Chapter 187: The End of the Bench

Within a week, Yun Shu had four hundred habits in her book, and about thirty of them were real.

Word traveled up the coast the way it always does there — fast, loud, and impossible to pin down. The reader wants to know the things your family does, even when they don’t know why. Turns out, every family in Teru does a lot of things for no reason, usually because some long-dead grandfather was a little strange.

People came to the soup line just to tell her about it. Kesa stood by her side and sorted them out.

“He says nobody in his family eats eels,” Nai said. “Not him, not his father, not his grandfather. Says it goes back forever.”

Yun Shu looked the man over for a long minute.

“That’s not a mystery,” she said. “He just doesn’t like eels.”

Nai told him. The man looked offended, then started shouting something long and heated.

“He says nobody in his family eats eels.”

“Ask him if anybody in his family actually likes them.”

Nai asked. The man paused, thinking it over.

“He says no.”

“Then it’s just a taste,” Yun Shu said. “It runs in families. Next.”

— • —

A woman came by to say her husband always slept on his left side. Kesa sent her packing before Yun Shu could even open her mouth.

A man came to say his village never whistled when a boat went out. Yun Shu looked at him and said that was just common sense — whistling at a boat is rude everywhere, not just at home.

Then a boy of ten stepped up, looking real serious. He said his grandmother put a flat stone on the doorstep at the first frost every winter, then flipped it over on the first warm day of spring. Nobody knew why; even she didn’t know. She just did it.

Yun Shu went totally still.

I know that stillness. I’ve seen it a thousand times. She stared at the boy for a long while, then wrote it down without saying a word, underlining it twice for good measure.

“Real?” I asked, once he left.

“Real.”

“You need a filing system,” the Scroll said from my shoulder. It had been watching all morning, getting more and more agitated.

“I have one.”

“It is a book.”

“It’s a book with dates,” Yun Shu said, closing it shut.

— • —

Sesa showed up on the fourth day with a habit of her own. She brought it the way she brings everything — loud, in front of everyone, with her sister standing right there.

“She says Kesa folds her blanket in three,” Nai said. “Every single morning. Never in two. Says it’s really weird and the reader should take note.”

Kesa shot something short and sharp at her twin.

“Kesa says that’s not a habit, that’s just how you fold a blanket,” Nai explained.

Yun Shu looked at Kesa. She looked for a long time. Then she turned that same look on Sesa.

“How do you fold yours?” she asked.

Sesa opened her mouth to snap back, but then she just stopped.

“She says in three,” Nai said, speaking slowly. “Says she always has, ever since they were girls. Says Kesa used to fold hers in two, and Sesa used to call her lazy, and Kesa would tell her to mind her own blanket.”

Nobody said anything.

“Fifty years,” Yun Shu said quietly. “She’s been folding it your way for fifty years.”

Kesa stood perfectly still, leaning on her stick. Then she muttered something — not to us, just to the air — and walked off up the beach.

“What did she say?” I asked.

“She said, mind your own blanket,” Nai replied.

Sesa watched her walk away. Then she laughed, mouth wide open, wiped her eyes with her hand, and hurried after her.

Yun Shu didn’t write that one down. I asked her why later.

“That one’s already home,” she said.

— • —

She had a headache by the end of every day that week. I knew it the way you know the weather’s turning. She’d stop talking an hour before dark and rub that spot between her eyes when she thought I wasn’t watching.

On the sixth night, I sat down by the fire, grabbed her cold hands, and started rubbing them.

“How many real ones?” I asked.

“Thirty-one.”

“And every one’s a person.”

“Every one’s a person nobody’s mentioned for two or three hundred years.” She let me keep holding her hands. “It costs more than the soup line did. A grief someone’s carrying now — that’s loud. It practically screams at me. These ones? They’re quiet. They’ve been worn down by being carried too long.” She closed her eyes. “It’s like reading a coin that’s been in too many pockets.”

“You need to rest.”

She opened one eye.

“You’re telling me to rest. You.”

“I’m the cook. Cooks are supposed to rest.”

“You sat up every single night for a whole winter with the Scroll on your shoulder,” Yun Shu said. “You carried the whole world on your back for fourteen years and you still don’t know how to put it down. Don’t lecture me about resting, Lin Bo. I’ve watched.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that. I just kept rubbing her hands.

“Thirty-one’s a lot,” I said eventually.

“Thirty-one’s nothing,” she said. “Song said more than that live on this coast right now.” But she leaned her head on my shoulder — the one without the Scroll — and stayed there.

— • —

The Scroll waited until she was finally asleep. Then it spoke, real quiet.

“Talent. Something for the record. Not my record. Hers. I won’t put it in her book. She’d only cross it out anyway.”

[DING.] Filed: on the Teru coast, a woman from the far side of the sea is now called the reader. Nobody published this, they just sort of made it up. Reach: the coast. Climbing. Talent, this is exactly how it starts. I should know.

I looked at Yun Shu asleep on my shoulder, book still in her lap, pencil still in her hand.

‘Don’t tell her,’ I said.

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ said the Scroll. ‘She’d just make me file it properly.’

— • —

Kesa picked the first one. Pela’s bench.

‘She says it was first in the book,’ Nai told me. ‘And she says Pela’s family already caught one. Dano. She says they know how to stand.’

So on the seventh evening, we headed over to Pela’s house at supper time — Kesa, Yun Shu, Nai, and me — and just stood in the doorway while they sat down to eat.

The room was long and low, a fire burning right in the middle, with a long bench running down one side of the table. Pela sat. Dano sat next to her, then Maru, then Iri squeezed in, and finally two cousins and an aunt. The bench was full from the right side.

The left end stayed empty.

Nobody looked at it. Nobody even thought about it. It was just where you didn’t sit, the same way you don’t shove your hand in the fire.

Yun Shu watched them for a long, long time.

‘Ask her,’ she said to Nai, ‘if anybody ever said anything about it. Not why. Just anything at all.’

Nai asked. Pela just shook her head.

‘She says her grandmother used to say something back when Pela was small and tried to sit there.’ Nai listened close. ‘She says her grandmother used to slap her hand and say: don’t sit at the end. The end’s for going.’

‘For going,’ Yun Shu repeated.

‘She says she never knew what it meant. She says she told it to Maru when Maru was small. Maru says she’s said it to Iri.’

‘I have,’ Maru said through Nai. ‘Last winter. I didn’t know why, it just came out.’

— • —

Yun Shu stepped into the room and sat on the floor at the left end of the bench — not on it, just beside it — and laid her hand on the empty wood.

She was quiet for so long that Iri started to fidget, and Pela had to put a hand on her knee.

‘A man,’ Yun Shu said at last. ‘Broad. Big hands, bigger than Taro’s. He sat at the end so he could get up fast.’ Her eyes were closed. ‘When weather came, he was the first one out to the boats. Every time. He’d be out that door before anyone else even put their bowl down. He sat at the end because he was the one who went.’

The room went dead silent.

‘And one night the weather was grey,’ Yun Shu said, ‘and he went, the way he always went. First out the door. And he didn’t come back. Nobody remembered him the next morning, but the bench did.’ She pulled her hand off the wood. ‘Somebody kept sitting on the right. And their children did. And their children. For three hundred years, this family has kept the end free for the one who goes first.’

Pela had both hands over her mouth.

— • —

‘What do we say?’ Pela asked through Nai. ‘We don’t know his name.’

That hit us all. I hadn’t thought of it. Every name on this coast had been a name — Ken, Haru, Sesa, Dano. You said it on the sand and somebody heard you.

Kesa said something.

‘She says say what you’ve always said,’ Nai translated.

‘We’ve never said anything,’ Pela said.

‘She says then do what you’ve always done.’

So they did. Pela got up, grabbed a bowl from the shelf, filled it from the fire-pot, and set it at the left end of the bench, right where nobody sits. Then the whole family stood up and linked hands around the table. Dano, Maru, Iri, the cousins, the aunt. Kesa took Pela’s free hand. Yun Shu took Kesa’s. I took Yun Shu’s. Nai stood in the doorway.

And Pela said, in Teru, slow and clear, to the empty end of her own bench:

‘The one who sits at the end. The one who goes first. Your place is kept. Come and sit down.’

Iri added something, really fast, before anyone could stop her.

‘She said, we kept it a really, really long time,’ Nai whispered.

— • —

Nothing happened.

We stood there holding hands around a supper table with the food going cold, and nothing happened, and kept not happening. Iri started to fidget again. The fire popped.

‘It took Taro two tries,’ Yun Shu whispered.

‘I know.’

‘I’m just saying.’

Then, outside, on the path that runs up from the beach, there were footsteps.

Slow. Heavy. The steps of a big man walking uphill on wet sand.

Nobody moved.

The gate opened. Dano’s gate, the one he’d fixed by lamplight a week ago because Pela told him to. It didn’t squeak anymore.

A man came through the doorway. He had to duck. He was broad, with huge hands and a beard, and he was wet to the knees, wearing a coat cut in a way I’d never seen anyone on that coast wear. He didn’t look at any of us. He didn’t look at the people holding hands around his table, or the foreigner in the corner, or the old keeper with her stick.

He walked straight down the room, like he’d done it every night of his life, and sat down at the end of the bench.

Then he grabbed the bowl they’d left out for him, acting just like anyone who’d only stepped outside to check the weather.