I,” said the Scroll. “Do not tell him.”

“I’m right here,” I said.

“I am aware,” said the Scroll, “of where you are.”

— • —

People came to it all day.

Not all of them were kind. I want that on the record, and Yun Shu has it, with the times.

A fisherman from the seventh village came up in the afternoon. He was about seventy, with a bent back. His mother had walked up out of the sea three days before, twenty-six years old, the age she’d been when the grey took her. He stood in front of Song and shouted. I didn’t need Nai for most of it.

“He says she missed all of it,” said Nai quietly. “His whole life. His wedding. His children. He says she came back and she doesn’t know him. He says he’s older than she ever got to be.”

Song didn’t look away.

“I know,” it said, in Teru. “I’m sorry. I can’t give the years back.”

The man shouted something else.

“He says, then what good is sorry?”

“None,” said Song. “I’m saying it anyway.”

The man stood there with his mouth working. Then he sat down hard on the sand and put his face in his hands. After a while a young woman came out of the crowd — short hair, twenty-six, with his nose — and sat down next to him without saying anything and put her arm round his bent back. Mu Chen came and sat on his other side.

Song watched them for a long time.

“That one’s mine,” it said to me, very low. “That one will always be mine.”

“Yes,” I said. I didn’t lie to it. You don’t, to Song.

— • —

Sesa came in the late afternoon, with her own bowl of her own terrible soup, and sat down across from Song as if they were two old women at a market. She asked it questions. Lots of them. Fast. Song answered every one in Teru, and I got it later from Nai.

“Was it dark down there?”

“Yes.”

“Cold?”

“No. Not cold. Still.”

“Was I by myself?”

“No,” said Song. “You were close to a great many others. Close together. Like fish in a net.”

Sesa thought about that, and nodded.

“Good,” she said. “I hate being on my own.” She pointed her spoon at her sister, who was standing a little way off pretending not to listen. “She’s the one who’s good at it. Fifty years on a beach. Did she tell you?”

“Yes,” said Song.

“Fifty years,” said Sesa again, to nobody, and ate a spoonful of her soup, and made a face, and kept eating it.

Kesa said something very rude to her twin. Nai would not translate it.

— • —

Kesa decided at the end of the day.

The line was gone. Most of the coast had gone up the beach to their fires. The tide was coming in, the sky was going pink over the mountains, and Song was standing at the edge of the water with its empty bowl, because it knew. The belief would hold it up for one day, and the day was nearly over.

Kesa came down the sand with her stick. Sesa came behind her. I came too, and Nai, though in the end we didn’t need Nai. Song translated for me itself — every word Kesa said about it, in my language, plainly, as she said it. I’ve thought about that since. I don’t know many people who could translate their own judgment and not soften a single word.

“I said I’d decide,” said Kesa, and Song said it after her.

“Yes.”

“For me,” said Kesa, “yes.”

Song’s hands moved a little on the bowl. It said the word in my language. Then it didn’t say anything else.

“For my sister,” said Kesa, “ask my sister. It’s not mine to give.”

Song looked at Sesa.

“Oh, yes, obviously,” said Sesa, before anybody could translate. Nai told me afterward. “I was asleep. I’ve only been awake four days. Though I’ve had his soup and yours now, so you’re both on thin ice.”

Then Kesa said the last part. She said it slowly, and Song said it after her in my language, just as slowly.

“For the nineteen — no. It isn’t mine. They aren’t here to say it, and nobody can say it for them. Not me. Not anybody.”

“I know,” said Song.

“So we’ll carry them,” said Kesa. “You and me.”

“Yes.”

Kesa looked at it for a long moment. Then she lowered herself down onto the wet sand, slowly, with her stick, the way she had sat down next to nine hundred families. She tapped the sand beside her, once.

Song sat down next to her.

Two old things on a beach at the end of the day. One that had held the forgotten of the world for ten thousand ages, and one that had held a coast’s grief shut for fifty years, and neither of them had ever once had anybody sit down beside them.

— • —

“Song,” I said, after a while. “The others. The ones you’re still holding.”

It didn’t look round. “Yes.”

“How many?”

“I don’t count. I never could.” It looked out at the water. “More than live on this coast now. A thousand years of winters, Lin Bo.”

“And nobody knows their names.”

“I never knew anybody’s name. That’s what forgetting is.” It turned the empty bowl in its hands. “On your side, when I opened, you had lists. The First Author’s list. The arks. People who’d written names down for a thousand years so somebody would catch them. Here nobody wrote anything. The rule was you don’t touch the gap.” It was quiet. “If I let them go to nobody, there’s nothing to catch them. They’ll just go out.”

Nobody said anything.

Then Yun Shu said, from behind us, “There’s a list.”

I hadn’t heard her come down. She had her book open, and the look on her face she gets when a shape has just come clear.

“They’re keeping one,” she said. “They just don’t know they are.”

— • —

She sat down on the sand with us and opened her book and showed me, though I couldn’t read half of it in the dusk.

“Pela’s family never sits at the left end of the bench at dinner,” she said. “Never. I asked her why, a month ago. She didn’t know. Her mother didn’t know. Her grandmother didn’t. Somebody always leaves it empty.” She turned a page. “The third boat shed at Asu has never been mended in anybody’s lifetime. Nobody will touch it. Nobody knows why. There’s a clapping song the children sing on the clam beds that stops dead in the middle, every time, on the same beat. They don’t know why. They just stop.”

Song had gone very still.

“Mu Chen said it,” said Yun Shu. “In the hut. Every family on this coast has been carrying their gap for a thousand years. He was right. They kept carrying them. They just forgot what they were carrying.” She closed the book. “The shape’s still there. In the bench, and the boat shed, and the song. Somebody sat at the end of that bench once.”

For a long moment Song said nothing at all.

“There’s a man,” it said at last, very slowly. “I’ve been holding him since before the boat sheds were built. He always sat at the end of things. I never knew why I knew that.” Its voice cracked. “Lin Bo. I never knew why I knew that.”

Kesa said something.

“She says she’s sat with nine hundred families,” said Nai, behind us. “She says she knows every bench on this coast. She says she’ll take the reader to all of them.”

Yun Shu looked at Kesa. Kesa looked at Yun Shu.

“That’s going to take years,” I said.

“Yes,” said Yun Shu. “I’ve got dates.”

— • —

It went back at dusk, the way it had at the harvest.

It stood up, stiffly, and held out the empty bowl to me.

“Keep it,” I said.

It looked at the bowl. Then it tucked it inside its grey shawl, carefully, the way it had held the plum, and walked down the beach into the sea. By the front. Like a person. The water came up over its feet, and its knees, and its shawl, and then there was only the tide.

Kesa sat on the sand a long while after, looking at the place where it had gone in. Sesa sat beside her. Nobody told them to come up.

RECORD. Day 158. Soup line at Asu: approx. 4,100. One of them the dark under the world. Waited four hours. Not noticed by anybody but the keeper. Its review of the soup: “the worst thing I’ve ever had in my mouth.” Second pot (Sesa’s) not reviewed. It was not offered any. Forgiven: in part. Correctly. New list begun tonight. Title: “Habits.” First entry: the left end of Pela’s bench. — Y.S.

I put another fish in the pot. It was going to be a very long list.