Chapter 416
The great root arching out of the world tree's bark into its pool, and the pool gone: the white cork-foam and the root and the shelf round it all turned to rich black soil overnight, and growing out of it, waist-high and rolling, a field of gold flowers, wide as a harbour. Among them, young trees in blossom and in fruit at the same time. Bees. Moths. On every deck of the raft-city, people waking, sitting up in their blankets, staring.
lying on her back in the middle of the field among the flowers. Spent: thin, pale, the fungus on her sparse, her bones showing under her skin like roots. The green shoots at her breastbone in full bloom. Smiling.
Jeppson's chalk, adding one more stroke to the tally. And beside it, very small, in exact print, the rest of his old answer:
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AND AN AFTERNOON
Smurjan walking down off the Marka onto the black soil, barefoot, his white braid swinging, and kneeling at the very edge of the gold field, exactly sixty seconds from the woman lying in it. Hands on his knees. His shadow spreading behind him, three shapes and a faint fourth. Out of it, rising, for once not talking: a one-armed woman with a red braid.
lifting one long thin hand off the soil toward the shadow behind him. Not toward him.
and rising out of it, slow, huge, gaunt, ribs like a ship's frame, small sad eyes much too far up: Bakasura. Looking down at the gold flowers for a long time.
Bakasura's vast jaws opening: wide, wider, gently, not to bite. And out of the dark of the maw, floating up, a light: big, round, warm, laugh-gold, bursting faintly at the edges the way a laugh bursts. Drifting down over the field. Settling into the flowers like a seed into a furrow.
And after it, one by one, sixteen more lights: smaller, every one a different colour and a different warmth, drifting out of the maw and down into the gold like seeds. Smurjan's face as each one leaves him: a man feeling a room he has lived in for ever go quiet, voice by voice.
the last light gone, his jaws still open. Searching inside himself. His small sad eyes going from flower to flower.
(Nothing comes.)
looking up at the great hungry shape above him, gently.
laid flat in the black soil. Her heart, one beat a minute: the Long Rot-Beat, drawn as a single slow pulse stretched across the whole panel. The shoots at her breastbone blooming wider. And all through the field, the flowers moving: parting, swaying, as if something underneath them were stretching after a long sleep.
Hanging in the air over the flowers, a rank plate: blank, and pulsing, the way a Called fighter's plate hangs in the air before the fighter steps up to it. Waiting for someone to come back to it.
· · ·
A field of gold flowers in the morning sun at the foot of the world tree, and people getting up out of it, the way people get up out of a hayfield after a nap in summer: slowly, stretching, blinking, flowers in their hair. Sixteen of them, from every century: a fisherman with an old bone net-needle still in his hand, a girl in a long-ago dress, an old soldier with no helmet, a ferry-hand in oilskins, a baker with flour on his arms, a mother looking round for someone and laughing when she finds she's alone and fine, and among them, tiny and bent and ancient, white hair to her knees, a very old woman standing up straight for the first time in centuries. And in the middle of them all, first, rising up out of the gold like a hill getting to its feet: a huge woman, two metres and more, broad as a door, many thick dark braids going iron at the temples and white with dried salt, bare brown freckled arms, a chipped front tooth, and the biggest grin in the world. The blank plate over the flowers stopping pulsing and settling over her head, plain, with nothing after the name: MARKA.
On every deck of the raft-city behind them, people on their feet.
blinking in the sun, gold petals stuck in her braids, looking down at her own two big hands, opening and closing them.
throwing back her head and laughing: the first laugh in her own body since the jaws. Her balloon no longer the rough, different border of a voice inside someone else: big, round, bursting at the edges, alive.
still kneeling at the field's edge, looking up at her. Marka striding out of the flowers toward him (and out of Röta's minute, fast, the way you get out of cold water).
vast and gaunt behind Smurjan, his small sad eyes on the flowers, not able to look at her. Marka reaching up and patting one of his broken-pillar teeth, the way Kali does.
tiny, bent, white hair to her knees, a face like a dried apple, touching her own new cheek with one finger. And remembering, after three hundred years, something nobody else has remembered for her.
And all round her, the others remembering theirs: hands going to faces, mouths opening, a chorus of small balloons each with one name in it, lettered small, too many to read, a field full of people saying who they are for the first time in centuries. The fisherman laughing. The girl in the long-ago dress spinning round.
together in the flowers, Gunvor's high cracked voice leading, singing a ferryman's song: Torbjörn's, for the place where he isn't.
(And Röta, spent, sinking back down into the root the way she came, slowly, smiling, moths settling on what's left of her.)
at the edge of the field with Mätt on his back and a stack of bowls, ladling stew for sixteen people who haven't eaten anything in centuries. The fisherman holding his bowl in both hands like a lamp.
Drekk, small and bow-legged, a beard to his chest, his hat in one hand. And his cracked brass spyglass falling out of the other, bouncing on the deck, rolling, forgotten.
at the edge of the field, turning. Seeing him across the water. Her grin changing into something with no name.
Marka striding up the gangplank from the root in three steps, the deck bowing under her. Drekk standing at the rail with his hat crushed in his hand. Face to face, him coming up to her chest.
(His balloon is drawn: rough-edged, a ragged border like frayed rope. And it is left empty.)
hearing whatever it is. And lifting him off his feet in a hug that squashes his beard flat, his sea-boots dangling a foot off the deck, his hat falling, her laugh going out over the water, his face buried in a salt-white braid.
still holding him up, looking past his ear at the ship's bow: at the bark hull, the name painted on it in big crooked letters: MARKA. At the brass bell at the bow, the Kettle's bell. At a bark plank nailed beside it: CAMILLA THE SERAPHIM. At a scarred wooden fist.
Ysel, standing frozen beside it, her strange eyes wide, no shadow at her feet on the bright deck. Marka setting Drekk down and turning, and seeing her.
Marka sitting cross-legged on the planks with Ysel between her knees, big fingers braiding, and Drekk sitting down beside them with his spyglass back in his lap, not saying anything else at all. Then getting up, going to the bow, and unshackling the Marka's anchor: iron, a fisherman's anchor on a chain. Holding it out to her.
(Drekk nods. There's no bottom under the world tree anyway.)
standing, swinging the anchor once round her head on its chain, the old arc, the chain wrapping twice round her fist. Then stopping, head up, listening. From the little bone-white cabin by the mainmast, a sound: a snore like a landslide.
Marka striding across the deck toward the cabin with the anchor over her shoulder, grinning. And in the doorway, standing up off his dented bucket into her path, a pirate with eleven days of beard and eyes like two burnt holes and an emerald ring round his boots.
past Vigolas's shoulder. The sagging hammock. A golden dog on a patchwork chest, lifting his head. And the sound that has filled that cabin for eleven days and an afternoon stopping.
(No SFX. A completely silent panel.)