Chapter 415
Gold light on the raft-city, and on every deck, in long rows, stooks of grey straw standing where a field of barley was in the night. A thousand of them. Lamp-bearer children tiptoeing between them. A troll poking one with an oar.
Jeppson's chalk, steady, adding one more stroke to the tally:
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Öde sitting among her barley tubs, her scythe across her knees, holding her own left wrist and staring at it. Vigolas watching her from the bucket. Ten feet away. He can't go to her: the emerald ring round his heels.
not looking up.
who learned every name off her arms so there'd always be someone left who remembered. Saying it.
looking up at him. Nothing in her face. Nothing at all.
Something happening on the planks without anyone doing it: moss, grey-green, spreading across the boards round Öde, moss that isn't wet. And in it, footprints, pressing themselves in one after another, small and bare, arriving, with nobody making them.
(No SFX. No sound written on the whole panel.)
And among the barley tubs, where there was no stump a page ago, a stump: old, grey, mossed. On it, knees together, a book open across them, a small old woman in a plain grey coat, a long white braid over her left shoulder tied with a strip of dark cloth, bare feet on moss that doesn't get wet. Already sitting there. As if she always had been.
in the doorway, staring at her. His face going young, the way it does.
(Fenna turns her milk-pale eyes to him for one beat. The corner of an old mouth, very slightly. Then back to the girl.)
looking at the old woman on the stump.
(Fenna's lips move.)
(Her balloon is drawn: small, plain, pale grey, no tail decoration, the text sitting a little below where it should, as if heard rather than spoken. And it is empty.)
in Fenna's two hands, turning: away from her, toward the farm girl. A column of names running back past the edge of the page into every soul there ever was. And one line in a small, exact, unhurried hand, with a mark beside it.
SIGRUN
reading it. Her lips moving. Then saying it, aloud, the way she says the names every morning.
A memory coming home, pouring back into a girl on her knees in a ship's garden like a field filling with light: a furrow in summer, and a small broad old woman in a headscarf in it, head thrown back, laughing. A scythe far too big for a six-year-old, and two rough brown hands over the child's hands on the snath, showing her the swing. A scythe-blade, a yelp, a small cut through an eyebrow, and the old woman swearing so magnificently the cows look up. Bread on a windowsill. A headscarf hung on a nail. A voice like a gate-hinge singing off-key at dusk. The last autumn: the old woman waving from the far end of the field as the edge of the world came in. And on the girl's wrist, at the centre of it all, the emerald name writing itself back, letter by letter, in the oldest ink on her arm: S-I-G-R-U-N.
both hands over her mouth, laughing and sobbing at once, grass bursting up out of the planks all round her knees.
looking down at her own open page. At the line in her own small exact hand. SIGRUN. And her milk-pale eyes passing over it the way they would pass over any line in the book: a name, a mark, someone she doesn't know. She gave the having-witnessed away. It's the girl's now.
(No balloon. Her face doesn't change. That's the price.)
wiping her face with the back of a dirt-caked hand, looking up at the old woman on the stump.
(Fenna's lips move once more.)
(Drawn, and left empty.)
No stump. No old woman. The moss fading back into planks. A line of small bare footprints walking away across the deck toward the rail, and stopping. Öde, kneeling among the tubs, reading her arm from wrist to elbow, out loud, the way she does every morning, starting with the oldest.
Daniel and Emma walking between the rows of grey stooks on a troll longship's deck. One of the stooks twitching, its straw shifting as if something inside it were trying to finish getting up.
his grey right hand tucked in his coat, frowning at the stook.
On every deck at once, every nose wrinkling. Trolls gagging. Tihi pinching her nose with both hands. Drekk at the wheel with his hat over his face. Flexsnus leaning very far away from the wind. And drifting over the water in the morning light, moths: big, pale, soft, dozens of them.
the root that arches out of the world tree's bark into a pool of white cork-foam like a jetty. Its bark slumping: going soft and black in one long patch, mushrooms bursting up out of it in a ring, fwip-fwip-fwip. And rising out of the black soil, slowly, as if she were never in a hurry because everything comes to her in the end: a tall bowed woman, moss and black leaves for hair, a ledge of shelf-fungus across her brow, mushrooms growing from her collarbones, moths drifting out of her hair, and at her breastbone a rotten stump-shape with fresh green shoots growing out of it.
her gilled eyes glowing a soft yellow-green, looking out at the raft-city full of stooks. Over her head, her plate, mould slowly creeping across it as we watch:
RÖTA · FERDINAND-3 · unranked (Order threat class K-IV) · not on any board
at the Marka's rail, his hand going to his chest, where seventeen voices have all, at once, gone very quiet.
looking at the nearest stook of grey straw on the root.
(All along the raft-city, people turning to look at the Marka. At a pirate on a bucket in a chalk doorway.)
his eyes ringing gold with Greed-sight. And seeing, round the woman of rot on the root, the black soil she stands on glowing gold: the most valuable thing he can see anywhere on the sea.
A procession across the raft-city to the great root: trolls carrying stooks on their shoulders like firewood, lamp-bearer children dragging sheaves, Roffe with six under each arm, the allies piling a thousand bundles of grey straw on the root round Röta. And every one of them stepping back from her at fifty-nine seconds, counted on their fingers, Röta counting with them and stepping back too.
resting on a stook. The grey straw slumping under it into rich black soil in one panel, and in the next, one small green shoot standing up out of the place where it was.
on the root now, standing exactly sixty seconds' distance from her, his white braid, his third eye closed, his hand flat on his chest.
Röta lying down on the root among the piled stooks for the night, the way she lies down in her own field: on her back, arms out, moths settling on her. The root going dark and soft beneath her.
The raft-city asleep. The Marka's port lit, the pirate on his bucket in the door. And on the great root at the Road's End, a thousand stooks of grey straw slumping, one after another, slowly, in the dark, into black earth, mushrooms coming up in rings, moths drifting. At the edge of it, at sixty seconds' distance, a quiet man with a white braid sitting up all night with his hand on his chest and three shadows at his feet.
in the dark, listening. And out of the black soil, soft and damp and patient, Röta's voice: