The wind carried Old Bann's song into the theatre.
The Wall of the Awaited stood nearly half a bay from the theatre ships. On an ordinary day, a song carried across water would have dispersed. But tonight the wind happened to blow from shore to sea, and that cracked-gong voice cared nothing for melody or metre, only roaring louder. By the third verse, people in the rear tiers had begun to look back.
"One lamp upon the high cliff—shining on the door of home—
Broth is simmering beyond it—coals beneath the stove still glow—
Father, Mother, wait a little—do not let the hearthfire burn low—
Your son's bow is breasting breakers—homeward, homeward does he go—"
Before the stage, the counters for collecting hearts had been opened.
Three long tables draped in crimson velvet, with rows of ash candles upon them. Blue-satin attendants stood behind, their voices gentle and warm. "If you please—one night's reunion, and the ship sails at dawn. Simply lay your heart upon the candle. It will not hurt. It is like putting down a burden."
Mrs. Horda stood first in line. At the table, she raised a hand toward the ash candle—half a step behind, her "husband" urged her gently. "Put it down, Marta. Once you do, I can come home often."
At that moment, the disturbance at the rear travelled forward.
"...Is that Bann's voice?"
"Someone's singing beneath the wall. At this hour, who would be beneath the wall—"
"Isn't Bann here? His pa called him just now—where is he?"
Mrs. Horda's hand stopped in the air.
In the centre of the front row, Sharlo rose.
He did not take the stage. Standing before his seat, he faced the apron and the whole house and clapped three times. The sound was not loud, but a theatre was made to hear what happened in the front row.
"Ladies and gentlemen, forgive the interruption," he said. "I am a stranger here, by the name of Vane, seated upon a ticket personally sent by the troupe master. The master invited me to find fault with this play."
Every eye in the house gathered upon him. In the shadows beside the stage, Manager Vaal shifted but did not intervene.
"First, a fair word—the play contains no false lyric, no false feeling, and not one of your tears has fallen wrongly." Sharlo looked around him. His voice was not loud, but every word was distinct. "I have found one fault only. A fault in the casting."
"You have spent half the night reunited. What have you asked them? 'Did you miss me?' 'Are you cold where you are?' 'Why did you take so long to come home?' Have you noticed, ladies and gentlemen, that every answer to every question already lay within your hearts? He speaks precisely the sentence you have waited ten years to hear. Not one word different."
"Can words be so perfectly considerate?" Sharlo paused. "They can. Words spoken by a mirror are always perfectly considerate."
"I do not ask you to believe me." He raised one hand, opening it lightly to the house. "Test them yourselves. The method is very simple—ask him about something you do not know, something only he knew. If he truly returned from the sea, what difficulty can there be? But if he was ladled from your own heart—"
"A mirror cannot reflect what does not stand before it."
Deathly silence filled the house.
The first to speak was Mrs. Horda's son. The young harbour clerk forced his way through the crowd and stopped before his "father," his lips trembling.
"Pa. When I was twelve, you took me night fishing. Just the two of us. You told me something on the boat and made me swear not to tell Ma. What did you say?"
The man who stamped left foot first smiled warmly.
"Foolish child," he said. "Your pa said so many things. How could I remember every sentence—"
"You said, 'If the sea takes me one day, don't let your ma look at the water.'" The clerk's tears struck the ground. "I swore. I never told anyone. Ma doesn't know. So—so neither do you."
He stepped back, looked at the face he had missed for eleven years, and said one word at a time, "You don't know."
It was the first breach opening in a dyke.
"Husband, that money jar beneath the bed—I never found the key. Where did you hide it?"
"Brother, the year we divided the household, did you owe me three silver candles, or did I owe you? We made a wager. What was it?"
"Son, the night before you sailed, you told Ma you fancied some family's daughter—which family was it?!"
Questions fell one after another like rain throughout the house. In the lights, the smiles of the ninety-four dead stiffened one by one. They could not answer. When they could not, they widened their answers into vagueness: "It was long ago." "I can't remember." "Why speak of that now?" A moment earlier, those evasions had sounded tender. Now every word sounded like a candlewick burning hollow.
Mrs. Horda stood before the long table, her hand still suspended above the ash candle. Slowly she turned and watched her "husband" for a long, long time. Then she asked a very soft question.
"You complained my broth was salty for nineteen years," she said. "Then tell me... what did you actually like to eat?"
The man's mouth opened.
For nineteen years, she had remembered only that he disliked salty broth. She had never known what he loved to eat. He had not said; she had not asked. And so this thing did not know either.
"Ah..." Very slowly, Mrs. Horda withdrew her hand and pressed it to her heart as though shielding something recovered after loss. She wept, but these tears differed from those before. Before, she had wept at reunion. Now, she wept at waking.
"My son—" In the crowd, an old mother clutched her "son" and wailed. He had answered a third question wrongly, yet she refused to release him. "I'll take the false one! Let me hold him one more stick of incense! Only one—"
No one prised her hands away. Sharlo stood where he was, his throat tight. This was the cruellest part of the trap—even exposed, the heart might refuse to turn. A desperate person would rather embrace a mirror.
Dismantling could break only half. The other half required something to be given.
And the giver had arrived.
At the theatre entrance, though no one had noticed him appear, stood an old man carrying a blue-green glass lamp.
The Old Boatman entered one step at a time, passing through all the frozen reunions. In his grey robe with his old lamp, he came into the light before the stage, turned to face eighteen hundred people of Gern Harbour, and raised the lamp.
"This old man may bear no surname and no given name. Those upon the river all call him the Old Boatman." His voice was hoarse, yet spread across the house like an ebbing wave. "Stillwater Society. Spirit-ferryman. I ferry the dead."
"I did not come tonight to dismantle a play. I came to report news—the first such news in three thousand years."
His gaze swept the house.
"In the past, those who died at sea possessed no road home. The sea was their grave. You nailed plaques to the wall and read names on the first and fifteenth, for hundreds of years, speaking to an empty sea. People of my trade knew it, and had not the heart to tell you."
"But since the autumn equinox, the waters under heaven have changed their rules." The Old Boatman spoke one word at a time. "The black river has seeped into the sea. From this day, the drowned possess the right to cross."
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"Your people are on the road home."
The house erupted.
"This old man knows you do not believe him." The Old Boatman raised his lamp higher. "Those who doubt, follow me outside—look into the harbour for yourselves."
No one organised them. No one called an order. Eighteen hundred people poured from the theatre like a tide.
At midnight in Gern Harbour, sea fog flowed inward between the two black-stone headlands. The crowd packed the docks and the cliff slopes, looking where the Old Boatman's lamp pointed—
There were lights in the fog.
A file of blue-green lamps, exceedingly distant and faint, stretched one after another into a long line deep within the fog outside the bay. Slowly, slowly, they travelled north. There was no counting them. Everyone in the harbour knew that colour tonight—the exact colour of the old spirit-ferryman's lamp.
"Night runs." The Old Boatman stood upon the highest stone step of the docks, his voice carrying far. "Every passenger came from the water. The boats do not enter the harbour—there are no berths here for them. They follow the water roads leaked from the river. Slowly, one stage at a time, guided only by the names spoken at home."
"Speak the name once, and one stage of the road lights," he said. "The instant you surrender your 'waiting,' one stretch of that road goes dark."
"Your people have travelled for decades. The road is open now. You must not let the lamps at home go out."
Someone in the crowd moved first.
People in Gern Harbour later said it was Mrs. Horda. She pushed through the crowd and ran toward the Wall of the Awaited, stumbling over the uneven ground. Beneath the wall, she drew a torch from the brazier, lit it, planted it in the stone trough, then faced the brass plaque bearing her husband's name and shouted with all the strength she possessed:
"Horda—! The broth is simmering at home—! You listen to me. I'm waiting for you—! I'll wait until the day I die—!"
The torches came alight, one after another.
All one hundred and twenty sockets were filled. When no more would fit, people held torches in their hands. The square before the Wall of the Awaited became black with kneeling and standing figures. Cole and Mick moved among them carrying the two books of names. Each book had been torn into dozens of sheaves, and each sheaf was pressed into an outstretched hand. The old deacon stood at the wall, old tears streaming, and began the first line—
"One lamp upon the high cliff—"
Eighteen hundred voices caught it:
"Shining on the door of home—!"
The Waiting-for-the-Boat Song rolled over the Wall of the Awaited, over the docks and the two black-stone headlands, and into the fog-heavy sea. They sang one verse, then read one round of names. Two thousand one hundred names, west to east, in men's voices, women's voices, and children's voices, one name after another. At each household's plaque, its people raised their torch higher.
Old Bann knelt beneath his father's plaque. When they reached the name "Bantson," all eighteen hundred people spoke it together—the old deacon had deliberately given the call. The old sailor pressed his forehead to the foot of the wall and howled as he had when he was eight.
Beyond the harbour, the line of blue-green lamps in the fog slowly brightened.
One after another, from the head of the line to its tail, they shone for an instant in succession, like a long file of boats answering one signal together.
The song faltered, then surged again at twice its strength.
Sharlo stood outside the crowd and did not sing. Watching those distant lamps and the wall of torches, he abruptly heard the faintest sound beside him. Viola stood there with her register closed against her breast. This woman who never failed to record a single word now recorded nothing. She looked at the wall, her lips moving almost imperceptibly as she read with them the names of people she had never known.
In the latter half of the night, the Floating Island Theatre weighed anchor.
The ninety-four "dead" did not remain for the ceremony of sailing at dawn. After the harbour's people flooded out of the theatre, the figures stood for a time among the empty tiers. Then, one by one, they quietly collapsed—into puddles of candle tears, wax-coloured and faintly glimmering beneath the stage lights. Attendants shovelled them into buckets and carried them below, bucket after bucket, like props cleared after a play. That was all they had ever been.
Sharlo was invited aboard at the gangplank. This time, he was not taken to the accounting office. Mr. Bassoon waited for him in person upon the deck.
There was no anger upon the plump proprietor's face. For a long while, he watched the torchlight beneath the Wall of the Awaited before turning.
"Thirty-seven ports," he said. "I harvested thirty-six and failed at two. Both failures at your hands."
"This engagement at Gern Harbour was intended as my closing number. The 'waiting' of the north is the heaviest quality under heaven. Two thousand brass plaques, seasoned for centuries—each outweighs an entire southern county." He opened one plump hand, his manner almost that of a colleague comparing accounts. "And now? An empty close, with one principal costume damaged besides."
"A costume?"
"You saw the ninety-four pieces collapse," Mr. Bassoon said, lowering his eyelids. "They were moulded with the strength of an old object kept behind the counter. One collapse takes three parts in ten from it. I spent two years nursing it carefully, and tonight it was injured in Gern Harbour. The counter will enter that loss against my name."
Something stirred in Sharlo's heart. The Scarlet Queen's fragment. It had been hurt.
"Mr. Bassoon," he said, "you escaped across the roof of the Golden Iris with admirable style two years ago. But from what you have just said—life behind the 'counter' has not treated you well."
The plump proprietor smiled, though the smile never reached his eyes.
"Mr. Curtainbreaker, I shall disclose one thing—not for any reason but that you understand what you face." He spoke unhurriedly. "My profession is producer. Above a producer stands the Proprietor. The Proprietor established the counter, and the counter recognises only one thing—settlement in full. At the beginning of next spring, the harvest of thirty-seven ports must pass the scales at a place in the north, not one ounce short."
"What happens if it is short?"
"Have you ever met my predecessor?" Mr. Bassoon returned. "No. No one has. The counter keeps no person who leaves a deficit—not even the fact that 'one person once left a deficit.'"
Sea wind crossed the deck, making the stage lights sway. Abruptly, Sharlo glimpsed something faint upon that plump, round face, something steeped through by the years—fear. The man who had bought half a continent's homesickness was himself held by the throat.
"So I must make good any shortage with something else." Mr. Bassoon's tone became lively once more. He saluted with folded hands, the merchant's smile returning to the round face. "Fortunately, the greater the shortage, the higher the market. At present, the most valuable item in advance purchase behind my counter rises three times a day—and that is you, Mr. Curtainbreaker."
"At slack tide tomorrow morning, our theatre sails north. You need not trouble to pursue me. For the first thirty-seven ports, you pursued this old man." He stepped aside toward the companionway with every courtesy. "From tomorrow, the order reverses."
"There are no harbours in the northern sea, no theatres, no city of lamps for you to kindle." The plump proprietor bowed his guest away, his voice mild. "I shall await you in the fog."
Back aboard the Evening Bell, at midnight, the pocket watch stopped as usual.
The audience of the grey-white theatre had grown much thicker tonight. New grey shadows packed the rear tiers—eighteen hundred people of Gern Harbour called away from their mirrors, every one of them owing him a performance. But after taking the stage, he looked first not at the seats, but at the apron.
Something new lay beside the black chess piece.
A little brass plaque, broad as a palm and engraved in the same style as those upon the Wall of the Awaited. But no name marked it, only a blank polished bright.
Sharlo crouched and studied it for a long time. He knew the theatre's archival rules: anything that appeared onstage was rent, an account recorded in the theatre's own fashion. A nameless plaque of the awaited. He spent half the night considering and found only one interpretation. There was another kind of passenger in this world—someone who went to sea and did not return, whose family had not even nailed up a plaque.
For example, a man who bought an old chart, said "I'm going home," and was never heard from again.
"Recorded." He bowed slightly to the empty plaque. "I shall find the name. When I do, I shall engrave it with my own hands."
Before dawn, Morsen heard the whole account in the Evening Bell's chart room and asked only one question. "When do we pursue?"
"Two days for provisions," Sharlo said. "We leave on the third."
The old captain nodded and rose to go, but stopped at the door.
"One more thing," he said. "Old Bann came to me."
Sharlo looked up.
"He wants to leave the ship." Morsen's face revealed nothing. "My sailhand for twenty-three years. Says his pa is on the road home. On the first and fifteenth, his voice cannot be absent beneath the wall again. Says he wants to guard the wall and wait for the boat."
"You gave permission?"
"A sailor leaves a ship in one way only." The old captain turned and walked from the cabin, his voice returning across the deck mixed with the morning wind.
"He's home."
Through the two days of provisioning, Gern Harbour treated the Evening Bell as its own ship.
Fresh water, salted fish, peat, and rope—the harbour office charged not one coin. Leaning upon his cane, the proprietor of the fish-broth tavern personally delivered two sealed barrels of broth base, addressed to Half-Ladle. "The north is cold. I've made your stock. You need only add ingredients." Saul brought several fishermen to inspect the Evening Bell's sails from end to end, muttering, "The North Sea wind and the southern wind weren't fathered by the same man. Put thirty per cent more purchase on every tack."
The old deacon summoned Cole to the little lodge and spoke with him behind a closed door for a long while. When they emerged, he pressed something into the boy's hand—a small manuscript copy of Ferry-Ticket Litany, the words the Stillwater Society recited to the drowned. "You are going north, where there may be many dead at sea. Perhaps you will need it. Ferrying is the Old Boatman's task, but he's one man with two hands." The old man patted Cole's hand. "You kindle lamps. A lamplighter and a ferryman have always belonged to the same household—one lights the road, one travels it."
The day they left harbour fell on neither the first nor the fifteenth. Yet at first light, a dense crowd already stood beneath the Wall of the Awaited—for one ship, the whole harbour had made an exception and held one extra reading.
Dawn was still grey, and already a black mass of people stood beneath the Wall of the Awaited. As the Evening Bell cast off, the song at the wall began. The whole harbour saw them off not from the docks, but from beneath the wall, in its own fashion: one The Waiting-for-the-Boat Song and two thousand one hundred names.
Old Bann stood at the wall's western end beneath his father's plaque. As the ship glided from the bay, the old sailor raised his torch above his head toward the Evening Bell.
At the wheel, Morsen raised one hand and pulled the ship's bell three times.
The peals struck both black-stone headlands. Their echoes pursued the stern and escorted the ship out to sea. Standing astern, Sharlo watched the mouth of the bowl between the headlands narrow, watched the torchlight diminish to a speck and vanish. Only the song remained—perhaps it too had gone, leaving only its shape inside his ears.
The bow turned due north. Ahead, the chart bore no more harbour marks, only great expanses of blank water and, deep within the blank, one speck of ink mistaken for the stain of a fly.
Wind came astern. Full sail.