Valo started asking questions, first of the other workers and then of Kit. His boat-building experience meant the questions were good ones, and he already designed boats. Kit passed on the first things he had learned as a child on his father’s sites, and showed him the manipulation of the immense blocks, and the tricky balance of material and plan; the strength of will that allows a man to direct a thousand people toward a single vision. Valo was too honest not to recognize Kit’s mastery, and too competitive not to try and meet Kit on his own ground. He came more often to visit the construction sites.
After a season, Kit took him aside. “You could be a builder, if you wished.”
Valo flushed. “Build things? You mean, bridges?”
“Or houses, or granges, or retaining walls. Or bridges. You could make people’s lives better.”
“Change people’s lives?” He frowned suddenly. “No.”
“Our lives change all the time, whether we want them to or not,” Kit said. “Valo Ferry, you are smart. You are good with people. You learn quickly. If you were interested, I could start teaching you myself, or send you to Atyar to study there.”
“Valo Builder…” he said, trying it out, then: “No.” But after that, whenever he had time free from ferrying or building boats, he was always to be found on the site. Kit knew that the answer would be different the next time he asked. There was for everything a possibility, an invisible pattern that could be made manifest given work and the right materials. Kit wrote to an old friend or two, finding contacts that would help Valo when the time came.
The pillars and anchorages grew. Winter came, and summer, and a second winter. There were falls, a broken arm, two sets of cracked ribs. Someone on Farside had her toes crushed when one of the stones slipped from its rollers and she lost the foot. The bridge was on schedule, even after the delay caused by the slow rock-breaking. There were no problems with payroll or the Department of Roads or Empire, and only minor, manageable issues with the occasionally disruptive representatives from Triple or the local governors.
Kit knew he was lucky.
The first death came during one of Valo’s visits.
It was early in the second winter of the bridge, and Kit had been in Farside for three months. He had learned that winter meant gray skies and rain and sometimes snow. Soon they would have to stop the heavy work for the season. Still, it had been a good day, and the workers had lifted and placed almost a hundred stones.
Valo had returned after three weeks at Nearside, building a boat for Jenna Blue-fish. Kit found him staring up at the slim tower through a rain so faint it felt like fog. The black opening of the roadway arch looked out of place, halfway up the pillar.
Valo said, “You’re a lot farther along since I was here last. How tall now?”
Kit got this question a lot. “A hundred and five feet, more or less. A third finished.”
Valo smiled, shook his head. “Hard to believe it’ll stay up.”
“There’s a tower in Atyar, black basalt and iron, five hundred feet. Five times this tall.”
“It just looks so delicate,” Valo said. “I know what you said, that most of the stress on the pillar is compression, but it still looks as though it’ll snap in half.”
“After a while, you’ll have more experience with suspension bridges and it will seem less.… unsettling. Would you like to see the progress?”
Valo’s eyes brightened. “May I? I don’t want to get in the way.”
“I haven’t been up yet today, and they’ll be finishing up soon. Scaffold or stairwell?”
Valo looked at the scaffolding against one face of the pillar, the ladders tied into place within it, and shivered. “I can’t believe people go up that. Stairs, I think.”
Kit followed Valo. The steep internal stair was three feet wide and endlessly turning, five steps up and then a platform; turn to the left, and then five more steps and turn. Eventually, the stairs would at need be lit by lanterns set into alcoves at every third turning, but today Kit and Valo felt their way up, fingers trailing along the cold, damp stone, a small lantern in Valo’s hand.
The stairwell smelled of water and earth and the thin smell of the burning lamp oil. Some of the workers hated the stairs and preferred the ladders outside, but Kit liked it. For these few moments, he was part of his bridge, a strong bone buried deep in flesh he had created.
They came out at the top and paused a moment to look around the unfinished courses, and the black silhouette of the winch against the dulling sky. The last few workers were breaking down a shear leg, which had been used to move blocks around the pillar. A lantern hung from a pole jammed into one of the holes the laborers would fill with rods and molten iron, later in construction. Kit nodded to them as Valo went to an edge to look down.
“It is wonderful,” Valo said, smiling. “Being high like this—you can look right down into people’s kitchen yards. Look, Teli Carpenter has a pig smoking.”
“You don’t need to see it to know that,” Kit said dryly. “I’ve been smelling it for two days.”
Valo snorted. “Can you see as far as White Peak yet?”
“On a clear day, yes,” Kit said. “I was up here two—”
A heavy sliding sound and a scream; Kit whirled to see one of the workers on her back, one of the shear leg’s timbers across her chest. Loreh Tanner, a local. Kit ran the few steps to Loreh and dropped beside her. One man, the man who had been working with her, said, “It slipped—oh Loreh, please hang on,” but Kit it was futile. She was pinned to the pillar, chest flattened, one shoulder visibly dislocated, unconscious, her breathing labored. Black foam bloomed from her lips in the lantern’s bad light.
Kit took her cold hand. “It’s all right, Loreh. It’s all right.” It was a lie and in any case she could not hear him, but the others would. “Get Hall,” one of the workers said, and Kit nodded: Hall was a surgeon. And then, “And get Obal, someone. Where’s her husband?” Footsteps ran down the stairs and were lost into the hiss of rain just beginning and someone’s crying and Loreh’s wet breathing.
Kit glanced up. His chest heaving, Valo stood staring at the body. Kit said to him, “Help find Hall,” and when the boy did not move, he repeated it, his voice sharper. Valo said nothing, did not stop looking at Loreh until he spun and ran down the stairs. Kit heard shouting, far below, as the first messenger ran toward the town.
Loreh took a last shuddering breath and died.
Kit looked at the others around Loreh’s body. The man holding Loreh’s other hand pressed his face against it, crying helplessly. The two other workers left here knelt at her feet, a man and a woman, huddled close though they were not a couple. “Tell me,” he said.
“I tried to stop it from hitting her,” the woman said. She cradled one arm: obviously broken, though she didn’t seem to have noticed. “But it just kept falling.”
“She was tired; she must have gotten careless,” the man said, and the broken-armed woman said, “I don’t want to think about that sound.” Words fell from them like blood from a cut.
Kit listened. This was what they needed right now, to speak and to be heard. So he listened, and when the others came, Loreh’s husband white-lipped and angry-eyed, and the surgeon Obal and six other workers, Kit listened to them as well, and gradually moved them down through the pillar and back toward the warm lights and comfort of Farside.
Kit had lost people before, and it was always like this. There would be tears tonight, and anger at him and at his bridge, anger at fate for permitting this. There would be sadness, and nightmares. There would be lovemaking, and the holding close of children and friends and dogs—affirmations of life in the cold wet night.
His tutor at University had said, during one of her frequent digressions from the nature of materials and the principles of architecture, “Things will go wrong.”
It was winter, but in spite of the falling snow they walked slowly to the coffeehouse, as Skossa looked for purchase for her cane. She continued, “On long projects, you’ll forget that you’re not one of them. But if there’s an accident? You’re slapped in the face with it. Whatever you’re feeling? Doesn’t matter. Guilty, grieving, alone, worried about the schedule. None of it. What matters is
She paused then, tapped her cane against the ground thoughtfully. “No, I lie. It does matter, but you will have to find your own strength, your own resources elsewhere.”
“Friends?” Kit said doubtfully. He knew already that he wanted a career like his father’s. He would not be in the same place for more than a few years at a time.
