The fifteenth dawned cold and clear.
The Evening Bell's morning meeting was brief. Sharlo assigned each task in turn, like a troupe master casting parts before the play.
"Viola, you sit with me in the front row. Your task inside the theatre is to record—every line of the play, every word spoken by every phantom. Everything absent from tonight's playbill. When the house clears, the entire harbour will depend upon your register for its lesson."
"Mick, you and Cole help the old deacon beneath the wall. Torches, braziers, hot broth—however many people come tonight, not one is to be left cold."
"Half-Ladle, how much of The Waiting-for-the-Boat Song have you learned?"
The cook scratched the half of an eyebrow he had left. "Got the tune, only learned three verses. Old Bann stopped teaching halfway through. Said the more he taught, the more it blocked his heart."
Sharlo nodded and asked nothing further. Old Bann had avoided everyone these past two days, the ticket inside his coat and his thoughts nowhere upon the ship. Sharlo did not try to persuade him. He could read the words above the man and what lay buried beneath them. Some accounts no one else could talk a man out of. A man had to reckon them himself.
At noon, however, Old Bann came to see Sharlo of his own accord.
The old sailor shuffled outside the cabin door for a long while. When he entered, he did not sit, but stood with his hands behind him until he finally forced out one sentence.
"Sir. There's something I want to ask."
"Ask."
"The one on the theatre ship..." Old Bann's throat moved. "You all say he's false. I believe you. It's not that I don't. But what I want to know is—" He lifted his head. In eyes that had read the wind all their lives lay a bewilderment with no direction. "A false pa, sitting before you, speaking to you, calling you by your boyhood name—for that one stick of incense, does he count as your pa?"
The cabin was silent for a long time.
"Old Bann," Sharlo said at last, "I cannot answer that. No one under heaven can."
"But I know one thing. If a 'Bantson' steps from that ship tonight, every sentence he can speak will have been ladled out of your own heart. He will contain exactly as much of your father as your heart contains—not one measure more."
"So what you must decide is not whether he is true." Sharlo met the old sailor's eyes. "It is whether you will carry what is in your heart yourself—or hand it to a theatre company to carry for you."
Old Bann stood there for a long time, said not one word, and left.
That afternoon, Mick and Cole helped the old deacon beneath the Wall of the Awaited.
Cole claimed one task himself: polishing the plaques. Two thousand one hundred pieces of brass, one by one, with oil upon a soft cloth. At first, the old deacon told him it was unnecessary. On plaques untouched for decades, corrosion had grown into the cuts of the letters. Cole said nothing. He began with the first plaque in the west—each time one shone, he read its name aloud in the sunset and copied it into the little notebook he carried.
Mick watched for a while, then took a cloth and began at the eastern end.
"What are you copying them for?" he asked.
"My master taught me." Cole did not look up. "The rule of the Hall of Names: where there is a name, there is a road back. We must read two thousand one hundred names tonight. The old deacon's voice cannot finish them alone. Copy them into booklets, one for each pair of hands. Whoever comes can read."
The boy rubbed the foot of a page between his fingers, then added, "Besides, a plaque is dead. Each layer of rust fades the name another shade. Copy it into a book, and the name lives one more time."
By sunset, a little under half of the two thousand one hundred plaques had been polished and two large volumes copied. The old deacon held those two books of names beneath the wall for a long time, as though holding the household registers of two streets.
Last, Sharlo looked at the Old Boatman.
"Old Boatman. What of your part?"
The old spirit-ferryman had spent the whole previous night at the stern. Now he lifted his eyelids and said slowly, "The report has gone out."
"An old method of our Society, called sending a tide report," he said. "I sank an inscribed lamp into the leaking seam. It bore these words: Gern Harbour. Two thousand passengers. Lamps at home tonight. Make haste."
"Whether the river hears, when it hears, and whether they arrive in time—" The Old Boatman settled the blue-green glass lamp upon his knee. "Those matters are no concern of mine. A spirit-ferryman reports the tide. He does not govern when the tide-message arrives. That has been the rule for three thousand years."
"It is enough," Sharlo said. "Once the message arrives, it becomes a road marker."
When night fell, two gatherings of light appeared in Gern Harbour.
One lay upon the water. Every lamp burned aboard the Floating Island Theatre's three great ships, their crimson hulls glowing beneath hundreds of stage lights like coals afloat upon the sea. The whole harbour emptied itself. Eighteen hundred tickets brought old and young alike until every tier upon the three vessels was full. When the opening gong sounded once, the harbour streets were already deserted—every household had extinguished its stove and locked its door.
The other light stood upon the shore. Seven torches burned beneath the Wall of the Awaited.
Seven. The long stone trough at the foot of the wall held sockets for one hundred and twenty.
The old deacon had changed into a grey robe washed nearly white. Trembling, he lit the seven torches one after another. The people beneath them could be counted on two hands: three elderly folk too infirm to attend the theatre; one mute young woman carrying an infant; Mick; Cole; and the proprietor of the fish-broth tavern, who had come leaning upon a cane. His reason for refusing the play was that "a pot cannot be left alone."
Mick set the barrel of hot broth beside a brazier. Stirring it, he watched the brilliance upon the water and muttered an oath.
Cole looked up at the old wall of black stone. More than two thousand brass plaques glimmered in the torchlight like half-open eyes.
"Do not worry." The old deacon planted the final torch firmly. His voice was steadier than it had been by day. "I have recited ferry tickets for fifty years, recited them to those who could not hear. I am accustomed to it. Someone listens in the darkness beneath a lamp—your gentleman taught this old man to believe that again."
In the theatre, the gongs and drums ceased.
Sharlo sat at the centre of the front row, in the seat Bassoon had reserved directly opposite the apron. Viola sat to his left, her register open upon her knees and her pen poised.
The announcement came. Dry, courteous, from deep within the stage:
"Final Curtain Season, special presentation. Home with a Full Hold. Ladies and gentlemen—please present your tickets."
All eighteen hundred grey-and-gold tickets warmed faintly in their owners' hands at once, as though someone had breathed upon them.
The grand performance began.
The first half held no phantoms and no trickery. Only song.
A gravel-voiced singer in an old-woman role stood upon the apron and sang Gern Harbour's own song—The Waiting-for-the-Boat Song. Sharlo's back tightened inch by inch. Bassoon had carried the old melody bodily onto his stage without changing one word.
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The singer sang of the ship leaving harbour, the rising wind, the waves, the toes of the women straining at the docks, the kneeling furrows worn deeper year by year beneath the Wall of the Awaited. The audience began weeping in the first verse. This was their song, handed down from their grandfathers' grandfathers, picked up from their own neglected throats, polished, and sung back to them.
First he returns their song, Sharlo thought. He warms the longing they have neglected—and once it is warm, he can collect it.
Fine craftsmanship. The poison lay in the fact that every line of the first half was true.
In the last verse, the singer's voice descended into a sigh:
"...Wait till green grows on the brass, till grandsons know no grandsire's face. Some say—wait no more, wait no more. But when you cease to wait, who opens the door the day he comes home?"
The singer slowly retreated into darkness amid the weeping of the house. The stage remained silent for ten breaths.
Then the Stage Announcer spoke. The voice was as dry and courteous as before, but now, for the first time, it held something almost tender.
"Ladies and gentlemen. Your wait is over."
"Meet the boat."
The great curtain opened to either side.
There was no scenery behind the stage. There was the real sea. The entire back wall had been removed, opening onto the harbour at night. Sea fog streamed across the apron, and the light of two strings of grey lanterns fell upon it, revealing a water road.
At the end of that road, a ship slowly approached.
An old three-masted fishing vessel, her sails patched upon patches and her hull paint peeled and mottled. Every northerner knew that kind of ship: the kind that carried the fathers and brothers of every household to sea. In the grey light, her nameplate drew nearer by degrees. The front rows saw it first, and caught breaths travelled backward through the tiers like a wave—
The Gull.
The Gull, sunk eleven years.
The ship came alongside the stage and lowered her gangplank. Then the dead disembarked.
One after another. Coarse sailors' clothes, rope over one shoulder, trouser legs rolled as though their shift had just ended. They walked down the gangplank and into the lights before the stage. In the deathly silence of the house, each stopped, each raised his head toward some place in the viewing tiers, and each called a name.
"Marta."
Mrs. Horda rose from her seat and stumbled headlong toward him.
"Saul—you little bastard, what row are you in?"
Saul tumbled across three rows of seats.
One call, then another. Each name drew a heart-rending answer from the tiers. From the front row, Sharlo watched the crowd surge toward the stage. He watched one pair after another embrace across the divide of life and death—a wife touching her husband's face, an old mother pressing her son's hand against her cheek, a white-haired man clutching the brother who had drowned twenty years earlier and howling like a child.
The Horda family was nearest Sharlo.
The "husband" descended the gangplank, stopped before the stage, and stamped his feet three times—left first. Then he opened his arms, caught Marta as she flung herself at him, rested his chin upon her hair, and said loudly enough for the whole house to hear, "Broth too salty again, is it? I could smell it across the sea."
Mrs. Horda wept in his arms until she could not stand upright. Three paces away, her son—an employee of the harbour office who ordinarily respected documentary proof above all things—covered his mouth while tears poured between his fingers. The sequence of those stamps and the habitual complaint about salty broth had belonged to every day of his life from his first memory until the age of twelve.
The weeping made the stage lamps tremble.
Only Sharlo remained seated and still. He was looking above the heads of the ninety-four dead.
From the first to step ashore to the last. When he had seen them all, his heart sank utterly—and at the same time became utterly certain.
Above ninety-four heads, there was nothing.
Not one word.
Every living person in this world trailed a script above his head—hawkers and labourers, emperors and generals, the rolebound, even Lightbearers who had kindled a name, like Viola and Grey. The dead bore no words, but neither did the dead walk and speak. These ninety-four before the stage walked, smiled, and spoke words intimate as the heart—and over them lay a blank as clean as an unwritten script.
Not people. Not souls. Not rolebound. Props. Ninety-four props moulded from the memories of the living, unworthy even of scripts.
"Viola," he breathed, "record this. There are no words above them. Only two things in the house lack words—props, and me."
"And there is only one of me."
Above the house, amber words rose like the spring tide, growing line after line in unison:
【She will wait no longer.】
【He will lay his heart down.】
【After tonight, she will no longer be one who waits for a boat.】
Viola's pen flew across the register. Her profile was taut as a bow, but not one letter of her writing went astray. When she filled a page, she said very softly, "Sharlo. Ninety-four."
"What?"
"Ninety-four came off the ship," she said. "The Wall of the Awaited bears two thousand one hundred plaques. He brought back only ninety-four—all lost within the past twenty years, all with someone alive at home who still waits."
"Not one green plaque returned."
Sharlo's nails bit into his palm. Of course. A soul for whom no one waited could yield no "waiting." Why bring them home? This ship had returned with a full hold not of the dead, but of merchandise. Ninety-four pieces of merchandise capable of opening a vein of waiting.
Upon the stage, the Stage Announcer spoke again, still gentle:
"Ladies and gentlemen, your reunion lasts one night. The ship sails at dawn. The price of passage was printed upon your tickets—when the house clears, please surrender to the counter the heart with which you have waited all these years. From this day, put down your concern and live in peace, each to your own life."
"The ninety-four households favoured tonight, if you please. All others, be patient—"
"The company will return next year."
At that moment, something at the theatre entrance caught the corner of Sharlo's eye.
Old Bann stood there.
No one knew how long the old sailor had waited outside. Half his body now entered the light, the ticket crushed out of shape in his fist. His gaze travelled across the crowd before the stage, across reunion after reunion, his throat working up and down.
On the gangplank, the last dead man to disembark had stopped.
He was a thin, powerfully built old sailor with a short grey beard and a piece missing from his left earlobe—lost to frost, as happened to half the men who sailed the North Sea. Unlike the others, he called no name toward the viewing tiers. At the foot of the gangplank, he slowly, slowly turned his head. His eyes searched over the sea of people, past the light and fog, all the way—
To the entrance.
"Bann," Bantson said.
The weeping of the house receded like a distant tide. Ticket in hand, Old Bann stood in the darkness of the entrance like a post driven into the ground.
"Come inside." His father beckoned, his voice exactly as it had been on the morning he sailed eleven years ago. "What are you standing there for?"
"Your pa's talking to you."
Old Bann walked inside, one step at a time.
Every reunion in the house was occupied with itself, and few noticed the pair at the entrance. The old sailor passed row upon row of seats and walked through the light until he stood before the gangplank, three paces from his father.
"Pa," he called hoarsely.
"Aye." Bantson answered and smiled, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes folding into fans. "You've gone white up top, boy."
"I'm fifty-three," Old Bann said.
"Aye, fifty-three." His father nodded. "Eight years old when you handed me nails under the boat. An eye blink."
Tears flooded Old Bann's eyes. No one knew this. When he was eight, his father had repaired a boat, and he had crouched beneath it handing up nails all afternoon, until rust stained his palms red and his mother cursed his father all night. Even Saul did not know.
Yet in the very instant the tears rose, something dropped inside the old sailor's heart.
No one knew—no. One person did.
He knew.
He stood with tears upon his face and abruptly remembered what the gentleman from the Daydream Agency had told him at noon: every sentence he can speak will have been ladled out of your own heart.
Old Bann wiped his face and took one step forward.
"Pa," he said. "There's something I want to ask."
"Ask."
"I've wanted to ask for eleven years." Old Bann stared at the face and spoke one word at a time. "That day. When the wave came. Did it hurt?"
Bantson smiled, waved a hand, and answered at once, warmly. "Didn't hurt. One wave. Closed my eyes, opened them, all over. Pa didn't hurt. Don't you worry."
Old Bann nodded. It was the answer he had composed for his father in the middle of the night for eleven years—identical, not one word changed.
"Then one more question." His voice steadied until its steadiness frightened him. "Where did the Gull sink? Give me a bearing. I've sailed thirty years. I'll go. I'll bring your bones back and bury you beside Ma."
Bantson's smile did not move.
"Foolish boy, what bones are you salvaging?" he said gently. "The sea is Pa's grave. The larger the sea, the larger Pa's grave. Leave it. Don't suffer for it—"
"The bearing," Old Bann said.
"North," his father said. "Beyond the old fishing grounds, where the fog rises..."
"Where?" Old Bann pressed another step closer, a fifty-three-year-old sailhand with eyes like two nails heated red. "North of the old grounds, I can name seventeen fishing banks and nine hidden currents with my eyes closed. I know what the Gull carried when she left, how deep she drew, and the direction of the wind that day. Give me the bearing. Half a degree wrong and I'll hear it. Speak."
Bantson's mouth hung open.
The face still smiled, but suddenly it was a smile drawn upon paper. He could not say. Marta did not know the bearing. Saul did not know. No living person in all Gern Harbour knew where the Gull had sunk—and therefore neither did this thing.
A mirror cannot reflect what does not stand before it.
"Pa." Old Bann stepped back, his voice softening almost to tenderness. "I understand."
He lifted the hem of his coat, knelt squarely before the phantom, and kowtowed once.
"This bow is thanks for speaking those few words with me. The 'didn't hurt' was what I hoped. You gave my hope a voice, and I'm grateful."
He kowtowed again.
"This bow is apology. I took you for my pa for one stick of incense. That was my foolishness."
He rose, dusted his knees, and looked one final time at the face.
"You are not my pa," Old Bann said. "My pa is at sea. When he comes home, he'll travel by water, not down a gangplank."
"I'm going beneath the wall to meet him."
He turned and left. Through all the reunions in the house, through the weeping and the light, and out the theatre doors. The night wind struck his face. The harbour lay in darkness. Only beneath the Wall of the Awaited did seven points of flame waver in the wind.
Old Bann strode over, drew an unlit torch from a brazier, kindled it from the fire, and planted it in the stone trough—the eighth.
Then the man who had lacked the face to return home for eleven years turned toward the sea, opened a voice like a cracked gong, pickled by thirty years of sea wind, and roared the first line of The Waiting-for-the-Boat Song:
"One lamp upon the high cliff—shining on the door of home—"