body as I push us all through. Petro’s daughter—she did not want to die when the wolves came, I’m sure; but she loved selecting timber.”
“If it comes for you?” he said softly. “Would you be so sanguine then?”
She laughed, and the pensiveness was gone. “No, indeed. I will curse the stars and go down fighting. But it will still have been a wonderful thing, to cross the mist.”
At University, Kit’s relationships had all been casual. There were lectures that everyone attended, and he lived near streets and pubs crowded with students; but the physical students had a tradition of keeping to themselves that was rooted in the personal preferences of their predecessors, and in their own. The only people who worked harder than the engineers were the ale-makers, the University joke went. Kit and the other physical students talked and drank and roomed and slept together.
In his third year, he met Domhu Canna at the arcade where he bought vellums and paper: a small woman with a heart-shaped face and hair in black clouds she kept somewhat confined by gray ribands. She was a philosophical student from a city two thousand miles to the east, on the coast.
He was fascinated. Her mind was abrupt and fish-quick and made connections he didn’t understand. To her, everything was a metaphor, a symbol for something else. People, she said, could be better understood by comparing their lives to animals, to the seasons, to the structure of certain lyrical songs, to a gambling game.
This was another form of pattern-making, he saw. Perhaps people were like teamed oxen to be led, or like metals to be smelted and shaped to one’s purpose; or as the stones for a dry-laid wall, which had to be carefully selected for shape and strength, and sorted, and placed. This last suited him best. What held them together was no external mortar but their own weight, and the planning and patience of the drystone builder. But it was an inadequate metaphor: people were this, but they were all the other things, as well.
He never understood what Domhu found attractive in him. They never talked about regularizing their relationship. When her studies were done halfway through his final year, she returned to her city to help found a new university, and in any case her people did not enter into term marriages. They separated amicably, and with a sense of loss on his part at least; but it did not occur to him until years later that things might have been different.
The winter was rainy, but there were days they could work, and they did. By spring, there had been other deaths unrelated to the bridge on both banks: a woman who died in childbirth, a child who had never breathed properly in his short life; two fisherfolk lost when they capsized; several who died for the various reasons that old or sick people died.
Over the spring and summer they finished the anchorages, featureless masses of blocks and mortar anchored to the bedrock. They were buried so that only a few courses of stone showed above the ground. The anchoring bolts were each tall as a man, hidden safely behind the portals through which the chains would pass.
The Farside pillar was finished by midwinter of the third year, well before the Nearside tower. Jenner and Teniant Planner had perfected a signal system that allowed detailed technical information to pass between the banks, and documents traveled each time a ferry crossed. Rasali made sixty-eight trips back and forth; though he spent much of his time with Kit, Valo made twenty. Kit did not cross the mist at all unless the flags told him he must.
It was early spring and Kit was in Farside when the signals went up:
He went to Rasali at once.
“I can’t go,” she said. “I just got here yesterday. The Big Ones—”
“I have to get across, and Valo’s on Nearside. There’s news from the capital.”
“News has always waited before.”
“No, it hasn’t. You forced it to, but news waited restlessly, pacing along the levee until we could pick it up.”
“Use the flags,” she said, a little impatiently.
“They can’t be broken by anyone but me or Jenner. He’s over here. I’m sorry,” he said, thinking of her brother, dead four years before.
“If you die no one can read it, either,” she said, but they left just after dusk anyway. “If we must go, better then than earlier or later,” she said.
He met her at the upper dock at dusk. The sky was streaked with bright bands of green and gold, clouds catching the last of the sun, but they radiated no light, themselves just reflections. The current down the river was steady. And light. The mist between the levees was already in shadow, shaped into smooth dunes twenty feet high.
Rasali waited silently, coiling and uncoiling a rope in her hands; beside her stood two women and a dog: dealers in spices returning from the plantations of Gloth, the dog whining and restless. Kit was burdened with document cases filled with vellum and paper, rolled tightly and wrapped in oilcloth. Rasali seated the merchants and their dog in the ferry’s bow, then untied and pushed off in silence. Kit sat near her.
She stood at the stern, braced against the scull. For a moment he could pretend that this was water they moved on and he half-expected to hear sloshing; but the big paddle made no noise. It was so silent that he could hear her breath, the dog’s nervous panting aft, and his own pulse, too fast. Then the
He heard a soft sighing, like air entering a once-sealed bottle. It was hard to see so far, but the lingering light showed him a heaving of the mist on the face of a neighboring dune, like a bubble coming to the surface of hot mud. The dome grew and then burst. There was a gasp from one of the women. A shape rolled away, too dark for Kit to see more than its length.
“What—” he said in wonder.
“Fish,” Rasali breathed to Kit. “Not small ones. They are biting tonight. We should not have come.”
It was night now; the first tiny moon appeared, scarcely brighter than a star, followed by other stars. Rasali oared gently across through the dunes, face turned to the sky. At first he thought she was praying, then realized she was navigating. There were more fish now, and each time the sighing sound, the dark shape half-seen. He heard someone singing, the voice carrying somehow to them, from far behind.
“The fishers,” Rasali said. “They will stay close to the levees tonight. I wish.…”
But she left the wish unspoken. They were over the deep mist now. He could not say how he knew this. He had a sudden vision of the bridge overhead, a black span bisecting the star-spun sky, the parabolic arch of the chains perhaps visible, perhaps not. People would stride across the river, an arrow’s flight overhead, unaware of this place beneath. Perhaps they would stop and look over the bridge’s railings, but they would be too high to see the fish as any but small shadows, supposing they saw them at all, supposing they stopped at all. The Big Ones would be novelties, weird creatures that caused a safe little shiver, like hearing a frightening story late at night.
Perhaps Rasali saw the same thing, for she said suddenly, “Your bridge. It will change all this.”
“It must. I am sorry,” he said again. “We are not meant to be here, on mist.”
“We are not meant to cross this without passing through it. Kit—” Rasali said, as if starting a sentence, and then fell silent. After a moment she began to speak again, her voice low, as if she were speaking to herself. “The soul often hangs in a balance of some sort: tonight, do I lie down in the high fields with Dirk Tanner or not? At the fair, do I buy ribbons or wine? For the new ferry’s headboard, do I use camphor or pearwood? Small things, right? A kiss, a ribbon, a grain that coaxes the knife this way or that. They are not, Kit Meinem of Atyar. Our souls wait for our answer, because any answer changes us. This is why I wait to decide what I feel about your bridge. I’m waiting until I know how I will be changed.”
“You can never know how things will change you,” Kit said.
“If you don’t, you have not waited to find out.” There was a popping noise barely a stone’s throw to starboard. “Quiet.”
On they moved. In daylight, Kit knew, the trip took less than an hour; now it seemed much longer. Perhaps it was; he looked up at the stars and thought they had moved, but perhaps not.
His teeth were clenched, as were all his muscles. When he tried to relax them, he realized it was not fear
